Either the hippie vision isn’t quite dead yet, or someone’s been reading a whole lot of fantasy novels – two MIT architects and an engineer envisage future homes being carefully grown from trees, using an ancient cultivation technique known as ‘pleaching’ to guide the shape, growth and development of the building. The downside to this otherwise lovely idea is the fact that it takes some time to grow trees big enough for the purpose, so don’t sell the trailer just yet.

Another blow for the life-on-Mars lobby – two NASA studies suggest that dust storms on the Red Planet may contain conditions that create toxic and/or caustic chemicals that are inimical to the constituent organic molecules of life as we know it. By next month, though, no doubt someone will have found some bacteria that thrive on hydrogen peroxide, and bets will be back on…

Today sees the launch of the collaborative online project to hunt down the interstellar dust particles collected by the Stardust probe earlier this year. Participants will have the opportunity of browsing through millions of microscope images of the collection substrate, in the hope of spotting one of an estimated fifty stellar particles amongst the millions of bits of comet. Put the coffee on…

If there’s one thing that people will just keep trying to invent, it’s the personal jetpack. That day may be closer than we thought, however, as Rick Herron of Skywalker Jets (warning: flash site with cheesy music) has made a prototype rocket pack that can propel a person around in the air for about five minutes – best of all, there are no unfortunate barbecued-flesh issues with the design, either. So (pending further investment, R&D, FAA approval – and your payment of $200k, of course), you could be Boba Fett-ing around in style any day now.

The East Japan Railway Company wants to cut its electric bill, by using people’s passage through the ticket gates to generate electricity – which has the added bonus of providing an easy method for them to measure the traffic passing through the turnstiles. They should possibly team up with that UK architect who said she wants to power tube stations with waste kinetic energy from human footsteps.