BBC to put Top Gear on YouTube. Let's hope Richard Hammond doesn't crash your browser.

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Some say that his 19th century views on environmentalism and global warming are pushing millions of viewers down the path of climate change scepticism, and some say that his incendiary views are designed to cause a stir and causes people like me to write about them… all we know is that he’s called Jeremy Clarkson.

If you’re a fan of party-political broadcasts for the Conservative party presented by ill-informed controversialists who probably do actually use the phrase “political correctness gone mad” without irony, then you’ll be delighted to hear that the BBC has launched a Top Gear YouTube channel.

Ofcom: 50MBit broadband in every home "possible" using only copper wires

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Ofcom, the telecoms regulator, has come out and said that it reckons nearly every home in the UK could hypothetically have 50MBit/s broadband in the future using copper wire, negating the need to put a fibre-optic line into every single home.

This sounds great – the only caveat is though that it sounds like it needs a hell of a lot of work to become a reality. Apparently it based this assertion on an “idealised situation” where all of the right kit is in place and everything works as planned. So it’s a bit like saying that in the future we’ll all be wearing silver and driving flying cars – probable, but requiring massive technological changes in every part of the industry…

Samsung push their green credentials with the E200 Eco

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Samsung have announced that they’re going a bit green – and have illustrated this in as literal way as possible by actually colouring the phone a lovely shade of green.

The E200 Eco is going to be revised version of the E200 and will obviously contain more environmental friendliness than it’s predecessor. Apparently it’s cased in “bio-plastic”, which is made from corn and apparently emmits 2.16 less tons of carbon dioxide during the manufacturing process when compared to regular plastic. The phone will also be sold in a recycled paper box…

Facebook overtakes MySpace, awaits passive aggressive status update in response

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New figures out today suggest that Facebook has supplanted MySpace as the world’s most popular social network, boasting 132m people in June versus MySpace’s 117.5m. A spokesperson for MySpace said in reaction to the news “It’s not fair, everyone hates me, the only person who understands me is Gerard Way from My Chemical Romance. Mood: Sad & Depressed :(“

Digital video camera / MP3 player hybrid has balls

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Have you ever wanted a tiny digital video camera, that’s about the size of a ping-pong ball, with built in MP3 player? No, me neither, but that doesn’t seem to have stopped the DVR Camball getting through the focus groups.

It’s a brave device. Perhaps something a film maker might call “avante-garde”, and what the rest of us would call “weird”. And for some reason they decided to make it spherical too…

Robots become self-aware, but think that they're rats, so we're okay for now

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Scientists at the University of Reading have got a step closer to creating Cybermen – human brains inside a robot – after putting together a small robot that uses rat neurones to control itself.

The scientists have managed to grow around 300,000 rat neurones artificially in the lab by starting off with the brain of a rat faetus. These neurones have gone on to make connections with each other and work in much the same way a regular rat brain does, using electrical impulses to make the brain “do stuff”. The neurons are connected to a regular microchip, where they can be stimulated and the results analysed to see what happens. For example, they’ve built a robot on wheels with an ultrasound sensor, to spot when it is approaching a wall. I guess it’s like giving a rat the Bat-power of echo-location. Maybe.

Not from the creators of WALL-E: Pictor, the wall painting robot

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The day when robots take over all of mankind’s most tedious chores has just got a little bit closer. The Pictor wall painting robot will climb walls all by itself and paint them using various science-fiction sounding techniques. It’ll apparently use a “cleaning laser” to prepare the wall for painting, then use an “airless nozzle” to paint the wall – which apparently results in no “atomised spray”. And apparently that is a good thing…