A bit late to the party on this one, as I just caught a pointer to this story from Digg. The Project Censored group named net neutrality the “Top Censored Story of 2007” due to its being ignored entirely by mainstream media.

Want to learn ballroom dancing? Don't feel like having all that icky physical contact with a human being? Well, you're in luck! Japanese researchers have invented a ballroom dancing robot partner for you. Once again, technology comes to the aide of misanthropes and shut-ins everywhere who want to avoid actual human contact.

Wired has this story about researchers at UCLA coming up with what has to be the most assinine form of DRM yet: a DVD that will be encoded so it will only play for the person who specifically bought it. This is accomplished through some handwaving mumbo-jumbo involving that recent poster child of privacy invasion: the RFID chip.

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One of the neat things about the ever-dropping price of technology is how people end up using off-the-shelf parts to create things that just a short time ago were the domain of government-funded organizations or large corporations.

Last year, one such project prompted governments into action as a man in New Zealand started to document his homemade cruise missle project.

A bit more on the benign side of things is this high-altitude unmanned glider project. Capable of being released from the edge of the atmosphere, such a glider could be used for all sorts of research, including a very cheap way of performing aerial surveys of remote areas.

Neurologists at the Wadsworth Center in Albany have designed a cap that allows people to manipulate a cursor on a screen by just thinking. Previously, this has been achieved only by invasive methods where small wire arrays were placed within the brain to monitor individual brain regions.

The focus of the research is on helping the disabled be able to control computers and by extensions, lights, robotic arms, etc. Personally, I can't wait until they just release the cap for general use. Not having to push a mouse around would be a big relief to my wrist, but I wouldn't want to have brain surgury just to be free from the threat of carpal tunnel syndrome.

I thought John would find this amusing, since he's a surfer and all.

Intel has built a surfboard with an embedded wireless laptop. [Read More!]

Not content with a single bank transaction, The New Scientist is reporting that there's a quantum cryptography network now running between Harvard and BBN Technologies. The two are connected with 10 Km of fiber optic cable and employ custom servers, making it very expensive. However, BBN is the company that created the use of @, among other things, so I expect the current Qnet will grow, and we'll wonder how we ever lived without it.

Starship Troopers was Robert Heinlein's novel about future soldiers. One feature of the book, besides a very right-wing political stance, was the suits worn by the soldiers in battle. Just as inventors made real the remote controlled hands in Heinlein's novella Waldo, the military is looking to nanotechnology and MIT to make battle suits. [Read More!]

You know, you can spend millions of dollars on research, burn the midnight oil, and pour out your blood, sweat, and tears to make money off of nanotech. Or, you could just accidentally include a future buzzword du jour in your company's name and accidentally reap the rewards.

Fools are tossing their money at anything that remotely sounds like the new new thing. I guess the economy is picking up.