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"PositiveID (PSID) is to begin a study of its Health Link implantable microchip in diabetic, hypertensive and obese patients. The study -like everything else associated with the company formerly known as VeriChip - is bound to be controversial. The Health Link chip is implanted under a patient's skin. It can be scanned to access the patient's online medical records. The company's critics fear the chip will one day become mandatory, leading to a complete loss of medical privacy, or that Americans will be unable to receive healthcare unless they get chipped. BNET has noted that PositiveID also owns a credit monitoring and identity-theft prevention company, Steel Vault, and that it envisions its chips being linked to Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT) and employers. PositiveID linked credit monitoring and the Health Link chip in its most recent 10-Q. While PositiveID's press release gives few specifics, it indicates that the study will have something to do with the Health Link chip and customers of HealthScreenDirect, a company that offers screening for diabetes and high cholesterol. Its says the study will be: … a prospective, randomized, comparative clinical study that will seek to address improving disease management through the use of appropriate, concise, and up-to-date patient health information available to both practitioners caring for diabetic, hypertensive and obese patients and the patients themselves through the utilization of PositiveID's personal health record (Health Link) and an electronic medical records system. PositiveID CEO Scott R. Silverman said in the statement that the study will also advance the company's in-development glucose-sensing chip. Silverman is doubtless hoping that patients with the chip - and with their health records online - will have better outcomes in terms of managing their diabetes than those doing it the old-fashioned way. The unanswered question is why health record access - or even a microchip

"WASHINGTON, DC - The U.S. Food and Drug Administration, in collaboration with major implantable pacemaker and ICD manufacturers, demonstrated the effects of emissions from radio frequency identification (RFID) readers on common implantable cardiac devices. According to research published in the January edition of the HeartRhythm Journal, the official journal of the Heart Rhythm Society, the observed effects may cause increasing complications as RFID use expands in the medical device field. Read full text of study » The study, which looked at the electromagnetic interference susceptibility of 15 pacemakers and 15 ICDs caused by exposure to 13 RFID readers, concluded that low frequency RFID readers may pose the greatest risk to pacemakers and ICDs. While modern pacemakers and ICDs use filters to minimize susceptibility to higher-frequency signals, there is limited filtering of low frequency signals due to the design constraints of both pacemakers and ICDs."

"In what is being touted as the first time humans have remotely controlled insects, University of California at Berkeley engineers successfully implanted radio-equipped, "miniature neural stimulation" systems into flying beetles-most notably, the "elephant" beetle Megasoma elephas (pictured above), which can grow up to 20 cm (about 7 + inches) in length. * » See also: 2009: Bad Year for Endangered Manatees * » Get EcoWorldly by RSS or sign up by email. There's just one problem: while the engineers are able to control the bug's muscle movements, so far, the beetles can't fly-due to the heft of the micro electronics "on board". Further refinements will need to be made to these systems. Currently, tests are being conducted with miniature solar cells, piezoelectrics (pressure-generated electric power), and other micro-electro-mechanics (MEMs) to power these devices and minimize their weight. The final step would be to equip the insects with miniature cameras and/or microphones. The "cybug" project (note: entomologists do not consider beetles to be true "bugs"; this is a colloquial term) is being funded by DARPA (the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) in the hope that one day the insects might be employed on the battlefield (e.g., to spy on troop movements) or perhaps even sent to spy directly on military commanders' strategy meetings. The chief engineers at UC Berkeley for this cybernetic insect project are Michel Maharbiz and Hirotaka Sato. "

"In a luxury hotel at Suweima, on the eastern shores of the Dead Sea, the Russians held a "Track II" conference this week designed to send a clear message to the Arab world: "We are back." Medvedev talks alongside... Medvedev talks alongside Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, not pictured, after they signed bilateral accords at the Presidential Palace in Cairo on Tuesday. Photo: AP The conference, covered widely in the Arab world but hardly at all in Israel, took place just weeks after the re-launch - after an absence of some 18 years - of an Arabic version of the Moscow News. It also comes at a time of diplomatic stagnation in the Middle East that has led to increased calls from many quarters - particularly the Palestinians and the EU - for various actors in the international community to step in and impose a solution on the parties. Russia, obviously, wants to be one of these actors. Hence the two-day conference, part of the Valdai Discussion Club, put on jointly by the Ria Novosti, the Russian News and Information Agency funded by the government, and the Russian Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, the equivalent to the Council on Foreign relations in the US. The organizers invited a slew of Mideast experts from Russia and the region - including Bahrain, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, the "State of Palestine," Saudi Arabia, Syria and Turkey, with a couple of people from the UK, US and France thrown in for good measure - to discuss whether a comprehensive settlement is possible in the Middle East by 2020. The hope of the conference, said Sergei Karaganov of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy at its outset, was to "generate fresh ideas." Forget about it. The real agenda, it seems, was to implant in the Arab public a sense that Russia has returned to the region and is a player. Some 50 Arab media outlets covered the conference, according to its organizers, and Ria Novosti quoted Al Jazeera as saying, "This is perhaps the first large-scale