OCD hamsters, iFarts and texting through Lent

Here are some some tech and science stories we found interesting today:

1. Let a hamster clean the carpet: Gizmodo reports that some inventor (possibly with a case of OCD) found a way to let pet hamsters control the direction of Roombas, those robotic floor-cleaning machines. A video shows a green hamster ball poised atop the UFO-shaped device. If the hamster decides to run a different direction, a different piece of your floor gets vacuumed. Notes the site:

I'm sure it's quite liberating for the hamster, but I wouldn't count on your floors getting too clean.

2. Low-tech Lent: As the LA Times and others report this morning, some Roman Catholic bishops are calling on followers to give up text messaging for the holy period of Lent, which precedes Easter. The paper's story begins:

They say idle hands are the devil's tools. But this Lent, it may be texting thumbs doing the dirty work.

3. Commemorating the iFart: CNet has a story looking back at the year in iPhone applications. Some, like the iFart, were unexpected successes , the publication writes. From the story:

Apple has since made iPhone applications the centerpiece of its marketing campaign for the device, with pitches tailored to consumers and business users showing off the breadth and depth of iPhone applications. The rest of the industry has noticed; virtually every other major smartphone company is scrambling to set up their own App Store-like experience.

4. Hope for the bionic eye: The BBC writes that another man has been fitted with a bionic eye and can now see "flashes of light" after surgery at a London hospital. The eyes are designed to help people with a degenerative eye disease. The eye "uses a camera and video processor mounted on sunglasses to send captured images wirelessly to a tiny receiver on the outside of the eye," the station writes on its Web site.

5. Facebook copies Twitter? The New York Times and others wrote about changes unveiled by Facebook, the popular social media site, that some say make it function more like Twitter, another popular site. Facebook is replacing the "status update" box at the top of its pages with a "What's on your mind" box. Twitter prompts its users to enter posts with a similar and perhaps simpler question: "What are you doing?"

By John Sutter, CNN.com

Filed under: robotics • social-networking sites • technology