The Food and Drug Administration announced today that 465,000 pacemakers installed in the US have a security vulnerability that could be exploited to make the device operate too quickly or deplete its batteries, and these devices need firmware updates to keep them from getting hacked.

Pacemakers are—even at their tiniest—intrusive bits of metal wired into the heart. But now scientists have come up with something completely different: a "biological pacemaker" in a pig made by reprogramming the heart's own cells with a modified virus carrying a specific gene.

This amazing 3D piece of silicone dotted with electronics looks like something out of the future—because it is. In fact, this potential pacemaker replacement fits over the human heart and is capable of monitoring and, soon, responding to, its vital signs.

The little magnets sure make the iPad's Smart Covers useful—but they could switch off pacemakers, too, if a new series of experiments is anything to go by.

One of the big downfalls of the pacemaker (apart from their newly discovered vulnerability to hacking) is that every couple of years you have to open up a person again in order to install a new set of batteries. So why not tap the body to power this device directly?

Discover Magazine has an amazing story about how a woman needed to be carried upside down in order to stay alive. It sounds crazy but it's real. The reason she had to be held upside down was because her pacemaker had become disconnected from her heart and holding her upside down led the pacemaker to be reconnected.

Picture this: a mountain of a man — over seven feet tall, by the looks of it — stands in the ambulance bay entrance of a hospital. Clutched in his hands are the feet of a small woman who is dangling, fully conscious, with her head pointed straight at the floor. She appears to be entirely okay with the situation. A…

Wilson Greatbatch has died at the age of 92. He was a lifelong inventor. And like many inventors, his most notable creation, the implantable cardiac pacemaker, was discovered accidentally.

Heart cells created by Stanford researchers could lead to a better pacemaker: The beat of the cells is paced by light rather than electricity.

Wirelessly-connected medical implants are convenient, smart, and save a lot of lives. But the prospect of murdering someone by remotely-screwing their, say, pacemaker, isn't that remote. And researchers at MIT are working to protect you from implant assassins.

Swiss scientists designed a small blood-powered turbine that would fit in arteries and power internal electronics like a pacemaker. Each turbine can produce 800 microwatts of energy which is far greater than the ten microwatts used by a pacemaker.

Forget stomach stapling and lap band surgery. The next big thing in weight loss surgery may be the stomach pacemaker.

The Volkswagen Darth Vader commercial was one of the Super Bowl's best and a lot of it had to do with the adorable kid dressed up as the Sith Lord. The cute kid behind it, Max Page, is now a healthy 6-year-old but at 4-months old he was diagnosed with Tetralogy of Fallot, a congenital heart defect found in children.…

"Everything comes to him who hustles while he waits," Thomas Edison once said. But is hustling all it takes? Is progress always deliberate? Sometimes genius arrives not by choice—but by chance. Below are our ten favorite serendipitous innovations.

Scientists have successfully controlled a living creature's heart with a laser beam, taking a first step towards technology that could prevent serious heart defects. The procedure used pulses of light to pace the heart of a two-day old quail embryo.

Bionic people of the world rejoice, for your heart ticks and booms booms will be transmitted through the internet from now on. A New York woman has got the world's first wireless pacemaker, which allows constant remote monitoring via web:

The Tonium Pacemaker, contrary to its name, will not maintain your heart's natural beat from the inside. It's a portable DJ system, packing a 60/120GB HDD, that simplifies the DJing process in a pocket-sized package.

A group of researchers from the Medical Device Security Center (who would've thought we needed one of those?) have demonstrated wireless vulnerabilities in some cardiac monitor-pacemakers that may allow someone to remotely deactivate them while they're implanted in a patient. Now that's what I call malicious.

DJing on the bus, at work, in the supermarket and in line at the DMV may sound like a pipe dream, but this pocketable Tonium Pacemaker DJ system lets you do just that. We got hands-on of this at CES, but Kat from TechDigest takes it for a "spin" (worst. pun. ever.) and finds that it's actually quite good if you ever…