Consciousness is a convenient fiction for giving cohesion to the multitude of agents that together decide what a human does. Researchers at Columbia University are kicking that illusion in the teeth — they’re hooking up the human visual system to a computer which detects the a-ha moment of visual recognition before the attached human is fully aware they’ve seen something. Basically, humans are faster at visual recognition than computers, but only if that darn consciousness doesn’t get in the way.

Don’t pair SeisMac with SmackBook Pro, even though they both use the built in accelerometers to do neat things with your PowerBook. A seismograph on a machine that gets slapped around would be pretty useless.

The next housing trend: dorms for adults. Overheated housing markets like that in the Bay Area or (in the case of the linked article, New York) are naturals for more formal (and less labor-intensive) housing arrangements for young urban professionals.

I think some of my favorite gadgets are those that re-imagine the seemingly unimprovable. Take the humble hammock, now become an asymmetrical Goretex sleeping pod, a rain fly- and velcro-sporting, tree-hugging artifact of high tech artisanship.

A drug in development at St George’s, University of London, helps allergy sufferers by making the skin impervious to allergens, thus preventing exposure. On the other hand, maybe a lack of exposure to allergens is the problem in the first place.