For years, even after MySpace, Facebook and Twitter had really got going, we yearned for a way to tell our friends we loved science. No not love science, fucking love science. Oh sure on occasion we'd happily stumble upon a little fact about the platypus poisonous skin but until we truly took the time to read New Scientist properly – instead 'saving it for later' and allowing it to pile up in the bathroom, using the same logic (logic! Sciencey) as the award winning actor 'oh these old Oscars, Ijust use them to prop open the door' so visitors know you are a person that can both understand science and can defecate at the same time.

Then one day a page popped us for Facebookers to like. A page destined to become more popular than previous favourite Yes I will go out of my way to step on that crunchy leaf page. A page that read New Scientist for us and picked out all the science news we cared about. Which is cute animals, but in a slightly more edgy way than Cute Overload.

If you hang around the same bits of the internet as me you can't help but have heard that Dark Horse have rebooted their Star Wars comic book and begun a new series starting right after the first Star Wars film (that's A New Hope, not any of those prequel nonsense).

Star Wars #1, as they've somewhat uninspiringly called it, has caused somewhat of a meltdown on the internet and not for the usual reasons - you know, someone having the wrong colour light saber or contradicting a minor plot point from a largely forgotten Expanded Universe book. No, this is far far worse. They've made Leia an X-wing pilot. Not just that – a crack-shot ace who leads her own squadron of fighters during undercover missions.

How dare they! A woman flying a space ship? What a ridiculous concept! I mean WW2 era dog fights in space (complete with sound in the vacuum of space) is perfectly believable; but a woman flying? Never! And anyway how would she fit a helmet over those hair buns?

Unless you’ve been living in a cave these last few weeks you will have heard that there will be a new companion in the next series of Doctor Who.

Leaving aside whether knowing this is a good thing or not (personally I preferred it when you didn’t know someone, even The Doctor, was leaving until the episode where it happened rather than the current soap-like situation where practically every major storyline is leaked by the BBC months in advance), let’s cover what we know about them.