Let’s just get this first one out of the way: Not only does the Head Spa Massager look like someone in the 1970s designed it in a future-Sparta fashion, but it’s a massage helmet. You look ridiculous, and it can’t even secretly double as a sexual aid.

This handsome silver fox has it going on. I mean, he’s talking to a sexy lady, and a power call could easily come through his Bluetooth earpiece at any moment, right? Nope, he fooled you! He’s hard of hearing, and that’s just his Stealth Secret Sound Amplifier. (I laughed when I first saw this, but now it just makes me sad.)

Every cyborg I know of has a head-mounted camera, and since this 5-megapixel Digital Camera Swim Mask is only good for 4.5m depth (that is, snorkelling or swimming pools), you might as well make the most of it and wear it on dry land too! Even has a cyborg-friendly LED that shines inside the mask, to let your friends know who’s part robot tell you when you’re shooting.

If sci-fi tells us anything, it’s that the bionic man (or woman) has great posture. Thankfully, the Posturetek Biofeedback System — it’s a shirt, but they call it a system — “senses incorrect posture and gently encourages posture correction”. My assumption is that it doesn’t use sharp spikes or electric shocks, but it’s still a tad sinister.

Snore correction makes up approximately 94 per cent of SkyMall revenue, but only one, the SnorePro Snore Relief Device, attaches to your wrist and sends a “biofeedback digital pulse” when the log sawing kicks in. (Can you imagine having a business card with the word SnorePro emblazoned on it? Would that be awful or awesome?)

When you embark on the man-machine merger, it makes sense to complement some of that silicon with silicone, if you catch my drift. Hell, you got so much going on, nobody’s going to notice that you’ve shoved some Body Figure Enhancing Pads down your pants. Well, they’ll notice, but not in a bad way.

What good is the cyborg life if it doesn’t permit you to jump higher, run faster, have more energy, appear two inches taller and “look like a million dollars”? The Gravity Defyers (spelling lessons sold separately) have been tempting travellers for ages with those very promises. Besides, its patented spring-loaded sole is found on no other shoe in the world pretty much ever, for some reason.

Locutus of Borg wasn’t much of a jumper — his footwear of choice skewed toward the comfort-illumination lines. That’s why he swore by the Brightfeet Lighted Slippers. They’re just the thing to slip on when you’re making the midnight trek from the regeneration chamber to the cube pissoir.

This week, Gizmodo is exploring the enhanced human future in a segment we call This Cyborg Life. It’s about what happens when we treat our body less as a sacred object and more as what it is: Nature’s ultimate machine.

Specter, who covers the science beat for The New Yorker, is pissed off. Forces on both the left and right have been coming down on good clean science like never before. Yes, this “denialism”, as he calls it, comes from both sides. People on the left might think of it as Bush-flavoured Intelligent Design agendas and bans on stem-cell research, while those on the right would recognise liberal whining about vaccinations and genetically modified food. It’s all of these factions, and plenty more.

And in his new book, Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives, Specter demonstrates that ignorance is death.

For our discussion — fitting the theme of This Cyborg Life — we singled out synthetic biology, a pursuit, as Specter describes it, that “by combining elements of engineering, chemistry, computer science and molecular biology, seeks nothing less than to assemble the biological tools necessary to redesign the living world”. Here’s an edited version of our discussion:

So we’re talking about, synthetic biology, the ability to take cells or small organisms and turn them into machines?

Yeah, that’s essentially where building machines, unbelievably complex ones, that will eventually be able to do whatever we want, out of cells and chemicals.

Yeah, so we just mix some chemicals in a pot and suddenly we’ve got a car manufacturer?

Well, it’s a little more complicated than that, but that’s the direction we’re moving in — you put some chemicals together and you get an organism, and then you get a more complex organism, and you get organisms that’ll do things, and you can get drugs or chemicals or plastics or fuel… These [scientists] are trying to take basic sugars, basic chemicals, and make it so they can digest carbon (which is kind of exciting though we’re not there yet) or just diesel fuels, plain fuel, that doesn’t emit any sort of greenhouse gasses. That has happened in small scales — we’re there. It’s just a question of scaling.

So why is this kind of low-level synthetic approach better doing than, say, the guys making fuel from algae?

I think the hope is that this will be cheaper and more stable. I don’t know that it’s better. I’m sort of agnostic on that, I think you’d rather have a lot of different approaches that are kind of greenhouse-gas neutral. And whatever works, you’ll use. And you know we’re not gonna have one source of energy, we’re gonna have a bunch. We’re gonna have wind, we’re gonna have solar, we’re gonna have chemicals.

When we look at the malaria drug [one of the first products that can be manufactured through synthetic biology — and a project funded by the Gates Foundation], they are going to be able to make all the drug that is needed in the world in a couple of vats. One of the reasons that’s exciting is because it’s a stable, easy way to regulate the manufacturing, to make sure that it’s done properly. We have a big problem with malaria medicine because it’s misused, it’s taken the wrong way, it’s counterfeit — and this is a way of regulating it. I think we’ll see that with energy sources too. It’ll be solid.

In the book, you refer to the opening of the Will Smith film I Am Legend, when doctors say they’ve harnessed the measles virus and turned it into a cancer killer, a mutant virus that eventually turns everybody into zombies. But two years after the movie comes out, real doctors from the Mayo clinic say that they’re using measles strains as a real cancer treatment, in real life.

The point I’m trying to make is, these things are a little scary. Anything that powerful has to have a downside. And we need to know what the downside is; we need to talk about the downside. And we need to acknowledge it exists and say to ourselves — and sometimes we won’t agree — but say to ourselves, “Gee, you know what, the potential benefits outweigh the risks.” Sometimes we won’t think that. But I do believe that lots of times, given the information, we would think that way.

We’re on the verge of creating our own viruses that go into the body — I mean, is that right? — they go into the body and they do something good rather than bad.

Yeah, but the thing is, that has a bad connotation but it ought not to. There’s a guy named Eckhard Wimmer who created a fake version of the polio virus, and lots of people screamed, because why would you do that? I even trashed him in an article once and I was wrong and so were those people. What he had been trying to do was to make synthetic vaccines. In order to make totally synthetic, rapidly reproducible vaccines, you need to understand the viruses. Wouldn’t it be great if, for H1N1, instead of growing tons of this stuff in eggs in Pennsylvania, we could just gear up instantly, making in factories all around this country, so that we could have millions of doses in two weeks? That’s not a pipe dream; that can happen.

Who says whether this kind of research happens or not? Who pounds the gavel?

If you live in America, it’d be some sort of democratic process. We need to have some sort of regulatory framework. Who approves a new drug? It isn’t just a pharmaceutical company that says, “Hey, I’ve gotta drug, let’s put it out there.” No, there are tons of hoops to jump through, and we need to have some hoops. And we need to make those hoops reasonable so that they’re not so ridiculous that no-one bothers to try to jump through them but not so easy that we’re endangering our citizens.

But the scientific progress will probably continue regardless of whether there’s a discussion or a regulatory framework?

I’ve never seen anything in the history of our planet where human progress has stopped. People have gotten in the way, people have slowed things down, but yeah it continues. People do the work. And so I think we kind of need to get on board and harness that work. Some people said, “we need to stop some things”, but I don’t think that can happen. I don’t think we can turn information back.

Right. In your book, you mention that Bill Joy’s argument was to just put a padlock on certain venues.

Yeah, and I understand why he said that, I just don’t think it’s realistic. I don’t think that’s the way the human animal is built or has ever acted.

The point I think that you make in the book is that, if American science infrastructure bans certain researches, it’s not gonna stop people who are outside America from doing the research, and maybe won’t stop people who we definitely don’t want to be doing this research.

It’s true. Look at the stem-cell ban. People went elsewhere to do it. It set us back, it set the world back. But it isn’t like it stopped. That’s a good thing, but it could be a bad thing. If we’re gonna do sort of high-end synthetic biology and be creating all sorts of exciting but theoretically scary things, let’s do it in this country. Let’s not have it done in some place with no regulatory system.

What’s the worst thing that could happen here?

You mean like in terms of?

I mean in terms of messing around with this particular biological technology.

Look, the worst thing that can happen when you mix genes around is you can let something loose that you can’t bring back that destroys, you know, fill in the blank. Humans? Animals? Life? That is the worst thing. That is the doomsday scenario and it… it can happen, these things can happen.

We have had agricultural biotechnology for 35 years and we’ve planted two billion acres. And people still talk about how it’s untried and untested. It isn’t untried. It isn’t untested. It doesn’t make people sick. It doesn’t mean there aren’t problems with it. But to go right to the idea that the worst thing will happen, it’s crazy. There’s always a worst case scenario. We don’t need to assume it. We need to think about it.

And then obviously the upside, this is the point of the book, the upside far outweighs the downside.

Yeah, you know, the worst case scenario is something goes awry and destroys the universe. OK, that’s the worst case scenario, and it’s a pretty remote likelihood.

Now, a pretty good likelihood is, if we continue living the way we live, my kid, who’s 16 years old, maybe she won’t live a whole life because people are dying of skin cancer like crazy in 50 years. This isn’t so long from now. We have really severe problems we need to address instantly. And those are the potential benefits of this research. We don’t talk about that very much. We need to do the work and find out and make our decisions and not decide beforehand that it makes no sense.

If this has piqued your interest, or if you’re just tired of people bitching about stem-cell research, genetically altered foods or the alleged evil that lurks in vaccinations, be sure to pick up Michael Specter’s amazing book Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives, and meanwhile have a look at his most recent piece on synthetic biology in The New Yorker. Thanks Michael!

This week, Gizmodo is exploring the enhanced human future in a segment we call This Cyborg Life. It’s about what happens when we treat our body less as a sacred object and more as what it is: Nature’s ultimate machine.

The information posted regarding Sony television models is incorrect. Any specifications, model names, photographs or other details were not issued by Sony and do not represent the company’s current or future product line.

The good news, if there is any, is that the early termination fee only applies to early termination. Surprised you there, didn’t it? The bad news is, what Mark said about the ditch fee being $US110 in the 23rd month is true. And pretty much anything you’d want to buy from Verizon these days — not just Droids and BlackBerrys but netbooks too — are locked into this new fee.

Verizon is pretty clear that this is about recouping the cost of the subsidy; a gadget lands on the “advanced” list when it has a combination of features that “drive up the cost”. Only wireless modems and dumbphones (below referred to as feature phones) appear to be exempt. Here are the details from a spokesman:

The higher tier of early termination fee applies to a device category that generally includes smartphones, netbooks and other advanced devices purchased at a subsidized price under contract. Please remember, feature phones still carry a $US175 early termination fee when purchased at a subsidized price with a new customer agreement.

Advanced devices include a combination of advanced capabilities that combined drive up the cost of the device, including premium HTML browser; high-resolution MP camera with optical zoom; dual processor chipsets; WiFi; very high-resolution displays, and/or operating systems such as BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Palm, or Android. The category also includes netbooks. (Modems will still carry a $US175 ETF.)

We are informing customers at the point of purchase/contract renewal—whether on line, in person or over the phone. On Sunday, when the new EFT takes effect, we will post the list of advanced devices.

By the way, it is important to note that this change has no impact on customers with previously signed contracts, and as a practical matter has no impact on the majority of customers who choose to complete the terms of their contracts.

Remember, if you sign a long-term contract and complete it, there’s no early termination fee. In addition, customers always have the option of buying any device at full retail without an early termination fee.

I’m not sure how serious this is, but it certainly reflects the design mentality of 50 years ago: If something doesn’t work right, it must be lacking features. Here are the most unexpected add-ons recommended by industrial designers, anthropologists, engineers and biologists:

• Folding ears, something like the old-fashioned ear trumpet, to catch low-pitched sounds

• Hooks on heads for strap-hangers on trains who wanted to read the papers

• A device resembling a giant clamshell can protect internal organs and be opened easily for surgical purposes

• 20 teeth would be an improvement over the present 32, according to dentists

• A long snout to do away with the nose’s confusing air flow and related sinus troubles

• Detachable arms so that you can sleep in comfort

• An extra pair of hands coming out of ears to hold hats in high winds

• Antennae concealed in the head that could pick up sound waves, lights and shadows

• A protective covering for the eye, containing substances which would screen out harsh ultra violet rays

• A small food storage compartment like the camel’s

• Built-in pockets, such as kangaroos have

• The spine as a solid column, to greatly increase load-carrying capacity and protect vital nerves

Only this last one comes with an admitted downside: “Man would not be able to twist and turn as he does now but the semi-flexibility of the cylinder would allow enough bending for every ordinary purpose.” Meanwhile, the only one from the list that may actually be a product soon — the UV protective eye-covering — was a suggestion “meant frankly for fun”.

In the intervening years, sometime between the Don Drapers and the Gordon Gekkos, the finger stopped being pointed at our inherent form, and was redirected at how we treat it. Not surprisingly, only one of the experts consulted has any real legacy at all, and he — design god Raymond Loewy — is most famous for artefacts like a locomotive engine (the S-1) and a packet of cigarettes (Lucky Strike). Besides, I’m pretty sure Loewy was joking when he suggested the hat hands. [Modern Mechanix via Secondhand Smoke]

1. Since a battery should never be 100 per cent full or 100 per cent empty, you should charge it then discharge it in sequence ideally ranging between 80 per cent to 20 per cent. Start by charging for 12 minutes, then running it down, then charge it for 11 minutes then run it down, and so on. Confused? Just use this handy formula: n!=C(n,k)/r! where n can’t equal r, and k never reaches zero. Simple!

2. If you use a phone or laptop without first charging its battery fully, you will die.

3. A lot of battery experts warn of the memory effect, but it’s not really an “effect”. It’s just their way of saying “Remember to charge your batteries!”

4. Batteries run better when cold. The easiest way to do this is to find a refrigerated warehouse, befriend the security guard, and do all your work from there. ($20 bribes usually work.)

5. If your laptop battery gets hot enough to sear tuna, step away. Check your fridge for tuna. If no tuna in fridge, run to the supermarket to buy tuna. Don’t worry, as long as you don’t unplug your laptop, the battery will stay hot while you are gone.

6. When putting your laptop into storage, take out the battery. Wrap the extracted battery in a well-oiled cloth and place it in a clay pot. Bury the pot in a hayfield. Any will do, but it’s best if there’s a long rock wall with a big oak tree at the north end. The battery should keep fresh for up to six months that way. If you’re worried about finding it again, just mark your spot with a rock that has no earthly business in a hayfield. I favour black volcanic glass.

7. If your battery is about to run dry, take it out and blow on it. I have no idea why this works, but it totally does.

8. If your battery does die, you can always make your own: A potato theoretically has enough “potential energy” stored inside to power a laptop for a full hour — the trick is knowing where to stick the wires. Just ask a third grader. One tip: The potato must not be baked.

9. You should never confuse your batteries. Here’s an easy way to keep them apart in your head: Lithium Ion batteries explode, Nickel Cadmium destroys the environment and Lead Acid batteries are more corrosive than the Alien Queen’s blood (plus, they contain lead). You can eat Lithium Ferro Phosphate batteries.

10. People may tell you to carry a battery-life extender in your bag, but the secret there is, it’s just another battery. What do I recommend? Jumper cables.

Windows 7 Sales 234% Higher Than Vista
NPD declared sales for Windows 7 were 234 per cent higher than the sales for Windows Vista in the same amount of time on the market, says Nick Wingfield at the WSJ’s Seattle desk. Oddly, Windows PC sales were down, 6 per cent lower than they were during the Vista launch weeks. The NPD analyst take: “I think it’s mixed. We would have liked to see a stronger jump on the hardware side.” The non-analyst take: People who had XP knew that switching to Vista would suck without a new machine; now, the opposite is true, with so many people keeping their old machines but trying any means necessary to rid them of Vista. Still, these are early days, and we already knew pre-orders were insane. I’m just curious to see if PC sales will pick up for the holidays. [WSJ - Image Source]

Battery Juice No Longer Just An Expression, Still Not As Tasty As Orange Juice
You know how the US Air Force has been working on a secret water-based battery technology for 25 years, but couldn’t get it to work because of water’s damned evaporative property? OK, me neither, but this research, which bears the ironically simple name “metal-air”, might become our next great battery technology. They won’t be using water, though. Instead, they’ll use a clear, viscous, electrically conductive and mercifully non-volatile substance called ionic liquid. This stuff isn’t going to be powering your Zune until the Zune itself is pretty much an implant (or a smart tattoo), but if you’re curious, you should check out the super over-my-head chemical explanation. [MIT Tech Review - Image Source]

Verizon Calls AT&T’s Ad Lawsuit “Junk”
As if AT&T’s stupid “Map For That” lawsuit wasn’t embarrassing enough on its own, Verizon Wireless’s Jeffrey Nelson got a chance to ridicule it when AdWeek called him for comment. “This is a junk lawsuit,” he said. “It’s surprising that rather than defend the ‘blue’ hot spots on their 3G map, our competitor instead focuses on their white spaces.” This isn’t working out according to plan, is it, AT&T? Reminds me of the Trojan Rabbit scene in Python’s Holy Grail. [AdWeek via AllThingsD]

Air Filter Uses Plants to Get Rid of Yer Weed Smoke
There’s a new air filter that draws air through the leaves, roots and soil of a house plant in order to filter impurities from the room. Well, it was designed in 2007, but it’s now a reality. Hey, are you thinking what I’m thinking? If you grow pot in the filter, when you smoke it, the plant itself that bestowed it upon you can filter the smoke, and maybe recapture some THC for bonus stickiness? Wait, what? Oh man, I’m freaking out. You’re crazy. This is crazy. Seriously. Let’s do it. [Inhabitots]

The goal here is simple: Play all the videos that I have ripped from DVD, downloaded from the web, shot with my own cameras or obtained in some other manner, no matter what the format. It sounds simple but Apple TV can’t do it. Video codecs and containers are a nightmare to keep track of, and even more of a nightmare to convert.

This isn’t about photos and music. Apple TV is better at both of those than any of this stuff. It’s also not about renting movies or buying movies, or even streaming movies. Roku has a nice cheap box for that, and Apple TV is suitable if you just want to live inside Steve Jobs’ media store. This is about playing non-DRM movies, pure and simple.

The names might be familiar to you: The Popcorn Hour C-200 by Syabas is quickly gaining cult status (and has its own hacker wiki), while the other four smaller boxes come from brands you probably have experience with, including WD, Seagate, Netgear and Patriot.

My two main tests were simple — I loaded PC and Mac formatted external hard drives with a variety of files ranging from H.264 MP4s to WMVs of several vintages, from raw AVCHD files in MTS wrappers to the hot new DivX 7 MKV. Then I browsed through my local network to a NAS that had a cache of similar files. Could I see them? Could I play them? These shouldn’t be issues, but they’re big issues.

Here’s a rundown of each machine and how they fared in testing:

As you can see, there were clear leaders given my criteria above, but what struck me was how each one differed. Truth is, depending on who you are, any one of these might be the best fit. Here’s what really separates them:

WD TV Live

I would have given this thing the solo spot at the top if it weren’t for a few dings that might very well be fixed in a firmware update: It won’t show you DVD menus on ripped DVD images, and when you play files with the suffix .m4v it won’t fast forward or rewind. Weird bug that can be fixed if you just change .m4v to .mp4, but since that’s the default file naming for Handbrake’s “Apple TV” profile it could be a problem for people, like me, who spent months ripping their entire DVD collection that way.

WD’s strengths include a friendly user-interface with handy video previews, some promising early online services (including Pandora), and the most reasonable photo and music handling I’ve seen in this cluster of gadgets.

Seagate FreeAgent Theater+

I loved this when I tested it a few weeks ago, despite its fugly interface, and it holds up under testing. It does better with ripped .ISO files than WD, doing both DVD menus and chapters (and it doesn’t have that weird .m4v bug either). Video was better, especially when running 1080p content.

The tradeoff is that the interface is bad, and there’s almost nothing in the way of online services. It gets points for making an attempt at sorting music and displaying photos, but if that’s a priority, WD is the better call.

Popcorn Hour C-200

Hardcore AV nerds love this thing, and I understand why. There are more ways to get at video content than in any other set-top box I’ve ever seen, and if you really know how to hack, there’s really not much it can’t do.

It’s a big ole thing — they call it a “network tank” and — despite reminding me of the far cooler ones in Tron — I get it. It has an internal BitTorrent client and you can plug in a Blu-ray drive, for god’s sake. I found very few video formats that it wouldn’t support (FLV was one) but I had to take major points off because for being so big, it has a lame interface, and it comes with an RF remote that only worked when I stood within 1m of it. They even mention that there might be problems with interference, and if people experience that they can buy the IR remote. Great, thanks.

My only question — and it’s not rhetorical — is why spend $US300/$AU599 on this (plus extra for the optional internal HDD and the IR remote) when you can just buy a home-theatre PC?

Patriot Box Office

This was the dark horse of the group, being a late entry by a company known only for computer memory. I was surprised at how well it held up. It actually could decode more tested formats than any other device in this lineup — it did Flash video (FLV), which the three above can’t render. Only the WD and the Patriot show you video previews, too. As small as it is, there’s space for a 2.5-inch SATA drive in there and even a BitTorrent client. You can copy files to and from different drives and the network, and it’s the cheapest of the lot at $US130.

So why did it come in a distant third? Unlike the three above, it can’t read Mac-formatted hard drives, and its video quality was noticeably the worst of the batch. That said, if you are a hacker sort and want something to play with that doesn’t cost as much as Popcorn, set your sights on this.

Netgear Digital Entertainer Live

As you can probably tell by now, Netgear had the most disappointing box of the lineup, despite its Apple TV ripoff look and feel. Lack of Mac media support and the inability to read key file formats — like DivX 7 and AVCHD — meant it couldn’t pass muster with real video fanatics. Its biggest point of woe was the fact that it didn’t support any file over 720p in resolution — whether that’s a software thing or a hardware thing, it’s sure not future-proof and probably best to stay away.

I also didn’t like the fact that its interface is laid out entirely for retail, like an Apple TV without the panache, or a Roku box that costs more and doesn’t do Netflix. Local files were not a priority, and despite the friendly interface, it doesn’t even make an attempt to differentiate photos and music. I did give it a gold star for online services, but only because it had the most in this group — if online services are what you love, buy a Roku, or a TiVo, or an Xbox, or a friggin’ Apple TV.

Still not sure what you’re looking for, check the spec comparisons here:

For ages, map makers have protected their own maps by adding little landmarks and towns that don’t exist, sort of a hiding-in-plain-sight watermark. Well, the Telegraph UK reported, that it had spotted one such town in a Google Map, which was using Tele Atlas data. Argleton, in Lancashire, simply doesn’t exist, even though you can plainly see it. What happened? Apparently, the name was quite possibly sucked up with other data when Tele Atlas’ map makers were busy inputting info from old maps. This isn’t unusual though you’d think there’d be a more rapid fact-checking process. By the way, we didn’t cover it because nowadays, the story isn’t really whether or not Tele Atlas is stealing maps from old dead cartographers, but whether or not Google is stealing the map business from Tele Atlas. [Telegraph UK via Valleywag]

MacLife created a choppy but thorough video of Steve Jobs unveiling everything from the original CRT iMac to the video-camera equipped iPod Nano, with bits of Schiller thrown in out of necessity. It’s a fun encyclopaedic romp (though I’m sure some of you can tell me what’s missing). The biggest reason we didn’t post it? We didn’t want to be sued by all the fanboys who suffered heart attacks — or the ones who maybe escaped cardiac arrest but came away with Teen Wolf palms. [MacLife via 9to5Mac]

After four months up and running, the CruiseCast satellite-TV service for cars bit the dust hard, with refunds and paid un-installations going out to current subscribers. What was AT&T and its partner RaySat thinking when they launched it? $US1300 up front and no major sports channels or adult programming to speak of? That just doesn’t — excuse me, didn’t — make sense. Good thing zero point zero readers fell for it. Right guys? [Engadget]

Just as drug-sniffing dogs can be replaced by machines that aren’t so prone to smack addiction, scientists are developing sensors — nowhere near ready but due in 2012 — that home in on the pheromone released when people experience stress or fear. Like what Leslie Nielsen must have felt when he got that call from OJ, asking about the Naked Gun 10-year reunion. [PopSci]