Have you heard of Spanish wi-fi startup FON yet? Well, you’re going to. Their business model revolves around getting people to share their broadband connection with other users, and to this end they are offering to sell new joiners a ‘social’ wi-fi router for just $5. The list of their investors is pretty impressive, but a lot of analysts are saying this will be a non-starter. I guess we’ll have to just wait and see. In the meantime, though, I could use an affordable router…

Even those who advocate nuclear power will admit there are problems with its current incarnation – the spectre of waste that stays lethal for thousands of years being one of them. But alternatives may be available. Using the plentiful element thorium as a nuclear fuel would produce waste that decays much more quickly, and as an added bonus it’s no good for producing weapons-grade material.

NASA are providing podcast updates and streaming videos in the run-up to the next Space Shuttle launch; to access them, the place to look is here. In light of the concerns of their engineers about the frost shields, I hope with all my heart that we get to watch a perfect lift-off and a successful mission.

Every now and again, a simple application of modern technology is announced that could really make a difference to the lives of those who most need it; the poor and dispossessed, the ecologically and economically abandoned. Provided it can filter microbes as well as dirt and impurities, this filtering water bottle could be a potential lifesaver for the third world.

Unperturbed by developments across the world aimed at producing petaflop computing, the IBM boffins have set a new performance record by running Blue Gene at a steady rate of over 200 Teraflops (trillions of floating-point operations per second). That’s powerful enough to run simulations of quantum behaviour at an atomic level, by the way – useful for checking the reliability of your nuclear stockpile.