If you hit Google this tuesday, you would have been greeted with the line “A Cool World: Enjoy a rosier future as a Virgle Pioneer“. Virgle is the partnership between Richard Branson’s Virgin, and Google, that aims to take humanity to Mars - and what’s more, they plan to make the red planet Open Source.

An article on MSN’s Tech and Gadgets section caught my eye today.

Called ‘Converging on a big mistake’, the article points out that technology convergenge - specifically in gadgets - isn’t so great, and can really make the water murky when it comes to functionality, as well as some other points.

To some extent, I agree with her. By cramming many gadgets in one, you tend to lose the essence of some of the functions that you’re putting in as extras. If you look at - oh, say - a mobile phone, you can get a mobile phone loaded with extras like video recording, still camera functionality, GPS, WiFi, and others.

On a mobile phone, the video camera quality is poor, the sound is tinny, the GPS is a little hard to use, and most mobile browsers are - I find - depressingly complex to use, and have cluttered interfaces.
This is because the mobile phone isn’t meant for this kind of use, meaning you do get reduced quality in the in-built gadgets.

It’s happened. Just like a science fiction film, innocently enough, 10 universities are collaborating with the European Union-funded Symbrion to create swarms of transformer-style robots for various humanitarian causes.

The scientists are aiming to create self-organising robots that will work in teams by 2013.

Researchers will create standards that will allow the robots to evolve, adapt, work together, and generally take over the earth, too - all with no human interaction or guidance.

I for one welcome our new automated, collaborative, and evolving robot overlords. However, if you want the full skinny on the actual developments planned for these robots, hit the link>

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This electronic version of a post-it note from Popular Science is actually a kit that you can make yourself. You use a trackpad to draw or write a note, which condenses to a small screen above. As much as this idea is fantastic, I think it might be adopted by iPhone and iPod SDK developers, who will soon be selling apps for the iSlates on Apple’s programme.

That, a hacked iPhone app, or both.

All we need now is a slightly larger (say 17″ widescreen) touch-screen version, that has Wi-Fi built in. That way, you can share notes to networked boards. Hmmm…

Dubbed "Hules Verne", a 20-tonne unmanned freighter left the Kourou spaceport in South America at 0403 (GMT) today, officially taking Europe into the space-age.

"With the launch of the ATV, we are embarking on an extraordinary voyage,", said European Space Agency chief, Jean Jacques Dordain.

The 20-tonne beast will provide fuel and waste disposal for the $100 Billion ISS (International Space Station.

Docking on 3 April, the ATV will dock without any human assistance.

The ATV will be carrying the following:

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This really is strange. Artist Alex Dragulescu has used neutralised forms of unpopular viruses such as PWS-Lineage, Stormy, Mytob, IRCBot, Netsky (which will become SkyNet in the future, until the John_Connor patch is released), and MyDoom, which took out Google for several hours back in 2004.

Security firm MessageLabs commissioned the works:

API calls, memory addresses and subroutines are tracked and analyzed. Their frequency, density and grouping are mapped to the inputs of an algorithm that grows a virtual 3D entity.

I don’t know about you, but for me, these images are just creepy, will the next generation of viruses come across in the form of images?

More info, plus more images and links after the jump.