44-pound roach bot is stuff of nightmares

(Credit: Engadget)

Here's the perfect answer to your prankster friend and his RC tarantula or that irritating co-worker who won't stop playing with the toy bug bot or "Solar Cricket" on his desk.

Relish the look on their loaf-of-bread faces when you summon all 44 pounds of the "Halluc II" beast-roach. Developed by Japanese scientists, this 32-inch, eight-legged robotic bug runs on Linux software and an 800MHz AMD processor, technology that Engadget says allows it to "walk or roll via a simple rotation of its jointed appendages." What's unclear to us is why it was created, though we suspect the project leader had an obsession with Kafka.