A new way of interpreting information from old devices has allowed researchers to watch the brain thinking in real time and could provide insight into such disorders as epilepsy and autism.

It is not quite the “Beam me up Scotty” teleportation of Star Trek, but teams of scientists said Wednesday they had made properties jump from one atom to another without using any physical link.

Weapons that can incapacitate crowds of people by sweeping a lightning-like beam of electricity across them are being readied for sale to military and police forces in the US and Europe.

Life-saving medical implants like pacemakers and defibrillators face a big drawback: their batteries eventually run out. So every few years, patients need surgery to have the batteries replaced.

They are hunting for “swallowers,” drug couriers who rent out their bodies as cargo containers, each carrying upwards of a kilo, or 2.2 pounds, of packaged narcotics. It’s an old trick, body packing, but on the rise, and getting more sophisticated.

The British Broadcasting Corporation’s Creative Archive, one of the most ambitious free digital content projects to date, is set to launch this fall with thousands of three-minute clips of nature programming.

Robert Bigelow is predicting that space tourism and commerce will take off, and is backing his hunch with cash. Through his other main commercial venture, Bigelow Aerospace, he has inherited a Nasa research programme to develop inflatable space stations.

Here are some interesting economic statistics. Of the world’s 100 largest economic entities, 51 are corporations and 49 are countries.

Complete list below.

Researchers at the University of Southern California and the University of Texas at Austin have built and tested a device based on nanostructures called quantum dots that can sensitively detect infrared radiation in a crucial wavelength range.