Plans are in place to alter 10% to 15% of ATMs to dispense 5-pound notes.

The plan is that this will improve the mix of cash available to consumers. Five-pound notes are often grubby and of poor quality due to the fact that they change hands frequently and do not go back in for sorting as much as their higher denomination brothers. The scheme has been popular where I live - every time I’ve visited the cash machine I have found the £5 variety of bank note labelled as unavailable, although you’d expect that from a student town.

The £20 note is the dominant note which is dispensed to the public.

Around 70% of notes reach the consumer from cash machines, showing the importance of ATMs. The plan also involves ‘fitness sorting’ of notes more often. I hate it when I am given a fragile £10 note which looks set to disintegrate if I so much as look at it wrong!

The scheme is set to coincide with new contact-less technology where cardholders can spend up to £15 by pressing their card to a sensor, rather than entering a PIN, although I for one enjoyed the extra security from having PINs. Fortunately, you have to request the service currently, however in the future this may not be the case.

You thought only sci-fi films would show you how you could get beamed up - well, perhaps in the future we could be using tractor beams to move objects and ourselves. New research has shown that a laser can draw objects back to the source.

The key to the beam? Its shape. The laser has a funny shape known as a Bessel beam, which has ‘ripples’ of varying light intensities. Meeting the object at an angle, the beam could have the effect of dragging an object towards the source.

Similar effects have been found which trap objects in the focus of a laser beam; this then can be moved around, giving the concept the name of ‘optical tweezers’, however, this is different, as the beam has the effect of dragging objects without any energy being expended other than concentrating the laser.

It is not unheard of that light can have this effect; other examples include solar sails which could work as propulsion for spacecraft on a ‘wind of light’.

Perhaps one day we might all be beamed up - it would certainly beat air travel!

Bionic arms … none of this cheesy 80’s robot malarkey, however. Scientists have come up with a new prosthetic arm which can be controlled with the use of the mind. Which, if you think about it, is just how a normal arm is controlled.  The arm has been trialled on Jesse Sullivan. The chest nerves of Mr. Sullivan have been connected to the arm, now all he has to do is think about moving his chest and the arm will respond instantly.

Nate Bunderson, who presented the research to the Society of Neuroscience conference in San Diego in November, said: ’if you transfer the nerves [from the stump] to healthy muscles, then you can amplify the brain signals used to control the arm’.

Unfortunately, amputees often find that they lose precisely those nerves involved in moving limbs as they are obsolete. However, Mr. Sullivan’s arms are reopening and rewiring nerve pathways in his brain so that these nerves are becoming stronger.

Computers which control the movement of the prosthetic arm have now become Mr. Sullivan’s muscles, although doctors recommend that he should avoid trying to beef up his muscles/computers at the gym.

This pioneering technology is hoped to be extended to more amputees.