Think your DVD collection is safe for life? Think again. According to the National Archives, CD/DVD life expectancy is "2 to 5 years". Enter then Cranberry, who have invented a DVD disc made of "synthetic stone" which they claim can last as long as 1,000 years without degrading.

The DiamonDiscs hold 4.7 GB of data, enough to hold a few thousand songs and photos. Perfect then for a digital time-capsule, in the unlikely circumstance that humans still use DVDs in 1,000 years time.

Isn't it a little convenient that the main selling point of the discs, the claimed 1,000 year lifespan, will never be proven by anyone who buys them in the near future?

We suspect that our future-friends will be too busy with their hover cars and cyborg body-parts to care much about our quaint digital holiday snaps anyway.

If you want to leave a message teaching the next 10 generations of kids what an iPhone was or how "revolutionary" we found the Wii, pick up a DiamonDisc here.

Canon are set to launch the imageFORMULA P-150 portable duplex scanner on Monday 9th November, and Tech Digest were on hand at Canon HQ today to have a test.

Weighing less than a bag of sugar, the P-150 is incredibly compact. It measures up at 280 x 95 x 40 mm when closed, folding out to 280 x 222.7 x 202.2 mm to reveal the loading tray. It'd easily fit in a hand-bag or "man-bag", and is light enough to not be too much of a hassle when travelling.

Despite its size, the imageFORMULA P-150 packs a lot of punch for a scanner so small. Capable of 15 pages per minute/30 image per minute duplex scanning in black and white and 10 ppm/10 ipm in full colour, it churns through paper work at a pretty pace.

In a nice touch, the P-150 is fully powered by USB, and thanks to built in software can be plugged into any PC and used instantly, without the need to install any extra programs. Mac users can breathe a sigh of relief, as the scanner will be compatible with their systems also.

For the high-volume user, the P-150 will be compatible with Therefore software, offering remote management and streamlined indexing of scanned items. An Office-style UI will make the management system instantly familiar to most users.

According to Canon, 23% of office space is filled with filing cabinets. With the imageFormula P-150 not much bigger than a handheld gaming console, it could be a great solution for the space-conscious.

Look for a full Tech Digest review on the imageFORMULA P-150 early next week.

All plans for slightly bigger DVDs have been blown out of the water today with claims from a group of scientists that they can store up to 10TB of data on a single disc.

The team of egg heads from the Swinburne University of Technology, Australia, has added the dimensions of colour and light polarization and employed them to store the huge amounts of extra information. Confused? I'll do my best to explain.

The colour is the tricky part. How can you store information in colour? I know. Weird. Well, the deal is that the surface is made of gold nanorods and these nanorods react differently to different kinds of light. Colours are, of course, different kinds of light of varying wavelengths, so you can record multiple amounts information on the same nanorods. Capiche? Yeah, bit of a mind melter.

AMD seems to release a new chunk of silicon every five minutes but when they break the 1GHz barrier with a graphics card, it's worth taking notice.

The ATI Radeon HD 4890 is the first standard air-cooled GPU to reach the clock speed milestone, nine years after they managed with CPUs, and it offers 1.6 TeraFLOPS of graphics crunching power.

AMD claims this factory over-clocked unit is 50% faster than the competition. What we do know for sure is that it's going to make video transcoding, post processing and, of course, gaming that little bit smoother.

AMD

The Mivx Nubbin might not be the sexiest name for a product but when this little USB devil can give your old arse laptop the kind draft-N wireless your router's been able to do since the Dark Ages, who cares?

Naturally, it's backwards compatible with IEEE 802.1n draft 3.0 and IEEE 802.1b/g to suit your location and it'll deliver up to 150Mbps speeds with just a 3/4 inch body. That makes it the smallest USB draft-N adaptor in the world today - well, at least for the next three minutes.

Works with Windows, Macs and Linux too.Yours for $39 including free postage if you happen to live in the US.

It's not every day I consider spending £129.99 on a wireless router but then it's not everyday you meet the D-Link DIR-825. Naturally, we're talking draft-N wireless here, backwards compatible with all the other standards and it goes without saying that all four of its LAN connections are gigabit Ethernet.

There's also a gig WAN port too as well as a USB Shareport where you can plug a printer or other such device that can then be accessed wirelessly by any computer on the network. The router supports quadband wireless at 2.4GHz and 5GHz frequencies for separation of signals and an easier way to prioritise your bandwidth between simpler browsing tasks at the lower level and the likes of HD streaming at the top.

You're getting a better penetrating and faster signal and it still manages to maintain the green standards that D-Links to have in place. It also supports the IPv6 should the rest of your equipment be sufficiently advanced. It's available from now in the UK.

D-Link Buy it

Intel has just announced a new chip based on its Nehalem-EP architecture called "Jasper Forest". It's aimed at storage products and embedded applications and the I/O hub has been integrated right onto the chip.

Jasper Forest is named after a petrified forest in Arizona, pictured above. Intel often names its chips after geographical locations, with Nehalem named after an Oregon-based tribe of American indians.

(via Macworld UK)