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Monstrous Mechanical Marvels: 9 Enormous Gadgets
<< previous image | next image >> When it comes to phones, notebooks and portable game consoles, smaller is nearly always better. But sometimes a gadget just needs to be really, really huge. True to their size, gigantic contraptions accomplish tasks enormously useful to our everyday lives. Take for example the Bagger 293 (above), a 31.3-million-pound bucket-wheel [...]
10.05.09 -
Aptera’s Odds of Federal Funding Looking Up
The odds that Uncle Sam will help Aptera Motors build the funky 2e improved a bit when the House of Representatives approved legislation making three-wheelers eligible for those loans the Department of Energy is giving automakers. Although the 2e electric car reportedly goes 100 miles on a charge, recharges in as little as four hours and [...]
10.05.09 -
Flash Lands on iPhone — One App at a Time
Adobe on Monday announced plans to roll out mobile versions of its Flash platform to several smartphones. Apple’s popular iPhone, however, is gaining a lesser Flash experience. At its worldwide developer conference in Los Angeles, Adobe said it would be releasing Flash for mobile platforms including Microsoft Windows Mobile, Palm’s webOS and Google Android. But don’t [...]
10.05.09 -
Surprise! Pakistan Siphoned off Billions in U.S. Military Aid
Between 2002 and 2008, the United States paid out $6.6 billion in direct support to the Pakistani military. Now, it appears only a fraction of that amount — around half a billion — actually made it to the intended recipients. That’s the story two anonymous Pakistani army generals tell the Associated Press. And their allegations are [...]
10.05.09 -
‘Epic Mickey’: Deus Ex Designer’s Dark Take On the Mouse
The veil is about to be lifted from “Epic Mickey,” a project long under development at Disney that casts the company’s iconic mascot in the middle of a dark adventure. This month’s issue of Game Informer magazine will feature a cover story on the game, being spearheaded by big-name game designer Warren Spector, executive producer of [...]
10.05.09 -
Hands On: New Wii Fit Plus Workout’s Custom Routines
Bored with Nintendo’s Wii Fit exercise game? The upgrades to this year’s new version should convince you to get the Balance Board out of the closet. Wii Fit Plus, which hits stores this week, is an upgrade rather than a sequel — mostly, it’s the same balance-based workouts and motion-controlled mini-games as last year’s original. Plus [...]
10.05.09 -
Negotiate Used Car Prices From Your Smartphone
Forget driving from dealership to dealership or threatening to walk out on a used car deal. A new website lets you use your smartphone to check whether your local used car dealer is trying to get you to pay too much. While we programmed a similar app — a post-it note marked “YES” that you can [...]
10.05.09 -
Arrested Development Sitcom Finally Spins Off as Movie
After more than two years of start-and-stops, it finally looks like Arrested Development, the TV cult-com that launched poster geek Michael Cera’s career, will get a second life on the big screen. Mitchell Hurwitz, who in 2003 created the critically adored Fox comedy about the hilariously damaged Bluth family, is co-writing the screenplay for a [...]
10.05.09 -
7 Glow-in-the-Dark Mushroom Species Discovered
Seven new glowing mushroom species have been discovered in Belize, Brazil, Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Japan, Malaysia and Puerto Rico. Four of the species are completely new to scientists, and three previously known species were discovered to be luminescent. All seven species, as well as the majority of the 64 previously known species of luminescent mushrooms, are [...]
10.05.09 -
Labels Emphasize Artist-Specific Social Networks, Websites
Don’t expect your favorite band to delete its MySpace page any time soon, but the general social network is no longer the latest word in fan outreach. Artists and their labels increasingly see dedicated websites as destinations in their own right, for fans who want to get close to a band, together, without distractions from [...]
10.05.09
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Nobel Winners Isolate Protein Behind Immortality, Cancer
This year’s Nobel Prize in medicine went to a trio of scientists who discovered the enzyme telomerase, which allows cells to divide without any limits, making them effectively immortal. It may be nature’s greatest double-edged sword. Coax cells into producing telomerase, and they will survive indefinitely, but they will also become cancerous. To safeguard against cancer, adult [...]
10.05.09 -
Infrared Video: 500,000 Bats Emerge From Cave
Bats use echolocation to see in the dark, but unfortunately human scientists cannot do the same. That poses a problem for ecologists who want to know, for example, how many Brazilian free-tailed bats live in the Carlsbad Caverns of New Mexico. Researchers can’t shine a light on them because that disrupts their behavior, but they can’t [...]
10.05.09 -
Roman Coin Hoards Show More War Means Fewer Babies
Coins buried by anxious Italians in the first century B.C. can be used to track the ups and downs of the Roman population during periods of civil war and violence. In times of instability in the ancient world, people stashed their cash and if they got killed or displaced, they didn’t come back for their Geld. [...]
10.05.09 -
Zombie Zeitgeist Shambles Forward With Woke Up Dead
Sony has zombies on the brain. First, the studio’s horror goof Zombieland pwned humanity at the box office over the weekend. Now the march of the undead continues with the web-only series Woke Up Dead, with four episodes premiering Monday on Sony’s Crackle website. See also: Rating Zombieland’s Awesome Ghoul-Killing Weapons Set in the ultimate land [...]
10.05.09 -
Termite Altruism Might Have Roots in War
Altruism might have evolved for fairly selfish reasons, at least in insects. When a warring termite colony loses its king and queen — the only members capable of reproduction — then its survivors merge with the victor colony, treating genetically unrelated former enemies as if they were siblings. In the short term, this makes no sense. But in [...]
10.05.09 -
The Strange Plea of Judy from Trap 17
*Speaking of rampant computer crime, this is definitely the weirdest 419-spam I’ve gotten for a while. It would appear to be some eerie hybrid of advance fee fraud, a foreign-bride scam, and live phone sex. *For one terrible moment I thought “Judy” from “trap 17″ was also going to advertise herself as underage, which would [...]
10.05.09 -
Grum, Bobax, Rustock, Maazben, and their friends
*Haven’t heard much out of “Storm” lately. I wonder what gives with that. Hi Bruce (((Oh boy, anti-botnet security firm PR here…. okay, bring the noise, I read about bots with a volatile mix of fascination and disgust))): Over 150 BILLION unsolicited e-mail messages ((((aieeeee))) are being distributed by compromised computers every day, which means that [...]
10.05.09 -
Modern French Radical Philosophers
*It’s kinda like swallowing a kilo of putty, but it probably does the rest of us good to stop every once in a while, and check out what’s hoppin’ with the French philosophes. Ignore ‘em at your peril; every couple of centuries or so, these guys haul out the Molotovs and guillotines. _____________________________________________________________________ CTHEORY: THEORY, TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE VOL [...]
10.05.09 -
Stewart Brand, Ecopragmatist
*I’d go: Hello, On Friday October 9th, 02009 Green pioneer Stewart Brand is revealing his new book, Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto. The Long Now Foundation is presenting this lecture by Brand which will cover the issues many environmentalists will to need to reconsider, like nuclear power, GMO’s and the benefits of urbanization, if they are going [...]
10.05.09 -
The Crazies Trailer Unleashes Modern Horrors
Timothy Olyphant, who played hard-ass sheriff Seth Bullock in Deadwood, squares off against much more modern problems in The Crazies. There are none of the corpse-eating pigs featured in HBO’s foul-mouthed Western, but in the slick Crazies trailer above shows people turning into zombielike creatures, military maneuvers and — horrors! — cellphone failure. The movie, a [...]
10.05.09
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GeekDad Puzzle of the Week: This is a Non-No-Fly Zone
Once again, our eccentric billionaire needs your help. Please e-mail your solution by 10:00 PM EST on Thursday for your chance to win a $50 gift certificate from ThinkGeek! Mr. Lion, the eccentric billionaire who recently bought and modified an island in the Bermuda Triangle has selected a site for his mansion and is having new [...]
10.05.09 -
Bruce Sterling et al at Dani Strane Knjige 2009
http://www.tportal.hr/kultura/knjizevnost/38233/Dani-strane-knjige-2009.html U zagrebačkoj knjižari Profil Megastore u Bogovićevoj ulici od 5. do 17. listopada održavaju se Dani strane knjige na kojima će gostovati bračni par pisaca Jasmina Tešanović i Bruce Sterling, a putem Skypea bit će organiziran razgovor s dobitnikom Bookera Yannom Martellom Dani stane knjige održavaju se četvrtu godinu zaredom, a riječ je događanju koje podupire [...]
10.05.09 -
Firefox 3.6 Aims to Bring Fullscreen, Open Source Video to the Web
Mozilla is pushing ahead with its open video support in the Firefox web browser. Current developer builds of Firefox 3.6, expected to arrive later this year, now include a fullscreen option for movies embedded using the HTML5 video tag. Early in the development of HTML5, the spec’s authors toyed with the idea of including a mandate [...]
10.05.09 -
Does Iran Have the Know-How to Build the Bomb?
Over the weekend, the New York Times revealed an alarming conclusion by the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog agency: Iran now has enough know-how to put together a workable atomic bomb. That report, the Times hastened to add, is preliminary. But the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) estimate of Iran’s bomb-making information goes beyond other assessments [...]
10.05.09 -
Happy Birthday! Monty Python’s Flying Circus Turns 40
It was 40 years ago today that the first episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus appeared on the BBC. The show ran for four seasons, cranking out 45 episodes and unleashing their zany, crazy sense of humor on the world. In addition to the “Ministry of Silly Walks”, featured in the video above, who [...]
10.05.09 -
Rugged, Waterproof Hard Drive Keeps Your Secrets Safe
How do you like the sound of 640GB of take-anywhere, kick-anywhere, dunkable hard drive? Then you’ll be pleased to learn about the A-Data SH93, an external drive with a rubber body and wraparound USB cord that van be left underwater for a half hour with no ill effects. Why on earth do you need an [...]
10.05.09 -
Beautiful Japanese Valve Amplifier Is a Metal Monolith
When Elekit, supplier of high-end kits to audiophiles of taste and style, decided to sell a ready made valve-amp, it turned to Japanese designer Koichi Futatsumata. The result is this beautifully minimal amplifier hewn from aluminum. Normally a valve amp leaves its components exposed to aid cooling of the hot vacuum tubes, but Futatsumata’s design encases [...]
10.05.09 -
Dark Energy Hunters Catch a Wave
A new project to create a 3D map of space so large that scientists can find a 500 million-light-year-size remnant from the early universe inside it began operation last month. The Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey opened its eyes to the universe, taking in data from hundreds of galaxies and quasars in the constellation Aquarius, from its [...]
10.05.09 -
Geeks and Nerds Congregate! Nerd Invasion is Coming!
Nerd Invasion is coming. Are you prepared? Is Pensacola, FL prepared? I dig into a nerdy foxhole and find out all I can about Nerd Invasion from Jason at Nerdrockstar.com so we all can be prepared.
10.05.09 -
Custom Bike Features Built-In U-Lock
Tony Pereira of Pereira Cycles in Portland, Oregon, has put together this super-customized bike as an entry into the “Oregon Manifest Constructor’s Design Challenge.” The bike has several rather nice mods, including a hand-made taillight and a color-matched frame-pump, but what caught our eye is the integrated U-lock pictured above. The lock is from Kryptonite and [...]
10.05.09
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Langu Teaches Your Toddler to Be Bilingual (or More)
How do you teach your kids another language? If you’re Ben Morrison, you write an iPhone app. Ben, a web developer at a marketing company, explains: My wife and I adopted our daughter, Violet, from Taiwan. We want Violet to be fluent in both English and Mandarin. We do our best to expose her to many different [...]
10.05.09 -
Stay Curious with Jamie and Adam of Mythbusters
Last week I had the privilege of talking with Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman from Mythbusters. The second half of their seventh season starts this Wednesday, October 7th on the Discovery Channel. The last time we were able to speak to either of these gentlemen was last spring when our own Ken Denmead and Matt [...]
10.05.09 -
Palm Doesn’t Know When to Stop, Adds iTunes Syncing for Pre Yet Again
It’s hard to see Palm as anything but a masochist. The catch-phrase for the Pre smartphone might as well be “Thank you sir. May I have another?” spoken as Palm bends over and Apple raises a heavy wooden paddle yet again. Arriving quickly behind last week’s 1.2 software update for the Pre comes 1.2.1, which — [...]
10.05.09 -
After Deadly Assault, Questions Linger Over Afghanistan Strategy
Over the weekend, eight U.S. troops and two Afghan soldiers were killed in an assault on a pair of outposts near Kamdesh, in the Nuristan province of eastern Afghanistan. According to a news release from the International Security Assistance Force, Nuristani tribal militia launched the attacks from a local mosque and nearby village. Coalition forces repelled [...]
10.05.09 -
D&D’s Eberron Campaign Sourebook Details a Fascinating World
Eberron is my new favorite game world. Okay, let me back up a bit. I recently checked out WotC’s Eberron Campaign Guide, the definitive manual for running a 4th Edition D&D campaign in that setting. I was expecting it to be a lot like the Forgotten Realms Campaign Guide, which focused more on the radical changes [...]
10.05.09 -
Gyrowheel, Or How To Teach Your Kid to Ride In One Afternoon
When a kid learns to ride a bike, it normally goes like this: First, training wheels. These keep you upright, but make it impossible to bank into turns and stop the bike from handling like a lean-able two-wheeler. They do, however, build confidence. Second, the “dad sessions”. This involves dad running along behind the now training [...]
10.05.09 -
Giant Light Brite and More at Nuit Blanche 2009
Saturday night was Toronto’s fourth annual Nuit Blanche, described by sponsor Scotiabank as a “massive participatory celebration of contemporary art.” Unfortunately, I’ve never had the opportunity to attend Nuit Blanche in person. Last weekend was the closest I’ve come, driving through Toronto on Saturday afternoon and again that evening, but I was shuttling the kids from [...]
10.05.09 -
In-Car Camera Catches Careless Driving
The pitch reads like this: “The new Car Cam Voyager with LCD is the first vehicle camera to let you see exactly what is happening in real-time while you’re driving.” You may have thought that the windshield did a pretty good job of letting “you see exactly what is happening in real-time while you’re driving”, but [...]
10.05.09 -
Five for Fighting 10/6/09
*”Help me or the iPhone gets it!“ * 15 years later, Russia finally gets satellite-guided bombs * Custom eyeballs? * Strap-on autonomous vehicle kit * Killer robo-copter pushes ahead (High five: EM)
10.05.09 -
Polemics of a Cybernetic Future
*Nobody does cyber-polemics quite like cyber-architects. ” It was a lattice of tongues, whiskers, and tendons made of wire, acrylic, vinyl, and mylar – over 50,000 components in all –- suspended from a cable structure. As visitors moved around and through the installation, tiny motors meant for cell phone vibrators brought it to ‘life’ with an [...]
10.05.09
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Yet Another Pirate Manifesto
*Okay, it’s great that you dudes have advanced from the state of petty thieves to political agitation, but you’re gonna have to try harder. *You get an A for the multinational translation effort. Borderless. Yeah man: no borders left, and pirates won’t even have to smash the states. They’ll drown in the bathtub [...]
10.04.09 -
Musica Globalista: Erdjan –Viski Coca Cola
*One and quarter MILLION YouTube hits? Over two thousand comments? Man, for Balkan pop music, that is phenomenal. *Gotta be the charismatic schtick of that keyboardist, I reckon.
10.04.09 -
2009 Ig Nobel Prizes
The “19th First Annual” Ig Nobel prize ceremony was held on October 1st at Harvard University. If you have never heard of the Ig Nobels, the purpose of the prize is to honor achievements that “irst make people laugh, and then make them think“. It is organized by a group called Improbable Research. At the [...]
10.04.09 -
Rube Goldberg Breakfast-Making Machine
I can haz breakfast? Almost 3 weeks ago, Yuri Suzuki and Masa Kimura started to build the Breakfast Machine during Platform21 = Jamming in Amsterdam. The machine is a Rube Goldberg machine which can serve you an omelet, coffee and a toast with jam. Yuri and Masa invited other designers and the public to help build and [...]
10.04.09 -
Wife of Japanese PM Brings UFOs, Aliens Into Global Affairs
There was a happy face lost in Friday’s hubbub over President Barack Obama’s complete whiz down his leg of America’s efforts to snag the 2016 Olympics. While Oprah trashed her hotel room after the International Olympic Committee told her and Mrs. Obama to go pound sand, Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama was still on hand to [...]
10.04.09 -
Lord of the Rings Music Rockets to Radio City Music Hall
How do you get to Radio City Music Hall? Practicing isn’t enough. You need to write the score to a film trilogy that gobbles up more Academy Awards than a Gollum eats fish. Howard Shore’s music for Peter Jackson on The Lord of the Rings trilogy won three Academy Awards, four Grammy, three Golden Globes and probably [...]
10.04.09 -
Schizophrenic Design Fiction
*Sometimes people wonder: are science fiction writers crazy? Well, there’s a scale of eccentricity, and then there is severe mental illness, which is like the difference between skipping along as you walk, and breaking your leg and having your thighbone come out. *Occasionally one runs into a mad person who is also very into science [...]
10.04.09 -
There Are Days When I Need Stuff Like This
*Catching up with Rudy Rucker’s blog. http://www.rudyrucker.com/blog/ (…) “Over the years, I’ve noticed that certain kinds of computations are inexhaustibly greedy, and that by dialing up certain of their parameters to values that seem not all that big, you can get a computation whose demands would overwhelm the physical world. “So what kind of computation is C. H. Hinton [...]
10.04.09 -
Terminal Man Attends to Some Business
One of the interesting parts about this trip has been the opportunity to see air travel from the airlines’ side. I’ve spoken with people from nearly every part of the industry — ground crew, airport administration, inflight, airline executives, air traffic controllers. Out of all of them, the ones with the most contact with passengers [...]
10.03.09 -
GeekDad Week In Review
Another week in the books here at GeekDad. Miss anything? Then you better check out the link fest know affectionately as the GeekDad Week in Review!
10.03.09
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Hackers Release iPhone OS 3.1 Jailbreak Tool for Third-Gen iPhone
Owners of the new iPhone 3GS can now jailbreak the latest iPhone operating system (3.1) thanks to the hardworking hackers known as Dev Team. One caveat: If you didn’t jailbreak the iPhone when it was running iPhone OS 3.0 or iPhone OS 3.0.1, you can’t directly jailbreak iPhone OS 3.1. Confusing with all the numbers, isn’t [...]
10.02.09 -
Police Arrest Customer Who Allegedly Threatened to Shoot iPhone
We can all empathize with Michael Bolton in Office Space when he beat the toner out of Initech’s problematic printer. But we can’t level with this incredibly stupid Cincinnati resident Daniel Goodrich, who told an Apple Store employee at Kenwood Towne Centre he was so mad at his iPhone he could “pop a 9mm at [...]
10.02.09 -
Shootouts, Pot Fields and Spy Drones: Danger Room in Afghanistan (Bumped)
<< previous image | next image >> KANDAHAR, Afghanistan — The final day was, in some ways, the worst. During nearly four weeks on assignment in Afghanistan and the surrounding region, I didn’t see a single person get seriously hurt or killed. That changed on a last mission, with an Air Force rescue team. A British [...]
10.02.09 -
Yes, It’s Time to Contain Al Qaeda.
There’s been a recent upturn in people arguing that we need to borrow a page from the Cold War and “contain” Al Qaeda. Instead of looking to eliminate the jihadists, the thinking goes, we should assume that we’re in the fight for the long run — and that our main goal needs to be just [...]
10.02.09 -
Playing the SG-1000, Sega’s First Game Machine
What was the first Sega console you ever played: Genesis? Master System? Some Japanese gamers were playing on Sega hardware long before that. In July 1983, long before the advent of Sonic the Hedgehog, Sega released its first game machine. If you’ve never heard of the SG-1000, that’s likely because it was obsolete before it even [...]
10.02.09 -
Military’s Disaster-Proof Cuisine ‘Tastes Like Soap’
The military’s got disaster-proof foodstuff down to a science: their meals ready-to-eat (MREs) are packaged, vacuum-sealed rations that supply high-calorie sustenance, have a multi-year shelf life and are prepped using nothing but water. Too bad they taste like Irish Springs. That’s according to a review panel at Popular Mechanics, where testers sampled three of the military’s [...]
10.02.09 -
Secure Flight Comes to Southwest Airlines, Six Years Later
Six years ago the federal government proposed taking over the job of comparing passenger names against the terrorist watch lists. Just this week, Southwest Airlines frequent fliers are being asked to update their profiles with name, gender and date of birth information in order to let the feds try that system out. In an e-mail [...]
10.02.09 -
Modder Creates PlayStation 3 Laptop
If we did a story every time serial console modder Benjamin Heckendorn put the insides of one machine into the outsides of another, we’d never cover anything else. But his latest work, the PlayStation 3 laptop, is too fascinating not to share. That this device exists and works is testament to the hardware skills of not [...]
10.02.09 -
Amazon Settles Kindle Lawsuit Over ‘1984′ Copy
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Amazon.com Inc has settled for $150,000 a lawsuit brought by a high school student and another consumer who claimed the online retailer illegally deleted from their Kindle devices digital copies of George Orwell’s “1984.” The settlement, filed September 25, revealed that Amazon in September offered consumers whose books had been deleted a [...]
10.02.09 -
Indaba Online Remix Contest Lets Crowd Work with Celebs
Think of the music collaboration site Indaba like an online, socially-networked version of the audio production suite Pro Tools, which lets people around the world log into the same session to remix, add tracks, record new parts, and so on. Just in time for the weekend, the site unveiled a free remix contest that lets anyone [...]
10.02.09
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Credit Card Skimming Survey: What’s Your Magstripe Worth?
Ever wonder how much the data on the back of your credit card is worth to a corrupt food service worker? The answer, it turns out, depends on which restaurants you frequent in Florida. For some reason, the Sunshine State is a hotbed of federal prosecutions for “skimming”, in which a retail or service worker with [...]
10.02.09 -
On The Salt: A Closer Look at 367 MPH
Bub Racing’s motorcycle is fast enough to go around the world in under 68 hours on two wheels. Diagnosis: Awesome. We know you have a fever and we have the prescription for you. No, not more cowbell; the picture and video goodies so you don’t have to attempt to set a new record on your [...]
10.02.09 -
Gridrunner Revolution Is Third-Eye Candy
Jeff Minter makes acid-kissed games — trippy bursts of color and sound, with gameplay mechanics that are just as oddball. Minter’s latest games are expansions on classic shooter-game concepts like those first floated by Tempest and other abstract ’80s arcade games. Minter himself made twitchy arcade-style games back in the day, like the original Gridrunner for [...]
10.02.09 -
Supermassive Black Holes Bringing Universe Closer to Death
For all its tumult — erupting stars, colliding galaxies, collapsing black holes — the cosmos is a surprisingly orderly place. Theoretical calculations have long shown that the entropy of the universe — a measure of its disorder — is but a tiny fraction of the maximum allowable amount. A new calculation of entropy upholds that general [...]
10.02.09 -
Wireless Network Signals Produce See-Through Walls
Researchers at the University of Utah have found a way to see through walls to detect movement inside a building. The surveillance technique is called variance-based radio tomographic imaging and works by visualizing variations in radio waves as they travel to nodes in a wireless network. A person moving inside a building will cause the waves [...]
10.02.09 -
New Video: Laser Gunship Blowtorches Truck (Updated)
Back in August, Boeing announced that its Advanced Tactical Laser — a cargo aircraft retrofitted with a chemical laser — had successfully “defeated” a target vehicle parked on the ground. The test was a step toward the fielding of a laser gunship that, in theory, could blast targets with little or no collateral damage. The company [...]
10.02.09 -
Teen’s DIY Energy Hacking Gives African Village New Hope
Some people see lemons and make lemonade. William Kamkwamba saw wind and made a windmill. This might not seem like a mighty feat. But Kamkwamba, who grew up in Masitala, a tiny rural farming village off the grid in Malawi, was 14 years old in 2001 when he spotted a photo of a windmill in a [...]
10.02.09 -
Google Pulls Pirate Bay From Search Results
The homepage of Pirate Bay disappeared from Google’s search results Friday, after Google allegedly received a DMCA takedown notice targeting the site. The move is unexpected because, while the Pirate Bay is rife with pirated material, the site’s spare landing page contains no content to speak of — just links, a logo and a search box. [...]
10.02.09 -
Religious Experience Linked to Brain’s Social Regions
Brain scans of people who believe in God have found further evidence that religion involves neurological regions vital for social intelligence. In other words, whether or not God or Gods exist, religious belief may have been quite useful in shaping the human mind’s evolution. “The main point is that all these brain regions are important for other [...]
10.02.09 -
Rating Zombieland’s Awesome Ghoul-Killing Weapons
About the Authors: Having been zombie survivalists since the age of 8, when their mother bought them Dawn of the Dead, twins Matt and John Yuan turned their passion for firearms and anti-ghoul geekery into a ticket to Hollywood. They played mall cops in the black comedy Observe and Report and serve as unofficial spokesmen for [...]
10.02.09
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Reader Photo Gallery: More Stunning DIY Astrophotos
This gorgeous image of the Jellyfish Nebula leads off our second installment of reader-contributed astrophotography. Also known as IC443, the Jellyfish in the upper right of the image is about 5,000 light years away in the constellation Gemini. It is the remnant of a supernova that exploded around 30,000 years ago. This image was captured by Mel [...]
10.02.09 -
AFVTech’s CNG-Powered, 600 hp 1933 Ford Roadster
Who says alt-fuel cars can’t be cool? The last time we saw something like AFVTech’s 1933 Ford Roadster, Harrison Ford was cruising around looking for it to see who had the fastest car in the valley. AFVTech is best known as a company that does compressed natural gas conversions for fairly mundane things like Chevrolet [...]
10.02.09 -
Ex-Darpa Chief Joins D.C. Lobbying Firm
Former Darpa director Tony Tether is joining a Washington-area lobbying firm best known for its influence on Capitol Hill. But Tether — who served for more than seven years as the head of the Pentagon’s premiere research arm — says he won’t be doing any lobbying in his new role. “I won’t be going to the [...]
10.02.09 -
Six Apart Resurrects Pownce With New ‘Motion’ Microblogging Platform
Six Apart, makers of TypePad and Movable Type, has added a new horse to its stable of blogging software. Motion, as the new tools are known, is built on the old Pownce platform, the microblogging service Six Apart purchased earlier this year. Motion is a distributed microblogging service designed to be hosted on your own server. [...]
10.02.09 -
Novel Solution for Saving Afghanistan: Tax the Expats
Here’s an idea that will provide desperately needed revenue for the government of Afghanistan, and help win the support of its people: Put a tax on foreign aid. Too bad it will never happen. Writing today in the New York Times, Peter Bergen and Sameer Lalwani note that a hefty chunk of the billions in foreign aid [...]
10.02.09 -
Dark Knight Biker Gear Pops a Nerdy Wheelie
A costume replica creator has taken a gutsy step — blending two cool concepts into a striking, yet potentially nerd-injuring, combination. Usually, riding a motorcycle is a guy’s way of looking tough — of capturing that rebellious spirit personified by Marlon Brando, Easy Rider or Fonzie. Meanwhile, The Dark Knight incarnation of Batman represents a lone, [...]
10.02.09 -
Review: Smart We Live in Public Probes Web Genius’ Hubris
Before Sept. 11, before the first dot-com bust, before Facebook, Twitter and YouTube turned mundane daily life into public spectacle, web-smart geeks drank deeply from a giddy zeitgeist cocktail made up of pop-culture adoration, huge sums of money and awesome parties. As chronicled in We Live in Public, an unrated indie documentary that opens Friday after [...]
10.01.09 -
Stuntwoman Zoe Bell Talks Whip It, Tarantino’s Genius Mind
In her new film Whip It, Zoë Bell raises hell on roller skates. In real life, she spends her time on other wheels. Wired recently interviewed the stuntwoman-turned-actress about how to fake a roller derby fight for the October issue, and when the phone call got a little strenuous, Bell apologized in a way only a [...]
10.01.09 -
Hands On, Ears Open: Blind Braver, a Game With No Graphics
TOKYO — In the race to put more polygons on the screen than their competitors, most new videogames are defined by how they look. There was one game at Tokyo Game Show, however, where the graphics didn’t matter at all. That’s because it’s designed for the blind. Blind Braver was created at the Tokyo Communication Arts [...]
10.01.09 -
Hands On: NeuroBoy, a Game You Play With Your Brain
TOKYO — Motion controllers and the promise of Project Natal might be all the rage this year, but why move at all? The Adventures of NeuroBoy is a game that monitors your brain activity via a Bluetooth headset (called a “MindSet”) and uses that data to interact with virtual objects. The technology is still limited to [...]
10.01.09
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Lawmakers Cave to FBI in Patriot Act Debate
Powerful Senate leaders on Thursday bowed to FBI concerns that adding privacy protections to an expiring provision of the Patriot Act could jeopardize “ongoing” terror investigations. The Patriot Act was adopted six weeks after the 2001 terror attacks, and greatly expanded the government’s power to intrude into the private lives of Americans in the course of [...]
10.01.09 -
Nissan Gets Schooled With Fish-Inspired Cars
Nissan’s latest concept promises that following fish logic can eliminate traffic jams and collisions. Drawing inspiration from schools of fish that can maximize available space while traveling around obstacles in tight packs, the Nissan EPORO is a robotic vehicle that communicates with its counterparts in order to squeeze as many cars as possible into a small [...]
10.01.09 -
Wired.com Gadget Lab Reviews PSPgo
Wondering if you should buy a PSPgo today? Check out Wired.com’s review and video coverage. “With a $250 price tag, Sony is taking a real gamble here. Apple’s 3rd gen iPod Touch, which is evolving into a real contender in portable gaming, is pricier — but it’s backed by superior features, iTunes music support, the App [...]
10.01.09 -
Google Chrome Gets an Extension Manager
Google recently added support for extensions to its Chrome web browser. But as any Firefox add-on junky can tell you, those bells and whistles for your browser don’t always behave perfectly, so you need way to manage them. That’s why Google has introduced a new extension manager to the development builds of Google Chrome. If you’ve [...]
10.01.09 -
Arcade Games on Wii: Data East Wins, Sega Loses
With Virtual Console’s releases still slow as molasses in January, Majesco brings us a far more palatable method of playing classic arcade games on Wii: The company said today that it will release Data East Arcade Classics in early 2010 for Wii, collecting 15 arcade games for $20. Said games include the two Burger Time games, [...]
10.01.09 -
Delicious Refines Real-Time Search Tools
Delicious has announced some refinements to its recently redesigned homepage that make the bookmarking site an even more useful tool for tracking the real-time web. Among the new features is the ability to narrow any search down to spans of a mere five minutes. While it’s not for everyone, if you’re trying to find better ways [...]
10.01.09 -
Movies: Cinematic Smorgasbord of Gervais, Zombies, Docs
An unusually offbeat movie slate opening Friday promises to provoke laughs mingled with wry insights, bitter loathing, blood-curdling screams and “you-go-girl” cheers. First the funny stuff: Horror comedy Zombieland casts Woody Harrelson and Jesse Eisenberg (Adventureland) as humans surrounded by vacant-eyed flesh-eaters. Current reviews: 9 Fuses Bleak Sci-Fi Story With Brilliant Visuals Nightmare Nazi Dominates Tarantino’s Glorious Basterds The Invention [...]
10.01.09 -
Mozilla Updates Weave for Faster, More Reliable Syncing
Mozilla has updated Weave, its free add-on for Firefox that lets you synchronize all your personal data across the various Firefox installations you have running on your work PC, your home PCs and your mobile phone. The big news in the latest Weave update (now at version 0.7, which can be downloaded from Mozilla), is support [...]
10.01.09 -
Toyota Safety Recall Involves Record 3.8 Million Cars
This is my 2005 Toyota Tacoma and it wants to kill me. That’s the message this author and almost four million Toyota and Lexus owners are receiving from Toyota of America in response to a problematic issue with floor mats. Yes, floor mats. That’s the topic of Toyota’s newest flavor-of-the-week in their recent recall-happy [...]
10.01.09 -
Payroll Firm Breached — Online Customers Targeted
PayChoice, a payroll processing firm that also produces an online payroll management system used by 240 other payroll processing firms, suffered a breach last week that resulted in hackers absconding with the account information of firms using its online payroll product, according to the Washington Post. In a Sept. 28 e-mail sent to customers, PayChoice indicated [...]
10.01.09
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Volvo Says Plug-In Diesel Hybrid By 2012
Volvo is at it again. Hot off the heals of their Frankfurt Auto Show debuts, where they rolled out an electric “car”, then an electric car for real, comes word from the Swedes that they will be producing a plug-in hybrid by 2012. And that’s not all, the internal combustion engine in the Volvo hybrid [...]
10.01.09 -
Forrester to Music Industry: It’s the Consumer, Stupid
The music industry has come a long way in the past decade towards embracing the consumer: abandoning DRM for single-song downloads, releasing interactive applications, launching remix contests, streaming music to phones, and allowing video sites like YouTube to monetize infringement. But music’s institutional disdain for its consumers persists, according to Forrester Research, which today released a [...]
10.01.09 -
Taming Twitter Overload: ‘Lists’ to the Rescue
Twitter is trying out a method to sub-categorize the people you follow into “lists,” making it possible for the first time to systematically organize — and recommend — feeds you follow. Once rolled out to everyone, Twitter lists will allow you to create dynamically updated timelines of your favorite news sites or opinion makers, celebrity administrative assistants, [...]
10.01.09 -
Probe Targets Archives’ Handling of Data on 70 Million Vets
The inspector general of the National Archives and Records Administration is investigating a potential data breach affecting tens of millions of records about U.S. military veterans, Wired.com has learned. The issue involves a defective hard drive the agency sent back to its vendor for repair and recycling without first destroying the data. The hard drive helped [...]
10.01.09 -
Refreshed Honda CR-Z to Debut at Tokyo Motor Show
Honda has offered a sneak preview of the CR-Z hybrid, which is debuting amongst a slew of alt-fuel concepts at the 41st annual Tokyo Motor Show. We’ve been teased by CR-Z concepts for almost two years, but these images give us the best idea of the car that might go on sale in Japan as soon [...]
10.01.09 -
Win a Copy of Star Trek Season 2 on Blu-ray
The folks at Paramount Home Video love Underwire readers. And the only way to prove love that really counts is to give stuff away. So, Wired.com is receiving four copies of Star Trek: Season 2 on Blu-ray to award to four insightful readers. All interested parties have to do to win a copy of this new Blu-ray [...]
10.01.09 -
For Sale: Stan Winston’s Terminators, Other Sci-Fi Memorabilia
When Stan Winston died last May, he left behind a visual effects legacy unlike any other. Next week, a trove of artifacts documenting Winston’s contributions to sci-fi classics including Jurassic Park, Terminator and AI: Artificial Intelligence will be sold to the highest bidders. On Oct. 8 and 9, Profiles in History is staging an auction [...]
09.30.09 -
50 Flights, and Still Stuck in the Airport
This morning I hit 50 flights. It seems like I should have celebrated it as some sort of special event, but there really wasn’t anything particularly remarkable about it. I boarded the flight early, which I suppose was a change of pace. I’m usually one of the last to go on, trying to savor every [...]
09.30.09 -
New Apps Promise to Find the News in All the News
The good news is that there are a lot of news sources from which to choose. The bad news: There are a lot of news sources to monitor. News services have always been in the business of deciding what the news is by choosing and prioritizing what to pass along. Informed by experience and tempered by [...]
09.30.09 -
Hugh Jackman Might Join Robot Boxing Flick
In between performances of his new Broadway play, Hugh Jackman is negotiating to star in DreamWorks ‘bot flick Real Steel for slapstick auteur Shawn Levy. Should he decide to sign on, Jackman would play a former boxer who promotes matches between 1-ton android gladiators. Variety reports that Steven Spielberg is executive-producing Real Steel, with Transformers [...]
09.30.09
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Terminal Man Attends to Some Business
10.03.09 -
Dark Energy Hunters Catch a Wave
10.05.09 -
LEGO Voltron
10.03.09 -
Wife of Japanese PM Brings UFOs, Aliens Into Global Affairs
10.04.09 -
Flash Lands on iPhone — One App at a Time
10.05.09 -
Nobel Winners Isolate Protein Behind Immortality, Cancer
10.05.09 -
Infrared Video: 500,000 Bats Emerge From Cave
10.05.09 -
Termite Altruism Might Have Roots in War
10.05.09 -
Roman Coin Hoards Show More War Means Fewer Babies
10.05.09
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