Tag: Technology

• 3.24.08

  GeekDad: Soda Bottle Water Rocket

  Build your own Mini Cape Canaveral Have you ever wanted to launch your own rocket? Well, now you can, with little more than a two liter soda bottle, wire hangers, a bicycle pump and some PVC pipe. Watch GeekDad Dylan Tweney and his helpers, Nelson and Be

• 2.4.08

  Maker Faire

  Inventors Build, Craft, Hack and Play Welcome to Austin, Texas, host city of 2007’s Maker Faire. If this event doesn’t sound familiar, picture a huge gathering of nerds and geeks who have just crawled out of their basements to show you what t

• 2.4.08

  GeekDad: Cigar Box Guitar

  Play Music with your own Custom Guitar Have you ever wanted to build your own guitar? Forget Gibson and Yamaha - you can create your own custom design in a single afternoon with less than $20 and a cigar box. The only remaining challenge will be finding

• 12.24.07

  WIRED LivingHome

  The Dwelling of the Future is Here - Well, in Los Angeles, Anyway Steven Glenn has an idea that buildings - the ones you live in and the ones you work in - could help save the planet. Glenn is the founder of LivingHomes, a company that develops modern, p

• 12.24.07

  The Quiet Zone

  One of the Few Places Left Where Wireless is Regulated In the remote hills of Virginia and West Virginia, a 13,000-square-mile area is one of the few places in the US where wire-less communications are not allowed. It's called the Quiet Zone. Astronome

• 12.24.07

  Perfect Water

  How Physics and Computers bring an Ocean to Life for the Movies Water seems like simple stuff, even when it's in motion. But try to fake it - like let’s say for a multimillion-dollar summer blockbuster movie - and you’ve got a problem. Until

• 12.24.07

  Electromagnetic Traffic Jam

  Wireless Transmissions are Tripping over Each Other as the Airwaves get more Crowded In the13,000-square-mile chunk of Virginia and West Virginia known as the Quiet Zone, technicians are at work every day tracking down and shutting down any electronic g

• 12.18.07

  Mixed Feelings

  Scientists Rewire the Brain through the Tongue Most of us see with our eyes, but what if we could see with other parts of our body, too? The idea may seem ridiculous, but it's already been done. Nearly a half-century ago, maverick neuroscientist Paul Bac

• 12.17.07

  Space Junkyard

  Second-hand Space Parts may take us Back to the Moon Norton Sales, a salvage yard and spare-parts shop on a rough industrial strip in North Hollywood, California, looks like the kind of place you'd go on a weekend afternoon to find a replacement item for

• 12.17.07

  Luis von Ahn: Human Computation

  Inventing Guilt-free Computer Games Without a doubt, computer games are addictive;  after hours of playing, it’s easy to feel guilty for not doing something more useful with your time. But what if computer games were useful in that they helped

• 12.17.07

  Crossing Sensory Boundaries

  Scientists Learn About Other Forms of Brain Plasticity from People with Mixed Senses Some people see colors when they hear music. Others taste strange flavors when they look at letters of the alphabet. And still others visualize numbers as if the digits

• 11.19.07

  GeekDad: Japanese Robots

  One Dad Builds Killer Robots in his Spare Time One might say that Japanese engineer Nao Maru has a large extended family. Besides his wife and three kids, he has a bunch of additional bodies running around his home. But they aren't human: They're robots.

• 11.19.07

  Where's My Rocketbelt?

  The Cult of the Personal Jet Pack Lives On If there's one enduring iconic image of the techno-utopian world of tomorrow, it's the rocket belt. For three quarters of a century, comics, films, TV, and books have told us that in the future we'd all be rocke

• 11.19.07

  Video Lab: Keepon Dancing

  Rocking Out with Japan's Cutest Robot He's tiny, yellow, as squishy as the Pillsbury Dough Boy, and over a million people have downloaded a video of him dancing to a Spoon song. The little robot called Keepon is much more than just another online time-w

• 11.12.07

  GeekDad: UFO

  Float Around your Backyard on your very own UFO Have you ever wanted to build your own UFO? It's a surefire way to freak out your neighbors, who would spill out of their homes in droves to either marvel at the spectacle, or stare at you and shake their h

• 11.12.07

  Stressed Out

  Getting Structures to Inspect Themselves Every man-made structure can fail. And when we're talking about something like a bridge or an airplane, the results can be catastrophic - like the I-35 bridge that collapsed in Minnesota last August. Because brid

• 11.5.07

  Audio Files

  For almost a century, sound was recorded using only analog techniques like magnetic tape. Over  the past 20 years, however, digital technology has almost wiped analog recording off the map, and not everyone is happy about it. Analog purists argue th

• 11.5.07

  Peter Diamandis: Space Entrepreneur

  Revolution Through Competition Peter Diamandis has a motto: “The best way to predict the future is to create it yourself.”  For Diamandis, the future is best created through competition.  Founder of the X Prize Foundation, Diamandis

• 10.29.07

  Ziya Goes To NextFest

  WIRED Science Intrepid Correspondent Finds the Future at WIRED's Annual Tech Expo It's a combination world's fair, technology convention, and geek party: every year, Wired magazine hosts Nextfest, where innovators from around the world show off some of t

• 10.29.07

  Virtual Paleontology

  High-Powered X-Rays Take You Inside a Dinosaur's Skull Paleontologist Nick Fraser knew he had found something special when he unearthed a particular fossil in a Virginia rock quarry. He'd been digging up fossils there for nearly a decade, but this one wa

• 10.29.07

  ShotSpotter

  Serving on the Oakland, California police department is no easy task—on average, the department responds to three firearm-related crimes each day. Considering that many residents don't inform the police of gunshots they have heard, how do the police

• 10.29.07

  X-Raying Ancient History

  Digital Scanner Brings Fossils Into 3-D View - and Exposes Fake Ones When researchers at an advanced computer scanning project at the University of Texas at Austin helped discover a previously unknown type of winged dinosaur recently, it made headlines a

• 10.29.07

  Watermelon Thumping

  High School Students Use Soundwaves to Test for Sweetness Everyone has thumped a watermelon at some time in their life. Old timers will tell you that  a ripe one makes a deep thud, while others may tell you to listen for a resonating ping. As part o

• 10.22.07

  Meteorite Hunters

  Searching for Space Rocks in Kansas Every year, thousands of asteroids sneak into our atmosphere, breaking up into smaller rocks that sometimes make it all the way to the ground. Most of the time, they go unnoticed, but once in a while, a big one gets th

• 10.15.07

  Hot Wheels

  High Tech Wheelchairs for Racers, Athletes...and Dancers? Think a wheelchair can only help a disabled person get down the street? Think again. Engineers, artist and wheelchair users are developing new conveyances that let their riders do everything from

• 10.15.07

  Got Clones?

  The Controversial World of Animal Cloning To some people, "cloning" might as well be a four-letter word. But in less than a year, it could become routine in some families—families of livestock animals, that is. Last year, the U.S. Food an

• 10.15.07

  Cloning: About More Than Just Meat

  Cloning Regulations Could Have Implications for the Economy and Public Health Chances are it won't be long before our Big Macs come from cloned cows or their offspring. While it's unlikely that the beef itself will hurt us, some experts argue the issue o

• 10.15.07

  Constructing an Infrasound Detector

  High School Science Teacher Reports From the Island of Maio Some 300 miles off the West Coast of Senegal lies a very small, dusty island named Maio. It is here that Professor Michael Hedlin of the University of California at San Diego built an infrasoun

• 10.10.07

  fMRI - Neuroscience Go-To Technology

  Can Detailed Brain Images Really Show Us When We’re Lying? Functional magnetic resonance imaging—fMRI—was all but unknown a decade ago. Today it’s the go-to technology for neuroscience, allowing phenomenally detailed images of the

• 9.27.07

  The Engineer's Disease

  Asperger's Syndrome May Help Make Some Scientists Who They Are Nobody wants to have Asperger's syndrome, a form of autism that limits a person's ability to communicate, often leaving them socially isolated and mired in weird-seeming behavior. But the dis

• 9.27.07

  Remote-Controlled Robot Surgery

  Doctors May Soon Operate From Miles Away Never mind RoboCop; the future belongs to RoboDoc. Sophisticated robots are already performing surgery in operating rooms around the world -- and may soon be saving lives on battlefields, underwater and in outer

• 9.25.07

  Transcript: Paul Kedrosky Interview

  Paul Kedrosky is a venture capitalist. That’s someone who connects investors to people with ideas and in spite of the bursting of the dotcom bubble back in the year 2000, remember how it got all poor a few years back? Well, there is still plenty of

• 9.23.07

  Botnets for Rent

  What’s the Cost of a Hijacked Computer? Botnets—networks of "zombie” computers that have been hijacked to perform dirty tasks—aren't just for computer whizzes anymore. Today, people who know how to do little more than check t

• 9.21.07

  Fired Up

  New Techniques and Technology to Fight Fire For centuries, people have fought fires with the same basic formula: Put the wet stuff on the hot stuff. But today, firefighters are using new techniques and technology to battle their old enemy  And they

• 9.21.07

  Fighting Fire from Above

  Airborne High Tech Gives Firefighters a Hand Today's firefighters aren't only equipped with high-tech tools on the ground--they've also got them in the sky. Networked NASA satellites spot wildfires and alert the US Forest Service. Closer to Earth, unmann

• 9.21.07

  Lie Detectors and Civil Liberties

  Paul Root Wolpe on Bioethics What if the fMRI worked perfectly as a lie detector? Wouldn't that be a great thing for courts and cops? What downside could there be to knowing whenever someone isn't telling the truth? Plenty, says Paul Root Wolpe, a profes

• 9.21.07

  Lie Detectors

  Can Brain Scans Keep Us Honest? The polygraph machine is still our best tool to tell when someone is lying - but it's based on technology that has barely changed since the 1930s. Now, there may be a better way to separate truth from fiction: a brain scan

• 9.18.07

  Cybertarget: USA?

  How Vulnerable Is America to Online Attack? The online assault that temporarily paralyzed the tiny Baltic nation of Estonia last spring may have been the first real battle inaugurating the era of cyber-warfare. But that attack was a relatively minor nuis

• 9.17.07

  World War 2.0

  Europe's Most Wired Country Under Hacker Attack Call it the first battle in a new era of cyber-warfare. Earlier this year, the entire country of Estonia was hit with a paralyzing attack on its Internet infrastructure that shut down the websites of gover

• 9.17.07

  Photosynth

  Snazzy New Software Gets the Whole Picture There must be millions of amateur snapshots of the Grand Canyon floating around on the Web. What if you could link them all together into a single image of the whole place, one that you could view from any angle

• 9.17.07

  Face Reader

  Children with Asperger’s Syndrome Test Facial-Recognition Software In our everyday communication, we are constantly monitoring other people's facial and body cues to discern whether we are enrapturing them, boring them, or confusing them—such

• 9.17.07

  Paul Kedrosky: Venture Capitalist

  Taking Science from Labs to Market  A new metal alloy that bounces - and can be used to make high-powered golf clubs? Hopping robots that right themselves if they fall over? These are just some of the projects Paul Kedrosky has helped to midwife fro

• 9.17.07

  RoboDoc

  Robot Surgeons are Fully Operational If you're getting surgery these days, chances are good the scalpel will be wielded by a doctor with nerves of steel - literally. Across the country, a growing number of operations are now performed with the help of ro