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.

Every time I think I'm making a fashion-forward joke about modern technology, reality beats me to the punchline. As loyal readers are aware, I tend to make many memorable, high-quality quips about dentists, dentistry, and dental technology. Like the amazing iToothpick, or the greatly anticipated Cybermolar Initiative.

So I was in D.C. last week, going over some Nikolas Tesla material in the National Archives. Tesla, as you may know, was a mad genius -- my favorite kind of genius -- and made many revolutionary contributions to the study of electricity and magnetism around the turn of the century, until Thomas Edison bullied him out of the business. Still, Tesla more or less invented the alternating current (AC) electrical power systems we use today, and I like to keep a sheaf or two of his notes on the nightstand for light bedtime reading.