The universe is full of extremely huge things, but the official crown of hugeness has just been claimed. The biggest known object in the universe is now considered to be an ameoba-like mass of galaxies and gas bubbles that is more than 200 million light years wide.

Biometric identification is shaping up to be one of the majotr technologies of the next decade. Its ubiquity will only be advanced by the announcement of Seiko Epson’s new 0.2mm thick fingerprint sensor, which reads electrical signals from the skin of a digit being touched to it. The tiny size of the device ensures it will be possible to incorporate it almost anywhere – so at least we’ll never have to worry about losing our keys again.

Or maybe it can. Data from the Huygens probe indicates that it is raining methane on Titan, and it will probably continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Plus the satellite has huge lakes of liquid methane and ethane, too. It may not sound too hospitable (and indeed, it wouldn’t be for us), but all that liquid moving around ramps up the possibility of there being some form of primitive life to be found.

If the observations and theories of Rudolph Schild are correct, then we may have been rather wrong about black holes all along. If the magnetism he has observed in a quasar is a common phenomenon, it may well be that what we assumed were black holes are actually ‘magnetospheric eternally collapsing objects’ – hot balls of plasma, rather than gateways out of spacetime as we know it.

The tiny transistors in microprocessors and other chips fail all the time. Of course, you rarely notice the effects, because they are loaded with redundancy as a contingency plan against it occuring – one little circuit snuffs, there’s a few others to take its place. Naturally, that doesn’t make them any cheaper to make. Self-repairing chips would need less extra circuitry on board, relying instead on clever ways of rerouting their architecture to avoid failures.