Biotech is showing the promise of solving a lot of problems that conventional technologies and methods struggle to deal with, especially in the field of medicine. A team of UK researchers are working on a method that uses a certain bacteria to ‘manufacture’ potential anti-cancer drugs that would be simply impossible to synthesise in a regular laboratory set-up. Why cook up new chemicals by hand, when you can get some little microbes to do the hard work for you?

NASA has announced the agenda for the forthcoming set of shuttle missions. Much like the vast majority of the space-geek blogosphere, I’m very pleased to hear that they are going to fix up the Hubble after all – to junk it would have been a tragedy (and probably a bad PR move to boot). And after all, they’re reusing the surviving part of the Deep Impact probe too. But you can’t please all the people all the time – Centauri Dreams is a bit put out by the absence of a launch for the New Worlds Imager project, which would use a ‘starshade’ to enable the detection of distant planetary systems down to planets the size of Earth.

If you read this blog, you’re probably familiar with the WorldChanging blog. The WorldChanging gestalt is all about rolling up your sleeves, warming up the brain farm and applying the right solutions at the right time to Fix Things. So it’s entirely consistent that they’re asking folks who plan on buying their book to do so from Amazon on November 1 at 11:11am (Pacific Time), with the intention of rocketing that title to the top of the list, for one day at least. I plan on doing so, to stick it to the Man if for no other reason.

Wired News polls the experts to find out how to build a better voting machine. One that’s stable, hard to hack, and combines the best of digital and analog voting. Conceived as an engineering problem, our current problems make you wonder what’s taking so long.

New Scientist writes of an interesting variant on the man-machine partnership. A new software application watches human cartographers turn satellite images into maps and then learns enough to take the task over.