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Say it five times fast: "Darth Vader-dressed dude dashes in Death Valley." It sounds like a comic convention fever dream, but it's very real. Jonathan Rice is a fan of heat running. It's pretty much what it sounds like. It involves running in stifling hot temperatures.

Rice is the originator of the Darth Valley Challenge, a personal challenge he sets himself to run a mile through Death Valley at the height of its heat, all the while dressed as everyone's favorite "Star Wars" villain, mask and all.… Read more

The world of "Star Wars" fan fashion is a wild and wonderful place full of Wampa-skin dresses and Boba Fett ski hats. No outfit is complete without a great pair of shoes, however. Etsy seller DeckoFab offers a pretty stunning set of "Star Wars" wedges.

The made-to-order wedges are crafted from decoupage with pictures of Stormtroopers, Princess Leia, Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, and Darth Vader plastered across them. DeckoFab also takes custom orders, so you could specify an all-Jar Jar Binks pair if you really want to be obnoxious.… Read more

At last, the mother of all mashups is upon us. Boba Fett has met the Bard, and the result is "William Shakespeare's Star Wars: Verily, a New Hope."

Many a nerdy writer type will surely have the same initial reaction I did upon learning of such a brilliant piece of literary pop culture/hipster-clout-raising coffee table candy: searing jealousy for not having thought of it first. Then I read on to learn that the author, Ph.D. and all-around smart guy Ian Doescher, not only rewrote "A New Hope" in the style of Bill Shakespeare, but also wrote it completely in iambic pentameter, a feat for which a very few of us are cut out to even attempt, let alone pull off.… Read more

Attention "American Idol" superfans: if you've been in major withdrawal since Candice Glover won Season 12 of Fox's blockbuster talent competition last May, you'll get your fix soon enough. On July 19, the American Idol Live! tour--a 30-stop national extravaganza, featuring the top 11 contestants--makes its way across the U.S. to a city near you. Expect to see Amber Holcomb, Angie Miller, Burnell Taylor, Candice Glover, Curtis Finch Jr, Devin Velez, Janelle Arthur, Kree Harrison, Lazaro Arbos, Paul Jolley, and fan-saved Aubrey Cleland re-creating your favorite performances from this past season and surprising you … Read more

Thirty-five years ago, sound designer Ben Burtt introduced an early version of legendary "Star Wars" bounty hunter Boba Fett to director George Lucas and select members of the "Empire Strikes Back" production team -- an epic behind-the-scenes moment you can now watch as if you were there.

"The Boba Fett character is really an early version of Darth Vader," George Lucas says in the visual novel The Making of the Empire Strikes Back. "He is also very much like the man-with-no-name from the Sergio Leone Westerns." … Read more

Few things are more embarrassing than landing your Millennium Falcon in Westeros, walking into an inn, and not having exact change for your flagon of wine. That's almost as bad as Harry Potter arriving at DS9 and trying to figure out how many galleons he owes to park his broom.

Sci-fi and fantasy characters no longer need to worry about making financial faux pas when crossing over from world to world. The Intergalactic Exchange Bureau is here to help convert a variety of fictional currencies into other fictional currencies, or into dollars, pounds, or euros.… Read more

At long last, a line of demarcation more clearly dividing the respective territories of geeks and nerds is being drawn with the help of (what else?) science.

Scientist and software engineer Burr Settles took on a little weekend project this year to try to more precisely define the realms of geekdom and nerdaliciousness using data scraped from Twitter.

Settles took a look at how often various words occurred within tweets alongside "geek" and "nerd" and then, using a mathematical equation that I sadly am not quite nerdy enough to explain adequately here (Settles finds "math" to be a much stronger part of the nerd vocabulary, as is the word "vocabulary"), plotted the following graph to serve as our first-ever atlas of a subcultural universe occupied by two sometimes dueling empires.… Read more

Superstar Seth Green is perhaps best known for his work on "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," three "Austin Powers" films, "Party Monster," "Family Guy," and his Emmy Award-winning, stop-motion-animated series "Robot Chicken."

What many fans might not know is that Green, who will soon appear on-camera in the upcoming feature "The Identical," the upcoming miniseries "Delete," and on fall's Fox comedy series "Dads," is quite the pro behind the camera as well, as his online photo album demonstrates. Green opened up about his Hipstamatic … Read more

Founded in 2004, award-winning tech blog Engadget has brought a lot of shiny and new aspirational gadgets and software into the light through the years. Tim Stevens--named "the nicest guy in tech" by "Fortune" magazine--has acted as the blog's editor-in-chief since 2011. Tim was gracious enough to share some of his latest and greatest software finds--for work and play--with Download.com readers.

What are your top five apps and why? 1. Gmail: I'd be lost without this app. There are some mail apps that are a little better, but none integrate with labels, filters, … Read more