Giving an animal a phone to tote around and monitor pollution is one thing, but hooking up a critter to your cellphone sans wires sounds like a much more viable solution to keeping track of filthy surroundings. UC San Diego's Squirrel -- which sounds an awful lot like a project UC Berkeley was working on -- is a Bluetooth-enabled, palm-sized sensor that currently measures carbon monoxide and ozone, but eventually will be able to "sample nitrogen oxide and sulphur dioxide in the air, as well as temperature, barometric pressure, and humidity." After sampling, the device then utilizes a software application dubbed Acorn to allow the user to "see the current pollution alerts through a screensaver on the cellphone's display." Furthermore, the program can periodically upload the captured data to a public database operated by the "California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), which is funding Squirrel's development." Of course, cleaning up the mess that these monitors will inevitably find is an entirely different matter.

[Via MedGadget]

What better deterrent to breaking into T-Mobile's customer database, than a year of being forced to sit at home with nothing to do but screw around on the 'puter? We can't imagine, and apparently neither could U.S. District Judge George King, sentencing 23 year old Nicholas Lee Jacobsen to a whopping 365 days of home detention for the 2004 crime in which several hundred names and Social Security numbers were swiped (not to mention the Sidekick contents of a Secret Service agent, of all people). To be fair, the hoodlum was also ordered to pay T-Mobile ten grand -- and we have to believe the feds are doing what they can to keep Mr. Jacobsen away from technology for the time being -- but we wouldn't have minded seeing some hard time involved.