When does social media become pathological narcissism? Maybe when you broadcast your whole day via a tiny voice-controlled personal-surveillance drone that hovers in the air and follows you around.

A small electronics maker, Always Innovating, says it’s created a palm-sized quadrocopter complete with a video camera, microphone and antenna designed to upload the story of your life directly to social media. The MeCam could be a CIA spybot prototype - but for the fact that it exists only to be ostentatious.

Your Own Private Reality Show Crew

Always Innovating, which didn’t respond to requests for comment, claims to have led the industry in developing portable devices. Indeed, if the company can deliver on its MeCam claims, it would likely have a hit on its hands.

Besides being your own reality-show crew, MeCam allegedly responds to voice commands and will follow you like a good dog, according to the firm’s website. No word on shipping dates. The site is advertising for licensing deals with social-media icons including YouTube.

How the MeCam can do what it does, all for a mall kiosk-friendly $49, is absent from the site. In fact, the only video showing a MeCam flying plays without sound.

There’s nothing technologically exotic about MeCam: voice recognition, semi-autonomous flight and maybe an RFID “leash.”

The big question is “why?”

It’s All About Narcissism

“This is about narcissism,” said Wafaa Bilal, an assistant professor in New York University’s photography and imaging department. “It’s how people on social media operate now.”

Bilal has some experience here, though he would argue that it’s not directly related. For a year between 2010 and 2011, he lived with a webcam implanted in the skin of the back of his head. It might still be there if one of the camera’s four titanium posts hadn’t been rejected by his body.

Bilal insists he was making a statement about surveillance and eroding privacy. Nevertheless, he uploaded 500,000 images, one per minute. The big difference between Bilal’s experiment – and innovations like Google Glass – and the MeCam is that rather than just showing what the owner sees, the narcissist would actually be in the MeCam pictures.

(See also Google Glass: Our Lives Are Not Reality TV.)

Who’s More Narcissistic, The Chicken Or The Egg?

It’s impossible to know if technology is creating narcissists, or narcissist are getting new venues through tech, said Wendy Behary, therapist and author of Disarming the Narcissist.

Regardless, the MeCam seems like the perfect accessory for the special self-absorbed jerk in your life, said Behary. Ground zero for narcissists is seeking attention, broadcasting the miracle that they are and disconnecting from others.

She worried that a MeCam would strongly reinforce that tendency, making it difficult to shake the disorder until life-altering losses like relationships or even careers.

“This does represent a truth, a scary truth,” she said. Narcissists “can continue avoiding relationships and hide” within their own glory, and others could be enticed into narcissism.

Sadly, it's going to take a long, long time before we can shrink people and submarines small enough to be injected into an ill patient, a la Fantastic Voyage. But it turns out that shrinking the people isn’t necessary to realize the idea.

Easy-To-Swallow Diagnostics

A team of doctors and researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital have created a pill-sized, tethered lab that patients swallow, and they are preparing to commercialize it. The 1-inch glass bead, in the shape of a typical multivitamin, can take better-than-high-def video and stills (what, no audio?) of a person’s entire esophagus, that tubular organ that starts at the back of your mouth and ends at the entry to your stomach.

The esophagus view. This is big news for anyone who has problems with their esophagus, notably the one-in-five Americans who suffer from acid reflux disease - which can lead to lesions known as Barrett’s Esophagus, which can lead to highly fatal stomach cancer.

The Old Way Hurts

Today, such patients periodically undergo an upper endoscopy, a $1,500 procedure in which they are anesthetized so that a specially trained physician can slide a long, flexible, black video camera and remote tool kit down their throat. Ouch!

Over the course of about 40 minutes, the team watches a video screen for signs of trouble - seeing only what’s on the surface of the surrounding esophagus. Along the way, the doctor can use tools near the lens to snip off bits of flesh for later examination.

No Knockout Juice Needed

About 18 months ago, the team, led by Dr. Gary Tearney, at Massachusetts General’s Wellman Center for Photomedicine, was kicking around ideas for simplifying the procedure. This is what they came up with:

You pour a cup of water in your mouth, put the device (attached to the end of a tether) in your mouth and swallow the water and probe at, say 2pm (this is important). No knockout juice.

The thin tether, containing a fiber-optic cable, dangles from your mouth as a doctor - or even a technician - lightly holds on. The same rhythmic muscle contractions that deliver swallowed coffee to your stomach even if you stand on your head does all the work, pushing the bead along.

“We were skeptical,” said Tearney. “We thought the bead would be loose in the esophagus.” Picture a small elevator in a big shaft. For it to work, the device had to be in contact with tissue. “I was shocked and amazed that the esophagus clamped down on the probe, giving us full contact all the way around. “I had no idea it would work this well.”

A Better Picture

The fiber optic cable shoots near-infrared light onto a tiny, rapidly spinning prism that reflects it out a microscope lens. The focused light scatters inside the tissue and, using sonar-like principles, software written by Tearney’s team builds a picture of features within the lining based on how long it takes the light to rebound. The information hits the prism and races back up the same cable to be reconstructed as a real-time, deep-tissue image, showing healthy and damaged flesh in minute detail.

The technician can pull the probe back at any point, but after shooting the whole esophagus, that little glass bead likely will exit your mouth at 2:06pm. Six minutes after the start of the procedure.

The probe has been tested on 13 patients so far, and has returned detailed images quickly, less expensively and without sedation. If doctors spot dodgy cells, they schedule a traditional upper endoscopy, with the snaking camera, anesthesia and snipping tools.

Still In Testing

Tearney declined to predict how much the tool, which requires purpose-built electronics, would cost. He did say the new procedure could be done in a doctor’s office, not in a much more expensive hospital room.

You can debate how much we have evolved emotionally since our early primate days in Africa, but there’s no arguing about our looks. At that point in human development. we were to beauty what the butt is to fine cuisine - distantly related, and in all the wrong ways.

How can we tell? Popular Science has a new $6 iPad app that maps your face to the digital skulls and muscles of eight of our extinct forebears. And the results aren't pretty.

Ugly Is As Ugly Was

PS Evolver is a top-rate teaching app, concisely explaining a lot about these early hominids and the worlds in which they lived. But you’ll want to buy it for the face-mapping feature.

It’s one thing to know that our various ape-like ancestors had a jutting jaw, a flat and flaring nose or a brow you could rest a pencil on. It’s another to see how you’d have looked with those features.

Seeing my skin wrapped around an ancient, weirdly constructed skull was bracing, and made me wonder again if Mick Jagger isn’t really a flash-frozen caveman rescued from a peat bog in the 1950s. I mean, check it out:

It's Easy To Travel Back In Time

Getting the images is easy. Match your eyes and mouth to guides on your iPad’s screen (sorry, iPad only) and take a photo. The app shows you thumbnail images of your ape self, there for you to choose. Click on one, and you can expand, shrink and spin the image on every axis.

There’s plenty of information about that particular failed branch of the human experiment, including a sober, PBS-esque voiceover about their lives. Learn how long they lived, how big their brains were (one line’s brains were larger than ours), even what liked to eat them.

The app crashes too often, and for some reason, the Neanderthal face-map sometimes doesn’t render, but bagging on the app because of this is like complaining about the wrapping paper on a birthday present. There’s a lot of enjoyment here.

Entrepreneurs: This is the time to disrupt a market. Those holding out for a better market conditions are bypassing the opportunity of a lifetime.

Granted, two countervailing trends –- a slowly recovering national economy and a pull-back in later early-stage funding -- are keeping things interesting for entrepreneurs. But at the same time, stubborn recession conditions like cheap office space and tech trends like cloud computing temper the need for big piles of outside money to get new companies off the ground.

This infographic comes from Bob Rizika, CEO of cloud computing, Infrastructure-as-a Service (IaaS) firm ProfitBricks USA, who obviously hopes lean startups see an advantage in operating in the cloud. The key points are that creating a startup now is cheaper than ever before, there are new sources of funding available, and the lingering economic issues can reduce competition:

You can almost hear fusty old Yoda's warning: “For consumerization, the lightsaber is not.”

He’s right, but don’t tell Wicked Lasers, maker of the 1.25-watt blue S3 Arctic series handheld laser.

As a point of reference, standard laser pointers are less than 5/1000 of a watt.

Even before you attach the 32-inch polycarbonate blade attachment, which Wicked also sells to create one very real looking lightsaber, the Arctic is megawatts cooler than other patently dangerous tools on the market.

Here are some Arctic rules that should convince and sober you:

1. Don’t stare at the blue blob of light created by pointing the laser at a wall. (You could blind yourself.)
2. Don’t point it at cars. (You could quickly, though temporarily, blind a driver, who might still run you over.)
3. Don’t point it at even high-flying jets (You could harm the eyesight of someone onboard. Someone like the pilot.)
4. Don’t point it at spacecraft. (While its beam is visible from space, you couldn’t blind an astronaut. However, as a general rule, never piss off someone who can drop a tank of oxygen on your house.)

Legit uses for a powerful handheld laser like the Arctic, according to Wicked, include search-and-rescue, military/law enforcement, astronomy and, outside the U.S., medicine.

If you have $400 and extraordinary commonsense, buy one (there's also a $300 1-watt version). The LaserSaber blade attachment adds another $100. But they're all totally worth it. 

It's beautiful and rare when the worlds of computer games, band geekdom and college football can all get along.

The Ohio State marching band peformed a fairly amazing tribute to computer games between halves on Saturday, Oct. 6, 2012, including an eye-popping rendition of Epona (Legend of Zelda) galloping across the field. Other games referenced include Space Invaders, Pokemon, Tetris, Mario Bros., Halo and Pacman.

Oh, yeah. There was a game, too. The Buckeyes kicked the snot out of the Nebraska Cornhuskers, 63-38.

To the list of objects that might occupy the coming Internet of Things, add the internal injury you suffered learning to kickbox.

A government-funded research project has come up with dissolvable electronics capable of such tasks as monitoring a bruised kidney, sharing information and fending off infection.

Researchers at Tufts University and the University of Illinois said they have made small, complete computing devices – including energy sources – that melt at prescribed rates in water. They look and bend a little like novelty transparent business cards with the familiar right-angle circuit etchings of semiconductors.

It’s called transient electronics, and potential uses go beyond medicine to include environmental protection and national defense. In fact, the project was funded in part by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the U.S. Air Force, as well as by the National Science Foundation.

The clear material is specially prepared silk and the circuits, which are only tens of nanometers thick, are made of silicon and magnesium.

The silk gives the circuits a foundation, but also delays dissolution, depending on how thick the material is. (The thicker the clear silk layer, the longer it takes to dissolve.) The circuits themselves dissolve as well, leaving nothing behind once the process is finished, according to Fiorenzo Omenetto, professor of biomedical engineering at Tufts School of Engineering and a senior and corresponding author of the team’s paper.

The devices can be crafted to last up to years. Downstream applications might include compostable consumer electronics and geophysical monitors.

Photo courtesy of the Beckman Institute, University of Illinois and Tufts University

Looking for a 21st-Century way to stamp out social unrest - and hand a pile of new revenue to mobile phone makers? Easy. Declare millions of phones "illegal" and turn them off.

That's what is expected to happen Sept. 30 in Kenya, whose leaders say they are shocked to learn that mobile phones might leak dangerous amounts of radiation, especially counterfeit phones.

So, in order to protect the health of its 29 million mobile owners - as well as the health of aggrieved phone makers including Samsung and Nokia - the Kenyan government says it is switching off all unlicensed SIM cards at the end of the month.

The Communications Committee of Kenya says one in 10 mobiles in that strife-torn African nation are no more legitimate than the Gucci clutches sold on the street corners of Manhattan.

The agency has also said that ridding the populace of counterfeits will help “secure the country from the threat of terrorism, lawlessness and political violence.” Read to the bottom here.

Fake phones being harder to track than genuine articles, they are more likely to be in the hands of criminals. Of the poor and disenfranchised, too, but mostly criminals. Who plan their crimes on their phones. At least that's the story.

Coincidentally, Kenya is preparing for its next round of elections, in March. Riots after the nation’s 2007 elections claimed more than 1,000 lives.

Stifling political dissent aside, the move theoretically means 3 million more potential sales for phone makers, something that struggling Nokia might have noticed.

Images courtesy of Shutterstock.

Apple reportedly is wasting no time in consolidating the market power it won in its patent case against Samsung.

Citing an unnamed source “familiar with the dealings,” CNET is reporting that Apple CEO Tim Cook and Google CEO Larry Page have met at least once already to discuss potential infringements by Google on Apple patents. CNET says the pair plan to talk again in “a few weeks.”

Neither Apple nor Google would respond to interview requests Thursday evening, Central Time.

Apple won a huge victory over Samsung Aug. 24 when a jury sided with Apple in its allegations that the South Korean electronics giant had copied Apple software and design intellectual property pertaining to its iPhone.

Samsung has been ordered to pay Apple $1.05 billion for the infringements, and Apple has pressed ahead, asking for an injunction against sales of specific Samsung products using Google’s Android operating system.

Google issued a statement Aug. 27 playing down the decision's impact.

Image via J3on.