Steven Colbert's new show The Colbert Report (it's French, bitch!) premieres tonight on Comedy Central. There's an article about it the Mercury News.

Stephen Colbert, who has been an integral part of "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart" since its inception, gets his own half-hour of faux news starting tonight (11:30, Comedy Central.) "The Colbert Report" will feature his quirky punditry (his character is a mix of Joe Scarborough, Bill O'Reilly and Aaron Brown) including his most popular segment from "The Daily Show," "This Week in God."

"The Daily Show" will lead directly into the new show with Stewart and Colbert sharing a split screen at 11:30. Just how well Colbert will work without Stewart -- and how well Stewart will work without Colbert -- remains to be seen. But I'm certainly willing to give it a shot.

Yes! More "This Week in God." Awesome.

As reported by the TimesOnline, the first Chinese car to be sold in Europe is a 4X4 that scored a zero in safety tests.

The two-ton 4x4 scored zero stars in crash tests last week by the ADAC, the German automobile club, which carries out tests for Euro NCAP. "It had a catastrophic result," said a spokesman for the ADAC. "In our 20-year history no car has performed as badly."

Testers calculated that a driver would be unlikely to survive a head-on collision at 40mph, and in a side-on collision at 30mph the driver would suffer severe head and chest injuries due to a lack of side protection.

"This car seems to belong in the 1990s in terms of engineering," said Chris Patience, head of technical policy at the AA Motoring Trust. "We will wait for the official Euro NCAP results, but if it really is that bad we hope people will think very carefully before buying this car."

With an expected £10,000 price tag, the Landwind is designed to rival cars such as the Kia Sportage and Hyundai Tucson, both about £5,000 more expensive. The Chinese maker plans to sell at least 1,000 models before July 2006.

£10,000 = about $17,000. A lot of money for a 2-ton deathtrap.

Time to throw out that obsolete 20-gig only-plays-mp3s monstrosity. Apple has debuted it's new video iPods. One with 30GB for $299, and one with 60GB for $399. And of course, besides the storage increase they have decreased the size (30% thinner than the original iPod) and extended the battery life again (5 more hours, bringing it to 20 hours). The video iPod also comes in black. The display is clearly bigger for easier viewing of video (it will also have a video-out connection). There's a new version of iTunes - 6. It looks like music videos on the music store are going for $1.99, and they are going to have TV episodes available at the same cost. So far they have mentioned "Desperate Housewives" and "Lost" as some of the shows they will offer. Also, like the Nano with the Mini, this is replacing the current iPods.

Read on for full-size pics.

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The TimesOnline has a story about a guy in Japan who has built a device that simulates the aging of wine...without the wait.

Squirrelled away in his chemical engineering laboratory in rural Shizuoka, Hiroshi Tanaka has spent 15 years developing an electrolysis device that simulates, he claims, the effect of ageing in wines. In 15 seconds it can transform the cheapest, youngest plonks into fine old draughts as fruit flavours are enhanced and rough edges are mellowed, he says.

Reds can become more complex, and whites drier. A wine costing £5 a bottle could taste the same as one costing twice that, which "will create huge changes to the global wine industry".

Read on for more details.

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Yahoo has an article about a company called Splashpower which is coming out with a device that allows you to charge things like cell phones and iPods wirelessly. Looks like the devices may be kind of expensive though.

To pick up the power field, gadgets must have a receiver coil built into them or have an adapter clipped on the back. At Ceatec the company showed a clip-on adapter for an iPod mini music player, and a Nokia cell phone with a built-in coil. Both devices, when placed on the pads, began charging.

Initially the company will start by selling Splash Pads and a range of adapters in the U.K. and Europe in mid-2006, said Cheng. Following the European launch, the company will turn its attention to other markets. It expects the larger charging pad will cost US$150 to $200, the smaller pad will cost between $30 and $40 and adapters will cost about $15 to $20 per device.

I have always been amazed at how accurate the computer-generated first-down line is and also how it has improved to where it almost never overlaps players and referees. According to an article at howstuffworks.com, "The idea to paint a first-down line across the football field on people's TV screens sounds so simple. As it turns out, implementing this is incredibly complex. It takes a tractor-trailer rig of equipment, including eight computers and at least four people, to accomplish this task!" The second page of the article is where they really explain how it works, down to small details like how they consider the curve of the football field.

The Edmonton Journal has a story about a camera prototype by Canon that can detect when everyone in the photo is smiling and has their eyes open before taking a picture. The article mentions several other features in development by camera companies, all with the eventual goal of having a camera that tells you how to take the most professional looking photos and then performing automatic contrast, red-eye, and other corrections.

There's a story at MyTelus about a guy who is flying more-or-less non-stop for 2 months to get 1 million air-miles, enough to take 10 round-trip executive class flights to Australia. Air Canada offers an unlimited North America pass for $3500 a month, which allows unlimited travel to over 100 US destinations.

He has the whole thing figured out, down to the total number of air points he's racking up each day. He even manages to spend three nights a week sleeping in his own bed in Vancouver and will have the million points in the bag within 50 days. "I'm flying about 7,500 miles or points a day," he explained. "But I hold super-elite status so it multiplies out at 2.75. I'm doing 19,000 points a day.

The "trick" is to spend the day flying back and forth between Vancouver and Victoria and Vancouver and Nanaimo. "They are short trips that last about 15 minutes. They garner a minimum 500 miles." By contrast, a flight to Calgary also garners 500 points but takes almost 90 minutes.

As soon as he arrives, he gets back on the return flight to Vancouver, arriving in time to resume the daily grind of flying to Vancouver Island and back. Even more astounding is the fact Tacchi takes 36 hours out of the odyssey to do his job. He works for another airline, flying a 767 cargo jet to Europe once a week.

"It's about a $70,000 value, all for a $7,000 investment," said Tacchi. "I figure a million miles will basically cover my travel for the next three to four years."

A man who invented prosthetic balls for dogs won an Ig Nobel Prize for it last night.

Gregg Miller mortgaged his home and maxed out his credit cards to mass produce his invention — prosthetic testicles for neutered dogs.

What started 10 years ago with an experiment on an unwitting Rottweiler named Max has turned into a thriving mail-order business. And on Thursday night Miller's efforts earned him a dubious yet strangely coveted honor: the Ig Nobel Prize for medicine.

"Considering my parents thought I was an idiot when I was a kid, this is a great honor," he said. "I wish they were alive to see it."

The Ig Nobels, given at Harvard University by Annals of Improbable Research magazine, celebrate the humorous, creative and odd side of science.

Miller has sold more than 150,000 of his Neuticles, more than doubling his $500,000 investment. The silicone implants come in different sizes, shapes, weights and degrees of firmness.

The product's Web site says Neuticles allow a pet "to retain his natural look" and "self esteem."

Somehow I think the dog would be even more humiliated. Read on for previous Ig Nobel winners.

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There's a story at news.com.au about an 83-old woman with a walking stick getting fined for "crossing the street too slowly."

Police recently issued a $30 fine to aged pensioner Pat Gallen for not crossing a road "in the most direct route" in the small township of Malanda, near Cairns in far north Queensland.

Friend Fay Millist, 66, said an uproar in the shocked town ensued, forcing embarrassed police to tear up the ticket and write an apology to the puzzled pensioner.

But the woman at the centre of the absurdity, Mrs Gallen, said she had been "looking forward to fighting it in court".

"We even had a busload of grey nomads ready to go down and protest out the front of the courthouse," Mrs Gallen said to the Cairns Post yesterday.

Busload of grey nomads....hilarious. I can just picture a bunch of angry senior citizens shaking their canes in the air. Or like Seinfeld when they're racing their Rascal scooters at 2MPH.