I don’t know what’s cooler, the concept of fishing rod prosthetic arm, or the Open Prosthetics project on which it’s listed.

Consciousness is a convenient fiction for giving cohesion to the multitude of agents that together decide what a human does. Researchers at Columbia University are kicking that illusion in the teeth — they’re hooking up the human visual system to a computer which detects the a-ha moment of visual recognition before the attached human is fully aware they’ve seen something. Basically, humans are faster at visual recognition than computers, but only if that darn consciousness doesn’t get in the way.

Yet more great data just in from NASA’s Cassini probe. Recent radar images of Saturn’s major moon Titan reveal a topography that is remarkably similar to some features of the Earth’s surface – except that the hills, valleys and rivers of Titan are made entirely of frozen methane and ethane, of course.

If you think stem cell research can polarise opinion, just wait for the reaction to this. In 2004, a fertility scientist named Panos Zavos claimed to have implanted a cloned embryo in a human uterus, but that it failed to create a pregnancy. The science world told him to shut up and publish his findings. And now, he has done, in an obscure but genuine science journal, along with claims that he has tried the procedure a number of times since. Let the frantic ethical battle commence.

Seth Shostak rounds up the four most common suggestions from the public as to why SETI has had no results so far. I particularly love the abductee quaintness of, “you SETI types are just looking in the wrong places. We know where the extraterrestrials are: on a planet in the Zeta Reticuli system.” Yeah, and they came all this way just to probe your bowels, right…