We've all heard the viability of biofuels for land transportation and sea, but when it comes to jet fuel, that's another story. Virgin Atlantic set out to prove that the idea of biofueled jumbo jets are plausible and flew a four jet-engine aircraft from London to Amsterdam to make a point. More details at the full story.

The use of mobile phones on planes is currently prohibited because these gadgets cause interference with on-board communication and navigation systems. Interestingly, we found out today that members of the European Union are devising a technology that would permit passengers to make calls 3,000 meters above Earth.

The said technology uses an on-board base station called pico cell that will communicate with the headsets of the passengers. Aside from having low power consumption, this pico cell is able to create a network area that will re-route the phone calls to a satellite.

The satellite, then, will be the one responsible for connecting the phone calls to mobile networks on the ground. Because of these processes, making calls from a plane will cost significantly higher than normal mobile phone calls. Regulators around Europe are saying, however, that they will monitor the rates charged by networks to avoid abuse.

One spokesperson from carrier Virgin Atlantic said, "We are monitoring customer demand and will act if they say they want to use their mobile phones. If we were to introduce this service in the future we want to ensure we do it in a socially acceptable way." EU regulators added that the technology could be available next year.

Ar first, this will only be implemented with 2G phones. But if consumers respond favorably to the service, the same will also be offered to 3G phones and other standards.

Virgin entrepreneur Richard Branson today revealed a mock-up of the rocket-propelled spaceplane that will take Virgin Galactic business customers into sub-orbital space flight. Tickets on a Virgin Galactic flight are expected to cost $ 190,000, a price that isn't bad considering that the spacecraft which Branson revealed today can only carry a total of 8 people, 6 passengers and 2 pilots, on the sub-orbital flight at an altitude of 140km.

The design of the yet unnamed craft was based upon the successful SpaceShipOne craft which was built by pioneer Burt Rutan, the first engineering beauty which claims the title for the first privately built vehicle to reach space in 2004. Since the success of SpaceShipOne, Virgin Group later created Virgin Galactic, the space-faring division of Virgin Atlantic and has contracted Rutan's company Scaled Composites to design and build a passenger version of SpaceShipOne. Virgin Galactic will own and operate at least five spaceships and two motherships which carry the spaceships up to approximately 50,000ft.

The passenger flights which could begin as early as 2009, will take off from the purpose-built 5m facility called Spaceport America in the New Mexico desert, technically the first private spaceport on earth. Virgin claimed back in July that they had already received 150 space-flight bookings already and that 60,000 potential customers had registered interest in the flights. It's just like Star Trek really, just without the faster than light engines.