The curse of technology – you just have to keep upgrading for better performance. And this applies not only to your fruit-branded laptop (eh, Jeremy?) – the Mars rover robots need upgrades and software updates too.

The Moon has no magnetic field like Earth’s, which means that anyone spending a long time there is going to be bombarded with a whole lot of radiation from the Sun. And as we all know, radiation exposure isn’t good for you, to say the least. The NASA thinkers need ways to protect the next generation of Moon explorers from the cosmic rays, and the simplest solution would appear to be to just bury the habitats under the Lunar soil.

Stenocara beetles live in the Namib Desert, one of the driest places on Earth, and have had to evolve effective methods of capturing water. A team of researchers have created a composite nanomaterial that collects airborne water from mist and fog based on the mechanism used by the beetle, which is much more effective than current mist-nets.

The Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Europe is due to come online next year, but the physics boffins already know what they want to do with it well in advance. While colliding particles together at a fraction less than the speed of light, they hope to observe SuperWIMPS (Weakly Interactive Massive Particles), which are the latest hunting ground for that ‘dark matter’ stuff that they still haven’t pinned down yet.

Humans, as a race, are converging with our technologies at an ever faster pace. Science fiction has long discussed the fusion of man and machine, and the realisation of some of these pipedreams is approaching fast. Cnet news has a good overview article on these developments, which they’re dubbing ‘The Next Big Bang’. Well worth a visit.