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Truth be told, we've already seen instances where technology has enabled individuals to speak without speaking, but a brain implant placed into Eric Ramsey's head could certainly raise the bar in this field.

"roots" began growing out of his arms and feet after he cut his knee in a teenage accident.

As the founder of a charity called Help Hospitalized Veterans, which distributes craft kits to veterans' hospitals, Roger Chapin of San Diego pays himself and his wife more than $500,000 a year in salary... Of the $70 million Help Hospitalized Veterans took in last year, only 31 percent went to the actual charitable cause.

The process, dubbed targeted muscle reinnervation (TMR), works by rewiring residual nerves that once carried information to the now-lost appendage to the chest; when the person thinks to move their arm, the chest muscle contracts, and with the help of an electromyogram (EMG), the signal is "directed to a microprocessor in the artificial arm which decodes the data and tells the arm what to do.

CNN aims to find out by opening an I-Report hub in Second Life, a three-dimensional virtual world created entirely by its residents.

Just as CNN asks its real-life audience to submit I-Reports -- user-generated content submitted from cell phones, computers, cameras and other equipment for broadcast and online reports -- the network is encouraging residents of Second Life to share their own "SL I-Reports" about events occurring within the virtual world.

CNN's in-world I-Report hub includes a news desk where CNN producers will hold weekly editorial discussions, and an amphitheater for larger in-world events, such as training sessions and appearances by CNN anchors and correspondents.

"If you define intelligence as the capacity to solve problems, plants have a lot to teach us," says Mancuso, dressed in harmonizing shades of his favorite color: green. "Not only are they 'smart' in how they grow, adapt and thrive, they do it without neuroses. Intelligence isn't only about having a brain."

plants have a lot to contribute in fields as disparate as robotics and telecommunications. For instance, current projects at the LINV include a plant-inspired robot in development for the European Space Agency. The "plantoid" might be used to explore the Martian soil by dropping mechanical "pods" capable of communicating with a central "stem," which would send data back to Earth.

Mancuso decided to use the controversial term "plant neurobiology" to reinforce the idea that plants have biochemistry, cell biology and electrophysiology similar to the human nervous system.

What do you get when you combine Google Maps with hyper-local news and comments?

The site detects where you are located and serves up news stories about events that recently occurred in your city or neighborhood, as well comments from YourStreet members who live nearby.

The Storm Worm botnet (thought to be the largest network of compromised machines in the world) has begun to figure out which security researchers are trying to disrupt its command-and-control systems and knock them offline with unmanagable crapfloods from its zillions of zombie machines. The worm can figure out which users are trying to probe its command-and-control servers, and it retaliates by launching DDoS attacks against them, shutting down their Internet access for days, says Josh Korman, host-protection architect for IBM/ISS, who led a session on network threats. “As you try to investigate [Storm], it knows, and it punishes,” he says. “It fights back.”

However, there are still plenty of questions about how much money the site can really generate long term. When Yahoo apparently tried to buy Facebook last year for $1.62 billion, the math still seemed ridiculous and hard to support.

Indaba, which launched earlier this year, provides a meeting ground for musicians. Anyone can upload a track — whether it's a beat, or a melody or a full-fledged song — and can solicit other musicians to record new or different parts. Similarly, musicians looking to add or build on other people's songs can search for these open "sessions," which are tagged by genre and instrument. They can ask to be invited to play and can send audition tracks.

Though the Indaba guys were at Harvard at the same time as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, and plan to release their own Facebook application

For each word you get right, we donate 10 grains of rice to the United Nations World Food Program.

The debate over RFID implants continues to rage on several fronts, as California has just enacted a measure prohibiting employers from requiring employees to get tagged.

There is evidence that the massive Storm Worm botnet is being broken up into smaller networks, and a ZDNet post thinks that's a surefire sign that the CPU power is up for sale to spammers and denial-of-service attackers.

With childhood obesity rates tripling in the last 15 years, Kaiser Permanente has decided to do something about this growing epidemic: It plans to introduce a video game.

Here's the next step in mankind's never-ending quest for eternal life: Ink Afterlife, where cremated and ground-up ashes are mixed in with printer ink, and end up in a photograph.

Internet giant Google said Thursday it will give $20 million to the first private group to land a roving robot on the lunar surface

For a team to win the $20 million grand prize, its vehicle must ramble at least a quarter-mile over the lunar surface and send video back to Earth. A $10 million second prize is reserved for the first spacecraft that can't rove but still transmits data from moon to Earth.

Surfing the net has become an obsession for many Americans with the majority of U.S. adults feeling they cannot go for a week without going online and one in three giving up friends and sex for the Web.

"People told us how anxious, isolated and bored they felt when they are forced off line," said Ann Mack, director of trend spotting at JWT, which conducted the survey to see how technology was changing people's behavior. "They felt disconnected from the world, from their friends and family," she told Reuters.

48 percent of respondents agreeing they felt something important was missing without Internet access.

the numbers of characters that have fallen victim is thought to be in the thousands.

The digital disease instantly killed lower level characters and did not take much longer to kill even powerful characters.

Many online discussion sites were buzzing with reports from the disaster zones with some describing seeing "hundreds" of bodies lying in the virtual streets of the online towns and cities.

Stony Stevenson writes to mention that some security researchers are claiming that the Storm Worm has grown so massive that it could rival the world's top supercomputers in terms of raw power. "Sergeant said researchers at MessageLabs see about 2 million different computers in the botnet sending out spam on any given day, and he adds that he estimates the botnet generally is operating at about 10 percent of capacity. 'We've seen spikes where the owner is experimenting with something and those spikes are usually five to 10 times what we normally see,' he said, noting he suspects the botnet could be as large as 50 million computers. 'That means they can turn on the taps whenever they want to.'"