Stories Written By: Vince Beiser

• 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

• 12.17.07

  Screwing with Wine

  Your Wine May be Better off with a Screw Cap - but the Planet Isn't High technology is transforming how wines are made, as Ziya Tong found out. But there's another big change afoot in the world of wine that's a lot more obvious to the average drinker. Fr

• 11.19.07

  History is Crumbling

  A Guide to Some of the World's Most Endangered Archaeological Sites The preservationists at CyArk, a non-profit organization that uses laser scanners to record three dimensional digital images of endangered historic structures,  have their work cut

• 11.12.07

  Who'll Take Out the Space Trash?

  The Growing Mess of Orbital Debris Threatens Satellites, Space Missions - and your Roof As WIRED SCIENCE's Adam Rogers mulls launching his own satellite (you can watch the process here), he's got more than just the half-billion dollar price tag to worry

• 11.5.07

  Worldwide Water Worries

  Too Many People, Not Enough Water Water shortages are a looming potential crisis in the American Southwest (See Peak Water for that story). But they're already a dangerous reality in many other parts of the world where populations are growing and freshwa

• 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

• 10.22.07

  An Arm and a Leg?

  Lizards Can Replace Missing Limbs - Someday Maybe We Will, Too Medical scientists recently scored a major breakthrough when they successfully implanted several people with the world's first laboratory-grown bladders. (See the whole story on WIRED Science

• 10.15.07

  Physics for Pitchers

  Why Does a Curveball Curve? What makes a curveball curve and a slider slide? Basic aerodynamics, as manipulated by a skillful pitcher. Three forces act on a spinning baseball as it flies toward the plate: the downward pull of gravity, the slowing drag o

• 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

• 9.21.07

  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

• 9.18.07

  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