The author JG Ballard, famed for novels such as Crash and Empire of the Sun, has died aged 78 after a long illness.

His agent Margaret Hanbury said the author had been ill "for several years" and had died on Sunday morning.

Despite being referred to as a science fiction writer, Jim Ballard said his books were instead "picturing the psychology of the future".

His most acclaimed novel was Empire of the Sun, based on his childhood in a Japanese prison camp in China.

By Leena Rao, TechCrunch Published April 5, 2009

 There’s been a proliferation of photo sharing apps tied to Twitter, including TwitPic, Twitxr (review), and Yfrog (review), giving users a vast amount of choice when it comes to image sharing on the popular micro-blogging service. But TwitPic seems to have emerged as the leader of the pack.

The service took the top spot on our list of the most popular Twitter applications according to Compete and was in the top ten of Twitter clients according to TwitStat. Compete pegs TwitPic to have had close to 1.6 million unique visitors in February, and its traffic doesn’t show any signs of slowing down.

Two more competitors to TwitPic have emerged. TweetPhoto and Pixim are both photo sharing applications attempting to challenge its dominance, so we took a closer look.

TweetPhoto, who plans to launch later this month, also lets you use OAuth to integrate your Twitter account. You are then able to send pics through your mobile phone or upload pics via the site. Like TwitPic, TweetPhoto lets users comment on pictures on-site and tag photos. TweetPhoto will also feature integration with Facebook Connect, which is pretty cool, and something both TwitPic and Pixim lack. Like Pixim, TweetPhoto plans to release its own API, but might confront the same issue with TwitPic’s dominance.

(CNN) -- "Still Alice," written by Lisa Genova, is a novel about a 50-year-old Harvard professor's struggle with Alzheimer's disease. It's also a book, Genova was told, that nobody would want to read.

After spending 1½ years writing "Still Alice," Genova spent just as much time trying to find a literary agent. "I never heard a response from most of the query letters I sent," Genova said. "Four literary agents asked to see the book. One of them said she just didn't think there was a general audience that would want to read about Alzheimer's."

When she was turned down by several traditional publishing houses, Genova decided to follow a different route: self-publishing via Web-based companies. When she informed one of the literary agents of her decision, his response was daunting.

"He said, 'Don't do that, you'll kill your writing career before it starts,' " said Genova.

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As the economic and environmental crises deepen, there is a growing recognition that many aspects of our lives need to be reinvented. Politicians routinely call for the “redesign” of society, and urge businesses to “innovate” their way out of recession. This readiness to embrace change — even radical change — coupled with advances in science and technology, is unleashing a stream of innovations. Here are some of the most exciting ones.

1. Old-school innovation

When most people imagine design innovation, they think of designers experimenting with new technologies to develop new products, which will be better than their predecessors. That is exactly what the French brothers Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec did with their Vegetal Chair for the Swiss company Vitra, which seems set to be a highlight of the Milan Furniture Fair later this month.

The Bouroullecs’ aim was to create a plastic chair that looked as if it had sprouted like a plant. They did so by molding the seat in the shape of a basket of twigs. The spaces between each “twig” make the Vegetal seem light and airy, and form holes through which the legs can be inserted to stack the chairs on top of each other.

The result is a great example of “old-school” innovation, and the most complex chair that Vitra’s engineers have ever produced. (That is saying something, given that they spent more than 20 years struggling to adapt Verner Panton’s S-shaped Panton Chair for mass-production.)

2. Green innovation

Whereas “old school” innovations tend to focus on making existing products easier to use or more efficient, a new goal is to make them environmentally responsible. A great example is gDiaper, the flushable baby diaper now sold in North America.

Conventional disposable diapers are an eco-nightmare. They are the third largest contributors to landfill sites in North America, with some 50 million being discarded each day. They take up to 500 years to decompose, and (here comes the yukky bit) the “contents” can seep into the ground water system, and contaminate it.

When Jason and Kimberly Graham-Nye were expecting their first child, they searched for an eco-friendly diaper and eventually found a company in Tasmania that had invented one. They bought the rights to the design and refined it into the gDiaper, which consists of a biodegradable flushable worn inside a pair of underpants. When the flushable is soiled, you can flush it down the toilet, or, if it is simply wet, use it as compost in the garden, where it will decompose within a few months.

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