Australia's national science agency is spending up on space technology and AI. Objectives include improved food security and quality, health and well being, better security for Australia and our region, improved response to drought and management of food resources and better genome and climate data to help with crops and livestock performance.

After 11 years in space and historic orbits of 2 separate objects in the main asteroid belt, the Dawn mission is over. Part of NASA's Discovery Program, Dawn was a huge success, demonstrating cutting-edge ion propulsion and vastly improving our knowledge of the origins of the solar system, the large asteroid Vesta and the dwarf planet Ceres, a startling and exotic world believed to once have an ocean.

Kids are amazing: energised and enthusiastic about science, tech and how to take best advantage of the internet of things. Three young winners of Australia's 'Little Big Ideas Competition' will go on an all-expenses-paid innovation adventure to the US, including a visit to NASA's Kennedy Space Centre in Florida.

Simon Mulvany of Save The Bees Australia has been embroiled in a legal dispute with Capilano Honey for years. Here he provides startling revelations about the leadership of Capilano in the person of Ben McKee, the company's CEO. He says his battle is partly about free speech and reckons in future there'll be benefits from his case for other activists.

The China Academy of Space Technology is aiming high, with an orbiter, lander and rover mission to Mars scheduled for 2020. Thirteen payloads will be carried, including ground-penetrating radar and a methane-sensitive spectrometer to look for hints of biological processes. But getting there aint easy, with more than half of all Mars missions ending in failure.

Fragmentation of quality programming among different streaming services is causing more people to turn to bit torrent and the like to get hold of the content they want.

Monsanto has been ordered to pay $290m to Dewayne Johnson, a Californian groundskeeper riddled with cancer after working with the herbicide Round Up. Simon Mulvany of Save The Bees Australia offers his thoughts on how this landmark case could open the door to over 4000 related law suits. He explains the terrible effects of Round Up on dogs and bees, and outlines alternative safe strategies to control weeds.

Google Plus, Google's failed social networking platform, suffered a significant security breach of users' private profile data but failed to disclose it immediately out of fear of 'reputational damage'.

Peptides extracted from Australia's deadly funnel web spider appear to be very effective in selectively killing melanoma skin cancer cells and Tasmanian Devil facial cancer cells. And there could be other uses in the biopharmaceutical industry.

In an effort to tap China's 750 million internet users, Google has secretly developed a search engine for the Chinese government that incorporates tight censorship and blacklists. Yet under pressure from free speech advocates, Google says the custom search engine may never be used.