Settlers on the Red Planet won’t be able to rely on frequent supplies from Earth to keep the larder stocked. Professor Masamichi Yamashita of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency proposes an agricultural biodome system where settlers would breed silkworms as feed for fish or poultry raised locally or (in more desparate times) as part of their own diet.

Anyone in the space industries is worried about space junk. Earth orbit is full of flotsam, and there are calls for planning how to deal with it – including people saying that some of it should be preserved for posterity.

David Beaty spent 10 years surveying remote parts of Earth for precious metals and another 12 years hunting for oil. Now he’s working for NASA, telling them what they’ll need to do to exploit the Moon. Apparently, “they’ll have to learn to live off the land, using local resources to meet their needs.”

They talk a good game, those Google people – even to the point of promising the currently unattainable. The top dogs have been addressing the European Zeitgeist conference in London, and Larry Page has come out and said that they want to use AI for search purposes, and that it could be only a few years away. I’d love this to be true – so much so that if I was an industry investor, I’d have my cheque-book out right now.

It’s important to keep an eye on your cholestorol, your heart rate, and pretty much everything else these days. That could become a lot easier when they roll out these subdermal nanobot-controlled medical displays, which the article admits are ‘a theoretical idea based on fact’. They’d probably get a lot more investment for the development stages if they pitched the idea of putting a TV in your wrist, though.