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Still, even the worst products deserve recognition (or deprecation). So as we put together our list of World Class winners for 2006, we decided also to spotlight the 25 worst tech products that have been released since PC World began publishing nearly a quarter-century ago.

Picking our list wasn’t exactly rocket science; it was more like group therapy. PC World staffers and contributors nominated their candidates and then gave each one the sniff test. We sought the worst of the worst–operating systems that operated badly, hardware that never should have left the factory, applications that spied on us and fed our data to shifty marketers, and products that left a legacy of poor performance and bad behavior.

Of course, most truly awful ideas never make it out of somebody’s garage. Our bottom 25 designees are all relatively well-known items, and many had multimillion-dollar marketing campaigns behind them. In other words, they were made by people who should have known better. In fact, three of the ten worst were made by Microsoft. Coincidence? We think not.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Google has succeeded in outbidding Microsoft for the right to integrate its search tools into the millions of personal computers that Dell will sell over the next three years. After Yahoo dropped out of what may have been a billion-dollar auction, sources say that along with its desire to increase the exposure of its services, it was Google’s frustration over the perceived difficulty in changing the default settings in Internet Explorer to non-MSN search options that ultimately motivated the company to emerge victorious. Besides winning a coveted spot on IE’s default homepage, the deal also nets Google some valuable desktop real estate, as its Desktop software — privacy concerns and all — will now come pre-installed on Dell machines. For most consumers, this deal really doesn’t mean too much, except for those of you who are really into MSN search, in which case you’ll have to take a few seconds and adjust your browser settings.

Which came first, the chicken or the egg? According to a scientist, a philosopher and a chicken farmer, it was the egg, British newspapers reported Friday.

The key to the age-old question apparently lies in the fact that since genetic material does not change throughout an animal’s life, the first bird that evolved into a chicken must have initially existed as an embryo inside an egg.

Professor John Brookfield, from England’s University of Nottingham, concluded that because of this, the living organism inside the eggshell would have had the same DNA as the chicken it turned into.

The specialist in evolutionary genetics was quoted in a number of newspapers as saying: “Therefore the first living thing which we could say unequivocally was a member of the species would be this first egg. The egg came first.”

Brookfield’s conclusion was backed up by Professor David Papineau, of King’s College, London, and the chairman of the trade body Great British Chicken, Charles Bourns.

Papineau, an expert in the philosophy of science, argued that the first chicken must have emerged from an egg even though it was laid by a different species of bird, but it was still a chicken egg because it had a chicken in it.

“The conclusion therefore must be that the egg came first and the chicken afterwards,” he stated.

It’s now possible to replace a defective, damaged, or diseased penis with a penis grown in a laboratory — in rabbits. But the finding promises an amazing new treatment for infants, boys, and men who suffer penis disfigurement.

We know what you’re thinking: another Samsung HDTV, another HDTV technology standard, another day. But you might actually want to check out Samsung’s 56-inch SVP-56K3HDB, the first production model featuring ACAP. For those who haven’t previously heard anything about it, the Advanced Common Application Platform (ACAP) standard was developed with the intention of being the future universal standard for interactive television (and is already a part of the ATSC spec in the US). Oh, sure, iTV’s been around in various incarnations since forever, but there’s never been an internationally standardized internet-connected TV system based around the concept of moving apps and data to and from your set — hence ACAP, which might enable newsfeeds, weather and traffic, as well as commercials linked to online merchants, and, of course, in depth sports stats, background info, or interactive information about the program you’re watching. We don’t know much else about the plasma dusokay the ACAP system’s powering in the SVP-56K3HDB, but we’re a little more interested in the two way data right now, if you don’t mind.

People may permanently store memories in their brains, even if they cannot consciously recall them, according to a study by Duke University Medical Center researchers.

“This finding provides insight into a fundamental neurological process and also may help us develop a tool for identifying so-called lost memories,” said Roberto Cabeza, Ph.D., a member of the research team and associate professor of psychology and neuroscience in the Duke Center for Cognitive Neuroscience.

One possible future practical application of such a “memory tool” may be as a lie detector, the researchers suggest.

The team’s findings were published in the May 24, 2006 edition of the Journal of Neuroscience.

The National Institutes of Health funded the study, which builds on the Duke team’s earlier research on episodic memory processes.

In the current study, Cabeza and his colleagues used a sophisticated imaging technique to detect brain activity in the medial temporal lobes (MTL) of test subjects exposed to “new” and “old” experiences. Located deep inside the brain, the MTL is known to play a role in a person’s ability to determine whether something happened in the past.

The researchers first showed 16 study subjects a list of words. The subjects were then placed in a device called a magnetic resonance imaging scanner and shown another list of words, some of them “old” words previously viewed and others “new” words not previously viewed. The researchers observed brain activity, by measuring changes in blood flow picked up by the scanner, while participants looked at the words one at a time.

When subjects viewed an old word, they exhibited heightened activity in the rear portion of the MTL, whether or not they correctly stated that the word was old, Cabeza said. “This indicates that the brain has the correct answer even if we don’t consciously think we’ve seen the word before,” he said.

Robots are one step closer to taking over the world today with news that researchers have developed an interface for Honda’s Asimo robot that allows individuals to control it simply by thinking. The system, developed by Honda and ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories, uses an MRI machine to measure a person’s brain signals, which are then relayed to Asimo. In a demonstration, a person in the MRI machine made a fist, then made a V-sign, which Asimo imitated a few seconds later. The same system could potentially be used to control a keyboard or phone, researchers say, or even help people with spinal cord injuries move their limbs. From there, we assume, it’s only a matter of time before the bots learn to reverse the process, initiating a mind control link over their would-be masters.