If the brains at MIT succeed with their new project, walking down a city street could be a layered and information-rich experience in much the same way as browsing the web. Thanks to location-aware technologies and increasingly powerful mobile computing devices, the eLens project could enable people to explore their environment for extra information, added by others in a ‘tagging’ system like that used by del.icio.us, or feed back into the system by adding their own annotations to buildings and places. The potential of such a system to increase the utility of cityscapes is staggering.

Only decades ago, astronomy was conducted in long cold nights at remote observatories by people who had to make the choice to isolate themselves for the sake of their research. Luckily for astronomers (and their families, one assumes), computers and automated telescopes have made things much less attention-intensive – and the ongoing development of the High Performance Wireless Research and Education Network (HPWREN) means that astronomers can get high-bandwidth data beamed directly to them anywhere on the planet. Which is excellent news for the field, but rather eradicates the romanticism of the lonely astronomer – that’s progress, I guess.

The security goons at Las Vegas have a new trick to look out for on the gaming floors. New research indicates that the brain chemical dopamine, the ‘reward’ substance of the human mind, may boost the ability to learn, and to spot winning strategies more effectively in gambling situations. Earlier studies have shown dopamine to aid learning in animal models, but this is the first work of its kind on people. Dopamine also plays an important role in addictive behaviours that is not yet fully understood.

When you’re talking to someone at a busty party, you can usually filter out the background noise and focus on the sound of the other person’s voice (unless it’s a very loud party, of course). Like a lot of human skills, it’s a remarkably hard one to replicate with technology – but two researchers reckon they has managed to do it using a ‘neural net’ that simulates a human brain. The only problem is that they aren’t sure exactly how the neural net is accomplishing the trick, as it doesn’t run on traditional algorithms.

Making good on one of his long-term platforms, Governor Schwarzenegger has passed a law that will see California become a leading state for the production of renewable energy. The bill aims to produce 3000 megawatts of power by 2018, by installing a million rooftop solar panels across the state – that’s the equivalent of five pollution-free power plants. Coupled with this are moves to cut greenhouse emissions and tax credits for developers who include solar power as an option in new homes – let’s hope that where California leads, others will follow.