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A mouse is a mouse, right? You move it, it moves a thingy on the screen, it’s as simple as that. Well not when you’re a hardcore PC gamer it’s not. For these guys, a mouse is a precision tool that needs to react exactly how and when you want it to, or be laughed to the bottom of every scoreboard in town.

And you’re not going to get much more precise than the Sidewinder mouse from Microsoft: a resolution of up to 2000dpi (not that you’ll need it) and interchangeable teflon feet for a smoother glide. You can even swtich cursor speeds live in any game with three adjustable buttons on the top, insert small weights into the body of the mouse to alter momentum, and reprogram all the buttons. It all sounds pretty ridiculous, but you just can’t scoff at this array of options.

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A first-generation commercial brain-computer interface (BCI) is being released by Emotiv Systems later this year. What does the future hold for BCI?

By 2050, and likely sooner, you will be able to buy a BCI device that records all your dreams in their entirety. This will be done in one of two ways. One method would be to use distributed nanobots less than a micrometer in diameter to spread throughout the brain and monitor the activation patterns of neurons. By this point, cognitive science will have advanced enough to know which neural activation patterns correspond to which sensory experiences. This has already been done with cats (using electrodes, not nanobots), where researchers led by scientist Garrett Stanley were able to extrapolate what a cat was seeing merely by monitoring the neurons of its visual cortex.
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It takes a lot of energy to keep the human body warm. So why not harness that power? The Berkeley Lab at UC Berkeley plans to lace silicon nanowires into a power-jacket. The excess heat from the human body would be used to recharge portable electronic devices, such as cell-phones, PSP’s and laptops.

The process being developed is called “electroless etching,” where rough silicon nanowires are synthesized with silver ions on a flat wafer surface. These wafers would be woven into coats and the excess warmth given off by the body would be transformed into energy.

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On March 19, Hitachi Maxell, Ltd. announced the development of new volume optical storage technology that can provide terabyte-level storage capacity in a compact device. Relying on unique nanoimprint technology, the company has succeeded in reducing the thickness of DVDs to 0.092 mm (92 micrometers) — which is 1/13th the thickness of current DVDs — while maintaining the standard capacity of 4.7 GB.

The system features what the company calls Stacked Volumetric Optical Disc (SVOD) technology, which consists of 100 ultra-thin optical discs (12-cm in diameter, the same as current DVDs) loaded into a 6.5-cm (2.5-inch) thick cartridge. The result is a compact optical disc library system (1/10th the conventional size) capable of combining random access memory and long-term storage.
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Scientists at the Boston Retinal Implant Project recently developed an implant that will help those with degenerative blindness see again.Although not a complete bionic eye, this implant is a huge step forward in that direction. It works by being implanted at the back of the eyeball and transmitting light to the brain via a tiny nerve.

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