Even hippy peaceniks like me can’t resist the lure of big explosions on camera. So I’ll be spending a few hours trawling through the US Energy Department’s Nuclear Weapons Film Declassification Project, which houses lots of old movies of the most powerful force known and harnessed by mankind. Now, where are my sunglasses?

There have been some real advances in quantum computing, but the effects aren’t scalable to a useful degree. At least not yet – a team of physicists have constructed a new form of ‘ion trap’ using conventional microfabrication techniques. It traps all the ions in a single layer, making the geometry of the hardware much more like the silicon we’re used to, and hence easier to potentially engineer useful machines from.

The Excalibur artillery shells soon to be on their way to Iraq and Afganistan use satellite guidance systems and tailfins for manuevering to increase accuracy. Seems somehow inappropriate to put them in the same category as the dumb hunks of metal and explosives used in the last few wars.

Seems kind of gimmicky to me, but I guess a GPS navigator that doubles as a camera and lets you pick your destination by its photo can’t be worse than the UI on most car navigation systems that I’ve seen.

More planet-hunting news! The ‘Centauri Dreams’ blog examines the content of a soon-to-be-published paper that claims the odds for habitable planets in the Centauri star system are much better than thought before. This is thanks to evidence that the dwarf third star in the system may be ideally placed to lob comets and other organic volatiles right into the habitable planetary orbits. This is good news, but don’t go laying down money for land deals just yet.