First teleportation, now this. It’s time to deflate another overblown science story that’s sweeping the net (and the other media) today – ZOMFG! Invisibilty cloak! Now, listen – this is a great scientific advance, and as such deserves to be widely reported, but not as something that it isn’t. This technology will not make you or your car car or anything else invisible to other people, okay? Unless those other people happen to only see in the microwave spectrum instead of the normal light the rest of us use, of course. Sheesh.

As a public sector employee, I’m never too keen on the thought of losing money – there’s never quite enough to go round as it is. Now, new research indicates that these financial fears are almost identical to the brain’s response to fear of physical attack, occuring in the same cerebral regions and producing equal amounts of stress symptoms. I’ll leave you to think up your own punchline for this one.

Here we go again – another report in to the horrors of internet addiction. It’s getting to be that we can be classified as addicts to practically anything, not just substances (illegal or otherwise), and more than anything else at the moment the intarwebs seem to raise the hackles of those who seek to protect us from ourselves. While I’d freely admit that internet use is highly compulsive, and that some people almost certainly use it to the detriment of meatspace relationships, I don’t think it can be compared to crack, heroin or alcohol. When we start hearing about people commiting robbery to pay for their bandwidth, I may consider reassessing that opinion.

Second Life may be best known for its reputation as an anything-goes playground for the technoscenti, but more practical uses have long been proposed. An IBM employee who frequents SL reports that an associate (possibly another IBMer) has scripted a program that takes ‘complex system information’ and displays it as a three dimensional structure in the synthetic world, thus enabling visualisation of the interconnections in a complex software project, for example. We can expect to see more ideas like this crop up as people start to test the envelope of possibilities in a world that can be redesigned to suit any requirement.

Call me cynical, but I’m not that surprised to hear that research indicates there may be a correlation between autism and heavy exposure to television as a toddler. The study demonstrates a rising occurance of autism since the 80s, when VCRs and cable became commonplace, and points to a ‘statistically significant relationship’ between time spent in front of the television and the symptoms of autism-spectrum disorders. There’ll no doubt be plenty of rebuttals of these findings – what will be interesting is to watch where (and who) they come from.