Michael Griffin, head honcho of NASA, wants to start a posse. Speaking at the Farnborough Air Show here in the UK, he claimed that the ISS will be a wasted project unless more countries sign up for missions with greater scope, like exploring the Moon and Mars. An ESA spokesman replied that collaboration is trickier than just signing bits of paper, but accepted that partnerships are necessary. But if Griffin is desperate to get some people on board, maybe he should chat to the Chinese…they seem pretty keen on a Mars mission.

Don’t pair SeisMac with SmackBook Pro, even though they both use the built in accelerometers to do neat things with your PowerBook. A seismograph on a machine that gets slapped around would be pretty useless.

The next housing trend: dorms for adults. Overheated housing markets like that in the Bay Area or (in the case of the linked article, New York) are naturals for more formal (and less labor-intensive) housing arrangements for young urban professionals.

I think some of my favorite gadgets are those that re-imagine the seemingly unimprovable. Take the humble hammock, now become an asymmetrical Goretex sleeping pod, a rain fly- and velcro-sporting, tree-hugging artifact of high tech artisanship.

A drug in development at St George’s, University of London, helps allergy sufferers by making the skin impervious to allergens, thus preventing exposure. On the other hand, maybe a lack of exposure to allergens is the problem in the first place.