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.

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. 

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

From the outset: No. Plain and simple. Controlled fusion is still way beyond our reach. But that doesn’t mean we’re not moving, ever so slowly, towards the ultimate prize of clean, cheap and inexhaustible energy.

Twenty years ago an institute on the Black Sea was at the forefront of ape spaceflights. One civil war later, it wants its reputation back – can it send a monkey to Mars?

The Copenhagen climate “accord”, which is neither a “treaty” nor even an “agreement”, may have met the lowest possible expectations of climate change activists, but one person walked out smiling: President Jacob Zuma.

The world’s largest panoramic photograph has just been created, and its subject is the enchanting city of Prague. Just don’t expect it to be anywhere close to the real thing.

Amidst global praise and criticism about the climate conference’s results, late on Friday, Barack Obama told the international media that five major nations - China, India, Brazil, South Africa and the US - had finally cobbled together a climate deal on the last day of the summit, just as the conclave seemed on the verge of total collapse. Well, sorta.

MIT unveiled a device at the Copenhagen climate conference that was touted as a transport breakthrough – a kinetic-energy-powered battery for bicycles. Nice idea, but a little problematic.

After nearly two weeks of tumult, hopes are growing that the Copenhagen climate summit is actually going to give birth to an agreement.

The Copenhagen clock only has one day left and despite the grim forecasts of a failed conference, Hillary Clinton’s announcement that the US would help create a $100 billion fund to combat climate change in poor nations by 2020 may yet lead to a somewhat more positive outcome that was feared just a day ago.

According to environmental analysts, China is now engaged in an increasingly vigorous effort to add green technologies for the world's biggest population and its fast-growing industrial economy. This effort could eventually reshape its entire economy.

Plastic body and top-speed of 112km/h notwithstanding, the East Germans loved their Trabants – mostly because it could take as long as 15 years to get one. Hold your breath, then, for 2012’s electric-motor retro version.

A top UN official calls the state of the talks “terrible,” and the newest draft of a proposed global accord leaves the critical questions unanswered: how deeply nations will cut their greenhouse gas emissions, how much money will flow to help poor nations adapt to global warming and just how will any environmental programme be monitored and verified.

You should have been able to see it coming if you followed Barack Obama’s recent visit to China. From the back and forth (in America) over the Dalai Lama’s visit (to the White House) before Obama’s China visit; the way financial analysts parse the two countries' relationship due to American debt held by China; by virtue of trade disputes between the two nations over everything from tyres to chicken feet, and now the efforts of the two at Copenhagen, the world seems to be settling into a new bipolar world. Or, as some wags have put it, the world of Chimerica.

If you’re rich and sophisticated and easily bored, it looks like a fantastic idea – a 24-day ultimate luxury world tour put on by none other than National Geographic. So what’s the catch?

The tempers approached combustion on Monday as 135 of the world’s poorer countries brought the global climate conference to a temporary halt when they threatened a conference walkout, insisting richer nations were failing to cut their greenhouse gases enough to make a real difference.

While the Copenhagen climate conference delegates await the arrival of the really big guns, presidents, prime ministers, and the like, conferees act out the international diplomatic equivalent of kabuki over the trade-offs and conditions in a treaty discussion draft, as well as those contained in earlier working papers and non-papers. Outside the conference centre, tens of thousands of international demonstrators clashed as well – this time with Danish police, rather than with each other, as they carried banners demanding “climate justice”. By the end of the weekend, nearly a thousand of the demonstrators had been detained, although Danish police released almost all of them a few hours later.

Remember when in 1903 the head honcho of the Michigan Savings Bank advised Henry Ford's lawyer not to invest in his car company: "The horse is here to stay, but the automobile is only a novelty, a fad." Or when in 1968, IBM’s Robert Lloyd said of the microprocessor: "But what ... is it good for?” OK, you don’t. So we’ll bet you don’t think the Transkei’s energy needs can be fuelled by a weed's first cousin.

They’d better talk fast in Copenhagen. And quickly decide what to do. Because climate change is happening much faster than the rabbiting on about the University of East Anglia row – where decades will likely pass before they decide whether the figures were fudged or not.

The just-leaked working paper at the Copenhagen climate conference, apparently produced by Denmark, the host country delegation, is generating a storm of criticism from developing countries and NGO climate activist leaders. Opponents are arguing that this draft  – if it were accepted as the basis for formal negotiations - would seriously shift more of the burden of dealing with the effects of climate change onto poorer, less-developed nations.