Your cyborg link for the day: an improved version of cochlear implants could return full-spectrum hearing to the deaf. Now, if they could make some with an input volume adjustment for attending rock concerts …

Some of the greatest scientific advances come from imitations of nature, and that appears to be the case with this new polymer that can repair itself by ‘bleeding’ a healing agent through capillaries to seal splits in the surface. Sure to be useful in space aeronautics and other environments where materials integrity is all-important … like exploring an ocean beneath the icy surface of Titan, perhaps. [SlashDot]

If you didn’t bookmark or subscribe last time I linked to it, you should be clicking on over to Subterranean Press’s online magazine – because the summer edition has got some damn fine genre fiction content in it, none of which will cost you a penny to read. Oh, you want names? How does fiction from Charles de Lint, Joe Lansdale, Rachel Swirsky and Elizabeth Bear sound?

If you’ve never seen Chichen Itza, take it from me – it’s an awesome piece of ancient history. Oh, you can’t afford a jaunt to Mexico? Me neither – I’m still paying off the last one, well over three years later. But hey – you’ve got broadband, right? So you can always go and visit a 3D scale model of the ancient Mayan city in Second Life … won’t cost you a penny. And talking of things that cost a lot to do in ‘Real Life’ but virtually nothing in the metaverse, geocaching seems to be taking off in SL too.

Publishers may not be so keen (even to the extent of making foolish gestures based on a misinterpretation of the situation), but twelve major United States universities can see the value in the Google Books project, and have agreed to having a significant part of their collections digitised. It’s won’t be an overnight process, thanks to the sheer man-hours involved, not to mention the price of the equipment – but the latter could fall in the wake of new technology like liquid camera lenses. At the other end of the scale, however, there are custom laser-wielding robots for creating 3D scans of millenia-old manuscripts.