The blogosphere especially likes to trumpet the demise of the ‘old media’ vanguards of print, radio and cinema – but is there any evidence to support these prophecies? Forbes.com has an article that disagrees strongly, pointing to the survival of old media forms through previous technology revolutions, and talking about ‘unimedia’ as opposed to multimedia – one platform (computers, the web) that can deliver all the old forms in one package. Maybe the dinosaurs aren’t fossilised quite yet.

It is in the nature of science that every new discovery or piece of data leaves you with yet more mysteries to solve, and cosmology is no exception to the rule. The Spitzer telescope has just shown us planet-forming dust discs in the Orion cloud complex, but there aren’t as many of them as were expected. Likewise, what might be a very young star has been spotted within 100 light years of the super-massive black hole at our own galaxy’s centre – if it doesn’t turn out to be a migrant or a binary pair, its formation in such a turbulent region is unexplained by current theories.

So, you thought the people coming up with ideas for effectively blocking asteroids from hitting the Earth were being a bit paranoid? There’s a whole lot of those rocks out there, as shown by this map of the known asteroids within 3AU of the Earth – and that’s not counting the ones we haven’t spotted yet, of which there may be literally thousands more. Makes you realise how lucky we’ve been to survive this long.

NASA’s heading for the Moon again, but they’re not looking to cutting edge technologies to do it. On the contrary, they’re taking a step back and re-examining the methods they used to get there the first time, sending their young engineers to get a hands-on look at the old Apollo landers. They also plan to use tried and tested components from the shuttle program, including the ever-controversial insulating foam. The times may have changed, but the fundamental engineering challenges of a moon landing haven’t – sometimes it’s best to stick with what you know already works.

Amazonian Dark Earth, or terra preta do indio, is a bit of a mystery. This rare rainforest soil holds two and a half times the carbon content of normal soils, but no one is entirely sure as to how the ancient tribes of the Amazon actually created the stuff. If the secret can be cracked, we would have access to a carbon sequestration method that would take biofuels from being carbon neutral to carbon negative – in other words, actually pulling out more carbon from the ecosphere than is released by the use of the fuels produced. And the more carbon it stores, the better the crops grown in it perform – any eco-project with a positive feedback loop has got to be worth looking into.