The current web2.0 bubble has introduced the world to a new crop of comparatively young millionaires who have climbed the ladder using their innovation and 1337 programming skills. This trend towards youth in the industry seems to be accelerating, if Mateusz Rajca is anything to go by – Mateus has nearly completed coding his own web browser (AuroraBrowser) from scratch, which is pretty good going for a twelve year old. He needs some beta testers, if you’re up for it.

Strange things are afoot at the US/Mexican border, largely involving cameras. A pilot project by Boeing seeks to avoid the erection of an actual fence in Tucson by using remote surveillance technologies, while an assortment of more grass-roots projects seek to crowdsource border guards by making video footage available on the internet in real time to would-be immigration vigilantes. Whether these initiatives will be sufficient to deter or catch those determined enough to take the risk in the first place remains to be seen – economic incentives might be more effective with a similar expenditure.

Improving the environment is best achieved by raising awareness. Here’s a campaign that is sure to raise more that just awareness, though – Japanese undergarment manufacturer Triumph Lingerie have unveiled the ‘No! Shopping Bag Bra’, which (as the name almost suggests) is a bra made from recycled plastic bottles that converts into a stylish shopping bag accessory. Designed to promote a new recycling law, one assumes that very few of these garments will actually be used for their designed purpose – although the thought of a long queue of pretty Japanese girls struggling to take of their bras before they reach the supermarket checkout probably has a lot of retail workers in ebullient pro-recycling frames of mind.

Far from being a euphemism for some obscure act of violence, an ‘Edinburgh Duck’ is in fact a wave-power generator designed in the 1970s. The old design is being revamped as a self-powered desalination device which its inventor hopes will benefit countries that have to rely on power-hungry desalination plants for their fresh water supplies. Whether the Duck can compete against these large-scale projects while staying affordable remains to be seen.

Well, the blogosphere is heaving today – and mostly with relief, it seems (but that could just be my partisan reading habits coming into play). Whichever way you voted, though, congratulations; the US is the biggest democracy on the face of the planet, and it’s great to see that the system can work the way it is supposed to. Now, if you can just make it plain to the people who decide such things that e-voting is not a mature enough technology to handle such an important process, you’ll be doing the whole planet another big favour.