Not much info on this new version of Microsoft’s laser mouse, but we do have pics. It seems that the finger and thumb grooves have been removed and the surfaces have been smoothed all over. The thumb inset appears to be much deeper, and the thumb buttons have also been streamlined to be thinner.

This "driverless vehicle" is called a CyberCar (kind of a misnomer in my opinion), but here it is – a car that takes you places but no driver.

It was recently demonstrated in a Northamptonshire town and uses lasers to avoid obstacles. It is described as designed for "short trips at low speeds in an urban environment." Don’t they mean rural environment? I cannot see this in New York!

I dare you to tell me that this doesn’t look exactly like that medical scanner that Bones used in the original Star Trek series. He’d wave this thing over someone’s body and could immediately diagnose whatever was or wasn’t wrong. Of course, that’s not really the case here, as this device is designed to monitor the healing of wounds by measuring a wound’s width and depth without physical contact. By storing the data, the wound healing progression can be more easily tracked and treatments adjusted, making this laser-based device well worth its $6,000 pricetag.

Radboud University Nijmegan (in the Netherlands, and quite a mouthful), has developed a laser-based storage system that is 100 times quicker than the plain old hard drive (POHD) we’re used to. There’s been a bunch of research into light-based computing, and much of it’s been pretty positive–if not yet quite practical. Now, if they can shrink this thing down to a reasonable size, they’ll really have something.

Some nefarious plots to kill off the human population are well-hidden, such as the alien virus that vexed Fox Mulder for so many years. Others are right out in the open, like the Lap Blaster from Pyramat. Those ominous laser-beam eyes are not very well-disguised, and those symbols across the side and bottom? If those aren’t alien instructions for putting the "blast" in "Blaster," then I’m a monkey’s uncle. It’s kind of them to add speakers and a USB iPod dock to the mix, but that’s just to fool the more gullible among us Homo Sapiens.