The Discovery orbiter has been moved onto its launch pad at the Kennedy Space Center, in Florida, as part of preparations for a July lift-off. The slow procession from the Vehicle Assembly Building to the pad took almost eight hours. The space shuttle is scheduled to fly some time between 1 and 19 July. It will be only the second shuttle flight since the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated on re-entry three years ago, killing all seven astronauts. Pointing skywards, the shuttle, already attached to its orange rocket fuel tank and two solid rocket boosters, inched along its four-mile (6.5km) journey atop a giant transport vehicle. Full Article

The new PlayStation 3 (PS3) will hit Japanese stores on 11 November, with the US and Europe following less than a week later, Sony has announced. The console will be available in two versions starting at $499 (394 euros). Sony revealed the launch details in Los Angeles ahead of this week's games expo E3. The PS3 is the successor to the best-selling PlayStation 2 and will compete with Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Nintendo's Wii. The machines make up the next wave of video gaming. The Xbox 360 is already available, while the Wii is due out later this year. Full Article

A real world cash card that allows gamers to spend money earned in a virtual universe has been launched. Gamers can use the card at cash machines around the world to convert virtual dollars into real currency. The card is offered by the developers of Project Entropia, an online role-playing game that has a real world cash economy. Last year, a virtual space resort being built in the game was snapped up by a gamer for $100,000 (£56,200). The buyer, Jon Jacobs who plays in the game as a character called Nerverdie, is developing the space station into a virtual night club through which the entertainment industry can sell music and videos to gamers. Full Article

Gene therapy used to treat children with no immune system could be far riskier than previously thought, a US study has suggested. The treatment is used for children with X-SCID - commonly known as "bubble boy" syndrome. The latest animal study in Nature found the treatment itself can cause cancer. But experts from Great Ormond Street, where nine children were successfully treated, said the study had used unnaturally high doses of the gene. They said other studies showed the cancer risk was not present when lower doses were given. Full Article

Sun Microsystems says co-founder and CEO Scott McNealy, who has been a critic of Microsoft, is to step down. The 51-year-old will quit the post with immediate effect, but will stay on at the company in the role of chairman. Sun's current president and chief financial officer Jonathan Schwartz will take over at the helm of the firm. The news came as the US firm revealed third quarter losses had widened to $217m (£121.4m) from $28m at the same time a year ago. Sun blamed a number of mainly merger-related charges for the fall - excluding the one-off costs losses fell to just 1 cent per share. Full Article

Computer users are being urged to update the Firefox web browser to close serious security holes in it. Some of the security lapses in Mozilla software, which Firefox is based on, could allow malicious hackers to hijack computers. There have been a total of 21 security flaws in various versions of Firefox, according to security firm Secunia. Users are urged to download the latest versions of all Mozilla programs to protect their computers from attack. The US Computer Emergency Readiness Team (Cert) warn that other Mozilla products including e-mail client, Thunderbird, and the internet application, Seamonkey, may also be affected. Full Article

Microsoft has snapped up one of the UK's leading figures from the world of video games, Peter Molyneux. The veteran game maker is best known for inventing the god game genre, where players control all that happens. The purchase of Mr Molyneux's Lionhead Studios is part of Microsoft's efforts to secure exclusive titles for its new console, the Xbox 360. "What we love about Peter is the innovation he brings," said Microsoft gaming division head Peter Moore. Full Article

Police are using the latest technology to clamp down on motorists who take to the streets without insurance. In some areas, as many as a third of drivers are said to be uninsured - although the nationwide figure is one in 20. Legal car users do not have to be hit by an uninsured driver to be affected. It already costs the honest motorist an extra £40 a year to cover the missing revenue. Full Article

The Burnout team swap cars for Kalashnikovs in a first-person blast that is big, dumb and full of guns and probably the last great shooter for the PlayStation 2 generation. There is a reason the developers describe Black as "gun porn". In this four-course feast for the explosion-starved, players fill the hobnails of Jack Kellar, part of the world's most brutal strike force, as he hunts down an ex-CIA operative in the Eastern Bloc. Full Article

Apple Computer Inc. has resorted to a poetic broadside in the inevitable cat-and-mouse game between hackers and high-tech companies. The maker of Macintosh computers had anticipated that hackers would try to crack its new OS X operating system built to work on Intel Corp.'s chips and run pirated versions on non-Apple computers. So, Apple developers embedded a warning deep in the software -- in the form of a poem. Indeed, a hacker encountered the poem recently, and a copy of it has been circulating on Mac-user Web sites this week. Full Article

Beat-em-ups, they always remind me of the "olden days". Groups of people huddled around arcade machines - winner stays on - and a decent queue forming to take on the recumbent champion, 10 pence pieces at the ready. This sort of thing doesn't happen much any more and it doesn't really have to. Our living room consoles have become far more adept at providing our entertainment for us. Full Article

After a white-knuckle takeoff, millionaire adventurer Steve Fossett soared out over the Atlantic in a bony-looking experimental airplane Wednesday on a quest to break the 25,000-mile record for the world's longest aircraft flight. Fossett squeezed into the tiny cockpit, kissed his wife goodbye and set out on the planned, 3 1/2-day nonstop journey, taking off from the Kennedy Space Center on a nearly three-mile runway. Full Article

"There are a lot of people who are going to be very unhappy on the third of February," said Professor Merrick Furst from the Georgia Tech College of Computing. That's when the Kama Sutra computer worm will begin destroying critical files on infected computers. And hundreds of thousands of machines may have the worm lurking within their Windows operating system, ready to be unleashed on February 3 and the third of every month thereafter. Full Article

Microsoft founder and Chairman Bill Gates believes cell phones are a better way than laptops to bring computing to the masses in developing nations, according to a published report. The New York Times reports that Craig Mundie, the No. 1 software provider's vice president and chief technology officer, told the paper that both he and Gates believe that turning a specially configured cell phone into a computer by connecting it to a TV and a keyboard is the best way to spread the power of computing. Full Article

The 20th anniversary of the first PC virus falls this month. It was during the opening weeks of 1986 that the first PC virus, called Brain, was discovered in the wild. Though it achieved fame because it was the first of its type, the virus was not widespread as it could only travel by hitching a ride on floppy disks swapped between users. Full Article