Travel broadens the mind, so they say. Many people enjoy visiting new places, checking out the sights and sounds and generally soaking up the ambiance. But it can be hard to find the best spots with nothing more than a guidebook and a rudimentary grasp of the lingo, and the same applies to online environments as much as to meatspace. What you need is a clued-up local guide to the synthetic world of your choice – and that’s exactly the service that new startup Synthravels offers to customers. Book early to avoid the busy season…

If you’re anything at all like me, you’re probably wishing fervently you could be at the X-Prize events in Las Cruces, New Mexico this weekend – I’m especially hoping for good results from the space elevator contest. But there is consolation for the geographically and financially challenged in the form of the intarwebs! Thanks to the Google Earth team and Space.com, there’s a whole bundle of excellent Google Earth material available to allow you to explore the site and see the vehicles without having to leave your swivel chair. Okay, so it’s all virtual, but if I can’t experience the games with all five senses in meatspace, this will just have to do.

First teleportation, now this. It’s time to deflate another overblown science story that’s sweeping the net (and the other media) today – ZOMFG! Invisibilty cloak! Now, listen – this is a great scientific advance, and as such deserves to be widely reported, but not as something that it isn’t. This technology will not make you or your car car or anything else invisible to other people, okay? Unless those other people happen to only see in the microwave spectrum instead of the normal light the rest of us use, of course. Sheesh.

As a public sector employee, I’m never too keen on the thought of losing money – there’s never quite enough to go round as it is. Now, new research indicates that these financial fears are almost identical to the brain’s response to fear of physical attack, occuring in the same cerebral regions and producing equal amounts of stress symptoms. I’ll leave you to think up your own punchline for this one.

Here we go again – another report in to the horrors of internet addiction. It’s getting to be that we can be classified as addicts to practically anything, not just substances (illegal or otherwise), and more than anything else at the moment the intarwebs seem to raise the hackles of those who seek to protect us from ourselves. While I’d freely admit that internet use is highly compulsive, and that some people almost certainly use it to the detriment of meatspace relationships, I don’t think it can be compared to crack, heroin or alcohol. When we start hearing about people commiting robbery to pay for their bandwidth, I may consider reassessing that opinion.