Sue Williams has been awarded a £20,000 grant by the Arts Council of Wales, to "explore cultural attitudes towards female buttocks." Sue plans to examine racial attitudes towards bottoms in Europe and Africa and create plaster casts of women's behinds to try to understand their place in contemporary culture. And here I've been studying the issue all these years for free like a sucker!

An anonymous reader writes "The Chinese government has sponsored the development of a censorware package called 'Green Dam Youth Escort'; basically a PC-resident IP blocker that gets regular updates of banned sites from a central government site. There are now plans afoot to mandate that all new PCs sold in China be shipped with this software. The rationale behind this is to 'stop the poisoning of children's minds.'"

If your child won't sit still at the dentist, the doctor, or the kitchen table, you need the PediSedate Helmet. The device consisting of a colorful headset that connects to a game component or a portable CD player. After a snorkel attachment goes into the child's mouth, the helmet will monitor respiratory function and distribute nitrous oxide or anesthetic gas. The company website states, "The child comfortably becomes sedated while playing with a Nintendo Game Boy system or listening to music. This dramatically improves the hospital or dental experience for the child, parents and healthcare providers."

FathomIT sends in a NY Times profile of Shai Agassi, owner of a company named Better Place, who is working to build the infrastructure to support large numbers of small-scale charging spots for electric cars, as well as fast, automated battery swap stations. "The robot — a squat platform that moves on four dinner-plate-size white wheels — scuttled back and forth along a 20-foot-long set of metal rails. At one end of the rails, a huge blue battery, the size of a large suitcase, sat suspended in a frame. As we watched, the robot zipped up to the battery, made a nearly inaudible click, and pulled the battery downward. It ferried the battery over to the other end of the rails, dropped it off, picked up a new battery, hissed back over to the frame and, in one deft movement, snapped the new battery in the place of the old one. The total time: 45 seconds."

Konami has announced that a new Silent Hill game, titled Shattered Memories, is due out this fall for the Wii, PS2, and PSP. "While the game shares its twisting plot with the original PlayStation game, Silent Hill: Shattered Memories takes a different path in many, many ways. Characters can be approached but will offer different responses and be found in different places, while new clues and gameplay paths can be followed." The Wii version will make full use of the Wii Remote, taking the role of both phone and torch, as well as being used to "pick up, examine and manipulate items to solve puzzles along the journey." According to the Opposable Thumbs blog, the choice not to develop for the PS3 and Xbox 360 was due to the development costs associated with those consoles.

gustavopuy writes with news that Intel will be transferring control of Moblin, its Linux-based OS for mobile devices, to the Linux Foundation. Quoting Ars Technica: "We spoke with Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin, who told us that the Linux Foundation offers a vendor-neutral setting for advancing the Moblin project. He believes that such an environment will help stimulate third-party involvement in the process of building the platform and could also encourage broader adoption. ... Zemlin explained that the Linux Foundation's stewardship of the project will empower third-party contributors to expand the platform beyond its Intel-specific roots. He assures me that Intel sees value in making Moblin open to everyone — including companies that are leveraging Linux on competing processors, such as those based on the ARM architecture."

Chris Anderson writes "This 5-min demo just posted from last week's TED — got a big crowd reaction. It's a new technology coming out of MIT, about to be commercialized. Siftables have been seen before, but not like this. They're toy blocks/tiles that are spatially aware and interact with each other in very cool ways. Initial use may be as toys, but there's big potential for new paradigm of spatially-aware physical mini computers."