Science fiction fans (and writers) love airships. After all, what’s not to love about one of the more gracefully archaic modes of transport ever invented? Now there’s a whole new twist to the trope for writers to play with (if they haven’t already) – a bunch of Swiss scientists have built a prototype blimp powered by artificial muscles that swims through the air like a fish. Rumours of grant offers from imaginary decadent magical empires may or may not be completely unfounded.

Young people get a pretty bad press. After a constant barrage of media handwringing over illiteracy, disrespect, criminal behaviour and believing that wrestling isn’t staged, I get a warm glow when something positive slips under the radar – like the story of two Singaporean teens who made a working chameleon suit as a science project. Good going, lads.

Yeah, I saw you sat at the back, yawning at the space-related posts yesterday. So rocket launch video footage doesn’t impress you? How about close-ups of our own sun’s chromosphere, looking like some sort of psychedelic fibre-optic eye-candy gadget, then?

Sad to hear that NASA has given the Institute for Advanced Concepts the financial axe – that’s a loss to the whole world, not just the US. But gladdening is the news that us Euros are starting to pull our space-related fingers out – the ESA has ticked the final boxes to give the BepiColombo Mercury exploration mission the go-ahead.

After an aborted attempt on Monday night, SpaceX managed to achieve their goal nearly flawlessly on Wednesday. Watch the video of Falcon 1 cruising all the way into space, and then try to tell me that’s not the coolest thing ever.