Pills are getting smarter every day. Here’s a regular-sized pill equipped with a miniscule microchip attached to a tiny digestible antenna, ready to transmit its status to a doctor, caretaker or loved one. Now doctors can confirm that their sick patients are indeed taking their medications on time. A study shows that chronically ill patients only take about half their prescribed medications, so it’s understandable that the doctors at the University of Florida wanted to be able to confirm compliance. That’s why they created this prototype, using conductive silver nanoparticles and a metallic label that functions as an antenna, sending its signals to an external receiver carried by the patient. This capability will be particularly useful when researchers are studying the effectiveness of new drugs in trials with thousands of people taking (or not taking) the pills. As far as smart pills go, this is only the beginning of the wizardry. One of these days, a normal-sized smart pill will miraculously release small armies of disease fighters at exactly the right place in the body. Until then, this little capsule that phones home is an auspicious beginning. University of Florida News , via MedGadget

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Smart pill broadcasts a signal when swallowed

Sick and tired of that dissonant alarm that scares us out of bed every morning, we’re looking for a more natural way to ease into the day. That’s the aim of the Verilux Rise and Shine Natural Sleep System, easing you into morning with simulated sunlight. At bedtime the clock also lets you drift off to sleep as its light progressively dims, and you can choose one of its many soothing sounds to go with it. Aiming to please, the unit lets you plug a lamp into the back of it for even more brightness, and it has an FM radio, an aux port for your MP3 player, and enough memory space for 800 MP3s. When we saw it at the recent Green Products Expo, the unit’s solid build quality and clean design reminded us of a Tivoli radio . Still, we’re taken aback by its $249 price. Via Verilux

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Stop the noise: alarm clock wakes you with simulated sunlight

If one umbrella is suitable for keeping one person dry from the rain, then it follows that a huge array of umbrellas should be enough to keep a whole party dry from the rain, right? That’s just what Unsolicited Studio and DUS Architects did for a drizzly street party in Rotterdam. They ended up combining dozens of umbrellas into a buckyball-like structure, large enough to keep everyone nice and dry underneath. It ended up looking really cool, too. Heck, this is something I wouldn’t mind having available on a deck or balcony when it rains out. Of course, you always run the risk of all of them blowing inside-out at once, which would be a pretty serious pain. Inhabitat , via Make

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Umbrella buckyball is the perfect party tent

As an astute DVICE reader, we’re sure you’re aware of what a horrible ripoff Monster HDMI cables are . In case you haven’t heard, you can get an HDMI cable that works as well as Monster’s $250 sucker bait for $8.14 at Monoprice.com. Take a look at the full-sized graphic below for details from the clever artists at Mint.com. Their most astonishing assertion: “Best Buy might make $138 on the cable to connect your PS3 to your TV.” And the most humorous: “You could hook up your TV with 14K gold chain for less.” Our buddies at Gizmodo tested cheap HDMI cables , noticing slight signal loss on a laboratory scope when using longer HDMI cable lengths. Despite that, you’ll never see the difference between those ripoff cables and the reasonably priced ones. Via CrunchGear

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Don’t get burned! HDMI cable ripoffs, graphically explained

One of the main gripes about the iPhone/iPad operating system is that it doesn’t support multitasking. You can’t run more than one app at once, which is annoying. But rumor has it that that will change when the iPhone 4.0 software is released this summer. So how would multitasking work? Similar to Expose in OS X. Hit the home button twice and all of your apps will spread out as small icons across your screen. Tap one to go to it. It’s a pretty easy. Would you do it differently? On Android, you can pull a menu down from the top of the window to access things like text messages, so you don’t need to leave your app at all. It’s an elegant solution. What are you looking for in iPhone 4.0? Via Apple Insider

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How should the iPhone integrate multitasking?

If you were excited by the latest TiVo box and its promise of consolidating your cable box and online on-demand services, now there’s something that blows it away. This $400 Ceton InfiniTV 4 card installs inside a PC, and then records four TV shows at the same time, twice as many as the TiVo Premiere, and with no monthly service fee. The guys at Engadget HD installed one of these low-profile PCI-E cards, plugged a single multi-stream CableCARD into it, ran TV Setup On Windows Media Center, and their FiOS TV service was working like a champ. Suddenly, except for video on demand, the PC was set up to record anything on cable, including premium channels. Check out EngadgetHD’s review, where they figure out how to record six TV shows at the same time. Remarkable. Pair this up with a home theater PC running Windows Media Center, and you have all the advantages of a TiVo and a PC in one powerful machine. Via EngadgetHD

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InfiniTV card beats TiVo Premiere, records 4 HD shows at once

I’ve been hunting for the best Bluetooth earpiece for some time. Most have some kind of deal-breaking flaw , or are just generally unremarkable . After using Aliph’s Jawbone Icon for the past few weeks, however, I’m prepared to declare it the best wireless earpiece I’ve ever used.

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Why the Jawbone Icon is the best Bluetooth earpiece out there

Stark Industries just unveiled its website for Stark Expo 2010, coming to Queens, New York, May 7. Between the gargantuan pavilions, sleek monorail and an array of huge, skyward-pointing spotlights, this thing’s going to put the Beijing Olympics to shame. Even better, there’s a good chance you’ll see Iron Man there! Or actually, it’s the opposite: There’s a good chance you’ll see the Stark Expo when you go see Iron Man 2 . Too bad it’s fictional — this promo site for the movie makes the Expo look like the best thing to happen to Flushing Meadows in a while. We particularly like the retro video on the Stark Expo from 1974 with Mad Men ’s John Slattery. Quick question, though: What is Burger King doing there? Via Sci Fi Wire

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Could the pavilions from the Stark Expo 2010 site be real, please?

Just when we thought our days of writing Minority Report in a headline were over, MIT students Tony Hyun Kim and Nevada Sanchez had to roll up with a concept so faithful to the movie it has us excited all over again. Called “Glove Mouse,” the device has microprocessors on the back of each glove to translate the movements of fingers into button presses, allowing all the pinching, pointing, grabbing and waving you saw in the movie. Hell, they even added sexy little LEDs to the tip of each index finger. The most amazing part isn’t actually the Glove Mouse itself, though — it’s that the entire rig only cost the pair $100. Check it all out in Kim and Sanchez’s (decidedly rockin’) video above. MIT , via Engadget

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Glove Mouse: MIT nails Minority Report’s hand waving interface for less than $100

Asus has made a name for itself with its netbooks. I remember when I first started writing about the Eee PC (before my time writing about it for DVICE), it was odd to think of a cheap computer as something super desirable. eMachines were cheap computers you bought your grandmother, but they didn’t pack enough of a punch to do all the computing a tech savvy person would want to do. Fast forward to today, and the Eee PC is a perfect companion to a student, or a traveler. Jonney Shih, Asus’s chairman, is credited as one of the key visionaries behind the netbook boom , and now he’s got his sights set on a new target: tablets. How does Shih view the tablet? “Netbooks are the best combination of personal computing and cloud computing,” Shih told Forbes. “But between netbooks and smartphones and e-readers, we think there will be a space for something like a tablet or slate PC.” According to Shih, Asus plans to enter the tablet space with tablets that will run Google — meaning either the Chrome OS or Android — and Microsoft operating systems. Much like Apple’s app-heavy approach, Shih sees content and media having “a very important role on tablets,” adding, “The Google tablet will have a lot of media.” There is, of course, the looming behemoth that is the iPad to contend with. Apple proved with the iPhone that the company knows how to launch a new product and entrench itself in a market. Is Asus afraid, though? Nah — what, Shih worry? “Asus’ culture originated from an engineering spirit with a focus on fundamentals and results,” Shih told Forbes. “But a good engineer also has to master theory, architecture, innovation and aesthetics.” Expect to see more news from Asus on its upcoming tablets in June, when the company attends Computex in its native Taiwan, one of the hotbeds for new announcements — especially from Asus. Forbes , via TFTS

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Netbook revolutionary to lock horns with the iPad