If you're a soldier suspecting an ambush, you probably don't have much time to spare, and you definitely can't afford to be carrying any unnecessary weight. That's why so much military tech involves shrinking whatever's portable, and why, now, a company has thrown its radar-in-a-backpack into the ring.

If you're wondering what new skills you should learn this year, and you live in or are comfortable moving to Milan, maybe you should check out Susmita Mohanty's class at Domas Academy entitled "Products and Microenvironments for Orbiting Hotels." Mohanty is an "aerospace entrepreneur" and has worked on the International Space Station and the Shuttle-Mir missions, so she seems like a good choice to teach a class on designing products to allow for a comfortable stay for orbiting tourists.

Since the Viking landers' footpads touched down on Mars, scientists have been searching for complex carbon molecules there, which on this planet are the building blocks of all life. They've found some examples in meteorites purported to come from the Red Planet, but debate persists about the origin of those rocks, let alone the carbon signatures inside them, which some have (controversially) argued could indicate life. Now a new study says the rocks in question are from Mars, but the carbon molecules are not relics of extraterrestrial life.

The immortal first words on the moon, uttered so shakily by a man who has done his best to avoid the spotlight ever since, are even more impressive in hindsight. The Eagle lander nearly plunked Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong in a boulder field, and Armstrong had to take over from autopilot to set the spacecraft down. This is according to very rare new commentary from Armstrong himself.

Vice's Motherboard has a great Q&A up with Jonathan Moreno, author of Mind Wars and an expert on the topic of neuroscience in the military. And seeing as how the military is at the forefront of all kinds of crazy neuroscience - drones, implants, the relationships between machines and our own brains - studying the military's efforts gives a kind of sneak peak at what we'll be seeing in the future in the civilian world. 

Whether you're at the doctor's office or taking medicine at home, future injections could be a lot less painful with this new gadget developed at MIT. Instead of a sterile metal point penetrating your skin, it fires a jet of medicine through your skin at the speed of sound.

A team from the University of New South Wales has created a computer modelling system to be used against dangerous and otherwise difficult-to-deal-with fire situations, by simulating a blaze right down to the levels of oxygen in specific locations within buildings, and also to possible secondary ignition locations.