A wave of "hurricane-like" thunderstorms ripped across Indiana, Ohio, West Virginia, and Virginia on Friday night, leaving more than 3.5 million people without power and knocking out the US-East-1 data center operated by Amazon Web Services.…
The announcement that Com Hem of Sweden has cut a deal with TiVo this week shows how the TiVo strategy is rolling out in Europe and points to more and more deals being likely in the future. Expect it to drift outside of Europe soon, as well.…
Apple has been credited with the first smartphone, with creating the mobile application business and pioneering touch interfacing. None of these things are true: but actually the launch of the iPhone, five years ago, was a much bigger revolution than that.…
This week we discuss the Google X Lab computer that learned to recognise cats, the US army's plans to build a 50 billion watt laser canon, Ofcom's proposals for dealing with UK filesharers and the rest of the week in Wired news.
By: Nate Lanxon,
UK defence firm BAE Systems has come up with a positioning system that it says "could make GPS obsolete."
It's called Navigation via Signals of Opportunity (Navsop) and uses the different signals that populate the airwaves -- including Wi-Fi, TV and mobile phone signals -- to calculate the user's location. It can find your current position, down to within a few metres.
By: Mark Brown, Edited by: Duncan Geere
At last, one can rent tens of thousands of cores-worth of HPC teraFLOPS on demand from an HPC cloud.…
Nasa's black hole-hunting Nustar telescope has taken its first images, the sharpest ever photos of high energy x-rays in deep space.
The Nustar (Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array) observatory was launched on 13 June, with the main objective of documenting high-energy events in deep space, such as black holes. It is able to produce images with 100 times more sensitivity and 10 times more resolution than any other x-ray telescope, including its predecessors Chandra and XMM-Newton.
By: Liat Clark, Edited by: Olivia Solon
Google's new Chrome browser for iOS has stormed the iTunes download charts - hitting the top spot for free apps worldwide. Announced at a dev meeting yesterday, the mobile browser was quietly released in Apple's App Store on 26 June.…
As part of the slow death of Adobe's Flash Player, the company has announced it won't be making a certified version for Android's new 4.1 OS – aka Jelly Bean.…
Geologists from the University of Alberta have made a discovery that pushes the existence of animals back by 30 million years.
Life has been around on Earth for about 3.5 billion years, but actual animals -- multicellular, eukaryotic organisms -- are only half a billion years old. The oldest confirmed animal was a slug-like organism called Kimberella, dated at 555 million years old.
By: Mark Brown, Edited by: Duncan Geere
Governments have started to put ICANN's massive top-level domain name expansion under scrutiny, after the revelation of 1,930 applications for new naming suffixes two weeks ago.…
A UK review by the Royal Society and the Royal Academy of Engineering has concluded that fracking can be undertaken safely, as long as "best practices are implemented and robustly enforced through regulation."
Fracking (short for hydraulic fracturing) is a process where highly-pressurised liquid is fired into the ground, splintering rocks many hundreds of metres below the surface. Oil and gas escapes, which is then collected up for fuel.
By: Mark Brown, Edited by: Duncan Geere
RIM has reported disastrous quarterly results and is delaying the launch of the new BlackBerry 10 operating system until next year at the earliest.…
The rise of cloud based services and data centre proliferation has prompted Nextgen Networks to launch a premium grade transmission service connecting nominated data centres in mainland capital cities.…
France says farewell to the Minitel – the little box that connected a country http://t.co/NWowTTgo
News Corp has confirmed the heavily rumoured plan to split Rupert Murdoch's empire in two, with the company's publishing wing parting ways with the broadcasting and entertainment division. It also means Murdoch is further distancing himself from his beloved newspaper biz.…
A massive HP data centre in Colorado Springs is in danger of being destroyed by a wildfire raging near by.…
Imagine a future where you are demanded to declare to your ISP that you wish to view pornography online?…
The government’s long-awaited Open Data white paper, published this morning, introduces standards for “higher data usability”, according to the minister in charge.…
On the 11th of July at 10:30am we’re broadcasting live with Garry Meaburn, the operations effectiveness and tooling manager at Unilever, dishing out practical tips on how to build a dynamic IT operation using private cloud principles. Garry's currently a good way through this sizable project.…
BT Vision is the most complained about pay TV service in the UK, regulator Ofcom said, receiving nearly four times as many whinges in the first quarter of this year as Virgin Media and nine times as many as Sky.…
BT has revealed plans to test its lightning-fast "FTTP on Demand" broadband in areas like High Wycombe and Cornwall. This lets power users beg BT to link a fibre cable directly to their home.
BT already offers Fibre to the Cabinet (FTTC), where a fibre cable runs from the exchange to a roadside box nearer to end-users' premises. That gets you speeds of about 80Mbps. Run that fibre from the exchange to a router, and you'll get staggering speeds of up to 330Mbps.
By: Mark Brown, Edited by: Duncan Geere
The US army has successfully tested a laser device that shoots out 50 billion watt-powered bolts of lightning.
"We never got tired of the lightning bolts zapping our simulated targets," admitted George Fischer, a physicist leading the project at the Picatinny Arsenal research lab in New Jersey.
By: Liat Clark, Edited by: Duncan Geere
Earlier this week, BT announced the company's latest phased rollout of its fibre optic-cabling technology in the UK. Blighty's national telco has said that BT's Openreach engineers will be upgrading another 98 exchanges. However, the national telco declined to tell The Register the exact split between fibre-to-the-cabinet (FTTC) and fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) technology.…
Valve has released a free movie-making tool that allows you to make animated shorts inside the same engine that powers games like Left 4 Dead and Portal.
Source Filmmaker allows you to jump between the world of cartoony shooter Team Fortress 2, and a sophisticated movie editor. That means you can make characters move, jump and shoot just by aiming a camera at them and then playing the game as normal.
By: Mark Brown, Edited by: Duncan Geere
Joe Britt hands me his latest creation, a black ball with glittering LED lights around the middle, and implores me to examine it. He wants me to feel how solid and heavy the device is -- about a kilogram -- to experience the smooth operation of its moving parts, and to see the care used in laying out its internal electronics. It is a very analog moment, akin to how I felt buying my first audio receiver. Back then there were three tests: How did the music sound? How did the knobs feel when you turned them? How cool did it look in the store?
Britt wants me to respond this way. In our two hours together, with his partner Matt Hershenson, they bring up the intersection of technology and liberal arts -- as Apple's Steve Jobs liked to call it -- half a dozen times. Once, to make his point, Britt reminds me of record parties, those 1970s gatherings where teenagers lugged their music to friends' houses in milk crates.
By: Fred Vogelstein, Edited by: Ian Steadman
By: Charles Black, Sen.com, Edited by: Duncan Geere
Is it possible to have cloud and on-premise computing intermingled in a hybrid called the private cloud?…
In California at Google's I/O conference, the search giant has announced an intriguing ball-shaped media streaming device, running Android.
It's called the Nexus Q, and represents what Hugo Barra from Google calls: "a new era in consumer electronics." Barra added: "Software, hardware, and the cloud are opening up new possibilities," and said that it's the first hardware product that Google has built from the ground up -- as opposed to getting an existing technology company to build it, like it has with its phones and the Nexus 7 tablet.
Do consumers want a 7-inch tablet for consuming content? Google evidently thinks so, as it's launched one at its I/O conference in California.
"We wanted to design a Google experience that is optimized around all the content on Google Play," said Hugo Barra, announcing the Nexus 7. "We wanted you to be delighted when you access this content."
By: Duncan Geere,
At Google's I/O conference in California, the company has announced the latest edition of Android -- 4.1, codenamed Jelly Bean.
"Jelly Bean builds on what we created with Ice Cream Sandwich," said Hugo Barra, adding that the 100 million total activations of Android figure announced in 2011 has been quadrupled to 400 million.
By: Duncan Geere, Edited by: Liat Clark
Companies should move away from self-destructive, factory models of work where people are rewarded for arriving early and staying late, says Matt Mullenweg, founding developer of WordPress.com.
Speaking at the Guardian's Activate summit, he described the distributed working practices of WordPress's parent company Automattic, which are inspired by the Open Source movement. WordPress.com receives more than 340 million unique visitors per month, with 100,000 new websites set up each day.
"We have taken the best people from all over the world who are unified by a vision. We have people in 25 countries and 90 cities and don't even have a headquarters right now. I don't care how someone lives or how good their spoken English is. I do all of my interviews on Skype text chat -- all that matters is their work," he said.
By: Olivia Solon,
A material previously unknown to science has been discovered in a meteorite that struck Mexico some 40 years ago. The substance, named panguite, could be among the oldest minerals formed in the solar system.
The Allende meteorite exploded in the skies above Mexico in 1969, scattering its chemically-enriched guts over the state of Chihuahua. It's the largest carbonaceous chondrite (a class of primitive meteorites) found on Earth, and is one of the best-studied space rocks in history.
By: Mark Brown, Edited by: Duncan Geere
Customers of O2 hoping for an upgrade to Nokia's new 41-megapixel camera phone, the 808 PureView, are out of luck: O2 has decided not to offer the handset in the UK.
A spokesperson for O2 confirmed the decision to Wired.co.uk today, although didn't cite specific reasons for it. T-Mobile has also informed us that it has "no current plans" to offer the phone either.
By: Nate Lanxon, Edited by: Duncan Geere
Astronomers have spotted one of the rarest and most extreme galaxy clusters in the universe and, behind it, an object that shouldn't exist.
Galaxy clusters are collections of galaxies that orbit one another and are the most massive objects in the universe. The newly discovered cluster, first detected by the Hubble space telescope, is over 500 trillion times the mass of the sun. It is located approximately 10 billion light-years away. Because looking out into the distant cosmos means also looking back in time, the cluster formed during an era when the universe was a quarter its present age.
By: Adam Mann, Edited by: Ian Steadman
Online activism is not enough; you need to get people out onto the streets in order to have real-world political influence, argues Rick Falkvinge, founder of the Swedish Pirate Party.
Speaking on a panel at Guardian Activate, he said: "Discussing something online is not enough. You need to bring people out into the streets so that others can see people that they identify with or else people are not going to take a new movement to heart. You need to give people role models, using social markers and making people feel included."
By: Olivia Solon, Edited by: Duncan Geere
Movements such as Occupy have done a great job of inspiring people but haven't managed to achieve true, concrete change, according to John Moore, CEO of Government in The Lab.
Moore puts this down to a lack of centralised leadership. "There were more than 2000 Occupy protests but their sets of demands were very different and it was so decentralised that, although it has made a mark, nothing has really come out of it in terms of real change," he said.
By: Olivia Solon, Edited by: Duncan Geere
A US non-profit organisation has published a damning report detailing a long list of human rights abuses at the Chinese factories of technology manufacturer VTech.
The Institute for Labour and Global Human Rights commissioned a business research firm to investigate VTech's Dongguan factory, where 10,000 employees reportedly earn 70p an hour, stand up for 12 to 15 hours a day, are at times beaten by a police force-like team of security staff and forced to work mandatory overtime that exceeds China's statutory limit by 237 to 273 percent.
By: Liat Clark, Edited by: Duncan Geere
Roboticists from the Ishikawa Oku lab at the University of Tokyo have made a rock-paper-scissors robot, which cheats its way to a near-100-percent win-rate.
The robotic hand has three fingers, and can bend its pinkies into a first (rock) an outstretched palm (paper) and two fingers pointing out (paper). When it plays against a human, it makes the winning move every single time.
By: Mark Brown, Edited by: Duncan Geere
I'm in Edinburgh this week among 850 curious optimists at the fifth TEDGlobal event in the UK (and any pessimists among them are at least trying to sound like optimists).
There are guests and speakers here from around 71 countries, and the international mix -- you run into investors and social activists, a princess and a war photographer -- ensures magnificent serendipity. This remains one of the highest-calibre speaker events in the country, and it's a credit to Bruno Giussani, Chris Anderson, Tom Rielly, June Cohen and team that they continue to source some of the world's best (and often most unlikely) storytellers.
My notebook is too full to give you a verbatim breakdown of the first day's events. So instead, I'm going to share 20 things I've learned so far at TEDGlobal.
By: David Rowan, Edited by: Duncan Geere
We need a "macroscope" to allow us to see the detail and the long-range view simultaneously, according to Berg's CEO Matt Webb, speaking at the Guardian Activate summit.
A macroscope is, according to designer John Thackara, "something that helps us see what the aggregation of many small actions looks like when added together". His theory is that such a device could help to focus ideas in the same way that a microscope focuses light, because it's seldom true that experts have access to both the micro and the macro views simultaneously.
Webb mentioned Stewart Brand, who in 1966 campaigned to make Nasa turn their satellite cameras away from space and back towards Earth. He sold badges for 25 cents each asking "Why haven't we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?". He hoped that the image of our planet might be a powerful symbol. In 1968, Nasa took the first picture of Earth, followed by the famous Blue Marble picture in 1972. "Turning the satellites towards Earth made us look at ourselves as never before," Webb said.
He went on to explain that even the cleverest people in the world who can understand the human impact of the credit crunch cannot tell a cohesive story about the macroeconomic situation, because it is too big to see or grasp. Where is the picture of the whole financial system, he asked. A macroscope would allow us to see the both the human impact of the financial crisis and the globalised financial system at the same time.
"If you are close enough to see the thickness of a human hair, you can't see both ends of the hair at the same time," he added.
The same, he argued, applies to society. People need to be able to understand the role that their individual actions play in creating societal change. He talked about the fact that it took around 100 million man-hours to put a man on the Moon, and the same amount to build Wikipedia. These enormous human achievements are the result of many individual hours. "How do we choose between a Moon landing or an online encyclopaedia of the world's knowledge? It just sort of happens."
He then set a challenge to the audience to set aside just 100 hours to work on a project - "create soething, learn to sketch, learn a language, build a wall… do something." Following a previous talk where he had set the audience the same challenge, he had been contacted by a German man called Florian Sieper who had taken his 100 hours to organise an event called Porkcamp. This was an event which brought together farmers, abattoir owners, chefs, food critics and food lovers over a weekend to understand the supply chain of pork, from pig to table. Florian has since launched a business off the back of Porkcamp, called Foodtrips, which organises trips to understand where food comes from.
"He has created a business around something that he loves. Put aside 100 hours. Society is not something we are in, it is something that we do," he concluded.
By: Olivia Solon, Edited by: Duncan Geere
Apple has released a dedicated podcasts app for iPhone and iPad, which recommends top stations and automatically downloads new episodes.
The free app is a pretty basic podcatcher. To find podcasts, you can look through the iTunes catalogue, search for a favourite show, or tap "Top Stations" to find popular podcasts in topics like arts, video games, social sciences and sports.
By: Mark Brown, Edited by: Duncan Geere
Security researchers have uncovered a sophisticated, multi-tiered financial fraud ring that may have defrauded businesses, wealthy individuals and banks of tens of millions of dollars.…
General Assembly, a global education network for entrepreneurs, has launched its first campus outside of the US, in London.
General Assembly provides classes, events and courses that educate people in technology, business and design. Topics range from software development and fundraising, through to fireside chats with founders of successful companies. It has launched with the support of 10 Downing Street, UKTI and investors including Yuri Milner.
By: Olivia Solon, Edited by: Duncan Geere
Thirty-seven communications companies around the world have signed up to trial Hotspot 2 Wi-Fi roaming – and billing – using commercially available routers later this year, it has been announced. Hotspot 2 tech allows a mobile handset (or tablet, or ereader) to automatically detect, connect to and register with a Wi-Fi base station. But while Hotspot 2 has the potential to be more disruptive than Wi-Fi was, the disruption may already have started.…
In the first half of 2011, Microsoft made a series of changes at the top of the team running Windows Azure, its cloud.…
Analysis First it was Apple and Foxconn, now Motorola, AT&T, Sony, Deutsche Telekom and others have come under the spotlight after a new report made shocking allegations of human and labour rights violations at the Chinese factories of technology supplier VTech.…
Netsweeper, the Internet filtering supplier linked to Telstra’s voluntary filter trial is also a supplier to the Yemen, the UAE and Qatar.…
Moving applications between clouds is arguably not much easier than moving them from physical machines, and there are very good (if disappointed) economic reasons for that.…
Red Hat is hosting its JBoss World and Red Hat Summit events side-by-side in Boston this week, where it kicked off the festivities by revealing its plans to commercialize its OpenShift platform cloud, which had thus far been in beta and relegated mostly to Java developers looking for a place to let their code roam on Shadowman's nickel.…
A datacentre in Amsterdam has drilled down into a vast underground aquifer to regulate temperatures in the summer and winter.
The TelecityGroup datacentre pumps cold groundwater stored naturally in the subsurface chamber up to its cooling units in the summer, so that excess heat can be dispersed. In the winter, the now-warmer water can be pumped to the surface to be cooled by low external temperatures, stored in the ground, and then used again during the next summer.
By: Duncan Geere, Edited by: Liat Clark
Ford is taking its first steps into autonomous vehicles, with an upcoming Traffic Jam Assist system that automatically drives your car in stop-start gridlock situations.
When the system is on, your vehicle keeps pace with the traffic flow, automatically accelerating and braking as the jam slowly slinks along the motorway. You're free to read a newspaper, check your phone or sip on your morning coffee.
By: Mark Brown, Edited by: Duncan Geere
HP could not find an internal candidate to lead the Technology Consulting business across EMEA, so it has raided Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN) and made off with Eric Pradier.…
Facebook seemed to be taking a step in the location-based app direction with the launch of Find Friends Nearby. But only hours after releasing the new -- yet very unofficial -- feature, the company reeled it back in, pulling it from its iOS and Android apps, and disabling the mobile page.
The new feature initially gave Facebook users a landing page on which to find other users who were within a certain vicinity. It was yet another move indicating Facebook's commitment to broadening its mobile experience.
By: Alexandra Chang, Edited by: Ian Steadman
The US International Trade Commission has said that it will be revisiting an initial ruling made in April that Apple had infringed on one of Motorola Mobility's patents.…
Over the weekend Mark Zuckerberg's recently floated company began quietly displaying @Facebook email addresses on all of its users' Timelines.…
Telecoms regulator Ofcom has detailed the code that ISPs and copyright holders must abide by, when enforcing the contentious Digital Economy Act -- a law where prolific pirates can face legal action after three warnings.
The act will see copyright owners send infringement reports to broadband providers BT, Everything Everywhere, O2, Sky, TalkTalk and Virgin Media. In turn, those ISPs will send letters to their customers whose accounts are connected to the report.
By: Mark Brown, Edited by: Duncan Geere
When Greg Marra built @Trackgirl, he designed her as an experiment to see if an automated program could worm its way into online networks of real people.
What he didn't expect is that people would actually care what happened to @Trackgirl.
By: Robert McMillan, Edited by: Ian Steadman
Mark Zuckerberg's right-hand woman, Sheryl Sandberg, has joined Facebook's no-longer-male-only board of directors.…
This month Wired defines the meaning of zombie debtor, tweetation and Möbius strip journalism.
By: Paul McFedries, Edited by: Ian Steadman
Apple and book publishers are facing a trial next year over the allegations they colluded on ebook prices to squeeze Amazon out of the market.…
Dismantling code aledgedly from the next iPhone 9-to-5 Mac has discovered Near Field Communications embedded in the hardware, paving the way for Apple Commerce come 2013.…
Online publishing of information takes place both in the location from where the information is served and the loaction where it is read, an advisor to Europe's highest court has said.…
Corporate fanbois rejoice – a new consortium has been launched in Japan designed to spur the adoption of iOS in enterprise environments.…
Back in March, a group of Italian and Swedish radio researchers demonstrated that a characteristic of radio waves called orbital angular momentum (OAM) can be used as a multiplexing technique, vastly increasing the theoretical capacity of wireless transmissions.…
What do you think of when you think of the National Trust? Men in waistcoats, or ivy-covered listed buildings, or wet weekends in the country with your parents. Crumpets, perhaps. However, it's likely not strippers and drugs and sex shops and all the other neon joys of Soho, London's seediest area.
A new app, Soho Stories, sees the National Trust celebrating the personal and the cultural aspects of Soho. Once the app knows where you are -- and after a genial greeting from Barry Cryer, who explains the app's mecahnics -- it plays audio related to your immediate surroundings. As you walk through the historic, and often sticky, streets of Soho, you'll be regaled with the wonderful tales of who used to work at which shop, or which phone box used to be particularly popular with heroin addicts.
By: Ian Steadman, Edited by: Duncan Geere
In 2000, former BT CTO Peter Cochrane founded a tech incubator called ConceptLabs with a team from Apple Computers in Silicon Valley. The aim was to create an "idea-to-market" incubator that could be syndicated globally, providing support infrastructure spanning the cultivation of an idea through to a full IPO. ConceptLabs would find ideas people and bring the business and marketing nous required to take the idea to market. Within 18 months the company had seven companies that were looking strong, but then the dot.com bubble burst, and investment evaporated and ConceptLabs had to be closed down at the end of 2003. Cochrane talks to Wired.co.uk about what went wrong.
By: Wired.co.uk Staff, Edited by: Olivia Solon
The Internet Watch Foundation has made improvement of international co-operation a key objective in the next phase of its fight against the online distribution of child abuse content.…
Two members of Lulzsec have admitted to hacking into high profile websites, such as the UK's Serious Organised Crime Agency, and the CIA.
At Southwark Crown Court, 20 year old Ryan Cleary and 19 year old Jake Davis admitted to being members of Lulzsec -- an upstart offshoot of Anonymous -- and entered guilty pleas to a series of computer crime offences.
By: Mark Brown, Edited by: Duncan Geere
The launch of a Twitter-like messaging service co-founded by UK politician Louise Mensch on Sunday has been accompanied by a huge security flap.…
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has started a petition to halt the US extradition of TVShack creator Richard O'Dwyer.
O'Dwyer is the 24-year-old British student who made TVShack, which provided links to other websites which hosted pirated copies of TV shows and movies. It was an aggregation tool, and did not host any copyright-infringing content.
By: Mark Brown, Edited by: Duncan Geere
Google wants to track your staff, and let you know where they are as well as what they're supposed to be doing, with a cloudy dispatch system called Google Maps Coordinate…
China has finally stepped out from the shadow of the United States and is leading the world at the cutting edge of cloud computing deployments, according to EMC.…
Troubled BlackBerry maker RIM could be getting out of the hardware business, with the Sunday Times reporting a plan to cut RIM in two and flog off the hardware division to focus on messaging and device management.…
It's been nearly four years since Tesla announced plans to expand its electric line-up from a singular sports car to a four-door, five-seat sedan. In the interim, the upstart automaker has grown its dealer network, secured more funding, revealed a crossover concept, and purchased and converted the former NUMMI plant in Fremont, CA to begin production of the Model S.
And that's where we're at today, joined by a smattering of press, investors, and a handful of EV early adopters who've plunked down deposits and are finally taking delivery of one of the first 10 full-size, fully electric, US-built sedans.
By: Damon Lavrinc, Edited by: Ian Steadman
China's Shenzhou 9 spacecraft successfully completed a manual docking procedure with its orbiting space lab Tiangong-1 on 24 June. It was the first manual docking of China's space programme.
The Shenzhou 9 spacecraft started the day joined to Tiangong-1, the two having achieved an automated rendez-vous on 18 June.
By: Charles Black, Sen.com, Edited by: Duncan Geere
Lonesome George, the last Pinta Island tortoise in the world and an icon for Galapagos conservation, has died. His death renders the subspecies Chelonoidis nigra abingdoni extinct.
George was first seen on the Galapagos island of Pinta in 1971, by Hungarian mollusk researcher József Vágvölgyi. George was the very last of his indigenous subspecies, after introduced feral goats had devastated the island's vegetation.
By: Mark Brown, Edited by: Duncan Geere
US House of Representatives Intelligence Committee chair, congressman Mike Rogers, has turned yet another blowtorch onto Chinese vendors Huawei and ZTE, alleging that the Chinese government is subsidizing the price of kit they sell in America.…
Judge Richard Posner of Chicago has ended the Apple-versus-Motorola legal battle, at least in America: not only has he dismissed the case, he has done so “with prejudice”, meaning the two companies can’t try to defibrillate the lawsuit with a new filing.…
One of the problems with trying to improve things is that not everyone appreciates it.…
The ITU has finalized its proposals for rewriting the regulations governing internet traffic, which will be decided at the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WC-IT) being held in Dubai this December.…
Rumors that the iPhone's familiar 30-pin connector will be replaced in the iPhone 5 with a Micro-USB port have riled the fanbois universe, inciting charges of planned obsolecense and worse. New reports, however, point not to a standard Micro-USB port, but a new – and proprietary – Apple port.…
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has confirmed that it will have new CEO to replace outgoing boss Rod Beckstrom, but not until October.…
If you charge your fully depleted iPad every other day, it'll cost you a buck thirty-six per year, according to a just-released study by the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) of Palo Alto, California.…
This week we learn how robots have been given human-like fingers, how eating less meat could help the climate, Microsoft's plans to challenge the iPad with Surface, we mark Alan Turing's centenary and discuss the rest of the week in Wired news
By: Nate Lanxon,
Google has accidentally revealed that the next update to the Android operating system will be nicknamed "Jelly Bean".
Since Android version 1.5, Google has given each update of the OS a dessert-themed name, starting with each successive letter of the alphabet. Examples include Cupcake, Donut, Eclair and, the most recent release, Ice Cream Sandwich.
By: Mark Brown, Edited by: Duncan Geere
Facebook is expected to cough up around $20m, and amend certain features of the site, to end litigation brought against the dominant social network following the arrival of its much-disliked "sponsored stories" feature.…
Kickstarter has launched a page to show off the statistics of projects on its site. So we now know that less than half of all Kickstarter projects manage to pull in their funding target. While fashion projects often fail, dance-related pitches are largely successful.
If you've never used Kickstarter, it's a site where smart people like inventors, designers and movie-makers can pitch an idea and then ask the community to chip in a few dollars to help bring that product to life.
By: Mark Brown, Edited by: Duncan Geere
Tractor beams -- which allow spaceships to pick up and shift objects without physically touching them -- have long been a staple of science fiction.
Previous attempts to build them have relied on inducing electric or magnetic charges, using heat to create air pressure differences, and even attempting to manipulate gravity. However, a physicist has proposed and intriguing new possibility -- one that uses nothing but light.
By: Ian Steadman, Edited by: Duncan Geere
Nintendo has announced a super-sized version of its 3DS handheld, which it calls the 3DS XL.
The console has 4.88-inch top screen (compared to the 3.58-inch screen on the 3DS), and a 4.18-inch bottom display (previously 3.02-inches). To accommodate, the console is 155 mm wide to the 3DS's 134 mm, and is a fair bit heavier to hold, too.
By: Mark Brown,
Google is being sued by the Texas Attorney General's office in the US, because - it has been alleged - the search giant "withheld" documents from a competition investigation of the company.…
Neo-Nazis operating in the UK have reportedly used YouTube's advertising revenue-sharing system to gobble up payments from companies that include BT, O2 and Virgin Media.…
