Here are some recent stories on TechCrunch Gadgets:

The Zen Table Practices Mindfulness So You Don’t Have To

The Wheel: What Is The Foxconn Debate Really About?

iModela Adds CNC Milling To Your Home 3D Printing Arsenal

A group of former FDA scientists who spoke out against the agency's allegedly flawed device-approval process are suing the feds for intercepting Gmail and Yahoo Mail messages by installing spy programs on their work computers. Although the computers were owned by the government, the plaintiffs say they were explicitly granted the right to use them for personal purposes.

Back in January 2009, nine scientists known as the "FDA Nine" anonymously wrote to the leader of then President-elect Barack Obama's transition team "pleading with him to restructure the agency," the Wall Street Journal reported at the time. Among other things, the Food and Drug Administration scientists complained that the agency approved devices in a flawed process that ignored science, and was driven by political lobbying.

A lawsuit filed January 25, 2012 in US District Court in Washington, DC on behalf of six of the scientists (two of whom remain anonymous) says agency officials responded to their whistleblowing by installing spyware on their computers to capture screen shots of private e-mail. The defendants in the suit allegedly stored the e-mails in a file called "FDA 9" with sub-directories related to each of the scientists. The FDA later used the e-mails to file complaints against the scientists with the Office of Inspector General (OIG), claiming that the scientists violated the law by providing information to the media and Congress. The scientists say their actions were protected by whistleblower laws, and the OIG repeatedly declined to take action against them.

None of the defendants still work for the FDA. Two of them, Paul Hardy and Julian Nicholas, are asking for a court order to get their jobs back, with Hardy saying he was fired without cause and Nicholas saying his contract was not renewed by the FDA in retaliation for his whistleblowing. More broadly, the defendants are alleging First and Fourth Amendment violations and asking for a "Declaratory Judgment finding that the United States cannot convert the private e-mail and electronic communications of federal employees without due process of law and just compensation and cannot target whistleblowers for searches and seizures without a search warrant or validly issued subpoena that is narrowly tailored and limits the scope of any such search within valid constitutional parameters."

The defendants in the case include the FDA itself, the Public Health Service, the Department of Health and Human Services, the US government as a whole, Surgeon General Regina Benjamin, Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius, FDA commissioner Margaret Hamburg, a variety of lower-ranking officials, and 99 unnamed IT employees, who presumably helped facilitate the e-mail gathering.

It stands to reason that workers should be wary of performing personal tasks on employee-owned computers. Monitoring employee computers is generally a trivial matter with modern technology, although the alleged actions of the FDA go beyond what an employee might normally expect, at least if the employees have no cause to think their employers have reason to watch their personal communications. The defendants, however, say in the lawsuit that the FDA's actions not only have a chilling effect on future whistleblowers, but also violated the understanding the agency had with the workers to whom the equipment was provided.

The "plaintiffs were permitted to access private, password protected Private E-mail Accounts from laptops and computers provided by FDA, but for which explicit permission was granted to use for personal purposes," the lawsuit states. "Defendants used this prolonged period of surveillance in an attempt to obtain nformation that could discredit the whistleblowers or be used by the United States to personally destroy the careers and reputations of distinguished medical doctors and other professionals. … When Defendants were unable to find evidence that the Plaintiffs had violated laws, they reviewed the contents of the secretly intercepted e-mails and recommended disciplinary action based on the content and viewpoint expressed in the intercepted e-mails."

The CEO of Micron Technology, Steve Appleton, died in a small plane crash today in Boise, Idaho. He was 51.

Appleton worked at the company since 1983, starting on the night shift production line. He died piloting a Lancair experimental aircraft around Boise.

He is survived by his wife Dalynn and his children.

Micron is a major semiconductor supplier and most notably built a number of memorable laptops and hard drives during the early days of the dot com years. The company currently produces the Crucial and Lexar memory lines, among other hardware.

via Micron

Remember those little Zen rock gardens they used to sell for desks? So you could take a minute of your busy day to contemplate the void? Thanks to the magic of Kickstarter, you can build your own automatic, desktop-based Zen garden that will rake itself into endless patterns.

The toy is a little pricey – $999 for the "table" kit, half that for the desktop version – but the concept is pretty cool. It’s basically a robotic Etch-a-Sketch with a few tricks built in. To wit:

Hello? This is Zen Table?

The coffee table version is 56″ x 39″ x 19.5″ while the desktop version is 13″ x 9.5″ x 2 1/2″. Created by video game developer Simon Hallam, the Zen table lets you draw nearly anything into the silicone sand, allowing you to complete your mandala without having to get off from work. They’re about $4,000 below their funding goal, so get over there and get zenning!

Project Page

Maybe it was too thick, maybe it was too heavy, maybe you just didn’t like Honeycomb. Regardless of your reasoning, you may want to keep your eyes peeled on your credit score if you bought and returned a Motorola Xoom between March and October 2011, because your personal information may be in someone else’s hands.

That’s the story from Motorola, anyway. As it happens, the standard refurbishment process that occurs when a customer returns a piece of hardware didn’t go exactly as planned for some devices. Motorola estimates that out of batch of 6,200 refurbished Xoom Wi-Fi tablets, about 100 of them weren’t properly erased before they were resold in batches on daily deals site Woot.com.

Though the odds are in your favor that you weren’t affected, I doubt that same line of reasoning will provide much comfort to someone who was.

Motorola doesn’t go into much detail about how exactly the process went awry. Were the tablets simply not wiped before they were resold? Did some glitch cause user-stored data to remain on the device even after a factory reset? According to them, the "information that may be accessible to the purchasers of the impacted refurbished tablets may include any information that the original user elected to store on the tablet.”

That could potentially include media like photos and video, as well as “user names and passwords for email and social media accounts, as well as other password-protected sites and applications.” With tablets supplanting notebooks and PCs for a growing number of users, this sort of snafu is the last thing Motorola needs as they and bounce back from a disappointing fourth quarter, though they’ve been pretty forthcoming about the whole mess.

If you were one of the people who returned a Xoom between March and October 2011, let Motorola know - they’ll be setting you up with a free 2-year subscription to Experian’s ProtectMyID identity theft alert service. They would also like to have a word with you if you bought a refurbished Xoom from Woot, so mosey on over to their returns site to see if your new old tablet is one of the troublemakers.

Megaupload boss Kim Dotcom (read our in-depth profile) was denied bail on Thursday by a New Zealand court. Dotcom insisted that he had no desire to flee the country and merely wanted to be with his pregnant wife and their three young children. But US attorneys argued the Dotcom posed a severe flight risk, and the court rejected Dotcom's bail request.

In court testimony, Dotcom described the dramatic raid on his home by law enforcement. Dotcom told the court that he didn't know the people invading his home were police officers, so he fled to a secure "panic room." Once he realized they were police officers, he decided to stay where he was rather than risk surprising officers and getting shot.

Wayne Tempero, Dotcom's security chief, who is facing charges over weapons found during the raid, backed up Dotcom's story. "Not once did they say they were police," he testified. "They had civilian clothes on. The only things that I saw were flack jackets with a lot of pistols and automatic weapons."

"When somebody's pointing an automatic weapon at you and tells you to get on the ground, you get on the ground," Tempero told the court.

Dotcom charged that the police used excessive force once they reached the panic room. "I was punched in the face. I was kicked down on the floor. One guy was standing on my hand so my nail was ruptured and my hand was bleeding. It was quite aggressive."

"No funds left anywhere"

The judge grilled Dotcom on whether he had cash or criminal connections that would allow him to obtain fraudulent documents and flee the country. "I want to be absolutely clear about this," Dotcom told the court. "There are no funds left anywhere. Everything has been seized." He also denied that he had any criminal associates who could help him flee the country.

"I have absolutely no desire to breach any condition that is given to me," he said. "I will not run away. I want to fight these allegations on a level playing field and have a fair chance to defend myself."

"I have three little children," Dotcom told the court. "My wife is pregnant with twins, and is due in the next two months. I just want to be with them."

But Dotcom's pleas went unheeded. He was denied bail and placed back in custody.

Speaking to reporters after the decision, Dotcom's attorney said the outcome was "very disappointing" to his client. Dotcom "believes that he has done nothing wrong in relation to the charges the US government has brought," the attorney said. "He has made a home for himself and his family here in New Zealand. He has absolutely no intention of doing other than remaining here and fighting extradition."

He said Dotcom was still considering his options. He might appeal the decision or "make a further application for bail if there are new circumstances."