The music business continues its downward spiral. Universal, one of the big four record labels, is now planning to cut the prices of almost all of its CDs to between $6 and $10.

This new test is called the Velocity program. The average price for CDs has been between $10 and $12 for awhile. And if they stick to this, other labels will do the same. Great for music lovers, bad for them. Could this really make actual CDs cheaper than downloads? Are Cds even worth making anymore?

We all like to stand out from time to time. We have our own personal style, etc. Now you can have Typeface personalized fonts that are based on how you look. It’s a new business concept that will analyze what your face looks like and convert it into a personal font.

So, if your font is unreadable, does that make you unattractive? If you have a beautiful font, are you beautiful? What if it’s a cat face? So many questions.

Need a hand with your data? How about an arm? Turns out that human skin is a very energy-efficient conduit for transmitting data. And why not? It can transmit electricity. In fact, a recent experiment achieved a rate of 10Mbps. In the experiment they used small, flexible electrodes.

The news might lead to new medical devices that can monitor blood sugar or electrical activity in the heart. Devices that could cut energy needs for a monitoring network by about 90 percent compared to wireless devices that run on batteries.

Pink Floyd has won a legal battle with its record label EMI over whether the label should be allowed to distribute digital versions of the band’s material on a song by song basis as it does through Apple’s iTunes Store. Pink Floyd is just one of several bands that have objected to the splitting up of what it considers to be single pieces of work.

And any Pink Floyd fan knows that you can’t just listen to one track and get the full experience. And if you only want one song, you clearly don’t get it anyway. The band has been signed to EMI since 1967 and said that their contract meant their albums could not be split up without their permission. A judge agreed and said that the contract contained a clause to “preserve the artistic integrity of the albums”.

So you just saw a penis or some couple doing the nasty on Chatroulette and you want to know where these freaks are located. Understandable I guess. I would want to make sure they don’t live next door to me. And if they do, I might want to move.

Chatroulette connects you with a stranger directly rather than routing you both through another server, so you can see the IP address of everyone you connect to. And an IP address can tell you where that person is on a map. Pretty simple.

Apple’s feud with Adobe has been making headlines and this latest news should make Apple happy. Virgin America has ditched Flash on its website because of lack of iPhone support. The new website was launched on Monday and will be replacing Flash with HTML so that customers can easily check in using their iPhones.

Of course the site will also be moved to HTML5, once the standards have been ratified. We aren’t sure if the loss of Flash will help Virgin America with increased web traffic or not, but we are assuming that they know their customers and if they do, this may be a great move for them.

Cool Leaf is an input system that is both flat and mirrored. It comes from a Japanese company called Minebea who have demonstrated it with a keyboard, calculator, and remote control that are all completely free of keys.

Sure they look amazingly futuristic, but they also make a lot of sense. The devices would be easier to clean with no keys that will gather dust and crumbs. Minebea has done a great job. The devices have backlights, force sensors, and a film from a company called Toray Industries that is the world’s first “electrostatic capacity type touch panel and a load sensor.”

Here’s an interesting story involving Playstation Home. The police are looking for a 43-year-old mother of three in Oklahoma City for seducing a 14-year-old kid on PlayStation Home. No offense to the suspect, but looking at this pic, I’m hoping her avatar was a real knockout.

Annamay Alexander of Deltona, FL apparently met the kid on Playstation Home and started sending him messages and even a picture of her in her underwear. After that the nutjob traveled to Oklahoma to see him and met with his mom, though she claimed to be there to talk about the kid wanting to marry her daughter. Yes, she’s clearly not playing with a full deck.

Yes, the Olympic torch is cool, as in it looks pretty neat. But it’s also cool in regards to temperature as well. The torch of the 2010 Winter Games has been carried all over Greece and Canada since October 30, 2009 and gets to be the coolest one ever used thanks to a fuel mixture of propane and isobutane.

It was designed by design director Leo Obstbaum and built by jetmaker and high-speed train manufacturer Bombardier. In all there were 12,000 torches hand-assembled in Montréal, one for each carrier. It looks classy and futuristic, not just some stick that’s on fire.

Remember that PA school district that was caught spying on kids at home? Well, according to the Washington Post, the school district has admitted to remotely activating those laptop webcams forty-two times over 2 years. (You have to wonder how many times they didn’t admit to.)

So now the FBI is involved and would like to determine if the school district violated any wiretapping or computer-privacy laws. Should be an easy call. Remember the school district claims that the remote activation of webcams was simply to recover stolen laptops, but the incident came to light when they tried to punish a student, using a webcam shot taken while the student was at home as evidence. The only thing stolen here was privacy.

Here’s a creepy tale involving a Pennsylvania school, and an abuse of technology and power. A Pennsylvania school district has been accused of spying on its students through webcams. Webcams in laptops which the school provided. Spying on them at home.

The district gave laptops to all of their students and were apparently able to activate the webcams remotely. Beware school officials bearing gifts…

Meanwhile in prosthetic foot news, a new prosthetic foot has been developed and detailed in a PLoS-One paper by Steven H. Collins (Department of Bio-mechanical Engineering, Delft University of Technology) and Arthur D. Kuo (Departments of Mechanical and Biomedical Engineering, University of Michigan).

This latest artificial foot uses a micro controller to operate a device in the foot which stores energy from the down step and then releases it on the up step, thereby mimicking the natural movement of a human ankle. So it’s an authentic fake foot. Or at least as authentic as a fake foot can be.

Soap has had it’s day and done it’s job admirably, but it may soon be dead. Plasma-gas filled boxes are here for all of your hand washing needs. Several laboratories are working on the technology. Turns out that bathing your hand in room-temperature plasma gas will kill even industrial grade bacteria like MRSA. It’s good for athlete’s foot too.

Hospitals are where they will show up first. Doctors and nurses could kill off bacteria, viruses, and fungi in just four seconds. Forget scrubbing. There are already some prototypes that are portable and wall-mounted, and they can cost as little as $100 to build.

This raises some interesting issues regarding how we care for those in vegetative states. A new study observed the brain of an unconscious patient responding to yes and no questions just like a normal person. Well, almost. Of 54 test subjects in the New England Journal of Medicine study, one man who was diagnosed as being in a vegetative state five years earlier actually answered yes or no questions. And did so accurately.

The answers came from a brain scan conducted by an MRI machine. Answering “yes” and “no” shows activity in different parts of the brain. For instance the patient was asked if his father’s name was Thomas and the scan showed his brain answering “no.” When asked if his father’s name was Alexander, the scan showed “yes.”

That little plastic tool you see above could make the dentist’s drill a thing of the past. No more drilling into your teeth, causing pain and making you nervous. The DMG Icon delivers a small amount of hydrochloric acid directly on the cavity and burns away just the right amount of enamel to reach the area where the cavity is eating away at your tooth.

Once that’s done, the dentist uses a separate applicator to inject quick-hardening resin-type goo into the hole, and then with a short zap of high-energy blue light, it hardens so well that your tooth is as good as new. Sounds too good to be true, but if it really works that well it could make dental visits happier.