Motorola’s latest cell phone offering is going in the opposite direction of the super-capable mobile computing platforms that are the tech industry darlings. It’s super simple, uses e-ink technology for great battery life, and remains slim and cool-looking. [slashdot]

It’s like some kind of Frankenstein’s monster for the alternative energy set: a bicycle with electric assist and a big ol’ sail. The Pterosail is, I suspect, a bit unwieldy for the average Joe but it sure looks like fun. [treehugger]

A friend of mine at secondary school had one of those not-quite paper-rounds, delivering one of those free rags that are ninety percent adverts to local homes. Suffice to say that, if his employers then had the technology and ruthlessness of this Australian leafleting outfit, he’d not have got away with his regular practice of delivering the twelve copies that were actually wanted and taking the rest to the local primary school for use in craft lessons.

The realities of the modern business world mean that there are folk who have to do almost everything on the road, and that’s been one of the driving forces behind the ballooning mobile technology industry. Here’s the newest addition to the itinerant executive’s tool-kit – a portable scanner that comes bundled with laptop software to allow content-keyword searching of scanned business cards, receipts, expense statements and pretty much any other document (real or virtual) that a business trip might produce. None of which is particularly new, but the integration of the features is a smart move that will probably pay off.

Biotech is showing the promise of solving a lot of problems that conventional technologies and methods struggle to deal with, especially in the field of medicine. A team of UK researchers are working on a method that uses a certain bacteria to ‘manufacture’ potential anti-cancer drugs that would be simply impossible to synthesise in a regular laboratory set-up. Why cook up new chemicals by hand, when you can get some little microbes to do the hard work for you?