Furthering the Internet's ambition to penetrate every available aspect of our lives, we have today a little gadget called the Chumby . It's a wireless Internet device, about the size of a coffee mug, that displays a constantly updated rotation of online content. (Chumby's not in stores yet, but is expected to sell for around $200.) Unfortunate name, you might say, but I dunno. I've seen worse. Nintendo's Wii continues to puzzle and disturb me. Then there was the iSmell, the Shling, and the Burning Love Pouch. Really -- these and others are rounded up here at PC Magazine.

So I had to get some stitches this week when a tray full of retroviral plasmid samples came flying across the lab and smacked me in the head. Happens pretty regularly, actually. Poltergeists, you see. There are those who say that it was a mistake to build my lab atop the sanctified Chippewa Burial Grounds for the Criminally Insane (later the LeVay Memorial Sanitarium for Lepers and Satanic Cultists), but hey -- the price was right.

I've become something of a sucker for industrial design ever since I split a Brooklyn coldwater flat with Raymond Loewy back in -- well, it was a while ago. Ray was a good guy. Clearly brilliant, but very … meticulous is the polite term, I think. He could not abide an apartment that was anything less than completely spic-and-span at all times. We had an Oscar and Felix thing going. Rumor has it he designed the Leisurama style of prefab housing just to get me out of the apartment. Anyway…

Here's an item that illustrates a dilemma that has long plagued the consumer electronics industry. We have devices to play our various media, yes. Devices to connect us all wirelessly to one another and the Internet. Devices to capture images in still frame and in motion, and even devices to shave our legs, brush our teeth, and massage our feet. But where are the devices that dance?

Over the years, I have honed a certain preternatural sensitivity to marketing hype. It's a kind of information sickness, I've been told. The more oversold and hyperbolically hyped an upcoming product, the queasier I feel. The iPhone phenomenon, as you might expect, very nearly put me in the hospital.

Even those who are not at all handy -- or into gadgets and general tech-fetishism -- dig the Leatherman tools. They're just so cool -- an entire toolbox in your pocket, with enough options to fuel dozens of MacGyver daydreams. I once escaped from a maximum security prison in Kiev using only a Leatherman, a fax machine, and a contact lens. Long story. Still on file at Interpol, actually, so I can't go into details.

Something about the concept of alternative batteries appeals to eco-friendly tech-nerd inside of me. We recently discussed the paper battery initiative , and now I come across this new prototype initiative by Sony concerning batteries that run on sugar .

While my background is principally in theoretical physics, applied metallurgy and subsonic detonations, you might be surprised to know that I can also bring the block-rocking beats. So I'm psyched to talk about today's item, an electronic supergadget that may well prove to be among the first genuinely new musical instruments of the 21st century. 

In Nürnberg hat eine Art Geisterrestaurant eröffnet: Bestellung und Lieferung laufen darin vollautomatisch ab. Oops, wait a sec. Wrong language. Sometimes I slip into German when perusing source material. Or Korean. Or Maori or Gaelic or Latin. Sucks to be icosalingual sometimes.

I so admire initiative in the young people today. And so I'm pleased to report on the ongoing development of a next-generation home-brewing machine designed to streamline the process of making your own beer.

The idea of virtual worlds has been around a long time. It's something of an industry now, what with The Sims , and Second Life , and the mushrooming universe of MMORPGs . It's no longer science fiction, or even just kinda real. It's really real, and people really do live entire lives online.

Laundry has forever been an occupational hazard for me. Back when I did contract work for the Hanso Foundation , I used to come home covered in voracious little nanobots that liked to eat the stitching out of my lab coats. They also preferred corduroy, for some reason. I had to design a sub-molecular dry-cleaning machine to eradicate the little idiots. My patent application was denied, however, when the machine somehow caused a temporal rift near Alpha Centauri .

Typically, I am not one to discuss bathroom matters any more than I absolutely have to. There is a certain strain of stalwart American Puritanism in my blood, and a regrettable subsequent squeamishness. But I have a firm belief that Penetrating Eye of Science must be unflinching, and so we proceed with not one, but two, toilet-related technology items.