Apparently the ultra-limited edition of her expanded first album includes a booklet with these pics (and others) but also a lock of Lady GaGa's hair. [Daily Mail]

The little interlude in the middle of that clip involves Robert Conrad and his partner investigating the cyborg killing spree... which, whatever. But the subplot, about the cyborg and the woman who loves him, is actually surprisingly great. (In a bit of forced irony, in a later scene she tells the cyborg he's a wonderful man and laments that all the men she usually meets are "so plastic.")

Balog was just written up in the Wall Street Journal for his Extreme Ice Survey, which involves a mix of mountaineering and nature photography to capture the effects of global warming. Balog explains:

Q: How did you come up with the idea for "Extreme Ice Survey"?

A: The New Yorker asked me to shoot a story on climate change in 2005, and I wound up going to Iceland to shoot a glacier. The real story wasn't the beautiful white top. It ended up being at the terminus of the glacier where it's dying. That idea gestated in my mind for a year and eventually turned into the "Extreme Ice Survey" in 2006.

Q: How do images of glaciers collapsing bring the idea of climate change home?

A: There were a lot of repeat photos that showed glaciers retreating over a hundred years. That's pretty abstract. I wanted to show a shorter term time lapse that would make people think, "My god, little Emily was in first grade in April and she's in second grade in October. I remember this. It's happening in my life."

The EIS photos are arresting and heartbreaking — they show the icebergs breaking off from the glaciers and going out to sea, and in one case you can actually see an iceberg on a beach where surf and sand meet the deaths of the icecaps. There are some utterly lovely pictures of "meltwater" floating on top of the ice, as well as some disgusting images showing the silt-befouled water encroaching on the ice, over the past few years.

But meanwhile, Balog's site also has a section called "Techno Sapiens" which celebrates the cyborgs in our midst, including gorgeous looking artificial limbs and wearable computers. Back in 1996, Balog talked to Fortune Magazine about it:

On the following pages, photographer James Balog documents what he calls Techno sapiens: fusions of humans and machines that can be found today in American research labs and hospitals, and even on the streets. Add up the images, says Balog, and it's not hard to envision a race of flesh-and-technology beings with electric hands, legs of steel that run a two-minute mile, and perceptual powers unknown in nature. "Imagine you are a traveler from another galaxy," Balog says. "You land in North America today and look around carefully, with fresh eyes. This is what you might see."

It's an interesting contrast, but maybe not a contradiction: He worries what we're doing to the planet, but he's also celebrated the way we're transforming ourselves.

There are tons more photos at the links. [Extreme Ice Survey and James Balog Photography]

Icebergs 200 feet tall, formerly part of the Greenland Ice Sheet, float into the North Atlantic Ocean, raising sea levels as they melt.

Jökulsárlón, Iceland. Decaying ice and icebergs on the surface of the Jökulsárlón in southeast Iceland. The ice drains off the great icecap called the Vatnajökull.

Columbia Glacier, Alaska. Columbia Glacier calves icebergs into Columbia Bay west of Valdez, Alaska. The ice shown in the bergs was deposited in snowstorms 300 to 500 years ago.

Columbia Glacier, Alaska. Contrasts between clean glacial melt water and water laden with eroded silt color these lakes on the surface of the East Fork of Columbia Glacier. Black stripes are erosional debris called "moraines."

Svínafellsjökull Glacier, Iceland. An EIS team member provides scale in a massive landscape of crevasses on the Svínafellsjökull Glacier in Iceland.

Greenland Ice Sheet, Greenland. On the surface of the Greenland Ice Sheet east of Kangerlussuaq, a meltwater stream known by the French word "moulin" (in English it means "mill," as in windmill).

Icebergs calved from Whiteout Glacier, Alaska.

River water and seawater polish the surface of a berg in Iceland.

Meltwater on surface of Columbia Glacier, Columbia Bay, Alaska.

Decaying ice and icebergs on the surface of the Jökulsárlón in southeast Iceland. The ice drains off the great icecap called the Vatnajokull.

Meltwater on surface of Columbia Glacier, Columbia Bay, Alaska.

Kenny's Arm

Breathing Observation Bubble

Wearable computer

1960s and before:

1970s:

1980s:

1990s:

2000s:

Robocop fights Otomo, the Japanese cyborg, in Robocop 3.

Cable, Rob Liefeld's most endearing creation.

Ricardo Delgado's concept art for the revamped Borg in 1996's Star Trek: First Contact.

The movie version of Johnny Mnemonic (1995)

Cain from Robocop 2

Seven Of Nine, the most famous of the Borg

The aptly named Cyborg Ninja debuts in the Metal Gear series (1998)

The 1995 anime film based the manga series Ghost In The Shell

Mantrid from Lexx (1998)

The Borg Queen in Star Trek: First Contact

Data and the Borg Queen share a passionate kiss after human skin grafts have turned Data into a cyborg, in Star Trek: First Contact.

The Universal Soldier

Jean-Luc Picard becomes Locutus Of Borg

The Engineer, from The Authority comics series

The Cyborg Superman

The Cyborg Superman, from one of his more recent appearances

LadyTron, from Alan Moore's run on WildC.A.T.S.

Cyborg 2, featuring a young Angelina Jolie as the cyborg bounty hunter Cash Reese.

Cameron Hodge, X-Men villain; bespectacled anti-mutant terrorist with cybernetic scorpion body (1990).

Random cyborg art of the 1990s, which I couldn't find the source or artist for.

Robocop fights Otomo, the Japanese cyborg, in Robocop 3.

Cable, Rob Liefeld's most endearing creation.

Ricardo Delgado's concept art for the revamped Borg in 1996's Star Trek: First Contact.

The movie version of Johnny Mnemonic (1995)

Cain from Robocop 2

Seven Of Nine, the most famous of the Borg

The aptly named Cyborg Ninja debuts in the Metal Gear series (1998)

The 1995 anime film based the manga series Ghost In The Shell

Mantrid from Lexx (1998)

The Borg Queen in Star Trek: First Contact

Data and the Borg Queen share a passionate kiss after human skin grafts have turned Data into a cyborg, in Star Trek: First Contact.

The Universal Soldier

Jean-Luc Picard becomes Locutus Of Borg

The Engineer, from The Authority comics series

The Cyborg Superman

The Cyborg Superman, from one of his more recent appearances

LadyTron, from Alan Moore's run on WildC.A.T.S.

Cyborg 2, featuring a young Angelina Jolie as the cyborg bounty hunter Cash Reese.

Cameron Hodge, X-Men villain; bespectacled anti-mutant terrorist with cybernetic scorpion body (1990).

Judge Dredd fights a giant cyborg ape, on his flying motorcycle... really, what more than that could you possibly need?

The Fantastic Four's nemesis, a Chinese cyborg vampire named Doctor Sun (1974).

Deathlok, Marvel Comics' cyborg superhero, from 1974.

The Bicentennial Man by Isaac Asimov.

Cyborg by Martin Caidin, the novel which inspired The Six Million Dollar Man.

Darkoth, Dr. Doom's cybernetic demon.

Cyborg — one half of the Cyborg And Mutton toy line. Because what goes with mutton? Cyborgs. Apparently.

Davros, creator of Doctor Who's mutant cyborg Daleks, as introduced in 1975.

Steve Austin, Six Million Dollar Man himself. Ho ho ho.

This is one of the best destructo-scenes from early 1990s flick Eve of Destruction, which features the nuke-hearted creation of a mad scientist who made one small miscalculation when building her AI. She decided to base its mind on her own, without getting therapy first. And our mad scientist was, sadly, raped by dudes who called her a bitch. Which makes the cyborg who inherited her memories a little, well, sensitive.

Of course, who wouldn't be sensitive when that dude says, "Say hellooooooo." Gross!

When the cyborg escapes the lab, with a thermonuclear device in her heart, she's just trying to explore. But then these asswipes remind her of the whole bitch thing, and she goes on a mission of revenge. Which could end in mega-explosions. Starring the awesome Gregory Hines as the cop who has to reel in the damaged bot, this is actually a pretty good twist on the standard cyborg flick. Plus there are sleazy beard dudes who get it right where it counts.

Eve of Destruction via IMDB

It gets more demented: the robot is controlled via a Bluetooth connection — which means anybody with a cellphone can probably hack its little rat cortex — and the brain is kept inside a bell jar, just like Sylvia Plath's. The rat neurons can send instructions to the robot body, but they can also get signals back. And it has a personality, say researchers:

According to Kevin Warwick, one of the researchers, "It's quite funny - you get differences between the brains. This one is a bit boisterous and active, while we know another is not going to do what we want it to." Warwick later speculates that much of the difference between rat and human brains lies in the number of neurons and not the neurons themselves. Picking on that particular statement, since I think it's a pretty bold claim, you have to wonder about animals like whales and elephants who have one to two times the number of neurons we do. If he's right and it's the number of neurons that makes the difference, we are literally killing sentient beings. Of course, to the people who are killing blue whales and elephants, that doesn't matter one bit.

[Mendicant Bug, thanks Chris!]

Abiocor makes this total artificial heart, shown off to an alarming extent in Crank 2. Want to buy one for your collection, or to stick in your chest when gangsters steal your ticker? They're right here. Today OObject has a great collection of cyborg technologies, and these are just a few of them. Here you can see the way researchers are building cybernetic muscles for robots that work via pneumatics. Put two of these pneumatic bags inside a leg and they control its actuators by stretching (expelling air) or contracting (filling with air). They function very much like real muscles and are strong as well as shock-absorbing. Learn more about your future muscle replacements here.


You can also keep on puffing down those cigarettes because we've got this nice artificial lung to pop into your chest when the inferior biological version has been topped off with sludge. How would it work? Find out more here.
And of course if you lose the use of your ears, you can always implant new ones. These cochlear implants, which are becoming more common all the time, are embedded in your skull and connect directly to the neurocircuitry of your inner ear. You can find an amazing book about a man who had a cochlear implant installed here.

See more genuine cyborg technologies on OObject!

Now, we know that this list is going to upset more than a few of you (Especially if you disliked the three Star Wars prequels), but we're not ranking these killer robots in order of awesome - Because then you would have seen IG-88 and KARR, amongst others - nor even in order of evil, but literally in terms of estimated kill-rate. Which robot has killed the most living things? That's all we're interested in.

So, get started with the countdown, and feel free to dispute our choices in the comments. Just don't send a robot after us, to change our minds.

Who else have we missed? Tell all here.

Next: See who didn't make the list.

Next: Science Fiction's Most Killhappy Robots!

Next: Planet-Eating Robots!

Next: Genocidal Robots With A Plan!