The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved the DEKA Arm System for amputees. Named in honor of Luke Skywalker, it's the first prosthetic arm that can carry out simultaneous multiple movements triggered by a person's electrical signals.

Dean Kamen's DEKA Arm is an electronic prosthetic that mimics natural arm and hand movement with an amazing level of finesse. It's controlled by electrical signals from the wearer's muscles. This week, the DEKA Arm became the first muscle-controlled prosthetic approved by the FDA for sale to the general public.

As the story goes, the Black Eyed Peas' frontman Will.i.am was just cruising on his Segway, thinking about technology and stuff—when he decided to call up Dean Kamen and got hoodwinked into hosting the FIRST Robotics Championship.

I can hardly walk through a grocery store aisle without clumsily knocking something over. An amputee equipped with Dean Kamen's incredible, shoe-controlled prosthetic arm, however, selects produce with grace. It's enough to make you forget about the Segway.

Last Saturday, Atlanta's Georgia Dome was packed with students cheering on the FIRST Robotics Competition national championship. We covered the final matches via live feed, but these up-close photos truly capture the event's electric atmosphere.

Tomorrow, squads of rough and tumble robots will face off in an elaborate competition involving hard-hitting soccer in a robo-ready jungle gym arena. The craziest part: all the bots are built by high school students.

Dean Kamen is both notoriously shy and uninterested when it comes to media appearances, but Stephen Colbert was able to lure him in with his earnest, unrelenting, right-wing agenda. And Kamen even brought his DARPA-funded bionic Luke Arm. Full video:

Everybody in this photo: Jared Cohen, US State Department; Dave Morin, Facebook; John Cusack; Dean Kamen; Bill Gates; Arianna Huffington; Michael Shermer, Skeptic Magazine; and (sorta) Xeni Jardin, BoingBoing. So, uh, you guys tell us what's going on here. [BoingBoing]

The early '00s saw a lot of breathless reporting about the Segway. Steve Jobs endorsed it and Time magazine ran a massive piece with the humbling title "Reinventing The Wheel"—the conclusion of three months of in-depth reportage.

Anyone who knows tech knows certain names—Gates, Jobs, Woz, Kamen, Stringer—but before they became legends, they were busy doing, well, some curious stuff. Here's a glance at their lives circa 1979:

One without a whole bunch of ramps, surprisingly. The interior has living spaces and working spaces, housing both a lab and a crazy wooden maze of banisters and staircases.

In case your obnoxious Segway weren't clarification enough, this Segway shirt reading "that's how I roll" should set things straight. Donning Dean Kamen's matching denim pants/denim shirt combo also works. [ExBoyfriend via ShinyShiny]

There's nothing more you have to do than point and laugh at this poor woman and her Segway. You would have thought the other woman would be the one to eat it, karmically speaking. [BBG]

This past year, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs began to focus on priorities other than tech. Who will fill their winged sandals and become the new Gadget Gods?

A recent CNN interview has revealed that Segway inventor Dean Kamen often loses sleep about giving up on a project that he knows deep down will never pan out.

The father of the Segway and 'Luke' cyborg arm has taken North Dumpling Island-his private Bond villain hideaway off the Connecticut coast-entirely off the grid with a complete (and badass) LED lighting overhaul.

The inventor Dean Kamen is being interviewed at All Things D now. He's here to talk about his cyborg prosthetic "Luke arm". (It's named after Luke, yes, Skywalker.) Amazing. UPDATE: The full vid of Kamen's interview, including arm demonstration footage, is embedded below.