Photosynthesis powers our biosphere and without it we’d be rather short of breath, but oxygenic photosynthesis is a tiny subset of what life has tried. In bacteria there are many different photoreactive molecules and several different photosynthetic processes – some use water as the reductant (hydrogen source), some use hydrogen neat, and some use hydrogen

Adrian Mann is an awesome digital artist who has visualised some of the classics of spaceflight studies of the last 35 years… This is Rocket Science …some notable creations are Starship Daedalus Starship Daedalus …which is very cool. And another ‘blast from the past’ is Project Orion Project Orion And the ultimate starship design, the

Hitachi have developed a brain-reading device which uses near-IR light to watch blood-flow in the brain – a proven proxy for simple, strong thoughts. Hitachi’s Brain-Scanning Remote In essence you’d wear a near-IR pick-up as a head-band and it would allow you to think simple commands on a remote control. They’re hoping to market to

Space.com has a news article covering the claim that we’ll soon be able to “eavesdrop” on ETs… Eavesdropping on ET soon …which would be fantastic if it happens and disquieting if it never happens. But detection may not be easy. Even the Square Kilometre Array will be hard-pressed to pick a signal from more than

Massive radio telescope arrays are soon to be built around the world – notably, for me as an Aussie, the Square Kilometre Array, and other systems around the globe. Such incredibly sensitive radio telescope clusters will allow direct detection of electromagnetic leakage (RADAR, TV, and radio) from star systems within 30 light years or more

The Integral Fast Reactor is so named because it handles all its fuel reprocessing on-site which does tell us much more about just what it does. Here’s a link to a very good Wikipedia article Integral Fast Reactor The external links are worth checking out too. I was put on to the design by a

Don’t know if you’ve seen this rendering work by Rhys Taylor of Orion before, but I’m gob-smacked… http://rhysy.plexersoft.com/orion/index.html …and his fictional Orion-powered space-fleets around Callisto… http://rhysy.plexersoft.com/Deep%20Space%20Force%20Gallery/ …plus a 3-D animation of an Orion launch… http://www.nuclearspace.com/gallery_orion_movie.htm …quite impressive really. Quite dire in other respects – nuclear Cold-War space-fleets have an Apocalyptic feel. Another link is an

One big topic of perennial interest is interstellar travel and all its sundry issues. I’ve fiddled with a few equations for relativistic rockets and produced some interesting results – at least to me. For example, the regular equation for motion under continuous, unvarying acceleration is usually written like so… s = Vo.t + 1/2.a.t^2 …where