Wants a cracker - The T3 Awards 2012 are open for your votes and as sponsors of the Phone of the Year category, TechRadar is obviously focusing on mobiles. But, it would be remiss of us not to mention that the Twitter vote for Gadget Personality of the Year sees Pollyanna Woodward facing off against Kim Dotcom, Edgar Wright and Hermione Way. We're calling this an 'eclectic bunch'. [PR]
Whoom whoom - In our opinion, the only thing to do with a frickin' laser beam that is finer than mounting it on a shark's head, is to harness it in a crystal and turn it into an accurate replica of a lightsaber. This may not salve our hurt at having our childhood favourites ruined by tinkerman George Lucas, but it's a start. [The Verge]
Jelly moulding - For the majority of us, watching a jellyfish swimming in an aquarium is, at best, likely to inspire us to take a photo. But for two scientists it inspired them to spend four years repurposing cells from the heart of a rat to make a jellyfish-like Medusoid. Kit Parker at Harvard and Janna Nawroth at Caltech are those scientists, presumably aided by a lightning storm and Igor. [Guardian]
Can opener - Now we all love a scapegoat (Booo! Hiss! Etc) and we all hate email spam (Boo! Hisssss! Etc) so when Sophos told us that 11.4 per cent of the world's email spam was originating in India, and that Asia is responsible for one in every two spam-filter-botherers we were so angry we were monetarily distracted from trying to buy v1agrA!1 and a surprisingly cheap R0leks [PR]
No F-in Chance -The world and his dog may be wondering if NFC is not the game changer that it's been billed as, but Juniper Research is certain that the contactless payment is going to be a success, predicting that $180 billion of mobile payments will be carried out by 2017. And, incidentally five years is just long enough so that nobody remembers the bold claims that people made. [SoMobile]
All and Sun-dry - Nasa has taken some pretty amazing photos of the sun through its newly launched High Resolution Coronal Imager. The 16MP images show the Sun's corona in detail and, for us Brits, give us our third glimpse of the sun for the summer. [Mail]
PR maths - Our back of an envelope calculations tell us that: mention of Olympics+back of the envelope calculations about the number of phones lost in 17 days+a bit of fudging=coverage by publications that don't look at the maths+mocking by One More Thing+67,000 mobile phones lost during the Olympics. Security company Venafi agrees +/- mocking. [PR]
Basically awesome - While we're waiting for our Raspberry Pi to arrive, we could be utilising our time by coding games in Basic directly on our Nintendo 3DS with Petit Computer. Unfortunately we left our slider all the way up so it gave us a 3D-shaped headache instead. TNW
Google Minus – According to research by The Group, British businesses have not been won over by Google's social network, with only 50 of the FTSE 100 companies having an official account, and only 12 of those actually using them. In contrast 86 have LinkedIn. +1.
Hotelly awesome - TechRadar is helping out as a judge again for Laterooms.com's Best Kept Secret Award. Obviously we aren't judging hotel rooms, expert as we like to think we are, but giving our views on the Best Hotel Gadgets category. [PR]
