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Pimp My Pony: Gear for the Equestrian Commute more similar news »
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 5\0xB0F.
5 // Springy...
Wired.com
Tue Oct 07, 2008 more from this source»»
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Oct. 7, 1959: Luna 3's Images From the Dark Side more similar news »
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...
Wired.com
Tue Oct 07, 2008 more from this source»»
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Gallery: Inside Secretive New Solar-Tech Factory more similar news »
: 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 and 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...
Wired.com
Tue Oct 07, 2008 more from this source»»
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Clive Thompson: Why Veteran Visionaries Will Save the World more similar news »
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...
Wired.com
Tue Oct 07, 2008 more from this source»»
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Goliath Beats Davids for Pentagon Power Prize more similar news »
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.
Wired.com
Mon Oct 06, 2008 more from this source»»
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Who Should Win the Nobel for Physics? more similar news »
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.
Wired.com
Mon Oct 06, 2008 more from this source»»
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Wall Street Tumbles Amid Global Sell-off more similar news »
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.
Wired.com
Mon Oct 06, 2008 more from this source»»
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3 European Scientists Share Nobel Medicine Prize more similar news »
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.
Wired.com
Mon Oct 06, 2008 more from this source»»
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Sega Getting Back into the Hardware Game more similar news »
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.
Wired.com
Mon Oct 06, 2008 more from this source»»
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European, Asian Markets Plunge on Crisis Fear more similar news »
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.
Wired.com
Mon Oct 06, 2008 more from this source»»
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Top 10 Wired.com Fall Photos, Decided by You more similar news »
:
Being based in San Francisco has its advantages, but having seasons is not one of them. Our readers were kind enough to share their fantastic fall photos with those of us who are seasonally challenged. These are the top 10 photos, according to your votes. Javier Echaiz takes home the gold with his photo "Gate to the fall" at left. Mr. Echaiz will be receiving a subscription to Wired magazine and a digital picture frame for his desk.
Since we had so many great photos that we thought should've received more votes, we've also compiled a Wired.com Editor's Choice Fall Photo Gallery.
Our next twice-monthly photo contest theme is motion. We want you to take dynamic movement, and make it still. Check out the contest page for more information.
Left:
Gate to the fall
Submitted by Javier Echaiz
Photographer's comment:
"This image comes from a rural area somewhere in the south of Argentina.”
:
shadows on yellow
Submitted by Javier Echaiz
Photographer's comment:
"Magic carpet made by thousands of yellow leaves and beautiful shades."
:
Wipperwill Drive
Submitted by Anonymous
Photographer's comment:
"…"
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Floating
Submitted by Patrice Peyre
Photographer's comment:
"HEC Campus - Jouys en Josas, France."
:
Fall Elements
Submitted by Gregory Tapler
Photographer's comment:
"The fall elements as seen at the Monocacy Creek in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania."
:
Fall in Paris
Submitted by Tyler
Photographer's comment:
"Fall in Paris. Was walking through a...
Wired.com
Mon Oct 06, 2008 more from this source»»
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Top 10 Wired.com Fall Photos, Decided by Us more similar news »
:
Though Wired.com readers selected 10 excellent photos in our fall photo contest, we here at the photo department like to fight for the underdog. Here are our 10 favorite submissions that we think deserved more attention.
Our next twice-monthly photo contest theme is motion. We want you to take dynamic movement, and make it still. Check out the contest page for more information.
Left:
A dry flower head
Submitted by Marty Mignard
Photographer's comment:
"Shot with my trusty old 4x5 Crown Graphic.”
:
Halloween
Submitted by Tyler Klemp
Photographer's comment:
"Crows in the sky, taken on Halloween."
:
Watch the Grass Glow
Submitted by Anonymous
Photographer's comment:
"Evening sunlight."
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Fading Light
Submitted by Brian Cooper
Photographer's comment:
"Australian autumn light in a monastery crypt."
:
Mist Returns to the Moors
Submitted by Kerrigan Swan-Garcia
Photographer's comment:
"This time of year the days begin with a blanket of hazy, ethereal fog, giving everything ordinary a mysterious, melancholy air."
:
Nightfall
Submitted by Scott
Photographer's comment:
"The leaves are just starting to turn."
:
Sleeping Golden Retriever in the fall afternoon ...
Submitted by Vladimir Sterkin
Photographer's comment:
"The adorable old three-pawed Golden Retriever from the pumpkin farm in August, Missouri."
:
Slow
Submitted by Brian Cooper
Photographer's comment:
"Fall slips it into a lower gear."
:
Solo Bench
Submitted by Dave...
Wired.com
Mon Oct 06, 2008 more from this source»»
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Oct. 6, 1956: Sabin Polio Vaccine Ready to Test more similar news »
1956: Dr. Albert Sabin announces that his live-virus, oral polio vaccine is ready for mass testing. It will soon supplant the Salk vaccine.
Poliomyelitis is an infectious disease caused by viruses. Its effects range from complete recovery to death. Intermediate possibilities are mild after-effects, moderate to severe paralysis of a limb or limbs, or paralyzed chest muscles, necessitating the confining but lifesaving use of an iron lung.
Polio epidemics periodically ravaged American cities in the first half of the 20th century. Children were especially vulnerable, but the disease also struck adults, most notably former Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1921.
Roosevelt was elected president in 1932, and he founded the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (as the disease was then often called) in 1938. The foundation conducted a huge annual fundraising campaign called the March of Dimes.
The polio epidemics of the early 1950s terrified American parents and their children. Between 1950 and 1952, the number of severe or fatal U.S. cases doubled to 55,000.
Authorities closed swimming pools during the warm months when new polio infections peaked. Parents kept kids at home instead of exposing them to possible contagion at summer camps. If you didn't know someone who had been stricken (though most recovered), you knew about a kid at your cousin's school, or the cousin of some kid at your school.
So, America breathed a sigh of...
Wired.com
Mon Oct 06, 2008 more from this source»»
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Convert Your Car to a Plug-in Hybrid more similar news »
If you really wanted to go green with your hybrid, you'd be plugging into the power grid. Furthering your fossil fuel independence is possible by converting your Prius to a plug-in. Whether you have the cash to pay someone to do it or are doing it yourself, there are several conversion packages available and we have a list.
Wired.com
Mon Oct 06, 2008 more from this source»»
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Wired.com Photo Contest: Motion more similar news »
This week's photo contest topic is Motion. We want you to cram as much action as you can into the stillness of a frame.
Use the Reddit widget below to submit your best Motion photo and vote for your favorite among the other submissions. The 10 highest-ranked photos will appear in a gallery on the Wired.com homepage. Nothing we can say will hold back the deluge of streaky, unintelligible photos, we know, but motion blur is only a small part of capturing the action. Show us bucking bulls at rodeos, sparring swashbucklers and collapsing buildings. We want to see arrows in mid-flight, jumping kangaroos and rockets blasting into the air. Capture the beauty of a single frame of action that the human eye can't catch, and we will be forever grateful.
The photo must be your own, and by submitting it you are giving us permission to use it on Wired.com and in Wired magazine. Please submit images that are relatively large, the ideal size being 800 to 1200 pixels or larger on the longest side. Please include a description of your photo, which may include exposure information, equipment used, etc.
We don't host the photos, so you'll have to upload it somewhere else and submit a link to it. If you're using Flickr, Picasa or another photo-sharing site to host your image, please provide a link to the image directly and not just to the photo page where it's displayed. Using an online photo service that requires that you login will not work. If your photo doesn't show up, it's because...
Wired.com
Mon Oct 06, 2008 more from this source»»
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Games Without Frontiers: 'Pure' Shows Off Fun of 'Artistic' Physics more similar news »
"The tricks in this game are pure fantasy. Do not attempt them in real life."
That's the warning that flashes when you first boot up Pure, the giddily awesome new ATV-racing game. And no wonder: Pure sends you driving around mudsplacked tracks with furious velocity, racing up steep hills and then -- woo hoo! -- launching yourself with escape-trajectory speed into the air. The goal is to pull off stunts -- 720s, forward rolls, one-armed handstands -- so you can earn "boost," which lets you go higher and, of course, pull off even crazier stunts.
After about 15 minutes, I was scraping the bottom edge of the ionosphere. Man, I had enough hang time to wander over to the fridge and grab a beer before I landed. So in one sense, yes, Pure is unadulterated fantasy: These sorts of tricks aren't remotely possible under the normal rules of gravity.
But the game isn't completely divorced from reality, either. The control scheme for the ATVs is forgiving, but only so much: You can survive a slightly sloppy landing, but not one that is one notch more careless. And when you first take off from a jump, you have only milliseconds to deduce whether you're going to go high enough to pull off a lengthy stunt. The upshot is that the physics in Pure encourages you to take crazy risks -- while still requiring you to think carefully about what you're doing.
In essence, the in-game physics cooked up by Pure's designers isn't merely a matter of being realistic or unrealistic. The...
Wired.com
Mon Oct 06, 2008 more from this source»»
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Weird Al: Forefather of the YouTube Spoof more similar news »
When "Weird Al" Yankovic packs for the road, he brings the following items: One red leather Michael Jackson jacket, one foam-rubber double chin, one Segway, one garden hoe, one silver dress suit, five Amish beards, five Jedi robes, and two accordions. That's actually just a partial inventory, as Yankovic employs so many costumes and hairpieces during his shows that a makeshift dressing room must be set up directly behind the stage—a sort of musical-parody triage unit. His performances usually last two and a half hours, and between each song he slips back to this space, where a wardrobe assistant affixes whatever wig or fake appendage he needs for the next number. When he reemerges, he'll have morphed into one of his countless music-video personas: There's Yankovic as the bearded laborer from "Amish Paradise" (a riff on Coolio's "Gangsta's Paradise"), as the marble-mouthed grunge singer from "Smells Like Nirvana" (a satire of "Smells Like Teen Spirit"), and as the diet-obsessed nag from "Eat It" (a parody of Michael Jackson's "Beat It"). At some point, Yankovic will switch into an old bowling shirt or thick, aviator-style glasses, his standard uniform in the '80s and '90s: Yankovic has been imitating others for so long that nowadays he occasionally has to imitate himself.
Weird Al Yankovich "Hey Ricky"
This year marks the 25th anniversary of Yankovic's first music video, "Ricky," in which he reimagined Toni Basil's "Mickey" as an ode to I Love Lucy....
Wired.com
Sun Oct 05, 2008 more from this source»»
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Tune-Deaf Scott Brown Opens Pandora's Jukebox more similar news »
I was 10 when I realized I had lousy taste in music. Billy Joel's "An Innocent Man" was my gateway drug: I listened to it on infinite loop, in perfect contentment, for days. Later, in high school, I began huffing a deadly theater-nerd mix of piano-driven rock balladry, pseudo-political folk-pop, Danny Elfman soundtracks, and Enigma. College, the place where most people atone for the sonic sins of their youth, was a haze of Ben Folds Five and Dave Matthews Band. And things haven't really improved since. Bad taste was less of a problem when our playlists were private affairs. Today, however, our personal soundtracks broadcast who we are, and it's simply not acceptable to swan around with the Indigo Girls' "Galileo," Annie Lennox's "Walking on Broken Glass," or (God help me!) Billy Joel's "Big Man on Mulberry Street" blazing across your iPhone screen. (One is ironic, two is quixotic, but try all three and you can hear the NSA giggling on the other end of the line.) Luckily, there are high tech treatments for bad taste — or so we're told. Pandora, for example, is designed to refine and expand your aural palate by working with your preferences, not against them. No shame and no looking back: Only progress! And now Pandora is on my iPhone: On the go, on the train, in da Sam's Club, I'm always on the road to musical self-improvement — which is the whole idea of portable, personalized, preference-driven software, right? To digitally whittle us closer to
Perfection...
Wired.com
Sun Oct 05, 2008 more from this source»»
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The Project That Tracks Big Projects more similar news »
The Human Genome Project isn't the only spendy endeavor that aims to significantly expand the scope of humankind's knowledge. Ambitious and obsessive researchers in a handful of fields aspire to do the same. Unfortunately, none of them used their funding to buy a thesaurus: Tracking the projects labeled project is a project in itself. Here are our fave five.
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Project
Budget
What It Is
The ITER Project
$14.7 billion
Gorbachev helped thaw the Cold War by pitching Reagan a superpower collaboration to suss out fusion energy. The 180,000,000F temperature requirement has been a significant stumbling block.
The Music Genome Project
$23.3 million
Every tune has hundreds of building blocks — from syncopation to harmony. Pandora's analysts are sequencing these "genes" by ear (up to 10 million a month) to create its proprietary database.
The Milky Way Mapping Project
$2 million
Using the Very Long Baseline Array — radio wave telescopes with 100 times Hubble's accuracy — astronomers are seeking ultraprescise measurements of the distances between us and 100...
Wired.com
Sat Oct 04, 2008 more from this source»»
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Instant Suburb of Prefabs Hits New York more similar news »
Tourists press up against the construction fence on the corner of 53rd and Sixth, staring speechless as a giant crane lifts an entire bathroom into the air and deposits it in what will be a master bedroom. Cellophane House is five stories tall, with floor-to-ceiling windows, translucent polycarbonate steps embedded with LEDs, and exterior walls made of NextGen SmartWrap, an experimental plastic laminated with photovoltaic cells. Its aluminum frame was cut from off-the-shelf components in Europe, assembled in New Jersey, then snapped together in 16 days on a vacant lot next to the Museum of Modern Art — joining four other full-size houses onsite through October as part of the exhibit Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling. It looks as if a suburban cul-de-sac took a wrong turn at the Holland Tunnel.
Prefab is "modernism's oldest dream," curator Barry Bergdoll says. Since the industrial revolution, architects have been in thrall of the idea that houses could be built in factories, like any kind of widget. But reality hasn't been extremely cooperative. Whether because of conservative public tastes, unachievable economies of scale, or designers' less-than-stellar business acumen, their utopian visions have mostly remained fantasies.
Frank Lloyd Wright, Buckminster Fuller, and Charles and Ray Eames each had compelling concepts of housing for all, most of which turned out to be housing for a few. Modernist masters Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier were among...
Wired.com
Sat Oct 04, 2008 more from this source»»
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