I don’t know what’s cooler, the concept of fishing rod prosthetic arm, or the Open Prosthetics project on which it’s listed.

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.

Yet more great data just in from NASA’s Cassini probe. Recent radar images of Saturn’s major moon Titan reveal a topography that is remarkably similar to some features of the Earth’s surface – except that the hills, valleys and rivers of Titan are made entirely of frozen methane and ethane, of course.