A group from MIT’s Earth Sciences Laboratory have come up with a way to use ultrasound to search for fossil fuels, rather than the gender of unborn children. This technique will enable drilling to get at ‘tight gas’ and ‘tight oil’, which is inaccessible due to the type of fractured rock it is found in. This may not be really big news technology-wise, but the little I know about economics would seem to suggest that this sort of research wouldn’t be happening if the industry wasn’t starting to realise that supplies are running short.

Taxi drivers – a necessity of modern urban life, maybe, but also a source of great strife when in an unfamiliar city (as anyone who has travelled in Mexico will probably agree). Over here in Europe, there are plans afoot to eradicate the drivers from taxis, replacing them with robotic devices that will take us from A to B without overcharging or playing bad music at us. The ‘CityMobil’ project aims to “eliminate city drivers”, and the first test site for the technology will be at London’s Heathrow airport. The driverless car is an old idea that was promised us time and time again in the past – maybe climate change and peak oil will be the driving force that makes the dream a reality.

What would you do if an earthquake wrecked your hard drive? If you were Michael Stadler, you’d write an open-source program to make a peer-to-peer network of drives into a crude distributed earthquake monitoring system. The software has (unsurprisingly) proved very popular in Asia, and although the system doesn’t have the precise resolution of proper seismographs (and has missed or under-rated a few recent quakes) I imagine that, in the continuing absence of a working ‘official’ system, the inhabitants of Asia are working on the theory that anything is better than nothing.

Professor of anthropology Nick Brooks has announced that he believes it likely that a period of significant global climate change may well have been the trigger for our transition from nomadic hunter-gatherers to static community-based lifestyles. The increased aridity would have forced humans to cooperate and coalesce around increasingly scarce resources like water. It will be interesting to see if anyone takes this fascinating insight into the cultural history of our species and tries to spin it as a justification for doing nothing about the current round of climate upheavals.

In the absence of any real Mars missions, it seems to be quite the fashinable thing to just run a simulated one instead. Hot on the heels of Roskosmos and its full-immersion pseudo-mission, the Mars Society is planning to install a huge metal can containing six scientists in the Arctic desert for four months. They may get to skip the lengthy flight to un-Mars and back, but it’ll still be no picnic – the mission is being billed as “hard work, no pay, eternal glory.” Well, where do I sign?