Hasta La Gadget!

Researchers at Northwestern University are working on (PDF link) sub-millimeter robots that are capable of “walking” without complex hydraulics and other systems that would be impossible to build at such a small scale for now.

This 8-legged crab (+2 arms) can walk sideways, thanks to materials specially developed. The technology works by building legs that remember their original engineered shape. When heated up with a laser, the leg changes shape, allowing a motion to occur. Repeat the process, and you’ve got a “walk.”

The laser effectively controls how the robot moves, and it’s a way to offload some of the power sources and mechanics away from the robot. Depending on the material and laser strength, some designs could even “jump,” but this one moves relatively slowly.

This kind of technology is one of the ways tiny robots can move and is popular in the nano-robots world. It is believed that eventually, these devices will be able to operate in ordinarily inaccessible places, including the human body.

It has been long theorized that nanorobots would someday perform surgery tasks in a completely non-invasive way, such as destroying tumors or repairing tissue damage.

In science fiction stories, you could “back up” your body’s state and have such machines continuously restore it, making you effectively immortal. Fun, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

Crab Robot Is Smaller Than A Flea

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Elon Musk is facing yet another lawsuit over his planned Twitter acquisition. Reutersreports investors have sued the Tesla CEO for allegedly manipulating stock prices ahead of his $44 billion takeover bid. As in an earlier suit, Musk supposedly saved $156 million by failing to disclose that he’d bought more than a 5 percent stake in Twitter by March 14th, violating SEC rules. The investors said Musk only disclosed his investments in early April, when he revealed that he owned a 9.2 percent slice of the social network.

Musk’s post-announcement statements also amounted to manipulation, the investors said. They were particularly concerned about his claim that the deal was “on hold” until Twitter could prove that bots weren’t a major problem and represented less than 5 percent of accounts.

The plaintiffs in the case are hoping for class action status, and ask for unspecified damages if they’re successful. Twitter has declined comment, and Musk hadn’t responded to Reuters‘ requests for comment.

Musk’s hoped-for purchase has already sparked a flurry of legal action. In addition to the previously mentioned lawsuit from April, a Florida pension fund sued Musk for purportedly violating a Delaware law that would bar the merger until 2025. The SEC, meanwhile, is investigating Musk’s disclosure timing. There’s no certainty any of these actions will succeed, but they still pose serious challenges to Musk’s ambitions.

“Johnny promised me — promised me — that he’d ruin my life,” Heard said on the stand in some of her final remarks of the weekslong trial.

Twitter has been slapped with a fine from the U.S. Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission – here’s what Twitter did to draw their ire.

It took several months, but Minecraft’s The Wild Update is nearly here. Mojang and Microsoft are releasing The Wild across all platforms on June 7th, and it remains as expansive as promised. The refresh adds two biomes, a mangrove swamp as well as a “deep dark” that hides vicious mobs (such as the Shrieker and Warden) as well as special resources. You can also sail a boat with a chest, so you won’t need to leave supplies behind if you’re crossing a lake.

The upgrade also adds a mud block (made with dirt and water, naturally), a crowd-voted item collector mob (the allay) and a frog that grows from tadpoles. It even produces “froglights” if it attacks magma.

The debut comes a while after Mojang had to rethink its expansion strategy. The deep dark biome was originally meant to appear in 2021, but was folded into The Wild as the developer grappled with the size of its two-part Caves and Cliffs Update. While it isn’t surprising that the Minecraft team wants to keep its game relevant more than a decade after launch, the schedule suggests it might have been a little too eager to please.