Software which links ordinary mobile phones into a smart camera surveillance network has been developed by Swiss researchers.

The software, named Facet, was conceived at the Institute of Pervasive Computing in Zurich by three researchers: Phillip Bolliger, Moritz Köhler and Kay Römer.

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Comet Holmes is seen among the stars of the constellation Perseus in the North-Eastern sky.

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. - A comet that unexpectedly brightened in the last couple of weeks and is now visible to the naked eye is attracting professional and amateur interest.

One afternoon in early September, an architect boarded his commuter train and became a cellphone vigilante. He sat down next to a 20-something woman who he said was "blabbing away" into her phone.

"She was using the word 'like' all the time. She sounded like a Valley Girl," said the architect, Andrew, who declined to give his last name because what he did next was illegal.

Andrew reached into his shirt pocket and pushed a button on a black device the size of a cigarette pack. It sent out a powerful radio signal that cut off the chatterer's cellphone transmission - and any others in a 30-foot radius.

An artificial intelligence researcher predicts that robotics will make such dramatic advances in the coming years that humans will be marrying robots by the year 2050.

Robots will become so human-like -- having intelligent conversations, displaying emotions and responding to human emotions -- that they'll be very much like a new race of people, said David Levy, a British artificial intelligence researcher whose book, "Love and Sex with Robots," will be released on Nov. 6.

Gone, he says, will be the jerky movements and artificial-sounding voices generally associated with robots. These will be highly human-like machines that people fall in love with, becoming aides, friends and even spouses.

The face of Egypt's most famous ancient ruler, King Tutankhamun, has been put on public display for the first time.

Archaeologists took the mummy from its stone sarcophagus and placed it in a climate-controlled case inside his tomb in Luxor's Valley of the Kings.

The event comes 85 years to the day after the pharaoh's tomb was discovered by British explorer Howard Carter.

The thirst for knowledge often inspires research with life-changing results. But it can also fuel experiments that range from the slightly silly to the downright disgusting.

Now a list of the most amusing, provocative and outrageous experiments of modern science has been compiled by author Alex Boese, who scoured research journals, books and university archives.

Topics covered include what happens when you give an elephant LSD and how to make a turkey frisky.

Featured in this week's New Scientist magazine, his book, Elephants On Acid And Other Bizarre Experiments, also tells of attempts to bring dead dogs back to life.

Cars sprouting whirling lasers on top, moving cameras on the sides, and banks of computers inside sped through the streets of a California desert ghost town on Saturday in a robot race -- no drivers needed.

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A member of the Massachuset Institute of Technology (MIT) team tunes their autonomous vehicle's computer before the start of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Urban Challenge race in Victorville, California November 3, 2007.

Physicists in Arizona State University have designed a revolutionary laser technique which can destroy viruses and bacteria such as AIDS without damaging human cells and may also help reduce the spread of hospital infections such as MRSA. The research, published on Thursday November 1 in the Institute of Physics' Journal of Physics: Condensed Matter, discusses how pulses from an infrared laser can be fine-tuned to discriminate between problem microorganisms and human cells.

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Femtosecond lasers could find immediate application in hospitals as a way to disinfect blood supply or biomaterials and for the treatment of blood-borne diseases such as AIDS and Hepatitis.

Current laser treatments such as UV are indiscriminate and can cause aging of the skin, damage to the DNA or, at worst, skin cancer, and are far from 100 per cent effective.

Femtosecond laser pulses, through a process called Impulsive Stimulated Raman Scattering (ISRS), produces lethal vibrations in the protein coat of microorganisms, thereby destroying them. The effect of the vibrations is similar to that of high-pitched noise shattering glass.

The first global map of magnetic peculiarities - or anomalies - on Earth has been assembled by an international team of researchers.

Magnetic anomalies are caused by differences in the magnetisation of the rocks in the Earth's crust.

Many years of negotiation were required to obtain confidential data from governments and institutes.

Scientists hope to use the map to learn more about the geological composition of our planet.

The Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies was given an ancient script yesterday which was discovered during a clean-up in a house in Hafnarfjördur a few years ago. The script is at least 200 to 300 years old and has mysterious writing.

"There are dots between the letters and they are neither runes nor Latin," manager of the institute Vésteinn Ólafsson told Fréttabladid. "It is some kind of a secret code written on skin in an old Icelandic binding."