Mz6 wrote with a link to an article on The Independent site about a most unusual scientific theory. "Some scientists suggest that our love of the mobile phone could cause massive food shortages, as the world's harvests fail. They are putting forward the theory that radiation given off by mobile phones and other hi-tech gadgets is a possible answer to one of the more bizarre mysteries ever to happen in the natural world — the abrupt disappearance of the bees that pollinate crops."

alphakappa asks: "I am interested in building a video wall as a personal project using recycled old laptops so that I can make use of the display controllers that are already present. Is there free or cheap software that can extend the display on Windows and still be capable of showing different videos on different zones (like, say run a video in one zone while showing a powerpoint presentation in another one) What tools would you use?"

LEGO - my - Crackberry writes "Matthias Wandel is an engineer at Research in Motion (RIMM), the company that makes the Blackberry. What did RIMM turn to for testing the antenna reception of one of its 900MHz devices? LEGO machines. Specifically a device made of LEGO that could rotate a Blackberry about its horizontal & vertical axis in a pre-defined pattern."

jetkins writes "The Melbourne Age reports that company officials announced Tuesday that Palm will move to a new Linux-based platform 'to help the company compete better.' The move was announced 'during a meeting with analysts in New York, where they also discussed the company's business strategy and refused to talk about recent rumors of a possible buyout.'"

A user writes "The mailing lists were buzzing recently when Michael Buesch, one of the maintainers for the GPL'd bc43xx Broadcom wireless chip driver project, called the OpenBSD folks to task for apparently including code without permission from his project in the OpenBSD bcw project, which aims to provide functionality with Broadcom wireless chips under that OS. It seems that the problem has been resolved for now with the BSD driver author totally giving up on the project and Theo De Raadt taking the position that Buesch's posts on the subject were 'inhuman.'" More commentary from the BSD community is over at undeadly.org.

collin.m writes in with news of results out of Darmstadt. Erik Tews and others there have demonstrated how to recover a 104-bit WEP key in under a minute, requiring the capture of fewer than 10% the number of packets the previous best method called for. The paper is here (PDF). Quoting: "We were able to extend Klein's attack and optimize it for usage against WEP. Using our version, it is possible to recover a 104 bit WEP key with probability 50% using just 40,000 captured packets... for 85,000 data packets [the success probability is] about 95%... 40,000 packets can be captured in less than one minute under good condition. The actual computation takes about 3 seconds and 3 MB main memory on a Pentium-M 1.7 GHz..."

cblount writes "DBSTalk's Earl Bonovich got his hands on one of the first portable DIRECTV receivers. The DIRECTV Sat-Go incorporates a TV, DIRECTV Receiver and DIRECTV Antenna into one conveniently portable design for camping, tailgating, RVing, sitting by the dock or even watching at home."

Fjan11 writes "Steve Jobs just announced that starting next month on you can buy higher quality 256Kbps AAC encoded DRM-free versions of iTunes songs for $1.29. Upgrades to songs you've already bought will be available at the $0.30 price difference. Currently EMI is the only publisher participating, accounting for about 20% of the songs available." There's also reports from Reuters and ABC News. The deal excludes the Beatles. You can also read the official press release from Apple if you still think this a late joke; this story confirms earlier speculation.

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Ashish Kulkarni writes "Google has just announced the launch of Google TiSP (BETA)(TM), a free in-home wireless broadband service that delivers online connectivity via users' plumbing systems. All the dark fibre that google has supposedly laid out is now fully operational! Check out the description of how it works."

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CSMastermind writes "CNN is reporting on a breakthrough technology. A startup called Powercast has developed and patented a device, the size of a dime and costing 5$ to make, which allows power to be transmitted wirelessly. The device has already gained FCC approval and the company has inked deals with the likes of Phillips. From the article: 'Powercast says it has signed nondisclosure agreements to develop products with more than 100 companies, including major manufacturers of cell phones, MP3 players, automotive parts, temperature sensors, hearing aids, and medical implants. The last of those alone could be a multibillion-dollar market: Pacemakers, defibrillators, and the like require surgery to replace dead batteries. But with a built-in Powercast receiver, those batteries could last a lifetime. '"

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SkinnyGuy writes "Virtually all of our phones have little motors that make vibration possible. Now there's a company working on taking the abilities of these mini motors much, much further. Touch-Bak's technology allows for users to send 'virtual punches' and jabs, and can send phones flying from the hands of users if they're unaware of the service. It's all a bit on the extreme side and, to his credit, the PCMag.com author recognizes that, but it's still a fascinating application of the little understood Haptics technology. '"Imagine," Galsworthy continued, "that you know your buddy Kyle is in an important meeting and you know that he keeps his phone in his pocket. You can deliver a digital punch right to his thigh. He jumps out of his seat during the meeting and . . . it's hilarious!" Galsworthy was so tickled by this description of events that he was lost in fits of laughter on the other side of the phone. To me, this service is childish and, well, kind of stupid.'"

srinravi writes "ArsTechnica reports that Quanta, the company manufacturing the XO laptops, has plans to begin selling low-cost budget mobile computers for $200 later this year. 'According to Quanta president Michael Wang, the company plans to leverage the underlying technologies associated with OLPC's XO laptop to produce laptop computers that are significantly less expensive than conventional laptops.' While OLPC plans to sell the laptops in bulk to governments, which will then distribute the hardware to school children, the XO computer itself is not for sale on the open market. These XO-like commercial devices are still something of an unknown, but it has been announced they'll be using Open Source software."

holy_calamity writes "A first step to allowing wireless data transfer over a currently unused part of the electromagnetic spectrum is reported in New Scientist. Terahertz radiation exists between radio and infrared. A new filter created at the University of Utah can filter out particular frequencies, a prerequisite for using it for data. The abstract of the paper in the journal Nature is freely available."

oldwindways writes "The BBC reports that in developing nations where it is prohibitively expensive to install the infrastructure for wired internet connections, drive by wireless updates are becoming a popular solution to the demand for internet access. This sounds great for checking news updates, sports scores, and visiting your regular websites, but somewhat limited if you are trying to do basic research and don't know exactly where your search will take you. It is certainly an innovative solution to some of the problems encountered in tackling the digital divide, but what longterm effects might this model have on the development of a communications infrastructure?"

coondoggie writes "Cisco has developed a set of small smart robots, which can act as wireless communications relays, that sense when a mobile user is moving out of service range, and can follow the user to maintain connectivity. According to Dave Buster, product marketing manager for the Cisco Global Government Solutions Group, the robots can follow a user almost anywhere to maintain connectivity. Published reports said the robots were part of Cisco's "Information on the move" initiative — a wide ranging plan to secure all things wireless. Whether or not the systems has an enterprise application, it is of interest to the military and initiatives such as the Army's Future Combat Systems which uses a variety of advanced systems to achieve battleground superiority."

bj sends word of Samsung's recently unveiled cell phone, called UpStage. It will ship April 1 (no fooling) for $300, or $150 with a 2-year contract from Sprint Nextel. "...the UpStage is a candy-bar style handset that's less than half an inch thick and not much taller or wider than an iPod Nano. Other multimedia-friendly cell phones struggle to balance the sometimes-conflicting requirements of a conventional handset and a music or video player; the UpStage solves this quandary by simply putting phone functions on one side of the device and the multimedia functions on the other side."

aluminumangel writes "For those of you who don't know what to do with all your money, why not a one million-dollar laptop from the U.K-based company Luvaglio? With 128GB of solid state disk space, Blu-ray, and a detachable rare diamond that acts like a power button and a security key."

Edward Sinovian writes "According to Cnet.co.uk, the days of MP3 players, digital cameras and satellite navigation systems are numbered with cell phones about to take center stage. "PDAs have already been crushed by smart phones and the same thing looks to be happening with standalone MP3 players, particularly the smaller flash ones — a theory supported by Apple's recent entry into the world of music phones. If you then take into consideration the convergence of camera, GPS, TV and laptop-like functionality into mobile phones, it raises the question of how long it's going to take before all you need is a mobile phone." With that in mind, do you think that the iPhone will kill the iPod?"

BobB writes "St. Louis University researchers have concocted batteries fueled by almost any kind of sugar, from tree sap to flat soda, and that could be used to power everything from computers to cell phones. Their thinking: If sugar can jack up the human body, why not electronics?"

Banner~! recommends an article in IBTimes on the search for the ideal size for an ultraportable computer. One device mentioned is Paul Allen's FlipStart, discussed here recently. After watching early users fumble and nearly drop an early version of the FlipStart while trying to perform a three-finger salute, designers ended up including a single key labeled "CtrlAltDel" in the version that will be shipping soon. From the article: "Each device maker... has a different sense of how small an ultra-mobile can get before it becomes impossible to use. For instance, Microsoft thinks the tiniest screen possible measures 7 inches diagonally, but FlipStart Labs settled on 5.6 inches."