You don’t need a huge dish in a South American mountain range to discover new planets. Peter McCullough and his team have been using consumer-grade technology and distributed computing to watch distant stars, and they’ve lucked out by spotting an extrasolar planet of similar size to Jupiter without the use of any big observatories.

The dream of fusion power has been a long-held one, but it may be a step closer to becoming a reality. Researchers at General Atomics, a company based in San Diego, California, have discovered a way to make the magnetic containment fields used to hold the plasma in place less susceptible to rupture, which means that critical components will have to be replaced less often, making the financial overhgeads much smaller. There are hopes to install this new system in the prototype International Tokamak Experimental Reactor being built in France.

In light of the biblical-scale cock-up that is the Three Gorges Dam, the development of a hydroelectric generator that works without damming seems all the more important an innovation.

Few things are less pleasent than vomit in freefall, and the other side-effects of motion sickness are no picnic either. The boys at NASA are working on a design for some goggles that cause a strobing effect in the wearer’s vision, which they are hoping will alleviate space sickness. They may also prove useful in more down-to-earth travel situations as well.

Yet another weird discovery regarding those tiny ‘tubes. Gases and liquids flow more effectively through nanotube pores in membranes than they do through pores made of other materials that are ten times the size. This property could revolutionise filtration processes.