NASA is considering re-purposing its successful Cassini-Huygens probe to do something that it wasn't designed for, but is nonetheless amazing: searching for signs of life on Saturns frozen moon Enceladus. Back in July 2005 Cassini observed a huge plume of ice particles and water vapour shooting from the tiny moon, suggesting the possibility that there's a liquid ocean hiding beneath its surface.

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Speaking of Sony, PS3 users can now try out its new Life With Playstation service, which gives you instant access to real-time news and information in a format that's much more graphically intense than anything you'll get on Wii News. The program works in conjunction with Folding@home, so you'll be helping Stanford researchers while you browse around Life. Download it onto your system by selecting the Folding@Home icon under "Network" on the XMB, and check out the Playstation blog for an interesting video explaining the service's features.

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Here's something that you might miss among all the crazy junk at SIGGRAPH. It's an interactive aquatic life table called Oasis, by designer Yunsil Heo, that is completely covered by fancy black sand. Why is it covered, you ask? Well, that's what makes it interactive. By moving the sand so it will show the LCD screen below you begin to grow aquatic life. At first only little guppies appear, but over time the guppies start to grow into fish and other crazy aquatic creatures. Make the sand-less hole bigger and it starts to populate with more life. Then once your little fishies are all grown up, just cover them up with sand and they'll be dead. [Oasis]

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I like this Life Clock. What makes it for me is not the fact that you can do it yourself using Arduino components--the open-source electronics prototyping platform--or that it can tell you the temperature and play Conway's life on its own. No, what makes it all come together is the simple wood design and the use of 60s sci-fi spaceship computer lights. [Make]

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A team of US and UK scientists have invented a portable scanner that may be useful in the hunt for life on Mars. And it sounds a whole lot like a Star Trek tricorder: it uses a beam of ultraviolet laser light and detects fluorescence from organic molecules, so it works remotely and doesn't damage samples. Under simulated-Mars conditions, they've used it to detect polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (found on comets, thought to be building-blocks of life) in masses as small as 1.5 micrograms. Plus they think the tech could be adapted to be rugged and fitted onto a future Mars rover. Just wait for the handheld version, and for an astronaut to start going "widdlywee..." as they stomp around Mars. [Eurekalert via IO9]

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Now, we've been raving about Sony's diminutive XEL-1 OLED TV for a while, but an independent investigation by Displaysearch is casting doubt on the screen's lifespan. They ran two XEL-1 units for 1000 hours, then measured the change in brightness emitted by the screen. They concluded that it would take 17,000 hours for the screen to lose half its brightness—a usual measure of display life. That sounds like a lot—it's 5.8 years, at 8 hours use every day—but it's actually close to half the 30,000 hours claimed by Sony. Sony, of course, is defending their figure, saying it's based on years of experimentation. Sounds like bad news, though of course when larger OLEDs hit soon they'll have newer tech inside. [Displaysearch via OLED-display]

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Craig Venter, the scientist who controversially commercialized the efforts of the Human Genome Project, is claiming to have constructed a synthetic chromosome with his research team, giving rise to an artificial life form.

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