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London Zoo's otters now livestreaming to YouTube using leftover TV signals
Like most residents of The Smoke, you probably don't visit tourist attractions like London Zoo unless out-of-towners (or your sprogs) require entertaining. Now, though, you don't even need make the trip to Regent's Park to gawk at some of the zoo's cutest critters, with new livestreams that send footage from several enclosures straight to the screen in your bleak office cubicle. The Zoological Society of London (ZSL) has teamed up with Google to make this so, in a two-month trial that's testing video broadcasting over TV white spaces (vacant frequencies in the TV spectrum). Live footage from the meerkat, otter and Galapagos tortoise enclosures is being sent over these idle frequencies to a central location, which forwards them on to YouTube (streams embedded after the break). This isn't just so you've got something to stare at during your 15-minute sandwich break, though, as the main aim of the trial is to figure out how white space transmissions could be used by conservationists out in the field.
London Zookeepers try to reform cellphone-snatching monkeys
Solving a problem that we didn't even know existed, staff at the London Zoo have trained their resident squirrel monkeys not to snatch visitors' cellphones while they attempt to photograph the little rascals. Apparently unable to resist the cacophony of sounds and blinking lights that emanate from today's handsets (especially those that have been modded with aftermarket "enhancements"), the monkeys were taking advantage of their barrier-free environment to reach out and touch unsuspecting guests and their mobiles. Instead of lecturing the monkeys on the possible health risks of cellphone usage, or scaring them with tales of bloated roaming charges, zookeepers decided to go the Pavlovian route and simply coat several old phones with an unappealing goo -- which we've tried several times to break our own gadget addiction, but we always just ended up getting addicted to the goo.[Via textually]
