Apple has unveiled the latest version of its iPod Nano, featuring what it says are the thinnest measurements yet.

A popsci.com writer reports on a swimsuit whose wearers have already broken 11 world records in two months. Will the technology pave the way for a new era in swimming, or will FINA crack down?

The attitude of global warming evangelists is akin to a new religion says sceptic Brian Durrant, editor of the Fleet Street Letter...

Troux Technologies announced that Fiducia, the leading German IT services company for the financial services industry, will implement its software platform, Troux 7, to enable strategic IT planning and to ensure that its extensive SOA program is properly aligned with business and IT transformation initiatives.

Japan's Toshiba Corp waved the white flag in the high-definition home movie war on Tuesday, giving up on its HD DVD format after losing the support of key studios and retailers to the Blu-ray technology backed by Sony Corp.

AppDNA, the leading developer of application testing software, today announced that its AppTitude product has been awarded “Approved” status by Broadband Testing, one of Europe’s foremost independent network testing facilities and consultancy organisations for enterprise IT solutions.

The iStation Traveller is available to purchase.

Hewlett-Packard continues to gain market share over Dell in the global market. Worldwide PC shipments rise 12%

The biggest revolution in TV viewing is about to hit us, and it's almost a secret. It has the potential to be one of the biggest consumer revolutions ever. Forget the much hyped single item mass hits like the Apple iPhone. When 3D TV becomes main stream, the impact on consumer spending will be huge.

For the past few year robotics has become a more and more popular hobby among geeks, I’ve even built a few simple ones myself.

Now Google, Intel and Microsoft have funded researchers at Carnegie Mellon University to create a new series of Internet-connected robots that almost anyone can build using off-the-shelf parts.

As part of the Telepresence Robot Kit (TeRK), a joint effort unveiled last summer between the Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute and Charmed Labs, associate professor of robotics Illah Nourbakhsh and members of his Community Robotics, Education, and Technology Empowerment (CREATE) Lab have created a series of "recipes" for robot building.

Users around the world can now get their hands on the latest version of Mozilla's open source e-mail client Thunderbird 2.0, which is designed to make it much easier to organise and find messages thanks to tags and advanced folder view functionality.

In addition to enhanced tagging and search features, users can also make use of navigation akin to what they're used to from a browser so that they can move forward and backwards through their messages quickly and easily.

What's more, hundreds of add-ons are available to make it even easier to customise Thunderbird, which is available as a free download for Linux, Mac and Windows in more than 30 languages, to their individual needs.

Huge hulking desktops may increasingly be a thing of the past. But they did have a couple of advantages. One was that to knock them over you almost had to slam your shoulder into them at ramming speed. Laptops are light weight, practical, and can go with you anywhere. Problem is, they can also go quite to pieces at the merest oops.

So and so many MHz, MB, and GB, are things the average prospective buyer can check before making a purchase. But chances are that the staff at the store would be less than pleased if you came in and began your own impromptu test of PC impact survivability.

The age old question for the rich and the famous, "What do you give the one who has everything?" or give yourself, is, like most things, subject to inflation. Once it was enough to have your own luxury yacht to leave just about anybody in the dust in the conspicuous consumption department. But after a few years, too many mere mortals could afford one. And you can only get so far by trying to impress with size. Sooner or later you're cruising along in a supertanker, and driving a moped to the toilet.

For decades people have tried to replicate the human mind, using more and more sophisticated software make better A.I’s, but still the best A.I’s are not much smarter than your average cockroach.

Maybe that’s the problem? Everything that we’ve done so far is software based, the hardware to drive the A.I has been much unchanged. But a Norwegian team at the University of Oslo has made what will possibly be the next generation of hardware.

Every creature in nature is a product of evolution, and did I mention that creationism is just bull?

What the team has done is add evolution to hardware (Norwegian), all hardware that you and I have used so far is made the creationism way, it’s made and can not be changed at runtime through evolution. All changes to existing hardware have to be made through software.

Samsung announced yesterday that it has begun shipping its hybrid hard drive. Samsung's MH80 Series hybrid hard drive is offered in 80GB, 120GB and 160GB capacities.

The hybrid hard drive has been optimized to work in conjunction with Windows Vista capable notebook PC's, Samsung's MH80 is a 2.5-inch hybrid hard drive with 128 or 256 megabytes of flash memory. It combines a hard disk drive with a OneNAND Flash cache and Microsoft's ReadyDrive software, offering faster boot and resume times, increased battery life and greater reliability compared to traditional magnetic media technology.

The hybrid hard drive preserves the high densities of magnetic storage technology, while the advanced NAND flash technology enhances the overall value with lowered power consumption, higher reliability and faster read/write access than traditional hard drives. The MH80 features Samsung's ReadyBoot technology, a new feature included in Microsoft's Vista operating system.

It would be an understatement to say that there's a bit of bad blod between the Greeks and the Turks, who once ruled Greece, and much of the Balkans, in it's former incarnation as the Ottoman Empire.

And the ancient feud is not limited to fighter jet skirmishes above an Aegean island with a population of two goats and a colony of lizards. Countless feuds on messageboards, forums and websites bear witness to the virtual war of words, and images.

It's the latter which has now led the Istanbul First Criminal Peace Court to order the video sharing site YouTube blocked by the dominant Turkish internet provider, Turk Telekom, a state-run monopoly until it was privatized in 2005.

Sony today announced that they would release a cheaper Blu-ray player this summer. The high price of current Blu-ray players is often cited as the main reason why consumers are holding off on buying into high definition movies.

Currently, Sony offers the BDP-S1 Blu-ray player for $999, a price aimed at the most hardcore of home theatre enthusiasts. The company plans to release a new model, the BDP-S300, priced at $599 and says that the new player will offer all the functionality of the BDP-S1 plus the added ability to play CDs. Why the ability to play CDs had to be added is a almost a shock, even the simplest of gadgets are able to play CDs.

The BDP-S300 will bring standalone Blu-ray players in line with the market’s current cheapest way to watch Blu-ray movies, the PlayStation 3. Even at $599, the BDP-S300 won’t be the cheapest entry fee into the next-generation format. For $499, a consumer can buy Blu-ray functionality in the form of a 20GB PlayStation 3, which boasts nearly equal Blu-ray performance to standalone players.

Digital Rights Management (DRM) on HD-DVD is finally a blast from the past, a cracker at the Doom9 discussion forum have discovered the cryptographic key that can be used to circumvent copy restrictions on HD-DVD and Blu-ray movies.

The key, which was published Sunday on the Doom9.org discussion forum, is a further step toward undermining the next-generation Advanced Access Content System (AACS) encryption system used to copy-protect high-definition media.

The cracker, going by the nick Arnezami, said he discovered the key by examining what was happening in his computer's memory while it processed an HD-DVD video. Bingo, he found what he was looking for with a little help from AACS.

Most of the time I spend studying the AACS papers. A good understanding of how things worked have helped me greatly in knowing what to find in the first place (and how to recognize something).

D-Wave of British Columbia has promised to demonstrate a quantum computer next Tuesday, which can carry out 64,000 calculations simultaneously, thanks to a new technique, which rethinks the already-uncanny world of quantum computing. But the academic world is taking a wait-and-see approach.

D-Wave is the world's only "commercial" quantum computing company, backed by more than 20 million US dollars of venture capital (there are more commercial ventures in the related field of quantum cryptography). Its stated aim is to eventually produce commercially available quantum computers that can be used online or shipped to computer rooms, where they will solve intractable and expensive problems such as financial optimization.

At the end of the 80s classic "Back to the Future", Marty McFly, played by Michael J. Fox, has escaped the 50s back to his own time. He's looking forward to taking his girlfriend for a ride in his newly manifested truck, when the air crackles and booms, and madcap inventor Dr. Emmett Brown comes flying out of the future in the time traveling De Lorean, which is now equipped with Mr. Fusion, a power generator which runs just fine on stale beer and banana peels.

Well, Pons & Fleischman notwithstanding, we're still a ways off from Mr. Fusion. But the portable trash powered generator may be here today.

LG Electronics announced Wednesday that they plan to sell a DVD player that will be able to play both rivaling high-definition DVD formats. This will be the first dual-format DVD player to support both HD-DVD and Blu-ray.

The player will be unveiled at next week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, further details on the player and details on pricing and availability will also become available then.

HD-DVD and Blu-ray have been battling for market share since their introduction last year. Both are expected to get a boost this year as more studios release films in the formats and more players become available.

Robotics scientists have created a technology that allows them to control movements of a humanoid robot with the power of thought.

Professor Rajesh Rao of University of Washington and students demonstrated an individual can "order" a robot to move to specific locations and pick up specific objects by generating brain waves that reflect the individual's instructions.

"This is really a proof-of-concept demonstration," Rao said. "It suggests that one day we might be able to use semi-autonomous robots for such jobs as helping disabled people or performing routine tasks in a person's home."

The controlling individual wears a cap containing 32 electrodes that detect brain signals from the scalp. Although the "thought commands" are currently limited to a few basic instructions, the controller is able to instruct the robot to move forward, choose one of two available objects, pick it up and take it to one of two locations.

Less than a week after Microsoft's Office 2007 shipped to enterprise customers, Novell has announced plans to support its new file formats in its own version of rival suite OpenOffice.

Novell, which has become increasingly cosy with Microsoft in recent months following a collaboration and interoperability deal, is working on plug-in converters for the new Open XML formats introduced for Word, Excel and PowerPoint in Office 2007, and will ship them to customers as part of its own version of the open source suite.

The source code for the converters will also be made available, so such plug-ins are likely to quickly find their way into the main downloadable OpenOffice product. The Word converter is due for release in January 2007, while no time frames have been announced for the other formats.

Today, Sun Microsystems will finally be releasing the Java source code under version 2 of the General Public License, which governs Linux and other open source products.

According to Sun, this move will promote Java and make it easier to bundle with Linux.

The Sun-hosted Java.net Web site will offer access to Java Platform Micro Edition (Java ME) software for mobile phones and Java Platform Standard Edition (Java SE) software for desktop applications.

While additions to software available under GPL have to also use the license, Sun is making an exception in the case of Java Standard Edition (Java SE). Meaning, programmers creating applications using Java SE will not be required to use the GPL license, and can instead opt for any other license for their applications.

At a press conference in San Francisco, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is expected to announce a new partnership between Microsoft and Novell. The unprecedented deal will have Microsoft offering a degree of sales support for Novell's SUSE Linux while both companies work towards better interoperability between Windows and SUSE Enterprise Linux Server (SLES) on virtualization, Microsoft's Active Directory and Novell's eDirectory, and Microsoft Office and OpenOffice XML formats on the desktop.

Microsoft will also promote SLES where customers pick Linux over Windows or decide to run Linux alongside Windows. Microsoft sales staff will distribute 70,000 coupons for SLES.

As part of the agreement, Microsoft also promises not to wield its patent portfolio against SUSE Linux. Novell has put up a detailed FAQ about the deal here.

BitTorrent. has reached agreements with several companies to embed its file-sharing software in their Internet devices, expanding its ability to reach users.

Some of the first electronics hardware makers to start embedding BitTorrent software into their devices include Asustek Computer Inc., one of the world's biggest contract manufacturers, as well as Planex Communication Inc. and QNAP Systems Inc.

The three companies will put BitTorrent download manager into their digital home devices, giving users immediate access to speedy downloads using BitTorrent, particularly downloads geared toward entertainment, such as movies and songs.

Ars Technica is reporting that Qualcomm, the parent company of Eudora, which produces the venerable email client Eudora for both Windows and Mac OS X, has decided to join forces with the Mozilla Foundation, the organisation reponsible for the open source Firefox web browser, and make their mail client open source as of next year.

The new Eudora will be based on the Thunderbird platform, but will retain its "uniquely rich feature set and productivity enhancements." When completed, the open source Eudora will be free to the public.

In addition to the open source announcement, Qualcomm also released its final commercial versions of Eudora—Eudora 7.1 for Windows and Eudora 6.2.4 for Mac OS X.

The bad news at AOL keeps coming. First they get in trouble for releasing search data on more than half a million customers, then it gives away security software with a nasty EULA, now its free client software is accused of acting like badware according to Stopbadware.org, the Google-funded rating group.

In our preliminary findings, we find that AOL 9.0 (free version) is currently badware because it installs additional software without telling the user, it forces the user to take certain actions, it adds various components to Internet Explorer and the taskbar without disclosure, it may automatically update without the user's consent, and it fails to uninstall completely.

This has been making the rounds on the net. I first came across it on the blog of one "Jon Swift", whose commenters seem to have a knowledge of literature, and a radar for satire, which leaves something to be desired.

According to Mark Noonan at the blog Blogs for Bush, which either has a very hard sell-by-date, or knows something we don't, science is dead. Well, to hear Noonan tell it, it's actually been pushing up daisies since before 1850. It seems Darwin did it in (bludgeoned it to death with the jawbone of an ape perhaps?).

[...]science is dead. We have reached the end of the Age of Science - what will come after, I don't know, but I don't think that we'll ever again have a time when Science is enshrined as some sort of god-like arbiter of right and wrong.

And good riddance to bad indoor plumbing! He then goes on to diagnose who the culprit was. And it wasn't Colonel Mustard in the pantry with a candle-stick.

OpenOffice.org has been increasing in both popularity and visibility over the past several months. Version 2.0 has added a number of new features to bring it closer to feature parity with Microsoft Office, and it also offers full support for the Open Document format. However, a report just released by the French Ministry of Defense says that it still falls short of Microsoft's office suite in one important area: security. This may actually be the first time in history that Microsoft is better at security.

In some instances, malevolent macros were considered to be secure by the open-source package, and as a result, users were not informed when they were executed. This was in contrast to Office, which barrages users with warnings each time a document with macros is opened.