If, as as some predict, the scarce resource of the future will be fresh water, there’s an awful lot of urban paving that could one day collect and purify rain water.

The United States has always wielded a big stick and a big carrot in the Western hemisphere, but lately Hugo Chavez has been defying the stick and offering bigger carrots. Whether this is anomalous or a sign of realignments in the Americas we’ll have to wait to see.

The Homeland Security Department certainly take their work seriously, but they come up with some strange (and occasionally sinister methodologies). Point in case, a new software package being developed to monitor foreign perceptions of the US by analysing newspaper and magazine articles. It’s hard to tell what the true deployment purpose of the program would be (being as it’s only in the very early development stages so far), but it would seem to be a rather roundabout and paranoid response to the problem of terrorism – how many terrorists write op-ed pieces, after all?

If you’ll forgive me acting a lttle out of character, I’d like to deflate some hyperbolic reportage. Anyone with an interest in science and technology who uses the web has inevitably seen the stories about successful teleportation by Danish physicists. While this transmission of entangled states is an exciting and important development in its field, it has nothing to do with physically transporting matter over a distance. If I had a penny for every mention of Star Trek in today’s science news, I’d be a rich man.

Michael Kinsley believes traditional newspapers should view the Internet as an opportunity, not a threat. The rise of the blog as a source of news (although generally not the source) should be seen as a sign that there’s room for personality and individuality in news. “…An intelligent person, paid to learn about some subject, will naturally develop views about it. [It is] more truthful to express those views than to suppress them in the name of objectivity.”