Google Streamlining its Approach to Digital Copyright

As the battle over intellectual property and online piracy heats up, web titan Google is announcing some significant changes to the way it deals with copyright infringement on its ubiquitous search engine. In making the changes, Google appears to want to send a message that Google is a good citizen when it comes to online [...]

Behold The Son of Thunder

Brough Superior has been called “the Rolls Royce of motorcycles,” renowned as much for power as beauty. Founder George Brough personally tested every motorcycle before it left the factory in Nottingham, England, so everyone who owns a Brough can say it was ridden by Brough. Now someone with deep pockets will own George Brough’s personal machine, [...]

WikiLeaked Cable Confirms U.S.’ Secret Somalia Op

It was an off-hand compliment during a January 2007 dinner meeting between Abu Dhabi crown prince Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, plus staff, and then-U.S. Central Commander boss General John Abizaid. But Al Nayhan’s jocular praise, as reported in WikiLeaks’ trove of leaked diplomatic cables, is a rare admission that the United States played [...]

The American Museum of Natural History Tours The Brain

Next time you’re in New York City you should stop by the American Museum of Natural History and visit a good friend and favorite zombie snack: your brain. Millions of years of evolution have helped shape our gray matter into the thought processing plant it is today. In a new exhibit called Brain:The Inside Story, [...]

Lunches That Provide the Daily Recommended Allowance of Fun

My daughter usually buys lunch at the cafeteria, so I don’t pack her a lunch every day. And on the occasions when she asks to take her own lunch, I have to admit that I don’t spend a whole lot of time preparing it: usually a sandwich or maybe some leftover fried rice from dinner [...]

BBC to Launch Subscription-Based Global iPlayer for iPad

The BBC iPlayer is coming to the iPad in the form of an international, subscription-powered app. Right now you need to be in the UK to watch the on-demand service, which streams BBC shows from the past seven days. The app won’t launch until the middle of next year (just in time for the next series [...]

A New Way to Check Video Game Ratings

If you’re like me, shopping for video games can be confusing. The games I like are definitely not the ones my two sons enjoy. I’ve made the decision to allow my fifteen-year-old to play anything but the most mature games, but picking out suitable games for my eleven-year-old gets a little chancy. This year, the ESRB [...]

Advent Countdown Competition

I’m always excited when we can get our advent decorations down from the loft. Our kids have really got into the whole “counting the days” experience and get up early each morning to see what is behind the new window on their calendar. While they get ever more excited, I like to use the time to [...]

Everything I Know About Parenting I Learned From Leslie Nielsen

Earlier this week, we lost the great deadpan comic actor Leslie Nielsen. Nielsen leaves behind six decades of film and television artifacts that feature over 200 of his characters, ranging from romantic leads to despicable heavies and oblivious comedians. I don’t know what kind of real-life parent Nielsen, who died Sunday of complications from pneumonia, was [...]

Mondo’s First ‘Director’s Series’ Posters Pay Tribute to Guillermo Del Toro

Fans of Guillermo Del Toro, Blade II or high-quality movie posters in general, you have something new to salivate over. Austin, Texas-based Mondo, the art collectible chop shop of Alamo Drafthouse, has dreamed up a visual pleasure-fest with its new Director’s Series of posters focusing on particular A-list moviemakers. The first artist/director collaboration features Del [...]

Six-Wheeled Sports Car Headed For Production

After 32 years of development, the Covini Engineering team claims this is the production version of the six-wheeled C6W it finally is unveiling this week. The future is now. The unusual sports car takes its engineering inspiration from the Tyrell P34 Formula 1 race car of 1976. The Tyrell had two pairs of 10-inch front wheels [...]

Kari Byron, MythBuster Mom: Affirmations for a Working Mom

“You can have it all.” I can???t express how much I hate that clich?? phrase. If I read another article about a celebrity mom who balances an amazing career with the perfect family, all while giving cooking/housekeeping tips, I am going to dig my eyes out with a rusty spoon. (Wait, I guess I can express [...]

Indie Game Developers Have a Home at Gamestreamer

It’s tough out there for an independent video game developer. The field of video game development is crowded. With mobile applications gaining a large portion of the marketplace, where many independent application developers find homes, the video game market is finding itself adapting to the mobile market. Where game developers had to develop for console [...]

Brain Camp: Not Just Learning and Fun

Almost right from the beginning, you know there’s something wrong at Camp Fielding: two kids racing for a geocache suddenly start convulsing and coughing up feathers. It certainly doesn’t look like a “summer of learning and fun” as promised on the T-shirt. Jenna’s parents think Camp Fielding sounds like a great idea, though. Their friend’s daughter, [...]

Dec. 2, 1942: Nuclear Pile Gets Going Dec. 2, 1957: Nuclear Power Goes Online

Dec. 2: It’s a double milestone for nuclear energy. The first man-made sustained nuclear chain reaction was created this day in 1942. And just 15 years later, the first full-scale nuclear power plant went online. 1942: Enrico Fermi, Leo Szilard and their colleagues achieve a successful, controlled chain reaction in a squash court underneath the [...]

Space Nazi Flick Iron Sky Goose-Steps Into Production

What if Nazis fled to the moon after World War II? That's the preposterous premise behind fan-funded sci-fi spoof Iron Sky, which has sprung from YouTube sensation into a full-fledged international production.

Let’s Stop Panicking Over Half-Assed Terrorists Already

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab couldn’t manage to blow up a plane over Detroit last Christmas, kicking off a year’s worth of high-profile terror-fails. But that hasn’t stopped the U.S. government from freaking out — putting naked scanners in airports and groping passengers. Overreactions like that compelled one of its senior-most counterterrorism officials yesterday to implore the [...]

Twinkling Stars May Reveal Human-Size Wormholes

If wormholes big enough to fit a human or a spaceship exist, telescopes should be able to detect any wavering starlight the space-time shortcuts cause while moving in front of a distant star. Star brightness would fluctuate from a wormhole because of gravitational lensing, caused when a massive object (such as a galaxy) warps the fabric [...]

No Deal in Xbox Modding Case, Trial Begins

LOS ANGELES — Federal authorities in the first-of-its-kind Xbox modding trial opened their prosecution here Wednesday, hours after the judge called a recess to give the government time to reach a plea deal or dismiss the case. The government decided to forge ahead in the landmark trial after U.S. District Judge Philip Gutierrez gave the government [...]

Google Unveils ‘Personalized Channels’ to Bridge TV Attention Gap

Some 35 hours of video are now uploaded to YouTube every minute, but the numbers Google are most interested in are “5″ and “15.” The former is the number of hours the average person watches TV every day. The latter is the number of minutes the average person stays on YouTube per session — yes, I [...]

Salaries of WikiLeaks Staffers to Be Revealed in New Report

Expenses and salary earnings for paid WikiLeaks staff will be revealed for the first time in a report expected to be published by the end of this year, according to Kristinn Hrafnsson, a??spokesman for the secret-spilling organization. Hrafnsson, speaking Wednesday in London on a panel discussion at the Frontline Club, said that the Wau Holland Foundation [...]

Chrome Browser to Start Sandboxing Flash Player

The latest developer channel release of the Chrome browser now supports sandboxing for Adobe’s Flash Player on Windows 7, Vista and XP. This feature should provide extra protection against malicious browser exploits through the Flash Player. The dev channel releases of Chrome on Windows already support sandboxing for HTML rendering and JavaScript execution, two of the [...]

Commanding Win Propels Ironwood Dark Into Final 4

Ah, so October Madness has indeed made its way to the freezing chill of December. And really, with all this Christmas spirit in the air, what better way to warm those frozen hands but with copious amounts of free beer? That’s what patrons and Wired beer enthusiasts experienced Tuesday night in San Francisco’s Mission District, [...]

Google, Facebook, Twitter to Feds: Man Up on Net Neutrality

Amid the cacophony of reactions to Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski’s proposed internet openness rules, one group has been conspicuously absent ??? the world’s largest internet companies. Not any more. On Thursday, the Open Internet Coalition, a diverse interest group that represents Google, Facebook, Twitter, Netflix, Skype, Amazon, eBay, and scores of other internet-dependent companies, will [...]

Dim Stars Triple the Universe’s Stellar Tally

There are more dim bulbs in the universe than even the most hardened pessimist might have imagined. Astronomers who examined eight relatively nearby galaxies have found evidence of a surprisingly high abundance of faint, low-mass stars ??? each has about 10 times as many as the Milky Way. Those elderly galaxies are so [...]

Nolan Says No to Heath Ledger in Dark Knight Rises

The Dark Knight director Christopher Nolan and his wife/producing partner Emma Thomas deny that Heath Ledger will make a posthumous appearance in The Dark Knight Rises. “I heard the rumor,” Thomas told The Hollywood Reporter. “We’re not doing that.” The rumor apparently got started on an Australian website, which quoted an anonymous source to explain the how [...]

Deficit-Hawk Panel Says It’s Keeping Its Defense Cuts

Confused by the lack of specifics on defense cuts in the big White House deficit-commission report today? You’ll find most of them in an earlier version released a few weeks ago. Or you can wait a few days to see the commission recapitulate its plan to cut tanks, planes and more. Even so, defense-budget hawks [...]

Xbox-Modding Judge Berates Prosecution, Puts Trial on Hold

LOS ANGELES ??? Opening statements in the first-of-its kind Xbox 360 criminal hacking trial were delayed here Wednesday after a federal judge unleashed a 30-minute tirade at prosecutors in open court, saying he had “serious concerns about the government’s case.” “I really don’t understand what we’re doing here,” U.S. District Judge Philip Gutierrez roared from the [...]

First Look: Sci-Fi Shooter Binary Domain

Killer robots, bald future-cops and girls with weird anatomy are the order of the day in Sega’s upcoming sci-fi videogame, Binary Domain. Sega will release the squad-based shooter for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 at some point in the future, the publisher said Wednesday. Created by Toshihiro Nagoshi (Yakuza, Super Monkey Ball), the game pits a [...]

Video: Sebastian Vettel Takes a Lap In a Tesla

Current Formula 1 champ Sebastian Vettel joined Michael Schumacher, S??bastien Loeb and other top drivers in taking a few laps of the Race of Champions in a Tesla Roadster. The battery-electric sports cars made a series of demonstration runs during for last weekend’s races, which pit the best drivers against each other in identical cars. The [...]

Telecom Giants Cheer FCC Plan, Net Neutrality Advocates Aren’t Amused

On Wednesday, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski set a vote on rules to protect network neutrality, the principle that broadband companies shouldn???t block or degrade rival web content, services or applications. The vote will be held on December 21st. The compromise rules would re-establish the principle that U.S. internet users can use whatever software, websites [...]

Ahmadinejad’s Getting Pretty Tired of This Dead Scientist Crap

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad likes to think of himself as a pretty patient guy, but all these dead Iranian nuclear scientists are starting to give him a rash, United Nations Security Council. The scientists who’ve been killed before today? He’s willing to float you those. But if one more gets killed — just one more [...]

FTC Backs ‘Do Not Track’ Browser Setting

The nation’s top consumer protection agency came out Wednesday in favor of tougher restrictions on online data collection, backing a “Do Not Track” setting in browsers and proposing that companies make it easier for individuals to see the data collected about them. The FTC’s 122-page draft privacy report (.pdf) comes after more than a year of [...]

Happy 40th Birthday, Jonathan Coulton!

As I’m sitting here, listening to “The Future Soon” by geek rock troubadour Jonathan Coulton, I have to remember that while it might be the future soon, it is currently the present, or it was just the present and now it’s the past. Or the present was the past and that past is now the [...]

Decoder Ring: That’s No Moon, It’s a Dreidel!

Irvin Kershner, the director of The Empire Strikes Back passed away on Saturday at the age of 87. The director of what many fans regard as the finest Star Wars film was Jewish, and it's the first day of Hanukkah. So it seems a fine time to share these mashups by me and Corey Macourek, my Loonbucket Brigade co-conspirator. We both found the lack of geeky Hanukkah offerings to be borderline criminal, so we made these. Enjoy, feel free to share, and RIP, Irvin Kershner.

Cable Traffic: WikiLeaks, Facebook, and You

As Wikileaks leaks occur with increasing frequency and with the usual suspects reacting in the usual ways and with no real bombshells going off, it won’t be long until, for most of us, these sorts of disclosures become background noise. But there is a good reason they shouldn’t: these are warning shots about the efficacy [...]

Space Shuttle Images Reveal Ancient Egyptian Lake Bed

A huge lake once waxed and waned deep in the sandy heart of the Egyptian Sahara, geologists have found. Radar images taken from the space shuttle confirm that a lake broader than Lake Erie once sprawled a few hundred kilometers west of the Nile, researchers report in the December issue of Geology. Since [...]

Super-Earth Atmosphere May Be Mostly Water

See Also: Most Earth-Like Extrasolar Planet Found Right Next Door Name the New Super-Earth At Last! First Real Evidence for a Rocky Exoplanet Life Ingredients Found on Extrasolar Gas Giant Scientists Create First Map of an Extrasolar Planet Hubble Finds Carbon Dioxide on Extrasolar Planet Exclusive: NASA's Plan to Save Astrophysics From Space Telescope's Budget Overruns Follow us on Twitter @astrolisa and @wiredscience, [...]

From 21,000 Photos, a Pittsburgh Hockey Icon Emerges

Like Michael Jordan in Chicago and Joe Montana in San Francisco, Mario Lemieux is beyond revered in the Pittsburgh metropolitan area. A Hall of Famer who scored 690 goals, beat cancer, and spent his entire career with the NHL’s Penguins, Lemieux won two cups as a player and a third in 2009 as the team’s [...]

Contest: Win an Adorable Scribblenauts Vinyl Doll

See that adorable little vinyl doll? It’s a minuscule version of Maxwell, protagonist of the charming Scribblenauts puzzle-action videogame series, and we’ve got three of them to give away to fine Wired.com readers. So how do you win one? Simple. Just post a comment below describing the funniest way you’ve beaten a level in either Scribblenauts [...]

WikiLeaks Hasn’t Broken U.S. Intelligence. Yet.

It’s not just Defense Secretary Robert Gates. The head of the National Counterterrorism Center also took a measured response to this week’s ongoing disgorgement of U.S. diplomatic cables from WikiLeaks, saying that a much-predicted halt in intelligence agencies’ sharing has yet to manifest itself. ??? ???More WikiLeaks Cablegate Coverage??? After giving a speech to a Washington think tank [...]

Play Flash Game Phylo, Help Trace Genetic Disease

By Mark Brown, Wired UK Forget FarmVille, chuck Canabalt. This time-wasting Flash game will actually do some good in the world as you idly click away. Phylo, created by bioinformaticians at Canada’s McGill University, is a pattern-matching puzzle game that will give researchers a better insight into genetic codes and could help identify the origins of genetic [...]

Dork Tower Wednesday: The John Lennon Photoshop Effect

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.

New Flash Player 10.2 Goes Easy on the CPU

[Updated, see below] Adobe has released the first beta of Flash Player 10.2, an update that focuses primarily on speed and performance improvements. New in Flash 10.2 is something Adobe calls “Stage Video hardware acceleration,” which the company claims will “decrease processor usage and enable higher frame rates, reduced memory usage, and greater pixel fidelity [...]

Electric Airplane Sets New Speed Record

??? The cool news is there’s a new speed record for electric aircraft. A French pilot flew his twin-engine, electric powered Cri-Cri to a top speed of 162 miles per hour. This beats the previous record of 155 mph set by an Italian team in 2009. The somewhat embarrassing news is the record was set September 5. [...]

Video: You Only Dream of Driving Like This

Rhys Millen drifting his 750-horsepower Hyundai Genesis coupe up Serra Do Rio Do Rastro in Santa Catarina, Brazil. Everything you need to know, by the numbers: 9.4 kilometers, 156 turns, 7 minutes and 17.898 seconds. Top speed? More than 136 mph. You will never, ever drive like this. Millen made the record-setting run during Red Bull Xtreme [...]

Did North Korea Really Give Iran Mega-Missiles?

It’s among the most alarming claims contained in the WikiLeaks archive of purloined U.S. diplomatic cables: North Korea secretly provided far-flying missiles to Iran. But it may not be true. A State Department cable from February 2010 references a belief by U.S. spies that North Korea gave the Iranians 19 BM-25s, a missile modified from a [...]

The Steepest Road On Earth Takes No Prisoners

PITTSBURGH, Pennsylvania — Most people would call The Dirty Dozen a grueling bicycle race. Hardcore cyclists in Pittsburgh call it a great way to burn off Thanksgiving dinner. Every year since 1983 bike nuts have subjected themselves to a 50-mile ride that hits the 13 steepest climbs in a city not known for being particularly flat. [...]

Ruckus Smart Antennas May Be Key to Nationwide Wi-Fi

I’m standing in the middle of the some of the most congested airwaves on Earth, and I’m watching Russell Crowe in 1080p like I just don’t care. If you opened your laptop to log on to the net here, you’d find a list of 160 different Wi-Fi access points to choose from. Normally, mere mortals would [...]

Dec. 1, 1952: Ex-GI Becomes Blonde Beauty

1952: It’s front-page news when George Jorgensen Jr. is reborn as Christine Jorgensen, gaining international celebrity and notoriety as the first widely known person to undergo a successful sex-change operation. Jorgensen, who grew up in the Bronx, in her words, a “frail, tow-headed, introverted little boy who ran from fistfights and rough-and-tumble games,” was drafted into [...]

Indie Comics Gamble on New Digital Strategies

By Michael Moreci, Guest Blogger In September of this year, Kris Simon left her job at Image Comics, where she had been an editor for six years. The move was bold, but to Simon it made perfect sense. She was ready for her career to evolve, ready to take the next step in her [...]

Video: Build a Chevrolet Volt In 1:55

We’ve already taken you inside the factory where the Chevrolet Volt is built to show you what it’s like. Here’s some time-lapse video that shows the process from beginning to end in not quite two minutes. The plug-in hybrids — and yes, the Volt is a plug-in hybrid — are rolling off the line at Detroit-Hamtramck [...]

FCC Announces Net Neutrality Order for December Meeting

Five years after the federal government first began considering rules designed to keep the internet free from meddling by the huge phone and cable companies, the nation’s top communications regulator is finally set to take action. But the agency’s approach means the case will almost certainly wind up in federal court. On December 21st, the Federal [...]

Gawker Gives Up on Blogging (And That’s a Good Thing!)

Gawker founder Nick Denton is one of the most aggressive and successful blog publishers around. Which is exactly why online news sites should be paying close attention to his new, and public, strategy intended to re-focus his snarky snack-bite empire on hard, original news, video, some aggregation and TV-like timing. Denton started with a good gut understanding [...]

Pentagon Boss Is Not Sweating WikiLeaks

If Defense Secretary Robert Gates had anything to say about WikiLeaks’ unauthorized disclosure of U.S. diplomatic dispatches, it was this: everybody calm down. ??? ???More WikiLeaks Cablegate Coverage??? WikiLeaks’ release of the often-undiplomatic diplomatic cables isn’t a “meltdown” or a “game-changer” for American foreign policy, an exasperated Gates intoned at a Pentagon press conference this afternoon. “Is this [...]

Jury Seated in Landmark Xbox Modding Trial

LOS ANGELES — Opening statements in a criminal Xbox 360 modding case are set to begin here early Wednesday, a day after 12 jurors were picked to decide the outcome of the first-of-its kind trial. It took five hours to empanel a jury, whose members include a university student dean, music engineer, lawyer, social worker and [...]

Win Doctor Who, Other Great Gifts With a British Accent

Wired.com and BBC America are teaming up to give you a shot at winning an ultimate BBC Holiday Gift Pack, with DVD sets of some of our favorite shows: Doctor Who, Life, Sherlock, Top Gear, Being Human and Robbie the Reindeer. The shows are all available at BBC America Shop, which is stocked with BBC films, [...]

Le Truc ‘Bustaurant’ Seats 12, Sells Out Fast

SAN FRANCISCO — For his new “bustaurant” called Le Truc, chef Hugh Schick has transformed a yellow vehicle designed for hauling schoolchildren into a gleaming, black mobile eatery tricked out with copper grills. Instead of food truck standards like tacos and sausages, Le Truc is serving up locally sourced, seasonal menus out of the 66-passenger vehicle, [...]

EA CEO: Buying Harmonix Would Be Like ‘Catching Falling Knife’

Who’s going to buy Harmonix? Sure as heck won’t be Electronic Arts. Speaking to Bloomberg this past Monday, EA chief executive John Riccitiello said that buying the Rock Band maker would be “doubling down on yesterday.” “I’m sure some smart investor will buy the business feeling that they can catch a falling knife, but more people [...]

Spider-Man, Fantastic Four Speak Espanol in iPad App Specials

Three new Marvel Comics releases tell tales of Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four in both English and Spanish. And of course there will be chupacabras. Fantastic Four: Isla De La Muerte! (artwork above and below), Fantastic Four in … Ataque Del M.O.D.O.K.! and Spider-Man & The Human Torch in … Bahia De Los Muertos! are now [...]

Even Old Soldiers Are Cool With Lifting Gay Ban

In civilian life, support for gay rights follows a pretty clear demographic trajectory: younger generations are more favorably inclined than their elders. That’s led many to presume that the same would hold true for the military. But according to the results of an exhaustive military study released today, there’s substantial support for repealing the legal [...]

Secret of Big Caves Revealed by Math

Spelunkers look at a cave and wonder how to explore its deepest reaches. But physicists look at it and wonder how it got there in the first place. A new mathematical analysis solves a longstanding cave-formation puzzle: how a trickle of water laced with carbonic acid manages to quickly dissolve rock to create massive [...]

Interpol Issues ‘Red Notice’ for Arrest of WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange

The international police organization Interpol has issued a Red Notice for the arrest of WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange, in connection with a sex crime investigation in Sweden. A Red Notice is kind of international wanted poster seeking the provisional arrest of a fugitive, with an eye towards extradition to the nation that issued the underlying [...]

Microsoft, Sony Duel Over Motion Control Sales

With Black Friday behind us, Microsoft and Sony would each like you to know that their motion controller is the most popular. On Monday, Microsoft said that sales of Kinect have surpassed 2.5 million units worldwide in its first 25 days on sale. The camera-based motion controller is available as a $150 standalone product and as [...]

Senate Passes Historic Food-Safety Reform

The U.S. Senate has approved the first major food-safety legislation in more than 70 years, by a 73-to-25 vote. The Food Safety Modernization Act will give the Food and Drug Administration more power, providing better food tracking systems and more inspections of large-scale food production operations, especially those with poor track records. The cost of increased [...]

B.P.R.D.: The Dead Remembered Explores Hellboy’s Fiery Friend, Liz Sherman

Upcoming comic book miniseries B.P.R.D.: The Dead Remembered digs into the traumatic teen years of Hellboy’s pyrokinetic pal, Liz Sherman. Written by Hellboy creator Mike Mignola and Dark Horse Comics writer and editor Scott Allie, the three-issue story arc lands April 6, 2011. But will it ignite, given that Liz is no superhero? “We need more female [...]

Minecraft Creator: PC Gaming Could Thrive as Big Pubs Walk Away

Recent trends show that game developers are choosing consoles over computers, but could that be a good thing for PC gamers? According to Markus “Notch” Persson, creator of PC indie sensation Minecraft, big-name publishers are almost exclusively focusing on consoles for graphically intensive titles, only turning to the personal computer for ports. Publishers no longer see [...]

Russian Spy Chief Kinda Sorta Takes Blame for U.S. Ring

Mikhail Fradkov, Russia’s top foreign spy and the man at the center of a controversy over whether Russia’s sleeper agents in America were betrayed from within, has a response to his critics: I know I’m in the doghouse, but I’m not going to change much. Earlier this month, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev weighed in on reports [...]

Launch Companies Beg NASA: Save the Space Planes!

In April, the Air Force launched into orbit its brand-new X-37B robotic space-plane, a maneuverable vehicle capable of spying on earth — and on other spacecraft — for nine months at a time. Now America’s private space companies want their own speedy, reusable space-plane in the vein of the X-37. To get it, late last [...]

Cadaver Legs Give New Insights Into Athletes’ Ligament Tears

Knee ligament injuries can strike at any time and be utterly devastating to an athlete’s career. A former Harvard wide receiver–turned–orthopedic surgeon is dedicated to finding new ways to prevent such an ailment from dashing players’ dreams of professional stardom, but it’s the methods in his Long Island lab that might give Mark Drakos a [...]

Mining Flickr to Build 3D Models of the World

Microsoft’s PhotoSynth tool is jaw-droppingly awesome. But, because it’s a Microsoft project, the technology is unlikely to appear on some of your favorite non-Microsoft online apps, like Google Maps or Flickr. However, our friends at ReadWriteWeb stumbled across a very similar tool — at least in terms of the end result — developed by the University [...]

Computer Game Makes You a Genetic Scientist

A new online game harnesses the computational power of idle brains to help decipher the origins of genetic diseases. The game, called Phylo, stands on the shoulders of crowdsourced science giants like the protein-folding game Foldit and the celestial object identification powerhouse Galaxy Zoo. Each project takes advantage of humans’ prowess at pattern recognition, something computers [...]

Can WAI-ARIA Build a More Accessible Web?

Accessibility in web design has come a long way since the days of table-based layouts with single-pixel .gif spacers. But even current best practices are far from perfect. Today, we’ll tell you a bit more about these accessibility troubles as they relate to dynamic web apps — fitting, as today is Blue Beanie Day. For [...]

Yellow-Bellied Marmots May Inherit Social Victimization

An unusual study of an animal social network suggests that ending up as the butt of unfriendly interactions could be in part inherited. The study, in yellow-bellied marmots, gives the first look beyond people at what facets of social relationships might have genetic components, says coauthor Daniel Blumstein of UCLA. It???s receiving incoming [...]

Airbus, Boeing Eager to Forget Post-Halloween Nightmares

Today marks the end of a month Airbus and Boeing would like to forget. Both companies endured in-flight emergencies with their latest airliners that required grounding the aircraft. The trouble started for Airbus on Nov. 4 when an A380 experienced an uncontained engine failure shortly after takeoff in Singapore. The plan had to return to the [...]

10 Cars You Can Bet Will Be Classics

9 More Dark Disney Games We’d Like to See

Epic Mickey takes Disney's lovable rodent to the dark side, and it's a wild ride. Now we're rabid for more fantastic journeys to play out in videogames.

Get Your Very Own Street-Legal Tron Light Cycle

Just in time for??Tron: Legacy, a Florida bike shop put together 10 custom-built, street-legal Tron Light Cycle lookalikes. For a cool $55,000, you could be riding one to the Dec. 17 premier. According to Jeff Halverson of Parker Brothers Choppers, each bike features a steel frame, fiberglass bodywork and a V-twin engine from a Suzuki TLR1000. [...]

WikiLeaks’ Cablegate: The Taiwanese Animated Version

The Taiwanese news-animation company NMA has distilled the global diplomatic furor sparked by the State Department cable leak into a 90-second computer generated highlight reel. Think of it as worldwide anarchy in a CGI format. See Also: Cyberattack Against WikiLeaks Was Weak Newspapers Reveal Diplomatic Cables Provided By WikiLeaks Suspected Wikileaks Source Described Crisis of Conscience Leading to Leaks U.S. [...]

Trailer: Game of Thrones Treads On Lord of the Rings Turf

Hollywood writer David Benioff, who worked at epic scale when he crafted ancient warfare saga Troy, is bringing a similarly sprawling story to the small screen in Game of Thrones. The series, which Benioff is executive-producing for HBO, is steeped in medieval history and should hit the sweet spot for Lord of the Rings-style fantasy buffs, [...]

First Criminal Trial Over Game-Console Modding Begins Tuesday

LOS ANGELES — A Southern California man is set to go before a jury here Tuesday on criminal charges of violating copyright law by modifying Xbox 360 consoles to play pirated games. In the first trial of its kind, defendant Matthew Crippen is charged with two counts of violating the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium [...]

Dark Jupiter May Haunt Edge of Solar System

A century of comet data suggests a dark, Jupiter-sized object is lurking at the solar system’s outer edge and hurling chunks of ice and dust toward Earth. “We’ve accumulated 10 years’ more data, double the comets we viewed to test this hypothesis,” said planetary scientist John Matese of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. “Only now [...]

David Lynch Drops ‘Good Day Today’ on iTunes

Visionary director David Lynch’s new electropop single “Good Day Today” sounds like the trendy Daft Punk, but with added saccharine. Released exclusively Sunday on iTunes (but available for months on record label Sunday Best’s SoundCloud), Lynch’s optimistic dance anthem is punctuated by gunshots and lorded over by a robot vocalist hoping for an angel. But for all [...]

Cyberattack Against WikiLeaks Was Weak

In the first test of WikiLeaks’ resiliency since a staff rebellion earlier this year, the organization recovered within hours from a distributed denial-of-service attack during its rollout of leaked State Department cables Sunday. But experts who monitored the disruptive traffic say the attack was relatively modest in size. WikiLeaks’ main web address and its “cablegate” site [...]

Iran: Computer Malware Sabotaged Uranium Centrifuges

In what appears to be the first confirmation that the Stuxnet malware hit Iran’s Natanz nuclear facility, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Monday that malicious computer code launched by “enemies” of the state had sabotaged centrifuges used in Iran’s nuclear-enrichment program. The surprise announcement at a press conference coincided with news that two of Iran’s top [...]

Radiation Rings Hint Universe Was Recycled Over and Over

Most cosmologists trace the birth of the universe to the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago. But a new analysis of the relic radiation generated by that explosive event suggests the universe got its start eons earlier and has cycled through myriad episodes of birth and death, with the Big Bang [...]

Underwire Is Hiring in San Francisco

Underwire is looking for a writer to cover geek culture. If you’ve got experience breaking tech news and writing compelling cultural critiques, we want to hear from you. We’re looking for a multitalented writer who is equally comfortable digging up news, crafting thought-provoking reviews and doing quick-hit blogging, using all the tools of the trade. It’s [...]

Secure Firefox With New HTTPS Everywhere Add-on

Earlier this year, the Firefox add-on Firesheep created quite a controversy by making it easy to capture unencrypted web traffic. Firesheep sniffs unencrypted cookies sent across open wi-fi networks. That means anyone with Firesheep installed can watch your browsing sessions while you lounge at Starbucks and grab your log-in credentials for Facebook, Twitter or other popular [...]

Wintervention Delivers on Ends-of-the-Earth Excitement

As ski season rolls around at this time every year, one time-honored tradition, aside from hearing the sound of freshly fallen snow shushing under your board, is the ski movie premiere, an annual big-screen bacchanalia of powder and promise. It’s not hard to find one at a local theater these days. But whether the auteurs are [...]

Supreme Court Won’t Hear RIAA File Sharing Case

The U.S. Supreme Court declined Monday to hear the first Recording Industry Association of America file sharing case to cross its desk, in a case that tested the so-called ???innocent infringer??? defense to copyright infringement. The case, which one justice voted to hear (.pdf), ??leaves undisturbed a federal appeals court???s decision in February ordering a university [...]

Video: Aliens Gets ‘Tronitized’

How did self-described “director and VFX freak” Benni Diez add an old-school Tron sheen to footage from Aliens in his video, “Get Away From Her, You 01000010 01001001 01010100 01000011 01001000 !!!”? Diez describes the process like this. “Pretty much all FX stuff was done in [Adobe] After Effects, mostly using some circuit-board layout images overlaid with [...]

Building a GameBoy Emulator in HTML5 and JavaScript

Like Flash before it, HTML5 is where programmers are turning to experiment, and nothing seems to make developers experiment quite like the desire to recreate the classic video games. We’ve already seen Pac-Man, Astroids and Conway’s Game of Life come to the browser in standards-friendly forms, and now Nintendo’s classic GameBoy platform is getting similar treatment. The [...]

Most Dangerous Object in the Office: GreenSteam Weed Killer

D’oh! We left a cup of coffee on our desk—last Presidents’ Day. A scouring pad will never kill all the germs living in this mug, but a blast of scalding steam at 930 degrees Fahrenheit just might. The GreenSteam Weed Killer is a propane-powered beast that flash-boils water in about half a minute, then [...]

Found: Retirement Home of the Future

Found Found Contest: Imagine the Future of NewsstandsMore Artifacts From the Future Behold a typical old folks home of 2095. The good news: average lifespan has doubled. The bad news: The age threshold for early retirement is 112. Click on the image for a closer look. What do you think our world will look like in 10, 20, [...]

Filter: Smart Wheels for Wee Ones

.param_hed { display:inline-block; margin-bottom:6px; padding:3px 9px; font-size: 1em; line-height: 1; background-color:#000; color:#fff; } 1// Inglesina Classica Pram Perfect for: Steampunk enthusiasts Geek factor: Most 21st-century strollers look like lawn chairs on wheels. But Inglesina’s Victorian-inspired pram, complete with organza privacy curtain and leather handle, lets your little dandy [...]

How to: Drive on a Frozen Lake, Build an Igloo, Heat Your Driveway

Hibernating by the fireplace is fine and all, but if you really want to enjoy the season, you’ll need a few ways to dominate Jack Frost. ???Drive on a Frozen Lake The glassy surface of an iced-over pond is perfect for power slides. Just keep your window down in case you take a plunge and need to [...]

The Age of Music Piracy Is Officially Over

Mark down the date: The age of stealing music via the Internet is officially over. It’s time for everybody to go legit. The reason: We won. And all you audiophiles and copyfighters, you know who fixed our problems? The record labels and online stores we loved to hate. Granted, when Apple launched the iTunes Music [...]

Equation: Formula for Calculating a Skycraper’s Sway

Photo courtesy: Taipei 101 A skyscraper is a giant tuning fork. Give one a good knock ??? like with an earthquake or a heavy gust of wind ??? and it???ll start vibrating at its own natural resonance frequency (about seven octaves below the lowest notes on a piano). If you???re on the top floor of, say, [...]

Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr.: The Inception of Inception

A movie that marshals eye-popping special effects, precision editing, sophisticated action choreography, and diabolically elaborate sets to explore the nexus between dreams and reality. Sounds familiar, right? Well, it’s not Inception—it’s the 1924 silent comedy Sherlock Jr., directed by Buster Keaton. On the surface, Sherlock Jr. is a typical Walter Mitty tale: A hapless movie [...]

How Two Outcast Rappers Built an Insane Clown Empire

Joseph Bruce and Joey Utsler have discovered a formula for success in the Internet age that the larger music world is only now waking up to.