Nintendo’s bestselling Wii may soon have a rival. Speculation is rife about a new motion-sensitive controller for the Microsoft Xbox 360. Like the Wii, this would enable gamers to control on-screen characters by moving their body rather than pressing buttons. More than 24m Wiis have been sold worldwide since its launch in 2006. So popular have games such as Wii tennis and boxing become that there has been a surge in injuries caused by overexertion or by players accidentally striking bystanders. An announcement about the Xbox is expected on www.e3expo.com - the website of E3, the Los Angeles gaming trade show. You heard it here first.

NAG NAG NAG

A new web and text message service will nag you to stop eating. It’s one of the fastest-growing message services in the United States - even though it does nothing but abuse its customers. It’s free to sign up at www.weightnags.com , though you will be giving the company your e-mail address and risking a future diet rich in spam. Typical of the nagging messages it sends is: “Hi Tubbo, Okay, we know it’s tempting to eat at the Hungry Heifer every night of the week. After all, they have everything.

“Or at least they did, before you licked every pan in that buffet clean enough to see your reflection in it. Did you bother to look at that reflection, though?

“Obviously not - yikes! You oughta lay off the buffet. Take care of your own beefy carcass before you eat a few pounds of something else’s.”

ROOT FINDER

A detailed map of the outer layer of the brain - the part responsible for higher-level thinking - has been created by scientists at several universities, including Indiana, Lausanne and Harvard Medical School. This map may unlock the workings of the most mysterious organ in the human body. Discover more at tinyurl.com/5tn6fkand see spectacular coloured illustrations of the millions of neural fibres in the MRI scans. Still no answer as to why women are so obsessed with cushions, though.

EARTH CALLING

Aliens approaching the Earth will encounter an ear-piercing series of chirps and whistles that R2D2 would be proud of. This is created high above the planet where charged particles from the solar wind collide with the Earth’s magnetic field and it is related to the phenomenon of the northern lights. Scientists have known about this since the 1970s, but for the first time you can listen to a new recording taken from space and posted online at tinyurl.com/5gqcu9 .

Good thing these radio waves don’t reach the Earth, as they’d overwhelm every radio station on the planet. Actually, come to think of it . . .

THE BIG BANG

On June 30, 1908, an explosion 1,000 times as powerful as the Hiroshima bomb flattened 830 square miles of Siberian pine forest, and apparently lit up the sky as far away as Britain. The details of the largest meteor impact in recent history remain unclear. New satellite-imaging techniques are narrowing down the exact impact site and even detecting remnants of the meteoroid, or comet fragment, that fell to Earth a century ago. The boffins at the University of Bologna believe they have found the smoking gun of this deep-sky object at Lake Cheko. See for yourself at tinyurl.com/5hw48w.

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