There’s a certain jealousy over in Europe – where are our space tourism start-ups? Looks like the ESA is going to look into ways to kickstart an industry in its own backyard. Which is good news for me – I don’t want to have to travel half the circumference of the planet before I can take a jaunt into orbit!

From a blogging Brit to the United States, I wish you a very happy 4th of July – and it looks like you got what I would consider the best celebratory rocket launch you could have wished for. May there be plenty more like it.

Call Steve McQueen; we’ve found an anomolous blob! No need for him to hurry though, as it’s nearly 12 billion lightyears away, and probably means us no harm. The blob in question (like the few others we’ve spotted) is a cosmological mystery, but new theories suggest it might be a galaxy in the early throes of formation, at a stage where gasses fall into a huge lump of dark matter.

Neuroscience has longed to map the human brain in real time; MRI is a great tool, but it’s a passive scan that can only describe a ‘rest state’, a mere snapshot of the activity. Finnish company Nexstim has taken the next step by developing a procedure called Navigated Brain Stimulation, or NBS. Their device can target electromagnetic stimuli in specific parts of the brain of a patient, and then measure the effects via EEG in real-time, allowing for far more effective diagnosis of dysfunction. In a hospital near you, soon.