In addition to enhancing digital camera technology, the eye-shaped lens could have an impact on many devices, Huang said.

“Camera technologies can benefit directly from these advances. We believe, more generally, that many new application possibilities will emerge from the ability to integrate … optoelectronic devices onto curved surfaces. Bring electronics to the human body in the form of advanced biomedical devices is one broad area of possible application,” he told TechNewsWorld.

Before the technology can be used in something like an optical prosthetic, however, other issues must also be resolved.

“We would like to explore the ability of these types of approaches for implantation into the human eye, for people who suffer from degeneration of the retina. Many other problems, mainly in the area of biocompatibility and bio-interfaces would need to be solved first, however,” Huang added.

Eye Opener

The two researchers spent two years investigating ways to develop approaches that would bypass the planar, 2-D constraints typically associated with conventional CCD (charge-coupled device) cameras, thereby enabling designs inspired by the human eye.

The result of their research is an array of silicon detectors and electronics that can be conformed onto a curved surface. That curved surface, much like the human eye, can serve as the focal plane array of the camera, which captures an image.

On a standard digital camera, these electronics have to lie on a flat surface. As a result, the camera’s lens system must reflect an image multiple times before it can reflect on the correct points on the focal plane.

The question Huang and Rogers confronted was how to place those electronics on a curved surface and still have a working camera. It’s a problem with which scientists have struggled over the past two decades. The electronics involved lie on silicon wafers, which can only be compressed 1 percent before they break and fail.

Take Nigerian civil engineer, Dr Joseph Adelegan for instance.

He firmly believes that the world’s future fuel demands can be met through renewable energy.

And he is using increasingly innovative methods to achieve these results.

Three years ago Adelegan won plaudits for his “Cows to Kilowatts” project, which used effluents and waste products from abattoirs to produce cooking gas.

The project was a winner of the prestigious 2005 Supporting Entrepreneurs for Environment and Development (SEED) International Awards.

It is still going strong and being used to provide cooking fuel for nearly 6000 homes in Ibadan, southern Nigeria. Adelegan tells CNN there are now plans to roll it out across most of Africa, including Zimbabwe, Kenya and Egypt.

This time he’s back with another groundbreaking idea to use waste from the cassava plant, a staple food of Nigeria, to generate electricity.

His project “Power to the Poor: Off-Grid Lighting from Cassava Waste in Nigeria,” was awarded a $250,000 grant in May from the World Bank after being named one of the best projects in Africa.

According to Adelegan, Nigeria produces over 20 percent of the world’s output of cassava, it is a $5 billion industry and provides the third largest source of carbohydrates for human food.

However, waste from cassava refining is a major public health problem in Nigeria, causing water pollution and emitting noxious greenhouse gases.

Through innovative biogas technology, zero emission bioreactors at specially constructed plants treat the cassava waste and produce biogas which drives microturbines for low cost, safe and reliable off-grid efficient lighting to thousands of rural homes.

Using this method, Adelegan says he hopes to generate 200kw daily, which will provide basic electricity for more than 2000 households initially.

He told CNN: “There will be four lighting points in their homes. We’re thinking in terms of basic lighting, they will be able to use their TV, cassette player, that sort of thing, but it will not be able to power a refrigerator.

“These people currently rely on kerosene lamps that are very bad for emissions and pollution. We also plan to provide them with low wattage lamps that use just 5kw to bring down usage.”

Through his not-for-profit organization– Global Network for Environment and Economic Development Research)– Adelegan has achieved the impressive feat of galvanizing the notoriously bureaucratic Nigerian government into action.

The scheme will cost $310,000 and will become profitable in little over three years, Adelegan says.

“This can never replace fossil fuels because of the huge demand we have for them, but we can help to reduce greenhouse emissions by creating alternative sources of energy,” he said.

If nothing else, the enthusiastic reaction to the unconfirmed report in The Wall Street Journal served as another reminder that investors want Yahoo to pursue a different path than the one mapped out by Chief Executive Jerry Yang.

And that could be bad news for Yang, who started Yahoo as an Internet directory 14 years ago. Unless he can sway shareholder sentiment before Yahoo’s annual meeting Aug. 1, Yang could lose his job in a boardroom coup being attempted by investor Carl Icahn.

Recognizing Yahoo’s vulnerability, Microsoft is trying to recruit News Corp., Time Warner’s AOL or other media partners to put together a joint bid that would slice Yahoo into pieces, according to the Journal. The story cited undisclosed people familiar with the discussions.

Microsoft declined comment Wednesday. A Yahoo spokeswoman didn’t immediately return a call seeking comment.

Under the reported breakup plan, Microsoft would emerge with Yahoo’s online search operations — the main object of the software maker’s desire since it began stalking Yahoo as long as ago as 2006.

After the two sides couldn’t agree on a price, Microsoft withdrew a $47.5 billion bid to buy Yahoo in its entirety in early May.

Just two weeks later, Microsoft offered to pay $1 billion for Yahoo’s search engine and invest another $8 billion for a 16 percent stake in Yahoo’s remaining business.

Yahoo rejected that offer, too, and instead forged an advertising partnership with Google Inc., whose rapid growth prompted Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo in the first place.

Now, Microsoft is trying to figure out a way to carve up Yahoo’s business and hand off the non-search pieces to News Corp., AOL or other media partners, the Journal said.

Neither News Corp. nor AOL are new players in this soap opera.

Yahoo explored possible deals with AOL and with News Corp.’s popular online hangout, MySpace.com, while trying to fend off Microsoft’s advances. And Microsoft previously has talked to News Corp. about making a joint bid for Yahoo.

Gates, who is stepping back to focus on his philanthropy, sat with CEO Ballmer in a Microsoft conference room and meandered through moments in Microsoft’s history. They stopped to get in a few good digs at IBM Corp., whose first personal computers were loaded with Microsoft’s DOS operating system before IBM adopted its own operating software and their relations strained.

“They went off with OS 2, we were left with good old Windows, and sure enough the David versus Goliath story came out with the right ending,” said Gates, eliciting laughter from the crowd of 830 Microsoft employees.

Gates, who founded Microsoft with Paul Allen in 1975, admitted that Microsoft has faltered along the way, and certainly isn’t perfect today.

“When we miss a big change, when we don’t get great people on it, that is the most dangerous thing for us,” Gates said. “It has happened many times. It’s OK, but the less the better.”

The unique prospect of sailing in open waters at the North Pole during the minimum ice cover in August and September has about a 50-50 chance of becoming reality, says one climate scientist’s prediction holds true.

“The issue is that, for the first time that I am aware of, the North Pole is covered with extensive first-year ice — ice that formed last autumn and winter,” Dr. Mark Serreze, a senior research scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center  in Boulder, Colo., told The Independent newspaper in London. “I’d say it’s even odds whether the North Pole melts out.”

One-year ice is highly vulnerable to melting during the summer months, and satellite data over recent weeks has shown the rate of retreat to be faster than last year, when there was an all-time record loss of summer sea ice in the Arctic, according to the report.

On a previously derelict site on the outskirts of Dagenham, sandwiched between the roaring A13 and the Thames, the final components are being placed into giant machines which will soon form the cutting edge of recycling in Britain.

The Closed Loop recycling plant claims to be the first in the world to take both milk bottles and clear drinks bottles and turn them back into food-grade plastic.Once it is up and running, the £13m facility aims to help create a continuous cycle by enabling manufacturers to use recycled plastic from the UK in their food and drink packaging.

“Essentially the consumer buys their product, say, a bottle of Coca Cola. If they do the right thing with that bottle and place it in the recycling it will have every chance of ending up at our plant and eventually being turned back into another Coke bottle,” says Closed Loop London’s managing director, Chris Dow.

It sounds simple but such are the difficulties involved in collecting, sorting and decontaminating plastics, that as recently as four years ago, many people in the industry were sceptical it could be done.

Bottle to bottle

But bottle to bottle recycling, as it is known, could go some way towards answering growing consumer ire about packaging.

The stringent processes used at the Dagenham plant will strip out any bacteria or toxins, says Mr Dow. He adds that Closed Loop aims to deal with 35,000 tonnes of used plastic a year.

YOKOSUKA, Japan —  Rolling your eyes to turn up the volume of a portable music player and tapping your fingers to turn on a DVD player are among technologies Japan’s top mobile carrier is testing for “wearable” gadgets.

In one version, sensors and chips inside headphones detect electrical current produced by movements of the wearer’s eyeballs, says Masaaki Fukumoto, executive research engineer at NTT DoCoMo.

“We are working on a cell phone of the future,” he said at a suburban Tokyo research center.

The new technology may also enable cell-phone cameras to read bar codes used in Japan to get product information, download music and coupons when the user simply looks at the codes, researchers said.

Fukumoto showed a wearable cell phone shaped like a ring about the size of a ping-pong ball. When a wearer sticks his fingers in his ears, the sound travels as vibrations through his bones and into his ears, where it is heard as sound again.

Another iteration of the technology appears in a wristwatch that can detect the wearer’s thumb and forefinger tapping together to work as a remote controller for such gadgets as a DVD player.

The days when wearable technology looks like fancy cumbersome space-suits are over. The latest look is everyday and inconspicuous, blending into the routine, Fukumoto said.

“Japanese don’t like to stand out,” he said.

The portable video game console is now being used as a key teaching tool, breaking with traditional Japanese academic methods.

A giggly class of 32 seventh-graders used plastic pens to spell words like “hamburger” and “cola” on the touch panel screen — the key feature of the hit console — following an electronic voice from the machine.

It’s a sort of high-tech spelling bee. When the students got the spelling right, the word “good” popped up on the screen, and the student went on to the next exercise. The first five students to complete the drills were awarded colorful stickers.

“It’s fun,” said Chigusa Matsumoto, 12, who zipped through the drills to get her sticker. “You can study while you have fun.”

The chemistry in the Ivuna meteorite is thought to contain information about the conditions that gave rise to the Sun and planets 4.5 billion years ago.

It landed in Tanzania in 1938 as one 705g stone, since split into samples.

Pieces from the UK sample, the largest in any public collection in the world, will be removed for study.

Most Ivuna samples are held in private collections, or by the Tanzanian government.

It is a so-called carbonaceous chondrite. It contains dust granules that may have been part of the cloud of material that came together to form our Solar System.

Unlike most rock found in our stellar neighbourhood, it has not been altered by major heating sometime in its history and, as such, gives researchers a remarkable view on the past.

Dr Caroline Smith, meteorite curator at the Natural History Museum (NHM), told BBC News: “These types of meteorite are very susceptible to alteration on Earth. Changes in humidity, for example, can change their composition.

“But this meteorite is important as it fell relatively recently and has been kept under nitrogen in a sealed environment for the last two or three decades.

The creature had a fish-like body but the head of an animal more suited to land than water.

The researchers’ study, published in the journal Nature, saysVentastega curonica would have looked similar to a small alligator.

Scientists say the 365-million-year-old species eventually became an evolutionary dead end.

Counting digits

About one hundred million years before dinosaurs began to roam the Earth, Ventastega was to be found in the shallow waters and tidal estuaries of modern day Latvia.

According to lead author, Professor Per Ahlberg, from Uppsala University, Sweden, this creature had the head of a tetrapod, an animal adapted to live on land. The body, though, was fish-like but with four primitive flippers.

“From a distance, it would have looked like an alligator. But closer up, you would have noticed a real tail fin at the back end, a gill flap at the side of the head; also lines of pores snaking across head and body.