The brilliantly-named Asha Deliverance is a co-founder of Pacific Domes, a company that are pushing to revive interest in geodesic structures, as once evangelised by Buckminster Fuller. Their domes are turning up at festivals and corporate events quite regularly now, so no doubt they’ll be well-placed to cash in when the weather systems get worse and we have to cover whole cities with them…

Science, as well as science fiction, has long dreamed of replacing lost or damaged (or simply inadequate) human limbs with bionic prosthetics. Progress has been slow to date, as it’s notoriously hard to get the human body to accept non-biological materials as ‘part of the furniture’. A breakthrough at University College, London may change all that though – a way of securing a titanium rod into human bone, and having the skin heal and mesh around it without bleeding or infections.

Wired News reports on the next generation of cybersex sites. The old days of surreal text-based interaction in chatrooms is giving way to social-network-esque communities, with a big emphasis on gameplay as well as the partner-hunting.

More news from the nanoscale – electrical charges can travel along conductors made of chromophores faster than any recorded speed for organic semiconductors by a factor of three. Chromophores are the parts of molecules that give them a colour, and they react to electrons by releasing more light of a specific wavelength. All this heavy science means there is a working proof for electronic conductors that function at the 10 nanometer scale.

Ways of searching for life on Mars are ten a penny, but here’s the latest suggestion, based on studies performed on rocks in Earth deserts. These rocks are covered with ‘desert varnish’, a patina of silica and other elements deposited on the rocks over time by wind and weather, trapping fragments of organic DNA as the layers are laid down. If we can find Martian rocks with a similar coating, a vigorous scraping of samples could yield evidence of life in the Red Planet’s past.