The iPad manufacturer has come under media scrutiny in recent months after a wave of suicides at its huge Shenzhen plant.

According to a report on MIC Gadget, Foxconn CEO Guo Tai-ming has said workers commit suicide for the money, and the company will no longer compensate the families of Foxconn workers who take their own lives.

A breakthrough in small, high-powered magnets could lead to handheld magnetic resonance scanners with similar capabilities to those of today's room-sized medical and scientific instruments.

This could mean that a lot of procedures which nowadays involve sending samples off to labs or patients to hospitals could instead be done in the field using devices no bigger than a Star Trek Tricorder.

Over the next few minutes, this "MakerBot" will do something I can only dream of doing: it will create a spare part of itself as an insurance against future mishaps.

MakerBot is one of a range of desktop manufacturing plants being developed by researchers and hobbyists around the world. Their goal is to create a machine that is able to fix itself and, ultimately, to replicate.

In a word: Persistence. Partly the traditional, inspiring, one man against all odds type of persistence, but more the obsessive, borderline insane persistence. But whatever, this dude's building his own metro, like a CITY, so I should probably shut up.

There's an old man in Russia, digging out about one metre of soil a day, right now, for a personal subway system.

The much-discussed software development kit for the upcoming iPhone OS 4.0 says that native applications must be "originally written" in Objective C, C, or C++, forbidding developers from using any sort of "translation or compatibility layer."

And what if you take an application that was already written in some other language for some other platform and rewrite it for the iPhone? Is that a translation too?

When you write a shader with an OpenGL script, you're not coding in Objective C. And what about XML?

So it's interesting to note that Pentagon boffins have now stated that perhaps the most intriguing reputed capability of Echelon - the ability to automatically pick out words of interest and flag that conversation up as important to its human masters - doesn't work.

The news comes as part of a solicitation from the Pentagon crazytech bureau, DARPA, in which the maverick military mayhem mavens request assistance with building a Robust Automatic Transcription of Speech (RATS) system.

The spray, which is harmless to the environment, can be used to protect against disease, guard vineyards against fungal threats and coat the nose cones of high-speed trains, it has been claimed.

The spray forms a water-resistant layer, meaning it can be cleaned using only water. Trials by food-processing companies showed that sterile surfaces covered with a film of liquid glass were equally clean after a rinse with hot water as after their usual treatment with strong bleach.

The big news in security circles this week is the fact that a security researcher claims to have cracked the encryption used to keep GSM mobile phone calls private.

"This is theoretically possible but practically unlikely," said Claire Cranton, an association spokeswoman. She said no one else had broken the code since its adoption. "What he is doing would be illegal in Britain and the United States. To do this while supposedly being concerned about privacy is beyond me."

The photo has been assembled from 600 shots clicked by a 21-megapixel Canon 5D Mark II camera and a 70-200mm lens, set to 200mm. The camera was mounted on a special robotic device that turned it tiny increments every few hours. The resulting data from the camera was about 40-gigabytes.

The photo measures 192,000 x 96,000 pixels, or 18.4 billion pixels altogether.

If you browse the Screwfix catalogue, you'll see there's recently been a flood of new lithium-ion-powered garden and workshop tools - they're rapidly taking over from NiCd and NiMH thanks to lighter weight, longer life and lack of the pernicious "memory effect".

66% premium on laptop batteries would be annoying enough - perhaps not enough to power a full-blown rant - but I also have a few power and garden tools made by Ryobi from its excellent ONE+ range, which are also powered by lithium-ion batteries.