Another challenge to the ubiquity of the silicon chips we know and love has appeared. Canadian researchers have created semiconductor devices that outperform the hard-to-manufacture standard formats we have today, by merely painting a liquid onto a glass substrate. This sort of ‘wet’ semiconductor tech has been tried before, but this is the first time it has trumped the old-school grown-crystal devices.

While the successful Shuttle launch (justifiably) stole the limelight, almost everyone forgot about the ESA’s poor little Venus Express. But the probe is doing fine; after a long period of careful maneuvers, it has settled into a steady orbit and is busily pumping data back to planet Earth for boffins to pore over. It has already shed light on Venusian features never seen before, such as the double-eyed vortex at the planet’s South Pole.

It’s a good news day for fans of brain-machine interface technologies. Not only are DARPA funding a project to use machines to boost the speed at which operators can scan visual images (which will probably come as a great relief to the people employed to vet the photos uploaded to social network sites), but the full details of the systems that allow a man who is paralysed from the neck down to interact with his computer (and meatspace, via a robotic arm) have been published in the journal Nature. So, when do I get my datajack?

Space tourism is one of the growing new industries at the moment, what with there being plenty of room for new product ideas and innovatory techniques. It looks like it won’t be all that long before people can pay for a trip into orbit, but then what? If heading straight back to Earth to clean the vomit off your flight-suit doesn’t appeal, maybe you can stay for a few days in an inflatable space-hotel, developed from the prototype being launched from Siberia this week.

Solar energy doesn’t have to be used to heat things up – it can be harnessed for cooling things down, too. A group of researchers are working on the ‘Active Building Envelope’, a thin-film technology that would attach both solar cells and heat pumps to virtually any surface, which they hope could eventually make traditional air-con and heating systems totally obsolete.