TOP TECHNOLOGY NEWS

Lego, the toymaker that cemented colorful plastic bricks into our childhood memories, is growing up into a gadget manufacturer.

At the Nuremberg Toy Fair this week, Lego showed off a prototype of a digital camcorder sporting the Lego aesthetic. The camcorder isn’t composed of actual Lego bricks, but the company is considering the possibility as it continues to test prototypes, according to Hobby Media.

The company is clearly responding to rampant Lego fanaticism in the tech community. On Wednesday a hot item was a cellphone from Alcatel featuring a colorful plastic case, which could be switched with other case colors as easily as you’d snap on a Lego piece.

Several electronic hobbyists have used Legos to construct gadgets, too.

Nikon’s new 35mm DX lens, released this week, is not the last lens announcement Nikon will be making this year. "This is not the last lens announcement we’ll be making this year." said Robert Cristina, Nikon’s head of pro products in Europe.

Speaking to the excellent DP Review, Cristina and his colleague Ludovic Drean outlined the reasons for releasing the rather odd and seemingly specialist 35mm ƒ1.8 DX lens.

Miniaturization of circuits and displays could lead to televisions shrunk into contact lenses and being powered by body heat, according to British futurologist Ian Pearson.

Channels could be changed using voice commands or gestures, Pearson told The Daily Mail. "You will just pop it into your eye in the morning and take it out at the end of the day," he said.

Pearson’s predictions are in contrast to how consumer electronics companies have been pushing bigger TVs.

Cheap, tiny netbooks are about to get a little more powerful.

Intel this week confirmed it’s shipping a new version of its low-powered Atom processor designed for netbooks.

Dubbed the Atom N280, the processor’s most notable improvement will be seen in high-definition video playback. The N280 is paired with a GN40 chipset, which includes a hardware-based HD video decoder for viewing 720P HD video.

An anonymous hacker in Austin, Texas, punked morning commuters earlier this week by changing the public safety message display of two LED road signs to warnings of zombie attacks.

Some of the messages included apocalyptic warnings like "The End is Near !!!," "Zombies in Area – Run!" and "Nazi Zombies, Run!"

Hacking LED road signs isn’t considered a difficult task because many of the people in charge of setting their security protection are (usually) not technically savvy.

Laser experts, we need to know something: Would this work? The Virtual Wall is designed as a replacement for traffic lights and if made would use "plasma laser beams" to project silhouettes of moving people into the path of oncoming traffic.

Supposedly this would calm traffic and make drivers more careful around the soft humans as they cross the street.

Super Bowl Sunday is one of the biggest TV events of the year, and people are always interested in buying a new set for their house party, recession or not.

Your smartphone is ready to morph into your next computer — with a little help from Microsoft.

Microsoft has applied for a "smart interface system" patent for smartphones. The patent shows a dock that would include an output for an external display, an ethernet jack and a USB hub, among other things.

But why would you want an ethernet connection and an external display for your smartphone when you’ve already got a computer on your desk? Clearly, Microsoft is looking forward to a future when smartphones have enough power to rival the capabilities of desktops for at least some tasks.

The promise of cloud computing is a good one — all your gadgets can be used to access all your information, all the time. Your iPhone can call up just the same files and music as your desktop machine at home. You can go on the road with a laptop and just pull down your data from the internet. And that same data, your precious data, is secure, backed up in the ether and resistant to both disaster and your own negligence alike.

Four-eyes. A taunt I heard almost daily in school, although curiously it never bothered me. I think I was so relived to be able to see after years of blind squinting at the class blackboard that I just found the name-calling rather sad and pathetic.

Four Eyes is also the name of this USB bookmark. In the manner of our rather disastrous how-to video on hacking novelty USB drives, the folks at IMM stuffed a thumb-stick into these specs in the hope of gleaning some geek-chic. The spex can also be slid betwixt the pages of a real life paper book to save your place, a rather old fashioned notion.

In fact, these glasses leave us rather confused.