In the USDA experiment, cows equipped with special ear receivers (like iPods for cows) receive signals from a remote controlling station. By giving them irritating stimuli, such as unpleasant sounds, they can direct the cows to move in a certain direction. They can even play them traditional "gathering songs" used by cowboys to group the herd. Based on invisible fence technology used by ranchers, the devices were upgraded by MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory to include GPS and a full suite of animal diagnostics. That could make it very easy to track and return a lost pet, and it could be a huge boon to biologists who track and study wildlife. Image by: Flikr.

A Futuristic Linkage of Animals and Electronics. [U.S. Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service]

Sometimes here at io9, we have to stretch a little to fit cool sci-fi buzzwords like "cyborg" or "post-apocalypse" into our science headlines. But sometimes the scientists do it for us. A team of scientists recently grafted vascular smooth muscle cells and epithelial umbilical cells onto a scaffold of poly-urethane, forming flexible artificial veins and arteries. They referred to this as "cyborg engineering." Once they started pumping blood through them, they found the cyborg veins worked better under vascular pressure. They hope to use them in coronary bypass surgeries, in which a vein from another part of the body is used to shunt a vein around a blockage.

Artificial veins are just a first step toward engineering artifical organs. Not only would this give us a near limitless supply of replacement organs (no more dramatic "tricking hospital administrators into allowing a patient onto the donor waiting list" scenes on House), but we could design the organs to be more healthy and perfect than real ones. You could celebrate your 50th birthday with a batch of fresh, young organs. Your cyborg grandpa might live to be 200. Image by: Science Daily.

'Cyborg Engineering' Enables Coronary Bypass Grafting Using Artificial Veins And Arteries. [Science Daily]

[Twitch]

Iron lungs are no longer manufactured, because there are many more portable devices that can help paralyzed people breathe. Apparently Odell suffered from a spinal deformity from the polio that made an iron lung her only option. Because it was so heavy, she rarely moved. Her family and a series of community volunteers cared for her. She had a mirror over her head that allowed her to meet people's eyes via reflection, and used a voice-operated computer. In addition, she had a breath-controlled TV remote, so she could watch her favorite soaps via a display also mounted over her head. Because she could not live without the iron lung, Odell was a true cyborg — half human, half machine.

When she was created, there were thousands of cyborgs like her, as you can see in this photograph of a hospital filled with people in iron lungs, below.

Tennessee Woman Who Spent Her Life in an Iron Lung Dies [AP]

Painted by concept artist Koshime and posted on the eye-blisteringly awesome Gorilla Art Fare blog, this is like some kind of dark cyber version of an armored bear from the His Dark Materials trilogy. Koshime (AKA Dr CM Wong) is a concept artist based in the UK, who also works as a doctor. He's interested in space medicine specifically, though we're hoping he's also working on creating giant robo-bears.

You can see more of Koshime's art here.

Easter — Shot in the Wild [Gorilla Art Fare]

After watching the movie, all the way through, it's never entirely clear to me exactly why the Daleks want to capture healthy human women in stripper heels in the first place. They make a huge show of "interrogating" the women, but never actually ask any questions. It's also not clear if they want to mate with these women — which would be quite out of character for the Daleks, who are obsessed with racial purity on Doctor Who. Even when they finally accept human DNA, only one cell in a billion is worthy of cultivation.

Abducted starts with three women picking up a fourth (who's really a Dalek agent) and then as they're driving down the street, they run over a super-fake looking alien and their car is wrecked. Even though there's a woman-skinning serial killer at large, the four women wander off into the forest, split up and then decide to remove their clothes randomly. And that's when the Daleks grab them with their teleportation device. I love the fact that the women don't notice they've been teleported to an alien spaceship and are surrounded by Daleks, until one Dalek makes a throat-clearing noise.

The interrogation doesn't go very well, so first the Daleks bring in their sexy human agent, who dresses up like a dominatrix and threatens the women with a big bullwhip. And then the Daleks set their ray guns on vibrate and train them on the women:

Note: I actually made three clips of Abducted, but decided to put up only two because so many people have mentioned a bug where all the videos start playing at once when they click through on a post. Let me know if I should add an extra clip, or if the simultaneous launch issue would be too annoying.

Update: Here's that third clip, by request:

Unlike Park's previous mega-hits, like Old Boy and Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, Cyborg didn't become a giant box office hit in Korea. But it's doing pretty well in the film festival circuit overseas — it won an award in Berlin, and opened the festival in Hong Kong. It plays next at the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival on March 15th and 16th. Here's a quick analysis of what I felt were the most unique aspects of this movie:

Characters:
Beginning with overly imaginative, schizophrenic Il-Sun — played by pop heartthrob Rain — the story includes some unforgettable characters you learn to love. There's an elder woman with myth-o-mania, a guy who sewed up his own butt, a guy who fell in platonic love with a calf he was raising, a woman who's obsessed with her skin and her flying socks, and a girl whose dream is to join the Edelweiss Choir. And then there's Young-goon, who is convinced she is a cyborg with a mission to obliterate all "white coats" but isn't quite sure how she's supposed to recharge her batteries (instead of eating lunch, she has a lunch box full of alkaline cells that she sticks in her mouth at mealtimes). "I didn't come with an instruction manual," she says.

Emotional baggage:
Humans have a lot of emotional baggage. Perhaps one of the reasons Young-goon decided she was a cyborg was because she stopped feeling things — or she felt too much and inadvertently turned it all off. We get glimpses of her past, which include a grandmother who was convinced her offspring were all mice and a mother who avoided her child's existential questions by turning to radish. Later, when she finds the secret cyborg manifesto while staying at the hospital, it stipulates that the seven deadly sins for cyborgs are sympathy, thankfulness, hesitation, daydreaming, being sad, restlessness, and feeling guilty. In one of my favorite scenes in the movie, Il-sun performs a virtual operation on Young-goon, taking away her sympathy and allowing her to attain a full charge and become the killing machine that she was destined to be. It's interesting that this seemingly heartless act is really driven by a very human emotion, vengeance. Meanwhile, Il-sun takes pride in his stealing skills — his parents ignored him so much when he was a kid that he believes he is sometimes invisible.

Seeking comfort in machinery:
Since Young-goon can't relate to other humans, she seeks solace in her conversations with the vending machine and the pay phone, and she takes orders from the mysterious voice coming out of her radio. The nurses can't get her to eat, so at one point in the film, they decide to give her shock therapy. Lying there with hundreds of wires sticking out of the treatment cell they put her in, Young-goon feels right at home. She reveals that she was raised by electrical wires in an incubator. "I feel like I've been born again," she says as the session ends and her toes light up. She walks off her wheelchair, goes upstairs, loads up her ammo, and goes on a full-scale massacre of the evil white coats, storing cartridges in her mouth and dispatching bullets machine gun-style from her dainty fingers.

Here's the totally pop-y trailer:

If we had the time, we might torture you again with another caption contest... but more than one a week might be a bit too taxing on the funnybone. So, if you want to win, please just let us know in the comments below. Please note that you need to live in or extremely close to New York City to take advantage of these, so enter only if you really plan on using these tickets.

We'll be providing a list of the winners to the organizers of the event, and they'll have your name on a list and you'll be good to go. Please note that we'll select the first five comments from folks in the NYC area who want to see the movie. For the rest of you, set your Netflix for Tuesday, March 11th, and enjoy.

The film is a Matrix-meets-cyborgs story featuring incredible animation, tons of bullets, lots of John Woo signature slow-motion, and even some cyborg doves. It's arguably, in this blogger's opinion, superior to the original Appleseed, and is at its best when things devolve into pure bullets and octane action. Thankfully, the multi-layered story is cerebral fodder as well as eye candy, so you won't get bored while you watch another clip of armor-piercing bullets get emptied into mindless robo-slaves.

This film sounds like Terminator meets Stephen King's The Long Walk, combined with alternate reality elements from The Matrix. In Japan, "onigokko" is a version of the game of tag, with a players chasing down others. Of course, in this movie it's cyborgbots with creepy heads, red vision, and some strange weapons chasing down poor Sato. If he evades his pursuers for a certain number of hours each day, then he gets various wishes granted. Although it looks like everything starts over the next day, so good luck wishing for the nightmare to end... or an unlimited number of wishes.

The film opened on February 2nd in Japan, and with any luck will be finding its way over here on a DVD platter.

I feel like most yaoi art is fantasy-oriented. Is your work more oriented towards fantasy or science fiction?

A lot of my art is ambiguous as to whether it's fantasy or sci-fi, but I think I gravitate more towards fantasy. Lately I've been doing more steampunk themed art, which I guess falls more into the sci-fi category... So the scifi vs. fantasy might even be around 50-50 at this point. I've often tried to break out of the scifi/fantasy niche and just draw something completely mundane, but I can't seem to manage it.

How big is the yaoi audience in the U.S. now? Is it as big as it is in Japan?

I won't claim to be an expert on the yaoi market. I'm pretty sure the Japanese yaoi market still far surpasses the American created/produced yaoi scene. They've just been doing it longer, and most of our popular yaoi media is imported from Japan. I think many of the bigger publishing houses are not so quick to pick up yaoi as they have been to dive into general audience manga, so that keeps the market small. It's difficult for the small presses to to make it in the business, and that's where most of our American yaoi is coming from - small presses, independant publishers, and self-publishing.

When did you get involved in yaoi art?

I discovered rather early in my teenage years that having two guys together is just hot, so when I first found yaoi on the internet (it is for porn, after all) it was like coming home. I didn't join the yaoi art scene until much later, circa 2004, but it really only coincided with graduating from college and suddenly having more time on my hands. Moving to San Francisco helped also, because that gave me my first chance to attend Yaoi-Con and meet the community in person. Having a group to share the artwork with just gave me more reasons to draw yaoi-themed art.

Festo's Bionic Arm [The Future of Things]

Rather than buying her sister's affection with $175 jeans and red wine, Jamie would try to set boundaries for Becca—and impress upon her the repercussions for bad behavior. Becca might still act out, but we'd believe she liked 70s punk and Broadway musicals. In fact, everybody would have a believably complex personality, not just the appurtenances of one; a show can buy all the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and New York Dolls songs and vintage GTOS it wants, but these aren't a substitute for good writing. The word "Good!" shouldn't be the first to spring to a viewer's mind when a character collapses after being poisoned.

Because Jamie wouldn't be working for the Berkut Group, she wouldn't have a boss like Antonio, who plays the Wise Black Man one week, and the Scary Black Man Threatening A White Woman the next. Ruth's authoritative manner and short haircut wouldn't immediately rate the questioning of her sexuality ("Is she a lesbian?").

Would it be a better show? I don't know—but I think I'd rather watch it than this one.

Famous Names: Paul Verehoeven (Director); Peter Weller, Kurtwood Smith and Ronny Cox (Cast).

Crunchy Goodness: 4

Sequels: Robocop 2, Robocop 3, a tv-spinoff in 1994 and a 2001 miniseries.

Sight You'll Never Unsee: After a brief dunking in some toxic waste, bad guy Paul McCrane staggers into the path of an oncoming car — and explodes into a cloud of wet goo.

Design Breakthrough: The ED-209 kill-droids weren't just amazing stop-motion effects; their distinctive visual design was unique, too — based on the curves, coloration and mass of killer whales.

MGM's Official Site

Famous Names: James Cameron (Director, co-writer); Arnold Schwarzenegger, Linda Hamilton, Robert Patrick (Cast).

Crunchy Goodness: 5

Spin-offs/Sequels/Copycats: The Cameron-less, too-little-too late Terminator 3 (2003) and the upcoming TV series The Sarah Connor Chronicles.

Bang for Your Buck: The silvery, featureless T-1000 striding sinuously out of a burning big rig before flowing back to the unscathed visage of Patrick's hunter-killer cop — the moment CG effects became an inescapable part of the Hollywood landscape.

Life Lesson: When a robot from the future shows up and says 'Come with me if you want to live,' believe him.

Roger Ebert's Review

Famous names: Patrick Macnee, Diana Rigg, Honor Blackman, Ian Hendry, Linda Thorson, Sydney Newman

Crunchy goodness: 3

Most wonderfully dated moments: The sixties fashions, the jazzy music, the charmingly innocent sauciness between John Steed and Emma Peel. It's retro heaven.

Spinoffs/Sequels/Copycats: The New Avengers, featuring Macnee teamed upwith Joanna Lumley and Gareth Hunt. And a 1998 movie, starring Ralph Fiennes and Uma Thurman, which captured all of the cheesiness and none of the fun of the original series.

Design breakthrough: In contrast to Macnee's slightly ironic English gentleman drag, Rigg always wore a collection of skintight catsuits and go-go dresses. Honor Blackman cashed in on her character's trend-setting fetish outfits by recording a duet with Macnee called "Kinky Boots," which was a top 5 hit on the British pop charts in 1964, and charted again in 1990.

The Avengers.TV - International Family of Websites

Famous names: Lee Majors, Richard Anderson, Martin E. Brooks, Harve Bennett

Crunchy goodness: 2

Spinoffs/Sequels/Copycats: Lindsay Wagner appeared in a series of episodes of season two as Jaime Sommers, who goes skydiving with Steve and becomes horribly injured. She gets her own bionic limbs and Steve decides to marry her, the only woman who can keep up with him. But then her body rejects her implants and she dies of a blood clot... only to come back to "life" shortly afterwards with no memory of her romance with Steve. Wagner went on to star in her own show, The Bionic Woman.

Change of pace: The show started as a series of TV movies, produced by Battlestar Galactica creator Glen A. Larson, which portrayed Steve as a snarky, reluctant superspy. But the actual series, produced by StarTrek II: Wrath Of Khan producer Bennett, was less James Bond-y and more friendly.

Memorable product tie-in: The classic Steve Austin action figure, wearing his red astronaut jumpsuit and featuring a big hole in the back of his head so you can look through his "bionic eye." The bionic right arm, controlled by a button in his back,could lift objects weighing up to two pounds.

The Six Million Dollar Man: Episode Guide