An asteroid roughly 64 to 140 meters wide -- about the size of a city block -- will be zipping past the Earth today and you can watch a live show of the event from the Slooh Space Camera consortium starting at 12:45 p.m. Pacific/3:45 p.m. Eastern.
Follow Underwire's up-to-the-minute coverage of this year's South by Southwest interactive, film and music festival.
OsteoFab is the coolest 3-D printed material you'd never want to use. Invented by plastics research firm Oxford Performance Materials (OPM), this first-of-its-kind polyketone can be used by 3-D printers to repair large sections of a damaged skull. It was recently cleared for use by the FDA and is being used in critical surgical procedures all over the world.
Sky-watchers can enjoy a spectacular show this weekend as comet Pan-STARRS streaks overhead. Viewers can see the comet as it brightens during the next few days by looking to the west above the horizon just after sunset. If any amateur astronomers out there snap some great pics and drop us a line. We'd love to see them.
For this year's South by Southwest, Mondo asked a slew of artists to do their own interpretations of
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Each week, Wired Design brings you a photo of one of our favorite buildings, showcasing boundary-pushing architecture and design involved in the unique structures that make the world's cityscapes interesting. This week: Sweden's Turning Torso.
Save your international friends money with a local number. Because everyone needs a local number in Sweden.
A federal appeals court for the first time ruled Friday that U.S. border agents do not have carte blanche authority to search the cellphones, tablets and laptops of travelers entering the country -- a "watershed" decision in the court's own terms and one at odds with the policies of the Obama administration.
The latest BlackBerry 10 handsets could have been really cool dual-screen smartphones. Instead, they?re the same ol? rectangle everyone else is using.
Autodesk's CEO sees the possibility of the powerhouse 3-D design software firm getting involved with hardware. No, they're not planning an imminent launch for a new phone or a set of architecture-analyzing glasses. But Carl Bass, who's helmed the two billion dollar corporation since 2006, admits that the delineation between making virtual and physical products is eroding, and that has created opportunities for companies who have traditionally focused on developing and selling software.
The National Transportation Safety Board has released its interim report on the investigation of a fire on board a Boeing 787 Dreamliner in January. The report does not yet specify a root cause for what caused the lithium-ion battery to catch fire, but does point to several potential contributing factors.
The experiences of eight platoons during the Afghanistan troop surge become an immersive experience with the Army's first interactive iPad book.
Cloud computing company Heroku may soon face a class action lawsuit after a New York startup uncovered some big performance problems with the online service where the company helps software coders build and run their software applications.
From the properties of dark matter to how the universe took shape shortly after the Big Bang, some of the universe?s oldest and best-kept secrets could soon be exposed as construction moves forward on three ?extremely large telescopes,? each with an expanse of mirrors bigger than a basketball court.
Watch as chimpanzees who have spent their lives undergoing medical research in laboratories step outside and see the sky for the first time in their new home at Chimp Haven.
A new contest, the 3D Rocket Engine Design Challenge, asks people to design open source 3-D printed rocket engines. The contest's sponsors hope to spur innovation and drive down costs. Whether or not this will truly be possible remains to be seen.
The harshest punishment an Air Force "superstar" convicted of molesting a sleeping woman will face is remaining a lieutenant colonel. Servicemember advocates are outraged.
Every time you throw food into a blender, you?re doing science. This seemingly mundane appliance is actually a cavitation chamber. Watch how the rips and explosions inside your blender transform chunks of veggies into a smooth mixture.
The internet sees your bloated webpages as damage and it's taking steps to route around them. Both Chrome and Opera have recently added an option for mobile users to connect to proxy servers, which slim down webpages before sending them over constrained mobile connections. The rise of proxy servers will likely mean that, in the future, developers will have even less control over how users access their sites.
Last year, NASA's Ames Research Center announced plans to launch an Google Android-powered nano-satellite into space. A test unit has already been sent into suborbit, and a space launch is set for April 4. But a team of British researchers has quietly beat Ames to the punch.
A large-scale study of a biomedical intervention that potentially offers novel options for women to protect themselves from HIV infection has, to the surprise of many researchers, failed. But the results say more about the participants' behavior than the effectiveness of the products being tested.
?Sitting has become the smoking of our generation.? I argued this in my recent talk at TED2013 and elsewhere while advocating for the concept of ?walking meetings? because we spend more time sitting than sleeping. The solution seems so obvious, yet it raises all sorts of ?But?? questions: ?How do you take notes?? ?Can we improve mobile meeting technology?? Technology was meant to facilitate meetings, not drive them. Technology was meant to connect us, yet it more often it disconnects us.
Ten years ago, finding a rash or bump "down there" might have provoked a wave of panic, a mental listing of sexual partners, and a frantic Google search for the symptoms for gonorrhea or the difference between a genital wart and an ingrown hair. Today, there's an app for that.
If you?ve been following the news this week, you could be forgiven for wondering why there have been so many stories about products that don?t yet exist, namely streaming services from Google and Apple. There've been so many stories about this because whatever deals are struck will define the music market for quite some time.Apple ...
Tomorrow sees the release of Oz The Great and Powerful, but does Sam Raimi's prequel miss the point of L. Frank Baum's original Oz stories?
For all its transformative potential, the high costs of 3-D printing continue keeping it from achieving mass consumer adoption. Now a new, open source device may change that with its ability to create plastic filament at a fraction of current prices.
Ubuntu -- possibly the most popular distribution of the open-source Linux operating system -- is striking out on its own. Canonical, the commercial company that oversees Ubuntu, has made a habit of building new Linux components from scratch, moving away from tools built and used by the larger open source community. That's rubbing many Linux developers and users than wrong way, and now, Canonical may have finally alienated these hard-core open sourcers.
EA, a technology company with a market capitalization of over $5 billion, could not muster the online servers necessary to handle an influx of players looking to build their cities in
They say inspiration can come from the most unlikely places. For a scientist at the Palo Alto Research Center, the Xerox-owned lab in Silicon Valley best it came from a tube of toothpaste. The result is a new manufacturing method that can help make solar panels more efficient and increase the energy density of batteries. It began when the lab was looking at ways it could use existing Xerox technology, in other areas. While watching the way the two or three materials help shape each other when they are squeezed through a toothpaste tube nozzle, an engineer had one of those "a-ha" moments. By squeezing through a print nozzle a silver paste surrounded by a sacrificial material that would eventually get burned off, researchers found they were able to get a very fine silver line—and in electronics, any type of fine, conducting line is usually good.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and Stanford University have partnered to save for posterity more than 15,000 software programs created in the early days of microcomputing. The 18-month project aims to make these titles, most of which were created between 1975 and 1995, available to researchers, and, eventually, to the general public. (See also ) "We don't really know what people will need this [old software] for, but we know this is important. This software is who we've become," said Barbara Guttman, computer scientist and director of NIST's (NSRL). "Spreadsheets have changed the way we live." In this 18-month project, NSRL will copy and dissect a software library of 15,000 titles from the Stephen M. Cabrinety Collection in the History of Microcomputing, held by the Stanford University Library. Considered to be one of the largest collections of obsolete software, this collection came into Stanford's possession in 1998 as part of its ongoing effort to preserve digital materials for research purposes.
LTE broadcast could make video and other content run better on smartphones and tablets, and the emerging technology has at least one highly motivated backer in mobile chipmaker Qualcomm. The system, based on the LTE mobile network standard, is designed to let carriers set aside part of their radio spectrum to deliver the same content to multiple subscribers. If enough people want that content, broadcasting is more efficient than sending a lot of individual streams, so it can bring customers higher quality or free up network capacity for other purposes. For Qualcomm, the prospect of LTE broadcast may sell more chips, such as its Snapdragon line of processors for mobile devices. But the technology also represents a chance for the San Diego company to salvage something valuable from a four-year dalliance with broadcasting that failed. The idea behind FLO TV was to over a dedicated network that carriers could resell to their subscribers and that devices could tap into if they had the right silicon and antennas. Users could tune into former TV channels in many major U.S. cities and watch a special lineup of shows, including some live TV, as it was broadcast over the airwaves. Monthly rates varied, but at one point Verizon Wireless charged US$15 per month for ten channels.
Sony chairman and former CEO Howard Stringer, who has been at the company since 1997, will be leaving the company in June. Stringer led Sony for seven years, facing harsh criticism as losses mounted before he was Speaking at an event at the Japan Society in New York on Friday, the executive said he would be leaving for a new offer, without divulging details. "A new world is opening up for me, too, one that allows me to complete my plan to retire from Sony, which I expect to do at the conclusion of my term later this year. That will allow me to move forward with new opportunities Ive been presented with lately," he said, according to a script of his comments provided to IDG News Service by Sony. Stringer moved to become chairman of Sony in June of last year. He was replaced by current Sony CEO Kazuo Hirai, who issued a statement thanking his predecessor. Like Stringer before him, Hirai has and job cuts to stem the company's losses.
Tech companies are playing a power grab and increasingly turning to lobbyists for a competitive edge. Several developments this week show that being adept at politics can be just as effective in gaining ground on rivals as making better products or pressing patent lawsuits. , is playing politics the tried and true American way by lobbying Congress. .
Technologies that end up improving lives and changing culture often seem trivial when they're brand new. Blogging, for example, began as a way to keep an online diary but has evolved to a medium that's transforming journalism and business. Social media started out as a way for teenagers and college students to flirt with one another, but it has become one of the primary ways people discover content online. Likewise, a brand-new generation of smart apps may appear to be limited toys for geeks and productivity enthusiasts. In fact, they represent first steps toward the future of all human-machine interaction -- a future in which we hold conversations with our computers and they get to know us, learn how to suggest things, solve some of our everyday problems and go out into the world doing chores on our behalf.
As Microsoft continues to push , its subscription software-as-a-service offering, a new survey underscores Redmond's diminishing hold on enterprise users. And the problem will only get worse as younger users enter the workplace, if a recent study at Princeton University is any indication. and received responses from 2719. There are a lot of interesting data points in the survey results, but here are the ones relevant to Microsoft and its growing struggle in the enterprise: OK, you might say. Many, maybe even most, of the respondents likely come from smaller businesses. Large organizations with a lot invested in licenses for Office software and a workforce hooked on Excel, PowerPoint, Word, and other Redmond apps understandably would be more willing to stay the course.
For as long as I can remember, WordPress has been synonymous with blog hosting—mostly consumer blog hosting. Although the company offered Pro plans for users who need more than the basics and enterprise options for the big boys, there was nothing in the middle for the SMB crowd. caters to small businesses needing a domain, storage, and a wide selection of themes for building a Web site. Essentially a bundle of premium upgrades, WordPress business includes not only site hosting and a free domain, but also live support (via chat, or email when chat isn't available), unlimited storage, and your choice of unlimited premium themes.