An innovative project in Brooklyn, New York, could be set to dredge the sludge from the bottom of the Gowanus canal, and turn it into washing machine-sized glass cubes for use in construction projects.

The canal has been designed as a site for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) superfund, as it's chock-full of chemicals, tar, sewage, and industrial metals. Nasty stuff. But by stuffing the sludge into metal moulds, heating it up and adding sand, the mess can be frozen into glass cubes that could be used to renovate the area and even be turned into sculptures.

Developers such as Adobe, Google and Unity are pleased with the new rules set out by Apple, and the implications that they hold. Yesterday, Apple announced that some of the stringent rules that govern the App Store would be relaxed, and subsequently published a thorough list of guidelines stating its grounds for rejection.

The new rules range from the strict and steadfast (using the volume or silent switches for functionality will be rejected) to ones that still leave Apple with plenty of wiggle room -- “We will reject Apps for any content or behavior that we believe is over the line”.

If you believe the hype, Demand Media represents the beginning of the end for everything that’s noble about journalism.

Coincidentally, Richard Rosenblatt’s company, which runs sites like eHow, Cracked.com and Livestrong.com, is currently one of the hottest tickets in town among digital commercial types. An out-of-work media executive recently told me that the company, which has opened a London office, ranked high on his target list.

Scientists at the University of Oxford have discovered a wildflower which accumulates metal in its leaves, and uses like armour it to protect itself from bacterial infection.

The species -- Alpine Pennycress, or Thlaspi caerulescens to its ancient Roman ancestors -- grows in the sites of former mines, and has been known for some time to collect up zinc, nickel and cadmium in its leaves.

A pair of robotic probes, orbiting the earth’s atmosphere, could help predict natural disasters earlier than ever, and monitor global climate change, NASA believes.

Should the proposal be accepted, one of the two spacecrafts would be used to monitor tiny, incremental change in the earth’s surface, to look for signs of imminent danger and provide earlier warnings for upcoming natural disasters.

Everyone knows hybrids get better fuel economy and emit less CO2 than their conventional counterparts, but they also cost more because of the added technology. And that makes them a lousy value because you won’t recoup that added cost in fuel savings.

So say the people at CarGurus.com, who repeat a common argument against hybrids but back it up with some stats. They examined the purchase price and operating costs of 45 popular hybrid models and discovered the average petrol-electric automobiles costs 25 percent more to own and operate than its petrol-only sibling.

Mozilla has shipped a new pre-release build of Firefox 4 with its latest JavaScript technology, JaegerMonkey, baked in.

To try it out, you’ll need to install one of Mozilla’s nightly JS Engine Preview builds. The JaegerMonkey-equipped browser was made available Thursday. Keep in mind, this is pre-release software and should be used only for testing.

As Chris Anderson recently argued in a much-debated piece in the US edition of Wired magazine (and reprinted in the most recent issue of the UK mag), the web is dead. In its place are rising simpler, sleeker apps that focus on providing you with exactly what you want without the hassle of trying to find it.

But there are so many competing platforms for delivering apps that it can be confusing to know which one to hitch your wagon to. There's many different reasons why you might pick one over another, including how open a platform is, how easy it is to develop for, and the average quality of the apps within, but one of the simplest metrics for comparison is the sheer range of apps available.

A massive cache of previously unpublished classified US military documents from the Iraq War is being readied for publication by WikiLeaks, a new report has confirmed.

The documents constitute the “biggest leak of military intelligence” that has ever occurred, according to Iain Overton, editor of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, a nonprofit British organisation that is working with WikiLeaks on the documents.

The documents are expected to be published in several weeks.

Apple, in response to complaints from developers, has opened up its App Store reviews process, just a little. The company has promised to permit third-party development tools after banning them earlier this year, and has promised to publish review guidelines, so that developers know whether they'll meet the requirements before they submit.

In April, Apple changed the license for its software development kit to ban development tools which were used to port apps built in Flash, Silverlight, Java and other languages over to the iPhone. The move kicked up an almighty fight between Apple and Adobe, and led to Apple CEO Steve Jobs writing an open letter which tore into Flash.

Belching cows are a problem. It's thoughts that worldwide, 37 percent of humanity's methane emissions come from livestock. But a dairy scientist has come up with a feed supplement derived from oregano that can not only cut those emissions, but also increase milk production.

A series of lab tests and a live animal test at Penn State University have confirmed that Alexander Hristov's formula, which was developed over six years after screening hundreds of different natural compounds and oils, delivers a 40 percent reduction in methane emissions without negative effects. It also increases dairy production by more than a kilogram of milk per cow, per day.

UK supermarket behemoth Tesco is the latest retailer to push online shopping to the mobile space, and embrace the nascent app boom, brought on by the growing popularity of iPhone, iPad and Android devices.

While previous Tesco-branded apps allowed you to find the exact aisle and shelf placement of the Jammy Dodgers in your local branch (Tesco Finder), buy wine by snapping a photo of the label (Wine Finder), and turn your device into a very expensive clubcard (Teso Clubcard), this latest is the most feature packed yet.

As promised last week, Apple has released the latest update to its iOS mobile operating system, taking the version number to 4.1. However, within hours hackers published a jailbreak for devices running the update that will be tough for Apple to close.

iOS 4.1, as previously reported, brings a laundry list of new features to iPhones and iPod touches. There's HDR photography, which will improve detail in photos taken in bright sunlight. There's HD video uploading over Wi-Fi connections and TV show rentals, if you're in the United States.

It’s one of those medical anomalies that nobody can really explain: Longitudinal studies have consistently shown that people who don’t consume any alcohol at all tend to die before people who do. At first glance, this makes little sense. Why would ingesting a psychoactive toxin that increases our risk of cancer, dementia and liver disease lengthen our lifespan?

Think you’re excited about the return of cigar-chomping space marine Duke Nukem? You’ve got nothing on Randy Pitchford.

A year ago, it looked like Duke Nukem Forever was finally dead. The perennial Wired Vaporware Awards (celebrating the best unfulfilled projects) winner, in the works since April 1997, couldn’t be completed since Dallas-based developer 3D Realms shut its doors and laid off its entire staff. Publisher Take-Two Interactive responded by suing 3D Realms parent company, Apogee Software.

I recieved a note from a troll yesterday, signalling the start of a series of events that'll bring about a Cataclysm in the world's biggest MMO, World of Warcraft.

The note invited me over to the Echo Isles off the coast of Durotar in Azeroth. It's one of the ancestral homes of the Darkspear tribe of trolls, but the tribe was ousted from the islands by a traitorous witch doctor named Zalazane, who began enslaving the population. However, the Darkspears, led by their leader Vol'jin, are fighting back, and preparing to take back control of their land.

Google has taken the wraps off a new feature for search called Google Instant, which delivers results instantly as you type, marking the biggest change to its famous homepage in many years.

The technology giant has teased the launch for a number of days, playing around with different homepage "doodles", including one which sent coloured balls splashing across the screen. However, in a press conference at the San Francisco museum of modern art, the company finally unveiled the update.

The Iraq war. And a London-based publisher called James Bridle has printed every single one of them in hardback, with the aim of showing how the documentation of the war has changed over time.

The project, which Bridle callas a historiography, contains every one of the 12,0000 edits made to the Iraq war page between December 2004 and November 2009. Yes, even the ones that deleted the entire page and replaced it with "Shut up stoopid Americans".

Off the coast of Cornwall, close to St Ives, a behemoth lurks beneath the waves. It's called Wave Hub, and it's the largest wave energy project in the world, comprising of multiple different energy generation devices with their own turbine arrays.

Each device is connected to the central hub by cable, and from there to a substation at a local village called Hayle, where it's connected up to the national grid. The idea is to provide a "socket" on the sea bed where previously-tested devices can prove their commercial worth by generating useful quantities of electricity, which the developers are paid for.

Astronomers believe that telescopic tech is getting so good, that we’ll soon be able to detect the volcanic eruptions of planets that lie outside our solar system.

The claim does comes with a few, hefty caveats though. Don’t expect any visual aids to go with your volcanic detection: it’s going to be decades before we can even get a blurry, barely visible image of an exoplanet’s rocky surface.