Since then, he's had a more sophisticated chip connected directly to his nervous system. He is still working toward his grandest experiment: having a chip implanted in his brain.

''I want to become a cyborg,'' he said with an infectious grin. "I can see the advantages.''

A cyborg, for the record, is a mixture of man and machine. And cybernetics is the study of communication and control between humans and computers.

IN THE MAD LAB

Warwick, who is 52, presides excitedly over the apparent chaos at the university's MAD lab. (The name stands not for madness but Mobile Autonomic Devices.)

Cables and machine parts litter the work benches. On the floor, two robots the size of model cars race around, mapping their environment and learning how not to bump into things. Nearby, a robot with a skull for a head works on combining the input from his various senses -- audio, video, ultrasonics, radar and infrared -- to interpret what's going on around it.

And in another lab on campus, computers are being controlled by living tissue taken from the brains of rats.

But Warwick's most daring experiments have been on himself. On Aug. 24, 1998, as the BBC filmed, doctors made a small incision in Warwick's left arm, slid in a thin inch-long glass capsule, and stitched him back up.

The capsule contained silicon microchips that announced Warwick's presence to other computers. His office doors swung open as he approached. Lights flicked on as he entered. His computer said hello and told him how many e-mails were waiting.

That chip stayed in for a couple of weeks. It's now on display at the Science Museum in London.

In 2002, doctors sliced open Warwick's left wrist and implanted a much smaller and more sophisticated device. For three months, its 100 electrodes were connected to his median nerves, linking his nervous system to a computer.

''I moved my hand, and my neural signals were sent over the Internet to open and close a robot hand,'' he said.

Not only that: The robotic hand had sensors. As it grasped a sponge or an eyeglasses case, it sent information back to Warwick.

''It was tremendously exciting,'' Warwick said. "I experienced it as signals in my brain -- which my brain was quite happy to recognize as feedback from the robot hand's fingertips.''

FUTURE POSSIBILITIES

The research has significant medical implications.

Paralyzed people might regain movement if one chip were implanted above the break in the nerves and another below to receive the impulses, Warwick said.

More intelligent chips in the brains of people with Parkinson's disease might sense when tremors were on the way and signal the brain to stop them.

''It's like a computer brain out-thinking a human brain,'' he said.

But Warwick's biggest experiment, in which he will have a chip implanted in his brain, is seven or eight years away. He will attempt thought communication -- ''literally the first brain-to-brain communication,'' he said.

''That excites me beyond all proportion,'' he said. "Nothing is going to stop me from doing that.''

ETHICAL QUESTIONS

Not everyone approves of Warwick. From time to time, he receives missives from people he calls ''religious extremists'' telling him he is tampering with God's work.

And in an opinion piece this month in the Toronto Star, Kevin Haggerty, an associate professor of criminology at the University of Alberta, called Warwick part of the ''advance guard'' trying to expand chip technology as widely as possible. The day will come, Haggerty warned, when all people will be chipped and the government will be able to track them all the time, recording their smallest behavioral traits.

CHIPS IN OPERATION

Despite differing over the desirability of implantation, Warwick and Haggerty agree on a great deal.

For one thing, the procedure is now more common.

More and more pet owners are taking advantage of chip implants that transmit identification to veterinarians.

Still, Warwick said, important questions will have to be answered for humans.

''Is it OK to upgrade? What about the people who don't upgrade?'' he asked. "If they don't upgrade, they could become some sort of subspecies.''

Until recently it was thought to be an insignificant disease in healthy people, Sydney University of Technology infectious disease researcher Nicky Boulter said, but new research has revealed its mind-altering properties.

"Interestingly, the effect of infection is different between men and women,'' Dr Boulter writes in the latest issue of Australasian Science magazine.

"Infected men have lower IQs, achieve a lower level of education and have shorter attention spans. They are also more likely to break rules and take risks, be more independent, more anti-social, suspicious, jealous and morose, and are deemed less attractive to women.

"On the other hand, infected women tend to be more outgoing, friendly, more promiscuous, and are considered more attractive to men compared with non-infected controls.

"In short, it can make men behave like alley cats and women behave like sex kittens''.

Dr Boulter said the recent Czech Republic research was not conclusive, but was backed up by animal studies that found infection also changes the behaviour of mice.

The mice were more likely to take risks that increased their chance of being eaten by cats, which would allow the parasite to continue its life cycle.

Rodents treated with drugs that killed the parasites reversed their behaviour, Dr Boulter said.

Another study showed people who were infected but not showing symptoms were 2.7 times more likely than uninfected people to be involved in a car accident as a driver or pedestrian, while other research has linked the parasite to higher incidences of schizophrenia.

"The increasing body of evidence connecting Toxoplasma infection with changes in personality and mental state, combined with the extremely high incidence of human infection in both developing and developed countries, warrants increased government funding and research, in particular to find safe and effective treatments or vaccines,'' Dr Boulter said.

Despite the barrage of marketing to the contrary, sales pitches, and misinformation, consumption of soda has been directly linked to both obesity as well as type 2 diabetes. Soft drinks are packed full of sugar and refined carbohydrates, both of which are undeniably correlated to these factors. Type 2 diabetes is also associated with a poor diet that is laden with high-fructose corn syrup and low in fiber. Research indicates that soft drinks largely contribute to this growing epidemic, with high school and college age kids being the most likely to consume sugar laden soda beverages on a regular basis.

Sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs) are bad news, according to health experts, because they contribute to the obesity epidemic by providing empty calories, that is, calories that provide little or no nutritional value. Meaning, a person who slugs down too much soda is swallowing more than their body can handle. And this added energy isn't healthy energy -- it's energy derived from high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS), i.e., highly refined sugar that has been chemically processed in order to excite your taste buds. It has been argued that too much HFCS in one's diet may offset the intake of solid food, yet does not produce a positive caloric balance. In turn, this over-consumption contributes to the slow development of obesity because the person is consuming more calories than their body can burn. And these days, people are drinking more soda than ever before. Perhaps not surprisingly, as portion sizes for soft drinks have increased, so have American waistlines.

Too put this dangerous pattern in to perspective, one regular 12-ounce can of sugar-sweetened soda contains approximately 150 calories with close to 50 grams of sugar. If this is added to the typical American diet, one can of soda per day could lead to a weight gain of 15 pounds in one year. Currently the consumption of soda accounts for about 8%-9% of total energy among children and adults, and studies suggest that it is most certainly having a negative effect on the people who consume it in such vast quantities. So what's so wrong with being overweight then, you ask? So what if soda has been linked to causing obesity? What's wrong with that? Well, plenty say scores of medical, health and public nutrition experts.

For starters, obesity increases the risk of type 2 diabetes, heart disease, bowel cancer as well as high blood pressure. Type 2 diabetes alone can contribute to cardiovascular disease, retinopathy (blindness), neuropathy (nerve damage), nephropathy (kidney damage), and other health complications. So if type 2 diabetes is highly associated with individuals who are obese, and obesity is linked to SSBs, then type 2 diabetes is highly associated with the consumption of SSBs because the consumption of SSBs is so highly associated with causing obesity. In short, if one consumes SSBs on a regular basis, they are more at risk of developing type 2 diabetes, which itself may cause many ailments. That's why being overweight is not a good thing for one's health. And that's why drinking copious amounts of sugar-sweetened beverages contributes to poor wellbeing byway of obesity and type 2 diabetes.

On top of causing one to gain unhealthy weight and spurring type 2 diabetes, SSBs may also contribute to the loss of bone density, which may cause one to be more susceptible to bone fractures. It has been argued that low bone density may be a result of high levels of phosphate, which is found in elevated amounts in sugar-sweetened cola. Such large amounts of phosphate may alter the calcium-phosphorus ratio in people whose bodies are still developing, or people who are most likely to consume SSBs, and consequently this can have a toxic effect on their bone development. If a growing individual has a low calcium intake it could jeopardize bone mass, which may then contribute to hip fractures and other bone related disorders later in life. Drinking a lot of SSBs while your body develops could have lasting, deadly effects on your health. So while it is clear that soda isn't good for you, it is also obvious that soda is downright bad for your health. It can make you overweight, suck the calcium out of your bones, and increase risk of type 2 diabetes, a leading cause of blindness. But that's not the kind of news the profiteers of big soda would ever want you to hear.

The marketing firms that barrage consumers with ads for their mouth-watering soft drinks hope to encourage you to drink more of their harmful products, not less of them. Indeed they have a financial incentive to do so. Their annual revenues are billions of dollars. To protect their interests, as Prof. Marion Nestle of NYU notes, the soda industry shells out tons of money to convince people to consume their products in mass quantities. In the late 1990s, Coca-Cola spent about $1.6 billion dollars in global marketing, with over $850 million spent in the United States alone. With that kind of lavish spending, it is little wonder why Coca-Cola is such a household name. Clearly, those who advocate for cutting down on the consumption of SSBs because of their negative health impacts are up against a very well financed opposition -- not unlike the anti-smoking activists who take on the shenanigans and deceit of Big Tobacco.

Nevertheless, Coca-Cola, like its competitors, is extremely savvy. They have inundated schools with their products. As Michele Simon, the author of Appetite for Profit, writes, "A 2003 government survey showed that 43 percent of elementary schools, 74 percent of middle schools, and 98 percent of high schools sold food through vending machines, snack bars, or other venues outside the federally supported school meal programs ... With public schools so desperate for funding, districts are lured into signing exclusive contracts (also known as "pouring rights" deals) with major beverage companies -- mainly Coca-Cola and PepsiCo".

In other words, these multinational corporations give millions of dollars to schools so that their districts and vending machines exclusively carry their goods. In reality, however, it comes down to one big clever marketing ploy: In the end these big corporations have hooked kids on their products while fooling people into believing they are virtuous corporate citizens because they support education.

Fortunately there is a growing movement across the country to ban sodas from schools. Indeed the feisty Killer Coke campaign, which focuses on the company's labor abuses and not Coke's negative health implications, has been successful is banning the product from over 10 major universities in the United States. But it would be wise to not just focus on the company's alleged murders in Colombia, and instead broaden the struggle against the soda industry by pointing out their complicity in the obesity epidemic worldwide.

Because death truly is the "real thing."

As the seas continue to swell, they will swallow whole island nations, from the Maldives to the Marshall Islands, inundate vast areas of countries from Bangladesh to Egypt, and submerge parts of scores of coastal cities.

Eight years ago, as exclusively reported in The Independent on Sunday, the first uninhabited islands - in the Pacific atoll nation of Kiribati - vanished beneath the waves. The people of low-lying islands in Vanuatu, also in the Pacific, have been evacuated as a precaution, but the land still juts above the sea. The disappearance of Lohachara, once home to 10,000 people, is unprecedented.

It has been officially recorded in a six-year study of the Sunderbans by researchers at Calcutta's Jadavpur University. So remote is the island that the researchers first learned of its submergence, and that of an uninhabited neighbouring island, Suparibhanga, when they saw they had vanished from satellite pictures.

Two-thirds of nearby populated island Ghoramara has also been permanently inundated. Dr Sugata Hazra, director of the university's School of Oceanographic Studies, says "it is only a matter of some years" before it is swallowed up too. Dr Hazra says there are now a dozen "vanishing islands" in India's part of the delta. The area's 400 tigers are also in danger.

Until now the Carteret Islands off Papua New Guinea were expected to be the first populated ones to disappear, in about eight years' time, but Lohachara has beaten them to the dubious distinction.

Human cost of global warming: Rising seas will soon make 70,000 people homeless

Refugees from the vanished Lohachara island and the disappearing Ghoramara island have fled to Sagar, but this island has already lost 7,500 acres of land to the sea. In all, a dozen islands, home to 70,000 people, are in danger of being submerged by the rising seas.

While the decision had been expected, some ham radio operators fear that their exclusive club has been opened to the unwashed masses - and that the very survival of Morse Code is in question.

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"It's part of the dumbing down of America," said Nancy Kott, editor of World Radio magazine and a field representative for the Centers for Disease of Control and Prevention in Metamora, Michigan. "We live in a society today that wants something for nothing."

A female in a mostly male radio world, Kott is one of about 660,000 licensed ham operators in the United States and is the U.S. leader of Fists CW Club, an organization that calls itself the International Morse Preservation Society.

(An "open fist" was the hand position typically used by telegraph operators when sending Morse, which is sometimes called Continuous Wave, or CW. In the slang of ham radio, someone who sends fine code is said to have a good fist.)

Within 48 hours after the Federal Communication Commission moved earlier this month to drop the Morse requirement, a discussion on www.eham.net ran more than 380 messages and 57,000 words long, the equivalent of a short novel. The postings were divided roughly evenly between those lamenting and those praising the commission's decision.

"CW is just another mode and should not be afforded any special priority over others," wrote K4UUG, who like many radio aficionados identified himself online using his radio call sign. "Proficiency should not be required for those who do not wish to use the mode."

As part of its decision to eliminate the Morse requirement, the commission made essentially the same point.

Inside a hilltop trailer above Stanford University, a couple of veteran coders seemed to be taking the commission's decision in stride earlier this week. In a room cluttered with electronic equipment, they translated the dits and dahs that beeped in the background at dizzying speed, the chatter between someone in Canada, VE6NL to be precise, and someone off the coast of Antarctica, VP8CMH.

"It's a bit like a foreign language," said W6LD, whose real name is John Fore, a securities lawyer at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, a prominent Silicon Valley firm. "You learn it and it's fun to use it."

With thumb and forefinger barely touching the two metal ends of a Morse paddle, W6NL, aka David Leeson, unleashed his own stream of dits and dahs with the ease of a virtuoso to join the global conversation. "I fell head over heels for amateur radio when I was 4 or 5 years old and heard Morse Code signals from afar at the station of a 14-year- old," said Leeson, 69, a consulting professor of engineering at Stanford University. "I still remember the thrill."

The thrill turned into a hobby, and the hobby turned into a career in technology. In 1968, Leeson founded California Microwave, once a thriving but now defunct telecommunications equipment company. Now radio and Morse are just for fun, said Lesson, who is faculty adviser to the Stanford Amateur Radio Club, which once counted Bill Hewlett and David Packard as members.

Leeson and Fore are both active in radio contests, 48-hour competitions in which hams try to contact as many other hams as possible, often using Morse. Leeson has a station in the Galapagos Islands, where he goes several times a year with his wife, Barbara (K6BL), for contests. They once contacted as many as 17,000 other hams in a weekend. Fore, who is 50, and got his first license when he was 10, has a station in Aruba.

They embody the kind of utility-free passion for Morse that the futurist Paul Saffo said would ensure its survival.

"Freed from all pretense of practical relevance in an age of digital communications, Morse will now become the object of loving passion by radioheads, much as another 'dead' language, Latin, is kept alive today by Latin-speaking enthusiasts around the world," Saffo, a fellow at the Institute for the Future, wrote in his blog.

Morse Code was first devised in the 1830s for use in the telegraph. It later became an essential part of civilian, maritime and military radio communications. But the military has largely abandoned its use in favor of newer technologies, and the Coast Guard stopped listening for Morse SOS signals at sea during the 1990s.

The FCC first lifted the Morse Code requirement for entry-level licenses in 1991. It later dropped proficiency requirements for higher-level licenses to five words per minute, from 20. And after international regulations stopped mandating knowledge of it in 2003, it was only a matter of time until Morse Code no longer was required in the United States.

The demise of the Morse requirement, however, could be a boon for ham radio itself. After the FCC decision, demand for information about radio licenses surged from about 200 in a typical weekend to about 500, according to the American Radio Relay League, an organization representing ham radio operators.

"We are very pleased to see that," said David Sumner (K1ZZ), the league's chief executive.

That is no consolation for the most avid defenders of Morse.

"There is something magical about being able to put two wires together and start going dit-dit-dit dit-dit," said Kott, or WZ8C. "We are just going to have to get on the air and do what we do and hope for the best."