Calls made on cell phones do not affect hospital medical devices, U.S. researchers said Friday, but store anti-theft alarms might make implanted heart devices misfire.

Tests at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, showed normal use of cell phones, also called mobile phones, caused no noticeable interference with patient care equipment. But a portable CD player caused an abnormal ECG (electrocardiographic) reading when a patient used it near one of the leads of the device.

And at least two reports suggest that anti-theft devices set up near the doors of retail stores can cause implantable rhythm devices such as pacemakers and defibrillators to malfunction.

Most hospitals forbid the use of cell phones.

A former Verizon sales rep wrote to The Consumerist recently offering insider advice to all Consumerist readers. By knowing how the sales force at Verizon are compensated, consumers can get an edge when haggling over a new phone.

What? Haggling!? Over a phone!? Yes, even you can do it. Verizon Steve confesses all he knows, from the simple to the sublime.

eBay has confirmed that, early on the morning of March 8 EST, an alleged Romanian hacker calling himself “Born_To_Scam_American_Guys” posted records for 15 eBay users on an eBay forum for between 40-60 minutes before the company removed them.

The posts were put up on the Trust & Safety board. According to other forum members who claimed to have taken part in the discussion and begged eBay to take down the information, the hacker signed in under a hijacked account and began taunting others, with the final result being the posting of the 15 accounts.

Health & Diet Manager for Windows Mobile Pocket PC from Iambic will help take control of your health and nutrition, so that you’ll actually have more energy – energy that you’ll be able to harness to accomplish more than you possibly thought.

This helpful program does everything from tracking your health-related vitals (resting pulse, blood pressure, hours slept), calories consumed and calories expended, to helping you create an action plan for eating and exercising.

Some former and current Best Buy employees suggest that the company may have intentionally misled customers about pricing.

As Connecticut state investigators continue to look into the Best Buy dual Web site situation, former Best Buy employees and customers are telling stories that question how accidental some of the confusion was.

The controversy stems from Best Buy giving employees access to two different–but visually identical–sites for them to show customers. One of the sites was the public Web site and the other was a full replica of that site but with in-store (typically higher) pricing.

Palm and CTI Movil announced the availability of the Treo 680 smartphone in Argentina. The Treo 680 GSM/GPRS/EDGE quad-band world phone, running on the Palm OS, boasts Palm’s hallmark ease of use. Slim, compact, and packed with features beyond its stellar phone capability–such as email, Web browsing, messaging, multimedia, calendar, contacts and more–the Treo 680 will keep any user productive.

The first animal to crawl onto land from the ocean probably looked a bit like today’s salamander, and researchers have wondered how it was able to switch from swimming to walking.

Now, European scientists have built a robot with a primitive electric nervous system that they say mimics that change in motion.

The robot doesn’t look much like a salamander–it’s nearly a yard long and made of nine bright yellow plastic segments each containing a battery and microcontroller–but it does seem to move like one.

A jury ordered Internet phone provider Vonage to pay $58 million for infringing on three patents owned by Verizon Communications. The eight-member federal jury also said Vonage must pay a 5.5 percent royalty rate on Vonage sales going forward.

Microsoft’s Craig Mundie has some big shoes to fill when Bill Gates steps down next year–or at least one shoe anyway.

Gates tapped Mundie, the software giant’s chief research and strategy officer, and chief software architect Ray Ozzie to replace him and handle the day-to-day operation of the company so he can focus on his charitable foundation.

In a recent speech at Georgia Tech’s New Faces in Technology Symposium, Mundie told the audience that computer science has had a profound impact on productivity and creativity, but said it was still a relatively young discipline.

An ethical code to prevent humans abusing robots, and vice versa, is being drawn up by South Korea.

The Robot Ethics Charter will cover standards for users and manufacturers and will be released later in 2007.

It is being put together by a five member team of experts that includes futurists and a science fiction writer. The new guidelines could reflect the three laws of robotics put forward by author Isaac Asimov.

Key considerations would include ensuring human control over robots, protecting data acquired by robots and preventing illegal use.