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Hate commuting? Imagine, instead, your train carriage hurtling down a tunnel at the same speed as a commercial jet airliner. That’s the dream of PayPal, Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk. His Hyperlink system would see ‘train’ passengers travel at up to 760mph through a vacuum tube, propelled by compressed air and induction motors. A site has been chosen with the goal of starting test runs in two years. Once built, the loop will ferry passengers between San Francisco and LA in 35 minutes, compared to 7.5 hours by train.

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NASA has challenged designers to develop a conventional drone to work inside a space station, navigating with no ‘up’ or ‘down’. The winning design, ArachnoBeeA, would use cameras and tiny beacons to manoeuvre its way around. How popular drones would be in such a confined space is a different question.

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London’s coffee industry creates over 200,000 tonnes of waste every year, so what do we do with it? Entrepreneur Arthur Kay’s big idea is to use his company, bio-beans, to turn 85 per cent of coffee waste into biofuels for heating buildings and powering transport.

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Forest fires could one day be dealt with by drones that would direct loud noises at the trees below. Since sound is made up of pressure waves, it can be used to disrupt the air surrounding a fire, essentially cutting off the supply of oxygen to the fuel. At the right frequency, the fire simply dies out, as researchers at George Mason University in Virginia recently demonstrated with their sonic extinguisher. Apparently, bass frequencies work best.

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If you want to take a trip into space, your quickest bet might be to take a balloon. The company World View Enterprises wants to send tourists into the stratosphere, 32km above Earth, on hot air balloons. Technically ‘space’ is defined as 100km above sea level, but 32km is high enough to witness the curvature of the Earth. The balloon flew its first successful test flight in June, and the company will start selling tickets in 2016 – at the bargain price of just £75,000 per person!

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Now approved by the US Food and Drug Administration, flibanserin looks set to become the first in a new class of drugs for improving female sexual desire. Though it’s been dubbed ‘the female Viagra’, flibanserin works rather differently: Viagra works by boosting blood supply to the penis, while flibanserin acts on serotonin receptors in the brain. Its makers say it increases sexual satisfaction, but critics question the drug’s safety and effectiveness.

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The UN predicts there will be two billion more people in the world by 2050, creating a demand for 70 per cent more food. By that time, 80 per cent of us will be living in cities, and most food we eat in urban areas is brought in. So farms moored on the sea or inland lakes close to cities would certainly reduce food miles. But how would they work? A new design by architect Javier Ponce of Forward Thinking Architecture shows a 24m-tall, three-tiered structure with solar panels on top to provide energy. The middle tier grows a variety of veg over an area of 51,000m², using not soil but nutrients in liquid. These nutrients and plant matter would drop into the bottom layer to feed fish, which are farmed in an enclosed space.

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Could your brainwaves function as your computer password? A team at Binghamton University, New York, looked at the way volunteers’ brain signals changed as they read a list of acronyms. Each person reacted differently enough for the system to predict who was reading the list with 94 per cent accuracy. In future, a honed version of this idea could verify who is sitting at a PC.

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Scientists want to swab the rectums of surfers, to see if this water contains the key to developing new antibiotics. They’re searching for antibiotic resistant bacteria known as super bugs, by studying the samples from the surfers, they hope to learn more about these potentially dangerous organisms in the hope of producing new drugs to combat them.

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The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has developed devices that can monitor alcohol levels by sniffing a driver’s breath or scanning the blood in their fingertips via the steering wheel, immobilising the car if levels are too high. Drivers using the system could be offered lower insurance premiums.

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Sergio Canavero , an Italian neurosurgeon, intends to attempt the first human head transplant by 2016, though no successful animal transplants with long-term survival have yet been made. Because of the difficulty of connecting the spinal cord, Canavero has suggested improvements in the process using a special blade and polyethylene glycol, a polymer used in medicine as well as in everything from skin cream to the conservation of the Mary Rose, can help start growth in spinal cord nerves.

Other experts say Canavero is wildly optimistic, but we can at least expect improved ability to repair damaged spinal cords over the next decade, restoring body function to some spinal injury patients.

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We’ve almost got used to the idea of driver less cars before we’ve even seen one on the roads. The truth is, you might well see a lot more driver less trucks – after all, logistics make the world go round. They’ll be cheaper to run than regular rigs, driving more smoothly and so using less fuel. Computers never get tired or need comfort breaks, so they’ll run longer routes. And they could drive in convoys, nose-to-tail, to minimise wind resistance. Companies like Mercedes and Peloton are already exploring these possibilities, and if the promised gains materialise, freight companies could upgrade entire fleets overnight. On the downside, it could put drivers instantly out of work, and even staff at the truck stops set up to service them, but many companies have said the trucks will still need a human passenger to ensure their cargo is safe.