Videogame addicts may become problem gamblers

October 7th, 2009 LONDON - An XBox 360 videogame console signed by Sarah Palin has been put up for sale on online auction site eBay at massive 1.1 million dollars. David Morrill, who is selling the gadget, claims that the politician had signed it two days before she announced that she was stepping down as governor of Alaska.

August 1st, 2009 WASHINGTON - People who play video games may get addicted for life to their consoles, just like gamblers get hooked to cards, warn health experts. This is quite evident from the growing sales of the games and the hardware amid the ongoing economic slowdown.

May 6th, 2009 GM recalls 300 new Camaros due to cable problemDETROIT — General Motors Corp. says it is recalling about 300 new Chevrolet Camaros because a battery cable could rub against the starter motor, wearing the insulation and potentially causing the car to stop running or fail to start.

September 23rd, 2009 LONDON - The first ever "virtual census" of the human characters used in US video games has shown that males, adults and white people are over-represented in such games, while females, black people, children and the elderly are under-represented. Dmitri Williams of the University of Southern California-Los Angeles (UCLA), who carried out the study with colleagues at Indiana University, Ohio University and Virginia Polytechnic Institute, says that the mismatch between real-world and videogame populations could be excluding some groups of potential players from games.

March 1st, 2009 TORONTO - The BlackBerry Bold smartphone that was recently launched in Japan is proving to be too hot to handle for the Japanese, literally. Many users have reported that the keyboard of their Canadian smartphone overheated during re-charging just days after its launch in Japan.

June 14th, 2009 WASHINGTON - A scientist has proposed a way to make hybrid cars more efficient, by solving a problem in the vehicles that leads to a waste of energy and very high fuel consumption. The scientist in question is Toni Font, who recently graduated from the ETSEIB (Escola Tecnica Superior d'Enginyeria Industrial de Barcelona).is proposal is based on one of the problems of conventional vehicles: the loss of kinetic energy during braking.

July 31st, 2009 Apple says it's fixed iPhone SMS vulnerabilityLAS VEGAS — Apple Inc. says it has fixed an iPhone vulnerability that lets hackers knock people offline — and possibly take over the phones — by sending them specially crafted text messages.

October 5th, 2009 Toyota formally recalls 3.8 million vehiclesWASHINGTON — Toyota Motor Corp. is officially recalling 3.8 million vehicles in the United States to address problems with floor mats that could cause the gas pedal to get stuck and cause a crash.

July 30th, 2009 WASHINGTON - A comprehensive study of gaming characters has revealed that video games do not accurately represent minorities. The study encompassing the top 150 games in a year across nine platforms and all rating levels, and weighted by each title's popularity, shows that the video game industry showed that less than 3pct of game characters were "recognizably Hispanic." Latinos were nearly invisible and women and other groups were underrepresented.

September 14th, 2009 Startup lets you play console video games remotelySAN FRANCISCO — As any a video game aficionado knows, it's easy to pop a game into your Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3 and spend hours working your way from one level to the next. Without the hefty console, though, you're out of luck if you want to keep blasting those aliens while away from home.

September 26th, 2009 WASHINGTON - Samsung Electronics have announced that it has begun mass production of a new kind of memory chip that stores information by melting and freezing tiny crystals. Called the phase-change memory (PCM), the idea was first proposed by physicists in the 1960s, but it took long for them to develop the chip.

September 14th, 2009 WASHINGTON - Researchers from the Eindhoven University of Technology and the University of Ulm in Germany have made the first high-resolution 3D images of the inside of a polymer solar cell. This gives them important new insights in the nanoscale structure of polymer solar cells and its effect on the performance.

June 22nd, 2009 Apple: More than 1M new-model iPhones soldNEW YORK — Apple Inc. sold more than a million units of its latest iPhone model in the first three days, making it the most successful debut for a smart phone yet.

July 8th, 2009 WASHINGTON - A team of scientists has developed a low-cost solution processing method for CIGS (copper-indium-gallium-selenide) based solar cells that could provide an answer to the problem of their production on a commercial scale. CIGS panels have a high efficiency potential, may be cheaper to produce and would use less raw materials than silicon solar panels.

April 24th, 2009 WASHINGTON - In absence of any satisfactory response from Sony Corporation, Hindus are planning to intensify their protest movement for withdrawal of its controversial "Hanuman: Boy Warrior" video game for PlayStation2. Spearheaded by acclaimed Hindu statesman Rajan Zed, who has stressed that this game "trivializes the highly revered deity of Hinduism", many other Hindu leaders and groups world over have joined the protest.