Put this bulbous contraption on your head and you'll suddenly have a total of 63 doodads manipulating your scalp. Bet you didn't know you needed the Headtime Scalp Massager by Kinatech, packed with 29 silicone head scratchers and 34 ceramic thingamajigs to make sure your head is promptly put in the right place.

Could that plethora of moving parts makes too much noise? Perhaps its manufacturer feels the same, trying to drown out the humming of all those magic fingers with an internal speaker piping in what it calls "soothing sounds of nature." Adding to the comfort is a temperature controller, warming things up if you're feeling too cool for words. We'd rather have it cooling us down.

We're thinking it might feel pretty good to have such a helmet busying itself about our crania, but as far as pricing goes, it has us scratching our heads. Check out this mechanical chapeau's mildly scary insides:

In order to advertise its Regza SV LCD HDTV, Toshiba headed out to the Black Rock Desert. There, company reps hooked an armchair up to a huge helium balloon with some cameras attached. The resulting footage of the chair traveling up to the edge of space is absolutely amazing. Enough to make me want to buy one of their TVs? Not quite, but my God, what a great ad.

Toshiba, via Gizmodo

Why do companies continue to try and hawk video phones? I'm not talking about phones that play video, but a phone that transmits both your voice and your face during a call. For 50 years, futurists have envisioned them and every attempt has been met by yawns if not outright contempt, largely because two people had to have the same equipment (which is why webcam video chatting has been widely adopted).

But here we go again. A company called Saygus (no, I've never heard of them either) will soon unveil the VPhone V1, a two-way video Android phone the company says Verizon will carry in the next few months. Using low bandwidth technology, Saygus says it can transmit real-time VGA video via a pinhole camera lens located to the right of the earpiece speaker — which means a lot of ear-oil smudging the lens, possibly resulting in gauzy images. You'll also be able to save the video chats to a remote server.

Obviously the only way this works is if two people buy a VPhone, or if other cellphone makers start equipping their phones with similarly located lenses and compatible video capabilities, more likely when wider-bandwidth 4G networks are launched a year or so from now.

VPhone may be a viable Android phone without the video. It's got a 5MP camera with flash on the rear, a slide-out horizontal QWERTY keyboard, a large 3.5-inch touchscreen, Wi-Fi, and a hefty 7-hour rated talk time. Saygus says the battery will give you four hours of video chatting, if you can find anyone else to chat with.

The goal of the Green Life competition was to produce ecologically friendly solutions that were design-centric without looking completely unrealistic. One of the top three winners accomplished that feat by designing the "shelf."

China's Leon Zhu came up with this innovative yet simple way to simultaneously protect your car's exterior from the elements and collect solar energy. The idea is that when folded the shelf would provide energy for the car's electronic systems and air conditioning system. This idea is so practical and useful it's probably one of the few winners that will actually see their design come to fruition.

Via Design Boom

You might have heard about harnessing the power of algae to make biofuels, but the team at Joule Biotechnologies decided started from scratch — by redesigning the organisms themselves.

They genetically engineered organisms that use photosynthesis to directly create the molecules that form the basis of diesel. Their SolarConverter array system suspends these organisms in a solution within a light-permeable structure that looks something like a solar panel array. Point these arrays at the sun, and the critters turn carbon dioxide and sunlight into biodiesel. They expect their first plant to be online by 2011.

Unlike traditional biofuels, like ethanol, the SolarConverter requires no farmland to grow the corn or other feedstock. In fact, the sunnier and more "useless" the land, the better.

Beyond fueling long-distance trucks, you could picture this system sitting beside large-scale solar farms or wind farms. Joule-biodiesel-powered generators could provide the green energy needed to cover the times of day when the sun doesn't shine and wind doesn't blow.

Via Joule Biotechnologies

You still have holiday shopping left to do, I'm betting. Well, guess what? Not anymore. Bam. You're done. You're buying one of these spinning tops.

Mark Frauenfelder from Boing Boing writes: "My daughter earned this spinning top for selling wrapping paper in a school fundraiser. It plays the theme from Beverly Hills Cop and draws a laser circle on the floor. Thirty years ago the technology in this toy would have cost $100,000."

A laser light show and the theme from Beverly Hills Cop? Begging Mr. Frauenfelder's pardon, I say this toy is still worth $100,000. Check it out in the video above.

Via Boing Boing

NVIDIA put out a call for fancy casemods using its ION ITX platform. What came back? Well, fancy casemods!

The ION Cube is a design by Bill Owen of Mnpctech.com, and it won first place in NVIDIA's competition. It's a fully functional computer — one that glows, to boot. "The concept reminded me of when LEGOS started incorporating UV Green parts into their "Space" sets in the late 70s and continue to today," Owen said of his design.

Check out more in the gallery below.

It's official, folks: Brita can start selling lunar water filters. NASA confirmed the presence of lunar agua today with a cheeky: "The argument that the moon is a dry, desolate place no longer holds water." Oh, NASA!

One month ago NASA's LCROSS spacecraft crashed onto the lunar surface, sending up a plume of moon dust to be analyzed. It's that plume that has yielded the amazing discovery. "We are ecstatic," LCROSS principal investigator Anthony Colaprete said. "Multiple lines of evidence show water was present in both the high angle vapor plume and the ejecta curtain created by the LCROSS Centaur impact. The concentration and distribution of water and other substances requires further analysis, but it is safe to say Cabeus holds water."

Translation: maybe not enough water to fill my lunar pool (shown here in the artist rendering above), but perhaps enough to prove useful to our future exploitation exploration of the moon.

NASA, via PhysOrg

Sure, this might look exactly like a dentist chair, but it's designed to provide you with the exact opposite of the stress that going to the dentist delivers. Instead, it's a therapy system by Neuronetics called the NeuroStar Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation Therapy System. OK!

Designed to help people with serious depression, the system delivers short magnetic field pulses to the left prefrontal cortex as an alternative to medication. Apparently, in trials, people responded very well to the therapy. But really, they could have made it look a little less like a dentist's chair.

NeuroStar via Gizmodo

Today, the world comes to an end. Well, in theaters, anyway. 2012 has us thinking about the apocalypse 'round these parts (so uplifting, we know), and that led us to wondering about all the crazy technology that's all around us — technology that at one point or another caused widespread fear that it was all over. It's happened several times, yet we're still here.

Make sure to knock on some wood before you click Continue, because here's six technologies that haven't ended the world — yet.

It was weird enough that scientists said a bird dropping a piece of bread on an electrical substation managed to shut down power to the Large Hadron Collider. Now two respected physicists are blaming that incident on a time-traveling bird, which was said to thwart the collider's mission of finding the Higgs boson, a particle thought to be the building block that gives everything in the universe its mass.

Bech Nielsen of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto theorize that there's something so dangerous about the collider, time travelers are coming back to 2009 and sabotaging the experiment. They're calling it "reverse chronological causation." That's right folks, it's a bird, flying right out of the Time Tunnel, saving the universe. Or could future life forms be trying to keep us from traveling to the stars?

Come to think of it, every time scientists try to capture the illusive Higgs boson, there are inexplicable failures. Twice, in 1993 and 2000, funding suddenly dried up for two separate projects. And then this Large Hadron Collider has had a series of setbacks, including one incident where a physicist was accused of terrorist activity.

So what do we do, wait around until thousands of years from now to finally find out if there really is something horribly dangerous about finding the Higgs boson? Or should we go on about our business, innocently trying to stumble upon the secrets of the building blocks of the universe? Note to future humans: if you're saving us from doomsday, thanks.

Via Time

Tablets! They've never really caught on before, but it seems like we're on the cusp of a big movement to give it another shot. This ICD Vega tablet is set to come loaded up with the Android OS in 7, 11 and 15-inch varieties early next year.

Look for these bad boys to come with a Tegra processor, 512MB DDR DRAM, 802.11b/g Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth 2.1. It'll have 512MB of flash storage that can be expanded via MicroSD cards. They're hoping to keep it cheap, which may mean carrier subsidies. But that's if anyone actually wants a tablet in the first place. We'll see!

ICD via Gizmodo

Now you can have all the fun of a Segway without looking like a dork. Notice how the Cool Rider is positioned to be a much more stylish conveyance, ridden by a suave gentleman with an insouciant sunglasses-wearing air.

He's probably happy that he can zip along at 12mph, looking cool while spending $1250 for the privilege, about a quarter the price of the much-geekier Segway. If he wants to be really daring, he can don a pair of roller blades and ditch that standing sled altogether. Try that, mall cop.

There's a lovely lady about to try out her inline skates on one, too: