You can watch the next plague coming your way on a map or satellite at HealthMap, a site that puts disease reports from a variety of sources, quick and questionable and slow and sure, on a world map.

Arden is a MMORPG under development that will be set in Shakespeare’s England. It’s being developed as a game, an educational environment and a research tool.

We’re still a long way off from having ourselves a magical beanstalk to climb off-planet on, but there are plenty of dedicated and innovative people working hard to make the dream a reality. Dr. Brad Edwards has made a report on the space elevator section of the X-Cup games – no winners this year, but some strong contenders and ingenious new ideas on display.

Among the many hazards of manned missions to Mars (or pretty much anywhere else beyond LEO) is that of long-term exposure to cosmic rays – radiation isn’t something that the human body copes with well, and it’s a long ride out to the red planet. A research project at NASA has obviously been brainstorming with groups of classic science fiction fans, as they’ve come up with a plan that involves hitching a ride on an asteroid that passes both Earth and Mars, and burrowing the vehicle inside the rock to use it as a radiation shield. It may sound a little crazy, but no more so than a lot of the other ideas that have been suggested, and it has the merit of being a low-tech solution – less things can go wrong, and logistics people like that sort of thing.

We’ve mentioned fabbing here before – the idea of desktop ‘rapid prototyping’ systems that can ‘print’ any three dimensional object, and a proof of concept in the journey toward self-replicating machines. A small team at Cornell University have made available the open source plans for just such a device, so that anyone who is interested (and can afford to stump up for the parts) can get their own version and start experimenting in their own shed or garage. And if that sounds too much like a Cory Doctorow plot for you, you should probably take a look at the people who blogged the Fab@Home site – the RepRap project goes one step further, in that they are trying to create a fabber that can produce functional copies of itself. Eat your heart out, von Neumann.