A one-eyed woman has appealed for some gadget guidance to help her turn her artificial eye into a camcorder.

In terms of recording capabilities, Vlach's opted for the MPEG 4 format and she hopes to have a Mini SD card slot inside it for cards of up to 4GB. It should also have a 3x zoom - optical, of course.

Underground nuclear power plants no bigger than a hot tub may soon provide electricity for communities around the world. Measuring about 1.5 meters across, the mini reactors can each power about 20,000 homes.

"You would need nation-state resources in order to enrich our uranium," Deal said. "Temperature-wise it's too hot to handle. It would be like stealing a barbecue with your bare hands."

The reactors need to be refueled about every seven to ten years. After five years of generating power, Hyperion says that the module produces a total waste of about the size of a softball, which could be a candidate for fuel recycling.

HiVision has managed to create a UMPC that sells right now for $120.00. They say they have refined the manufacturing process and have learned from building this laptop how to mass produce a laptop that will sell for $98.00.

MIPS based processor, WiFi, 1GB flash storage, it runs Linux, has 3 USB ports, Ethernet, SDHC card reader, audio in and out, multi-tabbed Firefox browser support and Abiword for word processing. Running a custom Chinese Linux distrubution named Xip.

In a rare gesture of openness, Apple has revealed data about iPhone application sales and confirmed the existence of a "kill switch" to disable malicious applications.

Even more interesting, though, is the strangely open and forthcoming answer Jobs gave when asked about the remote kill switch for iPhone applications. He confirmed that it is indeed possible for Apple to reach into your phone from afar and disable malicious applications.

"Hopefully we never have to pull that lever, but we would be irresponsible not to have a lever like that to pull," he told the WSJ.

A jet pack which could allows commuters to fly to work has been unveiled by an inventor.

The Martin Jet Pack is theoretically capable of flying an average-sized pilot 30 miles in 30 minutes on a full tank of fuel - it carries five gallons.

Most previous jet packs have lasted only a few minutes before running out of fuel. But Mr Martin, who gave up his job to concentrate on his design, hopes its superior performance will win over sceptics.

Pioneer has developed a 16-layer read-only optical disc with a capacity of 400 gigabytes.

The laminated disks, which are effectively 16 layers of 25GB each sandwiched together, could go into mass production soon.

Pioneer will present the details of this research at the International Symposium on Optical Memory and Optical Data Storage 2008 to be held in Hawaii from July 13.

If you were looking for a new way to make semiconducting diamond, you might not have thought of starting with tequila. But the potent spirit turns out to be excellent raw material.

They injected the heated vapour from 80-proof "tequila blanco" into a low-pressure chamber. Measurements confirmed that the carbon deposited on test surfaces had a diamond structure.

"The result is certainly funny, but the process seems reasonable," says physicist Rudolf Pfeiffer of the University of Vienna in Austria. "I don't know of any previous attempts to make diamonds from drinks."

This is the BMW Gina. Ostensibly a two-seater roadster, it's actually more of a philosophical statement that has informed BMW's current production line-up and will influence future vehicles.

Built on the short-lived Z8 Roadster platform, the Gina consists of a flexible 'skin' stretched over a metal wire structure enforced with carbon fibre. It allows the driver to change the shape of the car 'on the fly' - the rear spoiler can be raised, for example, while the rocker panels can effectively be bodykitted out.

What do you do with a robot armed with a million-round-per-minute gun? "Crowd control," naturally.

Metal Storm's 40mm weapons mount, the company tells us, can deliver both high-explosive and less-lethal rounds. Which makes it perfect for everything from urban assaults to "border patrol" to "infrastructure protection" to "crowd control."

Its rival, Foster-Miller, has already tried out its machines with Metal Storm weapons, and has three machine gun-toting 'bots in Iraq. Because of safety concerns, however, they're not seeing much action. Not even crowd control.

Customers in shopping centres are having their every move tracked by a new type of surveillance that listens in on the whisperings of their mobile phones.

The technology can tell when people enter a shopping centre, what stores they visit, how long they remain there, and what route they take as they walked around.

Path Intelligence, the Portsmouth-based company which developed the technology, said its equipment was just a tool for market research. "There's absolutely no way we can link the information we gather back to the individual," a spokeswoman said. "There's nothing personal in the data."