In the Italian town of Peccioli the streets are too old and narrow for garbage trucks to navigate, so residents have had to manage their own trash collection. That is, until the appearance of this summer of "Dustcart", a Segway-wheeled, sensor-equipped robot, that responds to house calls to collect garbage.

Dustcart was created by researchers at the Scuole Superiore Sant-Anna University, and just ended its trial in the Italian town, where residents summoned Dustbot from their cell phones and received a text message when it arrived. After punching in a pin number and selecting the correct type of garbage, users deposited the waste in Dustcart's stomach-like trash receptacle. The robot then took the trash to a dumping site and released it, a bit like the animated trash robot Wall-E. Dustcart's most important achievement is sensing and navigating in the real world.

The robot costs $19,000-25,000 dollars, and is intended for a city, rather than a private owner, according to the Dustcart team. The researchers suggest that a centrally operated system could monitor trash-collecting calls and manage them to a fleet of autonomous garbage collectors.

The balances itself using a Segway platform and runs on a lithium battery-powered engine. Motion sensors prevent it from colliding with obstacles or moving objects, and sensors for temperature, ozone, CO2 and other chemicals allow it to monitor how much air pollution there is in a city.

See a 2009 video of the robot in action:

See new footage at the Wall Street Journal.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs introduces a
new version of Apple TV at an event
in San Francisco.

Chatter about Google's social networking ambitions has been ubiquitous for months, but without warning a different Silicon Valley giant has pitched into competition with Facebook: Apple.

At an event Wednesday in San Francisco, Steve Jobs introduced Ping, which he described as "a social network for music."

"It's Facebook and Twitter meet iTunes," he explained--a line that might not impress if it came from a college dropout pitching a startup idea. Coming from Jobs it's a little more striking.

Some 120 million iTunes users can opt into the service. It lets people create a profile, based on their music choices, and get updates on their friends' purchases or reviews of music sold via iTunes. It's a social network that could be the same size as MySpace at launch, and it easily could pay for itself: Ping users are a click away from spending money at all times. Updates on friends' purchases on your news feed page feature a "buy" button. Artists also get profile pages and can be followed--a feature with the potential to take away MySpace's most loyal and valuable user base.

Jobs didn't take one potentially huge step -- to open iTunes up for streaming music. Even so, as is traditional he had "one more thing" to wrap his presentation. Or as he put it, "actually, it's one more hobby," raising chuckles from the crowd. That was a reference to a much-mocked past remark about Apple TV, the company's largely unsuccessful attempt to sell a system that can funnel video content to TVs.

Part of the problem, said Jobs, was that people found synchronizing and configuring the first-generation Apple TV box too much like setting up a computer. "This is a hard one for people in the computer industry to understand, but it's easy for consumer to understand," he said, in a none-too-subtle dig at Google TV devices that are set to appear this fall.

Apple's second attempt will cost $99 whereas the original cost $229. It is also fully a quarter of the size of the first generation and does away with storing TV and movies altogether. Everything is rented and the prices are low: just 99 cents for a TV show. Apple's most significant achievement might be that it has persuaded some big Hollywood content owners--ABC and Fox--to provide their TV shows such as "Glee" and "Bones" at this price in HD.

As I noted when Google announced its TV ambitions, persuading the owners of top-tier content to play along is the biggest challenge for a computer firm attempting to disrupt entertainment. Jobs acknowledged as much on stage: "This is a big step for the studios to make and not all of them wanted to take this step with us. We think the rest of the studios will see the light and get on board this with us."

If Apple TV 2.0 is a hit, it seems likely those studios will feel under pressure to do just that. The device will also stream movies from Netflix, another reason cable TV providers will be watching with interest.

The last word went to Coldplay's Chris Martin, wheeled out to play a few tunes on the piano. "Your marketing people can sell anything," he remarked, in reference to the way Apple helped the Coldplay song Viva La Vida become a hit (by making it available exclusively through iTunes initially, and then using it in an TV ad) after the band's label thought the track would be a dud. His point applies to Ping and the new Apple TV; whatever the technical merits or failings of the products, we know they will receive some of the slickest promotion on Earth.

The National Institutes of Health, the nation's largest biomedical funding agency, halted all ongoing research at the agency that involves human embryonic stem cells. The order comes in response to a federal injunction issued last week blocking use of federal funding for the research. (See my story, New Court Ruling Could Cripple Stem-Cell Research, for more details.)

According to Science Insider:

According to a furious NIH staffer who read the e-mail to ScienceInsider over the telephone, this morning's message from NIH intramural research chief Michael Gottesman states: "HHS [the Department of Health and Human Services] has determined that the recent preliminary injunction ... is applicable to the use of human embryonic stem cells in intramural research projects. In light of this determination, effective today, intramural scientists who use human ES cell lines should initiate procedures to terminate these projects. Procedures that will conserve and protect the research resources should be followed."

The agency has eight research projects that use hESCs, most if not all of which use lines approved under the Bush Administration, say NIH officials. It also has a unit that characterizes lines added to the NIH registry of approved hESC lines.

The shutdown is the first immediate halt to research since Lamberth issued the preliminary injunction. NIH Director Francis Collins has said that extramural researchers can continue their projects for now and that the injunction will affect only future grant payments. ("Intramural" means researchers in labs on the NIH campus; "extramural" refers to researchers at universities and other outside institutions who receive NIH grants.)But some biomedical research lobbyists worry that that interpretation of the ruling may have been too optimistic, and a shutdown of all ongoing NIH-funded hESC research could be imminent.

The Department of Justice is expected to ask the courts to stay the injunction as soon as today, an NIH source tells ScienceInsider.