Tiny robots powered by living muscle have been created by scientists at the University of California, Los Angeles. The devices were formed by “growing” rat cells on microscopic silicon chips, the researchers report in the journal Nature Materials. Less than a millimeter long, the minuscule robots can move themselves without any external source of power.

A company called Streamload is offering consumers a free 10 gigabyte online storage locker for multimedia files, potentially raising the stakes for larger companies such as Yahoo and America Online. Streamload typically provides online storage space for a price, making it one of the few companies to survive in that business through the dot-com shakeout. However, it is increasingly competing with larger companies that offer online homes for digital photographs, and even the huge archive space provided by Google’s Gmail service.

Lexmark International introduced the Lexmark P315 Portable photo printer. Consumers can print borderless, 35mm-quality images directly from most digital cameras or memory cards in any place at any time.

A mass email posing as a plea for aid to help the victims of last month’s Asian tsunami disaster is actually a vehicle for spreading a computer virus, Web security firm Sophos said Monday. The worm appears with the subject line: “Tsunami donation! Please help!” and invites recipients to open an attachment called “tsunami.exe”–which, if opened, will forward the virus to other Internet users.

palmOne announced that Angel Mendez, senior vice president and head of the company’s Global Operations, will leave palmOne to become senior vice president of Worldwide Manufacturing at Cisco Systems. Mendez joined palmOne in July 2001, assuming responsibility for maximizing the company’s operational excellence and efficiency by leading its supply chain, manufacturing, quality assurance, logistics and customer service efforts. Prior to palmOne, he was vice president of Global Supply Chain Management at Gateway.

If you’re a World of Warcraft (otherwise known as WoW) addict, all’s not happy in Mudville this evening. Apparently unable to sustain their user numbers, Blizzard has implemented user queuing, forcing many World of Warcraft players to wait for an hour or more to play the game. According to some online posts, there are some indications that there’s an online population limit of only 1,400 users per WoW “realm.”

Given that Blizzard has sold well over 250,000 game copies, and there are 88 realms listed, Computing Unplugged estimates that WoW has a total capacity of 123,200 players. In other words, more than half the people who bought the game can simply not be accomodated. How will this shake out for the otherwise wildly popular game? Will there be more and more customers dropping from the ranks. This is a very interesting trend to watch, because the buy-in to the game is not inconsiderable. In addition to the nearly $50 price of the game, Blizzard also charges $15 for game play, and yet is apparently unable to deliver the purchased services. Stay tuned. This one could get messy.

Verizon Wireless customers in California are suing the mobile phone operator for disabling some of the Bluetooth capabilities in a Motorola handset. According to the class action lawsuit, Verizon disabled some of the advertised Bluetooth features in Motorola’s v710 phone.

Sony won’t say for sure when the rest of the world will get its hands on the PlayStation Portable, but Amazon will. The British arm of the online retail giant has begun taking advance orders for the handheld game machine, citing a delivery date of March 18.

Samsung this week unveiled a motion-sensitive handset that measures movements the user makes with the phone and translates them into commands. Samsung said the phone is also able to recognize and translate more complex movements, including dialing numbers drawn in the air using the handset or recognizing an “o” or an “x” drawn in the air as a yes or no command. Additionally, the phone features a magnetic-sensor-based compass.

sfr GmbH have released their new product visPassword for Pocket PC. visPassword is a password generator, where you can create a new password with letters, digits or special characters. Best of all, visPassword is freeware.