The Cassini probe keeps on spewing out great data about Saturn and its local neighbourhood and sending it back to us earthbound dreamers, and long may it continue. Recent investigations of Saturn’s best-known features seem to indicate that the ‘E-ring’ is largely composed of material from the recently-observed outgassings of icy moon Enceladus, among other things.

I predict a busy few months for space announcements, and here’s the first to take advantage of the shuttle’s media buzz: Blue Origin, a company that receives big dollar from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, has submitted a draft environmental assessment paper for their proposed ‘New Shepard’ suborbital vehicle program to the FAA. The contents of the document give a lot of details of their future plans away – another serious contender has stepped into the commercial space arena.

The search for ‘exosolar’ planets, Earth-like bodies in other star systems, is starting to pick up pace. A large part of the problem at the moment is the light from the parent stars of potential planets making them hard to spot. A daisy-shaped star-shade, designed by a team at the University of Colorado, may make it possible to screen out the starlight and allow detailed analysis of planetary features, such as atmospheric content and surface topography, via spectrographic methods.

According to Bruce Schneier, “the fundamental problems in computer security are no longer about technology; they’re about applying technology,” which is why a conference dedicated to the the economics of information security has a lot to say about where IT security is going.

Want to stop terrorism? Find the terrorists wives. Or maybe give them a small business loan. Both would probably be most effective.