Researchers at Cornell University have created a robot that they claim is conscious, albeit in a very limited fashion. While it’s unlikely to turn Buddhist or torment itself with existentialism, it does ‘discover itself’ – rather than being programmed with a rigid model of its own function and of the world around it, it learns about its locomotive abilities and the terrain it is placed on with a trial-and-error approach that enables it to overcome new obstacles – and the amputation of one of its limbs. I, for one, welcome an old memetic catchphrase …

We’ve had our fair share of RFID passport hype over here in the UK – you know the stuff, how it’s safe, secure, necessary and so on. Well, we can scratch safe and secure off the list, just as predicted by any number of security tech experts. A journalist and his 1337 h4Xx0r contact managed to strip out all the personal data contained on a UK passport chip, in a mere 48 hours starting from scratch – time to stock up on tin foil.

The trend-watchers predict that mobile phones will become a major computing platform over the next decade or so, equalling or superceding the current capabilities of desk- and lap-tops. If that is the case, social networking will almost certainly be a driving force behind the change – and ‘loopt’ is just the sort of application to do it. ‘Loopt’ is a location-based mobile social mapping service, using geotagging capabilities to keep the user informed of the locations of people in their network relative to their own. You’ll never have to ‘just miss’ someone again – unless you really want to, of course.

Technology has ways of empowering those who would have been considered furthest from its reach a few decades ago. Case in point are tribes of Amazonian Indians who are defending their homelands from the encroachment of logging outfits and rogue miners, by using GPS devices and Google Earth to accurately map the extent of their reservations – which in turn helps them preserve their unique knowledge of the bio-diverse ecosystem that surrounds them.