Around The World In 80 Days With Zero Emissions

Four electric vehicles powered solely by renewable energy offsets departed from Geneva today on an 80 day race around the world. Though they’re sure to encounter adventure, this trip is less about Jules Verne and more about joules and volts. The Zero Race is the brainchild of Louis Palmer, founder of the SolarTaxi project and the [...]

Internet TV Powerhouse Hulu Reportedly Mulls an IPO

If you???ve ever wanted to own a piece of Hulu, the television network-backed video website, you could soon have your chance. The company plans to go public with an??initial public stock offering??valuing the online television service as high as $2 billion, according to anonymous sources cited by the New York Times. While [...]

Deleted Star Wars Scene: See Luke Become a Jedi!

If you read reports about Star Wars Celebration V, which just wrapped up yesterday in Orlando, you may have heard about a never-before-screened deleted scene from Return of the Jedi that was shown as part of Jon Stewart’s interview of George Lucas. If you’re anything like us, you were instantly jealous of all the folks [...]

WindPad: $500 Windows 7 Tablet Arrives September

As MSI’s WindPad 100 edges closer to stores, photos of the Windows 7-based tablet have been released. The little slate even comes with its own dock that adds in all the ports that you’d expect from a netbook, plus a handy HDMI-out. The WindPad isn’t really a netbook, though. It uses an Intel Atom Z530 processor, [...]

A GeekDad’s Guide to Getting a Puppy

Our 7-yr-old has been lobbying us for a sibling for as long as he’s been able to speak. This spring, however, a simple surgical procedure rendered that unlikely, and so we began casting about for alternative sources of companionship. Eventually, after a joint campaign between the kid and his grandparents, we caved on the [...]

Hands-On With the MoviePeg for iPad

The original MoviePeg stand for the iPhone was a pocket wonder. The little chunk of plastic had a notch chopped from one edge into which could you insert your iPhone. The MoviePeg would then form a kickstand, firmly propping up the phone for movie-watching duties. Even our ever fussy NYC Bureau Chief, John C Abell, [...]

High-Tech Army Team Turns From Killers to Airborne Spies

BAGRAM AIR FIELD, AFGHANISTAN — In 2006, the U.S. Army unleashed a lethal machine on Iraq’s insurgent bombers. Relying on a mixture of attack helicopters, unmanned drones, piloted planes and a massive amount of high-tech intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance and targeting gear, Task Force ODIN decimated the builders and planters of improvised explosive devices, helping take [...]

Secret New Sensors Sniff For Afghanistan’s Fertilizer Bombs

BAGRAM AIR FIELD, Afghanistan — Improvised explosive devices, the signature enemy weapon of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, aren???t just a lethal threat here. They’re also near-impossible to spot with traditional means. The U.S. military is launching a new experimental program, known as Project Ursus, to sniff them out. Earlier this year, the Pentagon???s top [...]

Dork Tower Monday

Read all the Dork Towers that have run on GeekDad. Find the Dork Tower webcomic archives, DT printed collections, more cool comics, awesome games and a whole lot more at the Dork Tower Website.

Gallery of GIFs Explains the Inner Workings of Machines

You gotta love the animated GIF. Sure it was responsible for the flashing and blinking of some the 1990s’ worst web home-pages, but how else would you explain the inner workings of an aircraft engine or a sewing machine, all in less than 100-kilobytes? That’s exactly what this wonderful collection of moving diagrams does. The World [...]

Nintendo and UK High Court Sound the Death Knell for Chiptunes

Let’s talk straight here, people. In gamer circles the term “homebrew” is often used as a code word for piracy. This certainly doesn’t mean that anyone who owns a Game Boy flash cartridge or runs custom firmware on his PSP is a pirate, but sometimes this homebrew argument is invoked with a sly nod and [...]

Canon Patents Radio-Controlled Flash

Canon has just filed a patent application for Wi-Fi-controlled flash. Using radio to communicate with a remote flash-gun, a camera could control the amount of light popped-out and automatically adjust exposure, all without wires. Wireless off-camera flash isn’t new. Third-party boxes and dongles like the Pocket Wizards have been around for a while. While these have [...]

Great Geek Debates: Books vs. Movies

It seems that the big book-related debate these days is paper vs. digital. Everyone wants to be the next Kindle, and there’s no shortage of opinions on whether the iPad is a better book reader than an e-ink version. Even children’s book authors have jumped into the fray. With all of that talk you might [...]

New Lego Slave I Packs Plenty Of Firepower, Good Cargo Space

My son and I built the Lego Slave I this weekend. It was a quick build ??? we finished in a couple of hours ??? and we were impressed by the model’s detail, but the best part was the brick of Han Solo encased in carbonite! Check out the video for more detail.

August 16, 1888: Birth of Sci-Fi Publisher Gernsback

1888: Hugo Gernsback is born in Luxembourg amid the Victorian era’s embrace of science and technology. He spends his life parlaying his talents as an editor and publisher to produce a body of work so formidable that the World Science Fiction Society will name its revered Hugo Awards after him. As a child, Gernsback discovered American [...]

New York City’s Trash-Sucking Island

<< previous image | next image >> NEW YORK CITY — The system of pneumatic trash-sucking tubes running beneath the surface of New York City’s Roosevelt Island is either a quirky relic or a glimpse of the future, depending on how you look at it. A network of 20-inch tubes takes garbage from the island’s 16 [...]

GeekDad Puzzle Of The Week: Barring Further Complications

E-mail your solution by Friday night and one lucky winner will be chosen to receive a $50 gift certificate from the folks at ThinkGeek.

Lucas: Star Wars on Blu-ray in 2011

George Lucas has confirmed that the whole Star Wars saga will be available on Blu-ray next year. Speaking at the Celebration V Star Wars convention, which took place last week in Orange County, Lucas revealed that the entire six-movie line-up will be available in high-definition for the fist time, doubtless in a high-priced box-set. It’s not [...]

Pictures: Kindle and iPad Screens Under Microscope

Keith, of tech blog BIT-101, got himself a new USB-microscope. And like any nerd with a new toy, he started pointing it at things around the house. Happily for us, Keith avoided magnifying the dog’s fleas and instead turned his high-powered eye on the screens of his twin tablets, Amazon’s Kindle and Apple’s iPad. As [...]

Bagram, Rocketed By Insurgents, Yawns

BAGRAM AIR FIELD, Afghanistan ??? This sprawling U.S. military base woke up to alarms shortly after midnight on Sunday: insurgents just beyond Bagram???s north side fired two rounds of indirect rocket fire. One damaged a concrete blast wall and the other didn???t make it into the base. The general warning was to stay where you [...]

Celebrating Star Wars Brick By Brick

No hinge pieces. No tricky angles or layered builds. Just 160,000+ Lego bricks hand pieced onto 4,608 six-by-six-block tiles over the first three days of Star Wars Celebration V. Watching this 8-by-15-foot mural come together has been one of my favorite things this weekend. You came up to the often-crowded table, received a white tile with [...]

Paul and Storm Rock a Solo (Sort of) Concert

Paul and Storm’s fame has been growing by leaps and bounds in the geek world recently, mostly through their touring with Jonathan Coulton, their appearances at PAX Prime and East, and their awesome w00tstock series. As someone who’s been enjoying their music for several years, I’m glad to see them start doing more concerts by [...]

The Birth of a U.S. Wind Power Manufacturing Industry

As the U.S. wind industry’s installed capacity went from 6.7 megawatts to 35,000 megawatts between 2004 and 2009, its manufacturing sector expanded from a few dozen facilities to more than 240. By 2009, over 60 percent of wind’s U.S. capacity was sourced domestically. This is a growing ecosystem supporting U.S. middle-class labor as well as [...]

Video Game Braid Reimagined As Interpretive Dance

The Chaparral High School Alumni Theatre in Parker, Colorado put together an interpretive dance production of last year’s indie-game darling, Braid last week. The dance follows the storyline of the game ??? no word on if speedrun mode becomes available after the completion of the performance. Via Joystiq/Via Official Braid Blog

The Psychology of Power

I’ve got a short essay this weekend in the Wall Street Journal on the dismal psychology of power: When CEO Mark Hurd resigned??from Hewlett-Packard last week in light of ethics violations, many people expressed surprise. Mr. Hurd, after all, was known as an unusually effective and straight-laced executive. But the public shouldn’t have been so shocked. From [...]

Letter From Britain: Secrets of the Ads That ‘Stalk’ You

LONDON – Imagine walking into a shoe shop in the high street, picking up and looking at a few pairs of shoes, before putting them down and leaving the store. Then imagine checking out a few other shops before popping into a newsagent, where you start flicking through a newspaper. As you do this, [...]

Net Neutrality Protesters Call for Google to Stand Tall

About a hundred net neutrality activists left their laptops at home Friday afternoon to gather at Google’s Silicon Valley headquarters to protest the search giant’s perceived betrayal of the movement for federal internet openness rules. The protest group’s ranks included eager young activists, long-time technologists, first-time protesters and the ever-present Raging Grannies, who led anti-Google sing-alongs [...]

Cyberwar Against Wikileaks? Good Luck With That

View WikiLeaks insurance seeders in a larger map Should the U.S. government declare a cyberwar against WikiLeaks? On Thursday, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange told a gathering in London that the secret-spilling website is moving ahead with plans to publish the remaining 15,000 records from the Afghan war logs, despite a demand from the Pentagon that WikiLeaks “return” [...]

Happy 150th Birthday, Annie Oakley!

From 90 feet away, the barrier-breaking sharpshooter could allegedly split a playing card edge-on with a .22 — and put five or six more holes in it before it touched the ground. The tricks from this rare video, from 1894, aren’t nearly as impressive. But it’s some of the only footage available of Annie getting her [...]

Oracle-Google Suit Attacks Open Source Software

Oracle’s suit against Google over its Android mobile operating system signals a major reversal in the stewardship of Java under new management, and will likely be the first of many battles over the ubiquitous web programming language. Java was created by Sun Microsystems in 1995, where it was conceived as a lingua franca for the web, [...]

Valve Hypes Up Homegrown Left 4 Dead 2 Maps

Valve is doing its best to give homemade Left 4 Dead 2 campaigns a boost. The game publisher said Thursday that it will promote a new player-designed campaign every two weeks. First, it will highlight Two Evil Eyes — a desperate crawl through swampy, zombie-ridden terrain. To ensure that the campaign gets its due, Valve has [...]

Virtual Boy, Nintendo’s Big 3-D Flop, Turns 15

Nintendo 3DS, the upcoming 3-D handheld gaming device, is currently generating a huge amount of positive buzz. But 15 years ago, another bold experiment in stereoscopic 3-D gaming by Nintendo turned out to be the company’s least-successful game system ever. Nintendo released its ill-fated Virtual Boy in the United States on Aug. 14, 1995. The system, [...]

NFL Considers Ball-Tracking Chips for Accuracy

From end zone to end zone, an NFL field is exactly 3,600 inches, and it’s easy enough for referees to spot a ball precisely when action stays within the bounds of play. But when players take the pigskin out of bounds, refs must watch where the 11-inch-long ball crossed the sideline and then approximate [...]

New Cactus Collection Includes Art Game Norrland

Freeware fans with a taste for the experimental just struck the mother lode. Indie game designer Jonatan Soderstrom, better known as Cactus, released Cactus Arcade 2.0 today. The all-in-one, free-as-in-beer download makes it easy to pull down and play the dozens of games the prolific designer has made over the years. This release is noteworthy in that [...]

Gadget Lab Podcast: Droid 2, Voice Search and Carrier-Humping Surrender Monkeys

runMobileCompatibilityScript('myExperience558091561001', 'anId');brightcove.createExperiences(); For a quick download on the top tech stories of the week, check out the latest Gadget Lab podcast — just 12 minutes long this week, yet packed with everything you [...]

Surrender Monkey or Not, Google Remains Last, Best Hope for Net Openness

The blogosphere has been howling over how Google sold out Monday when it announced that net-neutrality principles should not apply to the wireless internet. The leading headline came from my colleague Ryan Singel, with his spot-on story: “Why Google Became a Carrier-Humping, Net Neutrality Surrender Monkey.” Make no bones about it, Mr. Singel is correct. The [...]

Review: Scott Pilgrim’s Epic Battles Slay Story

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is a videogame movie even though it’s based on a comic, and that’s why this visually impressive cinematic adaptation ultimately fails. A stereotypical videogame provides hours of mind-numbing fun, challenging players to conquer foes, complete missions or rescue princesses in order to win. More often than not, videogame plots are less [...]

Marvel’s Nazi-Killers Get Alt-History Reboot in Invaders Now

Comics artist Alex Ross has teamed up with writer Christos Gage and artist Caio Reiss to resuscitate Marvel Comics’ World War II supergroup The Invaders for the new millennium. But who will they fight after the Human Torch kills Hitler? Themselves, of course. Lock and load Sept. 9 when the original android Torch, two Captain Americas [...]

Video: The Different Shapes of Iciclology

A team of Canadian iciclologists has put to rest the notion that one frozen cone of drips is exactly the same as the next. By growing lots of icicles in controlled laboratory conditions, the scientists have uncovered evidence that runs counter to an earlier theory saying that all icicles should, by and large, assume the [...]

Droid 2 Teardown Reveals Beefed-Up Processor, Few Other Changes

The Motorola Droid 2 looks a lot like the original Droid, and a teardown reveals that the similarities go more than skin-deep. In fact, the internal layout and most of the Droid 2’s components are nearly identical to those of the original Droid, gadget repair site iFixit found. The most significant upgrade is to the processor, which [...]

Is Iran Supplying the Taliban With Missile Tech?

The Afghanistan war may get a whole lot dangerous for U.S. forces, if a report from Kabul’s internal intelligence agency is to be believed. For years, older-model, shoulder-fired missiles have circulated among Afghanistan’s militant community. They’re the kind of weapons that have the ability to take down helicopters — a major problem for a counterinsurgency where [...]

True Blood’s Vampire King Spills Character’s History

For True Blood actor Denis O'Hare, playing the part of Mississippi's vampire king Russell Edgington involved writing an elaborate back story for the character. O'Hare explains Russell's age, origins and history.

Dark Energy and Exoplanets Top List of Astronomy Priorities

Dark energy and extra-solar planet studies received strong endorsement today in a once-a-decade astronomy and astrophysics prioritization report. The National Research Council recommended that the highest priority large-scale projects for the next decade should be the $1.6-billion Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope, or WFIRST, and the $465-million Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, or LSST. The report, titled ???New [...]

Axon Haptic Tablet Lets You Install Any OS

The Axon Haptic is a tabula rasa of a tablet. It comes as an empty, OS-less shell, waiting for you to install your choice of operating-system. The hardware of this ten-inch tablet is designed to work with almost any OS, from various Linux flavors through Windows to OS X. Yes, this little baby is hackintosh-ready. The [...]

Gregory Brothers of ‘Bed Intruder’ Fame Discuss TV Pilot, Antoine Dodson

Even if you don’t spend a lot of time online, you’ve probably heard “Bed Intruder,” the similar “Double Rainbow” song, or the “Auto-Tune the News” series at some point over the past year. As you may know, the Gregory Brothers created all of them with the help of a large cast of “unintentional singers” including [...]

Electric Motorcycle Racing Comes of Age

Michael Barnes of Lightning Motorcycles has already won the TTXGP North American championship ahead of this weekend’s final race. But the real winner is the sport of electric motorcycle racing. As the North American season comes to a close at VIRginia International Raceway this weekend, the people who have organized the races and the teams that [...]

Factbox: Where BlackBerry Stands Around The World

NEW DELHI (Reuters) – BlackBerry maker Research In Motion is facing demands for access to its encrypted data in some of its fastest-growing markets. RIM’s encrypted traffic is delivered through its network operating centers, based mostly in Canada, though corporate clients can choose to host their BlackBerry Enterprise Servers elsewhere. RIM says [...]

Soldiers Try To Trade Tech Support For Afghan Intel

TOKCHI, Afghanistan ??? Captain Cristian Balan shows up to the computer lab holding a spool of Cat-5 cable, eager to play tech support. If he can get the computers running in this relatively-prosperous town of 4000 people, he figures, it???ll pay dividends in goodwill. Maybe the platoon will get some tips about local insurgent activity. His [...]

Aug. 13, 1913: Great Alloyed Victory for Stainless Steel

1913: English metallurgist Harry Brearley casts a steel alloy that’s resistant to acidity and weathering. Because his sponsor names it “stainless steel,” Brearley will often be credited as the inventor, but there are more metallurgists than metals in this story. Even the hometown British Stainless Steel Association acknowledges that Brearley was not alone. English and French researchers [...]

Behind the Scenes at MotoGP

Alt Text: 6 Ways Procrastinators Can Accomplish Nothing More Effectively

The internet is the greatest procrastination device ever invented. It possesses all the hypnotic power of TV, along with tower-defense games and free porn. Plus, if you use a computer on the job, going online will make you feel like you’re just about to get to work. If you get up and turn on the TV, [...]

New Titi Monkey Species Discovered In Amazon

A newly discovered species of titi monkey purrs like a cat and looks like a leprechaun. Although it was first spotted in 1976 by biologist Martin Moynihan in the southern Caqueta province of Colombia, frequent armed conflict in the region has prevented scientists from being able to confirm its existence until now. digg_url ="http://digg.com/general_sciences/New_Titi_Monkey_Species_Discovered_In_Amazon"; The new species, named [...]

Ecosystem Engineering Could Turn Sprawl Into Sanctuary

For over a decade, University of Arizona ecologist Michael Rosenzweig has preached a gospel of what he calls reconciliation ecology: designing everyday landscapes to support as many plants and animals as possible. He says it’s the only way of averting ecological catastrophe, which standard approaches to preserving nature will only slow. Some conservationists have embraced [...]

ARGFest 2010: Hotlanta Recap

ARGFest is a yearly convention dedicated to alternate reality games and transmedia entertainment. This year’s conference was held in Atlanta, and included a gaming festival featuring two days of location-based games and public play. By Geoff May, originally posted at ARGNet Near, far, wherever you are – ARGFest 2010 in Atlanta, GA was a blast. Whether at [...]

Chrome 6 Beta Boasts New Look, Better Sync

The next version of Google’s browser has been promoted to beta status. You can now download Chrome 6 beta and start testing it out on multiple platforms. The biggest new features? There’s a simplified user interface in Chrome 6, a new autofill feature for completing web forms, and better syncing, including support for autofill data and [...]

July NPD: StarCraft II Outsells Every Console Game

Blizzard’s StarCraft II for PC sold 721,000 copies in retail stores in July, making it the top-selling game of the month, the NPD Group said Thursday. According to the research group’s sales reports for the month of July 2010, the biggest-selling console game was Electronic Arts’ NCAA Football 11, which sold 692,000 copies across the three [...]

Video: ‘The Twit Network’ Lampoons Facebook Movie

How much high drama can be milked from tweeting egomaniacs? Not much, but you’ve got to give YouTube filmmakers Rated Awesome credit for trying. Their “Twitter Movie Trailer” makes fun of David Fincher’s movie The Social Network by refashioning Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg’s character as if he were a pompous true believer in the transformative [...]

Meet Mexico’s Volcano-Inspired Soccer Stadium

Doom, Ultima Creators Talk Space at QuakeCon

QuakeCon, the annual LAN party and celebration of “peace, love and rockets” inspired by id Software’s first-person shooters, kicked off Thursday in Dallas. Emphasis on the rockets. In keeping with tradition, id Software co-founder and Doom lead programmer John Carmack will address the computer-toting QuakeCon masses with a keynote speech Thursday evening. Immediately following, Carmack will share [...]

Haiti Quake Occurred on Previously Unknown Fault

IGUA???? FALLS, Brazil ??? The devastating quake that slammed Haiti on Jan. 12 occurred on a previously unrecognized fault zone, report scientists who are still trying to determine the implications for the region???s long-term seismic risk. The newly discovered fault hasn???t been officially named yet but is informally known as the L??ogane fault, after one of [...]

Darpa’s Butterfly-Inspired Sensors Light Up at Chem Threats

The Pentagon’s got a new game plan to detect deadly chemical threats: tiny, iridescent sensors that are designed to mimic one of nature’s most colorful creatures. It’s the latest in a series of Darpa-funded efforts to use insects to spot weapons. Last year, the agency tapped researchers at Agiltron Corporation to implant larvae with micromechanical chemical [...]

The Mystery of Steve Jobs’ Plateless Benz

If you ranked the things in life that Apple chief exec Steve Jobs seems perfectly content to ignore, license plates would be up there with handicap parking spaces, three-piece suits and customer demands. The proof, as it were, is all … over … Flickr. His 2007 Mercedes-Benz SL55 AMG has been shot without proper attire [...]

Ubisoft Ditches Draconian DRM for Steamworks

The PC version of Ubisoft’s forthcoming game R.U.S.E. won’t be saddled with the restrictive DRM used on some of its other games, the publisher said on its official forum Wednesday. The strategy game will utilize Valve’s Steamworks, meaning that a Steam account and Internet connection will needed to activate the game. But those who want to [...]

Striking Teenage Portraits Boost Young Photog’s Career

For Laura Pannack, a young photographer from the U.K., 2010 has been a busy year. In February, for her portrait “Graham,” a teenager suffering anorexia nervosa (above), she won first place in the Portrait Singles category at the World Press Awards. Last month, Pannack was awarded Best in Show at the Foto8 Summershow for her [...]

Citizen Scientists Make First Deep Space Discovery With Einstein@Home

While your computer is running idle, it could be finding new pulsars and black holes in deep space. Three volunteers running the distributed computing program Einstein@Home have discovered a new pulsar in the data from the Arecibo Observatory radio telescope. Their computers, one in Iowa (owned by two people) and one in Germany, downloaded and processed [...]

Net Neutrality Groups Organizing Protest At Google HQ Friday

Net neutrality group Free Press and the left-leaning MoveOn.org are taking the fight over openness rules for the internet out of cyberspace and onto the streets Friday. Google’s street, that is. ‘We are trying to show that the public is against Google and Verizon’s plan to turn over the internet to corporations’ The groups are calling on their [...]

Storyboard: The Future That Never Happened

Dreams of “designer babies” with the genius of a rocket scientist or the athletic prowess of LeBron James aren’t ever coming true. Thanks to our complex genetic makeup, human traits are rarely expressed by one gene. Science is one thing, ethics are another, and genetic manipulation is something most researches don’t want to touch — [...]

Next Firefox 4 Beta Arrives, Now With Multi-touch

Mozilla has released the latest beta version of its Firefox 4 browser. You can grab Firefox 4 beta 3 for all major operating systems and over 30 languages from Mozilla’s beta download site. The big addition to this beta is support for touch events inside the browser on Windows 7 machines. Windows 7 ships with built-in [...]

Why Russians Don’t Get Depressed

The saddest short story I’ve ever read is “The Overcoat,” by Gogol. (It starts out bleak and only gets bleaker.) The second saddest story is “Grief,” by Chekhov. (Nabokov famously said that Chekhov wrote ???sad books for humorous people; that is, only a reader with a sense of humor can really appreciate their sadness.???)??And then, [...]

Next Firefox 4 Beta Arrives, Now With Multi-touch

Mozilla has released the latest beta version of its Firefox 4 browser. You can grab Firefox 4 beta 3 for all major operating systems and over 30 languages from Mozilla’s beta download site. The big addition to this beta is support for touch events inside the browser on Windows 7 machines. Windows 7 ships with built-in [...]

Epic Scott Pilgrim Posters Pimp Alamo’s Special Screening (Updated: Now With Poutine!)

A pair of limited-edition posters tout a star-studded screening of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World taking place Thursday at the Alamo Drafthouse theater in Austin, Texas. The posters, by artist Martin Ansin, will be sold at the Fantastic Fest/Ain’t It Cool News screening, which will be attended by Scott Pilgrim director Edgar Wright and cast [...]

First Look: BioShock Infinite Satirizes American Imperialism, in the Sky

NEW YORK — There couldn’t have been a more fitting place for BioShock designer Ken Levine to unveil his latest videogame vision than the Plaza Hotel’s Terrace Room. “The time for silence is over,” Levine told reporters gathered Wednesday evening in the grand room, which has been meticulously restored to its 1920s-era opulence. Members of the [...]

Football TV Ratings Favor All the Single Teams

A recent study reveals that when it comes to driving TV ratings for the National Football League, drilling down on certain criteria could lead to increasing eyeballs on Sunday afternoons. Scott Tainsky, a University of Illinois professor who specializes in sport management, analyzed nearly a dozen different factors as it relates to a team’s ratings popularity, [...]

A Victory for Alt Fuel

Isobutanol, a biofuel with energy density similar to gasoline, has hit a milestone with its first win in the American LeMans Series. Dyson Racing has been running the alt fuel in its Castrol Mazda Lola LMP2 coupe this year, and drivers Chris Dyson and Guy Smith took first at the Mid-Ohio Sports Car Challenge last weekend. [...]

Comics Legend Grant Morrison Talks Superman, Bizarro

How has the Man of Steel outlived his creators? Writer Grant Morrison reflects on the political relevance of the costumed hero, how a costumed Comic-Con attendee inspired his take on Superman, and his uncomfortable encounter with Bizarro.

See Real-Life X-Men in Stan Lee’s Superhumans

Marvel Comics legend Stan Lee brings his wild imagination down to earth with a televised summertime freak show about actual humans capable of extraordinary feats. This Thursday on The History Channel, Stan Lee’s Superhumans features a guy we think of as Boiler Man. His real name is Timo Kaukonen, and he’s a world sauna champion. Kaukonen’s [...]

Aug. 12, 1888: Road Trip! Berta Takes the Benz

1888: Berta Benz, wife of inventor Karl Benz, takes her husband’s car on the first documented road trip in an automobile. The trip would also include the first road repairs, the first automotive marketing stunt, the first case of a wife borrowing her husband’s car without asking, and the first violation of intercity highway laws [...]

Afghan Government MIA at American-Backed Farm

SHALIZAR, Afghanistan — The rows on the farm were neat and parallel, just as they should appear: red tomatoes that started out as Iranian seeds; bulbous watermelons ripening on the vine; even peanuts. Peanuts aren’t typically a crop grown in Afghanistan, but they’re cultivated here in almost 20 rows. It’s an apparent tribute to the [...]

Planets Align for Best Meteor Shower of Year Thursday Night

If you’re looking for low-tech star gazing action, Thursday night is the time to grab a blanket and head outside to watch the Perseid meteor shower. Just after sunset Thursday evening,??Venus, Saturn, Mars and the crescent moon will huddle very close together in the western sky after months of moving closer together. And as the moon [...]

Danger, Marine Generals!

I’m talking Thursday to the Marines’ newly-minted crop of Brigadier Generals. My task: prove that the Internet hasn’t killed journalism. Wait, it hasn’t?

Alleged Carder ‘BadB’ Busted in France — Watch His Cartoon

An alleged old-timer in the international carding community and one of the top sellers of stolen bank card data has been arrested in France, and faces extradition to the United States on an indictment unsealed Wednesday in Washington, D.C. Vladislav Anatolievich Horohorin, 27, aka BadB, holds dual-citizenship in Ukraine and Israel and was one of the [...]

Video: Broken Bells Line Up 3-D Hypnotics in ‘October’

Broken Bells, a superduo composed of Brian Burton (aka Danger Mouse) and The Shins’ James Mercer, has dreamed up a hypnotic time-waster with the new video for “October,” viewable below. But that’s just the 2-D model. The user-controlled, fully immersive “October” 3-D Line Project went live Wednesday on Broken Bells’ website. Realized by Flash developer Richard [...]

Prior Restraint Lives: Newspaper Blocked From Publishing Photo of Murder Suspect

We’re not sure what’s more alarming: that a local California judge has barred the Los Angeles Times from publishing lawfully obtained photos of a murder defendant, or that an appeals court has just decided not to immediately reverse this clear exercise of prior restraint. Prior restraint smacks at the heart of the First Amendment. The U.S. [...]

New App Brings Scott Pilgrim to iPad, iPhone

Here's a first look at the new Scott Pilgrim app that brings Bryan Lee O'Malley's graphic novel series to iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch. The free app, which includes some free chapters, is powered by comiXology's digital comics platform.

NHL Franchise Lets Fans Name Their Own Price

It’s hard enough being a National Hockey League franchise in a market that you don’t traditionally associate with hockey. But for the Florida Panthers, this off season around South Beach has been especially daunting, what with the hundreds of millions the Miami Heat has spent on fresh talent. And before those dollars reflect increased wins, [...]

Claptrap’s Robots Rise in New Borderlands DLC

Borderlands players will face an army of robots in an upcoming downloadable expansion, the fourth for one of last year’s dark-horse videogame hits. Claptrap’s New Robot Revolution, priced at $10, will be available for PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 this September, 2K Games and Gearbox Software said Wednesday. The expansion will pit players against mysterious [...]

Darpa Turns to Canadian Tobacco to Fight Viral Terror

The Pentagon’s after a faster, more reliable way to fight pandemics and viral terror threats by mass producing vaccines. So far, plant-based approaches seem to be their top pick to replace old-school methods. Now, in a bid to hasten the development of vaccines that are ready for human use before the next H1N1 emerges, the [...]

Next Up for Double Fine: Halloween RPG Costume Quest

Tim Schafer and his team at Double Fine will follow last year’s heavy metal epic Br??tal Legend with a modest downloadable game. Costume Quest, a quirky, Halloween-themed role-playing game coming this fall for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, will be the company’s next release, Double Fine said Tuesday. The game, spearheaded by Double Fine animator [...]

Troves, Caches and Suitcases: Famous Lost Photographs Discovered

Quite frankly, the are-they/aren’t-they brouhaha over the Ansel Adams “Lost Negatives” in recent weeks rubbed us at Raw File the wrong way. The dispute remains unresolved and, to us at least, its impact doesn’t seem that significant. There is a lot more intrigue, plots and plotting in the stories of other photographic archives. Let’s catch [...]

Meet Treesaver, a New HTML Magazine App

A startup called Treesaver has developed a slick presentation framework for digital magazines that runs in the browser. It has many of the features you’d expect from a clean, reader-friendly content wrapper (like Instapaper or Readability) but it couples that functionality with a way-cool user interface. Pages can be navigated by swiping from side-to-side, and you [...]

What’s on Our Robot Overlord’s iPod? Autolux

After blissfully merging music and machines on 2004’s Future Perfect, Los Angeles art-rock band Autolux returns with a new cyborg lovechild called Transit Transit. But the future is far from perfect when it comes to technology and the humanity it has entranced with each accelerated innovation, according to the group’s guitarist. “I’m not sure whether to [...]

New Find Pushes Age of Stone Tools Back A Million Years

The genus Homo is no longer the sole primate lineage known to have used stone tools to consume the meat of large mammals. New research pushes that skill back nearly a million years. Large fossilized animal bones with ends shattered for sucking out marrow and cut marks deliberately made with sharp stone tools have been found [...]

Video: Battlestar Composer Kicks Up SOCOM 4 With Taiko, Gamelan

Bear McCreary, composer of Battlestar Galactica, talks about his innovative work with the PlayStation game SOCOM 4 in this Wired.com video.

Video: Climb Pikes Peak With The Monster

Nobody drives to the top of Pikes Peak faster than Nobuhiro Tajima, who might be the bravest — or perhaps craziest — driver on the planet. And now you can ride along from the safety of your chair. Falken Tire — one of Tajima’s sponsors — has (finally) released a slick video of Tajima’s winning run [...]

The Drunk, Injured and Bizarre World of Air Rage

JetBlue flight attendant Steven Slater has gained a bit of a cult following after making his emergency exit from an Airbus following an altercation with a passenger. There are several accounts of what prompted his hasty escape, via an inflatable emergency slide, but we especially like the re-enactment a news show in Hong Kong featured. Depending [...]

Gaze Longingly at These Buicks of Yore

Aug. 11, 1978: First Atlantic Balloon Crossing Takes Off

1978: Three Americans take off in a balloon from Presque Isle, Maine. They will land in a field north of Paris 137 hours, 6 minutes later, the first people to cross the Atlantic in a balloon. After Lindbergh’s famous 1927 flight, crossing the Atlantic in a balloon remained one of the last great unconquered aviation challenges. [...]

Photos: Swan Station Hatch, Other Lost Props Take Bidders Back to Island

The Swan station hatch door is just one of the detailed props used to create Lost's bizarro island world. Now that the show's run has ended, the intricate pieces are going to the highest bidder. The Lost props pictured above, plus many more, will be auctioned off Aug. 21 and 22 in the Barker Hangar at the Santa Monica Airport in Santa Monica, California. Worldwide bidding begins at 1 p.m. Pacific both days. Bids can be placed in person, by mail, phone, fax or online at the Profiles in History website. Get a sneak peek now and start saving your pennies.

50 Ancient Sci-Fi Flicks Make Faux Avengers Trailer

As director Joss Whedon preps the real The Avengers movie, subversive mash-meister Ivan Guerrero has pasted together a cavalcade of once-earnest/now-hilarious mid-century sci-fi film clips to create a YouTube trailer titled Premakes: The Avengers. On his YouTube channel, Guerrero also offers “premakes” of movies including The Empire Strikes Back and Ghost Busters. [via And I'm Not Lying] Follow [...]

DeviantArt’s Muro Drawing App Is Pure HTML5 Awesomeness

The folks at DeviantArt, a website best known for hosting images of fairies and vampires created by gothy art students, have debuted a new browser-based drawing tool created entirely with web standards. Muro works in all modern browsers, and you can dive in and start drawing on a blank canvas, all without Flash or any other plug-in.