A German man used so much insect killer that he blew himself up when a spark from his computer ignited the aerosol spray.

Walter Mueller, 36, from Schleswig-Holstein, caused more than £100,000 of damage and debris flew up to 100 metres away.

But, amazingly, he was not badly hurt and was released from hospital after treatment for minor injuries.

Mueller had closed all the windows and emptied several cans of extra strong insect-spray before sitting at his computer to surf the internet.

A spark of electricity ignited the powerful fumes, causing an explosion that demolished the flat and blew out all the windows.

Several neighbouring apartments were also damaged but none of the other residents were injured. The street outside had to be closed for several hours.

While Greasemonkey is still only used by Firefox users on the bleeding edge, Willison sees the extension as a harbinger of a change in the web's power dynamics.

Greasemonkey was originally written by Aaron Boodman, who wrote the program in December 2004 to amuse his friends and found himself pleasantly surprised when it grew into a cult hit.

While quite a few scripts simply block ads, Mark Pilgrim, a coder known for his work on website accessibility and XML, thinks the coolest -- and most important -- scripts are the ones that mesh sites together.

"There's a script targeting Amazon pages that lets you know if a book you are looking at on Amazon is available at your local library," Pilgrim said. "Think about that. That's amazing, and it happens automatically. You configure it once for your library, and Greasemonkey goes and gets the data."

Whether it's merely snacking to help pass the time or voraciously devouring lunch while trying to restore the CEO's files we inadvertently deleted, we all eat at our keyboard. On any given day, my keyboard is assaulted with fragments of chocolate, drops of coffee, blobs of spaghetti sauce, and those long, stringy things that fall off bananas.

During a recent keyboard degunking attempt, I found myself musing on what would constitute the absolute worst foods to eat while typing. In making this determination, three factors have to be considered:

• The propensity of the food to fall
• The likelihood of the food becoming attached to or inserted into the keyboard
• The degree of difficulty associated with the removal

With these factors in mind, here are my worst-food nominations:
• Plain whole grain rice
• Angel hair pasta
• Sunflower seeds with shells
• Rice Bubbles (with or without milk)
• Jelly
• A Flake bar

The average viewer of the SciFi network is young and decidedly geeky. They are masters of media; they can find ways to get things they shouldn't have. Thus, a few hours after airing on SkyOne, "33" was available for Internet download. No news there.

While you might assume the SciFi Channel saw a significant drop-off in viewership as a result of this piracy, it appears to have had the reverse effect: the series is so good that the few tens of thousands of people who watched downloaded versions told their friends to tune in on January 14th, and see for themselves.

Audiences are technically savvy these days; they can and will find a way to get any television programming they desire. They don't want to pay for it, they don't want it artificially crippled with any digital rights management technologies - they just want to watch it. Now. This is the way that half a century of television and a decade of the Web has conditioned them to behave. We can't really complain that audiences are simply doing as they've been told.

Microsoft is calling all UK kids aged 14-17 to enter its Thought Thieves Competition. Remember kids, finalists must agree to formally license all intellectual property rights in their film on terms acceptable to Microsoft. And don't forget to download your free Thought Thieves Poster!

A battery with a lifespan measured in decades is in development at the University of Rochester, as scientists demonstrate a new fabrication method that in its roughest form is already 10 times more efficient than current nuclear batteries—and has the potential to be nearly 200 times more efficient. The details of the technology, already licensed to BetaBatt Inc., appears in today’s issue of Advanced Materials.

Betavoltaics, the method that the new battery uses, has been around for half a century, but its usefulness was limited due to its low energy yields. The new battery technology makes its successful gains by dramatically increasing the surface area where the current is produced. Instead of attempting to invent new, more reactive materials, Fauchet's team focused on turning the regular material's flat surface into a three-dimensional one.

Continuing its war on Internet file-swapping sites, the Motion Picture Association of America said Thursday that it has filed lawsuits against a half-dozen hubs for TV show trading.

The trade association said that piracy of TV programming is growing quickly online, and that shows are as important to protect as big-budget films. This is the first legal action from the group that has focused most heavily on TV content.

"Every television series depends on other markets (such as) syndication and international sales to earn back the enormous investment required to produce the comedies and dramas we all enjoy," MPAA Chief Executive Officer Dan Glickman said in a statement. "Those markets are substantially hurt when that content is stolen."

The suits are focused on the sites that serve as traffic directors for BitTorrent swaps, rather than on individual computer users uploading and downloading content. The MPAA also has sued individuals, but has not said how many people have been targeted.

As reported over on Sportsdot, the 2005 RoboCup US Open wrapped up today in Atlanta, Georgia. The American entry from the University of Texas fell 2-0 in robot soccer to the powerhouse German squad, the MicroSoft HellHounds. After the match, the German robot dogs were programmed to flex their metal biceps. With the time to devote to development and the financial backing of a company like Microsoft, the German entries are much more polished then their American counterparts at the moment. Last month at the RoboCup German Open, the Germans dominated nearly every category.

The Spam Prevention Early Warning System (SPEWS), whose blacklist is referenced by many antispam controls, imposed the block in response to the high number of Telewest customers whose machines have become compromised and taken over for the purpose of sending spam.

Last month, Silicon.com revealed that some of Telewest's Blueyonder.co.uk home subscribers were sending hundreds of thousands of e-mails each day--a sure sign of an open relay, pumping out spam.

Currently Blueyonder.co.uk is the ninth in the Senderbase list of domains generating e-mail--two places behind Hotmail and two ahead of America Online.

According to Senderbase, Blueyonder.co.uk addresses are generating 90.4 million e-mails per day. The company confirmed it has around 700,000 customers, with updated figures due for release on Thursday.

Smelling a male pheromone prompts the same brain activity in homosexual men as it does in heterosexual women, a new study has found. It did not excite the sex-related region in the brains of heterosexual males, although an oestrogen-derived compound found in female urine did.

The team observed 36 healthy men and women, who were exposed in turn to AND, the oestrogen-derived compound EST and other odours, including lavender oil, cedar oil, eugenol and butanol.

PET and MRI scans revealed that the ordinary odours activated parts of the brain associated with smelling in all test subjects. But in addition to that activation, AND excited the brain areas associated with sexual behaviour for female and gay male participants, as did the EST for straight men.