The Brennan Center report on voting system security vulnerabilities (584KB PDF) is out and, as expected, has some damning things to say about the ability of attackers to breach the security of the machinery of democracy. Bruce Schneier’s summary of the summary is worth a look for the main points.

What will those wacky designers think about next? How about a bed that floats in mid-air suspended by magnetism? The philosophy of design is the best: “The goal in this project was to make a usable artefact of respectable size that doesn’t have gravity but another force as it’s image dictating starting point, namely magnetism.”

A team at the Eindhoven University of Technology have developed a low temperature plasma needle that kills bacteria (and can trigger cell death in cancerous cells) without harming healthy tissue. Because dental tools just aren’t scary enough yet.

Our nearest stellar neighbour, Alpha Centauri is still a long way away. It would be great to send a probe to study the neighbourhood, but the practicalities are nightmarish – relativistic flight over that distance would be difficult and hideously expensive. Unless, of course, we sent something very small and light with no instruments, and just some simple way of signalling home – the modulations of that signal by the environments encountered could provide invaluable data, and the logistics of powering the mission would become much more manageable.

Beware: low flying web2.0 memes may strike at any time! We’ve been regaled relentlessly on ‘social networking’ and the ‘wisdom of crowds’, and there’s certainly something to it – it wouldn’t be raking in the investment cash otherwise. But will searches based on human recommendations ever knock the Googles and Yahoos of the world from their perches? Maybe eventually, but I’m not going to hold my breath just yet.