First radio-controlled rats, now mind reading machines:

It is possible to read someone’s mind by remotely measuring their brain activity, researchers have shown. The technique can even extract information from subjects that they are not aware of themselves.

So far, it has only been used to identify visual patterns a subject can see or has chosen to focus on. But the researchers speculate the approach might be extended to probe a person’s awareness, focus of attention, memory and movement intention. In the meantime, it could help doctors work out if patients apparently in a coma are actually conscious.

Further reading seems to indicate they're actually a long way from reading minds. In fact, this sounds quite similar to a primate biology experiment I read about back in high school, but as I recall that required the injection of special chemicals to allow a scanner to read the patterns.

So I wouldn't expect mind reading devices to show up any time soon, but it is nice to know they're working on comparatively objective methods of judging consciousness.