Hewlett-Packard is recalling thousands of rechargeable battery packs sold worldwide and used in laptop computers due to a potential fire hazard .

Spacewalkers' specially designed tools couldn't dislodge a balky bolt interfering with repairs at the Hubble Space Telescope. So they took an approach more familiar to people puttering around down on Earth: brute force.

Digital cameras have revolutionised the way we take photos. Gone are the days of stuffing in rolls of film and waiting hours to get the pictures developed at Boots. Today, photos can be looked at instantly – and, without too much extra effort, you can download them onto the computer and then upload them onto the internet.

Cyberclinic

Engineers have found a way to make lithium batteries that are smaller, lighter, longer lasting and capable of recharging in seconds.

Casiotone for the Painfully Alone is the recording guise of Owen Ashworth, a Chicago-based cult hero among fans of introspective synth pop. 'Advance Base Battery Life', a collection of singles and non-album tracks, is a fine primer for the uninitiated. The "fi" is stubbornly "lo" and the mood is one of elegiac romanticism, with echoes of the Postal Service and Laptop. It also includes a number of his covers, such as Missy's "Hot Boyz" and Springsteen's "Born in the USA".

Padraig Harrington, who returns to action at the Buick Invitational in San Diego today, has had two non-malignant melanomas removed from around his right eye.

Susan Pinker's big idea is that there are inherent psychological differences between the sexes and that they, rather than a glass ceiling, account for the persistent gap between men and women's occupancy of top professional positions. In the past, inherent differences have been used to justify all sorts of unfair treatment, but that isn't Pinker's agenda. She demolishes the idea of "vanilla gender" (the notion that men and women are basically the same) with evidence from a battery of interviews and psychological tests. It's a shame that the clichés are all true, but they seem to be: men are more competitive and single-minded; women are more empathetic, have better language skills, prefer working with people to things, and value quality of life more than career success.

What I Learnt This Week

The more gadgets we have, the crazier the tangle of chargers we collect. Rhodri Marsden asks why we're trapped in a tyranny of cables, and discovers wireless technology that could finally set us free

As the freezing weather threatens misery for motorists, Nargis Ahmad and Julian Knight report on the features and prices of vehicle rescue policies

Two people who died in a house fire did not have working smoke alarms, the fire service said today.

Matthew Herbert has gone to extreme lengths to give his political-protest big-band album There's Me, And There's You a literal, physical connection with its targets. The result is a series of protest songs quite unlike any since the days Henry Cow fused Maoist analysis with fun-dodging art-rock.

The most used word on the British mobile-phone network is a quizzical and repeated, "Hello?" Unimaginably important mobile-phone conversations are cut off in their prime, just as they reach a critical stage in the exchange of information. All you know is that the person to whom you were once talking is inaudible; you don't know whether it's the fault of your network, your phone or theirs – and, nor do they.