Our nearest stellar neighbour, Alpha Centauri is still a long way away. It would be great to send a probe to study the neighbourhood, but the practicalities are nightmarish – relativistic flight over that distance would be difficult and hideously expensive. Unless, of course, we sent something very small and light with no instruments, and just some simple way of signalling home – the modulations of that signal by the environments encountered could provide invaluable data, and the logistics of powering the mission would become much more manageable.

Beware: low flying web2.0 memes may strike at any time! We’ve been regaled relentlessly on ‘social networking’ and the ‘wisdom of crowds’, and there’s certainly something to it – it wouldn’t be raking in the investment cash otherwise. But will searches based on human recommendations ever knock the Googles and Yahoos of the world from their perches? Maybe eventually, but I’m not going to hold my breath just yet.

It’s not that cuddly or cute, but you’d certainly be pleased to see it if you were nursing an injury on a battlefield hundreds of yards from safety and medical help. The Vecna BEAR (Battlefield Extraction and Retrieval) Robot is designed to seek out, pick up and cart home wounded personnel in warzones. I think you’d be grateful enough to not be too worried about the blow to your soldierly dignity, either.

The chip manufacturers are high on the hog this year, churning out the product for a hungry market. But if there’s an economic cool-off next year, as some analysts seem to think likely, that could mean a glut of silicon that no-one wants to buy. Bad news for the makers, but it might be a real boon for the consumer, who may benefit from falling prices and increasing innovation and efficiency.

We’ve heard plenty of news about nanoscale science revolutionising electronics, medicine, computing, aeronautics and all the rest. But tiny tech can be useful for more everyday stuff, too – in fact, almost all the things that petroleum is used to make (besides fuels) could be replaced by nanoparticles of sugar and starch from crops. Think inks, think plastics, think adhesives, think paper coatings…think nano!