Out of about 40 pictures of the sun I took around 10:15 this morning, only this one came out showing Venus... It was shot at 10:18. I used a welding glass in front of the lens of an old Kodak digital camera, the whole lot hand-held in a stiff breeze, with clouds passing over the sun at a hundred miles an hour, with the digital and optical tele at ful bore...

I will try again a bit later on...

The Vatican has sharply criticised a book written by a US nun and theologian on sexual ethics.

Former prime minister John Howard has joined an exclusive group of 24 living people to be honoured by the Queen with the Order of Merit.

Prime Minister Julia Gillard, Attorney-General Nicola Roxon and Foreign Minister Bob Carr all sang from the same hymn sheet this week on the continuing legal saga of WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange. But they chose their words very carefully.

In the menagerie of Craig Venter’s imagination, tiny bugs will save the world. They will be custom bugs, designer bugs — bugs that only Venter can create. He will mix them up in his private laboratory from bits and pieces of DNA, and then he will release them into the air and the water, into smokestacks and oil spills, hospitals and factories and your house.

Each of the bugs will have a mission. Some will be designed to devour things, like pollution. Others will generate food and fuel. There will be bugs to fight global warming, bugs to clean up toxic waste, bugs to manufacture medicine and diagnose disease, and they will all be driven to complete these tasks by the very fibers of their synthetic DNA.