The Homebrew Mobile Phone Club is a gang of Valleygeeks with a noble goal – they want to produce an open source mobile phone design that will free us all from the tyranny of big-name manufacturers and grasping service providers. Don’t head for Radio Shack yet, though – they’ve only just got a basic prototype of the electronics sorted. But when the time comes, maybe you’ll be able to fund your Tuxphone by recycling your obsolete handsets.

It’s all very well there being electric cars on the market, but there still aren’t many on the roads. As part of the ongoing bid to de-congest the roads (and freshen the air) of London, the first free on-street car-recharging terminals in the world have been installed in the Covent Garden area in the hope of enticing city drivers to make the switch.

The most common failure point of structures put under stress by earthquakes or hurricanes turns out to be the humble nail. This, it seems, is an engineering problem that Ed Sutt has solved by reinventing the nail. [mefi]

MIT, funded by Boeing, is building software to control a fleet of unmanned aerial vehicles (in this case helicopters). Says Jonathan How, aeronautics professor, “You can have a student essentially operate this from their bedroom.” And thus the participatory panopticon is born, on the wings of bored college students and open source drone clouds. [digg]

Modafanil is one of a class of drugs that seems to allow its users to sleep less with no side effects. Modafanil is likely just the start of a trend. According to New Scientist, “…to all intents and purposes we are already too far down the road of the 24-hour society to turn back.” I like sleep, but I can already feel the social pressures that will be brought to bear when sleep becomes voluntary. [slashdot]