The ‘softly, safely, slowly’ approach to suborbital flights and space tourism isn’t for the Singaporeans, it would seem. Doubtless banking on getting into the lead in a future growth industry, the country’s Aviation Authority is lashing together a batch of rules and regs to govern the new businesses, while the visionaries from Space Adventures are slating ‘Spaceport Singapore’ to open its doors (hatches?) to travellers in 2009. I’d better start saving money.

The ‘Spirit’ Martian rover has located a pair of iron-based meteorites near its winter park-up site, trumping it’s sister, ‘Opportunity’, which saw a single lump of similar material last year. In the time-worn tradition of space exploration, the rocks have been given obscure names, in this case after locations in Antarctica.

Autonomous flying surveillance is a minor holy grail at the moment, hence the interest in a novel new material. Electroactive paper (EAPap) can be made to bend and flex under the influence of an electrical field, thanks to the thin coating of gold on its surfaces and some ionic effects. Researchers hope this property could be exploited to produce ultralight surveillance ‘dragonflies’ that fly by flapping EAPap wings.

Everyone knows that you shouldn’t look straight at the sun. And why would you need to, given that TRACE – the ‘Transition Region and Coronal Explorer’ satellite has being do it on our behalf since 1998? So save your retinas, and check out the archives of solar images it has gathered over the years. As balls of fusion go, the sun is a beautiful thing.

Nothing like a story about modern college life to make you feel old. Drugs were definitely de rigeur when I was at college, but the folks I knew who took them were most certainly not trying to improve their grade point average.