Good news for people who make a living creating virtual copies of real-world objects – the ZScanner700 is the world’s first handheld 3D scanning device, capable of digitising real surfaces quickly and easily. Needs no tripod, nor any positioning equipment – just point and scan. The CAD crowd will be pleased, but not half as much as game designers and Second Life afficinados, I’m thinking.

Roscosmos, the Russian Federal Space Agency, has put a moratorium on further launches involving Dnepr boosters, at least until the causes of last week’s failed CubeSat launch have been thoroughly researched. The crash scattered huge amounts of rocket fuel over a wide (but fortunately unihabited) region of Kazakhstan, a mishap that may cost $10m to clean up behind.

Still no mention of definite manned missions yet, but this week Beijing in China is the location for a big conference of Lunar planners, where an international coalition is being hammered together for the purpose of exploring our nearest neighbour with robotic probes. The successful ESA SMART-1 probe, currently rounding up its data-gathering, will be followed shortly by devices from Japan, China and India, with more to come.

Fingerprint scanning? Sooo last year, man. The hot new science-fiction-flavoured tip for biometric security is scanning the iris of the eye – it seems to have worked in penal institutions so far, at least. No doubt the hacking community will be on the case right away, but it’ll probably take more than gummi bears to get round this idea.

Either the hippie vision isn’t quite dead yet, or someone’s been reading a whole lot of fantasy novels – two MIT architects and an engineer envisage future homes being carefully grown from trees, using an ancient cultivation technique known as ‘pleaching’ to guide the shape, growth and development of the building. The downside to this otherwise lovely idea is the fact that it takes some time to grow trees big enough for the purpose, so don’t sell the trailer just yet.