Is your mouse too boring? Does your hand routinely fall asleep while resting on it? Well, Microsoft, known for sexying up its mice with all manner of wild patterns, has struck again — this time, with the Wireless Mobile 4000 series. The six new designs are seriously spiffy looking, so if you’re in the market for a new version of your favorite peripheral, who could resist names such as Micro, Botanic, Cosmic, Downtown, Crania and Pirouette, who could resist? These bad boys will be available starting in September for $39.95 each. There’s one more shot below — hit up the source link for the full set.

Think of it as an autonomous, swarming, photovoltaic legion of seagoing Roombas (or don’t, if you’re easily upset). The Seaswarm project at MIT takes a thin, hydrophobic material and drags it behind a robot outfitted with GPS and WiFi for determining its location and communicating within a swarm. When deployed, the group finds the outer edges of an oil spill, and works its way into the center, coordinating the cleanup with minimal human interference. The material itself can take on twenty times its weight in oil. And yes, the whole thing is re-usable. According to researchers, 5,000 of these relatively low cost devices could have cleaned up the BP oil disaster in a month — which is more than we can say for Kevin Costner! See it in action after the break.

The last time we plugged in our Nintendo DSi to recharge it all we got as thanks was a little light. It turned on, the electrons flowed, and we continued our humble existence. Just think how much more exciting that menial act could have been if only we had this sucker. Hori’s Pikachu charger accepts a DSi or DSi XL into its faux-poké ball slot and, presumably, jumps up and down excitedly as lightning bolts dance from its maniacal little fingertips to juice up your dead cell. Or, maybe it just pulls power from an AC adapter and sends it through the connector. Either way, it’s certainly more exciting than most other simple charging stands we’ve seen but, at 3,981 yen (just shy of $50), it’s also rather more expensive.

Hopefully you had your Campbell’s Chunky Fully Loaded Beef Stew this morning, because it takes a Man to look down the barrel of the G-Mate Mag Gun and live. The weapon just passed through the FCC unscathed, and now it’s gunning for the Xbox 360, PS3, and PC. The basic operation is simple enough, with triggers, face buttons, a d-pad and everything else you’d need to ape a modern console controller. There’s only one analog nub, but that’s of course because the gun’s own motion is meant to emulate the second. G-Mate isn’t so clear on how that part of the gun works, but from what we can glean, it’s basically an accelerometer and / or gyroscope, which you calibrate to the center of your particular screen with a dedicated button. A sensitivity knob completes the Mag Gun-specific functionality — which probably won’t revolutionize the FPS genre, but certainly might give those suspicious of the Move or too masculine for the XCM Fire something to watch out for. Check out some videos of it in action after the break.

Recently Nike — a shoe company that seems to enjoy a side dish of tech from time to time — challenged 78 artists to “hack” its shoes and come up with something decidedly different than your typical Air Force Ones. Now, a lot of the projects were more art and less tech, but that can’t be said for entrant Nick Marsh’s contribution to the experiment. The designer fused the internals of a Wii Balance Board with a pair of Air Maxes to create a gaming experience that may not be nuanced, but certainly seems capable of making you break a sweat. According to Nick, games are played exactly as they would have been previously, but since you can’t step of the board, you’re required to lift your foot or sit down when you need to back off on the pressure. Nick finished the project in April, but it sounds like a slightly more polished version could be in the offing. Check out a quick video of the shoes in action after the break, and hit the source for a slew of pics.