Hasta La Gadget!

Anyone on Tatooine can tell you that Jawas are annoying pests. They wander around collecting scraps and selling droids and are just generally everywhere. Meanwhile, on Earth, it turns out that we have our own Jawa pests.


This species of cockroach – called the lucihormetica luckae – looks just like a tiny Jawa, but there’s no droid selling here. I wonder if George Lucas was a bug collector and this was his inspiration.

Sadly, the bugs might be extinct now. They were only recently discovered, living inside a volcano in Ecuador. The problem is that the volcano erupted back in 2010, and they haven’t been seen since. They just need tiny blasters.

These cockroaches look adorable – especially when they glow in the dark. Bet you never saw a Jawa do this…

Wait, doesn’t that look like EVE from WALL-E?

[via Motherboard via Kotaku]

One thing everybody does is walk. You could drive a car or ride the bus to work or to school, but you’d still have to walk to do various stuff throughout your day. Now a group of students called the ‘Agitation Squad’ from Rice University are taking that very basic action and coming up with ways to use that kinetic energy, starting with the PediPower.

The PediPower is a prototype device that’s meant to be attached to the heel of your shoes. Energy is generated every time the heel hits the ground (or with every step that you take), and the PediPower harvests this as you go along. The device has an arm attached to the heel of the shoe which hits the ground first and moves up as the person puts his or her weight on the foot. The arm, in turn, is attached to a gearbox, where gears turn with every step to drive a motor that has been mounted on the side of the shoe.

This movement generates electricity, which is transported via a voltage regulator and through wires to a belt-mounted battery pack.

The initiative was a response to a challenge from Houston-based company Cameron International, which called for the creation of a device that could harvest energy from human activity.

The Agitation Squad gives an overview of the PediPower in the clip above. Check it out to see how putting your foot down will one day generate energy to maybe even power up your gadgets!

[via Gizmag]

This flying robot seems pretty creepy. Not only can it fly around, it can attach itself to walls like some sort of flying lizard. It won’t be long until these things have tentacles and attach themselves to our faces, while we thrash around suffocating. Thanks, researchers, thanks.

Airburr was developed at the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems, a branch of the European École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland. It is designed specifically to traverse cluttered environments, like those in the aftermath of a disaster.

The big news here is that AirBurr now has the ability to fly into a room and attach itself to a wall and act as a remote monitoring outpost. While perched, the AirBurr also shuts its engines down, preserving battery power. It uses an instant adhesive pad to attach to smooth surfaces. The video doesn’t show it detaching from the wall, so I’m guessing they haven’t worked that part out yet, though we’ve already seen technology which can do that.

via [Adafruit via DVICE]

We just posted the world’s smallest stop-motion animation over on The Awesomer earlier today, and now it turns out that’s not the only animation IBM’s team of scientists have created. They also made a special one just for Trekkies.

The animated GIF you’re looking at above is actually made of individually manipulated atoms, arranged to form various iconic images from the Star Trek franchise.

In addition to the Star Trek logo, they created still images of the Vulcan salute, and a U.S.S. Enterprise in two sizes.

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The images were created by IBM’s Almaden research facility, in celebration of the impending release of Star Trek into Darkness, which opens on May 17th.

The most amazing image of all is this tiny Enterprise that measures just 1 nanometer in height:

While I’d imagine it would be pretty easy to lose such a small Federation starship, at least it’s not likely to be spotted by Khan or any Romulans – unless their ship is equipped with an electron microscope.

You can check out more amazing atomic images created by the team over on Flickr.

They’ve already done it with frogs and sheep, so what’s to stop them from doing the same thing with trees?

I’m talking about cloning and how some people in the scientific community are turning to it to repopulate the earth with species that were once abundant before humans and other factors came and endangered their existence.

A non-profit group called Archangel Ancient Tree Archive is eager to jump-start reforestation programs of old trees before they become extinct. Described as group ”that locates and propagates the world’s largest and most iconic trees,” AATA will employ traditional and modern methods in the process.

The cloned trees will come from all over the world and will represent the “best” of old growth tree populations.

During this year’s Earth Day, the group planted and distributed redwood trees in Germany, Ireland, Wales, Great Britain, New Zealand, Australia and the United States. Now this is one application of cloning that I have no qualms about.

[via io9 via Dvice]