earthworm
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Worm infiltrates computer, disables CPU fan, causes overheating
If you have both cats and dirt you may want to be wary of a new type of worm that's infecting computers across Great Britain -- or computer, anyway. It's called an earthworm, and one of the five-inch variety stealthily found its way into the laptop of one Mark Taylor. He began receiving overheating errors and took his machine to a technician who promptly found the unfortunate invertebrate wedged in the cooling fan, slowly crisping thanks to the system's heat. Taylor thinks one of his cats dug up the worm, brought it inside, and then the poor thing crawled through one of the cooling vents on his notebook to flee its pursuer. We're not sure how it got separated from its ultra-high-tech-indestructible-super-space-cyber-suit, but surely somewhere Queen Slug-for-a-Butt is laughing.[Via Switched]
New robot does the worm, for real
Sure, we've seen plenty of robot snakes in the past, but none like this robot earthworm being developed at Chuo University in Japan. The same research department that showed us the incredible Strider bot, is now demonstrating a machine that can move on open land and along narrow passageways, using the same method of peristalsis as the average night crawler. Each section of the body expands and contracts in a specific order, thus enabling the rubber-gripped bot to move inside of a tube with almost no lateral motion, even when crawling straight up. We can see how this technology, which NASA is also working on, could be used in fields like geology, robofishing and medicine, even though watching the videos on the site and seeing the word "catheter" in the article made us more than a little uneasy.
Earthworm Jim previewed
Those wonderful folk over at Shiny that put the little earthworm into a giant mechanized suit so many years ago are back at it again, bringing Jim to the PSP for an all new 2D adventure inspired by the first two games in the franchise. Over at 1up, they were able to get some face time with the title and revealed it to be made up of 12 levels. As for multiplayer support, the piece only states that "two players will be able to compete with each other for high scores," so hopefully we'll get some more info as the game approaches its early 2007 release.
