The political debate in this country, such as it is, takes place primarily on television and radio. What astounds me is that the debate is rarely about the substance of political issues, but is instead about the race. Everyone wants to talk about what a poltician’s positions mean to their electability, and no one wants to talk about whether a politician’s positions are right or wrong. Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia fame proposes a different kind of political discourse, one that claims what we, the un-telegenic masses, do matters. I’m enough of a cynic to think that the Campaigns Wikia will be only a different kind of bad, but I’m not so much of a cynic that I won’t watch this with interest.

Everyone knows at least one guy with one of those fancy laser-pointers – and they always seem to be the kind of guy who won’t shut up about the things, too. Next time your acquaintance offers to light your cigar for you, remind him that the National Ignition Facility will have the most powerful laser in the world, which will focus 500 trillion Watts of power in 20 nanosecond bursts onto materials that the lab boys want to blow up. That’s the equivalent of 1,000 times the electrical output of the entire US in each burst…and it doesn’t take standard batteries, either.

Another challenge to the ubiquity of the silicon chips we know and love has appeared. Canadian researchers have created semiconductor devices that outperform the hard-to-manufacture standard formats we have today, by merely painting a liquid onto a glass substrate. This sort of ‘wet’ semiconductor tech has been tried before, but this is the first time it has trumped the old-school grown-crystal devices.

While the successful Shuttle launch (justifiably) stole the limelight, almost everyone forgot about the ESA’s poor little Venus Express. But the probe is doing fine; after a long period of careful maneuvers, it has settled into a steady orbit and is busily pumping data back to planet Earth for boffins to pore over. It has already shed light on Venusian features never seen before, such as the double-eyed vortex at the planet’s South Pole.

It’s a good news day for fans of brain-machine interface technologies. Not only are DARPA funding a project to use machines to boost the speed at which operators can scan visual images (which will probably come as a great relief to the people employed to vet the photos uploaded to social network sites), but the full details of the systems that allow a man who is paralysed from the neck down to interact with his computer (and meatspace, via a robotic arm) have been published in the journal Nature. So, when do I get my datajack?