We’ve been hearing from a couple of sources that on Monday, Circuit City will be closing a whopping 155 stores and leaving the consumer electronics business for good. Most store closings are expected to be done by December 31, 2008. A full list of stores will apparently be revealed in the next few days. Not entirely unexpected, but still sad for those CC employees losing a job during the holiday season.

Toys ‘R’ Us long known as the place where a kid can be a kid, will now be offering iPods and Eee PCs. They aren’t new to electronics, but they’ve never been big on gadgetry in general, except for their Zune sales that began last year.

Now they will be offering iPods in an “iPod boutique,” where you can purchase shuffles, nanos, touches and accessories all in the hopes that they meet their bottom line. I can see it now. An “iPod boutique,” with no employee in sight. The Eee PC will be offered in black and white, with 7-inch Linux and XP versions available for $269 and $299.

Scotch tape is pretty damn versatile. Right up there with duct tape. But I bet you never thought about scotch tape creating X-rays. . Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles have discovered that peeling Scotch tape in a vacuum tube generates X-rays. How they came up with the idea of putting scotch tape in a vacuum in the first place is anyone’s guess.

You can imagine their surprise that a 99 cent roll of tape can give you an X-ray. They managed to develop a slightly blurry X-ray image of a finger using the tape. They think that further research can yield a low cost/low power X-ray machine for use in areas of the world where the money and electricity aren’t available for standard machines.

Flying in a plane made of paper of any kind sounds dangerous, but ‘buckypaper’ isn’t paper at all, at least not what we’re used to. It’s a new type of carbon nanotube that may usher in a new lightweight, high strength composite. It was discovered accidentally while trying to create the same conditions that exist in a star. Buckypaper isn’t ready for prime-time just yet, but the potential is amazing.

The tube-shaped molecule is dispersed in liquid and then filtered through a fine mesh, creating a very thin yet powerful film, called buckypaper. The molecule has a large surface area, and that’s what gives it the incredible strength: when stacked to become a composite, you have something 10 times lighter, but maybe 500 times stronger than steel, while conducting and dispersing heat like copper. It could find a wide range of uses in areas like aviation, computers, batteries, armor, even fuel cells.

September games sales actually showed the first decline since March of 2006 according to the NPD Group, however things are still not looking too tough for the gaming industry. September of 2007 saw a huge hike in sales due to the release of Halo 3 which is contrasted by slightly lower sales this last September of 2008.

The drop is sales was not the only change of events for September, either. Due to the price cut of the Xbox 360 models, Microsoft saw a significantly noticeable boost in sales for its console from 195k units sold in August, to 347k units sold in September of this year, bringing it ahead of Sony’s PS3. Microsoft dropped the price to $50 less than the Wii and half of what the PS3 costs, making it the least expensive current-generation game console on the market.

The State of New York has now begun offering driver’s licenses embedded with RFID chips, which they are calling enhanced driver’s licenses (EDLs). This comes just after New York became the second state in the country to offer RFID embedded identification that can be shown at the border in place of a U.S. passport. The chip in the new licenses will have the ability to be scanned by authorities in order to identify citizens entering the state from Canada, Mexico, or the Caribbean. International travelers still need to produce an old fashioned passport to enter the country.

Since New York knows that many people do not trust RFID technology, you can still get the old RFID-lite version which does not act as a passport. According to authorities, no personal information will be stored or transmitted by the chip, only an identification number. Should you be interested, the new licenses will cost you an extra $30 over the $50 licensing fee. Hopefully they’re working on technology that makes you not look like a dork on your DL picture.

Best Buy has agreed to purchase Napster Inc. for $121 million, which values Napster at $2.65 per share. Like many of us, you might be wondering why Best Buy wants the once relevant Napster. According to Best Buy, they intend to use Napster’s assets to reach new customers with an enhanced experience for exploring and selecting music as well as other digital entertainment products over an increasing number of devices. Um, okay. Best Buy doesn’t have any plans to relocate Napster’s headquarters in Los Angeles yet, and they have no plans to make significant changes in personnel. I guess they just felt like shopping.

Looks like the folks over at Electronics Weekly have launched a search for the best Electronics blogs, with their first ever Electronics Blog Awards and they were kind enough to mention us by name. Now normally we don’t pay much attention to politics. For instance we won’t ask you to Rock The Vote, and we don’t care if you vote for the young hip guy whose face adorns the DS above or the old guy trying so hard to be hip with his corded phone. But when it comes to tech and assorted geekery, we want your vote.

So if you’re a fan of the ‘Brick just hit the link below and follow the instructions to get us nominated. We can’t say we stand for change and we have no Moose-shooting VP, we just really really love gadgets!

In what is probably the biggest physics experiment in history, today marks the first successful test of the Large Hadron Collidor in Geneva by sending a beam of protons through the the entire underground ring that makes up the world’s largest particle collider. The beam sent through travels through the 17 mile underground ring and nearly the speed of light and can make 11,000 laps through the tube every second.

Officials with CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) dubbed the test a success today and the next step will be to send a beam of protons through the tunnel in the opposite direction. Today’s beam went clockwise and the next trial will be to send the beam counter-clockwise.

If successful then the team will be able to work towards the ultimate goal of sending protons through the tunnel in both …

Sick and tired of waiting for Bruce Wayne to market one through Wayne Industries, students at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology have designed a winged flight-suit very similar to Batman’s outfit. The suit could allow humans dropped from airplanes to glide on their own just like the Dark Knight. First they estimated the size of the wings and tail needed for stability and how strong they would have to be to stand up to the drag forces they had calculated.

Interestingly, after wind tunnel tests, they discovered that flying in a “Superman” position would be impossible due to drag. Which really sucks because I had my blue pajamas all ready to go and the Superman position is really cool. It took about 100 trials, but they finally refined their original design into what they think is the perfect model and finally concluded that it would take a special kind of guy to use it. Either Batman himself or a super fit pilot who could comfortably wear the suit and use it to its fullest. It’s great news and all, but I’m bummed about the whole Superman thing.

The title says it all. Prisoners at any jail are not the brightest crayons in the crayola pack, but the prisoners in this jail really prove the point. Prison guards at Camp Jail were doing their daily clean up when they discovered that 37 prisoners had hidden mobile phones in their bodies. 30 of them were able to remove the phones without hospital treatment, but 7 members of this think-tank required surgery.

Although this is the largest single incident of this type prisoners often get caught with hidden phones – last year a UK prisoner required over 200 stitches and needed part of his bladder removed during surgery to remove a particularly large handset from his rectum.

According to the World Health Organization, glaucoma is the second leading cause of blindness worldwide. Glaucoma is basically a build-up of pressure in the eye. It can not be permanently cured. Now researchers at UC Davis have designed a special kind of contact lens that can measure pressure build up in the eye and they’ll even give you a warning if anything is wrong.

These smart contact lenses use an organic polymer called PDMS that acts like a pressure sensor. UC Davis says that they will start clinical trials of these lenses in humans very soon. But this isn’t the end of the breakthrough, they’re also working up to one that will dispense medication automatically.

This isn’t a gadget of course, but it does involve one of our favorite retro arcade games, Space Invaders. We love Space Invaders here at the ‘Brick and we’re a little jealous of our friends in Japan, where these Kit Kat bars are being produced in limited editions by Nestle for Taito arcades to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Space Invaders.

Putting Space Invaders on a Kit Kat should make it a bit easier to fend off the invading armada as you savor every delicious bite of their little bodies. I’d love to see more retro arcade candy bars hit the market, like a Pac-Man Reese’s cup and the like, but I wouldn’t be able to resist and I’d become a large geek instead of a trim geek.

I remember Mad magazine. The fold up joke page. The bad humor. Apparently it’s still around and going strong, has Circuit city pretty pissed off even. In this month’s issue of Mad Magazine, there’s an ad parody for Circuit City that reads Sucker City!. The parody takes aim at the electronics retailer and maybe says what many people were already thinking.

Like how they are always across the street from a Best Buy, Expensive TVs and how the price always goes up right after you bought them. Circuit city is not happy and ordered that all copies being sold at their stores be destroyed. I really doubt that anyone buys Mad Magazines from Best Buy anyway. In the ad you’ll also notice the Wii Epilepsy bundle with optical disc and bitestick controller.

Many of us go to extreme measures in order to keep pests out of our homes. Normally they’ll head straight for any crumbs that you’ve left on your floor or just blindly enter your dwelling as if for no apparent reason. They are easy enough to take care of. Start stomping or call in the verminators. But what do you do when insects start invading your tech?

One couple started noticing ants on their computer desk. They couldn’t quite figure out where they were coming from. There didn’t seem to be a problem anywhere else nearby. As you can see in the video, the work area is very clean. So the wife discovers that the printer isn’t working. The guy checks it out and finds that a small invading ant army had taken up residence in the scanner area. Pretty weird and makes you wonder where else they are that you don’t know about.