Don’t Miss This Great Robot Christmas Book! The Twelve Bots of Christmas (And A Funny Interview with Nathan Hale)

If you don???t know the name Nathan Hale, I???d like to be the one to introduce him to you. He???s a geekmom treasure who needs to be discovered. No, he???s no relation to the historical figure (who was a spy for the Continental Army and was best remembered for saying, “I only regret that I [...]

GeekDad Puzzle Of The Week Solution: Magic Rats

Well looks like we’re at the end of another puzzle week. Not a lot of you attempted the puzzle which combined a few concepts from past puzzles. Magic Squares and moving counter problems. A few of you the less musophobic did take a shot and this weeks winner of the ThinkGeek $50.00 [...]

Farmers Can Be Geeks, Too

Back when I used to get a daily newspaper???remember those? large unwieldy sheets of low-quality paper with ink that rubbed off on all your fingers, out of date by the time it arrived???there was a comic strip in it called “Pluggers.” It’s about the “hardworking people the world depends on,” the people who keep “plugging [...]

Mix Up Some Music for the Season!

Image by rob.wiss via Flickr Holiday music always puts me in a great mood. But even I have to admit that after a little while the same songs, over and over, can get a bit old. (Though there are a few that I will never tire of. I’m looking at you, Good King Wenceslas.) Putting together [...]

Kinect Takes to the Slopes

My family have enjoyed the various sporting and exercise Kinect games that the new controller launched with. But recently we’ve been looking for some different experiences – particular those that offer a more traditional game experience with the new hardware. This led me to stumble upon a duo of snowboard racing games that make use of [...]

PayPal Freezes WikiLeaks Account

In potentially the most significant attack on WikiLeaks to date, PayPal on Friday froze the account of the German foundation accepting donations for the secret spilling website, claiming that WikiLeaks was in violation of PayPal’s terms of service. “PayPal has permanently restricted the account used by WikiLeaks due to a violation of the PayPal Acceptable Use [...]

WikiLeaks Attacks Reveal Surprising, Avoidable Vulnerabilities

Some online service providers are in the cross hairs this week for allegedly abandoning WikiLeaks after it published secret U.S. diplomatic cables and drew retaliatory technical, political and legal attacks. But the secret-spilling site’s woes may be attributable in part to its own technical and administrative missteps as well as outside attempts at censorship. Struggling with [...]

Video Barbie in FBI Cross Hairs

A Barbie doll tricked out with a video camera concealed in her necklace could be used by predators to create child pornography, warns the FBI in a recent cybercrime alert. In the alert, mistakenly released to the press, the FBI expressed concern that the toy’s camera, which can capture 30 minutes of video and rivals a [...]

iPhone App Slows Down Music When You Speed

The Slow Down App from OVK on Vimeo. While driving, it’s tempting to hit the gas when one of your favorite jams plays on the stereo, but a new iPhone app discourages music-induced speeding. Shown in the video above, the app Slow Down uses the iPhone’s sensors to track how fast you’re driving. If you go a [...]

Why Percentage-Based Designs Don’t Work in Every Browser

Here’s a rule any web designer can live by: Your designs don’t need to look exactly the same in every browser, they just need to look good in every browser. It’s a maxim that will spare you many a hair-pulling hour. That said, there some things you would expect to be the same across browsers that [...]

Vuvuzelas Blare on Pirated Copies of Michael Jackson: The Experience for DS

A novel anti-piracy measure baked into the Nintendo DS version of Michael Jackson: The Experience makes copied versions of the game unplayable and taunts gamers with the blaring sound of vuvuzelas. Instead of “Beat It,” players get “Bleat It.” The phenomenon was documented by YouTube user ctkxtreme, who posted the video above with the following explanation: “This [...]

Glacial Silt Encased Some of Earth’s Best-Preserved Fossils

Some of the rarest and most detailed fossils on Earth owe their stunning preservation to dust blown out to sea by glacial winds. Soft-bodied creatures usually rot or get eaten before sediment can bury and fossilize their fragile tissues. Yet a zoo of squishy animals that swam 435 million years ago is exquisitely preserved in [...]

Man Claims Droid 2 Smartphone Exploded in His Ear

A 30-year-old Texas man claimed this week that he was talking on his Motorola Droid smartphone when it exploded in his ear. Wearing a bandage over his head, Texas resident Aron Embry showed broadcast reporters his Droid 2 phone, which appears to be cracked with a burn. “I heard a pop, I didn’t feel any pain initially, [...]

Chrome Store Possibly Launching Dec. 7

You may be able to buy your nieces and nephews some Chrome apps for the holidays this year. We just received this invitation from Google to attend a Chrome-centric event Tuesday. It arrived in our e-mail inboxes early Friday afternoon. Our guess is this will mark the public debut of the much-anticipated Chrome Store — Google’s directory [...]

Most Dangerous Week Ever

Judging by what we laced you with this week, it was more like the most dangerous leak ever. Spelunking through WikiLeaks’ trove of purloined diplomatic communications, we unearthed details about Iran’s illicit global weapons-procurement network, U.S. and Israeli efforts to stop Russia from selling Iran anti-aircraft missiles, dubious North Korean missile transfers to the mullahs [...]

Iran Blames CIA, Makes Arrests in Nuke Scientist Slay

What’s one thing America, Britain and Israel’s spy services can all work together on? Killing Iranian nuclear scientists, if you believe Iranian intelligence. But in the murky world of violence in Iran, there’s more potential players — and less certainty — than the Mullahs’ spooks might suggest. Iran’s intelligence minister??Heidar Moslehi announced late yesterday that arrests [...]

Viacom Says YouTube Ruling Will ‘Completely Destroy’ Copyright

Viacom appealed Friday its unsuccessful $1 billion copyright lawsuit against Google’s YouTube in a case testing the depths of copyright-infringement protection under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998. Viacom, on behalf of its MTV, Comedy Central, Black Entertainment Television, Paramount Pictures and Nickelodeon units, is seeking to overturn a June ruling that, if it survives, [...]

How to Print With Any Printer From iPad, iPhone

Apple’s latest mobile operating system update introduces a much-demanded feature: wireless printing. Problem is, it will only officially print from printers labeled “AirPrint-compatible,” which you likely don’t own. However, if you want to print from just about any printer, there’s a mod for that. AirPrint Hacktivator offers a solution for Macs to set up wireless printing [...]

What’s Right (and Wrong) With Game Dev Story’s Addictive Simulation

DeathSpank and Monkey Island developer Ron Gilbert picks apart strangely compelling iPhone time-waster Game Dev Story, sharing insider insights into the game's truths and creative fictions.

EA To Slash Game Release Schedule In Half by 2012

Electronic Arts will continue to drastically reduce the number of packaged videogames it ships, CEO John Riccitiello told Reuters Friday. In the last fiscal year, EA shipped over 50 games. This year, it will ship about 35. Next year, says Riccitiello, “I don’t think it goes… less than 20, but there’s some number probably between the [...]

Generals, Gates Split Over Gay Ban in First Public Rift

Robert Gates spent the past four years running the Pentagon by riding herd over the military brass, on everything from the Iraq surge to the defense budget. But a day after Gates passionately urged a Senate panel to quickly repeal the ban on open gay military service, the heads of the Army, Marines, and Air [...]

Tesla Commissions an Art Car

Tesla Motors is taking a page from BMW’s playbook and rolling out its very own art car. The Silicon Valley automaker teamed up with artist Laurence Gartel to create a one-off Roadster to celebrate the Art Basel Miami Beach festival. Tesla Motors, never shy about tooting its own horn, hailed the car as “showcasing both cutting-edge [...]

GeekDad Family Day at the Wired Holiday Store In NYC Tomorrow

For our friends in the greater New York metro area, I’ll be hosting a GeekDad family day at the Wired Holiday store, 692 Broadway at 4th Street, NYC from 1-4pm on Saturday. Bring the family and have some fun checking out some projects from my book and playing with all the neat stuff in the [...]

Chrome 8 Offers Built-in PDF Tools, Security Fixes

Staying on track with its rapid-fire, six week release cycle for its web browser, Google has pushed out the final version of Chrome 8. The latest release packs in some 800 bug and security fixes, as well as a new inline PDF viewer. If you’re using the stable, everyday version of Chrome, you should be automatically [...]

Celebrating MC Frontalot’s Birthday

When Mama Hess birthed her little boy Damian some 37 years ago, little did she realize that he would become the one and only MC Frontalot ??? the world’s 579th greatest rapper and godfather of nerdcore hip-hop! On this, the day of his birth, we at GeekDad would like to pause and reflect back upon his [...]

Baja Racing With a BMW, a Dream and Not Much Else

Conventional wisdom holds that there are two ways to go about racing a motor vehicle: You can do it right, spending loads of cash to ensure that things go off without a hitch. This is known as the Expensive Way. Failure paths are eliminated and the chance of winning, or at least crossing the finish [...]

Surprise: Radioactive Mercury Decays Into Uneven Chunks

More than seven decades after German chemists discovered nuclear fission ??? the splitting of an atom that is harnessed by nuclear energy and nuclear weapons ??? scientists still can???t describe the process in detail. A paper to appear in Physical Review Letters underscores that knowledge gap with the report of a totally [...]

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.

Street Sign Squabble Is MUTCD Ado About Nothing

Is Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood frustrated by “a few erroneous news stories” overstating the government’s reach when it comes to replacing worn-out road signs? All signs point to yes. The social-networking-savvy secretary took to Twitter to better explain the impact of updates to the Manual of Uniform Traffic Control Devices, the standards for street signs, road [...]

Secret Space Plane Finally Lands; Twin Preps for Launch

After 225 days in orbit the Air Force’s mysterious X-37B space plane touched down Friday at 1:16 a.m. local time at California’s Vandenberg Air Force Base. It was only the second fully automated re-entry and runway landing in the history of space flight. The Soviets achieved the first in 1988 with the robotic prototype of [...]

It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Geekmas

While many of you were hastily disposing of those last few morsels of leftover Thanksgiving turkey, we GeekDads have been toiling away to ensure that you have the happiest of holidays. Unlike Santa’s elves, however, we haven’t been crafting your toys ourselves. Instead we’ve been exploiting mining the goodwill of our media and public relations [...]

London Restaurant Orders Up Interactive Tables

In London, it’s hard to find a restaurant without a gimmick. And Inamo has probably the biggest gimmick of all. If you’re a hungry, tech-loving nerd, that is. The restaurant, which just launched a new venue on London’s, tries to do away with almost all waiterly duties, apart from actually carrying plates around. A projector sits [...]

Russia’s Shadow War on Georgia, WikiLeaked

The brief shooting war between Russia and Georgia in 2008 was just the final, action-packed scene of a years-long drama. As the U.S. Embassy in the Georgian capitol of Tblisi saw it, Moscow spent much of the previous decade destabilizing the former Soviet republic, using “missile attacks and murder plots,” natural-gas “sabotage” and support to [...]

Okay, Who Left Their Robot Out?

The news: Police in Denver rerouted rush hour traffic for hours and called in the bomb squad to handle a little toy robot. The conversation at home: “Kids, if we’ve told you once, we’ve told you a thousand times: Make sure you put your toy robot away. “All right, very funny: Who cemented their toy robot to the [...]

Pentax Swallows Paint and Robots, Vomits Camera

Somebody at Pentax has just plain lost it. Here you see the forthcoming limited-edition K-r, a custom version of the regular 12 megapixel DSLR. It seems to have been built from eye-searingly bright children’s building blocks, and somebody has even wedged a robot-head into the hot-shoe. Pentax has a history of colorful experimentation, from the “world’s [...]

Competition Rules: UK iPads From ??200, 15GB Per Month

Over in the UK, something is happening that will bring cheer to the miserable, heavily-drinking denizens of that gray, cold land: Competition. To be precise, competition in iPad plans. 3G operator “3″ has entered the iPad subsidy game, going squarely up against Orange, which announced its own plans earlier this week. The prices for the iPad [...]

GM’s Smart Dummies Tell You Where It Hurts

General Motors has long been a pioneer in developing crash test dummies, including the Hybrid III model widely used today. But after years of building dumb dummies, the automaker is building smart dummies. GM said its new dummies feature 70 to 80 sensors that record and transmit data 10,000 times per second. The General’s army of [...]

Ear Mounted iPhone Camera Is Like Tivo for Your Life

Looxcie, the ear-mounted, sci-fi styled video-camera now works with your iPhone. The Bluetooth camera is like a Tivo for your real life. When running, it is constantly filming. When something happens that you might want to keep, you hit a button and the last 30 seconds of video are dumped into your iPhone. The only problem [...]

Spinning Shelf Balances Your Books

Christian Kim’s DreiX shelf brings a little bit of the fairground to your living room, in the form of three spinning, rotating cubbyholes. His concept features three boxes. The central box is fixed to the wall and the other two are joined on by a pair of metal beams, which allow them to move around [...]

Apple Updates Universal Dock with Metal Remote, Power-Brick

Apple has updated its Universal Dock for iPods and iPhones. Now, instead of being a $50 box full of plastic parts, it’s a $60 box of plastic and aluminum. Gone is the old white remote, the one that was the exact size and shape of the little cookies that come with coffee in certain cheesy hotels, [...]

Track Record: Man-Made Footprints on Other Worlds

See Also: Where Will Next Mars Rover Land? Martian Dune Mystery Solved by Bouncing Sand Grains Inside the Soviets’ Secret Failed Moon Program Lunar Probe Sends First High-Res Images The Moon Hides Ice Where the Sun Don’t Shine First-Ever Photo of Liquid on Extraterrestrial World Follow us on Twitter @astrolisa and @wiredscience, and on Facebook.

Dec. 3, 1984: Bhopal, ‘Worst Industrial Accident in History’

1984: Poison gas leaks from a Union Carbide pesticide factory in Bhopal, India. It spreads throughout the city, killing thousands of people outright and thousands more subsequently in a disaster often described as the worst industrial accident in history. Union Carbide chose Bhopal, a city of 900,000 people in the state of Madhya Pradesh, because of [...]

Alt Text: The Perils of Elf Overdose

Cataclysm, the latest expansion for World of Warcraft, will hit shelves next week. Millions of copies will be picked up by eager hands and left clumsily hidden under welcome mats by delivery drivers. The face of Azeroth will be changed forever, the very foundations of the game will be reforged, and I will be playing Red [...]

Game of Numbers: How the BCS Rules College Football

Eighteen years ago, Jeff Anderson and Chris Hester were just two roommates at the University of Washington, frustrated with their beloved Huskies always being disrespected in college-football poll rankings. “Back then, teams were rewarded for playing softer schedules and moving up by attrition,??? Anderson says. ???There was also a lot of East Coast bias.??? So the two [...]

‘Dual Battery’ Powers Electric Bus of Tomorrow

Buses are a natural for electrification. They follow fixed routes, they’re stored in centralized locations and they benefit from loads of torque. Trouble is, batteries are really big and really expensive, especially when you’re talking about something capable of powering a bus. GE Global Research thinks it has an answer to that problem. The company’s hybrid systems [...]

Dr. Sudoku Prescribes: Star Battle

This week???s prescription deals with Star Battle, an object placement puzzle that is truly out of this world.

CALM Act Passed, Will Quiet Loud TV Commercials Within A Year

Though Congress still bickers over net neutrality, spying on Americans, and universal health care, at least Democrats and Republicans can agree on one thing: TV commercials are too damned loud. After approval by the House, the Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation (CALM) Act is now on its way to President Obama’s desk. [...]

Trailer: Superpowered Teen Fears for His Life in I Am Number Four

runMobileCompatibilityScript('myExperience695961056001', 'anId'); brightcove.createExperiences(); What planet did they come from? Why are they being killed? The new I Am Number Four trailer zeroes in on one of nine “escapees” from who knows where who is trying to pass as normal. Three of the refugees have already been knocked off, which makes teen hero John (played by Alex [...]

Lieberman Introduces Anti-WikiLeaks Legislation

Senator Joseph Lieberman and other lawmakers on Thursday introduced legislation that would make it a federal crime for anyone to publish the name of a U.S. intelligence source, in a direct swipe at the secret-spilling website WikiLeaks. “The recent dissemination by Wikileaks of thousands of State Department cables and other documents is just the latest example [...]

Video: Tron Evolution Designers Talk Wii, Multiplayer

runMobileCompatibilityScript('myExperience695957704001', 'anId'); brightcove.createExperiences(); The creators of the Tron: Evolution videogames discuss the multiplayer modes and the Wii version in two new trailers released Thursday by Disney. In the video above, lead designer James Toghill runs down the features of Tron: Evolution — Battle Grids, the Wii version of the game that Disney will release on December [...]

Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Don’t Do: ‘Objectivity’ in the Age of the Internet

Alan Mutter, a media critic who is both wise and smart, has pointed to the elephant in the room: journalists aren’t objective. Can’t be, really (though many try). But their biases are so mundane, he argues, that these collections of predilections and conflict-appearing life facts certainly don’t disqualify the conscientious ones from being respected reporters [...]

Feds Warrantlessly Tracking Americans’ Credit Cards in Real Time

Federal law enforcement agencies have been tracking Americans in real-time using credit cards, loyalty cards and travel reservations without getting a court order, a new document released under a government sunshine request shows. The document, obtained by security researcher Christopher Soghoian, explains how so-called “Hotwatch” orders allow for real-time tracking of individuals in a criminal investigation [...]

WikiLeak: Pakistanis ‘Sabotage’ U.S. Mercs, Gear, Diplos

Whatever the Pakistani government’s secret collusion with the U.S. on drone strikes, it doesn’t mind screwing with American officials and contractors stationed there. A WikiLeaked diplomatic cable from February 2010 cites repeated instances of Pakistani security personnel seizing U.S. diplomats’ cars, shutting down counterterrorism programs and “sabotaging” deals with their security contractors. ??? ???More WikiLeaks Cablegate Coverage??? Despite [...]

Prosecutors Dismiss Xbox-Modding Case Mid-Trial

LOS ANGELES — Federal authorities in the first-of-its-kind game-console–modding criminal trial abruptly dropped their prosecution here Thursday, “based on fairness and justice.” “The government has decided to dismiss the indictment,” prosecutor Allen Chiu told the judge shortly before the jury was to be seated on the third day of trial. The announcement came a day after a [...]

Gallery: 10 Visions of the Postnatural World

See Also: The ’70s Photos That Made Us Want to Save Earth Earth as Art: Stunning New Images From Space Maps: How Mankind Remade Nature Artist Builds Temple of Science Artist Wants Nuke Waste Dump to Make New Universes Brandon’s Twitter stream, reportorial outtakes and citizen-funded White Nose Syndrome story; Wired Science on Twitter.

How BlackBerry Could Benefit From a Swedish Redesign

See Also: RIM’s Fighting Apple On Every Front RIM Unveils Tethered Tablet, the BlackBerry PlayBook BlackBerry OS Makeover Promises Social Feeds, Better Search BlackBerry Maker Overhauls Phone Operating System BlackBerry 6 Coming to New Curve 3G

Xmarks Lives: LastPass Buys Downtrodden Bookmark-Syncing Service

Just when we all thought we’d never see it again, the cross-browser bookmark syncing service Xmarks has received a life-saving injection. The company has been acquired by LastPass, maker of a cross-browser password manager and form filler add-on. The deal was announced Thursday, and terms were not disclosed. Xmarks will live on as a freemium service. The [...]

Xmarks Lives: LastPass Buys Downtrodden Bookmark Syncing Service

Just when we all thought we’d never see it again, the cross-browser bookmark syncing service Xmarks has received a life-saving injection. The company has been acquired by LastPass, maker of a cross-browser password manager and form filler add-on. The deal was announced Thursday, and terms were not disclosed. Xmarks will live on as a freemium service. The [...]

DeathSpank Creator: Combat Should Be a Puzzle

Action RPG DeathSpank did a lot of things right, but what could have it done better? Several weeks ago I had a conversation (more of which will be available later) with legendary designer Ron Gilbert (Monkey Island). He said that if he could do his recently-released downloadable DeathSpank all over again, he would have tried to [...]

NASA Unveils Arsenic Life Form

When cooking up the stuff of life, you can???t just substitute margarine for butter. Or so scientists thought. But now researchers have coaxed a microbe to build itself with arsenic in the place of phosphorus, an unprecedented substitution of one of the six essential ingredients of life. The bacterium appears to have incorporated a form of [...]

Anti-Superhero Comic Death-Ray to Hit Hardcover, Then Movie Screens

Out-of-print anti-superhero fable The Death-Ray is being re-released as a hardcover graphic novel next fall by Drawn & Quarterly. The award-winning story, by geek comics heavyweight Daniel Clowes, is also being made into a movie by Jack Black’s Electric Dynamite Productions, with music video and commercial director Chris Milk attached to the project. Clowes’ deconstruction of [...]

For Barbadians, Road Tennis Rules the Streets

As dominant as Roger Federer is at traditional tennis, there does exist an offshoot of the sport that the super Swiss would have trouble mastering. It’s called road tennis, and it’s been one of Barbados’ best-kept secrets for decades. Created in the 1930s by those who couldn’t afford to play lawn tennis, road tennis is essentially [...]

Video: This Is the Sound of Angels Singing

We love the Ferrari 250 GT SWB Breadvan. It is an amazing and beautiful machine with an amazing and beautiful 3.0-liter V12 engine that makes an amazing and beautiful sound. Here for your enjoyment is a Breadvan running flat-out during the Mugello Historic Festival in 2008. Enjoy. Photo: Ferrari. Video: Impuls2000 / YouTube Via Jalopnik

From Russia With Love: Putin Says His Spy Net Never Meant to Hurt Us

Is this the face of a woman who would cause you any pain, America? Vladimir Putin would like you to know that Anna Chapman and her network of sleeper agents in the United States weren’t there to cause harm; they just wanted to talk. Last night, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin made an appearance on CNN”s [...]

RIP Frank W. Lewis: WWII Codecracker, Ingenious Puzzle Designer

It's a sad year for legendary puzzlemakers in their 90s. Following on the heels of the death of 95-year-old puzzle genius Martin Gardner earlier in the year, this month brought the passing of Frank W. Lewis, the World War II cryptanalyst who followed up his wartime exploits with a whopping 62 years as the puzzlemaker at The Nation. He died Nov. 17 at the age of 98.

NASA Finds New Life Form

By Jesus Diaz, Gizmodo Hours before its special news conference today, the cat is out of the bag: NASA has discovered a completely new life form that doesn’t share the biological building blocks of anything currently living on planet Earth. This changes everything. At its conference today, NASA scientist Felisa Wolfe-Simon will announce that [...]

Fly Away on These 10 Classic Airliners

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 seems to be sending a message that it is a good citizen when it comes to online copyright [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

6-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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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.

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]