Every soldier is keen to have access to a good surgeon in the heat of battle, but those suckers don’t come cheap, and if your doc buys the farm, it can take some time to fly in another one with the same expertise. Now there’s a way to keep the sawbones away from the battlefield but still make use of their life-saving skills – they can operate on you using a machine controlled by telepresence from miles away. It’s a great idea, but I imagine it’ll take a while before soldiers (or anyone else) are completely trusting of an anonymous machine with moving scalpels and needles.

You’ve got to give VeriChip credit for persistance, if nothing else. Utterly unfazed by people hacking and cloning their implantable RFID chips, and still cheerily touting them as a secure form of identification (when used in conjunction with other forms of ID, perhaps), their new target market is the subdermal tissues of the US Armed Forces. Their friends at the Pentagon seem fairly keen, but (as always where RFID is concerned) there’s a privacy backlash gathering pace.

As much as I wish it wasn’t the case, space tourism is way out of my financial reach – and probably out of the reach os almost every reader of this blog. ‘Space Adventures’, a company from Virginia in the US, knows that the first rule of business is to tap the right market for your product. Which is why SA have set up a bureau in Beijing, to snare the custom of the nouveaux riche of the planet’s fastest growing economy.

The recent spate of heatwaves has had repercussions for the energy business, in the form of increased demand and blackouts (especially in California). The power companies, well aware that blackouts are bad for their reputations, are taking measures to lighten the load at times of peak demand, and to shore up aging distribution grids – and good on them for doing so. But until someone invents a more energy-efficient air conditioning unit, we’ll still be in the ironic position of using more energy to cope with the environmental situation that using too much energy has already created.

Hot on the heels of the eLens project mentioned yesterday comes news of NFC, or near-field communications technology. NFC is based around RFID chips and mobile devices (at the moment, customised phones) that can communicate with each other when in close proximity. The transit authority of Frankfurt in Germany has just completed a ten month test of the system which they report was a great success, enabling public transport users to either use their mobile phone in place of a ticket, or to use it to purchase bulk lots of tickets. And given the constantly improving versatility of mobile devices, there will be a slew of new applications in no time at all. Then what will we do when we have our phone stolen?