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Wired News: Top Stories

Video: Neil Gaiman Gives Away 'The Graveyard'

Posted: October 6th, 2008, 11:00pm CDT by Annaliza Savage

The Sandman author reads from his new book, about a boy who hangs out with dead people, and posts the clips online for free. Gaiman talks about Graveyard in a video interview with Wired.com.

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Solar Goes From Gardens to Gigabucks

Posted: October 6th, 2008, 11:00pm CDT by Alexis Madrigal

A California company has a billion dollars worth of orders in hand for a new solar product that could soon blanket the tops of flat-roof buildings across the nation.

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Pimp My Pony: Gear for the Equestrian Commute

Posted: October 6th, 2008, 11:00pm CDT by William Snyder

Gas gas hovers around $4 a gallon, your Prius-driving neighbors are cruising smugly all the way to Whole Foods. Sure, you could join their self-satisfied ranks. Or you could commute in style — on a horse (if your city's ordinances allow it). The timing is good: Equestrian gear recently got some serious and long-needed upgrades. High tech, Silver, away! 1 // Bitless Bridle Robert Cook's Bitless Bridle is an evolution of an ancient pony-friendly design. It steers with straps that crisscross under the muzzle: To turn left, draw the left rein away from your steed's neck, applying pressure to the right cheek and turning its head in the direction you want to go. 2 // Ultralight Helmet Old-school hats were just velveteen-sheathed plastic. Today's models, made of high-density polystyrene, are almost half the weight of the classic style yet can withstand several hundred Newtons of force. 3 // Carbon-Fiber Saddle Leather seats have all the give of a two-by-four, and a bad fit can cause your horse's vertebrae to dip. The Swedish company Linear has designed a modular seat (for a custom fit) with a carbon-fiber core to spread your weight as evenly as possible. 4 // Polyurethane Wraps To better protect tendons and joints from accidental hoof slaps, wool wraps are being replaced by boots padded with gel and carbon fiber. An outfit called Veredus molds its shells from 54-Shore TPU, a tough polyurethane mixture that stays flexible down to 5xB0F. 5 // Springy...

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Oct. 7, 1959: Luna 3's Images From the Dark Side

Posted: October 6th, 2008, 11:00pm CDT by Tony Long

1959: The space probe Luna 3 takes the first photographs of the dark side of the moon. The radio-controlled Luna 3 was part of the Soviet Union's highly successful lunar program, which completed 20 missions to the moon between January 1959 and October 1970. Although the United States won the race to land a human on the moon, the Russians achieved a number of their own lunar milestones, including the first flyby (Luna 1), first surface impact (Luna 2), first soft landing (Luna 9) and first lunar orbiter (Luna 10). Luna 3's mission objective was to provide the first photographs from the moon's far side. To achieve this, the probe was equipped with a dual-lens 35mm camera, one a 200mm, f/5.6 aperture, the other a 500mm, f/9.5. The photo sequencing was automatically triggered when Luna 3's photocell detected the sunlit far side, which occurred when the craft was passing about 40,000 miles above the lunar surface. Luna 3's camera took 29 photographs over a 40-minute period, covering roughly 70 percent of the moon's far side. The photographs were developed, fixed and dried by the probe's onboard film processing unit. Seventeen images were successfully scanned and returned to Earth on Oct. 18, when Luna 3 was close enough to begin transmitting. Although the low-resolution images had to be boosted by computer enhancement on Earth, in the end they were good enough to produce a tentative map of the dark side. Among the identifiable features were two seas, named Mare...

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Gallery: Inside Secretive New Solar-Tech Factory

Posted: October 6th, 2008, 11:00pm CDT by Alexis Madrigal

: Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com FREMONT, California -- Solar photovoltaics make up a tiny percentage of the world's power largely because they just cost too much. Burning fossil fuels remains cheaper than even the best solar panels. But Solyndra's new thin-film technology could substantially cut the cost of manufacturing and installing solar electricity, perhaps reaching the cost of standard power within a few years. The venture-backed company, which came out of stealth mode today, gave Wired.com access to their new whirring fab, installed in a former hard-drive factory. Most of the equipment was designed in-house by Solyndra's 500 employees with the aid of more than $600 million in venture capital. "We've put a lot of effort into very sophisticated process control," Kelly Truman, VP of business development told Wired.com. "We design and build all the critical equipment in the factory ourselves." Left: Solyndra's solar modules enter the factory as simple glass tubes a few feet long, seen here awaiting a special cleaning process. : Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com Designed with automation in mind, the factory's many robots do much of the work in transporting the panels of glass tubes around the floor. : Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com The glass tubes are dipped in a series of solutions including coatings of copper indium gallium diselenide, known as CIGS. Here we see finished tubes, which have lost their transparency. : Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com As the panels receive...

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Clive Thompson: Why Veteran Visionaries Will Save the World

Posted: October 6th, 2008, 11:00pm CDT by Clive Thompson

Don't trust anyone over 30. That's the prevailing wisdom in Silicon Valley, a land once again bestrode by millionaire CEOs who just learned to shave. Many people believe that the breakthrough ideas come only from the young. And why not? Media stories constantly recite the ages of a few famous founders: Bill Gates of Microsoft, 20; Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, 20; the Google boys, 25; YouTube's Chad Hurley, 28. Tumblr founder David Karp is 21 — and on his second successful company. Young people rule tech innovation, we tell ourselves, because they have several key advantages. They're fearless and naive, so they'll try anything. They can spy markets that elders, with their locked-in views, cannot. And without dependents or spouses, twentysomethings can work the sort of pyramid-building hours necessary for a startup. It's a kind of Logan's Run world: If you're ending a third decade, you're obsolete. But hold on. A recent study has finally collected some data on age and high tech innovation and found that older geeks are just as successful as young Turks. What's more, the chronologically advanced are especially successful at solving problems we increasingly — and desperately — need solved. In other words, the high tech future may belong to the over-30 set. The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation surveyed 652 US-born CEOs and heads of product development who founded high tech firms in the boom (and bust) years of 1995 to 2005. Both the average and median...

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Fruits of the Comcast-Plaxo Marriage: Fan Pages

Posted: October 6th, 2008, 11:00pm CDT by Besty Schiffman

If it wasn't immediately obvious why Comcast forked over a reported $150 million for Plaxo, a social networking site, it may become clearer later this month, when Plaxo officially launches Fan Pages for FanCast, Comcast's online video site. The social features available in beta now let users join fan groups of various TV shows, where they can share episodes and discuss plot developments to their heart's content with fellow obsessives.

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Meteoroid Predicted to Burn Up in Earth's Atmosphere Tonight

Posted: October 6th, 2008, 3:57pm CDT by Betsy Mason

A small meteoroid is predicted to burn up in Earth's atmosphere over Sudan tonight. This is the first time astronomers have been able to predict when a meteoroid will enter the atmosphere.

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Judge's Secret Decision Blocks Sale of DVD-Copying Software

Posted: October 6th, 2008, 2:42pm CDT by David Kravets

A federal judge seals a decision tentatively blocking RealNetwork's sale of DVD-copying software.

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Goliath Beats Davids for Pentagon Power Prize

Posted: October 6th, 2008, 2:25pm CDT by Noah Shachtman

The Pentagon set up a million-dollar prize to get entrepreneurs and tinkerers to come up with radically new ways to supply power to the all those gadgets a soldier has to lug around. But the winner, the Pentagon declared today, is as traditional as it comes: DuPont, the chemical giant -- and military supplier, since 1802.

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How to Understand the Financial Crisis

Posted: October 6th, 2008, 2:15pm CDT by Scott Loganbill

There's a lot of hype surrounding the financial crisis, but what does it really mean? To get acquainted with the financial crisis and what it means to you and me, we've pinged several sources on the internet for economic explanations even we could understand.

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Is the Cheapest Genome Sequence Ever for Real?

Posted: October 6th, 2008, 12:34pm CDT by Brandon Keim

A biotech company is planning to offer complete personal genome sequences for $5,000, but is it too good to be true?

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Toy Robot Intended to Save Humans From Evil

Posted: October 6th, 2008, 12:05pm CDT by Ryan Singel

Zeno, a toy robot that may be available for around $300 in 2010, is designed to fend off future robots that are psychotic and lack sympathy for humans.

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Who Should Win the Nobel for Physics?

Posted: October 6th, 2008, 9:37am CDT by Brandon Keim

Nobel Prize week kicked off this morning with awards in Medicine given to discoverers of the viruses that cause HIV and cervical cancer. Up next: Physics. And if you'd like to test your significance-assessing chops against those snobs at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, now's your chance.

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Wall Street Tumbles Amid Global Sell-off

Posted: October 6th, 2008, 8:56am CDT by Associated Press

Wall Street tumble, joining a sell-off around the world, as fears grow that the financial crisis will cascade through economies globally despite bailout efforts by the U.S. and other governments. The credit market remained under strain, and investors piled into government bonds. The Dow Jones industrials skidded more than 300 points.

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EBay To Drop 1,000 Employees, Picks Up Two New Businesses

Posted: October 6th, 2008, 8:11am CDT by Chris Snyder

As rumored, EBay is cutting 1,000 employees -- 10% of its workforce. The company also announced the acquisition of an online payments business, Bill Me Later, for $820 million in cash and $125 million in options, and two online classified sites based in Denmark for about $390 million.

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The Clone Wars" TV series: Better Than Expected, Still Not Great

Posted: October 6th, 2008, 7:30am CDT by Matt Blum

I was completely prepared to hate the new "Clone Wars" TV series, but while it's in no danger of making its way onto anyone's list of great sci-fi shows, it's not so bad. Any animated TV series is only as good as its writing, and, if the first two episodes are any indication, the writing for "The Clone Wars" is decent, though unspectacular.

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Wall Street Set to Follow Global Sell-Off

Posted: October 6th, 2008, 6:47am CDT by Associated Press

Global markets sell off after European governments take steps to limit the damage from the growing global financial crisis. U.S. stocks appear headed for a steep drop at the opening, and the credit markets remained under strain.

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3 European Scientists Share Nobel Medicine Prize

Posted: October 6th, 2008, 6:44am CDT by Associated Press

Three European scientists share the 2008 Nobel Prize in medicine for separate discoveries of viruses that cause AIDS and cervical cancer. French researchers Francoise Barre-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier were cited for their discovery of HIV while Germany's Harald zur Hausen was honored for finding human papilloma viruses that cause cervical cancer, the second most common cancer among women.

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Sega Getting Back into the Hardware Game

Posted: October 6th, 2008, 6:29am CDT by Charlie Sorrel

According to the Register, Sega plans to launch a new handheld console next year, and it won't just play games. The new console, called the Vision, will also play music and movies, have a built in camera, TV-Tuner and display e-books. We speculate that the battery pack will come in a separate, suitcase-sized box.

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European, Asian Markets Plunge on Crisis Fear

Posted: October 6th, 2008, 6:02am CDT by Associated Press

Asian and European stock markets plunge as government bank bailouts in the U.S. and Europe failed to alleviate fears that the global financial crisis would depress world economic growth. Britain's benchmark stock index fell 4.42 percent and Germany's DAX index fell 4.22 percent to 5,552.27. Across Asia, all markets were also in the red; Tokyo's Nikkei 225 index fell to its lowest level in 4 1/2 years, sinking 4.25 percent to 10,473.09.

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