According to Cambridge University biomedical gerontologist Aubrey de Grey, the first person to live to 1,000 years of age has already been born. True or not, this idea is frightening to me mainly because the average person today starts to get pretty frail right around sixty, so unless we manage to improve the quality of life for the elderly along with their lifespan, we youngsters are doomed to some 900 years of infeebled misery. While I’m sure that at some point the necessity for some kind of physical rejuvenation process would breed the requisite ingenuity to devise one, I’m still not convinced that several decades, if not centuries, of torture would be worth it.

Yet another safety concern for the NASA mission planners – apparently the moon has seismic activity of inexplicable origin, manifesting as quakes that can last for up to ten minutes at a time. Better make those Fuller domes pretty strong and flexible.

Radar scans by Europe’s ‘Mars Express’ probe have detected what may be thin layers of water ice near to the polar cap deposits located previously.

The UK’s Bath University houses a project known as ‘RepRap’, short for ‘Replicating Rapid-Prototyper’. Basically, the idea is to produce a machine that can duplicate itself (and other industrial products) and then give away the resulting device under the GNU public licence – in other words create a von Neumann Universal Constructor.

DARPA is the branch of the Pentagon charged with keeping the US out in front of its competitors when it comes to technological superiority. They’ve come up with some pretty loopy ideas before, but the BBC are most unimpressed by their plans for insects implanted with micro-systems for control and surveillance.