© Rich LeeRich Lee can listen to his phone through an invisible speaker embedded in his ear.
If headphones are too bulky and ear buds make your ear canals hurt, why not surgically transform your ear itself into a speaker?
That's what body hacker Rich Lee has done, by
implanting rare-earth magnets in his ears, so he can listen to music or amplified sounds even when he's not wearing headphones.
"The fidelity is comparable to a cheap set of earbuds at the moment," Lee told me in an email. So these aren't the high-fidelity bone induction implants you might have read about in science fiction novels (I think Neal Stephenson's
Snow Crash references them). They're not connected directly to bone anyway, so he's actually using his ear's cartilage as the speaker diaphragm.
"However, in experimenting I have discovered ways to improve fidelity and possibly introduce stereo (currently it is just mono)," Lee said.
In addition to music, he looks forward to connecting these embedded bio-speakers to a directional microphone or a voice analysis app, so he can do surreptitious spy-like activities, like listening to conversations across the room and detecting whether you're telling lies or not.
He'd also like to connect his setup to a Geiger counter, so he can get ambient readings on radioactivity, or perhaps use it as part of a digital echolocation system of some kind.
It's not the kind of project you'd undertake lightly.
Comment: Puerto Rico is heavily polluted with DU residue from years of being used as a bombing range for the USAF. Perhaps the disappearance of corpses is related to DU analysis in the population...a retrospective baseline snapshot. Perhaps it's to destroy evidence the mil complex wants to disappear.