Space exploration is a given – provided we don’t immolate ourselves in pointless wars or avoidable climate disasters, natch. But what about when we actually get out there? Dr Patrick Lin, of the The Nanoethics Group in Santa Barbara, California has called for us to start considering the ethical implications of space exploitation before we export all our human follies to other planets and environments.

Just because you can see through something doesn’t make it truly transparent. Even the finest glass still loses some light to reflection, leading to loss in optic fiber, for example. So this new completely transparent and optically loss-less material from Japan is good news for the future information infrastructure of the world.

It’s easy to forget that the boys at Big Blue don’t just do computers – they have their fingers in a whole lot of other pies too, one of which is the development of electron microscopes. They’ve just demonstrated the latest advance in this field, an ‘atomic force microscope’ which doesn’t just produce images of materials at the nanoscale, but can manipulate individual molecules with incredible precision. The future is tiny.

New technology springs up daily, and finds new ways to merge together. The ‘Web 2.0’ concept is just one part of an all-encompassing convergence. But where is all of this actually taking us? That is the question that the Metaverse Roadmap has been created to answer, by examining such things as online social networks, online games and digital mapping. The business of predicting the future is always a little risky, but there’s a lot to be said for looking ahead further than the end of the week.

Group dating, in which groups of friends get together in the hopes of pairing off, kind of takes the “single” out of the “singles” marketplace, dontchathink?