MIT researches have created a device that potentially (when working a large swarm) could clear up the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

The technology is a prototype at the moment and uses technology that can separate water and oil. The researches behind it have calculated that 5000 of these autonomous robot cleaners would take just one month to clean up the surface oil on the water.

The technology is based on the use of robots, 16ft long and including a 7ft wide solar-powered conveyor belt that is made of an oil-slurping nanowire mesh. The material is capable of isolating and absorbing up to 20 times its weight in oil. The robots will use the principles of swarm robotics, where thousands of such devices will be interacting and coordinating with each other using GPS and wireless technology.

The devices can either burn the oil they collect to keep them working uninterrupted or can break away from their teams occasionally to deposit their oil in large, GPS-tagged floating reservoirs. A large tanker could come and collect oil from these reservoirs.

[Read more…]

Logitech is getting ready to launch the Logitech Revue this fall. The Revue is a Google TV companion box that will bring the new Google TV services to existing HDTV’s.

Three adverts have been launched which simply put, are weird. They each feature a HDTV with legs running around a house, frightening someone to death or taking a swim outside.

Rather than trying to describe them any further, I’ve embedded them below to see if you can figure them out. [Read more…]

Apple has released a new version of the iWork productivity suite. The new version is iWork 9.0.4 that is available for download today.

New features included with the update include some big fixes for the Keynote, Pages and Numbers software. Also the update brings the ability to export Pages documents in the ePub format so that content can be copied over to the iBooks app that is available for the iPhone running iOS 4 and the iPad. [Read more…]

Facebook has announced that it is dropping support for the older Microsoft [MSFT] browser, Internet Explorer 6. The policy for Facebook is in regards to the chat features rather than the site as a whole, so if you don’t use chat you should be OK to stay at version 6 for now.

We do however recommend that you update Internet Explorer to a later version, or switch to something like the latest version Chrome or Safari to be more secure.

The reason Facebook has dropped support on the chat side of things is due to bugs found in the chat service. The code needed to fix the chat box wasn’t compatible with Internet Explorer 6 and thus, they had to drop support for it. [Read more…]

The Facebook mobile app has been installed on millions of devices from BlackBerry, Android and iOS based smartphones.

Joe Hewitt is the man responsible for developing the Facebook apps for mobile devices and has had a little rant on Twitter about how he finds the operating systems that he works with. His main gripe is with Android OS that Google [GOOG] develops by saying it’s too hard to use. [Read more…]

Apple [AAPL] is holding an event on September 1 to launch some “music related” gadgets and services. It is expected that the new iPod touch 4 will be launched along with iTV and potentially 99 cent TV show downloads.

The event is being held at Yerba Buena and the picture above and below shows what’s going on at the moment in preparation for the launch. [Read more…]