Coder for CIA: Drone Targeting Software ‘Far From Ready’

Still wondering if Facebook is a ripoff of ConnectU? That’s nothing. Software firms that developed the targeting systems of the CIA’s terrorist-killing Predator drones are locked in their own intellectual property battle. Their court case has at least an outside chance of halting a program the agency, the White House, and the Pentagon considers vital. [...]

Study: 85 Percent of U.S. Customers Own Cellphones

If you’re wondering why your cellphone reception sucks so badly, part of it is because so many people carry phones today. In fact, the cellphone is by far the most popular gadget in the United States. A whopping 85 percent of U.S. adults and three quarters of teens now own a cellphone, according to a new [...]

White iPhone Delay Explained by Lucky Owner

The white iPhone 4 has been delayed so long that some of you probably forgot the handset comes in two colors. Tech blog Pocket Lint offers the first plausible explanation for the delay, which comes from a lucky owner of the elusive device. Pocket Lint spotted a man with a white iPhone 4 at a press [...]

Cold, Dead Stars Could Help Limit Dark Matter

Hunting for cold stellar corpses near the center of the galaxy or in star clusters could put new limits on the properties of dark matter. “You can exclude a big class of theories that the experiments cannot exclude just by observing the temperature of a neutron star,” said physicist Chris Kouvaris of the University of Southern [...]

Cellphones Are Filthy Germ Magnets, Says Study

Keep that bottle of Purell handy for your iPhone or Droid display is a germ magnet, says a recent Stanford University study. Phone displays attract viruses and transfer it to finger tips, says the study. “About 20 to 30 percent viruses transfer to the glass from someone’s fingers and about the same will transfer to a [...]

Inside The Soviet’s Secret Failed Moon Program

By Matt Hardigree, Jalopnik The Soviet lunar program was covered up, forgotten after failing to put a man on the moon. These rare photos from a lab inside the Moscow Aviation Institute show a junkyard of rarely-seen spacecraft, including a never-to-be-used Russian lunar lander. Soviet scientists were well ahead of their American counterparts in moon exploration before [...]

Teen to Plead Guilty to Staging Bomb Hoaxes For Lulz

A North Carolina teenager has agreed to plead guilty to a federal conspiracy charge for phoning in hoax bomb threats to colleges, middle schools and FBI offices around the country for the amusement of a live internet audience. Ashton Lundeby, 17, and his associates staged bomb hoaxes from mid-2008 until Lundeby’s arrest in March of last [...]

French Find Open Parking Spaces On Their Cellphones

The French city of Toulouse is testing a system that displays available parking spots on drivers’ smartphones. The system can also tell when someone is illegally parked or hasn’t fed the parking meter. “This technology comes from space travel,” says Patrick Givanovitch. “They were supposed to help find landing spots on Venus.” The French space agency [...]

iPhone Band Rocks Out on NY Subway

While riding the Subway this week, New York resident Brittany Tucker spotted the band Atomic Tom pulling a musical stunt on the train, jamming out their song “Take Me Out” on their iPhones. Each band member used an iPhone app to play a different part (drums, guitar, keyboard, vocals), and the end result is quite [...]

Looks Like Volkswagen Is Serious About EVs

First Martin Eberhard, now this: Volkswagen has hired the guy who ran Renault’s electric vehicle brand operations and put him in charge of global EV sales, a move that suggests the Germans’ are committed to cars with cords. The German automaker created the position specifically for J??rg Sommer, who will be responsible for EV sales for [...]

Weekend Project: Make a Vampire Bunny for Halloween

When I was a kid, one of my favorite books in the world was Bunnicula. So when I saw this Instructables project, I fell a little bit in love. I’m tired of the store bought stuff that’s become such a huge staple of the Halloween season, and I think taking the time to make something–especially [...]

Antarctic Ice Sheet Preserves Invisible Mountain Range

Buried deep beneath East Antarctica???s ice sheet, the Gamburtsev Mountains are the world???s most invisible range. New research suggests that overlying ice like that hiding them from view today could have preserved their rugged topography for the past 300 million years. The work bolsters the counterintuitive notion that glaciers, rather than just carving down young peaks [...]

Large Hadron Collider Starts Edging Out Rivals

The Large Hadron Collider has made its first steps beyond the standard model of particle physics. With just four months of data gathered, the monster collider has already edged past the Tevatron, its particle-smashing rival. “The surprising thing for me is how quickly the experiments started to top the Tevatron data,” commented theoretical particle physicist Ulrich [...]

Sci-Fi Writer Iain Banks Talks Surface Detail’s Hell, Creationist Heresy

Iain M. Banks' latest novel, Surface Detail, is a grand addition to his long-running science fiction series known as the Culture novels, named after the sprawling civilization which dominates his space opera's universes.

Military Scales Back On Wonder Weapons

First Gates’ Pentagon came for the fifth-generation F-22 stealth fighter jet. Then it cut the “Flying Lightsaber” anti-missile laser plane. Now it’s talking about saving $100 billion over five years. The message to defense contractors and the military: Don’t bother trying to sell us on out-there, futuristic weapons. Well, not totally. The XM-25 intelligent grenade launcher [...]

E-Books Sales Nearly Double In a Year, Trounce Harcovers In August

E-book sales have almost doubled year-over-year, according to figures released by the Association of American Publishers, and August showed a particularly huge migration from print to digital reading. Through August the total for non-acedemic e-books was $263 million, versus just under $90 million for the first eight months of last year. So far this year e-books [...]

Livescribe and Evernote Partner Up for Multimedia Notetaking

Livescribe’s Smartpens take manuscript and audio notes. Evernote backs up and syncs multimedia notes across devices and platforms in the cloud, even doing basic OCR on photos. Now the two companies have teamed up, making for an extraordinarily versatile notetaking solution. “Many of our customers have been asking for this capability,??? said Livescribe’s Byron Connell in [...]

Size Does Matter When It Comes To Tablets, Newspapers Fear

The iPad has been a hit with newspaper and magazine publishers because its 9.7-inch screen gives apps room to play with layout. At a recent industry conference, a digital strategist for the Gannett newspaper chain worried that the coming wave of 7-inch tablets might hurt that investment by shrinking one key component that makes those [...]

7 Geeky Ideas for Using Apple’s FaceTime

We may not have jetpacks for commuting yet, but in many ways, we do indeed live in the future. We carry around more computing power in our pockets than the Eagle had on board when it landed on the moon. And the things we can do with that computing power is straight out of the [...]

Book Review: 100% Pure Fake: Gross Out Your Friends and Family with 25 Great Special Effects!

This book pick is in anticipation of whatever creepy gross thing my three boys will think up for Halloween this year. Some years they have fun freaking out the neighbor kids with my extra prosthetic leg (and lots of fake blood) and some years they leave my leg in the closet and do their own [...]

David Alvarez’s Game-Based Mosaics

Dice. Cards. Rubik’s Cubes. I’m sure many of you have these around your house, maybe lots of them. You might even use them quite often. But I bet few of you have done what performance artist David Alvarez did with his dice, cards, and Rubik’s Cubes. In the three videos on his YouTube channel, Alvarez creates [...]

Virtual Pen and Ink Lets Kids Scrawl on Walls

The KLEXL is a concept Interactive Painting machine from designer Dario Jandrijic. It tricks your kids into thinking that they are scrawling their childish rubbish onto your pristine walls, and cleanup is as easy as flicking an off-switch. I was never allowed to draw on the walls as a kid, which was never a problem as [...]

Tiny, Fully-Functional Rubik’s Cube Smaller Than a Thumbnail

Evgeniy Grigoriev’s home-made Rubik’s Cube is the smallest in the world. It measures just 10mm across, beating his own previous record of 12mm. In inches, that’s… Well, just take a look for yourself. This thing is tiny. Even more impressive is that the thing is fully functional, and is perhaps even more frustrating than the full-sized [...]

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.

Celebrate Alt Fuel Vehicle Day

Today is surely marked on everyone???s calendar as the Alternative Fuel Vehicle Day Odyssey. What? You haven’t heard of it? The biannual event celebrates the great strides being made by alt-fuels and the vehicles that use them. The National Alternative Fuels Training Consortium has sponsored the event since 2002. The consortium, which calls West Virginia University [...]

More Awards for My Mommy

With three Eisner nominations, a French Essentials Award, and the Tam Tam Literary Award, My Mommy is in America and she met Buffalo Bill was already a well-respected comic book. Last week at the Frankfurt Book Fair it was also awarded the German Youth Literature Prize (worth 8,000 Euros, among other things). My Mommy was [...]

Speaker Dock Turns iPad into Tiny iMac

There’s pretty much only one thing I don’t like about my iPad. While the speaker is strong and clear when it comes to iTunes and most other movie and music apps, when you watch films and TV shows in the Apple-supplied “Videos” app, the sound sucks. It’s just way too quiet. Combine that with the [...]

10 Cheap and Geeky Halloween Costumes (GeekDad Re-Animator)

It’s October. There is only one thing on all of our minds: Halloween. No matter how you split it, that’s what October is about. Well, it’s also about playoff baseball but this isn’t the site for that. If you are thinking about Halloween, and you know you are, then you are already thinking about your [...]

NYT for iPad Now Offers Full Content, Still Free (For Now)

The full-content version of the New York Times is now available on the iPad, and it’s free. Previously, get the full Times experience, iPad owners had to go to the website. The Times has an iPhone app which already has the same extended functionality the iPad is getting, but the layout is completely different on the [...]

Review: Your Chance to Party Hard with Wii Party

Reviewing party games is a bit of a delicate art. Sure, a lot of the fun depends on the strength of the title itself, but the full party game experience also hinges on gathering the right players and finding the optimum environment in which to get your game on. Nintendo has obviously realized this, and [...]

Self-Balancing Unicycle Only Half as Dorky as Segway

Focus Designs Self Balancing Unicycle (SBU) has hit version 2.0. Seeing as we never covered the previous versions here on Gadget Lab, we’ll only mention one improvement before getting straight to the specs (And, of course, the snark). The new SBU ditches the dirty old chain and external motor for an internal hub motor, making [...]

This Week on The Clone Wars: Mandalorian Cadets

Last week, Padm?? was sent to Mandalore; this week, Ahsoka must go to teach cadets at the Mandalorian academy. Since the planet is mired in corruption, it’s no surprise that her students become caught up in a plot. With Ahsoka’s help, they set out on a quest to expose the corruption plaguing Mandalore, [...]

Oct. 15, 1900: Boston Embraces the Sound of Music

1900: Boston’s Symphony Hall, an acoustical marvel in its day and still regarded as one of the world’s great concert halls, opens with an inaugural concert by the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Unlike most American concert halls, which tend to favor a wider, fan-shaped configuration, Symphony Hall was built along European lines — deep, narrow and high. [...]

12 Awesome Airplane Paint Jobs

Critics Lash Out at ‘Shoddy’ Final Fantasy XIV

The reviews are beginning to trickle in for Final Fantasy XIV, and critics are unanimously panning Square Enix’s MMO. Final Fantasy XIV fell through the cracks here at Game|Life; reviewing a massively multiplayer online game is always a daunting proposition and nobody had the bandwidth to take it on. Judging by what the major game enthusiast [...]

Alt Text: Videogame Villains Mull Strike for Higher Pay

Talks have broken down between major videogame developers and the Video Game Antagonists’ Union, leaving thousands of digital bad guys without a contract as the industry faces its first shutdown since the disastrous Atari lockout of 1983. Speaking for the villains, Andrew Ryan, union head and main villain of BioShock, released the following statement: “Game [...]

Will 400,000 Secret Iraq War Documents Restore WikiLeaks’ Sheen?

After a brief quiescence, the secret-spilling website WikiLeaks is about to explode again onto the global stage with the impending release of almost 400,000 secret U.S. Army reports from the Iraq War, marking the largest military leak in U.S. history. Measured by size, the database will dwarf the 92,000-entry Afghan war log WikiLeaks partially published last [...]

Superbombs and Secret Jails: What to Look for in WikiLeaks’ Iraq Docs

The Afghanistan war logs were just the beginning. Coming as early as next week, WikiLeaks plans to disclose a new trove of military documents, this time covering some of the toughest years of the Iraq war. Up to 400,000 reports from 2004 to 2009 could be revealed this time — five times the size of [...]

Trailer: Danny Boyle Captures 127 Hours of Canyon-Climbing Hell

Based on a true story, 127 Hours is a film about a young mountain climber who becomes trapped in a remote canyon in Utah. James Franco is fantastic as the young, overly confident but endearing climber.

Ninkasi Brewing Brings Belief and Domination to Wired Beer Tournament

We first learned of Ninkasi Brewing when some of Beer Robot’s Twitter followers suggested that because his goal is World Domination, he should be serving Total Domination IPA. This seemed appropriate and last month when Ninkasi, based in Eugene, began distributing kegs in San Francisco, Beer Robot was the first to receive Total Domination. So Wired [...]

Review: Wonky Physics, Nasty Levels Ruin Sonic the Hedgehog 4

Sonic the Hedgehog 4: Episode 1 is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. The new downloadable game for Wii, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 (reviewed) seems to make all the changes that Sonic’s fans have been clamoring for: It brings the series back to 2-D. It gets rid of Sonic’s crappy friends and makes the iconic [...]

Video: 101st Airborne Delivers Game Ball From Above

Delivering game balls to the official before a football game isn’t normally a big deal. Oh, maybe some famous former player will get to come and wave to the crowd before he hands the ball to the head ref, but it doesn’t often get creative. Except, that is, during last weekend’s intrastate showdown between Michigan [...]

Inside Back to the Future’s Novel Take on Time Travel

What does time travel look like? In 1985 sci-fi comedy Back to the Future, it barely looked like anything at all. The filmmakers' basic concept, as revealed in this exclusive behind-the-scenes clip from the Back to the Future: 25th Anniversary Trilogy Blu-ray collection, was to make the temporal jump immediate and understated. Plus: Comment to win a copy of the Back to the Future: 25th Anniversary Trilogy Blu-ray collection.

Leave The Calls. Take The Texts.

Any doubt that voice is just an app? Nielsen reports that the average teen sends or receives 3,339 texts a month — that’s six per every waking hour. For teenage females, the average is 4,050. Even though teenage boys bring down that average with a paltry 2,539 texts per months, they are the largest user demographic [...]

PS3 Netflix Update Monday Ditches the Disc

Sony said Thursday that it will release a new version of its Netflix streaming video software for PlayStation 3 that does not require a disc be inserted into the drive. Hallelujah. I’m sure Sony’s more excited than anyone that it is no longer markedly inferior to Xbox 360. The software will be available on Monday. Full details [...]

The 411 On Google 411

Do I use it much? No. But Google-411 is on my iPhone speed dial, and when it works it works very well and also saves me a buck that would otherwise have extravagantly gone to AT&T. Google announced late last week that its experiment in allowing you verbalize your directory assistance needs would end on Nov. [...]

Exclusive: Mysterious Minister Shepherd Book Seizes Spotlight in New Serenity Comic

Joss Whedon's cult sci-fi show Firefly gets another comic book spinoff in Serenity: The Shepherd's Tale, which delves into the murky back story of benevolent minister Shepherd Book.

Love Makes You Increasingly Ignorant of Your Partner

BASEL, Switzerland ??? Long-lasting marriages may thrive on love, compromise and increasing ignorance about one another. Couples married for an average of 40 years know less about one another???s food, movie and kitchen-design preferences than do partners who have been married or in committed relationships for a year or two, a new study finds. Two University [...]

So Much for Spy Oversight: The Danger Room Guide to The Next Congress (Part 3) [Updated]

It can be easy to forget that “oversight” has two meanings. But longtime spy-watchers never do. “It could mean ‘oversee,’” reminds John Pike, the intel-and-military analyst who runs GlobalSecurity.org, “or it could mean ‘overlook.’” The senators and congresspeople who staff the intelligence oversight panels on Capitol Hill are increasingly inclined to the second interpretation. There’s no [...]

Opera’s Next Act: Add-ons, Hardware Acceleration, Android

Opera Software has announced that the next version of its desktop web browser, Opera 11, will include support for hardware acceleration and browser extensions. The company also has plans to port its popular Opera Mobile browser to Android phones. It’s the next version of Opera for the desktop that will see the most enhancements. The first [...]

‘Men in Black’ Computerized Grenade Launcher Heads to Afghanistan

It looks like a piece of riot-control gear. It’s got a computerized in-board targeting system. It can kill someone from 2,300 feet away, while he takes cover. And it’s on its way to the Afghanistan war. The XM-25 grenade launcher shoots a 25 mm high-explosive round that’s basically a “smart” grenade. What makes it smart? Sensors [...]

Final Fantasy XIII Creators: We Lacked ‘Shared Vision’

Square Enix’s Final Fantasy XIII broke tradition in many ways, discarding conventions and challenging previous definitions of the role-playing game genre. But where did it go wrong? On Thursday, Gamasutra shared a developers’ postmortem from the October 2010 issue of Game Developer magazine. Square Enix executives Motomu Toriyama and Akihiko Maeda penned the article, which [...]

Opera’s Next Act: Add-ons, Hardware Acceleration, Android

Opera Software has announced that the next version of its desktop web browser, Opera 11, will include support for hardware acceleration and browser extensions. The company also has plans to port its popular Opera Mobile browser to Android phones. It’s the next version of Opera for the desktop that will see the most enhancements. The first [...]

The Awesome “Geek A Week” Project Goes Mainstream on CNN.com!

The geeks are speaking about “Geek A Week.” Cleveland artist Len Peralta’s quest to create a year-long trading-card style tribute to geekdom, which began last winter with a Jonathan Coulton card, is not only going strong 33 weeks in, but has landed a big CNN.com profile today with quotes from Adam Savage, Felicia Day and “Weird [...]

How to Make a White Hole in Your Kitchen Sink

That ring of water in your kitchen sink is actually a model white hole. For the first time, scientists have shown experimentally that liquid flowing from a tap embodies the same physics as the time-reversed equivalent of black holes. When a stream of tap water hits the flat surface of the sink, it spreads out into [...]

Extended Avatar Reissue ‘Ultimate Box Set,’ Says Cameron

runMobileCompatibilityScript('myExperience628119810001', 'anId'); brightcove.createExperiences(); Director James Cameron calls the upcoming Avatar: Extended Collector’s Edition “the ultimate box set of Avatar, with everything in it the fans could possibly want.” In a press release detailing the bonus-packed reissue, which hits stores Nov. 16, Cameron said the set would include an extended cut that’s 16 minutes longer than the [...]

Sats Spot 3 Miles of NATO Supply Trucks Bottlenecked in Pakistan

Pakistan’s 10-day blockade against NATO convoys has ended, but a new video released by a commercial satellite company shows just how massive the consequences were: a sprawling, three-mile bottleneck of oil tankers and supply trucks, some parked in a dry riverbed, waiting to cross the Torkham border pass into Afghanistan. The images were snapped by satellites [...]

AOL + Yahoo = Really?

AOL swallowed up the much larger Time Warner back before the boom went bust — we all know how that went. Now there is talk of a reprise of sorts: That the now-again independent AOL will acquire the much-larger Yahoo. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that AOL and a handful of private equity firms are [...]

You Have An iPad? Big Deal. Obama Has an iReggie

President Obama put up a big fight to keep his Blackberry — and won — but apparently he hasn’t found it necessary to acquire an iPad. The most powerful man in the world does, arguably, have superior options. “I have an iReggie, who has my books, my newspapers, my music all in one place,??? the president tells [...]

Did Disdain for Counterinsurgency Breed the ‘Kill Team?’ [Updated]

Protecting the Afghan population around Kandahar was “pussyfooting,” according to the commander of the Army’s 5th Stryker Brigade. Better to “strike” and “destroy” the insurgents. Inside one of his platoons, a team of young soldiers went rogue, applying that guidance not to insurgents, but to unarmed civilians. The looming question within Craig Whitlock’s excellent Washington Post [...]

Solar Roadways Gets $50K to Move Forward

Solar panels may be coming to a road near you a bit sooner thanks to funding from the GE Ecomagination Challenge. The husband and wife team of Scott and Julie Brusaw we told you about back in September were the first recipients of a Challenge Award of $50,000. Their project to pave roadways with solar panels [...]

Anthony Zuiker Takes CSI to the Next Level 26

On Thursday October 14th, Anthony Zuiker is bringing the villain from his digi-novel Level 26: Dark Origins to CSI. This crossover comes in just in time to herald the debut of his second book in the series, Level 26: Dark Prophecy. Interested in learning more? Tune in for an online Q&A with Zuiker on Thursday. By [...]

Move Elite Troops Into Pakistan: Ex-Green Beret Politico

End the conventional war in Afghanistan. Free up Special Forces to hunt terrorists in Pakistan — and maybe in Yemen and Somalia, too. Get Iraq to pay for its own defense. Rein in the President’s broad powers in wartime. Those are just a few of the controversial positions taken by Tommy Sowers, a former Green Beret [...]

Oct. 14, 1985: C++ Adds to Programming

1985: The first official reference guide for the C++ programming language is published. The author, Bjarne Stroustrup, is also the language’s creator. Stroustrup had been hacking away at his replacement for the C programming language at AT&T Bell labs since 1979, where he and his colleagues in the research department were given free reign to experiment [...]

The 12 Most Expensive Videogames in Tokyo

The rarest of the rare, these strange and sought-after titles were distributed in extremely limited editions. The scarcity drives prices through the roof, but some collectors will stop at nothing to track them down.

Trailer: Black Swan Puts Natalie Portman Through Painful Paces

Ouch! Natalie Portman looks graceful and tortured in the trailer for Black Swan, which casts the Oscar-nominated actress as an ambitious ballet dancer. The new film from Darren Aronofsky uses the famously painful demands of high-end dance training as a point of departure for a series of elegant tableaux infected by nasty shenanigans.

Doc of the Day: NSA, DHS Trade Players for Net Defense

The military keeps saying that it only wants to defend its own networks — not yours, civilian. Only if the Department of Homeland Security, which safeguards the civilian internet, comes calling will they help out, the generals insist. Today, the Departments of Homeland Security and Defense started to lay the ground work for how to [...]

Report: Natalie Portman May Star in Alien Prequel

Natalie Portman may be too mature to star in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies — the 29-year-old actress dropped out of that film last week — but she’s evidently not too old to kick some ass in Ridley Scott’s Alien prequel. Portman is reportedly the frontrunner for the lead female role in 20th Century Fox’s [...]

Boont, Big Daddy Prepare for Cal Academy Showdown

The second round of Wired’s October Madness tournament commences on Thursday, October 14, and this time there’ll be more than beer. There will be sharks. Wired will be stopping by the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, where they will be hosting their annual Sharktoberfest celebration. And this year, in addition to shark-inspired [...]

Export Adobe Illustrator Drawings and Animations to HTML5

There’s a new conversion tool for fans of Adobe’s popular Illustrator desktop publishing app that lets developers export their vector drawings and animations as HTML5 code that runs natively in the latest web browsers. The new tool is called Ai>Canvas, and it does exactly what the name implies. You can take any vector illustrations you’ve made [...]

Supreme Court Won’t Review President’s Right to Eject Critics From Events

The Supreme Court is refusing to hear a legal challenge by two Americans ejected from a President George W. Bush event in 2005 for having a “no more blood for oil” bumper sticker on their vehicle. Only two justices voted Tuesday to review a lower court’s ruling that said the pair had no First Amendment right [...]

Human Genome Still Chock-Full of Mysteries

BOSTON ??? No one really knows all the genetic parts needed to make a human being. Exactly how many genes make up the human genome remains a mystery, even though scientists announced the completion of the Human Genome Project a decade ago. The project to decipher the genetic blueprint of humans was supposed to reveal all [...]

Implants May Help Heroin Addiction

People addicted to heroin or prescription opiates might have a hands-free device for getting through the rigors of drug withdrawal. The medication buprenorphine implanted under the skin and released over 24 weeks can ease drug cravings and helps some patients stay clean, researchers report in the Oct. 13 Journal of the American Medical Association. Buprenorphine is [...]

The Year’s Best Fossil Finds

See Also: 2-Billion-Year-Old Fossils May Be Earliest Known Multicellular Life Shark-Bitten Crocodile Poop Fossils Found (No, Really) Stunningly Preserved 165-Million-Year-Old Spider Fossil Found 67 Million-Year-Old Snake Fossil Found Eating Baby Dinosaurs Inkayacu ??? Peru’s Giant Fossil Penguin and the Stories Its Feathers Tell Dinosaur Fossil Reveals True Feather Colors Follow us on Twitter @davemosher and @wiredscience, and on Facebook.

We’ll See More Ethanol In Some Of Our Gas

We’re going to see more ethanol in our gasoline, but only for vehicles made since 2007. The Environmental Protection Agency granted a waiver that allows refiners to increase from 10 percent to 15 percent the amount of ethanol blended into gasoline. The decision follows months of testing by the EPA and a review of data on [...]

Sierra’s Kellerweis Hefeweizen Pulls Off Killer Comeback

Wired teamed up with the Public Library of Science (PLoS) staff in the latest October Madness challenge to taste and vote on some of Sierra Nevada Brewing Company’s lesser-known varieties. Sierra is of course best known for its Pale Ale, which is the most popular craft beer in the country. But the Chico, California, brewery [...]

Bing Friends Facebook

Microsoft’s search engine Bing made friends with Facebook Wednesday, an integration that poses a new challenge to the companies’ shared rival Google, which has struggled to build software that connects users socially. “This is going to show how search gets better through your friends,” Microsoft VP Yusef Mehdi said onstage at Microsoft’s Mountain View campus, in [...]

Valve Revives Defense of the Ancients RTS in 2011

Valve’s next big project is Dota 2, a sequel of sorts to the popular competitive real-time strategy game Defense of the Ancients, the publisher said Wednesday. Dota 2 will “take the unique blend of online RTS and RPG action that has made Dota popular with tens of millions of gamers and expand upon it in every [...]

Stan Lee Superheroes Coming to Save Pro Hockey

As the comic book guru responsible for Spider-Man, the Hulk, and so many other iconic characters, Stan Lee has now signed for one of his most challenging projects to date: Bringing younger fans to the National Hockey League. Lee and the NHL have joined forces for a partnership called the Guardian Project, in which Lee will [...]

Electric Motorcycle GP Draws A Factory Team

Chinese motorcycle manufacturer Zongshen is joining the TTXGP as the electric motorcycle grand prix series’ first factory team. You’ve probably never heard of Zongshen, but it’s huge in China. The Zongshen Group, which has 52 subsidiaries and 18,000 employees, builds everything from generators to motorcycles. It has partnerships with Harley-Davidson and Piaggio and claims to build [...]

Chrome 8 Adds Google Instant to the URL Bar

Google's Chrome development team has pushed out a pre-release version of Chrome 8 for those who would like an early look at the next version of the Google's web browser. While far from complete, the build of Chrome 8 currently available in the dev channel adds some welcome new features, including more hardware acceleration and the arrival Google's new "Instant search" right inside the URL bar of Chrome.

‘Wearable Robots’ Could Solve Soldiers’ Hauling Woes

Communications equipment, weapons, extra ammo, dinner for the next two nights — the stuff troops have to lug around just keeps getting heavier. The Army brass recognizes that it’s getting ridiculous, but isn’t so sure how to lighten the load. Defense contractors say not to bother: just strap on a robotic exoskeleton and it’ll bear [...]

Chrome 8 Adds Google Instant to the URL Bar

Google’s Chrome development team has pushed a pre-release version of Chrome 8 into the dev channel for those that would like an early look at the next version of the Chrome web browser. While far from complete, Chrome 8 adds some welcome new features, including more hardware acceleration and the arrival Google’s new “Instant search” [...]

Monster Galaxy Cluster Found in the Distant Universe

A monstrously huge cluster of galaxies lurks 7 billion light-years away. The cluster weighs in around 800 trillion suns and holds hundreds of galaxies, making it the most massive galaxy cluster ever found at such a great distance. Despite its tremendous bulk, the cluster was hidden until astronomers looked for the distortions it created in the [...]

South Park Beats Back Jersey Shore’s Tired Hordes

MTV’s Jersey Shore is everything that is wrong with reality and television. The merciless satirists of South Park accept this truth, which is why they’re barricading Colorado against the spawn of someone named The Situation. Or something like that: South Park’s network Comedy Central is huddled under Viacom’s megamedia umbrella with MTV. So the long-running [...]

CarWoo Takes the Cheap Suit Out Of Car Sales

If you’ve ever contacted a car dealer online, you’re familiar with the internet sales pitch: relentless phone calls and e-mails making almost any promise just to get a warm body in the showroom. CarWoo, aims to change that by connecting you with firm offers from dealers while preserving your privacy. The new service only helps out [...]

SpaceShipTwo First Glide Flight Details From The Pilot

After Sunday’s first glide flight of Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo, one of the first thoughts going through the head of test pilot Peter Siebold after coming to a stop on the runway was that it all went by too quickly. He and co-pilot Mike Alsbury had been released from the mother ship, Eve, just 13 minutes [...]

Wildest Exploitation Movies, as Picked by You

From Two Thousand Maniacs! to Surf Nazis Must Die, Wired.com readers weigh in with their favorite guilty cinematic pleasures.

Oct. 13, 1884: Greenwich Resolves Subprime Meridian Crisis

1884: Geographers and astronomers adopt Greenwich as the Prime Meridian, the international standard for zero degrees longitude. The late 19th century was an era of standardization. With the Second Industrial Revolution stimulating world trade, the Treaty of the Meter established the International System of weights and measures in 1875. With railroads linking together entire continents, nations [...]

Trailer: Fair Game Thriller Revisits Valerie Plame Scandal

When the Bush administration revealed that Valerie Plame was a CIA operative, she was not pleased -- and neither was her husband, Joseph Wilson. In Fair Game, director Doug Liman revisits the spy scandal that rocked Washington, D.C.

Video: Bittersweet Tune Bids Adieu to Dollhouse

When Dollhouse was good, it was very, very good. And when it was bad — oh never mind. Joss Whedon and Eliza Dushku’s mind-wiped-escorts-for-hire show is TV history, but the sci-fi series lives on in perpetuity thanks to the Dollhouse: The Complete Second Season DVD, released Tuesday. To mark the occasion, Dollhouse writer Maurissa Tancharoen and [...]

Everything* Explained Through Flowcharts

Hello! Welcome to my article. My name is Doogie Horner; I used to be a mess like you until I discovered that life???s most confusing conundrums—cellular division, quantum mechanics, blue jean shopping???can be explained through infographics. (I???ve even written a book on the subject.†) In the following pages, I will demonstrate the technique???despite protests from Condé [...]

Hear 90 Seconds of Daft Punk’s Tron: Legacy Soundtrack

For an aural glimpse of upcoming film Tron: Legacy, fill your ears with 90 seconds of the movie’s ominous soundtrack by Daft Punk. A snippet of the song “The Game Has Changed” can be heard on the Tron: Legacy Facebook page. The score, written by Daft Punk, will be released Dec. 7, 10 days before [...]

House of Horror: Inside the Infamous Stasi Prison

Feared for the physical and psychological torture within, Hohensch??nhausen was the operational hub for the Ministry State Security in communist East Germany. German photographer Phillip Lohoefener, documents its beige patterned walls, wood-paneled interrogation rooms and antiquated medical apparatuses.

School District Pays $610,000 to Settle Webcam Spying Lawsuits

A suburban Philadelphia school district is agreeing to pay $610,000 to settle two lawsuits brought by students who were victims of a webcam spying scandal in which high school-issued laptops secretly snapped thousands of pictures of pupils. The agreed payout by the Lower Merion School District comes two months after federal authorities announced they would not [...]

Buggy Medal of Honor Is Superficial Slaughter

I’m crouched behind an open window in an Afghan village. One of my fellow soldiers stands in front of me and chucks a grenade at the al-Qaida fighter headed toward us. The grenade bounces off the wall in front of him and falls at our feet. “Grenade!” the computer-controlled character yells, diving out of the way. [...]

Eric Stoltz’s Marty McFly Gets Dissected in Back to the Future Reissue

For five weeks in the early '80s, actor Eric Stoltz played skateboarding teenager Marty McFly in Back to the Future before being famously replaced by Michael J. Fox. Previously unseen footage from the Back to the Future: 25th Anniversary Trilogy shows the Caprica actor who was bounced from the '80s sci-fi movie.

Red Bull Won’t Be Skydiving From Space

Red Bull has pulled the plug on its plan to have daredevil Felix Baumgartner skydive from the edge of space, because it is being sued by a California promoter who says Red Bull stole his idea. Baumgartner planned to ride a balloon called Stratos to an altitude of 120,000 feet and step into the void, breaking [...]

HTML5 Simplequiz: The Complexities of the Cite Tag

The latest installment in HTML5Doctor’s Simplequiz — part of a series of “tests” designed to help you understand HTML5 and how to use it — delves into what might be the most controversial change in HTML5: the cite tag. The question in the quiz seems simple: given a passage by an author, how do you mark [...]

Mozilla Labs’ New ‘Prospector’ Hopes to Improve Firefox’s Awesome Bar

Mozilla has announced a new Labs project, dubbed Prospector, which will help improve Firefox’s search tools. Although details are thin so far, and there’s no code to play with yet, it appears Prospector will extend the Awesome Bar, which first arrived in Firefox 3. Rather than a single add-on or tool, the Labs blog calls Prospector [...]