Frankenfish takes to the water

The New Scientist magazine reports of fishy experiments in the laboratories of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Researchers at MIT have constructed a robotic fish consisting of a microprocessor that sends signals to live muscle taken from a frog in order to make it wiggle and swim through a solution of glucose. The robot fish swam around for a few minutes and then stopped to regain energy from the sugary waters. ...more

Mozilla betas Thunderbird 2

Mozilla has released a first beta of Thunderbird 2, the next generation of its standalone email client. A redesigned visual theme introduces the new Message Tags features - custom tags that can be added to messages and combined with saved searches and mail views to make it easier to organise email - as well as numerous improvements to existing features. The changes involve: Session History Navigation (back and forward buttons allow navigation through message history); extensions support (extensions can now add custom columns to the message list pane in addition to storing custom message data in the mail database); and notification alerts (new mail alerts include information such as the subject, sender and message text); and find as you type. ...more

High street charity shops enjoying CD donation boom

High street charity shops are enjoying a boom in CD donations, as people increasingly store all their music on their computers. Cerebral palsy charity Scope said that its stores are receiving 'sack loads' of unwanted discs - both old and new material - as people clear out CD collections that cover an estimated 23,000 miles of shelf space across the UK. However the charity-minded are far outnumbered by those who offload their CDs on eBay. ...more

Intel calls for end of the floppy

Intel is calling on PC manufacturers to finally do away with the floppy drive still common in the Windows world, according to a report on the Register. The Register claims to have seen "confidential Intel documents" which reveal that the leading chip manufacturer is hoping to see the floppy phased out in the second half of 2002 along with serial and PS/2 ports. Apple was ridiculed by the PC world when it decided, with the introduction of the first iMac in 1998, to dispense with what is known as legacy IO - the jumble of old input and output ports that included floppy drives, ADB (for mice and keyboards), SCSI and serial. ...more

Microsoft: We won't sue, but run Novell

Microsoft has warned customers worried about open-source patent infringement to buy Linux software from its partner, Novell. Last week, Microsoft stipulated that 235 of its patents had been breached by open-source software. The claims were strongly criticised by open-source advocates such as Linus Torvalds, who said the company's failure to name which specific patents had been violated 'should tell you something'. ...more