Robo-fish to hunt pollution

ROTM Scientists in the UK plan to release a school of autonomous robotic fish into the sea off northern Spain to help detect hazardous pollutants in the water, reports The Register.

The robots are designed to look like carp and swim like real fish so they won't scare the local wildlife while patrolling the port of Gijon. Each robo-carp costs upwards of £20 000 to make, measures 1.5m long and can swim a maximum speed of about one meter per second.

Five fish are being built by a robotics team at the University of Essex's school of computer science and electronic engineering. The project has been funded by the European Commission and is being coordinated by the engineering consultancy firm, BMT Group.

Xhead = UK card fraud reaches £610m

Card fraud losses in the UK reached £609.9 million last year - up from £535.2 million in 2007 - driven by cardholder-not-present crime, says Computing.co.uk.

Fraud taking place in transactions without chip-and-PIN protection - in purchases made via the Internet, phone and mail order - increased by 13% over the past year and represent 54% of all card fraud losses.

Online banking fraud totalled £52.5 million in 2008, a 132% rise from 2007 figures. According to Apacs, the increase should be seen alongside the popularity of online shopping and increasing numbers of businesses accepting cards remotely.

Samsung has opened a virtual store where customers in Europe can buy or rent movies and TV programmes and download them to their mobile phones, says CNet.

In its initial roll-out phase, the Samsung Movies service will offer more than 500 films from studios such as Warner Bros, Paramount and Universal. The service began initially in Britain and Germany, but Samsung intends to open it up to other European markets later in the year.

By the end of the first quarter, the company said it planned to double the number of titles it will offer to 1 000, and again to 2 000 movies and TV shows by the end of June.

Two US astronauts ventured outside the International Space Station yesterday on a six-hour spacewalk to install a 14 000kg girder with solar wings, completing the final piece of the complex's structural backbone, reports LA Times.

It was the first of three spacewalks scheduled during shuttle Discovery's mission to the station, and the main objective of its 13-day trip.

The $300 million girder is the last major American-made piece of the space station. Tucked inside the framework of the truss is the final set of folded-up solar wings that will bring the 10-year-old space station to full power, crucial for boosting science research and doubling the crew on the space lab to six this year.