The World Touring Car Championship tightened up at the top on the weekend when rounds five and six were run at Silverstone in the UK. Alfa Romeo drivers dominated the first race, while SEAT claimed a brilliant 1-2 finish in the second, putting both marques in contention for the manufacturer's crown and taking Alfa Romeo's Gabriele Tarquini to within two points of BMW driver Dirk Muller's points lead.  Read More

To look at the Pump-a-bike, you’d swear it would sink the moment it hit the water. Not so, indeed, with a bit of practice, the human powered hydrofoil is capable of nearly 20 miles per hour – not that much shy of the world record for human powered watercraft . To make it work, all you need to do is jump up and down. Given some time to coordinate the movements and gain a degree of mastery, the Pump-a-bike can even be used in surf to ride waves.  Read More

World Champion Valentino Rossi extended his lead at the top of the MotoGP World Championship with a victory from pole position at the French Grand Prix this afternoon. The Italian World Champion recorded the fastest ever motorcycle lap of Le Mans in qualifying yesterday and followed it up with a new lap record on the very last lap of the today's 28-lap race in order to hold out fast-finishing rival Sete Gibernau. Rossi’s win makes it three wins and a second from four starts so far this season, and particularly heartening for Yamaha was the competitiveness of Rossi’s team-mate Colin Edwards who started from second place on the grid, led the race until the final laps when he was mown down by the Rossi/Gibernau juggernaut but easily finished ahead of the field to make up the podium.  Read More

Citroen’s Sebastien Loeb collected his third consecutive win in Cyprus, and his fourth of the 2005 season to take a significant points lead in the World Rally Championship. This weekend's success – the crew's fourteenth at WRC level – takes the defending champion 11 points clear at the top of the provisional Drivers' World Championship standings thanks to the failure of Subaru’s Petter Solberg, Loeb’s main rival for the title.  Read More

May ABB e=motion has abandoned its attempt to break the world electric land speed record following an aborted attempt in Nevada last week. The e=motion team has not yet announced whether it will attempt to break the record in the future. After a successful trial run on an isolated highway outside of Wendover, Nevada on May 4, the car - which is powered by an ABB variable speed drive and two 50 hp ABB motors - experienced a series of false starts. Technical problems arose in the car’s control circuits, preventing it from starting. A detailed investigation to find the exact nature of the fault will be done when ABB e=motion returns to the U.K.  Read More

May Delaware-based communications company Nethercomm Corporation has announced a new broadband technology promising massive bandwidth with minimal additional infrastructure investmentment required. Nethercomm’s Broadband-in-Gas (BiG) carries enormous amounts of data through existing subterranean gas pipes instead of over the air (with constraints and interference), to offer much greater bandwidth and hence access to content and services beyond that which has been available to date. BiG (note that acronym – you’ll certainly hear more of it) uses Ultra Wideband technology to wirelessly broadcast information in a way that is both safe and reliable by using the private spectrum isolated within natural gas pipelines.  Read More

The Maybach Exelero high-performance show car unveiled to the world for the first time this week is a remarkable car with an even more remarkable story behind it. The 700-hp V-12 biturbo two-seater is a unique custom model produced for tyre manufacturer Fulda Reifenwerke, which is using the Maybach Exelero as a reference vehicle for a newly developed generation of wide tyres. The German manufacturer of luxury cars built the unique model as a modern interpretation of its legendary streamlined sports car from the 1930s, thereby forging a link with the historical predecessor, which at that time was likewise based on a powerful Maybach automobile (SW 38) and used by Fulda for tyre tests. Highly recommended reading.  Read More

As the world evolves rapidly into a digital age, the skills to which we ascribe value are changing rapidly. A good billiards player once signified a “misspent youth” but you’d be hard pressed to explain that to the hundreds of professional billiards and pool players on the planet … and who would have thought a century ago that someone would be paid a king’s ransom to kick an inflated pig’s bladder around a paddock. And you don’t need to go back too far to see computer and video games regarded by parents, the education system and main media as a complete waste of time. Now, the world’s best videogamers earn US$250,000 plus a year and this week the first US$1,000,000 tournament was announced. Given the rate of penetration growth into households, world championship gaming skills will undoubtedly be worth a lot more in time to come. It's now quite conceivable that we'll see videogamers earning as much as elite sportspeople.  Read More

With miniaturisation one of the key themes of convergence, everything seems to be getting smaller regardless of whether it’s a good idea. As anyone over the age of 40 will attest, one of the first signs of mortality is the decline of eyesight, so the ever-shrinking dials, screens and type point sizes produce massive user-interface problems for the over forties and the most voracious consumer segment in history, the baby Boomers. It was this trend that was recognised by a baby boomer and addressed with the invention of the iBEAM watch – a simple watch with a pop-up magnifying lens and built-in LED flashlight can help the tens of millions of people suffering from shrinking type syndrome.  Read More