Supercomputers aren't what they used to be. The Chinese are building a supercomputer with their own microprocessors, shunning American chip giants Intel and AMD. The Spanish are building one with cellphone chips. And this week, the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) officially plugged in the first supercomputer that uses flash memory for storage rather than good old fashioned spinning disks. Naturally, they it call it Gordon. As in Flash Gordon.
Noise-cancelling receivers are a tricky bunch. Overdo it, and the eery silence on the line sounds like your call has been dropped. But if it's too low, excess street noise or nearby loudmouths could drown out whoever you're speaking with. Apple seems to have found just the right balance, giving the user control over their experience, according to a recently published patent.
For a shot heard around the world, the cannonball misfire only really rocked one suburban neighborhood. Now a map lets you see the wayward projectile's path through Dublin, California.
Reading is changing. And arguably, even more than e-readers, tablets, or "readers' tablets," smartphones are changing it.
For eight weeks, two groups of students in Los Angeles and Montreal worked together to help a tiny plush robot named Laika reach her spaceship as part of . A team of photographers documented the robot's journey, fueled by the students' creative output.
A replica Occupy Wall Street encampment created as a set for just blocks from Zuccotti Park gets swarmed by real Occupy activists, rallied to the scene by organizers using the #mockupy hashtag on Twitter.
The car in question is the 1 Series M Coupe, and we think it's the best BMW we've ever driven.
The iPad isn't the only mobile device that's well-suited for visually rich, touch-based magazine experiences. Android tablets have potential in this arena too, and Google is getting in on the action with its new Currents app, which launches on not only Android, but also iPhone and iPad.
That's the best way to measure the efficiency of a data center? No one really knows. But there's no shortage of IT minds trying to figure it out. Last month, in partnership with Intel, data center management software vendor iTRACS took up the challenge of developing a metric -- a single number -- that will allow data center operators to assess the efficiency of their facilities relative their bottom line, and the company is only the latest in a string of organizations trying to develop similar metrics.
HP announced Friday that its WebOS mobile platform would be made open source. It?s a major decision that essentially sends the software to a slow, quiet death.
As if the old-timey lyrics of some Christmas carols weren't confusing enough, viral video pros Rhett McLaughlin and Link Neal have run a few chestnuts through YouTube's closed-captioning tool to make the songs almost completely intelligible. And hilarious. (Sorry, little baby Jesus.)
You may best know Zite as a personalized iPad magazine that learns from your interests to intelligently provide you with just the right content. The app has now been repackaged for the iPhone to deliver a similar customized experience on the small screen.
As researchers get ever closer to finding an Earth-like exoplanet, some scientists are starting to think about how to spot smaller things, like exomoons.
What would Facebook have looked like in 1997? Relying on memories of CRT monitors, limited bandwidth and 1-pixel gifs, two artists have created an imaginary past for Facebook, Google+ and YouTube -- the social networking world that never was.
We soldier on without Game|Life honcho Chris Kohler, who claims he was working overtime raising money for sick kids. Fear not! Wired senior editors Chris Baker and Peter Rubin and Wired.com managing editor Marty Cortinas recruit a replacement.
The MythBusters had a cannonball get out of control. How fast was the cannonball going? Does size matter? And how would you stop a cannonball, anyway? Dot Physics blogger Rhett Allain weighs in.
The moon will be turning a vivid red color to viewers in western North America during a total lunar eclipse on Saturday, Dec. 10.
Back in September, as part of the preparation for TOC 2012, I sat down for an interview with O'Reilly's Mac Slocum to talk about big trends in digital publishing and how they intersect with emerging issues across media and technology.
Can there be any doubt that Steve Jobs was a modern-day Renaissance man ? a latter day da Vinci, brimming with creativity, invention, aesthetic and business acumen! If Jobs had been around 200 years ago he would have designed cathedrals, structures so breathtaking no one could have imagined them possible until they saw what he had brought to life.
When London cab drivers successfully learn a mental atlas of London's spaghetti streets, the activity causes structural changes in the brain, affects memory and creates a greater volume of nerve cells in the brain's hippocampus.
Photos have surfaced allegedly depicting the secretive RQ-170 Sentinel spy drone that went down eastern Iran last week, apparently while spying on Tehran's nuke sites for the CIA.
Can a card game replicate the excitement and strategy of boxing? Maybe not, but it can make for a fun time!
Brook & Hunter?s Mo-Tool is quite a monstrosity, but you can?t frown on it forever—it has an ax!
It doesn't matter which location-based service you use, but if you want to claim the crown of the ultimate Wired Geek, you need to check in at these nine supremely nerdy locations.
. David Fincher takes angst and gloom and makes it beautiful.
It seemed like a good idea at the time. It improved engine performance and reduced one kind of pollution. But the best-laid plans ...
Coming soon to the Afghanistan-Pakistan border: a State Department security contractor, running vague "aviation" operations to stop the flow of drugs, insurgents, and weapons. The "aviation adviser" is arriving just in time for a downward spiral in the Washington-Islamabad relationship, prompted by a huge aviation accident that left 24 Pakistanis dead. What could go wrong?
As he satirizes hip hop from the inside, North Carolina native Affion Crockett proves his gift for finding the person inside the persona.
The Jawbone Up has great potential as a health and wellness gadget. And it worked fabulously -- until it stopped working entirely.
Fecal transplants that cure intestinal diseases are minimally invasive, reliable, cheap and have a durable clinical history. Ick factor-powered regulations, however, are blocking treatments. Superbug blogger Maryn McKenna reports.
jd writes "There has been research for some time showing that London cab driver brains differ from other people's, with considerable enlargement of those areas dealing with spacial relationships and navigation. Follow-up work showed it wasn't simply a product of driving a lot (PDF). However, up until now it has been disputed as to whether the brain structure led people to become London cabbies or whether the brain structure changed as a result of their intensive training (which requires rote memorization of essentially the entire street map of one of the largest and least-organized cities in the world). Well, this latest study answers that. MRI scans before and after the training show that the regions of the brain substantially grow as a result of the training, and they're quite normal beforehand. The practical upshot of this research is that — even for adult brains, which aren't supposed to change much — what you learn structurally changes your brain. Significantly."
OverTheGeicoE writes "The Transportation Security Administration is getting a lot of negative attention, much of it from the U.S. government itself. A recent congressional report blasted the TSA for being incompetent and ineffective (PDF). A bill to force the TSA to reduce its screening of active duty U.S. military members and their families was approved unanimously by the House of Representatives. After a TSA employee was arrested for sexually assaulting a woman while in uniform, a bill has been introduced to prevent TSA agents from wearing police-style uniforms and badges or using the title 'officer.' The bill's sponsor calls these practices 'an insult to real cops.' The FBI is getting involved by changing its definition of rape in a way that might expose the TSA's 'enhanced pat-down' screeners to prosecution. Lastly, public support for the TSA's use of X-ray body scanners drops dramatically when people realize there is a cancer risk."
snydeq writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister writes in favor of new programming languages, given the difficulty of upgrading existing, popular languages. 'Whenever a new programming language is announced, a certain segment of the developer population always rolls its eyes and groans that we have quite enough to choose from already,' McAllister writes. 'But once a language reaches a certain tipping point of popularity, overhauling it to include support for new features, paradigms, and patterns is easier said than done.' PHP 6, Perl 6, Python 3, ECMAScript 4 — 'the lesson from all of these examples is clear: Programming languages move slowly, and the more popular a language is, the slower it moves. It is far, far easier to create a new language from whole cloth than it is to convince the existing user base of a popular language to accept radical changes.'"
New submitter Minion of Eris writes "It seems NASA can't keep track of its goodies. A recent audit discovered that moon rocks have been missing for 30 years, loaned displays have gone unreturned, and book-keeping has been generally poor. From the article: 'In a report issued by the agency's inspector general on Thursday, NASA concedes that more than 500 pieces of moon rocks, meteorites, comet chunks and other space material were stolen or have been missing since 1970. That includes 218 moon samples that were stolen and later returned and about two dozen moon rocks and chunks of lunar soil that were reported lost last year. NASA, which has lent more than 26,000 samples, needs to keep better track of what is sent to researchers and museums, the report said. The lack of sufficient controls "increases the risk that these unique resources may be lost," the report concluded.'"
Several readers sent word of HP's announcement that the company will be contributing webOS to the open source community. According to HP's press release, they will continue to be active in webOS's development, and one of their goals will be to avoid fragmentation. ENYO, the application framework for webOS, will also go open source in the near future.
adeelarshad82 writes "Last month Google released the Android 4.0 'Ice Cream Sandwich' code base to the general public and manufacturers but it may be a while yet before it's actually rolled out to existing phones. In an attempt to explain why it takes so long, Motorola and Sony Ericsson shed some light on the process. Motorola described the long testing process involved in getting the new code out there, whereas Sony focused on explaining the time-consuming certification process."
misterbarnacles writes "Can space travel be democratized? Kristian von Bengtson and Copenhagen Suborbitals think so, and they're building a DIY manned suborbital spacecraft to prove it. 'Bengtson describes the craft as "a half sized Apollo-shaped space capsule with a diameter of 2 meters capable of serving one (or two) persons." When complete, Bengtson hopes the suborbital craft will convey a human passenger higher than 62 miles above sea level, allowing him the rare opportunity to escape Earth’s bonds and view the heavens from the ionosphere.'"
An anonymous reader writes "Emily Steel at the Wall Street Journal writes about an unexpected twist for Google and Facebook, two companies that make their money selling ads next to content created by others. New companies like Sambreel Holdings are writing slick browser interfaces for popular sites like Facebook or Google and supporting themselves by injecting their own ads into the mix. Naturally, the original ad sellers aren't so happy about other ad sellers inserting themselves farther down the chain. Are we in the middle of an ad war where every company tries to inject their ads over the others? Will only the last 'ad supported' software in the chain win?"
dcblogs writes "An analysis of 745 applications for violations of good architectural and coding practices found that Java applications had the most problems and Cobol-built systems, the least. Some 365 million lines of code were analyzed by Cast Software to assess 'technical debt,' or the cost to fix the violations. Java was calculated at $5.42 per line of code, while Cobol did best at $1.26. Cobol code had the least number of violations because programmers 'have been beating on it for 30 years,' said Cast. As far as Java goes, 'there are many people going into Java now that really don't have strong computer science backgrounds,' said its chief scientist, Bill Curtis."
sciencehabit writes "Empathy lets us feel another person's pain and drives us to help ease it. But is empathy a uniquely human trait? For decades researchers have debated whether nonhuman animals possess this attribute. Now a new study shows that rats will free a trapped cagemate in distress. The results mean that these rodents can be used to help determine the genetic and physiological underpinnings of empathy in people."
New submitter sandeepabhat tips news that Android Market recently saw its 10 billionth app download, reaching the milestone less than a year after the App Store accomplished the same feat. New downloads through Android Market are proceeding at a rate of roughly 1 billion per month. Google has now created an infographic to break down the information further. Games outpace any other type of app, accounting for more than a quarter of all downloads. The top five countries in downloads-per-capita are South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, the U.S., and Singapore.