Libraries and universities are protesting about plans to make them police users of wireless networks.

The government’s Digital Economy Bill includes plans to make them responsible for what is done over free wi-fi.

The plans imply that libraries, universities and cafes offering free wireless will be responsible if people use it to pirate movies and music.

Bodies representing universities want the law clarified so they are not hit with big bills for policing every user.

“We’re very concerned about this,” said Toby Bainton, secretary of the Society of College, National and University Libraries (Sconul). “We have been pressing them on this for quite some time.”

Some fear that the provisions in the Bill will also spell the end for the free wi-fi services that many coffee shops and restaurants offer to patrons.

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Wikileaks has provoked the dream of Iceland becoming a haven for whistle-blowing

Iceland could become a “journalism haven” if a proposal put forward by some Icelandic MPs aided by whistle-blowing website Wikileaks succeeds.

The Icelandic Modern Media Initiative (IMMI), calls on the country’s government to adopt laws protecting journalists and their sources.

It will be filed with the Althingi – Iceland’s parliament – on 16 February.

If the proposal succeeds it will require the Icelandic government to consider introducing legislation.

Julian Assange, Wikileaks’ editor, told BBC News that the idea was to “try and reform Iceland’s media law to be a very attractive jurisdiction for investigative journalists”.

He has been in Iceland for a number of weeks and is advising MPs on the IMMI.

The hope is that journalist-friendly laws will encourage media businesses to move to Iceland.

“If it then has these additional media and publishing law protections then it is likely to encourage the international press and internet start-ups to locate their services here,” Mr Assange said.

He believes the political mood in Iceland is receptive to the need for change.

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Hand-held devices could soon have pressure-sensitive touch-screens and keys, thanks to a UK firm’s material that exploits a quantum physics trick.

The technology allows, for example, scrolling down a long list or webpage faster as more pressure is applied.

A division of Samsung that distributes mobile phone components to several handset manufacturers has now licensed the “Quantum Tunnelling Composite”.

The approach could find use in devices from phones to games to GPS handsets.

In January, Japanese touch-screen maker Nissha also licensed the approach from Yorkshire-based Peratech, who make the composite material QTC.

However, as part of the licensing agreements, Peratech could not reveal the phone, gaming, and device makers that could soon be using the technology to bring pressure sensitivity to a raft of new devices.

Besides control for scrolling, the pressure-sensitivity could lead to a “third dimension” in touchscreens.

For instance, instead of many “2-D” pages of applications, they could be grouped by type on a single page – using the press of a finger to dive into each type and select the desired app.

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In the first case of its kind, an Australian court has ruled that an internet service provider cannot be responsible for illegal downloading.

iiNet, Australia’s third largest ISP, was taken to court by a group of 34 movie production houses.

The group included the Australian divisions of Universal Pictures, Warner Brothers and 20th Century Fox.

They claimed that iiNet was guilty of copyright infringement for not preventing illegal downloads of films.

The movie group hired investigators to track the numbers of iiNet customers using BitTorrents to illegally download movies.

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Scientists have been able to reach into the mind of a brain-damaged man and communicate with his thoughts.

The research, carried out in the UK and Belgium, involved a new brain scanning method.

Awareness was detected in three other patients previously diagnosed as being in a vegetative state.

The study in the New England Journal of Medicine shows that scans can detect signs of awareness in patients thought to be closed off from the world.

Patients in a vegetative state are awake, not in a coma, but have no awareness because of severe brain damage.

Scanning technique

The scientists used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) which shows brain activity in real time.

They asked patients and healthy volunteers to imagine playing tennis while they were being scanned.

In each of the volunteers this stimulated activity in the pre-motor cortex, part of the brain which deals with movement.

This also happened in four out of 23 of the patients presumed to be in a vegetative state.

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The group behind the world’s most popular smartphone operating system – Symbian – is giving away “billions of dollars” worth of code for free.

The Symbian Foundation’s announced that it would make its code open source in 2008 and has now completed the move.

It means that any organisation or individual can now use and modify the platform’s underlying source code “for any purpose”.

Symbian has shipped in more than 330m mobile phones, the foundation says.

It believes the move will attract new developers to work on the system and help speed up the pace of improvements.

“This is the largest open source migration effort ever,” Lee Williams of the Symbian Foundation told BBC News.

“It will increase rate of evolution and increase the rate of innovation of the platform.”

Ian Fogg, principal analyst at Forrester research, said the move was about Symbian “transitioning from one business model to another” as well as trying to gain “momentum and mindshare” for software that had been overshadowed by the release of Apple’s iPhone and Google Android operating system.

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A major hurdle to producing fusion energy using lasers has been swept aside, results in a new report show.

The controlled fusion of atoms – creating conditions like those in our Sun – has long been touted as a possible revolutionary energy source.

However, there have been doubts about the use of powerful lasers for fusion energy because the “plasma” they create could interrupt the fusion.

An article in Science showed the plasma is far less of a problem than expected.

The report is based on the first experiments from the National Ignition Facility (Nif) in the US that used all 192 of its laser beams.

Along the way, the experiments smashed the record for the highest energy from a laser – by a factor of 20.

Star power

Construction of the National Ignition Facility began at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 1997, and was formally completed in May 2009.

The goal, as its name implies, is to harness the power of the largest laser ever built to start “ignition” – effectively a carefully controlled thermonuclear explosion.

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The way fungus-like slime moulds grow could help engineers design wireless communication networks.

Scientists drew this conclusion after observing a slime mould as it grew into a network that was almost identical to the Tokyo rail system.

The scientists describe their ideas for “biologically inspired networks” in the journal Science.

They have incorporated the slime mould’s efficient strategy into a mathematical formula.

This “slime formula” could help engineers develop better, more efficient designs.

Efficient slime

The single amoeboid cells of slime moulds fuse and spread into a network as they feed and grow.

“These biological networks have been honed by many cycles of evolutionary selection pressure,” wrote the researchers in their article.

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Ordinary cotton and polyester fabrics have been turned into batteries that retain their flexibility.

The demonstration is a boost to the nascent field of “wearable electronics” in which devices are integrated into clothing and textiles.

The approach is based on dipping fabrics in an “ink” of tiny tubes of carbon, and was first demonstrated last year on plain copier paper.

The new application to fabrics is reported in the journal Nano Letters.

“Wearable electronics represent a developing new class of materials… which allow for many applications and designs previously impossible with traditional electronics technologies,” the authors wrote.

A number of research efforts in recent years have shown the possibility of electronics that can be built on flexible and even transparent surfaces – leading to the often-touted “roll-up display”.

However, the integration of electronics into textiles has presented different challenges, in particular developing approaches that work with ordinary fabrics.

Now, Yi Cui and his team at Stanford University in the US has shown that their “ink” made of carbon nanotubes – cylinders of carbon just billionths of a metre across – can serve as a dye that can simply and cheaply turn a t-shirt into an “e-shirt”.

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Europe’s biggest space company is seeking partners to fly a demonstration solar power mission in orbit.

EADS Astrium says the satellite system would collect the Sun’s energy and transmit it to Earth via an infrared laser, to provide electricity.

Space solar power has been talked about for more than 30 years. However, there have always been question marks over its cost, efficiency and safety.

But Astrium believes the technology is close to proving its maturity.

“Today we are not at an operational stage; it’s just a test,” said chief executive officer Francois Auque. “In order to implement a solution, of course, we would need to find partnerships and to invest, to develop operational systems,” he told BBC News.

Those partnerships could comprise space agencies, the EU or national governments and even power companies, he said.

‘Safe’ system

Space solar power is an attractive concept because it would be clean, inexhaustible, and available 24 hours a day.

The amount of energy falling on photovoltaic cells placed in orbit is considerably greater than the same solar panels positioned on the Earth’s surface. In space, the incidence of light is unaffected by clouds, dust or the filtering effects of atmospheric gases.

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