• Dozens of suspected terrorists have attempted to infiltrate Britain's top laboratories in order to develop weapons of mass destruction, such as biological and nuclear devices, during the past year.
• The big debate in the near to mid-term future of aviation, according to Professor Ian Poll is not nuclear versus conventional, but noise versus carbon. Airport noise limits, says Poll, are already causing increased emissions.
• Nuclear power plants smaller than a garden shed and able to power 20,000 homes will be on sale within five years, say scientists at Los Alamos
• The UK's home office has confirmed, in extreme circumstances, it would be possible for the UK government to close down the internet. See Spooks (ep 2)
• As more and more people spend their time uploading digital narcissism to Facebook, the uber-social networking site seems to have burned through its Microsoft-juiced funding much quicker than expected. - Facebook is spending "well over" a million dollars a month in electricity alone and "likely" another $500,000 for bandwidth.
• Video: A Facebook privacy issue worth noting.
• spEak You’re bRanes
• In pushing for advertising regulation for Google TV executives are likely to usher in the technical regulation that makes Google invincible.
• Windows 7
• Mental: All invisibility cloaks to date work by hiding an object embedded inside them. Now a group of physicists have worked out how to remotely cloak objects that sit outside a cloaking material. The trick is to make the cloaking material with optical properties that are exactly complementary to the space outside them.
• What stands a better chance of surviving 50 years from now, a framed photograph or a 10-megabyte digital photo file on your computer's hard drive?
• The Internet is the "Worse Is Better" poster child.
• A century after it began publication, The Christian Science Monitor is giving up its daily print edition to focus on posting news online.
• New computer tools have the potential to revolutionize the practice of mathematics by providing far more-reliable proofs of mathematical results than have ever been possible in the history of humankind.
• Mainstream database management system (DBMS) technology faces a challenge from new approaches that reject the relational model.
• Kindle Economics
• Woman out $400K to 'Nigerian scam' con artists

• Twitter, Flickr, Facebook Make Blogs Look So 2004
• A Few Harsh Words about Twitter.
• Profile: Marcus du Sautoy, Oxford's new Simonyi professor of the public understanding of science, a post recently relinquished by its first incumbent, Richard Dawkins.
• The US Army is ramping up the development of technology right out of the X-Files, "making science fiction into reality" as Dr. John Parmentola - Director of their Research and Laboratory Management - puts it. The list of things currently in the works is amazing: Regenerating body parts on "nano-scaffolding", telepathy through electronic impulses in the scalp, and self-aware virtual photorealistic soldiers that can be deployed in the battlefield through "quantum ghost imaging".
• Sounds like a dangerous combination. The US Army Research Office and the National Security Agency (NSA) are together looking for some answers to quantum physics questions.
• Under the watchful eye of law enforcement in 40 states, Craigslist pledged Thursday to crack down on ads for prostitution on its Web sites.
• 2009 is shaping up to be the most challenging year in more than a generation for luxury items such as high-end apparel and fragrances.
• Why an Economic Crisis Could Be the Right Time for Companies to Engage in 'Disruptive Innovation'
• Britain will miss its climate change goals without tenfold investment in green technology, say business leaders
• Steven J. Wallach thinks he has come upon a new idea in computer design in an era when it has become fashionable to say that there are no new ideas.
• Last week, Dilbert's Spam Filter became Self Aware
• The future of science fiction - William Gibson, Kim Stanley Robinson and Ursula K Le Guin comment.
• The 'Life Cube' - A blow-up survival shelter featuring a bed, a couch, freeze-dried food, a 50-gallon water bladder, a first-aid kit, a radio and a cookstove.
• The largest truck in the world is about to become the largest robotic vehicle in the world.
• Singularity Summit 2008 Reviewed
• The "world's first ruggedised, weaponised high energy solid state laser designed for battlefield applications"
• How Lightsabers Work

• Science's Alternative to an Intelligent Creator: the Multiverse Theory - Our universe is perfectly tailored for life. That may be the work of God or the result of our universe being one of many.
• The world's largest women-only university is being built in Saudi Arabia; with a campus that will cover 8m square metres and accommodate 40,000 students.
• The 5,300 year old human mummy - dubbed Oetzi or 'the Tyrolean Iceman' - is highly unlikely to have modern day relatives
• Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao said rich nations must abandon their "unsustainable lifestyle" to fight climate change and expand help to poor nations bearing the brunt of worsening droughts and rising sea levels.
• Cells taken from mice frozen 16 years ago have grown into healthy clones, raising the possibility of reproducing long-dead animals and even resurrecting extinct species.
• 1675: Gottfried Leibniz writes the integral sign in an unpublished manuscript, introducing the calculus notation that's still in use today.
• Confusing creation with creationism.
• Reducing the Risk of Human Extinction
• Cool Science - Videos
• Baby talk: The roots of the early vocabulary in infants' learning from speech (topical for me - Ed.)
• Taking up bowling or tennis is an excellent way to stay fit. But if you're not careful, you might find that these amateur sports can have unexpected long-term health risks.
• "Eighty per cent of women's inferences about fidelity or infidelity were correct, but men were even better, accurate 94 per cent of the time" - Men are better at detecting infidelities
• The Evolution of Insanity - Today's schizophrenic may believe that terrorists are beaming radio transmissions into his brain; 50 years ago, however, Communists were the culprits.
• There are simply too many exceptions to the conventional rules for genes.
• New Physics at an Aging Tevatron
• Amazon UK pulls Scientology exposé for 'legal reasons'

Space News

Credit: NASA, ESA and M. Livio (STScI)

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope is back in business. Just a couple of days after the orbiting observatory was brought back online, Hubble aimed its prime working camera, the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2), at a particularly intriguing target, a pair of gravitationally interacting galaxies called Arp 147. The two galaxies happen to be oriented so that they appear to mark the number 10.

• For the last 12 months, the International Space Station's Early Ammonia System (EAS) has hung above our heads like an evil-smelling Sword of Damocles, which might suddenly plunge down to release its payload of eyewatering space niff at any time.
• NASA spinoff firm the Ad Astra Rocket Company has announced a key milestone in ground testing of its prototype plasma drive technology, the Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket (VASIMR).
• The International Space Station - 10 years in Space.
• There is a possibility that the Cassini probe might be repurposed to look for signs of life on Saturn's enigmatic moon Enceladus.
• American weaponrytech behemoth Lockheed Martin has been awarded a $30m contract by the US Air Force Space Superiority Systems Wing. Under the deal, Lockheed will develop a prototype "tactical" space scanner for use in the covert orbital warfare of tomorrow.
• Winners: The annual Northrop Grumman Lunar Landing challenge.
• It's the beginning of the end for the Phoenix Mars Lander. As winter approaches in the Martian arctic, NASA says it's in a 'race against time and the elements' in its efforts to prolong the robotic spacecraft's life.
• How to eavesdrop on alien chat
• I like the look of this: The New Star Trek Trailer