In a rare display of innovative thinking, a UK school has decided that rather than battle against kids who prefer gadgets to textbooks, they’re going to let the gadgets become the textbooks, by using Sony PSPs as text readers to allow the kids to access their lesson materials. Wait for the ‘things were different in my day’ backlash … [SmartMobs]

The cyborgisation of the human continues apace, with news of a patent for a bionic foot that mimics the mechanics of the real thing, and the announcement of a prosthetic hand that is strong enough to crush a drinks can. Still no news about my hardwired brain-computer interface, though. Meh.

The old consensus in astonomy used to be that we’d only find terrestrial planets around stars much like our own sun. But as is the way of consesus, especially in astronomy, that view is changing, with more researchers saying that binary star systems are just as likely to have planet systems as singletons. Let’s just hope the governments of the world decide to spend more money on researching and (maybe) exploring them – as opposed to filling LEO with weapon systems.

If you’ve found your daily RSS diet has lost its sense of challenge, why not make things a little harder for yourself – by building yourself a steampunk-style replica telegraph sounder that converts your feeds into morse code? Seems like the sort of project that’ll involve a lot of time and some skill with machine tools, but hey, it looks awesome. [Engadget]

You can’t move for people linking to this one today, but if all my friends stuck their hands in the fire I’d be damned if I was the one who got called a loser. So I heartily recommend that you click through to a webpage that shows you all the known bodies in the solar system larger than 200 km in diameter. Because sometimes feeling really small is a lot of fun. [Scalzi]