Toyota (NYSE: TM) researchers in Japan have built a brain/machine interface (BMI) that has been demonstrated to control a wheelchair using a person’s thoughts.

The system enables a person to make a wheelchair turn left or right to move forward simply by thinking the commands. The response time is in 125 milliseconds. One millisecond is equal to 1/1000 of a second.

The BMI was developed at the BSI-Toyota Collaboration Center (BTCC), a 2-year-old research center established by Japan’s government research unit RIKEN and Toyota Motor, Toyota Central R&D Labs, and Genesis Research Institute. Japan has focused on the control of devices through brain waves as a way to deal with the projected shortage of healthcare workers to tend to Japan’s large aging population.

The BTCC’s system uses several sensors placed over the areas of the brain that control motion to measure electrical activity in the region. The electical impulses triggered by the rider thinking of turning or moving the wheelchair are picked up and analyzed by an onboard laptop that passes the commands on to the wheelchair.

The system has an emergency stop that can be activated by the user puffing his cheeks.

Palm Inc. said Thursday that its much-awaited new smart phone, the Pre, can connect to Apple’s iTunes software and download music and photos just as if it were an iPod or iPhone.

The feature might be unique for a device not made by Apple Inc., though third-party software is available that lets some digital music players masquerade as iPods in iTunes.

Palm Inc.’s new phone goes on sale June 6, with Sprint Nextel Corp. as the exclusive launch carrier. It will be $200 with a two-year contract and a rebate, competing with Apple’s iPhone in the market for high-end smart phones.

Researchers at Cranfield University have developed an external airbag that they say will significantly reduce pedestrian fatalities and injuries in the event of a crash.

The system deploys a bonnet-mounted airbag at the base of the windscreen, which research shows is where a pedestrian’s head is most likely to hit. The system uses radar and infrared technology to “pre-detect” a collision and inflates quickly enough to cushion the impact, said Roger Hardy of the university’s Cranfield Impact Centre.

“Test results indicate that the system works extremely well,” Hardy said of the system, which was tested on a Fiat Stilo. “When fitted to a demonstrator vehicle not originally designed with pedestrian protection in mind, the results were well inside all current legal criteria for pedestrian protection currently in force in Europe.”

Eizo Nanao has announced the inclusion of an “EcoView Sense” feature into its just announced FlexScan monitors, the 20-inch EV2023W and the 23-inch EV2303W.

The EcoView feature allows the monitors–using motion detectors–to detect if a person is sitting in front of it.

If it senses for 40 seconds that no one is there, it puts the monitor into sleep mode. It then resumes normal operation when the user returns. For example, it won’t be fooled by such shenanigans as leaving a cardboard cutout of yourself in front of it. It will only resume if there is movement up to 120 centimeters in front of it.

The problem: you’re upgrading your collection of animated classics at home to Blu-ray, but the backseat video player in the minivan only plays DVDs. The solution: trade up to Panasonic’s new Blu-ray-compatible entertainment system for the car.

The two-part system consists of the CN-HX900D, a Windows-powered dash-mountable device with a 7-inch, 1280×720 display. The CN-HX900D offers GPS, a CD/DVD player, Bluetooth, a 40GB hard drive, and iPod/iPhone compatibility.

You’ll need to hook it up to the CY-BB1000D in-car Blu-ray player if you want the kids to get the full fancy-movie treatment in the backseat. (It’s not BD-Live compatible.)

Pricing for CN-HX900D and CY-BB1000D is not yet available

Every time you print out a page on a laser printer you’re using toner made from petroleum-based products. Now there’s a greener choice that shows promise: a toner product derived from soybean oil.

While some customers might be wary, potential benefits are clear. It’s easier to recycle paper printed with soy. And perhaps more important in a sour economy, soy toners can cost less than the standard alternative. Soybeans are a renewable resource whose price is likely to be more stable than that of oil.

Newspaper, magazine and book publishers have shifted to soy-based ink in recent years.

Early results suggest soy toners work as advertised. In a recent test involving identical documents from two identical printers - one with a new Hewlett-Packard cartridge and the other a soy cartridge - the printouts were indistinguishable, equally dark and smudge-proof.

A University of Waterloo engineering research team has developed the world’s first flying micro-robot capable of manipulating objects for micro-scale applications. The mini-’bot discovery provides researchers with more control over the micro-scale environment—with tiny objects at levels too small to be manipulated by humans—allowing them to move and place tiny objects with greater precision.

A class of undergraduates at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has created a set of robots that can water, harvest and pollinate cherry tomato plants.

The small, $3,000 robots, which move through the garden on a base similar to a Roomba vacuum, are networked to the plants. When the plants indicate they need water, the robots can sprinkle them from a water pump. When the plants have a ripe tomato, the machines use their arms to pluck the fruit.

Even though robots have made few inroads into agriculture, these robots’ creators hope their technology eventually could be used by farmers to reduce the natural resources and the difficult labor needed to tend crops.

Palm announced at CTIA that an emulator for the original Palm OS would be available on the Pre. The news of this is a sigh of relief for many current Palm owners who are nervous about making the switch from Palm OS to WebOS.

Fortunately this will ensure any software that worked on the original OS will indeed work, as long as you are using the emulator on the Pre. One such application displayed in our demo was ePocrates, a very important piece of medical software to essentially every doctor and health professional. It worked seamlessly during the demo.

In the video the Palm rep shows off several different aspects of the emulator.

Tucked within Apple’s iPhone 3.0 beta firmware are hardware strings that mention not one but two unreleased iPhone models as well as similar changes in store for the iPod touch.

An exploration of device strings by the same source that correctly leaked MMS and tethering ahead of Apple’s iPhone 3.0 preview event now finds that there are at least four and as many as six new devices in the pipeline that would share OS X iPhone as their foundation.

Sony Corp is making available public domain books from Google Inc to users of its electronic book reader, Sony said on Wednesday, vastly increasing the amount of available content on the device.

In the latest round of a budding digital book battle with Amazon.com Inc, Sony said that more than a half a million classic titles will be free to users of the Reader, which allows consumers to read books and newspapers on a hand-held device.

That will boost the available titles in Sony’s eBook Store to more than 600,000, Sony said.

Sony sells two versions of its Reader, which competes directly with Amazon’s Kindle. Kindle users can access over 245,000 titles plus newspapers, magazines and blogs.

You may not have the latest $359 Kindle electronic book reader from Amazon.com, but if you own an iPhone or iPod Touch, a new application will let you access much of the same content on your Apple device.

In a bid to increase its slice of the e-book market, the Seattle-based online retailer rolled out a free program Wednesday that brings several of the Kindle’s functions to the iPod and iPhone’s smaller screen.

The program, which can be downloaded from Apple’s online application store, lets iPhone and iPod Touch users read the same electronic books that Kindle owners can buy on Amazon.com. As with the Kindle, the iPhone app lets users change the text size on the screen, and add bookmarks, notes and highlights.

The application does not connect to the Kindle store, however, so users must access the Web browser on their iPhone, iPod or computer to buy the content. Users cannot read magazines and newspapers on the Kindle application, either.

If you happen to have a Kindle and an iPhone, Amazon’s program will handily sync the two so you can keep your place in the same book on both devices.

The Kindle program isn’t the first e-book reader for the iPhone, but it marks the first time Kindle content is available on a cell phone - a move Amazon recently said it would be making, and something that rival Google Inc. is also doing.