I’d call it biomimicry, but it’s really geomimicry. Bruce Kania, an inventor in Montana, is producing artificial floating islands designed to clean up waterways polluted with biowaste like sewage or animal effluent by providing a home for waterscrubbing plants. And they look nice too.

Just about anyone who took a junior high biology class understand the concept of pollination: plants breed when flying insects, usually bees, spread their pollen from plant to plant. But did you realize that 1/3 of food crops need pollinators? And that bee populations are dying?

How the hell do you define a ‘futurismist’, anyway?

“We overexpect dramatic developments early, and underexpect them in the longer term.”

Ah, OK. Centauri Dreams cuts a slice from a new book by Stewart Brand, ‘The Clock of the Long Now’ – a slice in praise of science fiction readers, no less.

Nothing brings back memories like a photograph. But Hewlett Packard think that having the ability to stream back audio or video to a digital device by waving at a photo would enhance your nostalgia trip immensely. Hence their development of the Memory Spot, a shirt-button sized device that can store documents, pictures, audio and more, designed to be stuck onto ‘meatspace’ documents to enhance their content. It’s basically ‘RFID plus’…though hopefully not so easy to hack.

Can your ability to pay attention be trained and improved? That is the question being investigated by scientists using real-time Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to observe the human brain in action. It’s already been shown that patients can learn to alleviate chronic pain by watching the images and using them as a feedback loop to tame thgeir minds – but can it be used to help people with attention deficit disorders to improve their concentration?