Are spring allergies making you feel a little stuffed up? No problem–a small outlay of cash and a lot of faith in crackpot science should soon set you straight. Just invest in one of the new “healing ringtones” available in Japan; then the next time your phone rings, stick your cell phone close to your nose and let the ringtone work its magic.

According to Japan Ringing Tone Laboratory, each downloadable therapeutic ringtone can heal a certain ailment. From weight loss to hay fever, creator Matsumi Suzuki is confident that his ringtones can perk you up. (His previous innovation was the “Bow-lingual,” a device that he claimed could translate dog barks into human-speak.)

Explaining how a healing ringtone can fight hay fever, for example, Suzuki said the sound waves produced by the ringing phone dislodge stuck pollen in the nose, thus clearing the airway and making the allergen-crazed individual feel better.

While healing ring tones sound entertaining, it seems pretty obvious that they won’t save you a trip to the doctor. The BBC cautions:

Index, the mobile phone content provider which markets the therapeutic ring tones, admits the technology behind them is perhaps a little unproven but insists the number of downloads suggests they may be working.

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For those people seeking some long-term postmortem respect, you could always go the route of the Royal Tenenbaum epitaph and have your hyperbolic greatness engraved upon a headstone. But we all know weather eventually gets the better of those words, and besides: Why settle for one measly sentence when you could speak directly to your descendants from beyond the grave?

The Objecs company has the answer: RosettaStone “technology enhanced memorial products,” which, preloaded with your autobiographical information, will attach to your grave. From Discovery News:

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The next time you come across a loudmouth yammering away into a cell phone at top volume, be comforted by the fact that researchers are working on a mobile phone that could put an end to “volume-control challenged” people. The lip-reading phone would allow people to silently mouth their words–but the electrode-heavy prototype seems unlikely to catch on anytime soon.

The BBC reports:

The device, on show at the Cebit electronics fair in Germany, relies on a technique called electromyography which detects the electrical signals from muscles. It is commonly used to diagnose certain diseases, including those that involve nerve damage.

Professor Tanja Shultz of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany explained that the device requires attaching nine sensors to the face. As the user mouths words, the electrodes capture the electric impulses created by the muscle movement. These impulses are transferred to a device that records and amplifies them, before passing them onto a laptop via wireless. Software in the laptop translates the signals, converting them into words which can then be read out by a synthesizer in handset and sent over the wire to the person on the other end of the phone call.

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Chinese citizens hoping to share dirty jokes or flirtation via text message will now be subject to Beijing’s all-seeing eyes. After policing the Internet and censoring online dissent, the Chinese government has stepped up its monitoring of cell phone messages in the country. The government is encouraging people to be mindful of the texts they send, and is asking them to refrain from writing or forwarding any smutty messages or pornographic content.

State controlled-media has reported on the new effort to clean up cell phone messages. Mobile service providers in Guangzhou, Beijing, and Shanghai are reportedly trying a text-filtering system, looking for porn or sexual content in short messages–which the Chinese refer to as “yellow texts.”

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For many people, texting serves as a useful tool. But for British student Caroline Tagg, a study of text-messaging earned her a PhD.

That’s right, Dr. Tagg now has a doctorate of philosophy in texting—the first of its kind.

To earn the degree, Tagg spent nearly four years studying a total of 11,000 text messages containing 190,000 words and sent by 235 people, all of which she compiled and analyzed in a database. The Telegraph reports:

[Tagg] discovered that people text in the same way as if they were talking, using unnecessary words such as ‘oh’, ‘erm’ and often use grammatical abbreviations like ‘dunno’….

And she discovered from her 80,000 word thesis that there is more to texting that just abbreviations—something most people associate with texting.

“Actually, not many people use abbreviations,” she said. “People use playful manipulation and metaphors. It is a playful language. Not only are they quite creative, it is also quite expressive.”

She found that the average text message contains 17.5 words and that (shocker) some texts can be about incredibly mundane matters—”Hi. I know you are at work but I just wanted you to know I found my pen lid” being a prime example. She also called the experience “enlightening.”

So what do you think: Was the research a waste of time, or is Tagg a pioneer in exploring the linguistics of our newest communication method?

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Cell phones that just make phone calls are so last millennium. Today, those pocket-sized wonders can perform myriad tasks, from checking email to taking photos. Bet you didn’t know what your phone is missing: The ability to survive being driven over by an SUV, blasted with a high-pressure water hose, or trampled by an elephant.

Lucky for us all, Land Rover’s new cell phone, which is touted as the toughest phone in the world, is now on the market. According to the Telegraph:

Staff at The Sun, who laid hands on the S1 a day before it was released, managed to crush the gadget under the weight of a three-tonne forklift truck.

Before it was finally broken, the phone had survived being roasted in an oven at 150 degrees centigrade, soaked in a pint of lager and tossed from the second floor of a building.

Check out a video of some extreme testing of the new phone:

The phone is reportedly shockproof, puncture-proof, water resistant, and dirt and dust-proof. Its plastic case is made primarily from recycled film and bottles.
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If you’re too far away from your honey to exchange real kisses, you may soon be able to kiss him or her over the phone, using the—you guessed it—KissPhone.

You actually kiss the phone—on its big, pink lips, to be precise—and the pressure, temperature, percussion speed, and “sucking force” of your mouth are measured. The phone then transmits these signals to your partner’s KissPhone, which reproduces the conditions of the kiss.

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Love ‘em or hate ‘em, social networking tools are growing faster than anyone can keep track of, and are being used plenty of unexpected ways.

Some developments are questionably beneficial, like new education standards in England that may require students to learn to use online tools like Twitter and Wikipedia, while scrapping history. Who needs a textbook to teach the Second World War when you can learn about it from a user-generated encyclopedia?

Other ideas have ambition, like Nokia’s investment in a California startup that will allow cell phones to act, essentially, like credit cards. Now, the developed world may not need additional forms of credit, but in countries where people often lack bank accounts, the ability to use prepaid phone credit as cash—or to transfer funds for a loan to a friend, for example—will facilitate transactions and a lot of everyday life.

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Looks like radiation may not be the biggest health concern posed by cell phones. Turns out our trusty phones may be making us sick in a more direct way: by spreading bacteria in hospitals.

Turkish researchers have found that 95 percent of cell phones were contaminated with at least one kind of illness-causing bacteria. They tested the phones and dominant hands of 200 hospital doctors and nurses, and found that almost 35 percent carried two types of bacteria, and more than 11 percent carried at least three types. Perhaps scariest, though, is that one in eight phones were found to carry the methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), a virulent strain of bacteria that has raised health concerns in hospitals worldwide.

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Roman Catholic bishops have called for a new kind of abstinence this Lent: no text messaging. They have deemed every Friday during Lent “no SMS day,” partly to honor “concrete” rather than “virtual” relationships. But the refrain from phones is also an attempt to bring attention to the ongoing conflict in Congo, which is partly fueled by coltan, a mineral found aplenty in the eastern part of the country and which is crucial for many technologies, including cell phones.

Others, meanwhile,  are embracing technology to the fullest—enough to try and turn magic carpet rides into reality. In space, no less. A Japanese astronaut will try to fly on a carpet when he arrives at the International Space Station later this month—he’ll also try 16 other challenges out of the total 1,597 total suggestions submitted.

Over in Italy, a “vampire” skeleton has been exhumed from a mass grave in Venice. It is thought to be from a period during the Middle Ages when vampires were believed to spread the plague by chewing on people’s shrouds after dying—an act that grave-diggers sought to prevent by putting bricks in the mouths of suspected vampires.

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