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<title><![CDATA[Wired Top Stories]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://automators.net/news/archive/wired-top-stories/]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[all articles from Wired Top Stories]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[10 Hottest New Bike Gadgets for Gearheads@Wired Top Stories]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/416448883/gallery_bikestuff]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[: Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com
Cyclists are often overlooked in the gadget-lust category because their gear usually doesn't involve a screen, but no one craves the newest gizmo more than a biker with money to burn. The litany of bike models, the sophisticated engineering and the personal stat analysis also attract avid data addicts who appreciate product legacy and innovation.


Here at Wired.com, we have more than a few resident pedal pundits who love to accessorize. Click through the gallery to see the latest bike gadgets and apparel that got even our empty wallets salivating.


Left: Quarq Bicycle's new Power Meters allow you to measure pretty much any stat imaginable from your bike rides. The Quarq CinQo is compatible with your Garmin Edge 705, their own Quarq Qranium or the new iAreo, giving access to power, heart rate, speed, distance, torque and altitude. 


The Qranium computer runs on Linux and comes with 512 MB of memory. Quarq says they are lightweight, waterproof and come with a user-changeable battery. The system runs about $1,200, plus the price of your crank of choice.
: Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com
The Pinhead prototype Bubble Lock is seen here with one wheel lock, a seat-post lock and a headset lock. Pinhead's disc-locking system allows you to carry around one key for all your bike parts and avoid elaborate lock jobs. Just turn the key on your wheels, seat and the bubble-shaped U-lock, and you're set. This convenience will set you back $75, with the...

Wired.com
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<pubDate><![CDATA[Fri, 10 Oct 2008 06:00:00 +0200]]></pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[Browse the Artifacts of Geek History in Jay Walker's Library@Wired Top Stories]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/416448882/ff_walker]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[The View From Above Looming over the library is an original Sputnik 1 satellite, one of several backups the Soviets built. At far left is a model of NASA's experimental X-29 jet, with forward-swept wings. "It's the first plane that a pilot can't fly&mdash;only computers can handle it," Walker says. On the top of the center shelves are "scholar's rocks," natural formations believed by the Chinese to spur contemplation. Behind the rocks is a 15-foot-long model of the Saturn V rocket.



Nothing quite prepares you for the culture shock of Jay Walker's library. You exit the austere parlor of his New England home and pass through a hallway into the bibliographic equivalent of a Disney ride. Stuffed with landmark tomes and eye-grabbing historical objects&mdash;on the walls, on tables, standing on the floor&mdash;the room occupies about 3,600 square feet on three mazelike levels. Is that a Sputnik? (Yes.) Hey, those books appear to be bound in rubies. (They are.) That edition of Chaucer ... is it a Kelmscott? (Natch.) Gee, that chandelier looks like the one in the James Bond flick Die Another Day. (Because it is.) No matter where you turn in this ziggurat, another treasure beckons you&mdash;a 1665 Bills of Mortality chronicle of London (you can track plague fatalities by week), the instruction manual for the Saturn V rocket (which launched the Apollo 11 capsule to the moon), a framed napkin from 1943 on which Franklin D. Roosevelt outlined his plan to win World War II. In no time,...

Wired.com
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<pubDate><![CDATA[Fri, 10 Oct 2008 06:00:00 +0200]]></pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[Pimp My Pony: Gear for the Equestrian Commute@Wired Top Stories]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/413448832/st_pimpmypony]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[Gas gas hovers around $4 a gallon, your Prius-driving neighbors are cruising smugly all the way to Whole Foods. Sure, you could join their self-satisfied ranks. Or you could commute in style &mdash; on a horse (if your city's ordinances allow it). The timing is good: Equestrian gear recently got some serious and long-needed upgrades. High tech, Silver, away!



1 // Bitless Bridle


Robert Cook's Bitless Bridle is an evolution of an ancient pony-friendly design. It steers with straps that crisscross under the muzzle: To turn left, draw the left rein away from your steed's neck, applying pressure to the right cheek and turning its head in the direction you want to go.



2 // Ultralight Helmet


Old-school hats were just velveteen-sheathed plastic. Today's models, made of high-density polystyrene, are almost half the weight of the classic style yet can withstand several hundred Newtons of force.



3 // Carbon-Fiber Saddle


Leather seats have all the give of a two-by-four, and a bad fit can cause your horse's vertebrae to dip. The Swedish company Linear has designed a modular seat (for a custom fit) with a carbon-fiber core to spread your weight as evenly as possible.



4 // Polyurethane Wraps


To better protect tendons and joints from accidental hoof slaps, wool wraps are being replaced by boots padded with gel and carbon fiber. An outfit called Veredus molds its shells from 54-Shore TPU, a tough polyurethane mixture that stays flexible down to 5]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[Show Us Your Company Gear@Wired Top Stories]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/415298009/submissions_company_gear]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[Are you working on a laptop that's as big as most current desktops? Do you get to use a particularly sweet piece of equipment for your job? We want to see the gear you use every day that's issued by your employer. Show us what wired workers are using out there.


Use the Reddit widget below to submit your best Motion photo and vote for your favorite among the other submissions. If we like your photo, we'll include it in a gallery on Wired.com.


The photo must be your own, and by submitting it you are giving us permission to use it on Wired.com and in Wired magazine. Please submit images that are relatively large, the ideal size being 800 to 1200 pixels or larger on the longest side. Please include a description of your photo so that other readers know what they're looking at.


We don't host the photos, so you'll have to upload it somewhere else and submit a link to it. If you're using Flickr, Picasa or another photo-sharing site to host your image, please provide a link to the image directly and not just to the photo page where it's displayed. Using an online photo service that requires that you login will not work. If your photo doesn't show up, it's because the URL you have entered is incorrect. Check it and make sure it ends with the image file name (XXXXXX.jpg).


Please bookmark this page, send it to your friends and check back periodically over the next two weeks to vote on new submissions!



Vote on company gear photos submitted by other readers.



Show entries...

Wired.com
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<pubDate><![CDATA[Thu, 09 Oct 2008 03:00:00 +0200]]></pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[Scouting the Blogs of Internet Icons@Wired Top Stories]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/415298010/Scouting_the_Blogs_of_Internet_Icons]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[Several superstars of the tech world have started up their own blogs, allowing us to bask in their deep thoughts and cower from the brilliance of their devastating insight. If only some of them would post more often.
    
    
    
    
  


Wired.com
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<pubDate><![CDATA[Thu, 09 Oct 2008 02:00:00 +0200]]></pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[Steven Levy: Why the iPhone Is Almost Perfect@Wired Top Stories]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/414451082/ts_levy]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[My first full day with the iPhone 3G turned out to be too full. At least as far as the iPhone was concerned. It was just two in the afternoon when the screen displayed the most unwelcome dialog box in mobile computing: low battery: 20% of battery remaining. In my experience, that message's real meaning is make your last call NOW, because the lights are going out soon. Though it didn't happen instantly, within a few minutes that gorgeous screen looked like the closing shot of the The Sopranos finale.


I had been enjoying the iPhone 3G. The out-of-the-box price was right &mdash; as low as $200, with a two-year contract &mdash; if you qualify for the subsidy from AT&amp;T. It was slimmer and sleeker than its predecessor. It had real GPS. And, addressing my biggest problem with the original iPhone, data loaded much faster when a 3G network was available. Most of all, I was itching to try out loads of the intriguing applications from the iTunes App Store, about a dozen of which I'd already downloaded. But there's no joy in a juiceless phone.


How bad is the problem? No way around it &mdash; 3G cellular chips eat energy. But Apple's Bob Borchers contends that the iPhone team succeeded in extending battery life to an acceptable level. There's evidence to back this up: The iPhone does best its 3G rivals when it comes to run time.



Nonetheless, battery life is more of a challenge for the iPhone than for its competitors, because Apple's multitouch darling entices you to actually...

Wired.com
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<pubDate><![CDATA[Wed, 08 Oct 2008 06:00:00 +0200]]></pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[Showdown: BlackBerry Storm vs. iPhone 3G@Wired Top Stories]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/414788852/showdown-blackb.html]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[After teasing us with videos and a vague web site, Research in Motion has finally decided to come out of the closet with full details on its touchscreen handset, the BlackBerry Storm.
Those following the smartphone market are aware that the word touchscreen has become a synonym for "iPhone competitor." So we've compiled a chart comparing the two handsets' specifications.
    
    
    
    
  


Wired.com
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<pubDate><![CDATA[Wed, 08 Oct 2008 06:00:00 +0200]]></pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[Hands On With The BlackBerry Storm@Wired Top Stories]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/414803404/hands-on-with-t.html]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[To put it bluntly, we?ve seen a butt-load of handset makers jump on the iClone bandwagon since Apple?s device was announced in 2007. And without exception, every single attempt has failed to come close to meeting the iPhone?s nearly mythic combination of intuitive UI, responsive touchscreen, and gorgeous hardware. The Blackberry Storm gets closest of any device we?ve ever laid hands on. And in one critical area it ? wait for it ? it actually beats the iPhone.
    
    
    
    
      
  

Wired.com
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<pubDate><![CDATA[Wed, 08 Oct 2008 06:00:00 +0200]]></pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[IBM Researchers Put Test Project on iPhone App Store@Wired Top Stories]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/414295617/ibm-researche-1.html]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[IBM Almaden researchers are adding their research projects to the iPhone App Store in a bid to bring them to real world users.
    
    
    
    
      
  

Wired.com
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<pubDate><![CDATA[Wed, 08 Oct 2008 00:00:36 +0200]]></pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[Video: Neil Gaiman Gives Away 'The Graveyard'@Wired Top Stories]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/413448831/neil-gaiman-giv.html]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[The Sandman author reads from his new book, about a boy who hangs out with dead people, and posts the clips online for free. Gaiman talks about Graveyard in a video interview with Wired.com.
    
    
    
    
  


Wired.com
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<pubDate><![CDATA[Tue, 07 Oct 2008 06:00:00 +0200]]></pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[Gallery: Inside Secretive New Solar-Tech Factory@Wired Top Stories]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/413448834/gallery_solar]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[: Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com
FREMONT, California -- Solar photovoltaics make up a tiny percentage of the world's power largely because they just cost too much. Burning fossil fuels remains cheaper than even the best solar panels. But Solyndra's new thin-film technology could substantially cut the cost of manufacturing and installing solar electricity, perhaps reaching the cost of standard power within a few years. 




The venture-backed company, which came out of stealth mode today, gave Wired.com access to their new whirring fab, installed in a former hard-drive factory. 




Most of the equipment was designed in-house by Solyndra's 500 employees and the aid of more than $600 million in venture capital. 




"We've put a lot of effort into very sophisticated process control," Kelly Truman, VP of business development told Wired.com. "We design and build all the critical equipment in the factory ourselves."


Left: Solyndra's solar modules enter the factory as simple glass tubes a few feet long, seen here awaiting a special cleaning process. : Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com
Designed with automation in mind, the factory's many robots do much of the work in transporting the panels of glass tubes around the floor. : Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com
The glass tubes are dipped in a series of solutions including coatings of copper indium gallium diselenide, known as CIGS. Here we see finished tubes, which have lost their transparency. : Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com
As the panels receive...

Wired.com
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<pubDate><![CDATA[Tue, 07 Oct 2008 06:00:00 +0200]]></pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[Clive Thompson: Why Veteran Visionaries Will Save the World@Wired Top Stories]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/413448835/st_thompson]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[Don't trust anyone over 30. That's the prevailing wisdom in Silicon Valley, a land once again bestrode by millionaire CEOs who just learned to shave. Many people believe that the breakthrough ideas come only from the young. And why not? Media stories constantly recite the ages of a few famous founders: Bill Gates of Microsoft, 20; Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, 20; the Google boys, 25; YouTube's Chad Hurley, 28. Tumblr founder David Karp is 21 &mdash; and on his second successful company. 


Young people rule tech innovation, we tell ourselves, because they have several key advantages. They're fearless and naive, so they'll try anything. They can spy markets that elders, with their locked-in views, cannot. And without dependents or spouses, twentysomethings can work the sort of pyramid-building hours necessary for a startup. It's a kind of Logan's Run world: If you're ending a third decade, you're obsolete. 


But hold on. A recent study has finally collected some data on age and high tech innovation and found that older geeks are just as successful as young Turks. What's more, the chronologically advanced are especially successful at solving problems we increasingly &mdash; and desperately &mdash; need solved.


In other words, the high tech future may belong to the over-30 set. The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation surveyed 652 US-born CEOs and heads of product development who founded high tech firms in the boom (and bust) years of 1995 to 2005. Both the average and median...

Wired.com
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<pubDate><![CDATA[Tue, 07 Oct 2008 06:00:00 +0200]]></pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[Oct. 7, 1959: Luna 3's Images From the Dark Side@Wired Top Stories]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/413448833/dayintech_1007]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[1959: The space probe Luna 3 takes the first photographs of the dark side of the moon. 


The radio-controlled Luna 3 was part of the Soviet Union's highly successful lunar program, which completed 20 missions to the moon between January 1959 and October 1970. 


Although the United States won the race to land a human on the moon, the Russians achieved a number of their own lunar milestones, including the first flyby (Luna 1), first surface impact (Luna 2), first soft landing (Luna 9) and first lunar orbiter (Luna 10). 


Luna 3's mission objective was to provide the first photographs from the moon's far side. To achieve this, the probe was equipped with a dual-lens 35mm camera, one a 200mm, f/5.6 aperture, the other a 500mm, f/9.5. The photo sequencing was automatically triggered when Luna 3's photocell detected the sunlit far side, which occurred when the craft was passing about 40,000 miles above the lunar surface.   


Luna 3's camera took 29 photographs over a 40-minute period, covering roughly 70 percent of the moon's far side. The photographs were developed, fixed and dried by the probe's onboard film processing unit. Seventeen images were successfully scanned and returned to Earth on Oct. 18, when Luna 3 was close enough to begin transmitting.


Although the low-resolution images had to be boosted by computer enhancement on Earth, in the end they were good enough to produce a tentative map of the dark side. Among the identifiable features were two seas, named Mare...

Wired.com
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<pubDate><![CDATA[Tue, 07 Oct 2008 06:00:00 +0200]]></pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[Fring Turns Your iPhone Into a Free Skype Phone@Wired Top Stories]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/413152418/Fring_Turns_Your_iPhone_into_a_Free_Skype_Phone]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[A new free application lets iPhone users make voice-over-internet protocol (VOIP) telephone calls from their iPhones. The new app, called Fring, works with the popular Skype network, but it doesn't work over AT&T's cellular network &#151; it's wi-fi only.
    
    
    
    
  


Wired.com
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<pubDate><![CDATA[Mon, 06 Oct 2008 06:00:00 +0200]]></pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[Tune-Deaf Scott Brown Opens Pandora's Jukebox@Wired Top Stories]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/412973769/pl_brown]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[I was 10 when I realized I had lousy taste in music. Billy Joel's "An Innocent Man" was my gateway drug: I listened to it on infinite loop, in perfect contentment, for days. Later, in high school, I began huffing a deadly theater-nerd mix of piano-driven rock balladry, pseudo-political folk-pop, Danny Elfman soundtracks, and Enigma. College, the place where most people atone for the sonic sins of their youth, was a haze of Ben Folds Five and Dave Matthews Band. And things haven't really improved since.  Bad taste was less of a problem when our playlists were private affairs. Today, however, our personal soundtracks broadcast who we are, and it's simply not acceptable to swan around with the Indigo Girls' "Galileo," Annie Lennox's "Walking on Broken Glass," or (God help me!) Billy Joel's "Big Man on Mulberry Street" blazing across your iPhone screen. (One is ironic, two is quixotic, but try all three and you can hear the NSA giggling on the other end of the line.) Luckily, there are high tech treatments for bad taste &mdash; or so we're told.  Pandora, for example, is designed to refine and expand your aural palate by working with your preferences, not against them. No shame and no looking back: Only progress! And now Pandora is on my iPhone: On the go, on the train, in da Sam's Club, I'm always on the road to musical self-improvement &mdash; which is the whole idea of portable, personalized, preference-driven software, right? To digitally whittle us closer to


Perfection...

Wired.com
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<pubDate><![CDATA[Sun, 05 Oct 2008 06:00:00 +0200]]></pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[How to Hack Your Apple TV With Boxee@Wired Top Stories]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/410684082/Hack_Your_Apple_TV_With_Boxee]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[The open source software package Boxee frees up your Apple TV, allowing you to play any DRM-free movie, TV show, song or video on the set-top box. All you need is a USB stick and some know-how. We show you how to unleash your Apple TV from the clutches of iTunes in Wired's How-To Wiki. Got extra tips? Log in and contribute.
    
    
    
    
  


Wired.com
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<pubDate><![CDATA[Fri, 03 Oct 2008 23:45:00 +0200]]></pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[Federal Charges Filed Against Alleged Cyber Peeping Tom@Wired Top Stories]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/410651472/fed-blotter-cha.html]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[A college student who allegedly rigged a woman's laptop to snap nude photos through her webcam faces federal charges this week, and tops Threat Level's roundup of cybercrime in the federal courts.
    
    
    
    
  


Wired.com
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<pubDate><![CDATA[Fri, 03 Oct 2008 22:30:00 +0200]]></pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[Nokia Launches Its 5800 XpressMusic Phone@Wired Top Stories]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/410698611/nokia-5800-expr.html]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[Nokia is set to retail its new touchscreen phone, the 5800 XpressMusic, which has access to the subscription service from Nokia's online music store.
    
    
    
    
  


Wired.com
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<pubDate><![CDATA[Fri, 03 Oct 2008 22:24:12 +0200]]></pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[Ubuntu 'Intrepid Ibex' Beta Delivers Improved UI, New Features@Wired Top Stories]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/410539921/First_Look%3A_Ubuntu__Intrepid_Ibex__Beta_Delivers_Improved_UI__New_Features]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[The latest beta version of the Ubuntu free Linux desktop operating system
has been released. While it's still in beta, the next Ubuntu should appeal
to those seeking a simpler user interface for Linux by making peripherals
and WiFi connections, traditionally a pain, easier to configure.
    
    
    
    
  


Wired.com
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<pubDate><![CDATA[Fri, 03 Oct 2008 06:15:00 +0200]]></pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[Oct. 3, 1947: Birth of Palomar's 'Giant Eye'@Wired Top Stories]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/409920137/dayintech_1003]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[1947: After 13 years of grinding and polishing, the Palomar Observatory mirror is completed at Caltech.


It was, at the time, the largest telescope mirror ever made in the United States, measuring 200 inches in diameter. Following its completion, the disk was mounted in Palomar's Hale Telescope and first used in January 1949 to take pictures of the Milky Way. Edwin Hubble was the first astronomer to make images using the new scope.  


The mirror began as a 20-ton piece of molten Pyrex, a new glass blend, at the Corning Glass Works in upstate New York. Pyrex expands and contracts far less than regular glass, making it less prone to distortion, a problem that plagued the 100-inch mirror already in operation at Palomar.


After being heated to 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit, the Pyrex was poured into a ceramic mold and cooled at an average rate of one or two degrees per day until it reached room temperature 11 months later. After that it was shipped west to Caltech in Pasadena, where the glass was painstakingly ground to perfection in a process lasting more than a decade. 


The era of giant telescopic lenses began in the 1700s, when astronomers recognized that the bigger the lens (or reflecting mirror), the better the image. In 1774, English astronomer William Herschel mounted several 9-inch mirrors in a 10-foot-long telescope and recorded, with satisfaction, that he had spent the first night looking at "Saturn's rings and two belts in great perfection."


Herschel followed that...

Wired.com
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<pubDate><![CDATA[Fri, 03 Oct 2008 06:00:00 +0200]]></pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[Assembling Internet Images Into a Garden of Webly Delights@Wired Top Stories]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/409920143/pl_arts]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[Give Hieronymus Bosch a Mac Pro with two 3.2-GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon processors and 32 gigs of RAM, unfettered Internet access &mdash; and some electricity &mdash; and you have Case Simmons and Andrew Burke's You Can Live Forever in Paradise on Earth. The duo raided image forums like 4chan and 12ozProphet (plus Flickr and Google Image Search) and collected thousands of files to assemble into four mural-sized collages. The series, accompanied by audio composed entirely of samples from the Internet, is on view at LA's Kim Light/Lightbox gallery through November 1. "We crash our computers almost every day," Simmons says. They're gonna need a bigger Mac.



    
    
    
    
      
  

Wired.com
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<pubDate><![CDATA[Fri, 03 Oct 2008 06:00:00 +0200]]></pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[Photographer Awarded TED Prize for Work on War, Disease@Wired Top Stories]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/409920136/gallery_nachtwey]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[: Photo: James Nachtwey
Last year, acclaimed war photographer James Nachtwey was honored with the 2007 Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED) Prize for his work documenting images of war, disease and political unrest across the globe for over 25 years. Along with President Bill Clinton and Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson, Nachtwey was awarded $100,000 to help him bring "one wish to change the world" to fruition. 


James' wish was to share an underreported worldwide story, prove the power of news photography in the digital age and raise awareness about a global health issue that has the potential to become a worldwide pandemic ? Extensively Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis (XDR TB). 


Tonight Nachtwey will unveil the images of the disease he hopes to combat at a special screening at Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York City. His poignant images will be used to offer awareness about the worldwide spread of tuberculosis through a multimedia campaign on all seven continents, in 50 cities around the globe, and across the web. You can find out more information about screenings and the images at http://www.xdrtv.org. 



Nachtwey shared his digital images with us and took a few moments to tell Wired.com what he learned during the yearlong process of tracking the global spread of tuberculosis. 
: Photo: James Nachtwey

Wired.com: When did you first encounter XDR-TB? 


James Nachtwey: In 2000, I did a story for Time on AIDS in Africa. It was my first introduction to that subject. In South...

Wired.com
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<pubDate><![CDATA[Fri, 03 Oct 2008 06:00:00 +0200]]></pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[Picasa For Linux 3.0 Brings Better Photo Management to Free OS@Wired Top Stories]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/410528721/Picasa_for_Linux_3DOT0%3A_Photo_Management_Done_Right]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[The latest desktop software release from Google brings the Linux version of
its photo-management app up to par with its Windows counterpart.
Photographers working with the free OS now get automatic camera detection,
full integration with their other applications and better performance. Mac
users, however, will have to continue to wait.
    
    
    
    
  


Wired.com
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<pubDate><![CDATA[Fri, 03 Oct 2008 06:00:00 +0200]]></pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[Show Us Your Favorite Telescope Photos@Wired Top Stories]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/408793501/submissions_telescopes]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[In honor of the telescope's 400th anniversary, we here at Wired.com want to see your favorite telescope photo. Whether it's constellations, your telescope from home or a giant observatory you visited last summer, show us your best tribute to this epic invention.


Use the Reddit widget below to submit your favorite telescopes photo and vote for your favorite among the other submissions. 


Please tell us who to credit the image to and submit images that are relatively large, the ideal size being 800 to 1200 pixels or larger on the longest side. Please include a description of your photo, which may include exposure information, equipment used, etc.


We don't host the photos, so you'll have to upload it somewhere else and submit a link to it. If you're using Flickr, Picasa or another photo-sharing site to host your image, please provide a link to the image directly and not just to the photo page where it's displayed. Using an online photo service that requires that you login will not work. If your photo doesn't show up, it's because the URL you have entered is incorrect. Check it and make sure it ends with the image file name (XXXXXX.jpg).


Please bookmark this page and check back periodically over the next two weeks to vote on new submissions!



Vote on telescopes photos submitted by other readers.



Show entries that are: hot | new | top-rated. Submit your telescopes photo.





 



 
Submit your telescopes photo.

(No more than one every 30 minutes. No HTML allowed.)
...

Wired.com
]]></description>
<pubDate><![CDATA[Thu, 02 Oct 2008 03:00:00 +0200]]></pubDate>
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<item>
<title><![CDATA[Multitouch Is Unlikely to Be a Big Hit on Notebooks@Wired Top Stories]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/408769277/laptop-makers-s.html]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[Despite the success of the iPhone touchscreen technology in the mobile arena, laptop makers are being more cautious about multitouch and think it may not be the best choice of interface for notebook computers.
    
    
    
    
      
  

Wired.com
]]></description>
<pubDate><![CDATA[Thu, 02 Oct 2008 00:03:00 +0200]]></pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[Apple Abandons iPhone Developer NDA@Wired Top Stories]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/408570170/Apple_Hears_Developers__Nixes_iPhone_NDA]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[Apple has lifted the nondisclosure agreement attached to the iPhone developer's kit. Software developers building apps for the iPhone -- who had previously been forbidden from discussing the inner workings of their creations -- are now free to talk about their code, collaborate with one another and share knowledge publicly.
    
    
    
    
  


Wired.com
]]></description>
<pubDate><![CDATA[Wed, 01 Oct 2008 20:45:00 +0200]]></pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[Facebook's New iPhone App Gets It Right@Wired Top Stories]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/408570171/Facebook_s_New_iPhone_App_Gets_it_Right]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[Social networking site Facebook released a much-needed upgrade to its popular iPhone application, adding the ability to post messages and add friends, and updating the look and feel of the app to match the website's recent redesign.
    
    
    
    
  


Wired.com
]]></description>
<pubDate><![CDATA[Wed, 01 Oct 2008 20:30:00 +0200]]></pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[Six New Directors Who Are Making Music Video Cool Again@Wired Top Stories]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/407900982/pl_music]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[Not long ago, it seemed music videos were doomed to go the way of the radio star. Cool bands hated making them, MTV had stopped showing them, and innovative directors like Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry had long since moved on. Then, somewhere between OK Go's treadmill-dancing "Here It Goes Again" on YouTube (more than 37 million views) and Feist's "1234" choreography lesson turned iPod ad, the music video made a comeback &mdash; and launched a new generation of directors more at home with URL than TRL. Meet the next wave of filmmakers and their greatest hits &mdash; so far.



Cat Solen


Signature style: Art-school aesthetic on the cheap.


Key video: Bright Eyes, "At the Bottom of Everything." As a jetliner plummets toward the ocean, the passengers gleefully embrace, and smiling stop-motion clouds play catch with the plane. "I want to keep making videos because they're artistic yet appeal to a mass audience," Solen says.




Rik Cordero


Signature style: Urban tales with a grime-noir twist.


Key video: Nas, "Be a Nigger Too." A nine-minute epic of narrative arcs within arcs about the most loaded of words, with nearly every directorial technique thrown in. "It used to be the only outlet for non-mainstream videos were street DVDs," Cordero says. "When YouTube came along, we just ran with it like purse snatchers."



Matthew Cullen


Signature style: Technical chops and enough whimsy to choke a dramatic prairie dog.


Key video: Weezer, "Pork and Beans." YouTube semi-celebs...

Wired.com
]]></description>
<pubDate><![CDATA[Wed, 01 Oct 2008 06:00:00 +0200]]></pubDate>
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<item>
<title><![CDATA[Mark Smolinski: Detect Epidemics Before They Start@Wired Top Stories]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/405921409/sl_smolinski]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[Back in May 1993, as a medical resident at the University of Arizona, Mark Smolinski volunteered for a shift with the state's Department of Health. Right after he started, Arizona and neighboring states were struck by a deadly outbreak of an unidentified respiratory illness. The young doctor found himself face-to-face with an emerging epidemic, part of a team that spent sleepless months struggling to contain the outbreak. "I was going from hospital to hospital trying to determine the patients' exposures," he recalls of his harrowing first assignment. "Almost all the cases were under the age of 30, and it had a very high mortality rate."



The researchers finally identified the culprit &mdash; which eventually infected 53 people, 60 percent of whom died &mdash; as a new strain of hantavirus. They pinned the outbreak on a confluence of ecological and social factors: Wet weather during an El Ni&ntilde;o year spawned heavier-than-normal vegetation. That in turn fueled an unusually large population of deer mice, which harbor the virus. The victims were exposed when they rummaged through closets or gardened, inhaling dust laced with mouse droppings, urine, or saliva. The disease soon receded, but Smolinski was hooked on the rush he got from investigating outbreaks. "It seemed like a career that would never be dull," he says. "That has certainly proven true."



These days, Smolinski's business card at Google.org, the philanthropic arm of the Mountain View behemoth, identifies him simply as "threat detective." He's director of the organization's Predict and Prevent Initiative, a global health program. The 46-year-old's job is to channel money &mdash; one insider estimates up to $150 million &mdash; into projects and technologies that will help catch outbreaks like hantavirus wherever they crop up. What's even more ambitious is Smolinski's desire to push disease surveillance "two steps to the left of the epidemic curve." The strategy: Draw on Google's search acumen to predict hot spots before the first case of some imminent calamity hits the hospital.



Smolinski faces a daunting landscape. More than 300 new diseases have emerged since 1940, many the result of jumps from wild animal to human. Outbreaks are expected to increase as environmental degradation thrusts humans into ever-closer contact with wildlife and as climate change alters the life cycles of disease vectors &mdash; like El Ni&ntilde;o did to the deer mouse. Meanwhile, older diseases are rapidly...

Wired.com
]]></description>
<pubDate><![CDATA[Mon, 29 Sep 2008 06:00:00 +0200]]></pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[Sept. 29, 1920: Radio Goes Commercial@Wired Top Stories]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/405921406/dayintech_0929]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[1920: The Joseph Horne department store in Pittsburgh advertises ready-made radio receivers that can pick up a local broadcast station. Commercial radio is just weeks away.




Frank Conrad was assistant chief engineer of the Westinghouse Electric Company in Pittsburgh. He'd been interested in radio since 1912. To settle a $5 bet (about $110 in today's money) about the accuracy of his $12 watch, Conrad built a radio receiver to hear the time signals transmitted by the  U.S. Naval Observatory.




Conrad won the bet, but that's not the point. Notice that he had to build his own receiver. Just like the days of home-brew computers later in the 20th century, that's what 
aficionados of the emerging technology had to do in those days.




If you didn't want to start from scratch, you could -- and this, too, should sound familiar -- buy a kit with all the parts and all the instructions. They were advertised in magazines that appealed primarily to ... guys. Science magazines, the Boy Scout Handbook, cheap fiction, detective rags, and the kind of stuff you'd find in the barber shop.




In any case, Conrad was on to bigger things than building a receiver. Like building a transmitter. Under license 8XK, he started broadcasting from the second floor of his garage in nearby Wilkinsburg in 1916.  





In fact, Conrad was a pioneering in using the word broadcasting. It was borrowed from agriculture, where it means spreading seeds far and wide. Radio in those days was conceived of mainly as a two-way point-to-point medium. The idea of using one radio transmitter to reach a broad audience equipped only with receivers was something new. 




Conrad tested and tweaked his equipment for hours on end in his spare time. But his voice got tired making constant announcements of his call letters and location, so he started playing gramophone records to give it a rest. 




Sure enough, those with their own transmitters started radioing requests for specific music. Those who had only their own scratchy receivers phoned or wrote in. Conrad was radio's first DJ, and he was building an audience.




Horne's department store had something new in 1920: the first shipment of ready-to-use radio receivers. Nothing to build, just plug-and-play. The store placed an advertisement in the  Pittsburgh Sun heralding the miracle that you could listen to music over the air:


Air concert picked up by radio here. The music was from a Victrola in the home of Frank Conrad. Mr. Conrad is a wireless...

Wired.com
]]></description>
<pubDate><![CDATA[Mon, 29 Sep 2008 06:00:00 +0200]]></pubDate>
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<item>
<title><![CDATA[Playlist: Bounty Hunter's Hikaru Iwanaga, <cite>Walken A to Z</cite>, Google Transit@Wired Top Stories]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/405921407/pl_playlist]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[: What do the Sex Pistols and Cap'n Crunch have in common? Both were inspirations for Hikaru Iwanaga, the mastermind behind seminal Japanese fashion and toy juggernaut Bounty Hunter. This low-budget documentary, recently re-released on DVD (the first run sold out quickly), highlights Iwanaga and Frank Kozik &mdash; the droog who created Ludwig Van (left) &mdash; to explore the interplay of American pop culture, punk rock, and Japanese designer toys.: The human body is an organic machine, and there's no one better to explain how it works than David Macaulay, the author and artist behind the best-selling book The Way Things Work. Now Macaulay illustrates our insides down to the cellular level &mdash; the heart as power plant, the liver as manufacturing facility. His clear, amusing depictions are aimed at kids, which makes even this most complex system easy for anyone to understand at a gut level. (David, particle physics next, please.): If you already have the More Cowbell iPhone app, you'll love this encyclopedia. If you don't know what "more cowbell" refers to, you need it. Inside is everything we ever wanted to know about the actor whose accidental second life as a twisted YouTube hero (search "walken impersonations" ) has turned him into a high-haired cultural meme &mdash; the new Lebowski.: Keep your wallet fat and yourself thin by walking and taking public transit. Thanks to Google engineers who used their "20 percent time" to pore over bus, subway, and train schedules from 70 metro areas, Google Maps now offers step-by-step instructions for not driving from point A to point B.: The battle of the fake bands erupts with the dueling releases of Guitar Hero World Tour and Rock Band 2. Both let four players drum, strum, and sing to more than 85 tracks. Want to scream the new track from GN'R? Buy Rock Band 2. Rather perform "Purple Haze"? Guitar Hero. Each game has nifty new functions: World Tour lets you create your own instrumentals; Rock Band 2 has a drum training mode (and an optional $300 controller from Ion that converts into a real kit). Bonus: The instruments from the original Rock Band work with both titles.: This 1/9-scale model of Ferrari's iconic Formula One racer is made out of everyone's favorite building blocks &mdash; nearly 1,000 of them. The 20-inch-long stallion is not the fastest build, but from the functional steering and removable front spoiler to the authentic branding, it's the perfect nexus of gearhead obsession and toy nerddom.:...

Wired.com
]]></description>
<pubDate><![CDATA[Mon, 29 Sep 2008 06:00:00 +0200]]></pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[Novell Engineer Blasts Ubuntu for Not Helping Linux@Wired Top Stories]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/406624797/Nerd_Fight%21_Novell_Engineer_Blasts_Ubuntu_for_not_Helping_Linux]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[Linux kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman calls Ubuntu out for a fight. Ubuntu is being lambasted for not contributing to the underlying Linux technology.
    
    
    
    
      
  

Wired.com
]]></description>
<pubDate><![CDATA[Mon, 29 Sep 2008 06:00:00 +0200]]></pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[15th Anniversary: The Rantiest Reader Rants Ever@Wired Top Stories]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/405174077/st_15insults]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[A decade and a half of provocative content has inspired plenty of letters to the editor. Some of them have been thoughtful and constructive, others just plain rude. Sticks and stones, kids...



I have to pass on my disappointment with the first issue of your magazine. In fact, it has made me angry ... It's yuppie bullshit.


Gary Chapman


May/June 1993



I hated the cover on my new Wired magazine so much I tore it off and threw it in the trash.


dteeter@aol.com


August 1994



I don't know whether to congratulate you for your courage or cancel my subscription for presenting such one-sided drivel.


Charles Lewis


November 1995



As fiction goes, Ed Regis' article on anti-environmental crusader Julian L. Simon was a work of art.


Tim Andrews


May 1997



"101 Ways to Save the Internet" had a few good ones and a whole lot of crap.


Andy Harrison


March 2004



Prince is geekier than William Gibson? The unhackable computer in Hackers was named after Gibson, for Pete's sake! Ever seen an unhackable computer named after Prince?


Peter Aaron


October 2004
    
    
    
    
      
  

Wired.com
]]></description>
<pubDate><![CDATA[Sun, 28 Sep 2008 06:00:00 +0200]]></pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[Steve Rayner: Take Climate Change Seriously@Wired Top Stories]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/405174076/sl_rayner]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[Mr. President:




The outgoing administration failed to come to grips with climate change out of fear that reducing greenhouse gas emissions would damage the economy. But the decision to deal with climate change doesn't lend itself to cost-benefit analysis. It is a strategic choice, like the decision to get married. You have an opportunity to define the nation's character and upgrade its infrastructure &mdash; and bold action would be consistent with America's historical role as a leader in innovation. It would also encourage India and China to participate in the effort. Here are a few points to keep in mind.



Cap and trade won't work. The market for carbon offsets is widely touted as the best way to curb greenhouse gases. This would be fine if time were unlimited. However, the best available science suggests that we need to stabilize emissions by mid-century. That's too soon for carbon prices to rise enough to drive the R&amp;D necessary to enable cleaner alternatives to compete with fossil fuels. It doesn't help that the cap-and-trade approach relies on underdeveloped monitoring and accounting systems that inevitably leave plenty of wiggle room for unscrupulous speculators to work the system, amassing fortunes while achieving nothing for the atmosphere.




New technology is critical.The only plausible way to curb emissions in the next few decades is to accelerate the development and adoption of low-carbon energy sources. Rather than setting targets for greenhouse gases, we should establish goals for installed technology, beginning with the most energy-intensive sectors, like electricity generation, ground transportation, and cement manufacturing. Similarly, international cooperation on emissions reduction should focus on the handful of countries responsible for the lion's share of the problem. In the US and elsewhere, R&amp;D funding should be directed toward technologies that otherwise might not come online for up to 20 years. This would fill the gap between the turnaround timeline for venture capital (three to five years) and for basic research (beyond 20 years).



Let the market decide. No amount of public investment will succeed if politicians are allowed to pick the winners. The program must be designed to widen the choices available to the market, not to preempt them. There is no silver bullet, but we can develop silver buckshot. The point is to ensure that money flows to a variety of options from which the market can select, not just the one...

Wired.com
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<pubDate><![CDATA[Sun, 28 Sep 2008 06:00:00 +0200]]></pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[Leroy Hood: Look to the Genome to Rebuild Health Care@Wired Top Stories]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/404776542/sl_hood]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[Leroy Hood thinks the $2.3 trillion US health care system is headed for life support, but he has a plan for curing its inefficiency, and ineffectiveness. The 69-year-old biotechnologist bases his plan on the four Ps&mdash;medicine that is predictive, preventive, personalized, and participatory. The goal is to shift medicine from treating illness to managing health, saving money and lives along the way. Hood's Institute for Systems Biology is developing the diagnostics and technology to make it happen. Here's the doctor's Rx.

The US medical system should be ...



	
		
			
				
			
			
				Predictive
			
		
	
	

	The vision

	Using genome sequencing and blood tests, a doctor will be able to determine a patient's probability of developing certain diseases. The price of these tests is dropping and will soon be less than $1,000 &mdash; the same as a CT scan today. 
	


	The challenge 

	Physicians will have to be trained to use the technology ethically. Patients will have to make sense of new kinds of choices. 




	
		
			
				
			
			
				Preventive
			
		
	
	

	The vision

	Based on an individualized risk profile, you could start therapies in advance to cut the likelihood of illness. Drugs could be designed to blunt the desire to overeat, drink, or smoke. Average lifespan could be extended by 10 to 30 years.
	


	The challenge

	What qualifies as a disease? Will we have fewer football players if we quiet the genes that drive aggression?




	
		
			
				
			
			
				Personalized
			
		
	
	

	The vision 

	With billions of data points for every patient, drug therapies can be created to suit each genome. This would eliminate the trial-and-error approach doctors use today. 


	The challenge 

	Having your genome on Google could be a huge privacy risk. With so much information around, data security will become an important field in the health care industry. 




	
		
			
				
			
			
				Participatory
			
		
	
	

	The vision 

	People will maintain their own health, not just by treating existing illnesses but by learning about their own predispositions.
	


	The challenge

	How to explain biomarkers to someone with little grasp of science? Hood proposes games that teach health concepts, and his Institute for Systems Biology is working with school districts to develop top-notch science curricula. 



	




Leroy Hood is President of the Institute for Systems Biology.

    
    
    
    
      
  

Wired.com
]]></description>
<pubDate><![CDATA[Sat, 27 Sep 2008 18:00:00 +0200]]></pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[Current TV Hacks the Debate@Wired Top Stories]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/404946556/current-tv-cras.html]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[Current TV melds a traditional televised presidential debate format with next-generation web technology that incorporated viewers' spontaneous reactions into the broadcast.
    
    
    
    
      
  

Wired.com
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<pubDate><![CDATA[Sat, 27 Sep 2008 10:21:00 +0200]]></pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[Artifacts from the Future: Bumper Stickers of 2018@Wired Top Stories]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/404371485/found]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[: 
We imagine the bumper stickers you might see 10 years from now. Wired staffers created many of the stickers on a truck bumper and "weathered" them. They put the stickers on a rented Chevy truck, smeared dirt on and added more wear and tear in image post-production. 



We'll continue to create a new Artifact from the Future in upcoming issues of Wired magazine. But we'd like to see your prognostications too. What do you think our world will look like in 10, 20 or 100 years? Each month, we'll propose a scenario. Then it's up you: Sketch out your vision, then return here to upload your ideas, see other submissions and vote for your favorites. Check out this month's Happy Meal challenge.

- - -

The concept and many of the stickers came from Aaron Rowe, a contributor to the Wired Science Blog. Contributing Wired magazine designer Walter Baumann,  photo assistants Sarah Filippi and Daniel Salo, deputy photo editor Anna Goldman Alexander, production director Jeff Lysgaard helped create the future stickers on the truck. 

: 
Calvin clones: 
We need another border fence.: 
Costco retirement village reserved parking: 
Climate change is a hoax: Sea levels are rising because Jesus is crying.: 
Only hippies eat vat-grown meat.: 
They'll get my gun when they disable my AI sentrybot!: 
Stop outsourcing jobs to Moonbase Alpha.: 
Local 225: International Brotherhood of Microfluidics Reconfigurers, Nanotechnicians, & Cybernetics Engineers : 
WWRPD: What would Ron Paul do?


More Artifacts From the Future

Wine Spectrometer


Dawn of the Networked Era


RISK CNN World News Edition



    
    
    
    
  


Wired.com
]]></description>
<pubDate><![CDATA[Sat, 27 Sep 2008 06:00:00 +0200]]></pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[Wired's Geek Guide to the Prez Debates@Wired Top Stories]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/404183864/wireds-geek-gui.html]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[Want to rate the candidates? Blow off steam online? See what everyone's saying about how the debate went? Here's a few places online where you can check out the action.
    
    
    
    
  


Wired.com
]]></description>
<pubDate><![CDATA[Fri, 26 Sep 2008 23:28:00 +0200]]></pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[Webmonkey Maps iPhone App Developer's Frustration@Wired Top Stories]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/404125077/Webmonkey_Maps_iPhone_App_Developer_s_Frustration]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[Apple hasn't been at the top of its game lately in developer relations. There's a lot to complain about: the expensive developer fee, the nondisclosure agreements, the arbitrary iPhone app process, iPhone apps dropped inexplicably from the App Store, the secrecy.  
Long story short, developers are mad but fear retribution based on very temperamental Apple policies. Webmonkey maps out the story and the ongoing developments and invites your contributions.
    
    
    
    
      
  

Wired.com
]]></description>
<pubDate><![CDATA[Fri, 26 Sep 2008 22:45:00 +0200]]></pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[Chinese iPhone Knockoffs Described With Hilarious Engrish@Wired Top Stories]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/404003635/chinese-iphone.html]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[They look like iPhones, but these gee-whiz gadgets are really just clones. The crazy listings and bargain-basement prices should clue you.
    
    
    
    
  


Wired.com
]]></description>
<pubDate><![CDATA[Fri, 26 Sep 2008 20:10:00 +0200]]></pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[Chinese iPhone Knockoffs Described With Hilarious English@Wired Top Stories]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/404003635/chinese-iphone.html]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[They look like iPhones, but these gee-whiz gadgets are really just clones. The crazy listings and bargain-basement prices should clue you.
    
    
    
    
  


Wired.com
]]></description>
<pubDate><![CDATA[Fri, 26 Sep 2008 20:10:00 +0200]]></pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[IPhone 2.2: Safari Redesign, Possible Cut and Paste@Wired Top Stories]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/403890566/iphone-22-safar.html]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[With the iPhone v2.1 software out of the door, Apple is hard at work on v2.2. From this first glimpse it looks like Apple, now the major bugs have been squashed, is adding some new features.
    
    
    
    
  


Wired.com
]]></description>
<pubDate><![CDATA[Fri, 26 Sep 2008 13:26:00 +0200]]></pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[New GNOME Release Pretties Up Linux Desktop, Adds Cellphone Support@Wired Top Stories]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/403056308/Upgrade_Your_Linux_Desktop_Experience_With_GNOME_2DOT24]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[The latest release of GNOME -- the desktop environment used by Ubuntu and Fedora -- adds more functionality a new coat of paint sure to be welcomed by the point-and-click Linux crowd. There's also a new GNOME desktop tailor-made for Linux-powered mobile devices. Take that, Android.
    
    
    
    
  


Wired.com
]]></description>
<pubDate><![CDATA[Thu, 25 Sep 2008 17:45:00 +0200]]></pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[Mac Fans Disappointed in Tools for Porting Linux Apps@Wired Top Stories]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/403056311/Mac_Fans_Disappointed_in_GTK__Port]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[The recent release of GTK+ for the Mac, a set of tools software developers can use to make their Linux applications run on the Mac OS X desktop, has been greeted with a round of jeers by the Apple faithful. The GTK+ team has future updates planned, but for now, Mac users begging for enhancements will have to continue to wait.
    
    
    
    
  


Wired.com
]]></description>
<pubDate><![CDATA[Thu, 25 Sep 2008 17:36:00 +0200]]></pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[Gear Gallery: Giant New ThinkPad, Top DSLRs and More@Wired Top Stories]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/382815238/gallery_gadgets]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[: 
The Lenovo ThinkPad W700 is the most massive laptop Lenovo's ever made. This over-nine-pound monster is loaded in every way you can imagine and a few you probably can't. Two laptop "firsts" are already making waves. For starters you'll find a stylus secreted in the base of the W700 for a pint-sized Wacom digitizer that has been added next to the mouse pad. The second feature is built-in color calibration. Settings are tweaked automatically, and the before versus after images are striking in the effect the calibration has.


Though groundbreaking, these two features actually add just $150 to a laptop that costs ? wait for it ? $4,473. It's all those other specs that add to the price tag: A gorgeous LCD, by far the brightest 17-inch model we've ever tested. Core 2 Duo CPU running at a blistering 2.8 GHz. 4 GB of RAM (and 64-bit Vista installed, so you can actually access it all). Dual hard drives. And finally, an Nvidia Quatro FX 3700M graphics card with 1 GB of video RAM. All this goodness powers the W700 to record-setting benchmarks, though not quite offering the highest gaming scores we've seen. The stratospheric price tag ensures the W700 will likely only find a home in the high-test worlds of CAD, 3-D imaging and professional photo editing. The rest of us will simply have to appreciate the thing from afar ? and wait for its features to trickle down to cheaper, smaller machines.


WIRED: Digitizer and color calibrator set a new bar for features in a notebook. Top-notch performance all around. Unbeatable screen brightness at this size.


TIRED: Seems bigger than it needs to be: Lid is 20 inches diagonally to fit a 17-inch screen. 87 minutes of battery life is 84 more than the W700 will ever spend on. DVD playback stuttered and ultimately crashed the system during our tests. Keyboard not up to usual ThinkPad standards. Blaringly loud fan.


$4,470 (as tested), Lenovo





Read our full Lenovo ThinkPad W700 review.


Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily.
: 
Nikon's latest offering, the 12-megapixel D90 is a feature-packed fistful of photo fury that?s sure to help pave your way to full-fledged Flickrati status. Straight from the box and out on the street, the D90 shows off its picture-making prowess. Our testing unit came bundled with a (bordering on) superwide 18-105mm f3.5-5.6 lens that we used for all of our evaluations.


The 11-point focusing system speedily locks onto subjects, and the flash images show off a pleasing balance...

Wired.com
]]></description>
<pubDate><![CDATA[Thu, 25 Sep 2008 01:30:00 +0200]]></pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[Wannabe Space Tourist Wants $21 Million Back Over Scuttled Mission@Wired Top Stories]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/402322304/enomoto_lawsuit]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[The Japanese internet tycoon who paid $21 million to become the first space tourist to walk outside the International Space Station wants his money back.


In a lawsuit, Daisuke Enomoto, 37, claims that Space Adventures, the private firm with connections to the Russian Federal Space Agency, "deceptively and fraudulently" induced him to pay $21 million for a 10-day orbital sojourn that never materialized.


The Virginia company scuttled Enomoto's space journey to the Russian section of the station after he refused to cough up more money, according to the suit, which says Space Adventures cited his health as a "pretense" to deny him of his childhood dream of space travel.


The complaint (.pdf), filed in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, tells a tale seeped in eye-popping sums of money, and allegations of the rich eating the rich in a bid to reach space, the final frontier.


Enomoto claims that Space Adventures repeatedly pestered the former Livedoor executive to invest, and that the company took his money without ever having permission by the Russians or the 15 other members of the International Space Station to participate in a space walk -- what the lawsuit calls "extra-vehicular activities" or EVA.


The lawsuit charges that Space Adventures informed him that the Russian Federal Space Agency "approved Mr. Enomoto's EVA participation." But the space walk will cost an "extra" $10 million.


In response to the complaint, Space Adventures said in a court filing Wednesday that, "Even if Enomoto could prove his unlikely claim that he was somehow misled, he suffered absolutely no damage from any misstatement because, as the complaint admits, the cause of his failure to fly was medical disqualification, not lack of authority."


Enomoto, of Tokyo, grew up coding his own computer games and dreaming of space. "I just wanted to go up there and chill," he said in a recent interview with Wired magazine.


As part of his space flight, he planned on dressing like one of his favorite anime characters: Char Aznable from Gundam. His planned space experiment was to put together Gundam toys under weightlessness.


Enomoto finished months of intense training at Star City, Moscow, and was ready for his September 2006 launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Maikonur, Kasakhstan, home to the world's oldest spaceport. He was to fly in a Soyuz-FG rocket and Soyus-TMA spacecraft.


But a month before the Sept. 18, 2006, flight, according to the lawsuit, he...

Wired.com
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<pubDate><![CDATA[Thu, 25 Sep 2008 01:00:00 +0200]]></pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[Prosthetic Fetishes and Fan Erotica: Sci-Fi Predicts Future of Sex@Wired Top Stories]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/402322305/teledildos-pros.html]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[The annual Arse Elektronika sex-tech event brings its blue-sky visions (and its altogether concrete sex toys) to that bastion of prudery, San Francisco.
    
    
    
    
      
  

Wired.com
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<pubDate><![CDATA[Thu, 25 Sep 2008 00:47:00 +0200]]></pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[Opposition to Financial Bailout Jumps from Online to Streets@Wired Top Stories]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/402322306/blog_threatlevel_bailoutprotest]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[An e-mail railing against the proposed U.S. government bailout of Wall Street has ignited a national day of street protests. Some people are planning to dump their rubbish in front of the bronze bull sculpture near Wall Street Thursday.
    
    
    
    
  


Wired.com
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<pubDate><![CDATA[Thu, 25 Sep 2008 00:30:00 +0200]]></pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[Android Welcomes App Store Rejects With Arms Wide Open@Wired Top Stories]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/402322311/will-google-and.html]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[After being disappointed by Apple's restrictive and seemingly arbitrary policies regarding its iPhone App Store, some mobile software developers are considering jumping to Google's Android operating system.
    
    
    
    
  


Wired.com
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<pubDate><![CDATA[Wed, 24 Sep 2008 21:14:32 +0200]]></pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[Sept. 24, 1993: Beautiful 'Myst' Ushers In Era of CD-ROM Gaming@Wired Top Stories]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/401434954/dayintech_0924]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[1993: Broderbund Software releases Myst, a game for the Macintosh computer that becomes a record-setting best-seller and the killer app that sparks sales of CD-ROM drives.




Brothers Rand and Robyn Miller founded a software-development business called Cyan Worlds in 1987, and they started making history. The pair partnered in 1989 with game-publisher Activision to create a CD-ROM version of Cyan's first game, The Manhole, which was the first entertainment product released in the fledgling format.




More CD-ROM games followed, including follow-ups from Cyan, but few consumers bought expensive CD drives for their home computers, because there were no truly compelling applications -- that is, until Broderbund published Cyan's Myst in 1993.




Myst's dreamlike world and simple gameplay appealed to what we would now call "casual gamers." Its graphics were so polished and its world so entrancingly designed that it hooked a wide audience. Copies flew off the shelves. But perhaps more important, CD-ROM drives flew off shelves. To play Myst, you needed the hardware.




The underlying technology of the new game wasn't that different from Manhole's -- both were programmed using HyperCard, a free Mac application that gave amateur programmers a user-friendly, visually oriented creation tool.




What separated Myst from the pack was the game's beautiful, "pre-rendered" 3-D world.




The mid-'90s were videogames' puberty, a strange and awkward time spent trapped between child and adult. Computers were able to render 3-D worlds, but the videogame consoles in people's homes couldn't come close.




As a result, game designers often created 3-D worlds on their workstations, then took 2-D bitmap snapshots of the worlds and dropped them into their games as pre-rendered graphics. Nintendo would later use this technique to great effect in Donkey Kong Country for the Super Nintendo.




As its box art signified, Myst dropped the player into a remote, deserted island with little in the way of prelude. The player's goal: Explore the island, find the fragments of story that explain the situation, and solve puzzles.




Writing about the game in the early days of Wired magazine, Jon Carroll described the appeal of Myst's atmosphere: "The game is remarkable for its sense of control and mood; it is internally consistent in a subtle and layered way. There are interlocking themes: sound, water, gears, energy. The interface is transparent and minimal; it works like a glove....

Wired.com
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<pubDate><![CDATA[Wed, 24 Sep 2008 06:00:00 +0200]]></pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[T-Mobile's G1 Android Phone: Neither Open nor Exciting@Wired Top Stories]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/401332072/g1-android-phon.html]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[The widely-anticipated T-Mobile G1, which sports Google's long-awaited Android operating system, made a decidedly disappointing debut Tuesday. The smartphone doesn't have the design sizzle of Apple's iPhone, lacks key features, and isn't as open as expected.
    
    
    
    
  


Wired.com
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<pubDate><![CDATA[Wed, 24 Sep 2008 03:00:00 +0200]]></pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[Brits: U.S. Passed a New Law Just to Nail Gary McKinnon@Wired Top Stories]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/401332074/brits-us-passed.html]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[Father of the 42-year-old Pentagon hacker claims Congress passed legislation this month to make it easier to convict McKinnon. We can't find that law anywhere. Maybe it's in a secret Army computer with the UFO blueprints.
    
    
    
    
      
  

Wired.com
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<pubDate><![CDATA[Wed, 24 Sep 2008 03:00:00 +0200]]></pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[Photo-Gear Nuts, Start Your Drooling: Germany's Photokina Revs Up@Wired Top Stories]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/401245029/gallery_photokina_1]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[: Photo: Jock Fistick/Wired.com
COLOGNE, Germany -- Just 18 hours before this year's Photokina opens its doors, the biannual camera extravaganza was looking like a bit of a wreck. 


But just like photography, behind the scenes at giant expos is rarely pretty. To keep spirits high, new gear announcements and demos are already coming through, including a hands-on with what might be the most revolutionary camera to date, the Canon 5D Mark II. 


Click through the gallery to see the most promising products as a few brave reps shout over banging hammers and clanging ladders, kicking off the five-day photo geekfest. 


Left: A carpenter works in the Samsung display area hours before the opening of the Photokina exhibition. 
: Photo: Jock Fistick/Wired.com
Richard Shepherd, of Canon Europe, presents the Canon EOS 5D Mark II to foreign journalists. Its announcement last week set the photo world abuzz due to its extreme low-light sensitivity and ability to output full-HD video at 30 fps. Many photographers are itching to get their hands on it. It will sell for $2,700. : Photo: Jock Fistick/Wired.com
The full-frame, 21.1-megapixel EOS 5D Mark II is the first EOS with full high-def video capability. The camera can snap 3.9 frames per second and can capture still images while video is being recorded -- the video recording will be paused when a still image capture is activated and will resume.  : Photo: Jock Fistick/Wired.com
Panasonic has their new Lumix G1 on hand -- the first implementation of the Micro Four-Thirds system which does away with the mirror and prism of DSLRs in order to achieve a smaller body. This means you can't see directly through the lens and have to depend on the live view on the LCD screen. On the plus side, you get a far more portable body with interchangeable lenses.


The Lumix G1 sports a 12-megapixel MOS sensor and is available in blue and red as well as the standard black, and is priced around 900 euro.: 
Tamron announced a tiny 18mm to 270mm F 3.5 - 6.3 variable aperture zoom lens aimed at the amateur travel photographer who likes to pack light. Tamron claims this lens has the largest focal-length range of any zoom currently in production and that their "Vibration Compensation" technology (aka image stabilization)  adds four stops of hand hold-able usability. 


18mm to 270mm is certainly an impressive range for a single lens of this size, but we're wary of the sharpness of images one can expect. This could certainly be a boon for...

Wired.com
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<pubDate><![CDATA[Wed, 24 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0200]]></pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[How Google Can Save Android From Certain Failure@Wired Top Stories]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/401171592/what-google-mus.html]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[T-Mobile's new G1 is the first phone to be based on Google's Android operating system -- but it's not a "Googlephone." If Google really wants to compete with Apple's iPhone, it needs to fix that, and fast.
    
    
    
    
      
  

Wired.com
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<pubDate><![CDATA[Tue, 23 Sep 2008 20:15:00 +0200]]></pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[Google Dream Phone Makes Its Debut@Wired Top Stories]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/400972675/google-dream-ph.html]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[The T-Mobile G1 with Google powered by Android was unveiled this morning in New York with a list price of $179 -- undercutting Apple's iPhone -- and confirming many of the rumors that had been floating around about the device over the past few weeks.
    
    
    
    
  


Wired.com
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<pubDate><![CDATA[Tue, 23 Sep 2008 06:25:00 +0200]]></pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[T-Mobile G1, aka First 'Googlephone,' Carries High Expectations@Wired Top Stories]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/400144258/since-apple-lau.html]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[T-Mobile is set to announce the first phone based on Google's Android operating system. The T-Mobile G1, also known as the HTC Dream, may be the first credible challenger to the iPhone's dominance of the smartphone market.
    
    
    
    
  


Wired.com
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<pubDate><![CDATA[Mon, 22 Sep 2008 20:16:29 +0200]]></pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[Apple Zaps Another Competing iPhone App@Wired Top Stories]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/400027761/Another_Competing_iPhone_App_Zapped_By_Apple]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[Apple has rejected the iPhone application MailWrangler, banning it from the App Store for "duplicating functionality" already in the iPhone's native e-mail client. The developer argues otherwise, stating that his app goes above and beyond Apple's offering. This is the second app this week to be banned for the same half-baked reason.
    
    
    
    
  


Wired.com
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<pubDate><![CDATA[Mon, 22 Sep 2008 19:00:00 +0200]]></pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[SanDisk's New SlotMusic: But Why?@Wired Top Stories]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/399897869/portfolio_0922]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[News from Portfolio.com




Also on Portfolio



Judge: School Can Suspend Over Fake MySpace Profile



Reality TV School Getting Reality TV Deal



Spotlight on Media's Health Care Coverage

Subscribe to Portfolio magazine



As the world seems to march toward downloaded or streamed digital music, SanDisk today is unveiling a new physical medium for music.


It's called slotMusic, and it's basically an album on a thumbnail-size microSD card. Four of the major music labels -- Warner, Universal, Sony, EMI -- are supporting it with MP3, unprotected music. So you'd go into a Wal-Mart, pay about $10 for the card, and slip it into your cell phone or any other gadget with a card slot. SanDisk says it will be almost as simple to use as putting a CD in a player. The MP3 songs can be moved around or copied anywhere. And you can write to the card, adding more of your own music into whatever storage space is left.


I talked to SanDisk executive Dan Schreiber about slotMusic. Unable to imagine the iPod generation wanting anything to do with going to a store to buy music on anything made of atoms, I asked if this is aimed at, like, old people. "Some of it is an age thing," he said. "But it's about instant entertainment. Downloads continue to thrive, but not everybody wants to spend half their day curating playlists." He added that slotMusic "tested well with young guys who liked the gee-whiz factor." Although, I always take those kinds of results with a grain of salt. Young guys can think a lot of things are gee-whiz ... for about five minutes. Whether they'll actually buy it or not is a whole different question.


There doesn't seem to be much question about whether SanDisk did this product well. It seems to be inexpensive and easy to use, and the deals with the record labels mean slotMusic will have plenty of content in a DRM-free format, which is what consumers want these days. 


The slotMusic cards are so small, retailers could carry a solid selection in a small space. If nothing else, it could be a perfect product for a booth in an airport -- where travelers might want new music for a flight but have limited ways to get it onto a device. Even then, we're talking about selling to generations that are less tech savvy -- and, generally speaking, not the biggest music buyers. But maybe slotMusic will find a niche there.


"SanDisk is in the business of displacing legacy media with silicon," Schreiber told me, explaining the company's rationale for the product. "We...

Wired.com
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<pubDate><![CDATA[Mon, 22 Sep 2008 17:30:00 +0200]]></pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[Sept. 22, 1791: Faraday Enters a World He Will Change@Wired Top Stories]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/399480871/dayintech_0922]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[1791: Michael Faraday is born. In his 76 years on the planet, the chemist-physicist will make fundamental contributions to our understanding of electricity and magnetism, advise governments and establish lasting institutions of scientific education.

Faraday came from a working-class family and had to go to work after rudimentary schooling in reading, writing and arithmetic. But genius won out.

Faraday became a bookbinder's apprentice in his teens and continued his education by reading the books he was binding. An article on electricity in the Encyclopedia Britannica inspired him to buy some equipment and conduct some experiments himself.
 
Faraday joined London's City Philosophical Society in 1810 to hear the lectures there and participate in scientific discussions. Then, in 1812, a client of the bookbindery gave the earnest young man tickets to hear a series of lectures by pioneering chemist Humphry Davy at the Royal Institution.

Thirsty for knowledge, Faraday took copious notes. He organized them, added illustrations and bound them into a book. Faraday secured an interview with Davy, presented him with the bound copy and asked to be hired as a lab assistant.

Davy was impressed but had nothing open at the moment. True to his word, however, he did hire Faraday the next year ? at about $10 a week (the rough equivalent of $135 in today's money).

A few years later, Davy asked his assistant to follow up on the work of Danish scientist Hans Christian Oersted, who had just discovered that an electrical current would deflect the needle of a magnetic compass. Faraday theorized that magnets created force fields, and he designed an experiment that significantly one-upped Oersted in 1821.

Faraday suspended a wire above a magnet. When he passed a current through the wire (whose bottom end hung in a dish of conductive mercury), the wire rotated around the magnet, following lines of magnetic force. It was a prototype for the electric motor, using electricity to create motion. It just needed to be scaled up. 

The discovery was a sensation -- perhaps a little too much of one. Davy, a scientific rock star of his day, was envious. He accused Faraday of stealing the idea from him and tried to block the young man's election to the Royal Society. Davy backed off but never withdrew the charges. Faraday became a Fellow of the Royal Society and lab director at the Royal Institution in 1825.

Faraday decided to tread gingerly and shied away from electrical experimentation. He worked instead on analytical chemistry and the compression of gases, discovering benzene in 1825.



Davy died in 1829, perhaps from the after-effects of his frequent inhalation of nitrous oxide and other gases, including carbon monoxide. That gave Faraday free rein to resume his work on electricity. 

He discovered electromagnetic induction in 1831. Reversing his effect of using a magnet and electricity to create motion, he used a magnet and motion to generate electricity. No messy, voltaic cells needed, it was the progenitor of steam, hydro and diesel generators.

Faraday plumbed the mysteries of electrochemistry in the 1830s, coining such words as electrode and ion, and establishing the laws of electrolysis.

But wait, there's more.

In 1845, he suspended a heavy piece of glass between the poles of an electromagnet, watching the glass twist into alignment with the magnetic field. Other materials produced the same result, which Faraday named diamagnetism, the propensity of a nonmagnetic substance to create an opposing field in the presence of externally applied magnetism.

He also discovered the magneto-optical effect, also called the Faraday effect, that very same year: A magnetic field can rotate polarized light.

All this work -- integrating magnetism, electricity, chemistry and light -- eventuated in Faraday firmly establishing the field theory of electromagnetism, a foundation of modern physics.

Remembering his own education through public lectures, Faraday founded the Royal Institution's Christmas Lectures on scientific topics. They've gone on since 1825, interrupted only during World War II. They've been on television since 1966 and are now supplemented by interactive online features.

Faraday also served as a science adviser to British governments for more than three decades. He worked fervently for the electrification of lighthouses. 

Faraday's name is honored in the scientific world not only by the Faraday effect and the Faraday cage apparatus, but by two electrical units of measure and a physical constant. The farad is the humongous unit of capacitance, equal to one coulomb per volt. Because the unit is so huge, you usually see capacitance measured in micro-, nano- or picofarads.

The faraday is a unit of electric charge that can electrolytically deposit one mole of an element or univalent ion. It's equal to Avogadro's number multiplied by the charge of a single electron, or approximately 96.4853 kilocoulombs or 26.8015 ampere hours, and is also known as Faraday's constant.

Source: Royal Institution, others

    
    
    
    
  

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<pubDate><![CDATA[Mon, 22 Sep 2008 06:00:00 +0200]]></pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[Wired.com Photo Contest: Fall@Wired Top Stories]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/399461245/submissions_fall]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[The air is turning cold and crisp and the sun is becoming a recluse, which herald the subject of our next photo contest: Fall.

Use the Reddit widget below to submit your best Fall photo and vote for your favorite among the other submissions. The 10 highest-ranked photos will appear in a gallery on the Wired.com homepage. Sure, the fiery leaves are always a crowd-pleaser, but we want to see more. Show us the legions of our greatest resource headed back to school. Show us giant gourds, ghouls and ghosts, and hay mazes. Uncanny headless horsemen amongst skeletons of trees, and autumnal feasts that stretch as far as the eye can see. Fit Fall into a frame and show us what it means to you. 

The photo must be your own, and by submitting it you are giving us permission to use it on Wired.com and in Wired magazine. Please submit images that are relatively large, the ideal size being 800 to 1200 pixels or larger on the longest side. Please include a description of your photo, which may include exposure information, equipment used, etc.

We don't host the photos, so you'll have to upload it somewhere else and submit a link to it. If you're using Flickr, Picasa or another photo-sharing site to host your image, please provide a link to the image directly and not just to the photo page where it's displayed. Using an online photo service that requires that you login will not work. If your photo doesn't show up, it's because the URL you have entered is incorrect. Check it and make sure it ends with the image file name (XXXXXX.jpg).

Please bookmark this page and check back periodically over the next two weeks to vote on new submissions!

Also, check out the winner's galleries from our previous contests: Holga, Red, Self-Portrait, Night, Macro, Transportation, and Black and White.



Vote on fall photos submitted by other readers.

Show entries that are: hot | new | top-rated. Submit your Fall photo.



 


 
Submit your fall photo.
(No more than one every 30 minutes. No HTML allowed.)
 

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<pubDate><![CDATA[Mon, 22 Sep 2008 06:00:00 +0200]]></pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[Games Without Frontiers: The Game of Politics Is Ready for Its Upgrade@Wired Top Stories]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/399461248/gamesfrontiers_0922]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[
I won the White House for Barack Obama last week. And for John McCain, too!



I was playing The Political Machine 2008, this year's big sim-election title, and had a blast slinging mud and pandering. Playing as Obama, I stormed around the coasts, promising clean coal and running ads blasting McCain for supporting the war, and soon I was kicking back in the Oval Office. Playing as McCain, I played precisely the opposite cards in the red heartland, and won that race as well.



And as I turned off the computer, I thought -- wow, you could regard The Political Machine as the supreme indictment of American Democracy. Because for all its cartoony graphics, the electioneering feels quite realistic. Almost too realistic. And you wind up worrying: Is real-life politics just a game, too? 



As we move ever closer to Nov. 4, pundits constantly complain that the presidential campaign has become a farce of scorekeeping -- with the candidates, media and consultants treating it merely as a horse race. Why aren't we talking about issues? they moan. Isn't democracy supposed to be about more than just pandering to the crowd?



In one sense, the pundits are completely right. There's something enormously depressing about watching the electioneering devolve into such nanoscale pettiness as the "lipstick on a pig" argument, or the choruses of "drill, baby, drill." We're facing down some of the hugest social crises in a generation -- climate change, a worldwide economic meltdown -- yet we're faced with campaigns dominated by who's racking up more daily points: Who attacked? Who deflected? Modern political campaigns even borrow directly from the linguistics of game-playing: The candidates are engaged in a "horse race."



But let me suggest another way to look at it. Maybe American democracy really is a game -- and maybe that's the best thing about it.



What, after all, is a game? A game is a set of rules that gives players a set of goals but also constrains their behavior in striving for those goals; it architects their behavior in an interesting and hopefully enjoyable way. A really well-designed game is "balanced" and self-correcting. In a game of pool, for example, if you take an early lead by sinking a ton of balls, you quickly discover that -- whoops -- the game gets harder because your opponents' balls block all your shots. In MMOs like World of Warcraft, different classes of players do different things; as a result, no one class can run roughshod over all others.



In comparison, what's a democracy? Much like a game, it's just a bunch of rules -- written down on a piece of paper (er, a "constitution") -- that constrain everyone's behavior in an attempt to architect a productive, happy and peaceful polity. And, again like a game, if it's well-designed, it's self-correcting.



One reason to admire the U.S. democratic system is its neat balance of power. On paper, anyway, the branches of government -- executive, legislative and judicial -- are co-equal, so each can prevent the others from causing too much mischief. When it comes to elections, some sparsely populated states were weighted higher -- given extra senators and congressmen or Electoral College votes so that, again in theory, they wouldn't be run roughshod over. American democracy is strikingly gamelike in its design.



Yet the thing is, the game is clearly in need of a redesign. When you play Political Machine, you quickly realize -- much as real-world candidates do -- that you're mostly worried about the small handful of vote-rich "swing" states, like Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio. I won even though I almost completely ignored population-rich New York, California and Texas. 



This is, of course, because of the superweird Electoral College system. It's a design choice that made a lot of sense 200 years ago, but makes increasingly less sense as time goes on and America becomes more of an urban, coastal country. The software of American democracy was designed to run on hardware -- a particular population distribution -- that no longer exists.



If American democracy actually were a game, like Halo, players would call it unbalanced -- and cry out for a solution. Or to put it another way: The software of U.S. democracy needs a patch. It needs some tweaks that force politicians to consider the whole map.



Plenty of electoral thinkers have suggested reweighting the Electoral College, or maybe even scrapping it. Assuming this were politically possible, it would require some sober meditation on design. For example, to ensure that low-population states don't get completely overlooked politically in the new regime, you might want to include new safeguards for them -- such as a couple extra senators or representatives. 



Even so, you'd want to be very, very careful as you proceeded. As any videogame designer knows, changing even one tiny part of a system -- making the rifles more lethal in Call of Duty, or gravity slightly more powerful in a racing game -- can send the entire thing spiraling into chaos. The same goes with democracy, in spades.



But the point is, thinking about American democracy as a game is not necessarily a bad thing. Quite the contrary: It might be the best way to fix it. 



- - -



Clive Thompson is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and a regular contributor to Wired and New York magazines. Look for more of Clive's observations on his blog, collision detection.

    
    
    
    
  

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<pubDate><![CDATA[Mon, 22 Sep 2008 06:00:00 +0200]]></pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[Attorney General Pulls the Immunity Trigger, But Denies 'Dragnet' Surveillance@Wired Top Stories]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/398533187/mukasey-denies.html]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey on Saturday denies the nation's telecommunications companies assisted the Bush administration in "dragnet" spying on Americans' electronic communications following the Sept. 11 terror attacks.
    
    
    
    
  

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<pubDate><![CDATA[Sat, 20 Sep 2008 22:41:00 +0200]]></pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[Robot Hands Get a Grip on the Future@Wired Top Stories]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/397720681/gallery_robothands]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[: Image courtesy VintagecomputerConsidered to be the first working robot hand, the Handyman, developed in 1960 by General Electric's Ralph Mosher, was a two-fingered, heavily jointed claw that set up the foundation for later hands.  



The design looks rudimentary now, but the five-pivot segment design in each finger was innovative in its attempt to replicate the human hand's flexible joint structure. A human hand is made up of a set of rigid links (bones and muscles) connected at joints. Each joint can have one degree of freedom (hinging or sliding) or two (rotating or cylindrical). We have four degrees of freedom in each finger, giving us enormous flexibility and the ability to make complex motions.



The Handyman's fingers had three degrees of freedom. But it was the attached mechanical forearm that provided most of the wrist action, as mechanical "tendons" pushed and pulled on the fingers. A technician had to manipulate the hand by placing his arm inside the apparatus like a puppet. 



The Handyman's capabilities were limited: It could pinch and hold, but had no sensitivity to what it was holding, limiting it to clawing indiscriminately at things.
: Image courtesy University of RochesterBuilt to study the reaction times of robot muscles, the Utah/MIT hand, built in the early 1980s, is a tendon-based (forearm) system. Electric signals are sent to the knuckles through a complicated cable setup, where one tendon moves each joint, as opposed to the dueling and matching motors of earlier models.



The tendon system was precise because air cylinders allowed knuckle sensors to monitor the angle of the fingers, as well as the tension in the wrists. In addition, the tendons were strong and made the fingers move much faster than previous versions -- the seven pounds of force exerted at the fingertip was the strongest at the time. 



But that power sacrificed control and range of the whole hand. If you wanted to move it with any regularity, you had to set up a complicated plan to move the 288 pulleys.
: Designed in the early 1990s by Mark Rosheim, the Omni-Hand is dexterous, rugged and hand-powered by an electric gearbox in the palm. It also was the most life-like and reliable hand that NASA made in the '90s. The space agency's researchers even put a glove on it. 



Like the human hand, closing and opening the fingers together laterally (as if you're making Spock's 'V' sign, also known as adduction and abduction) was made possible by a ball-and-socket joint design. This design was also used in the wrist, which enabled pitch (at 110 degrees) and yaw motions (at 70 degrees). Also, each knuckle had built-in stops that limited backwards movements, or hyperextension, just like human fingers. 



By using the palm's gear box for sensor placement, tendons became unnecessary and led Rosheim to use stronger hinge materials, like double bearings supporting stronger motor shafts, and he placed flexible sensor wires near the fingers. Finally, every finger was the same as any other, so they could be easily replaced one at a time.
: Photo: Courtesy Gabriel GomezBy 2007, scientists had developed the technology of robot hands to such a degree that they could attach a robot hand to a human forearm. Much of recent research has been split between developing hand dexterity and bridging the connection between flesh and machine. 




The robotic hand created by the University of Tokyo's Hiroshi Yokoi is such an arm, and it is tendon-based, similar to the Utah arm. But this time, the tendons don't drive the movements. Instead, the wire currents inside the tendons do the job.  

The Zurich/Tokyo hand has 13 degrees of freedom, and each finger is laced with powerful sensors that give it specific joint commands, enabling it, for instance, to simultaneously set a 75-degree angle for one finger and set a specific pressure for another. When the hand was finally attached as a prosthetic device, electromyography signals were used to "interface the robot hand non-invasively" to a male patient. To mimic the tactile feedback of a real hand, scientists sent electrical stimulation through the wires to the test subject's own (organic) sensor and motor system. 
: Photo: Glenn MatsumuraThe BH8 BarretHand, built in 2007, is a three-fingered programmable "grasper" known for its great flexibility. Two of the multijointed fingers rotate around the palm (at 180 degrees), and switch positions easily, giving the hand two opposable thumbs. 

The hand has its own processor and is controlled by a PC through a serial port. It's also completely self-contained and quite durable, which means scientists no longer have to worry about the force of the tendons or the grippiness of the fingers. It also comes with a clutch mechanism that determines the strength of the grasp.

Robotics experts at Stanford are currently using the BH8 for their Stair 2.0 autonomous robot project, fetching everything from wine glasses to toothbrushes through speech-recognition techniques. 
: Image courtesy TouchbionicsThis $65,000 prosthetic robot hand has supersmall motors and five fully articulated digits powered by a two-input myoelectric signal. Doctors place electrodes on the surface of the hand's "skin," which connects to the electrical signal generated by muscles in the remaining portion of a patient's limb. 

The i-Limb enables different grips that had not been available to amputees before, such as the key grip (thumb to index finger), and power, precision and index grips (the "we're #1' grip.")

But its realistic dexterity isn't the only good thing about it. Fingers can be easily swapped out with one another, which makes servicing a little bit easier and less expensive.
: Image courtesy SensopacCreated by the EU-funded SENSOPAC group in 2005, the "Robo Habilis" is managed by a software program modeled on the human cerebellum. Now we're really getting somewhere. 

An advanced software program coordinates sensations and movements picked up by the hand, getting us a bit closer to intelligent, self-aware robot arms. The SENSOPAC is also covered by sensitive skin made out of a thin, flexible carbon-based material whose resistance changes with pressure. This allows hundreds of tiny sensors to be used as the hand's main information conduits, providing more detailed information on a touch or grip than ever before.

In addition, the attached arm has 58 motors (in opposing pairs) that it uses to create a large range of force. The fingers have 38 opposing motors, allowing it to snap its fingers and even pick up an egg without breaking it. 
: Kamen created the Segway, an invention so far ahead of the game that it makes its users look, well, rather dorky. Not so with his robot arm. 

Kamen's arm is light-years ahead of the clamping "claws" amputees are used to. It's a fully articulated appendage, with flexible joints and detailed user manipulation called "Gen X - Separate Exo Control." It gives the user the same range of motion (14 degrees of freedom) as a natural arm, and is sensitive enough to pick up a piece of paper, a wineglass or even an olive in a martini. 
: The Anatomically Correct Testbed (ACT) hand is all about the accuracy of the human hand's bone/muscle/nerve structure. Yoky Matsuoka, director of the Neurobotics Lab at the University of Washington, designed the autonomous ACT hand to respond to sensors that mirror the brain's neural commands. To do so, she created neuromusculoskeletal copies of the arm's anatomy, including tendon insertion points, specific bone shapes and weight, and supersmall motors that duplicate muscle contraction behaviors. As a result, it is the most human-looking and -moving arm out there.  

Like the Handyman and the Utah/MIT hand, the ACT is based on cable "tendons," but those tendons are arranged and attached in a much more human-like manner, giving it a full range of motion. 

There's also an uncommon focus on the palm, which is about as important to the human hand's multifaceted nature as its fingers. 
: Image courtesy ElumotionThe Sheffield Hand, built in 2002, focuses on the development of "artificial muscle" and sophisticated joints. Powered by telescopic rods throughout the palm of the hand, fingers are pulled and bent in a rotating motion. But it's the detailed phalanges that make it one the most flexible hands and arms, through simple cylindrical disks that produce realistic abduction and adduction. 

The hand includes haptic sensors and its hard plastic muscles mimic the flexibility of real human arms. In the process of testing, the scientists conducted arm-wrestling contests between a human and three different versions of the arm. 

The Sheffield was also used by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratories as a early prototype for the Discovery space mission's 50-foot arm. 
: Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.comYes, this hand looks like it's about ready to start sewing up your undies. But it's actually a very sophisticated Intel project that smartly senses the shape of objects through the magic of electrolocation, used by sharks and other marine animals to detect objects and prey via faint electric fields. 

Called the "Shark Hand" or "The Sixth Sense" because of these sonar-like powers of perception, the tips of its fingers emit an "electrical impulse" that detects objects and gives the hand an sense of the shape of objects it is about to grasp. 

The hand is part of a larger Intel project on "Pre Touch" technologies, where robots are being laced with internal sensors that are more long-range than the sense of touch, but more short-range than vision.

Check out the video of Wired Science's Alexis Madrigal and Intel researchers playing with the Intel shark hand. 
: Image courtesy Shadow RobotThe Shadow Hand has integrated sensors all over its palm and fingers, and can be controlled by different computer systems, which is why several university robotics programs and private contractors are using it. It even has a network option, which means you can torture your coworkers with crazy hand gestures even when you're taking a sick day. 

But it is special because it's got more moves than a Moonwalker-era Michael Jackson. Its integrated bank of 40 "Air Muscles" allow it to perform 24 different, large-angle moves, and the fingertips are so sensitive that they can even detect a quarter on the floor. Not only that, but the muscles are soft and acquiescent, which allows it to play with soft and fragile objects.
: Despite almost 50 years of development, these hands are only the beginning. Like notebook computers and MP3 players before them, robot hands will get tinier and ever more complex.

Intuitive Surgical's EndoWrist Instruments are small surgical tools, with 5 mm- and 8 mm-diameter options. With seven degrees of freedom and 90 degrees of articulation, they are the most precise robotic appendages in the medical world. They are widely used by surgeons because they improve the surgeons' own world-renowned dexterity and allows them to perform minimally invasive surgery through teeny incisions.

A doctor manipulates the hand through fingertip controls from a few feet away from the patient, looking into a micro lens. It's hard to believe, but the Endowrist is also strong, and it can handle a variety of forceps, needle drivers, scalpels and any other things needed to cut up a person carefully and safely.

    
    
    
    
  

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<pubDate><![CDATA[Sat, 20 Sep 2008 03:00:00 +0200]]></pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[Comcast Discloses Throttling Practices -- BitTorrent Targeted@Wired Top Stories]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/397709888/comcast-disclos.html]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[Comcast finally admits that it targeted peer-to-peer sharing services starting in 2007 to clamp down on bandwidth usage. The company is complying with the Federal Communication Commission's August order to stop the throttling of particular internet programs, but is still challenging its legitimacy in court.
    
    
    
    
  

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<pubDate><![CDATA[Sat, 20 Sep 2008 01:34:00 +0200]]></pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[Safari Browser Leads Pack in JavaScript Performance@Wired Top Stories]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/397609861/Safari_Leading_the_Pack_in_JavaScript_Performance]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[The new JavaScript engine that will show up in the next version of Apple's Safari browser is screaming fast -- faster than Chrome and Firefox, even -- and bloggers have the stats to prove it. It isn't ready for your desktop yet, but when it is, your Ajax web apps are going to be faster than ever.
    
    
    
    
  

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<pubDate><![CDATA[Fri, 19 Sep 2008 23:45:00 +0200]]></pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[Palin Hacker Group's All-Time Greatest Hits@Wired Top Stories]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/397525647/palin-hacker-gr.html]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[The group of online troublemakers that busted into and shared private emails from Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin calls itself Anonymous, but its work in attacking Scientology and causing seizures in epileptics is earning it a name online.
    
    
    
    
  

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<pubDate><![CDATA[Fri, 19 Sep 2008 21:00:00 +0200]]></pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[iPhone Developers Go From Rags to Riches@Wired Top Stories]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/397603572/indie-developer.html]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[Independent software coders are on the road to becoming self-made millionaires through the iPhone App Store, where popular applications are raking in thousands of dollars a day.
    
    
    
    
      
  
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<pubDate><![CDATA[Fri, 19 Sep 2008 20:54:00 +0200]]></pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[Sept. 19, 1982: Can't You Take a Joke?  :-)@Wired Top Stories]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/396853911/dayintech_0919]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[1982: At precisely 11:44 a.m., Scott Fahlman posts the following electronic message to a computer-science department bulletin board at Carnegie Mellon University:

19-Sep-82  11:44  Scott E Fahlman&nbsp;&nbsp;:-)
From: Scott E Fahlman 

I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers:

:-)

Read it sideways. Actually, it is probably more economical to mark things that are NOT jokes, given current trends. For this, use:

:-(

With that post, Fahlman became the acknowledged originator of the ASCII-based emoticon. From those two simple emoticons (a portmanteau combining the words emotion and icon) have sprung dozens of others that are the joy, or bane, of e-mail, text-message and instant-message correspondence the world over. 

Fahlman was not, however, the first person to use typographical symbols to convey emotions. The practice goes back at least to the mid-19th century, when Morse code symbols were occasionally used for the same purpose. Other examples exist as well. 

In 1881, the American satirical magazine Puck published what we would now call emoticons, using hand-set type. No less a wordsmith than Ambrose Bierce suggested using what he called a "snigger point" --&nbsp;&nbsp;__/&nbsp;&nbsp;-- to convey jocularity or irony. 

But the modern emoticon does trace its lineage directly to Fahlman, who says he came up with the idea after reading "lengthy diatribes" from people on the message board who failed to get the joke or the sarcasm in a particular post -- which is probably what "given current trends" refers to in his own, now-famous missive. 

To remedy this, Fahlman suggested using&nbsp;&nbsp;:-)&nbsp;&nbsp;and&nbsp;&nbsp;:-(&nbsp;&nbsp;to distinguish between posts that should be taken humorously and those of a more serious nature. 

Fahlman's original post was lost for a couple of decades and believed gone for good, until it was retrieved from an old backup tape, thus cementing his claim of priority. 

Source: Various
    
    
    
    
  

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<pubDate><![CDATA[Fri, 19 Sep 2008 06:00:00 +0200]]></pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[Gallery: Emoticons Jump From Web to Real World :-)@Wired Top Stories]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/396853912/gallery_emoticon]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[: Photo: Gene J. Puskar/AP
With three simple keystrokes, Scott Fahlman brought a smile to the internet. 



In a 1982 message board post, Fahlman, a computer scientist at Carnegie-Mellon University, proposed using typographical smiley faces to mark jokes and clear up confusion about writers' intentions. With his simple proposal, the emoticon was born. 



Fahlman's smiling shorthand (and its frown-face equivalent) started a wave of internet expression that's spilled over into the real world. The emoticon has been upgraded and animated, loved and hated. Emoticons have graced gadgets, T-shirts and more.



Witness the emoticon's lasting impact, and smile if you can.


Left:



Father of the emoticon Scott Fahlman shows off his happy handiwork. His proposal to use smiley and frowney faces is credited with launching the emoticon in the internet age. Now, Carnegie-Mellon hands out an annual Smiley Award for "innovation in technology assisted person-to-person communication."

: 
Emotibles' Emotibuds slip onto classic iPod earbuds, giving Apple's bland white gear a colorful geek upgrade. The company also makes "strangely expressive" emoticon stickers, pins and more.
: 
Wear a freaky-looking Mask of Emotion and you'll really light up a room. The bubble-shape mask, developed by designers at Hongik University in Korea, uses LEDs to put emoticon expressions on its wearer's "face."

: 
An unknown visionary (or maybe a time traveler) used typographical symbols to mimic human expressions in an 1881 edition of Puck magazine.
: 

Did the person or persons who installed the locks and handle on this door realize the statement they were making? London graphic designer Peter Gibbons spotted the happy hardware on a door in Copenhagen.

: 
Old-school methods for inter-vehicular communication -- flipping the bird at the tailgating bastard behind you or mumbling "sorry" to yourself after cutting somebody off -- aren't exactly effective.



Cruise into the 21st century with the Driving LED Emoticon, which lets you express your true feelings in a straightforward fashion. Just mount the LED message sign in your rear window, then use the remote control to transmit one of five messages (smiling face, winking face, "Thanks," "Back Off" and "Sorry") to the driver on your bumper.

: 
Feeling a little remote from your loved one? Drop a clue about your current mood with the Web Are You? networked emoticon device from Mauricio Melo Design. Connect the thing to the internet, then ping it via a web page or cellphone. One of the four emoticons will light up to give your significant other a visual representation of your state of mind.

: 
Wear your emotion on your lapel (or anywhere else) with one of these colorful emoticon pins. The set includes "Roll Eyes (Sarcastic)," "Mad," "Smilie," "Cool," "Frown," "Wink," "Big Grin" and "Eek."

: 
Emoticons aren't just for the internet. With the Emoticon Transforming Stamp, you can ink a piece of paper with a standard smiley in nothing flat. The $6 silicone stamp is flexible -- squish it for variations on the theme.

: 
Screw e-mail -- use an actual mailbox to send a message with these emoticon letterpress cards from Lizard Press.

: 

Endless mutations on the smiley face, as popularized by AOL Instant Messenger and other services that use animated emoticons, show up all over the place. Smiley World, which registered the '60s-era smiley face as a trademark in 1971, sells customizable T-shirts that will look familiar to anybody who's ever used AIM.

: 
One beautiful thing about emoticons: The keystroke expressions can be put to virtually limitless creative uses. These boobtastic potholders by CrochetandCrafts owe a clear debt of gratitude to Fahlman's very first smiley.

    
    
    
    
  

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<pubDate><![CDATA[Fri, 19 Sep 2008 06:00:00 +0200]]></pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[The Heat Is On for Details of Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement@Wired Top Stories]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/396731518/heat-is-on-for.html]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[Two rights groups sue the United States Trade Representative, in a lawsuit seeking information about the proposed Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. The agreement, being hashed out with several nations, is said to bolster intellectual property powers and possibly even allow internet companies to monitor web traffic. But details are shaky, and that's why the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Public Knowledge are seeking them.
    
    
    
    
  

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<pubDate><![CDATA[Fri, 19 Sep 2008 02:16:00 +0200]]></pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[How to Customize Your iPhone Wallpaper@Wired Top Stories]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/396540655/Change_Your_iPhone_Wallpaper]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[The default iPhone wallpaper is pretty boring and it displays every time you unlock the screen. Don't you think you should customize it with something more personal? A loved one perhaps? Maybe your favorite band photo? You can even snap a wallpaper photo on the spot. Our guide will point you in the right direction.
    
    
    
    
  

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<pubDate><![CDATA[Thu, 18 Sep 2008 20:45:00 +0200]]></pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[Googlephone Will Cost the Same as the iPhone@Wired Top Stories]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/396233241/googlephone-wil.html]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[The HTC Dream, the first Googlephone, due out next month, will be priced at an iPhone-matching $200, the Wall Street Journal reports. This makes it clear that T-Mobile sees the the Android phone as an antidote to AT&T's exclusive on the iPhone.
    
    
    
    
  

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<pubDate><![CDATA[Thu, 18 Sep 2008 12:05:00 +0200]]></pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[Sept. 18, 1830: Horse Beats Iron Horse, for the Time Being@Wired Top Stories]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/395863093/dayintech_0918]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[1830: America's first native locomotive loses a smackdown race to a draft horse. Embarrassment does not alter the course of history.



The city fathers of Baltimore were plenty worried about the financial future of their bustling burg in the late 1820s. The National Road and its eastern connections had linked the city's harbor to Wheeling, Virginia (now West Virginia), on the Ohio River in 1818. The federally financed wagon road was the best, quick link for moving products and raw materials between the young nation's East Coast and the burgeoning interior.




But Baltimore was losing business to a new competitor: canals. The Erie Canal, which opened in 1825, gave New York City access to the Great Lakes. The proposed Chesapeake and Ohio Canal would link Washington, D.C., to the Ohio River. (Using Canada's St. Lawrence River to reach the Great Lakes was out of the question: The War of 1812 was a recent memory, and real peace -- and boundary settlements -- were still decades away.)



Thomas Carroll of Carrollton (Maryland), a nonagenarian who had signed the Declaration of Independence, led a group to establish the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad in 1828. They planned to beat the competition by jumping to a superior technology.



Locomotive steam engines that could move along a track and haul passengers or freight were a new idea. England's first steam railway had just opened in 1825. The B&O intended to haul its carriages with sturdy horses.



Or maybe wind power. But the experiments with sail cars were a flop ... literally. It's pretty darn hard to tack on a track, and the cars frequently toppled over.



Engineer Peter Cooper thought he could build a locomotive that would impress the B&O barons. His Tom Thumb was basically a miniature locomotive. The boiler was no bigger than those found in large kitchen ranges of the time, and Cooper repurposed musket barrels for boiler tubes. 



The B&O arranged a demonstration of the Tom Thumb on the 13 miles (of a projected 379) of track it had completed by 1830. Hauling a car full of 40 officials, dignitaries and social notables, the little loco covered the distance from Baltimore to Ellicott Mills in an hour, reaching the unheard-of speed of 18 mph. Gracious!



On the return trip, the train was met, on the adjacent track, by a similar open-air passenger car hitched to the best draft horse of a local stagecoach company. The iron horse and bio-horse were to race.



The horse-drawn car pulled ahead first, as the tiny engine struggled to build up steam. Then it got going. Soon it was chasing the horse. Then it pulled even, and sure enough the little Tom Thumb pulled ahead. A cheer arose from the crowd.



Then: Murphy's Law. A drive band slipped in the locomotive's works. The engine slowed to a crawl. The horse car pulled ahead. By the time Cooper (who was a railroad engineer in both senses of the word) repaired the damage and got the engine going again, it was too late. The horse was too far ahead, and it won the race.



Aah, but he who laughs last laughs best. It was easier to increase the horsepower of a steam engine than to up the horsepower of a horse.



An improved locomotive reached the ferocious speed of 30 mph in a speed test at Baltimore in 1831. The B&O stopped using horses to pull its carriages on July 31 of that year.



The railroad announced a competition for a locomotive specifically designed for the steep, curvy route it contemplated though the Allegheny Mountains. By 1832, the B&O stretched 137 miles west from Baltimore -- the world's longest stretch of railway.



Source: Various

    
    
    
    
      
  
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<pubDate><![CDATA[Thu, 18 Sep 2008 06:00:00 +0200]]></pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[RIAA Decries Attorney-Blogger as 'Vexatious' Litigator@Wired Top Stories]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/395704114/riaa-decries-at.html]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[The Recording Industry Association of America, which has sued dead people, children and those without computers for unlawful file sharing of copyrighted music, accuses one of the nation's few lawyers who work on behalf of RIAA defendants of practicing "vexatious conduct" because he has "consistently posted virtually every one of his baseless motions on his blog seeking to bolster his public relations campaign and embarrass" the RIAA.
    
    
    
    
  

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<pubDate><![CDATA[Thu, 18 Sep 2008 00:47:00 +0200]]></pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[Qaida's Propaganda Sites, Smacked Down@Wired Top Stories]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/395672568/al-qaedas-once.html]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[Al-Qaida's once-robust online propaganda network has taken a major
hit. The release of a 9/11 anniversary video was delayed by nearly a
week. And one of the most-popular video-distribution sites is
offline. One paper blames American bloggers. Online jihadists think
it was the CIA.
    
    
    
    
  

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<pubDate><![CDATA[Thu, 18 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0200]]></pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[Chrome on Mac and Linux Is Buggy and Unsupported, But It Works@Wired Top Stories]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/395619870/Chrome_on_Mac_and_Linux%3A_Buggy_and_Unsupported__But_it_Works]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[Thanks to the coders at the open source Wine project, experimental versions of Google's Chrome browser are available for Mac OS X and Linux. These builds, dubbed Crossover Chromium, come well before Google's official releases, and they are a little half-baked. But if you can't wait to run Chrome on your Mac, now's your chance.
    
    
    
    
  

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<pubDate><![CDATA[Wed, 17 Sep 2008 22:45:00 +0200]]></pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[High Prices Stifle iPhone Demand in India and Japan@Wired Top Stories]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/395694839/apple-stumbles.html]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[High prices and the lack of strategy taking into account local market realities is killing sales of the iPhone in Asia.
    
    
    
    
  

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<pubDate><![CDATA[Wed, 17 Sep 2008 22:21:00 +0200]]></pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[Open Source Intel Rocks, But It's Classified@Wired Top Stories]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/395412233/download-hayden.html]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[The head of the CIA doesn't want you to know what he watches on TV. So-called "open source" intelligence -- tidbits taken from newspapers, internet postings, and TV shows -- may come from unclassified material, but the CIA chef says the finished products are too sensitive for average folks to see.
    
    
    
    
  

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<pubDate><![CDATA[Wed, 17 Sep 2008 17:45:00 +0200]]></pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[Gallery: Sci-Fi-Inspired Concept Ships Show Future of Travel@Wired Top Stories]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/394858926/gallery_conceptships]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[: Image: Nicolas Bouvier

Future worlds described by science fiction visionaries like Philip K. Dick, William Gibson and Robert Heinlein often included wildly inventive methods of transportation to other planets, galaxies and dimensions.



These brief glimpses into the possible future of travel were left largely to the readers' imaginations, but a flourishing group of dreamers, designers and illustrators are bringing those creations to life -- at least online.



The conceptships.org website run by Igo Tkac showcases these artists' renditions of spaceships and other fantastical creations. From retro-futuristic aerial attack machines to automated deep-sea treasure hunters, here are some of the coolest.



Left:



Nicolas Bouvier has always been fascinated with space travel. Growing up in Cape Canaveral, Florida, he vividly remembers watching shuttles and rockets launch. Now a game designer with credits including Prince of Persia: Warrior Within and Assassin's Creed, Bouvier also designs book covers. He fashioned this illustration for a French edition of a collection of Philip K. Dick short stories.


See more of Bouvier's work.

: Image: Jeffrey Turley
Jeffrey Turley's otherwordly aquatic vessel is an archeologist's -- or treasure hunter's -- dream. The underwater vehicle submerges to unexplored depths to locate lost artifacts and document unusual life forms.



Turley, a visual development artist at Walt Disney Animation Studios, said he dreams up his concept creations in his spare time.



"It was just for fun," said Turley. "I do these warm-ups now and then to keep my art fresh."





See more of Turley's work.

: Image: David Levy
For this ship's ethereal design, David Levy decided to upgrade an old concept -- the pirate ship -- with a sci-fi twist. Levy, art director of visual design studio SteamBot Studios, envisioned a space boat voyaging across the universe undetected, thanks to advanced disguise technologies that would keep the craft hidden from enemies.



Additionally, the expansive wings of the sleek ship are solar-powered and can be rotated to face the sun as the ship travels. Even the ship's captain has a revamped first mate: "The bird on the shoulders of the pirate is a robot," said Levy. "Which is why it does not need any breathing apparatus."


See more of Levy's work.

: Image: Ben Mauro
Although 23-year-old designer Ben Mauro painted this haunting vessel as an assignment for an art class, sketching and illustrating concept ships is an avid pastime of his.



Mauro based this ship's bulbous skeleton on shapes formed by musical notes and rhythmic formations. According to Mauro, the cruiser's main purpose would be largely for surveying foreign lands, exploring unknown areas and conducting reconnaissance missions. 




See more of Mauro's work.

: Image: Michal Jelinek
Industrial designer Michal Jelinek came up with this cargo ship concept as part of an instructional lecture for his students.



"The main purpose of this ship is to deliver goods across the planet and to outer space," said Jelinek. The carrier, with its powerful jet engines positioned on the hull for maximum steering control, would also be capable of navigating extreme atmospheric conditions, he said.



See more of Jelinek's work.

: Image: Joel Carlo Aymat
Multimedia artist Joel Carlo Aymat pieced together this clover-shaped ship while experimenting with his favorite graphic applications, Photoshop and ZBrush.



Aymat pictured it as a perfect vehicle for everyday intergalactic traveling -- though he still needs to concoct a fuel-efficient power source. "It would probably be a pretty snazzy hybrid commuter," said Aymat. "It'd be like the Toyota FT-HS of space travel!"



See more of Aymat's work.

: Image: Jake Parker
When Jake Parker isn't at his day job developing special effects for big-budget animated films like Ice Age and Robots, he's bringing his own creations to life in comic books.



This vessel would compete in aerial death matches, so Parker envisioned a vehicle with superior speed and lethal attack functions.



"I love the designs of pre-WWII racers," said Parker, who works as a designer for high-end CGI firm Blue Sky Studios. "Their sleek lines and full shapes always appealed to me."



A bright yellow paint job with black racing stripes gave way to the craft's nickname -- The Wasp.




See more of Parker's work.

: Image: Theodor Waern
Swedish concept artist Theodor Waern took inspiration from dystopian sci-fi thrillers Aliens and Terminator to illustrate a menacing battleship for deploying troops to and from pockets of action.



Dubbed the "Ferro," Waern's war machine is equipped with weapons and can carry up to eight passengers and a pilot. 



See more of Waern's work.

    
    
    
    
  

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<pubDate><![CDATA[Wed, 17 Sep 2008 06:00:00 +0200]]></pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[Sept. 17, 1683: Van Leeuwenhoek Gives Us Reason to Brush and Floss@Wired Top Stories]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/394858925/dayintech_0917]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[1683: Anton van Leeuwenhoek writes a letter to Britain's Royal Society describing the "animalcules" he observed under the microscope. It's the first known description of bacteria.



Van Leeuwenhoek had a varied career in his hometown of Delft, Netherlands. He earned money with stints as fabric merchant, surveyor, wine assayer and minor city official. He also served as trustee of the estate of painter Jan Vermeer, who died bankrupt.



One thing he did not do was invent the microscope, regardless of his glorious association with that instrument. Nor did his well-known contemporary, the Englishman Robert Hooke. The compound microscope (using an ocular and an objective lens in series) was invented in the 1590s, some four decades before their birth.



Van Leeuwenhoek, in fact, didn't even use a compound microscope. Despite the eventual superiority of the concept, the compound designs of his time couldn't produce a clear image at much more than 20x or 30x magnification.



After seeing Hooke's illustrated and very popular book Micrographia, van Leeuwenhoek learned to grind lenses some time before 1668, and he began building simple microscopes. This jack-of-all-trades became a master of one.



His simple microscope design used a single lens mounted in a brass plate. A sharp point held the specimen for examination. One screw moved the specimen into position in front of the lens, and another screw moved it backward or forward into focus.



(Fewer than 10 of  van Leeuwenhoek's original microscopes survive, but you can use these plans to build a replica if you're so inclined.) 



Van Leeuwenhoek had to hold the 3- or 4-inch instrument close to his eye. Besides good lighting, it required sharp eyesight and a fair dose of patience. Van Leeuwenhoek had both. He built the best microscopes of his day, achieving magnifications above 200x. 



Delft's deft optician also had a fair dose of curiosity. He started writing letters to England's Royal Society in 1673, with descriptions of what he saw. One letter in 1674 detailed his observations of lake water, in which he detected green spiral algae.



The Royal Society translated van Leeuwenhoek's letters from Dutch and published them in English and Latin. His missive of Sept. 17, 1683, detailed how he took plaque from between his teeth and from four other people, including two who had never cleaned their teeth. It was, he wrote, "a little white matter, which is as thick as if 'twere batter." Continuing:

I then most always saw, with great wonder, that in the said matter there were many very little living animalcules, very prettily a-moving. The biggest sort ... had a very strong and swift motion, and shot through the water (or spittle) like a pike does through the water. The second sort ... oft-times spun round like a top ... and these were far more in number.

The "unbelievably great company of living animalcules ... were in such enormous numbers," van Leeuwenhoek wrote, "that all the water ... seemed to be alive." These are among the first recorded observations of living bacteria.

Van Leeuwenhoek was also the first to see foraminifera fossils in minerals. He discovered blood cells (confirming William Harvey's work on circulation a few decades earlier) animal sperm cells, nematodes and rotifers.

Van Leeuwenhoek sent more than just letters to London. He sent specimens, and some of his original samples were rediscovered in 1981 in the strong room of the Royal Society. Astonishingly, they were so well prepared that they could still be examined under modern microscopes.

So, van Leeuwenhoek's place in history is not as the inventor of anything, but as a scientist, the founder of experimental microbiology. 

Source: University of California Museum of Paleontology
    
    
    
    
  

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<pubDate><![CDATA[Wed, 17 Sep 2008 06:00:00 +0200]]></pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[Hollywood Control of DVD-Copying at Crossroads@Wired Top Stories]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/394658968/hollywoods-grip.html]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[With the advent of illicit BitTorrent trackers and nefarious open source decryption software, Hollywood has been slowly losing its grip on the encrypted DVD. Now legitimate companies, such as RealNetwoks, are allowing their customers to make copies of their DVDs, and the courts are allowing it. All of which is placing Hollywood's control of the DVD in a crossroads.
    
    
    
    
  

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<pubDate><![CDATA[Tue, 16 Sep 2008 23:24:00 +0200]]></pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[VMWare Fusion 2 Shows Off New Tricks for Running Windows on a Mac@Wired Top Stories]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/394508864/Fusion_2_Upgrade_Brings_Mac_and_Windows_Harmony]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[The new release of VMWare's Fusion, which lets Mac users run Windows
applications on their Mac OS X desktops, has several new features, including
support for multiple monitors, folder sharing between operating systems and
better support for games. And if you bought an older version of the
software, Fusion 2 is a free upgrade.
    
    
    
    
  

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<pubDate><![CDATA[Tue, 16 Sep 2008 21:30:00 +0200]]></pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[Leopard Gets Bug Fixes Galore With Mac OS X Upgrade@Wired Top Stories]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/394521706/OS_X_Update_Packed_With_Bug_Fixes_and_Improvements]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[Apple has pushed out an incremental upgrade to its Mac OS X operating
system, fixing many nagging bugs like MacBook Air glitches, Time Machine
hiccups, iPhone support problems and poor syncing reliability in iCal and
Address Book. Also, those struggling with Apple's much-maligned MobileMe
service will see some improvements under Mac OS X 10.5.5, according to the
company.
    
    
    
    
  

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<pubDate><![CDATA[Tue, 16 Sep 2008 19:00:00 +0200]]></pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[Sept. 16: Jobs Quits Apple in 1985, Returns in 1997@Wired Top Stories]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/393860684/dayintech_0916]]></link>
<description><![