Titan’s Haze Could Hold Recipe for Life, No Water Needed

When it comes to determining exactly where in the solar system life began, things have never been so up in the air. Scientists over the past decade have suggested deep-sea hydrothermal vents, underground aquifers, partially frozen lakes and even comets as locations for the origin of life. Now an experiment that simulates chemical reactions in the [...]

First The Thing Prequel Footage Cracks Open the Alien Ice Block

By Meredith Woerner, io9 Universal debuted the first ever footage from The Thing prequel at New York Comic Con. We witnessed a pretty impressive mix of ominous foreshadowing and hot alien tentacle action. So far, so good. Spoilers ahead… In a place where there is nothing, they found SOMETHING….fade out “some” to reveal just THE THING. The trailer [...]

Why Mark Zuckerberg Should Like The Social Network

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg (L) in a 2007 photo. Jesse Eisenberg (R) as Zuckerberg in The Social Network. It’s hard to go anywhere and not see, hear and read about Mark Zuckerberg right now. Last week and the week before, the Facebook founder and CEO was getting attention for giving away $100 million. This week [...]

A New Contender For The Largest Lego Mosaic Ever

As the Dorling Kindersley Books website says: “Imagine this in Lego bricks!” DK Publishing, based in the UK, is looking to destroy the current Guinness Book of World Records record for building the world’s largest Lego mosaic.?? Here is the UK event invitation: LEGO fans (young and old) come along to Shoreditch Town Hall, London and create [...]

GeekDad Fears: Hexbugs in the Ducts (or Why You Should Keep Your Bugs in Their Habitat)

Of course, here at GeekDad, we love Hexbugs. In all their fascinating colors and shapes. Well, I’ve loved them for a while having never seen one. I’ve loved them from afar because, you see, most technological advances take a little bit longer to make it down to Australia. A few might come in via GeekDad travelers [...]

Leaked Report: Worker Abuse, Violence Continues at Foxconn

Electronic gadget manufacturer Foxconn is under fire???yes, again???for alleged worker abuse. The Chinese state-run Global Times claims to have information from an as-yet-unreleased report by Foxconn itself on the results of its worker investigation, which details safety issues, “violent training,” and low wages. The survey was conducted on Foxconn’s behalf by researchers from [...]

GeekDad Puzzle Of The Week Solution: Smply Hrrrfyng

Welcome back victims … I mean Puzzlers. Last week was the start of the Halloween season and I thought it would be nice warm up to learn a new word and go over some movie suggestions for the upcoming All Hallows Eve. The new word was Disemvoweled which is the act of removing [...]

Cool Evolution Trick: Platinum Turns Baby Snails Into Slugs

Evolution doesn???t have to operate at a snail???s pace, even for snails. In experiments designed to simulate the evolutionary transition that produced slugs, researchers exposed baby snails to the metal platinum, causing the animals to develop without external shells. The research illustrates how a big leap on the evolutionary path of [...]

A Humbled Microsoft Prepares to Boot Up Windows Phone 7

Joe Belfiore, Microsoft’s man in charge of mobile, has a favorite word when he talks about Windows Phone 7: “holistic.” The company’s mobile infrastructure underwent a sea change to make an operating system based on what users want, which required retooling its entire phone manufacturing and design strategy. It even involved building robots, like the one [...]

Silicon Valley Lacks Vision? Facebook Begs to Differ

Facebook VP and early employee Christopher Cox believes and he’s got some words for those who think Facebook and social networking are a waste of time and overvalued. “This stuff matters,” Cox says. Cox ??? who graduated Stanford in 2004 and joined Facebook the following year ??? is one of CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s closest confidantes. He’s prone [...]

Black Death’s Daddy Was the Bubonic Plague

Piles of bones and historical records tell us the Black Death pandemic wiped out as much as half the population of Europe during the Middle Ages. But how and what, exactly, caused the grisly scourge has sparked a boxing match of sorts within the pages of scientific journals. The final bell has rung, according [...]

DIY Filmmakers Gear Up for ‘One Day on Earth’

A singing automaton from Germany, a New York gamelan robot orchestra and a group of Australian helium-balloonists plan to document their adventures for a daylong global videofest Sunday. Anyone who registers at the One Day on Earth site can submit footage, which will be archived for perusal by other members of the project’s online community. [...]

Full Sail’s Beers Make Headway With Wired, Mother Jones

The October Madness beer tournament came home to Wired’s San Francisco headquarters Oct. 7, where we met up with the hard-working and extremely beer-deserving staff of Mother Jones magazine to taste beers from Full Sail Brewing Company. For many MoJo staffers, it was their first encounter with Beer Robot, who presided over the competition, but [...]

Gadget Lab Podcast: Windows Phone 7 and the Madness of Sony and Cisco

Gadget Lab's weekly video (and audio) review of the top topics in the gadget universe. This week: a Star Trek pizza cutter, Windows Phone 7, Cisco's home videoconferencing solution, and a cool new iPhone app called Instagram.

Most Dangerous Week Ever

Come for the contractors, stay for the A/V club. This was quite the eye-catching week for the Danger Room. It’s not that we didn’t supply you with our usual blend of the advanced, the bizarre and the unsettling in the security sphere. Marines balking at a replacement truck for the Humvee; Darpa working on ways to [...]

Failure in My Pocket: Gaming’s Tortured History of Handheld Convergence

Steve Fossett’s 800-MPH Jet Car for Sale

The car Steve Fossett was developing to set a land-speed record is for sale to anyone with an interest in supersonic driving and a pile of money to finance it. The adventurer bought the “Target 800 MPH” car from experienced land speed driver Craig Breedlove in 2006. Fossett’s crew was modifying it to attempt an 800-plus-mph [...]

Babies Want to Be Social, Even Before They’re Born

The impulse to be social is so deep-seated in human consciousness that it’s even evident in the womb, suggests a new study on the interaction of twins just a few months after conception. Twin pregnancies offer “the unique opportunity to explore social behavior before birth,” wrote researchers led by psychologist Umberto Castiello of Italy’s University of [...]

Everything We Know So Far About Amazon’s Android App Store

Amazon seems ready to get into the app-store business with plans to launch a new Android app store. The company has reportedly sent welcome kits to some developers to entice them to start signing on to the store, according to reports in The Wall Street Journal and Engadget. With its plans to offer an Android app store, [...]

Final Fantasy Versus XIII, Agito Trailers Hit YouTube

Here are the trailers I saw during Square Enix’s closed theater presentation at Tokyo Game Show, featuring some brief snippets of gameplay for Final Fantasy Versus XIII on PlayStation 3 and Final Fantasy Agito XIII on PSP. As I mentioned when I saw the video at TGS, it closes with an announcement of an announcement: Square [...]

Are Picture Books a Dying Breed?

On Thursday the New York Times ran an article stating “Picture Books No Longer a Staple for Children.” One major reason for the decline, a decline confirmed by many publishers and booksellers, is that parents are pushing their kids to move on to chapter books and more advanced reading earlier and earlier. There’s a sense [...]

Video Sneak Peek: Insane Kinetic Sculpture Tests Limits of Math, Art, Man

runMobileCompatibilityScript('myExperience628260777001', 'anId'); brightcove.createExperiences(); The atrium in the Dallas Hilton Anatole hotel is Texas-big, lofting more than 150 feet in the air. Owner Harlan Crow — legendary real estate investor and eccentric collector of ego-size dead-dictator statues –??needed to fill it. What happened next was??perhaps the most ambitious kinetic sculpture ever commissioned, the Nebula. Conceived and designed [...]

Video: ‘Flying Car’ Approved for Production

One of the more unusual approaches to the flying car combines a dune buggy with a propeller and a big parachute. It’s odd, but that hasn’t kept the FAA from approving it for production by issuing a Special Light Sport Aircraft airworthiness certificate. The flying buggy is called Maverick and Itec, the Florida company building it, [...]

Report: Blizzard Floats Spring 2012 Release for Starcraft II: Heart of the Swarm

The second installment in the Starcraft II trilogy could arrive sometime around April 2012, according to Battle.net project director Greg Canessa. During a presentation at GDC Online in Austin, Texas on Thursday, Canessa said that future Battle.net features like replay exchange and profile upgrades would be a main area of focus “over the next 18 months [...]

Haptic GPS Let Your Fingers Do the Driving

A new invention in GPS technology would rid your car of the distracting screen and let you understand the directions even if you’re yakking away on your mobile and can’t hear the spoken instructions. Instead of animated graphics or a computerized voice, technology being developed at the University of Utah gently tugs on your index fingers [...]

Meat Beat Manifesto’s Hypno-Funk Is ‘Totally Together’

Jack Dangers’ Meat Beat Manifesto excels at electronic music hybrids that careen between industrial, breakbeat, funk, dub and ambient. But his San Francisco-based band is also deft with the multimedia, especially in the video below for “Totally Together.” But be warned: Meat Beat Manifesto’s hypnotic reel for “Totally Together” is not for viewers who have trouble [...]

Solar System’s Deepest Canyon Sinks Miles Into Mars

On the Martian surface, the mountains are high and the canyons are low. Really, really low. Not only is the martian volcano Olympus Mons the highest peak in the solar system, Melas Chasma, the canyon pictured above, is the deepest in the solar system. In this image from the European Space Agency???s Mars Express [...]

New Blu-Ray Lasers Mean Faster Burns, Quad-Layer Discs

This week, Sony launched the first commercial 400mW blue???violet laser diode for Blu-ray. The higher-power lasers can perform triple or even quadruple-layer recording at 8X-12X speeds, storing up to 128GB on a single disc. Sony’s blue-violet laser diode, called the SLD3237VF, will cost about $12. Until the

Cases Might Break iPhone 4 Glass Due to Design Flaw

Now that Apple has shut everybody up about the iPhone 4 antenna with free cases, it faces another potential problem: Those cases could potentially cause damage to the handset’s glass body, according to Ryan Block of GDGT. Block, a well-sourced tech journalist who was formerly chief of Engadget, claims sources both inside and outside Apple told [...]

Fish, Birds and Bats Inspire Navy’s Next-Gen Drones

The Pentagon wants robots that can maneuver through pretty much any environment, from dense forests to towering city skyscrapers. So the Navy is trying to learn from creatures that can already do it all, by funding a consortium of researchers to study the travel patterns of fish, bats, birds and insects. And it’s hardly the first [...]

Pilot G2 + Mont Blanc Ink Refill = Cheap, Amazing Pen

Mont Blanc makes unbelievably gorgeous pens, but they also make terrific ink, high-quality points and smart refill technology. The pens cost hundreds of dollars; the refills, about $12. You can cut down a Mont Blanc refill with an exacto-knife and reap all its benefits inside an inexpensive Pilot G2. Instructables user Kingant posted this hack almost [...]

Celebrate the 10th Anniversary of The Rose Space Center on Sunday (the 10th)

This year marks the 10th Anniversary of The American Museum of Natural History’s Rose Center for Earth and Space in New York City. The center opened in February 2000 as one the most ambitious achievements of the AMNH. The center, designed by Polshek Partnership Architects encompassed a completely rebuilt Hayden Planetarium which set [...]

In High School Chem Labs, Every Cameraphone Can Be a Spectrometer

University of Illinois chemistry professor Alexander Scheeline has developed software that turns a camera phone, an LED, and a few other cheap tools into a spectrometer. Armed with these, he thinks we can bring high-end analytic tools to high school chemistry labs all over the world. ???The potential is here to make analytical chemistry a subject [...]

Samsung Tablet May Cost $400 with Long-Term Contract

Despite the announcement of its first Android tablet last month, Samsung has been coy about the most awaited information of the device: pricing. Now a leak suggests the Galaxy Tab will be priced at $400 with a two-year contract on Sprint and $600 without a contract. The device could be available starting November 14 in the [...]

Report: Apple Blocks Spotify in the U.S.

Like many foreign acts, free music streaming service Spotify is having trouble breaking into the United States. We had assumed it was simply tough negotiations with record companies that were causing the holdup, but it could be something altogether more sinister. Apple may be blocking the Swedish company to protect both its iTunes Store sales [...]

Autism Plays Hide-and-Seek in Family Genes

Autism seems to play a genetically inspired hide-and-seek game in some families. Undiagnosed siblings in families that include two or more children with autism often grapple with language delays, social difficulties and other mild symptoms of the disorder, a new study suggests. Genes prompt autism symptoms of varying intensity among members of these families, including in [...]

Code Pink Disses Blackwater in Wackest Rap Video Ever

In its wisdom, Code Pink, the antiwar agitators fond of disrupting congressional hearings, decided to rap about how controversial private-security company Blackwater “makes a killing out of killing.” Lead emcee and Code Pink co-founder Medea Benjamin, alas, cannot kill the track. You are guaranteed never to hear this on a Gangsta Grillz mixtape. In just the [...]

1010* fun things to do on 10/10/10

Sunday is the 10th of October 2010, or 10/10/10, or 101010:?? a binary day! Of course, it’s also a decimal day too, and one of the few that is the same no matter which way around you write your dates ??? so long as you don’t write the century part of the year, of course. Without [...]

PaperPro Makes “Quite Possibly the Best Staplers Ever”

PaperPro’s staplers use a patented staple-gun-like spring-and-lever mechanism to turn 8lbs of finger pressure into 30lbs of staple-driving force. They’re quickly attracting a devoted following. OfficeSupplyGeek does pretty thorough product reviews, so when he says “I have found the only stapler I???ll ever use,” I believe him. Paper capacity, ease-of-use, ergonomics, style — the entire range [...]

Asus Eee PC 1008P-Karim Rashid Edition: First Impressions

I was recently loaned an Asus Eee PC 1008P-Karim Rashid edition for one year to use and love and try out in many different ways. I have owned a Dell Mini 9 for a while, but its battery recently died. Not being able to use it wherever I want certainly affects its usefulness, and at [...]

Klutz Animation Blog Tour, Stop 15 — With a Giveaway!

I’ve been a fan of stop-motion animation since the later days of Gumby and Pokey. It intrigued me then, and still does now, that you could create such a compelling illusion of movement by taking a series of very-slightly-different photographs. I recall it nearly blowing my mind when I found out that regular live-action video [...]

Nokia N8 Teardown Shows Tough Phone, Great Camera

Nokia has wowed us with its hot N8 smartphone, the flagship cellphone which packs in every function known to man, and controls them all with a horrible, old fashioned Symbian OS. Meanwhile, Nokia’s soon-to-be-leaving mobile boss Anssi Vanjoki said using Android was like “peeing in your pants for warmth” in winter, and Ari Jaaksi, head [...]

Dork Tower Friday

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.

Lego Universe: A Closer Look

Several bloggers with kids in tow visited NetDevil Studios earlier this week for the Lego Universe Family Media Day. It was a chance to talk to the game designers and developers about their upcoming MMO. Just visiting the NetDevil offices was a blast, but I’m sure what you’re most interested in is the game itself, right? [...]

Around the World in an Electric Bubble Car

In our quest to hear from all the teams involved in the Zero Race, we had the chance to talk with the folks from Australia’s Team Trev somewhere on the side of the road in Shanghai (shown above). The teams have completed the European and Asian part of the journey and will soon be headed [...]

Oct. 8, 1582: Nothing Happens … in Catholic Lands

1582: Nobody does anything, anything at all. In fact, nobody does anything whatsoever between Oct. 4 and Oct. 15, 1582, because the 10 intervening days have simply been declared out of existence by the pope. (This offer may not apply outside Italy, Spain and Portugal.) Where did those days go? By the mid-1570s, the Julian Calendar established [...]

Constant Danger Fuels Addictive Indie Game Minecraft

Lots of videogames let you build things, but hot new indie gem Minecraft adds an addictive twist: the constant threat that your elaborate creations will be destroyed by zombies, skeletons and other nasties in the dead of night. Players manipulate the game’s low-res environment, terraforming the earth and painstakingly crafting structures block by block — anything [...]

Alt Text: 5 Flash Games That Hate You

Studies show that there’s a 93 percent chance you’re reading this while you should be doing something else. That’s OK: The internet runs on pure, refined procrastination and you’re just doing your part to keep the packets moving. However, the internet also requires a steady stream of deep shame to oil the switches, so the least [...]

How To: Cut Deals With Pirates, Start Classroom Revolts

Instead of midterms and final exams, we’d stage an insurrection. That was of the notions behind my ersatz “Rogue Diplomacy” class at WIRED University, a mock guide to the circulum for the 21st century. The piece, which looked at “practicing statecraft without states,” went through a thousand edits before it finally ran. (The stories in these [...]

Caught Spying on Student, FBI Demands GPS Tracker Back

A California student got a visit from the FBI this week after he found a secret GPS tracking device on his car, and a friend posted photos of it online. The post prompted wide speculation about whether the device was real, whether the young Arab-American was being targeted in a terrorism investigation and what the [...]

New Belgium Sneaks Up on the San Francisco Mission

Our October Madness beer tournament moved to San Francisco’s Mission district to historic Shotwell’s Bar for a face off between New Belgium Brewing’s big IPA and an unexpected dark horse contender. The odd match-up was wonderfully representative of the the Colorado brewery’s craft which includes their Explore series that aims to entice people to try [...]

7 Past and Future Philip K. Dick Adaptations

As producer for the BBC1 adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, Ridley Scott returns to the storyteller that inspired his dystopian masterpiece Blade Runner 28 years ago. The four-hour miniseries, written by British playwright and screenwriter Howard Brenton (The Churchill Play, Spooks), is based on one of Dick’s best pieces [...]

Change in Mexican Irrigation Can Be Seen From Space

This area of Mexico recently underwent a change in agricultural practices that has had an impact on the region so great that it can be seen from space. These images, taken by the Landsat satellite in 1992 (left) and 2010 (right) show how increased use of water from a major reservoir has affected this part of [...]

Wild Seals Work as Oceanographers’ Lab Assistants

Seals diving for their dinner near Antarctica have surfaced with an extra morsel: information, gathered by electronic tags on the animals??? heads, about the shape of the seafloor there. The work has revealed previously unknown undersea channels, through which warm water might flow toward fragile ice shelves. And the seals do it all for a fraction [...]

Chinese Mao Impersonators Are Devoid of Irony, Satire

In China, the Mao heritage industry is thriving. The former communist ruler’s image has shifted from political posters to tea cups and now, increasingly, Mao Zedong doubles reenact episodes of his childhood and political life for theater, film and TV soaps. In perfecting their acts, Mao doubles train their voices, mimic body language and undergo [...]

Taliban Allies, Warlord Flunkies Guard U.S. Bases [Updated]

The U.S. military’s bases in Afghanistan are frequently guarded by Afghans who pay kickbacks to warlords — and even aid the Taliban. That’s what the Senate Armed Services Committee found after a year-long investigation into 125 contracts held by private security firms in Afghanistan. In a report released today (.pdf), the committee discovered that the [...]

PlayStation Font Creators Conjure Dystopian Dark Age

Graphic-designing twin brothers Nick and Adam Hayes are best known for creating Sony’s PlayStation font and slick ads for Marc Ecko. But as comics avatars Mada and Vin Shaye, they’ve crafted the oppressively dystopian graphic novel series Dark Age. A simple trip through the pages in our sneak-peek gallery above will show you that the glossy [...]

Nintendo Hacks Super Mario Bros. For Limited-Edition Wii

For the 25th anniversary of Super Mario Bros., Nintendo is doing a little ROM hacking. On November 11, the company will release a limited-edition Mario-red version of its Wii console in Japan. It will include an exclusive version of the legendary action game with altered graphics. For example, as shown in the one screenshot that Nintendo [...]

CIA Gets New Internal Watchdog To Hate

David B. Buckley, you lucky ducky, you just got one of the most thankless jobs in government. Buckley came on board yesterday as the new CIA inspector general, the internal-affairs watchdog for the nation’s chief spy agency. If history is any guide, he’s in for a world of bureaucratic pain. CIA Director Leon Panetta was all [...]

Best of a New Trove of Mind-Blowing Space Photos

The European Southern Observatory is a veritable factory of mind-blowing space photos, and now they’ve compiled their top 100 images ever all in one place. Some of these have already appeared on Wired Science (and spent weeks as this reporter’s desktop background), but many are new to us. ESO comprises a constellation of telescopes high in [...]

Swanky Super Mario Bros. Anniversary Box Set Europe-Bound

By Duncan Geere, Wired UK It seems like Europe is going to be getting the remarkably pretty box set that Nintendo is releasing to mark Super Mario Bros’ 25th birthday. The Swedish-language section of the company’s website has posted some images of the contents of the package, complete with English translations of the original Japanese text. While the [...]

Damn the W3C, HTML5 Is Already Here

According to the web’s governing body, you shouldn’t be using HTML5, CSS3 or any of the HTML5-related APIs just yet. At least that’s the spin InfoWorld’s Paul Krill took from his sit-down with Philippe Le Hegaret, the interaction domain leader of the W3C. In the InfoWorld article, Le Hegaret says, “The problem we’re facing right now [...]

Lab-Sized Earthquakes Challenge Basic Laws of Physics

A model earthquake on a lab bench shows that a basic assumption of introductory physics doesn’t hold up at small scales. The finding could have a wide variety of implications for materials science and engineering, and could help researchers understand how earthquakes occur and how bad they might be. “Our group has recently devised a way [...]

Silicon Knights Creating X-Men: Destiny for Activision

The next project from the creator of Too Human and Eternal Darkness is… X-Men. Silicon Knights is developing X-Men: Destiny for Activision Blizzard, the publisher said today. The game, which revolves around choosing your character’s moral path, will be revealed at Activision’s booth at New York Comic-Con this weekend. Activision also said Thursday that X-Men: Legacy [...]

Tron-Style Visuals Drive Enter the Void’s Psychedelic Death Trip

To convey the trippy visions experienced by a Tokyo drug dealer who gets shot while high on psychedelics, Enter the Void director Gaspar Noe conducted firsthand research. He went to Peruvian jungle and drank ayahuasca, a psychotropic concoction made from vines.

Epic Promises Gears of War 3 Beta in Early 2011

Epic Games will release a public beta of Gears of War 3 next year, a first for the popular shooter series. The publisher made the announcement at a press event this week. This comes at the heels of Epic’s recent decision to delay the highly anticipated Xbox 360 third-person shooter’s release by five months. Epic aims to [...]

Don’t Pimp My Ride: Marines May Stick With Humvees

U.S. troops first started driving Humvees in the 1980s. At the rate things are going, they may keep on driving ‘em forever. In recent days, the Commandant of the Marine Corps and Army officials have complained that the Hummer successors are too heavy and too expensive. Which may put a decade-long effort to restock the [...]

Firefox 4 Adds Bing to List of Search Engines

Mozilla has announced that Microsoft’s upstart Bing search engine will soon become a default part of Firefox’s search bar. When Firefox 4 arrives it will feature some slight changes to the list of included search engines, offering, in order: Google (default), Yahoo, Bing, Amazon, eBay and Wikipedia. Bing is a new option, though savvy users have [...]

Firefox 4 Adds Bing to List of Search Engines

Mozilla has announced that Microsoft’s upstart Bing search engine will soon become a default part of Firefox’s search bar. When Firefox 4 arrives it will feature some slight changes to the list of included search engines, offering, in order: Google (default), Yahoo, Bing, Amazon, eBay and Wikipedia. Bing is a new option, though savvy users have [...]

Personalize Your Map With a Custom Map Marker

If you’re adding a map to your website, why settle for the vanilla design when you can customize it and leave your own personal mark? This tutorial will show you how to create a custom map from scratch, then add a little unique flavor to it by replacing the standard “map pin” icon with a custom [...]

‘Tatooine’ Songwriter Envisions Paper Galaxy Far, Far Away

Eric Power’s adorable paper-craft video for Jeremy Messersmith’s song “Tatooine” light-speeds through the first Star Wars trilogy with its interstellar heart at one with the Force. But there won’t be a sequel video blasting through the second trilogy. “Eric and I are both OT (original trilogy) fanboys, so I don’t spend time watching the prequels,” Minneapolis-based [...]

Today’s Army: Smarter, Richer, Southern

If the strain of two wars wasn’t enough, U.S. soldiers also face the unfair burdens of stereotyping: They’re dumb; they’re brutes; they’re broke; they’re joining up because they have no other career options. But a new demographic study of who’s joining the Army demonstrates that the reality is entirely the opposite. The National Priorities Project, a [...]

Honda Is the Greenest Automaker … Again

Honda has won its fifth consecutive “greenest automaker” award from the Union of Concerned Scientists in what was the closest finish ever. Honda won by a single point over Toyota and Hyundai, which tied for second in the Union’s ranking of the eight largest automakers. In ranking the “greenness” of the companies — which account for [...]

Video: Wingsuit Flyer Makes Paratroopers Look Tame

Jeb Corliss wing-suit demo from Jeb Corliss on Vimeo. Parachuting out of planes? Even octogenarian ex-presidents do that now. These days, dudes who want to show off their stones (and their utter contempt for their self-preservation) are all about the wingsuits. Example A: this video of wingsuited daredevil Jeb Corliss as he swoops through canyons, soars [...]

Smog Musicians Turn Pollution Data Into Jagged Melodies

There’s nothing like a whomping dose of volatile organic compounds to fire up a whacked-out free-jazz composition. That’s the only conclusion to be reached after listening to soundscapes designed by two California professors who draw musical inspiration from an unlikely muse: smog. “We’re trying to take the rich set of patterns you find in music [...]

Pre-Exercise Stretching Is Killing Your Workout

Seems that most everything your high school gym teacher told you is wrong. Well, at least when it comes to all that start-of-the-class stretching. A recent spate of studies shows that when it comes to warming up before exercising, phys ed instructors didn???t do us any favors by having us to go through a series [...]

Exoskeletons, Robo Rats and Synthetic Skin: The Pentagon’s Cyborg Army

October 7, 1954: IBM Gets Transistorized

1954: IBM builds the first calculating machine to use solid-state transistors instead of vacuum tubes. IBM already had a business selling calculating machines, and it was humming along quite nicely. The IBM 604 Electronic Calculating Punch, which IBM introduced in 1948, was a desk-sized cabinet that ate and spat out punch cards in its single-minded mission [...]

Motorola Asks ITC, Two Federal Courts To Throw Book at Apple

Motorola has launched the next offensive in an increasingly confusing legal war over mobile patents. The company, through its Motorola Mobility subsidiary, has filed patent infringement complaints against Apple in both Northern Illinois and Southern Florida federal district courts. It has also asked the International Trade Commission to block Apple [...]

Ninja Tune Blows Out Birthday With Box, Book

The London electronic music label has been slicing and dicing music and multimedia for the benefit of beat junkies for the past two decades. Now its engaging explorations are chronicled in the new 108-track box set Ninja Tune XX and retrospective book Ninja Tune: 20 Years of Beats and Pieces.

Expert: ACTA No Longer Gutting Internet Freedom

The United States is caving on the internet section of a proposed international intellectual-property treaty, meaning its one-time quest to globally dictate draconian copyright rules has come to an abrupt halt. That’s what Michael Geist, an Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement expert at the University of Ottawa, concluded Wednesday after the United States released the latest draft of [...]

Facebook Embraces Group Chat and Lets You Export, Too

Facebook introduced new grouping features Wednesday, calling them the answer to the big problem of wanting to only share information with a small set of friends. The site also gave users the ability to export all their data and keep a closer eye on the sites and apps that they have allowed to access the [...]

Surprise Win for Lagunitas Little Sumpin’ Wild Ale

The Lagunitas Brewing Company is known for two things: its IPA, which is often the best selling IPA in the state of California, and its strangely named, interesting twists on classic beer styles. Last night’s first round event showcased both of these strengths as the popular IPA took on one of the brewery’s lesser known, [...]

Caribbean Island to Offer Rides Into Space

XCOR Aerospace is teaming up with the southern Caribbean island of Curacao to develop a space port for future suborbital tourist and scientific flights. The agreement is with the territorial government of Curacao and a group of Dutch investors with the hopes of offering flights in 2014. The joint venture is known as Space Experience Curacao, [...]

Transmedia at PICNIC: Everything We Know Is Wrong

The following article provides a summary of the panel discussion Everything We Know About Transmedia Is Wrong! at the PICNIC conference in Amsterdam that took place in late S??eptember. Dani??l van Gool covered the conference as part of ARGNet’s media partnership with PICNIC: Wired was also a media partner with PICNIC. Visit ARGNet for additional [...]

Hacked Voting System Stored Accessible Password, Encryption Key

An internet-based voting system that was hacked last week by researchers at the University of Michigan stored its database username, password and encryption key on a server open to attack. Alex Halderman, a computer scientist at the university, has detailed the vulnerabilities and hacking techniques his students used to completely control the system last week. The [...]

Gaming’s Critics ‘Out of Touch,’ Says Director Del Toro

Film director Guillermo del Toro delivered some passionate words on gaming at a book reading in Portland last week, calling videogames “the comic books of our time.” “It’s a medium that gains no respect amongst the intelligentsia,” the Hellboy director said during a Q&A at the Bagdad Theater in Portland, Oregon to promote his new fiction [...]

Beware Troll Bay: XKCD Updates Map of Online Communities

By Duncan Geere, Wired UK Webcomic artist Randall Munroe, who draws XKCD, has updated his Map of Online Communities for 2010, to reflect how the volume of social activity has changed around the web since the original map was created in 2007. The chart, which can be viewed over at XKCD, compares the sizes of different sites [...]

Batman Gets Hard-Boiled, Haunted in New Comics

Hard-boiled writer Brian Azzarello will pulp the Dark Knight and the Joker in Batman: Europa, a four-issue miniseries due next year. The story is a tech-noir upgrade of Rudolph Mate’s 1950 noir movie D.O.A.: Poisoned by an indestructible virus, a weakening Batman must beat the clock — and work with his archenemy — to avoid the [...]

Army Updates Espionage Rulebook Following Leaks to WikiLeaks

The Army has updated a 17-year-old rulebook on espionage following internal leaks of classified information to the secret-spilling site WikiLeaks. The update, released Monday, now requires troops to alert authorities if they suspect someone is leaking classified information to the media or any other unauthorized person, according to the Associated Press, identifying media leaks specifically for [...]

Storyboard: The Supercharged Story of Tesla Motors

Forget about other electric vehicles — Tesla might have the sexiest EV out there. The Tesla Roadster is a sleek, fast, high-performance electric car that almost didn’t make it. In a classic David-versus-Goliath story, Tesla Motors had the odds stacked against it, almost stalling out thanks to financial woes, internal tension, lawsuits, divorces — you name [...]

Electrified DeLorean Heads Back to the Future

Hold on to your Huey Lewis and the News cassettes: An all-electric DeLorean DMC-12 will be rolling through the country roads of Italy just in time for the 25th anniversary of Back to the Future’s original European release. Our friends at Wired Italy are big fans of the movie. They’re also fascinated by electric cars, so [...]

For Championships, Chemistry Is Often the Best Teammate

With the Chicago Blackhawks coming off a historic NHL season where they captured their first Stanley Cup since 1961, it always makes me stop and think about what it takes to bring home the ultimate prize, whether it’s the Stanley Cup for hockey pros, the Lombardi Trophy for the NFL’s elite, or the World Cup [...]

Helsinki Hovercraft Runs On The Sun From Start to Finnish

A Finnish designer has drawn up a concept solar hovercraft that may soon be ferrying passengers among ports along the Baltic Sea. The AirFlow, penned by Lukas Medeisis, was designed to solve transportation woes in the coastal city of Helsinki. He wanted to get the public transit infrastructure out of crowded urban areas and give passengers [...]

Breakthroughs and Busts: Mapping Cinema’s Technological Evolution

The history of cinematic technology is littered with stunning achievements and epic fails. From pioneering exercises in technique to feature-length shames and riotous gimmicks, there's no shortage of film stock worth analyzing.

Oct. 6, 1927: The Jazz Singer Gives Movie Audiences the ‘Talkies’

1927: Prohibition-era movie audiences in New York City get drunk with excitement when they hear Broadway belter Al Jolson appear on the big screen and bark, ???Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain’t heard nothin’ yet.” At the premiere of The Jazz Singer, attendee Doris Warner recalled that when Jolson and co-star Eugenie [...]

Secret-Spilling Sources at Risk Following??Cryptome Breach??

Secret-spilling site Cryptome was hacked over the weekend, possibly exposing the identities of whistleblowers and other confidential sources, according to a hacker who contacted Wired.com and claimed responsibility for the breach. The hacker said two intruders from the group Kryogeniks breached the long-running site, where they gained access to a repository of secret files and correspondence. [...]

Blowback: Is Caprica Taking Religion Too Far?

There’s an awful lot of religious talk and precious little action in “Unvanquished,” the new episode that kicks off Season 1.5 of Caprica on Thursday night. Speechifying about the pros and cons of polytheism, the characters in the Battlestar Galactica prequel lumber through disappointingly dull scenes as the show returns to Syfy after a six-month hiatus. [...]

Building a Better Superman: How Zack Snyder Can Forge a New Man of Steel

Now that producer Christopher Nolan has entrusted Zack Snyder with stewardship of the Superman movie franchise, things should get really interesting. Nolan and Watchmen director Snyder aim to revive the legacy established by Richard Donner and Christopher Reeve in 1978’s Superman movie, which was sullied by a string of less successful movies (most recently Bryan Singer’s [...]

Enslaved Goes Through the Motions, Comes Out OK

Over the weekend, I managed to get a few hours into Enslaved: Odyssey to the West, Ninja Theory’s new adventure. It’s got quite a lot going for it, but thus far I’ve found it a little light on gameplay. First things first: Enslaved, a retelling of the classic Chinese tale of Journey to the West set [...]