So, you thought the people coming up with ideas for effectively blocking asteroids from hitting the Earth were being a bit paranoid? There’s a whole lot of those rocks out there, as shown by this map of the known asteroids within 3AU of the Earth – and that’s not counting the ones we haven’t spotted yet, of which there may be literally thousands more. Makes you realise how lucky we’ve been to survive this long.

NASA’s heading for the Moon again, but they’re not looking to cutting edge technologies to do it. On the contrary, they’re taking a step back and re-examining the methods they used to get there the first time, sending their young engineers to get a hands-on look at the old Apollo landers. They also plan to use tried and tested components from the shuttle program, including the ever-controversial insulating foam. The times may have changed, but the fundamental engineering challenges of a moon landing haven’t – sometimes it’s best to stick with what you know already works.

Amazonian Dark Earth, or terra preta do indio, is a bit of a mystery. This rare rainforest soil holds two and a half times the carbon content of normal soils, but no one is entirely sure as to how the ancient tribes of the Amazon actually created the stuff. If the secret can be cracked, we would have access to a carbon sequestration method that would take biofuels from being carbon neutral to carbon negative – in other words, actually pulling out more carbon from the ecosphere than is released by the use of the fuels produced. And the more carbon it stores, the better the crops grown in it perform – any eco-project with a positive feedback loop has got to be worth looking into.

IBM are hard at work as ever, attempting to create a toolkit of molecules that can be used as the components of logic and memory systems, in place of the semiconductor structures we use today. The search is going well, it seems – two researchers have announced that they have been able to use single molecules as a storage medium, by switching them between two discreet charged states. At 1.5 nanometers, the molecules are 1% of the size of CMOS structures that perform the same functions. Moore’s Law has held up well so far, but it will take developments like this for us to continue making smaller faster electronics.

Wired seems to be running a set of articles on India’s efforts to join the club of spacefaring nations. They talk about India’s developing reputation for cheap and effective launches of satellites and other hardware, and list some of their home-grown space technology projects, that include new propulsion systems and a lunar imaging satellite. Last but not least there’s an interview with Madhavan Nair, chief of the nation’s civilian space agency, about his outfit’s aims for the future. India has been described as a ‘leapfrog’ economy – will they leapfrog the West to the Moon?