Some gadgets change the world. Others don't. These ones, however, are very effective at one thing in particular: teleporting money out of customers' pockets.

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Q-Ray Bracelet__

The FTC smacked down Q-Ray's "ionized" bracelet to the tune of $87m after the makers made deceptive advertising claims. The $200 placebo trinkets are still on sale, however — the ad copy just makes vague intimations of "wellness" and the like instead of specific medical claims.

Whether "ionization" even does anything, however, is a moot point. Tested by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation at an electron microscopy lab, it found that the thing wasn't ionized at all. Even for true believers, it's a waste of wonga.

Orbo

When it comes to gadgets, perpetual motion machines are bullshit's bread and butter. Steorn, the Irish company behind Orbo, is only the latest in a long line of deluded, incompetent or fraudulent firms to claim the scalp of the laws of thermodynamics. File this one under deluded:

enthusiastically setting up a public display, the inventors were humiliated when it failed to operate. But wait! Steorn gave its deal to 22 scientists who'll "validate" the device. Don't hold your breath, chaps.

Perhaps it's art, a complex exploitation of media credulity and skeptics' blood pressure. Perhaps its a clever-dick ad for Steorn's marketing abilities. What it isn't, however, is a free energy machine.

Think it might be real? For the love of Liebniz, get a freakin'

clue: if it looks like a toy and the net gain is almost imperceptibly small, you're selling a measurement error.

Danie Krugel's DNA search device

Marshall McLuhan may have seen technology as an extension of the human body, but we're not going to fall for this one: former South

African cop Danie Krugel's "quantum" box, which he claims can locate anyone on Earth, when primed with a sample of their DNA.

Science-challenged bumpkins at Britain's Observer and Telegraph newspapers fell for it hook, line and sinker.

After Krugel approached the parents of missing toddler Madeleine

McCann, then told them she'd been buried on a beach, the Observer described this hogwash as "forensic DNA tests" by a "detective renowned for locating abducted children."

Ben Goldacre of Bad Science called the reportage "contemptible." Krugel's led more than one bereaved family up the garden path, it transpires: The Daily Mirror delivered a much-needed debunking.

The magical mystery box weds "complex and secret science techniques" with GPS to show exactly where the missing person is. Krugel, however, won't let anyone examine it. If anyone gets a chance, swap it out for one of Mother Mohiam's when he's not looking, would you? That'll teach him.

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Harmony Chip__

The Harmony Chip is so transparently useless as to be an object lesson in how drivel may be dressed up as science.

Everything is just as it should be. The appropriation of scientific teminology to tout snake oil. Misrepresented research from real scientists. A website slathered in testimonials. Vague medical claims about pain relief, blood pressure and curing headaches. A long-haired, bare-chested Yorkshireman with a fake Eastern name who rambles emptily about the nature of innovation and who attributes commonplace platitudes to himself.

Wait... What?

Harmony "revitalizes" blood and water, improves your golf swing, speeds recovery from injury and "personal development," and makes you "clearer" and "cleverer." It improves gas mileage, reduces tire wear, cuts emissions, reduces workplace turnover and absenteeism, cleans swimming pools, refreshes "exhausted" engine oil, and protects one from radio waves. It even does the dishes.

Buy the basic kit for $200. Buy it with a pair of headphones —

"probably the most powerful self-development accelerator on the planet"

— for $537. Go get yours, now! Do it!

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Philip Stein Teslar Watch__

Described by Wired's Katie Dean as "a watch powered by snake oil," Teslar watches contains a chip (uh oh) that purports to emit a frequency that

"neutralizes the electromagnetic fields" output by cellular telephones, computers and radios.

Most scientists don't think such fields are harmful anyway, but even if they were, a feeble wristwatch wouldn't protect you from the radio waves rattling around every human head on planet Earth.

"There is not a chance in the word that [it] will do anything but lighten your wallet," says John Molder, a professor of radiation oncology at the Medical College of Wisconsin.

Here's the blurb, straight from the company's website: "When a Teslar watch is worn on the left wrist, the frequency goes into the triple warmer meridian on the left wrist, and then travels throughout the body, canceling out harmful static caused by electromagnetic fields

(ELF) along the way."

This snake oil starts at $600.

Screen Mist

Clarins' Expertise e3P

"ultra-sheer screen mist" purports to offer a "Magnetic Defense

Complex" with Rhodiola Rosea and Thermus Thermophillius, to protect you from all that horrible radio pollution.

At about $40, this bottle of failure takes the electromagnetic biscuit.

The Guardian, for one, found its makers unwilling or unable to cite the scientific research that they said supports their claims.

The main cause of premature skin aging is sunlight, for which the cure is darkness or sunscreen. If you want to get away from EM radiation, spraying water on your face is not an effective way to do so—even if it does have bits of dead

Siberian weeds in it.



MPion MP3 Player

Done listening to the MPion's stash of music? It won't take long, with only 128MB of flash storage on board.

The real feature of this device is is

"negative ion generator," which is said to clean pores when you smudge the unit over your face. Yours, for only $170, in Japan.

Even if this thing harmed bacteria, the effect would be more than compensated for by the torrent of them acquired by smooshing the grease from your own hands all over your chops.

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Harmonic Products's EMP Power Modulator__

With so many crackpot devices out there with alleged wellness benefits, it's hard to pick one out. Ah, the agony of choice.

Harmonic Products's EMP Power Modulator, however, is like the

Telsar Watch's big daddy. Plug it in, and it supposedly emits

"non-Hertzian frequencies" to remove "harmful" radio waves from the building and allow biological de-stressing. It also purportedly makes electrical devices safer and more efficient.

Reports of success tend to be anecdotal rather than evidential, but don't let that stop you buying this AU$300 toy. Actually, do let it stop you.

The sellers of this particular device don't like to be called on their nonsense: when one critic, Daniel Rutter, upbraided the Power Modulator online, its makers issued a series of nutty legal threats and had his website taken offline. Say "Hi" to the Streisand Effect, guys. Maybe it'll help shift some of your junk.

The thing is just an extension cord with a ghetto line filter: three aluminum plates held close to a copper conductor running the length of the device. The plates have holes in them, because

Harmonic Products also sells them as pendants.

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A Beech Knob__

If paying thousands of dollars for a volume control isn't spendy enough, try upgrading it with a pair of $485 wooden volume knobs, replacing the standard bakelites.

There's just no reason to pay this much for wood, even for committed audiophiles. Look at it this way: unlike speakers, signal processors or even cables, there's no engineer out there dedicating his life to polishing wooden volume knobs.

This well-known pearl of rot may, unfortunately, now be a thing of the past. The product page seems to have been removed. Where will the world get its $485 volume knobs? Silver Rock beech knobs 4 lyfe!

Dowsing Rods

I can't let you go without mentioning the all-time classic scam-friendly gadget. Be it two precision-engineered brass rods, dangling crystals or old hazelwood, divining is to the technology of magical thinking as the humble flintknap is to invention itself.

Usually associated with the search for water, dowsers search for pretty much everything: buried gold, gemstones, hydrocarbons and murder victims are just the beginning of a practice stretching back millenia.

Generous skeptics and even some dowsers maintain that the rods serve to amplify near-imperceptible twitches caused by the suppressed wisdom of the unconscious mind. Unfortunately, such inspired ideomotoring vanishes under test conditions, like just so much Randi-fodder.