There appears to be something profound about a design method that copies nature, even for people who aren’t big fans of reflexology or wheatgrass. Maybe, just maybe, biomimicry can do YOU a favour.

In a milestone verdict handed down by an Italian court on Wednesday, three Google executives were given six-month suspended sentences for allowing a video about which they were totally unaware to be uploaded to their site, Google Video. Is this the end of Internet freedom, or the beginning of Google's accountability to the individual? 

A collection of files made available to the British National Archives on Wednesday, courtesy of the Ministry of Defence, contains thousands of reports of UFO sightings between 1994 and 2000. For British media, it’s Christmas all over again.

On 18 February 1930, 23-year-old junior researcher at the Lowell Observatory in Arizona, Clyde Tombaugh, discovered Pluto. Hailed as Planet X that humanity was for some reason desperate to find, it was the stuff of dreams and pure romance. Today it drifts forgotten and unexceptional. How things change.

Walter Isaacson, the man who has been chosen to write the authorised biography of Steve Jobs, has a life-story that reads like a romance novel. Can we expect the ‘Book of Jobs’ to read like a romance too?

It is a sad, mad and downright bizarre story about the young athlete who once stood on the winner's  podium of the world's toughest cycle race, but now stands officially accused of hacking into the French national anti-doping laboratory computers.

Can you believe it's only five years old? In half a decade YouTube has changed the nature of online infrastructure, nearly caused a catastrophic policy change in the USA and given Google near-total dominance over an entire category of advertising. Now for its next trick: forcing standards-based video streaming on reluctant parties – like Microsoft.

Once famed for his hankering for chart-busting fast-food snacks after trademark power jogs, then for the near-inevitable quadruple heart bypass surgery in 2004, former President Bill Clinton was hospitalized on Thursday to have two stents inserted into a clogged heart artery after he complained of chest pains.

After three wind delays on Wednesday, Nasa gave the go-ahead for the Atlas-V rocket to blast off from Cape Canaveral on Thursday evening SA time. This awesome piece of equipment will open the secrets of our own star like never before.

According to America’s paper of record, which likes to make pronouncements about new Ages in human history – and sometimes even pronounces right – the electric car is finally a viable reality. Why have they said this now? Because they’ve test-driven SA-born Elon Musk’s new Tesla.

If it looks too good to be true, it probably is, even if it makes the news on CNN. But there is some value in your own “personal hydrogen power station”.

A company in Europe is touting a new nano-scale silicon coating as a revolution that will banish dirt and detergents to the history books – and vine rot, and bacterial infections, and graffiti too. But we're learning that small things can kill you, so the comparisons with asbestos aren't going to go away.

Fans of space travel everywhere, rejoice not. As the outlines of US President Barack Obama's proposed $3.8 billion 2011 budget started appearing in news, one major loser was obvious: Nasa will not get the $100 billion it needs to send a manned spaceship back to the Moon by 2020 as originally planned.

The asteroid Apophis, were it to hit the Earth in 2036, would explode with the force of more than half the weapons in the United States nuclear arsenal. That would be bad. True to form, though, the old Cold War enemies are in disagreement about the dangers.

In the annals of men who came second, Buzz Aldrin is arguably the most famous of them all. On his 80th birthday we look back on his life, and consider why idiotic talk-show hosts clamor to interview him.

There is an old saying, often used by socially-activist priests: “God must truly love the poor, he made so many of them.”  Maybe He feels the same way about failed states – there are so many of those as well. Contemporary Hobbesian universes around the world like Moldova, Somalia, Chad and Afghanistan all come readily to mind. But if you really want to travel to an easily-accessible world leader in failed statedom, you almost certainly need to book your flight – or ship passage, perhaps - to Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

It’s a phenomenon that appears way larger than we suspected when we first wrote about it last week. Growing communities from California to South Africa, from China to Ghana, believe the world will end on May 21st 2011.

Here is the good news: it is possible to screw Eskom … sort of. And here is the bad news: you have to change your life. And you have to fork out a whack of cash.

Every consumer electronics company in creation is launching 3D television sets this year. They’re counting on you tossing your two-year-old flatscreen in the bin and spending big on one of these babies. They’re wrong about your wish to play along, but they’ll get you in the end.

Perhaps the scariest part of ageing is dementia, and Alzheimers is the worst form of dementia. But maybe for not very much longer.

So, what do you think about a substitute for alcohol that allows you to get pleasantly buzzed, but neither drunk nor hungover? And from which you can immediately “sober up” by taking an antidote pill?

The game between whalers and anti-whalers turned dangerous on Wednesday when at least one activist was injured and an entire $2 million, Batman-styled ship banged up. Now it’s just a matter of time until one side or the other goes too far, and triggers real public outrage.

We published an article on Tuesday under the header “Only 501 shopping days to Armageddon”. The piece was generally about a recent perceived surge in millenarianism, but was more specifically about a sect in California that has judgment day pegged as May 21st 2011. The sect was quick to react.

With the new decade upon us, and the six-thousand-year yardstick of the creationists looming, doomsday prophecies appear to be on the up. Here’s one about a multinational media evangelist who’s rooting for May 21st 2011.

It used to be limited to just your cellphone provider, the SA government and its various branches and bureaucracies, any foreign government, any other organisation with sufficient motivation and resources, or anybody with the skills to find and bribe a couple of easily-bribed network provider employees. But as of this week, anyone with a couple of grand for equipment and two hours to spare can listen in on your cellphone calls.

Just a few days after the globe’s most comprehensive, and most confusing, environmental conference ever was gavelled to a close, the long knives are already out, searching for someone, anyone, to blame for the Copenhagen meeting's seemingly stuttering finish.

Without it, you probably wouldn’t be reading this article. In fact, you probably wouldn’t be doing a whole bunch of things you do on a daily basis. So spare a thought for the transistor, whose birthday it is today.

The Red Book was a long time coming. For decades it existed only as a rumour, an unconfirmed report of the strange magnum opus of Carl Gustav Jung. It was published, finally, this month. 

What is the idea of Berlin, the city that has just celebrated twenty years of liberation from division? Let us take you on a journey.

Within hours of learning they found water on the moon, my colonising expedition was fully staffed. By Ivo Vegter