New devices that enable deaf people to have a greater level of participation in phone calls and meetings have been developed by UK organisations.

One of the organisations Teletec, a Bedfordshire-based company, will launch two services to help those who are hard of hearing to use their own voices, by incorporating Internet devices and voice recognition technology.

The Royal National Institute for Deaf people (RNID) is also launching the ScreenPhone that uses similar technologies.

Both of the organisations have developed products to allow voice calls or meetings to be transcribed into text. The ScreenPhone costs just over £200 and uses the RNID’s Typetalk service.

RNID estimates that the ScreenPhone could be of benefit to almost half a million people.

The Screenphone works by connecting the calls to a Typetalk operator so that the deaf person is able to use their own voice but the other person’s responses are typed and presented as text on the ScreenPhone’s display.

RNID stated that people who lose their hearing during adulthood often prefer to use their own voice for making phone calls. Until now, text phones have required the users to type what they want to say, something older people have found difficult.

Mark Downs, for RNID told the BBC: “This is a very exciting breakthrough for people who are losing their hearing and can no longer use the telephone.”

Teletec which also offers services for deaf people, are planning to use WebCapTel which connects two callers via an operator. The operator listens to the conversation and then repeats it into voice recognition software. The words are then transcribed and appear on the deaf person’s hardware.

The company also uses the same technology to offer a hearing-impaired person access to a face-to-face meeting.

The BBC reported that whilst both Teletec and RNID systems work on similar levels, one of the main differences is the long term costs to the user.

The ScreenPhone once purchased, will cost the same as ordinary phone calls whereas WebCapTel will cost £1 per minute.

Conflict zones might not occur to you as the best starting point for creating a game but Global Conflict: Palestine is aimed at bringing to life some of the issues in the Middle East in a bid to educate people.

Based in midst of the conflict in the Palestinian territories, the game depicts a young journalist arriving in Israel, navigating their way between Palestinian and Israeli sources to obtain their article.

Developed by Serious Games Interactive, the player can take a pro-Palestinian angle, a balanced angle or a pro-Israeli angle.

Simon Egenfelt Nielsen, for Serious Games Interactive, told the BBC: “The game is much more about the personal experience, the emotional experience.”

The game takes the player around a city which resembles Jerusalem and the surrounding area by talking to local people.

By engaging with real personal stories, seeing conflicts from different perspectives and experiencing the situation as it intensifies, the game helps to explain some of the reasons for the ongoing situation.

Global Conflict: Palestine is planned to be released early next year, following the success of MTV’s internet-based Darfur is Dying, which had 700,000 players in the first month.

The game also features extensive support for educational use with extras such as an encyclopedia and a teacher’s manual.

Nielsen stated: “The Palestine topic fits very well with what you need for making a game - it has conflict, different perspectives and people are interested in it.

“That was the initial starting point, that Palestine would make a good game. I might regret this, but I think that you can do a game about anything - it depends very much on your framing and your approach to it.”

The National Trust are encouraging people to record a day in their lives on their website. Thousands of people in the UK are expected to participate in the project, which aims to create an online archive of people’s diaries in the country.

The project is being called “Britain’s Biggest Blog” by the National Trust, and was inspired by the Mass Observation Archive, which was established in the late 1930s to allow ordinary people record their lives in diaries for future generations.

The trust says that the blogs will create a “fascinating social history archive” of everyday life for future generations.

To participate in the project, people should record a diary of their day, with a word count ranging from 100 to 650 words. They should then log onto the History Matters website and follow instructions on how to upload their diary.

The National Trust director general, Fiona Reynolds told the BBC: “We want this day to have its own place in history and be a snapshot of everyday life at the beginning of the 21st Century”.

“It would be fantastic if hundreds of thousands of people take up this opportunity for mass online participation … and make it the biggest blog ever.”

The archive of diaries have been stored at the University of Sussex since 1970, but the blogs will be stored by the British Library.

David Cannadine, for the Institute for Historical Research, said: “The wonderful thing about these records is we don’t yet know what it is about them that will be interesting in the future.

“It may be that historians in the future will be amazed that on 17 October 2006 we were still eating meat or driving privately owned cars.”

IBM has developed a system that translates Arabic into English to improve communication between the U.S Army and Iraqi civilians.

The two-way speech-to-speech translation system, named MASTOR (Multilingual Automatic Speech-to-Speech Translator) has been installed onto the 35 Panasonic Toughbook laptops that are used by the military.

MASTOR aims to bridge the language barrier between Iraqi citizens and security forces, as well as help to ease the tight supply of Arabic translators available to the U.S forces in Iraq.

The system works by the user speaking into a microphone that is interfaced with software, which recognises, translates and broadcasts the speech.

The foreign language speaker can then respond into the microphone in their own language, and MASTOR translates and vocalises their speech back into the former language spoken.

The software will be used in settings such as the hospital and daily interactions with Iraqi citizens.

IBM stated that the MASTOR differs from earlier computer translators, as it recognises individual words rather than phrases, which allows the technology to keep up with a free form conversation.

The software has a database of 50,000 English words and around 100,000 words in Iraqi Arabic.

By searching the library of words, the software can put sentences together in real time, aiming to convey the meaning of what is said, even if the speaker or speech recognizer makes minor errors.

MASTOR also features audio playback, and can create text versions of conversations that can be downloaded to a PDA or other devices.

The software will be tested out by the U.S Army and Marine units, as well as the Army medical personnel and Special Operations Command.

MASTOR is available in two-way English to Iraqi Arabic, English to Modern Standard Arabic and English to Mandarin Chinese with additional languages being planned.

Translation software is also being developed for different fields such as aerospace and defence, medical facilities, law enforcement, banking and travel services.

Libya may become the first country to provide every school-age child with a laptop computer and Internet connection, through a scheme supported by the UN Development Programme.

The government of Libya is reported to have agreed a £134m deal with an American non-profit group, One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) to provide 1.2m school children with an affordable durable laptop computer by June 2008.

OLPC aims to provide laptops for children in developing countries that cost $100 (£54). The laptops are all equipped with Internet access and are powered by a wind-up crank and can be used as an conventional computer or an electronic book.

The laptops have been specially designed for durability with a rugged case and sealed rubber keyboard to keep out dust and water as well as a power cable that acts as a carrying strap.

The designers have also replaced the conventional hard disc with a flash drive, and have dispensed with a cooling fan to reduced the major problems that laptops suffer from.

Computer Scientist Nicholas Negroponte, chairman of OLPC, told the BBC: “The idea is that it fulfils many roles. It is the whole theory that learning is seamless”.

To keep costs down, the computers will rely on free software such as Linux instead of Microsoft Windows.

The company stated: “The power supply is tolerant of almost any voltage you might have at hand for charging, either from a human powered generator or a car or truck battery … under typical use, the computer should last the entire school day without requiring charging.

“Our goal is to provide children around the world with new opportunities to explore, experiment, and express themselves.

“Laptops are both a window and a tool: a window into the world and a tool with which to think.”

The Guardian reported that the company have also reached tentative purchase agreements with Argentina, Brazil, Nigeria and Thailand.

Chinese specialities such as Sichuan duck, crispy wonton and crab meat and sweetcorn soup, can now be prepared by a robot made by Fanxing Science and Technology Co.

The company, based in Shenzen, south China, have developed the people’s first cooking robot, bestowed with skills to prepare thousands of traditional dishes, says the state news agency Xinhua.

The robot, named AlCookingrobot, or AIC as it known for ease, “will help standardise Chinese fast food” said Cai Hegao, a member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering.

The robot knows how to “fry, bake, boil and steam, and can perform other special Chinese cooking actions”. Some of the different cuisines that AIC robot can cook are Sichuan, Shandong and Canton.

In a recent demonstration, the robot apparently cooked a dish of “beautifully-flavoured, attractive-looking” shrimp in five minutes, according to Xinhua.

Restaurants will be able to buy the robot in 2007, with a family-friendly version for the general public being devised for a later sale.

The company spent four years and more than 2 million yuan (around $250,000) to develop the robot, stated Liu Xinyu, executive director of the company.

Students are now able to take their first GCSE online, submitting coursework and completing exams electronically.

The exam is being made available through OCR, an examining board, and is the first to be completely “e-assessed”.

The board said it would “transform the future of school examinations”. Pupils taking the new environmental and land-based science course are able to upload videos, photos, presentations and written reports to support their coursework.

They will also sit computer-based tests under normal controlled examinations conditions.

The exam is aimed at students who are considering careers such as farming, horticulture and conservation.

Pupils taking the exam will sit through computer-based tests involving a mixture of multiple choice and short answers without the need for pens or pencils, making the exam the first non-paper GCSE.

Moderators will still assess the short answers and coursework, but the multiple choice section of the exam will be marked by the computer.

One of the first schools to participate in offering the exam is Thomas Alleyne’s High School in Uttoxeter, Staffordshire, which has its own farm.

Teacher Martin Wedgwood told the BBC that the school wanted a qualification that reflected the everyday use students now tended to make of information technology.

He stated: “Another positive is that the online assessment will put an end to endless reams of paper for both students and teachers, which will make an enormous difference to us, as students can often mislay much of this paperwork,” he said.

“We also feel that it will enable students to take a much slicker and more professional approach to their work by presenting their work electronically.”

The government has awarded a £1.85 million grant to a UK biotechnology firm based in Cambridge, to develop a robot to help treat baldness.

Intercytex has successfully tried and tested a method of removing hair follicles from the back of the neck, multiplying them and re-implanting the cells to the area needed.

The company stated that it had been awarded funding from the Department of Trade and Industry’s Technology Programme, which it planned to use to develop a robotic system to speed up the time consuming process of multiplying the hair cells before they are replanted.

The method could be used to treat male pattern baldness and alopecia in both sexes.

Working with The Automation Partnership, who developed the robotic system for the storage and growth of the cells, Intercytex hopes to develop the production of hair follicles known as dermal papilla cells, on a commercial scale.

The treatment was initially tested on seven men with male pattern baldness, five of whom grew hair and is now being tested on a further 20.

The process consists of a 30-minute operation, where hair follicles are taken from the back of the neck, then grown in culture until they number in thousands before being injected under the skin where the hair needs to grow back.

The most common form of baldness is activated by the male hormone dihydrotestosterone, which causes hair follicles to shrink and hair to thin, before it disappears altogether.

Intercytex chief executive Nick Higgins told the BBC that in male pattern baldness, the area at the back of the neck was unaffected by the hormone.

“We take a very small sample of the dermal papilla cells and then grow them in a special medium until we get ten thousand fold. Then we take a very fine needle and we inject them under the skin and the idea is at each point of injection a new hair will grow.

“The robot does two things - the cell culture growth phase takes about three weeks and involves lots of steps but we can programme it to do all the steps, and it can do 200 samples at once.

“The clever bit is we don’t want to give the wrong person the wrong hair back.”

Higgins also added that Intercytex would be testing the method for cases of alopecia, but stated it would be about three years before the treatment would be available to the general public.

Many rubbish bins in the UK are being fitted with microchips to test drive possible “pay as you throw” schemes. This scheme is one of the latest attempts to encourage more recycling, controlling the amount of rubbish that ends up in landfill.

More than 30 councils are participating such as Harrow, Peterborough and Alnwick. Local authorities do not yet have the authorisation to charge households for how much rubbish they produce, but many have taken on the technology that allows wheelie bins to be weighed within 500 grams by the collection trucks.

The chips help to identify the property the rubbish bin belongs to, and once weighed, a bill for the waste would be sent to the household. Councils are expected to get the go-ahead from the government to start charging the residents using the chips.

According to a report for BBC One programme Real Story, some of these bins are helping to point out the areas of low recycling rates. Many of the local authorities are in favour of the scheme, and are already anticipating the changes.

The BBC reported that there is an estimated nine years of landfill space left, and council across the UK are facing tough decision about how to deal with the waste as simply disposing of rubbish in the ground is not an option.

Local authorities can face tough fines from the government on what they bury and by 2010 they will have to meet 40% of recycling targets to avoid EU sanctions. In some areas recycling is now compulsory, meaning if people do not comply rubbish will not be cleared away and they could face prosecution.

However, microchip implemented bins have not proved popular with residents, the Daily Mail reporting of indignant homeowners removing chips and posting them back to their local town hall or throwing them away. An estimated 25,000 “bugs” have been removed in Bournemouth.

Video games could play an key classroom role according to a new report based on a survey of almost 1,000 teachers and more than 2,300 primary and secondary school students in the UK.

The report found that 59% of teachers would consider using off-the-shelf games within the classroom, while 62% of students wanted to use games at school.

The Teaching with Games report was commissioned by the games company Electronic Arts (EA) and carried out by FutureLab to investigate the place of mainstream commercial computer games in the classroom.

The research project ran for a year, and was aimed to provide practical and informed evidence of implications and potential of the use of these games in school.

It also aimed to develop “an informed strategy for future educational development requirements, based on collaborative discussions between industry and education community”.

The BBC reported that researchers followed 12 teachers in four schools in the UK and looked at ways they could use commercial software in the classroom, concluding that there was “still a generational divide between teachers and students in respect of computer games play”.

The report found that more than 70% of teachers never play games outside of school hours while 82% of children said they played video games at least once a fortnight.

The reported also noted 37% of teachers and 22% of students think that computer games should not be used in the classroom.

The survey, which was also backed by Microsoft, Take Two as well as the Interactive Software Federation of Europe (ISFE) found both teachers and students were concerned about the effect of games on players.

More than 70% of the teachers asked felt that playing games could lead to anti-social behaviour while 30% of students believed that playing games could lead to increased violence and aggression.

The report which coincides with the first day of the London Games Festival, a week of events that include the Bafta videogame awards, a developers’ conference and a showcase of new titles for consumers.