Geek Weekly: Our top weird tech stories for 18 September

Technology Decisions’ weekly wrap of IT fails, latest tech, new must-have gadgets, ‘computer says no’ moments and more.

My phone is, like, totally random. We just knew smartphones had to be good for something other than playing games and placing online bets - such as becoming random number generators. It turns out that the CMOS cameras found in most smartphones are sensitive enough to detect individual photons of light. This means that an app could potentially use the properties of light to “generate random numbers of a quantum origin”, which would be very useful for cryptography and security.

When simply ‘broken’ would be welcome. The city of Detroit is bankrupt. And it’s no wonder, as no-one in charge seems to know how much money the city owes or is owed. And that’s because 70% of the city’s financial transactions are still performed manually. And that’s because Detroit’s overall IT system is a shambles. Beth Niblock, Detroit’s chief information officer, describes it as “Fundamentally broken, or beyond fundamentally broken. In some cases, fundamentally broken would be good.” Read further - you’ll be amazed.

The eye, the rat and the robot. It sounds like the title of a kid’s fantasy novel, but it’s actually what scientists hope to combine to help robots navigate intelligently. “This is a very Frankenstein type of project,” says QUT’s Dr Michael Milford. “It’s putting two halves of a thing together because we’re taking the eyes of a human and linking them up with the brain of a rat. A rodent’s spatial memory is strong but has very poor vision, while humans can easily recognise where they are because of eyesight. We have existing research, software algorithms in robots to model the human and rat brain. We’ll plug in the two pieces of software together on a robot moving around in an environment and see what happens.”

Big cat is a bounder. An amazing robot called Cheetah 2, built by engineers at MIT, can run and bound untethered across grass. Watch the video:

Fat finger fail. Someone’s in trouble. What is suspected to have been a ‘fat finger’ error briefly raised oil company BP’s stock market value by more than £4 billion on Tuesday. The jump of almost 5% in the share price led to trading being suspended for five minutes.