Kevin Kelly has some fascinating ideas about where science as a practice is going in the next 50 years. Just the topic headings make for crunchy, futurismic reading: compiled negative results, triple blind experiments, combinatorial sweep exploration, and the list goes on.

One of the more hopeful stories coming out of the Katrina disaster was that the city would open its wi-fi network to anyone wishing to use it for free. As a staunch libertarian, I generally disapprove of the government doing anything that puts it in competition with the private sector, but in this case I’m almost ready to support the government wi-fi program just to see the telecoms screwed. With stories coming out regularly on the email tax and other such shady business practices, I don’t think it’s any wonder that many people harbor ill will against the telecoms and ISPs.

The astronomers are arguing again…some of them think that the estimates of asteroid impact frequency on Earth are hugely optimistic, and that collisions of certain types may be up to ten times more likely than these estimates state.

The everyday apps for carbon nanotubes are coming thick and fast. Pro bike manufacturers BMC have released a bike frame made from carbon nanofibre composite which weighs about the same as five mobile phones. Hardly a snip at £2100 ($3650), though.

Looks like someone’s working on one of Ray Kurzweil’s many futurist projects…Kwabena Boahen, an associate professor in the Department of Bioengineering at Stanford University, leads a research group that is trying to mimic the functions of the brain’s complex neural system using silicon chips.