It’s not that cuddly or cute, but you’d certainly be pleased to see it if you were nursing an injury on a battlefield hundreds of yards from safety and medical help. The Vecna BEAR (Battlefield Extraction and Retrieval) Robot is designed to seek out, pick up and cart home wounded personnel in warzones. I think you’d be grateful enough to not be too worried about the blow to your soldierly dignity, either.

The chip manufacturers are high on the hog this year, churning out the product for a hungry market. But if there’s an economic cool-off next year, as some analysts seem to think likely, that could mean a glut of silicon that no-one wants to buy. Bad news for the makers, but it might be a real boon for the consumer, who may benefit from falling prices and increasing innovation and efficiency.

We’ve heard plenty of news about nanoscale science revolutionising electronics, medicine, computing, aeronautics and all the rest. But tiny tech can be useful for more everyday stuff, too – in fact, almost all the things that petroleum is used to make (besides fuels) could be replaced by nanoparticles of sugar and starch from crops. Think inks, think plastics, think adhesives, think paper coatings…think nano!

Knife crime is endemic in the UK, at least according to our media. Scotland has a particular problem with this, which is why the police there are field-testing kevlar-armoured metal-detecting gloves. The idea being that they can be used to scan a suspect for concealed knives without the need for a separate gadget, and protect the wearer should a knife be present (and its bearer willing to use it). Fellow body-piercing afficionados may want to get their disclaimers prepared in advance…

As a kid, I would frequently compose soundtracks to accompany the scenery that flashed by my window in one of the many interminable car trips we used to take. LocoSound proposes a similar experience, music composed to match the scenery of a specific train voyage and broadcast over low power FM radio to the denizens of a single car.