Bizzare and Freak Mobile/Celll Phone Accidents (News, Report, Urban Legend)

There have been some bizarre cell phone accidents in the news of late:

* In January 2004, a Malaysian man who napped on his bed while his cell recharged beside him was reportedly scalded across his buttocks by the remnants of the phone's battery as the unit exploded. The 40-year-old electrician had put a new battery into his cell the week before.

* In February 2004, Asia Pulse reported that the SV-130 phone belonging to a 54-year-old South Korean woman exploded, setting her bed on fire. According to their account, the cell was not being used at the time, and its battery was disconnected. Fortunately, the woman was sleeping in another room at the time her phone went ka-bang.

* In March 2004, a welder in Thailand was said to have suffered a severe electric shock when his cell phone exploded from having been brought into too close proximity to a high-voltage pole. The victim's injuries were severe enough to necessitate his leg's being amputated.

* In September 2004, a report out of southern Vietnam stated that a two-year-old Siemens C45 left charging for 30 minutes had exploded, slightly injuring a bystander.

Worldwide, a number of cells exploded in 2003, a great many of them Nokia phones. According to Nokia, third-party or counterfeit batteries were to blame: in each and every exploding phone case it investigated, the battery in question proved not to be original to the unit and not to have included industry-standard safety measures. It also found the vast majority of short circuits that led to these explosions were caused by the units' having undergone traumatic events (such as being dropped) which jeopardized the integrity of poorly-manufactured batteries.

Cell Phones Reach for Zero

Here is a bizarre idea: a company that offers all-you-can-eat voice and data service across a network of data lines and cell infrastructure it does not own. Meet Las Vegas-based Zer01 Mobile. The company has developed its own VoIP system that runs not only on the landed Internet, but on the mobile Web as well. Details are hazy.

More will come out at the coming Cable Telecommunications and Internet Association trade show in Las Vegas early April. But the buzz on the Zer01 is compelling: The product will offer all the voice, data and cell usage a customer wants for $70 a month. That's right, $70, with nary a contract or commitment.

New Company Likely to Raise Ire

The system will emulate landed broadband phones by running on data networks and not phone systems. And Zer01 is almost certain to raise traditional carrier ire.

But, still, in these cost-conscious times, expect value-hungry cell phone users to take this product seriously: Since who really has the money these days to throw away on pricey data plans?

World swine flu toll nears 10,000 - World News, Report

Nearly 10,000 cases of swine flu have been confirmed in 40 different countries around the world, the World Health Organization (WHO) has said.

The WHO said 79 people are known to have died from the new virus.

The news comes as the WHO and UN hold talks with top pharmaceutical firms to discuss the production of a vaccine.

Correspondents say there is concern about the global distribution of a possible vaccine after wealthy states pre-ordered large stocks.

The WHO says the global tally of swine flu cases stands at 9,830, after rising by 1,001 in one day.

Most of the new flu victims were in Mexico, which reported some 545 cases, and the US, where 409 new cases were confirmed. There were also 34 new cases in Japan.

Five confirmed cases were reported in Panama, three in Chile, two in El Salvador and one each in the UK, Peru and China.

Five new deaths have also been reported - four in Mexico and one in the US.

Scramble for Vaccines

UN chief Ban Ki-moon and WHO head Margaret Chan are holding talks in Geneva with pharmaceutical companies to ask for commitments over the production of a vaccine.

Mr Ban will be looking for a commitment to increase capacity and to produce vaccines at a fair price, the BBC's Imogen Foulkes reports.

Pharmaceutical companies are committed to producing a seasonal flu vaccine and somehow capacity has to be found to produce an affordable swine flu vaccine as well, she says.

Rich countries such as Britain and the US have pre-ordered vast stocks of such a vaccine before a single dose has been produced, leading to concerns about future global supplies.

Michele Childs of the medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) said that wealthy countries were "putting in place these agreements with vaccine manufacturers to basically jump the queue".

"What needs to be done is all of the countries need to agree how it will be equably shared, based on need, so if one country has got a huge outbreak then they need to be getting the vaccines first," she said.

"But that debate is not happening."

Schools Closed

In Japan the number of swine flu cases has continued to rise rapidly.

The new cases brought the total number of people to have caught the virus in Japan to at least 176, according to authorities there.

Just four cases had been confirmed in Japan as of Friday - people who had returned from Canada.

The first case in someone who had not been abroad - a 17-year-old student in Kobe - was reported on Saturday.

Japanese media say the new wave of infections makes Japan the fourth-most infected country in the world, after Mexico, the US and Canada.

Officials doubled the closures of schools and universities in Hyogo and Osaka on Tuesday, bringing the total to more than 4,000.

None of the patients in the new wave of Japanese infections were reported to be in serious condition.

14 Strange and Scary Military Technologies (News, inventions, review, report)

Mankind has been trying to hurt his fellow man since the dawn of time, and technology makes the job much easier.

Modern technology means 'increased lethality' and scarier weapons - but it can also keep soldiers out of harm's way, patch them up when they're hurt and one day, even erase traumatic memories.

These fourteen technologies may sound like the stuff of sci-fi, but they're rapidly becoming reality.

1. Exoskeletons
Wouldn't it be great if you could give ordinary soldiers robot strength and stamina? Exoskeletons do just that, and as this video shows, they're not very far away. They're also capable of working without a person inside them. Everybody panic!

2. Smart uniforms
We can't make soldiers invisible just yet, but smart fabrics can make them much harder to see - and almost invisible to night vision goggles, heat sensors and radar kit.

3. Liquid armour
Armour is handy, but it's heavy and inflexible - so scientists have developed liquid armour, which is designed to offer the best of both worlds. There are two kinds of liquid armour: Shear Thickening Fluid (STF), which hardens on impact, and Magnetorheological (MR) fluid, which is essentially iron particles suspended in liquid. Add a magnetic field and MR fluid becomes solid in fractions of a second. Of the two, STF liquid armour is the current favourite: MR fluid armour is still a good few years away.

4. Bendy guns
One potentially fatal problem with the good old-fashioned gun is that you need to see what you're shooting at - so when you pop your head round a corner, the enemy might just pop it off your shoulders. Enter Cornershot, an Israeli system designed for SWAT teams and special forces. It's a simple enough idea: a gun that can be bent at right angles, with a sight that follows the barrel so the operator can see what he or she is shooting at.

5. Sonic bandages
One of the biggest preventable causes of battlefield deaths is from blood loss, so the Deep Bleeder Acoustic Coagulation (DBAC) programme is working on 'sonic bandages' that cauterise wounds with a focused blast of ultrasonic energy.

6. Electronic guns
Metal Storm combines electronic ignition and stacked projectiles to devastating effect - or "increased lethality", as the brochure puts it. Its light weight means that Metal Storm guns tend to have lots and lots of barrels firing simultaneously. It makes a machine gun look like a pea shooter.

7. Rail guns
Rail guns use magnetic fields to blast projectiles at incredible speeds: the US Navy has tested one that fires its load at seven times the speed of sound.

8. Robot bombers
Earlier this week, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) fired three Hellfire missiles at a house on the Afghan border, killing fugitive Rashid Rauf. That's just a taste of what's on the horizon, because today's UAVs are titchy compared to projects such as Taranis, which includes building full-size, unmanned fighter jets.

9. Brain erasers
For many soldiers, the trauma of war doesn't end when the fighting does - and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) can make their civilian lives a misery. A Men In Black-style brain eraser would be a big help, so it's no surprise that the military is funding research into whether such devices are possible. Scientist have already found a way to erase mice's memories, so such tech could well be possible.

10. See-through planes
Clearly inspired by Wonder Woman, the MoD wants pilots to be able to see right through their aircraft. Sadly that doesn't mean making planes out of glass with scantily clad lovelies flying them; it means a heads-up display inside the pilot's helmet that projects images from outside, enabling the pilot to 'see' through the metal. The helmets are currently in development for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.

11. Invisible tanks
As the old joke almost put it: What's green and invisible? That tank. Last year, the MoD revealed that it was testing invisibility systems for tanks and even troops. It's a simple enough idea - cameras film the tank's surroundings and then project it onto the tank - but it'll be a few years before it's battlefield ready. A proper invisibility cloak is probably decades away.

12. Pain beams
Want a non-lethal but exceptionally painful energy weapon? Then get thee to Raytheon, whose Silent Guardian uses a focused beam of microwave energy to heat up the skin and force enemies to take cover. As Ars Technica notes, rather brilliantly, this is one area where a tinfoil hat really could defend you.

13. HAARP
Depending on whom you believe, the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Programme is either a system for better global communications, a space weapon for battling UFOs, an earthquake creator or a mind control ray. The first explanation comes from military men who can't see a piece of cheese without wondering how to kill people with it; the others from the tinfoil hat brigade and Muse's Matt Bellamy. Who to trust?

14. Terminators
We've got exoskeletons. We've got guns. So why not go the next step into Terminator territory and develop robot brains that would enable the exoskeletons to chase us around with their guns? That's exactly what DARPA's SyNAPSE (Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics) electronic brain programme seems designed to do. SyNAPSE? SKYNET, more like. Everybody panic! Again!