More than 50,000 Facebook users signed a petition calling on the company to alter or abandon its Beacon advertising technology. When Facebook users shopped online, Beacon told friends and businesses what they looked at or bought.

Scientists have cloned monkey embryos for the first time, bringing human cloning a step closer. They created dozens of embryos from a 10-year-old rhesus macaque monkey and planted them into surrogate primates.

A recent poll has found that 75 percent of users think the web is becoming too vast to be useful.

After some self-confessed “nerds” queued in the cold for up to 36 hours to be at the head of the line. They were snapped up at a rate of 4.2 per second at the height of the frenzy at 1,300 outlets.

Nintendo’s ground breaking Wii console has been crowned gadget of the year. The best-selling games machine walked away with the coveted top prize last night at technology website Pocket-lint.co.uk’s annual Gadget Awards, beating off competition from Apple’s much-hyped iPhone and Nokia’s N95 mobile.

Although not hugely loved by the UK public, mainly for the way it forces people to pay for free content, the new eBook from Amazon has sold out within hours of going on sale. With a sale price of £194 ($400), some think it is far too high for what essentially is a digital screen that you can read books on.

The future of grocery shopping has changed in the Palatinate region of Germany. The Edeka supermarket chain offered in one of its Rülzheim stores fingerprint identification as method of payment. Customers can have their fingerprint put on file and begin using the system as an alternative to cash or card. Customers then place their finger on the scanner to complete a purchase.