You know you’ve really made it when you become official. And in the English language stakes, there’s nothing that says we love you more than being added to the latest Collins English Dictionary.

Cue Twitter, which has now been added as a verb (meaning to use the social networking service’s 140 character status update function) as well as a noun.

And it’s not just Twitter than is enjoying its time in the limelight. Other shortened phrases such as OMG (meaning oh my god), soz (short for sorry) and WTF? (an expletive we’re sure you can guess at) - just a handful of the overall 267 additions Collins has introduced.

It’s all a little bit Harry Potter, but we could soon be seeing - or not as the case may be - a real-life cloak of invisibility as a leading researcher at the University of St Andrews has received funding to move this dabbling forward into more involved research.

Professor Ulf Leonhardt had received enough cash that he can now dedicate the next two years, full time, to working on turning the practical cloaking device from fiction to fact.

“The idea of invisibility has fascinated people for millennia, inspiring many myths, novels and films. In 2006, I began my involvement in turning invisibility from fiction into science, and, over the next two years, I plan to develop ideas that may turn invisibility from frontier science into applicable technology,” Leonhardt said in a statement.

“Technology is the modern form of magic; imagine your ancestor being transported into the future - they never thought it possible that people could fly or talk to others in different parts of the world. Fantastical, magical things are possible in principle; the question is whether you can turn them into practice, and that depends largely on ideas, which are even more essential than the development of new materials.”

See below for a video of the professor in action, courtesy of the University of St Andrews.

Ulf Leonhardt from James Shield on Vimeo.

Orange has announced that the quirky LG watchphone (LG-GD910) will be available exclusively on its network, with the devices going on sale from 9am next Thursday, 27 August.

The Bond-style gadget calls people when you tell it to and plays you music to while away the time waiting for the bad guys to turn up, or just waiting for a cab.

The video below, courtesy of LG’s official UK blog shows a demo of the new gadget at this year’s Mobile World Congress show.

Although it is shiny and quite cool, it will leave quite a dent in your pocket - setting you back £500. Although Orange has promised that this beauty is just one of several ‘future phones’ it’s planning on selling this year. We can’t wait.

Facebook is great isn’t it? You can get in touch with old school friends you haven’t seen or spoken to for years, have a nose about what they’re doing and what they look like now and just generally pass the time.

All fairly innocent use. But, some people have used Facebook in the past for slightly less delightful purposes. Affairs have been ignited thanks to this social networking trend and now even robbers are getting in on the act.

A burglar who stole a laptop from Hove in East Sussex apparently taunted his victim via Facebook. But this wasn’t the offender using their own account to tell their friends what they’d done. Oh no, this cheeky burglar rubbed salt into the wounds by using the victim’s own Facebook account….

I’ve heard of people finding a lost phone and using the owner’s Facebook account to tell them they’ve found their missing handset, but this takes a good tool to a whole new nasty level.

Let’s hope the burglar was stupid enough to log into Facebook while at home and gets caught soon enough.

You learn something new every day. And while Google has no doubt expanded the knowledge of countless people who’ve used its search functionality, it’s not often it teaches me something before I’ve even clicked.

But today it did. Thanks to the ever-changing imagery above the search bar, today I discovered that it is Hans Christian Ørsted’s birthday.

No, not Hans Christian Andersen, Ørsted. He didn’t do fairy tales, just scientific jiggery pokery instead. Ørsted was a Danish chemist and physicist who discovered the fact that magnetic fields can be induced by electrical currents.

He was born on 14 August 1777 and died on 9 march 1851, but his legacy clearly still lives on.

Kind of. That’s the gist of a report from Down Under that has identified a possible link between children who rely on predictive text on their mobile phones and them not exercising their little grey cells enough.

Boffins at Melbourne’s Monash University have suggested that the laziness that predictive text brings with it could make children more impulsive and less thoughtful. Which, in theory, could lead to mistakes later down the line.

“We suspect that using mobile phones a lot, particularly tools like predictive texts for SMS, is training them to be fast but inaccurate. Their brains are still developing so if there are effects then potentially it could have effects down the line, especially given that the exposure is now almost universal,” Professor Michael Abramson, said in an interview with the Telegraph.

“The use of mobile phones is changing the way children learn and pushing them to become more impulsive in the way they behave.”

What sort of mistakes and impulsiveness is on the cards we don’t know. It’s obvious that anything that does the job for us (whether predictive text to stop us typing a whole word or a microwave to cook our food quickly) will make us a bit lazy and less active (either physically or mentally), but I’m not quite sure it is a Sliding Doors-type life changing issue whereby those that don’t use predictive text will somehow go down a completely different and better path.

There’s no doubt that mobile and communications technologies (such as email) have changed our lives for the better. But, there’s a down side to everything.

More than a third of UK teenagers have been bullied via mobile phones or email, according to the Beatbullying charity. Perhaps more worryingly, the form of abuse they’re suffering is so-called ’sex texts’ whereby they’re exposed to sexually explicit images or content. Most often, this harassment is coming from other teenagers, but, in some slightly more disturbing cases, the bullies choosing ’sex texting’ as a method of intimidation are actually adults.

“This is about campaigning for the rights of our young people and for digital safety. We need to address the fact that sexual peer to peer contact is being exponentially facilitated through new technologies,” said Beatbullying’s chief executive Emma –Jane Cross.

“The Byron report made a commitment to protecting our young people in this complicated new online era, the Government has a duty to ensure it meets these recommendations. We need to take series note of what has happened in the US and Australia. To avoid similar cases here, politicians must work together with organisations like Beatbullying to create an intervention and prevention task force in schools and communities.”

She concluded: “This needs to be part of the solution if we are to educate our young people, teachers and families about the consequences of their actions and how to keep safe online as well as offline.”