We humans have a bad habit of leaving rubbish everywhere we go, as any nature lover or walking fanatic will tell you. That habit extends to our short tenure of adventuring in orbit around the planet, with some experts suggesting that we’re reaching a point where there is so much junk as to make space flight an unrealistically dangerous proposition. It strikes me that this can’t be a problem that is beyond our technology to address – much like the aftermath of a good house party, the issue is more likely to be that no one wants to take responsibility or volunteer to start first, let alone pay for the effort. [FutureWire]

Here’s a very interesting annotated slide show on airport architecture from Business Week. [digg]

Researchers at U.C. San Diego have developed an imaging element that performs like a 38mm lens in a lot less space by bouncing light between two mirrors. Materials costs prevent it from being marketable yet.

There’s plenty of licences floating around to facilitate the development of open source software, which is a relatively proven concept. The same doesn’t yet apply to hardware – but that could all change with the release of the TARS Open Hardware Licence, launched this week. Will this start to level the playing field of computer hardware, or is the open source idea not portable beyond the realms of code? [reBang]

Nanomachines – cutting edge ideas, right? Well, not really; Drexler was kicking the ideas around in the 70s, long before they were even vaguely practical. But the ancestry of nanotech concepts goes back further – 140 years, in fact, to a theoretical design for a molecular machine called Maxwell’s Demon, which has finally been built by a team at the University of Edinburgh. [gizmodo]