The Economist takes a look at what characterizes successful open source projects, and the answer is not immediately obvious: strong controls on who contributes. The article makes open source projects sound less like a new structure, and more like a new way of organizing.

I have a feeling the Celestro SkyScout is the kind of gadget that makes life too easy. Point the SkyScout at a heavenly object and press a button to find out what it is, or ask the SkyScout to locate a planet for you and follow its instructions to find it in the sky. Feels like cheating. I much prefer freezing with a red masked flashlight, trying to figure out which way is north.

Is there such a thing as a sustainability geek? ‘Cause I’m pretty sure I am one. Anyway I love reading about gadgets like Philips’ new woodstove, which uses a fan (powered by the heat generated by the stove) to burn wood hotter and more efficiently, decreasing the amount of wood a family needs and decreasing the amount of particulate pollution emitted. It’s aimed at people in third world countries who use wood as their primary means of cooking and heating?

A joint UK-US team of researchers claim to have created a new type of organic polymer which could supercede silicon compounds as the standard material for making certain types of electronic system. The major edge it has over silicon is that it can be manufactured at low temperatures with little waste. It could also be ‘printed’ as a fluid using conventional inkjet technologies, putting an end to expensive and error-prone lithography techniques and enabling it to be used on flexible substrates. Maybe ‘electronic paper’ won’t be vapourware forever.

Scientists from the UK’s Norwich University have taken a novel approach to building nano-scale objects. They are using a plant virus as a scaffold on which to assemble iron-rich compounds into an electronically active particle that acts like a tiny capacitor.