Researchers have created a wearable device that can read people's minds when they use an internal voice, allowing them to control devices and ask queries without speaking. The device, called AlterEgo, can transcribe words that wearers verbalise internally but do not say out loud, using electrodes attached to the skin. "Our idea was: could we have a computing platform that's more internal, that melds human and machine in some ways and that feels like an internal extension of our own cognition?" said Arnav Kapur, who led the development of the system at MIT's Media Lab. Kapur describes the headset as an "intelligence-augmentation" or IA device, and was presented at the Association for Computing Machinery's Intelligent User Interface conference in Tokyo. It is worn around the jaw and chin, clipped over the top of the ear to hold it in place.

Captain Picard: "How do we reason with them, let them know that we are not a threat?" At least, I've never known anyone who did." With this brief, ominous exchange, the heroes of Star Trek: The Next Generation are introduced to one of their most formidable enemies: the Borg, a race of cyborgs whose minds are linked to a collective "hive mind" through sophisticated technology. The collective expands their civilization through a process of mental and physical "assimilation": They find new intelligent beings, like humans, implant them with Borg technology, and integrate them into the hive mind, erasing their previous identities. Individual Borg are not conscious in the way humans are, and they have no sense of individuality. The hive mind is a dictator, an unquestioned voice that commands each individual. The Borg nature is split in two, an executive called the collective and a follower called the drone. For the humans living in the Star Trek universe, the prospect of assimilation is terrifying. When asked why humans resist assimilation, Chief Engineer Geordi La Forge says, "For somebody like me, losing that sense of individuality is almost worse than dying." In his 2008 TED Talk, Philip Zimbardo introduced his subject by showing his audience M.C. The art, Zimbardo explained, reminds us that "good and evil are...READ MORE For many humans living in the real world, the fictional Borg are similarly unsettling.