The Homeland Security Department certainly take their work seriously, but they come up with some strange (and occasionally sinister methodologies). Point in case, a new software package being developed to monitor foreign perceptions of the US by analysing newspaper and magazine articles. It’s hard to tell what the true deployment purpose of the program would be (being as it’s only in the very early development stages so far), but it would seem to be a rather roundabout and paranoid response to the problem of terrorism – how many terrorists write op-ed pieces, after all?

If you’ll forgive me acting a lttle out of character, I’d like to deflate some hyperbolic reportage. Anyone with an interest in science and technology who uses the web has inevitably seen the stories about successful teleportation by Danish physicists. While this transmission of entangled states is an exciting and important development in its field, it has nothing to do with physically transporting matter over a distance. If I had a penny for every mention of Star Trek in today’s science news, I’d be a rich man.

Michael Kinsley believes traditional newspapers should view the Internet as an opportunity, not a threat. The rise of the blog as a source of news (although generally not the source) should be seen as a sign that there’s room for personality and individuality in news. “…An intelligent person, paid to learn about some subject, will naturally develop views about it. [It is] more truthful to express those views than to suppress them in the name of objectivity.”

Those accelerator-ring people may have an idea, but do they have a roadmap? Because as of today, space elevator pioneers Liftport certainly do, outlining where they think the major landmarks of progress will be on their journey towards building a ‘beanstalk’. It’s a working document, subject to change with feedback from experts and the public, but they’re boldly stating their intents to the world. I expect they’re also pretty stoked by the news that the Spaceward Foundation now has a prize purse totalling $4million for forthcoming space elevator development contests.

My inner teenager couldn’t resist posting this story just for the sake of using the obvious headline – bad puns aside, the Hubble space telescope recently spotted a massive dark storm in the atmosphere of the planet Uranus, which would be large enough to engulf more than half of the United States.