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"Scientists gingerly tap into brain's power -- Today's science fiction could be tomorrow's reality … and a whole new world for everyone from paraplegics to fighter pilots." This was the title and subtitle of a big story in the Money Section of USA Today on October 11 -- just one day after Christopher Reeve's passing. The article was not at all connected to him. It was about a sensor chip implant in the brain of a 25-year-old quadriplegic in a wheelchair -- with wires connecting his brain to a computer -- allowing JUST HIS THOUGHTS to play the computer game known as Pong. All of this was part of a FDA-approved trial in Foxborough, Massachusetts and the preliminary results were revealed at the annual conference of the American Academy of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation. The company behind the technology told attendees at the conference "the man can use his thoughts to control a computer well enough to operate a TV, open e-mail and play Pong with 70% accuracy." A little later in this article, it says that the technology "could lead to artificial limbs that work like the real thing: The man could think of moving a finger, and the finger would move." "It's Luke Skywalker," said John Donoghue, a neuroscientist who founded the company (Cyberkinetics Neurotechnology Systems) in 2001. This story appeared just two days before the Partial Solar Eclipse at 21+ Libra that trigged America's Juno (empowerment versus disempowerment) and Chiron (healing wounds and pains via intellectual powers and alternative, advanced methodology). In a related story appearing on October 14 -- just a day after the Partial Solar Eclipse -- the headline reads: Implantable medical chip gets FDA's OK. This short story indicates that the FDA approved "an implantable computer chip that can pass a patient's medical details to doctors, speeding care. About the size of a grain of rice, the under-the-skin, radio frequency microchips, known as VeriChips, have already been used to identify wayward pets and livestock." As soon as I started reading the story, I thought of the biblical notion of "666," the so-called Mark of the Beast, where you could not buy or sell unless you had some kind of unusual number connected to your forehead or hand. Many people feel that the Nazis' use of numbers on concentration camp victims was a fulfillment of this mysterious prophecy in Revelation, the final book of The New Testament. The last sentence of this new feature is a little chilling in this regard: "When a scanner passes over the chip, the implant's serial number pulls up the patient's blood type and other medical information." While this sounds helpful and useful at first glance, we can also imagine a future where everyone has one of these chips but the medical information is misused to deny people jobs, discriminate against some individuals or even refuse a person health insurance. Plus if this technology proves reliable, what other kinds of chips might be implanted in humans covering a WIDE ARRAY of information -- including any past criminal behavior, school or college records, political ideology and the list goes on.

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