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The Bread Lab at Washington State University is a collaboration between plant geneticists and master bakers. The goal? To breed new varieties of wheat that can turn out superior breads and beers while still growing well in the cool and wet Northwest climate. According to Ferris Jabr’s profile of the lab in the New York…
I have a hard enough time trying to crack an egg without fishing out bits of the shell so I don’t even dream about ever separating the egg yolk from the egg white. If I eat an egg, it’s always going to be the whole damn thing no matter how many flip flopping lies I’ve…
NASA’s Super Guppy aircraft is one of the most extravagant cargo planes in the world. The awkwardly shaped aircraft has been in service since 1965, and was specifically designed to carry oversized payloads, like rocket stages and spacecrafts. This Tuesday she was fed with the Orion service module stacking assembly interface ring and stack holding…
Ever wish your Legos could fly? Someone invented the next best thing—BitDrones are tiny box drones that work like 3D building blocks. Created at Queen’s University, BitDrones are physical manifestations of pixels, made for the real world. There are three different kinds of BitDrone: PixelDrones come with an LED light for different color capabilities, while…
We’re trusting robots with more and more these days: Our luggage, our meals—even our lives on the road. Why not add finances to the list? Bank of America is joining several other banks that want to do just that. Bloomberg Business reports that Bank of America wants to use algorithms that provide customers with investment…
Cities beefing up their smart infrastructure have tapped the ubiquitous streetlamp to track traffic data and measure pollution. Now, in Los Angeles, some streetlights will help keep the communications network intact after an emergency. LA is the first city in the world to install Philips-branded SmartPoles, which are outfitted with 4G LTE wireless technology by…
Has texting worn your thumbs to the nub? Help is on the way: Japanese electronics giant NEC is introducing new wearables that project an augmented reality keyboard onto your arm. NEC announced the innovation, called ARmKeypad, earlier this week. Here’s how it works: Slip on special glasses and a special smartwatch. With the glasses on,…
The logic behind these construction projects where a ship gets chopped in half and then extended always seems a little bit like a magic trick. So you’ll chop a floating vessel, plug in a whole part in the middle and then hope it doesn’t sink? Cool! I’m all in for watching as many of these…
Architecture and code are inseparable these days–just about every new building involves software in some way. Now a design project is taking the influence of code on architecture to generate building plans designed by software, and the results are oddly human. The recipe for these buildings looks a lot like any other: There are walls.…
Outside the Florida Everglades, cougars haven’t lived east of the Rockies in over 100 years. But, a new study finds there’s a strong likelihood that states like Illinois, Missouri and Wisconsin could become home to healthy populations of the large carnivores in the next few years. Photos: Johanna Turner, unless otherwise noted. Across America, ungulate…
Google wants to make a better Android for the future. That means building a smartphone that can handle the technical challenges of augmented reality, virtual reality, and whatever else smartphones will become. And that means tying Android more tightly together with hardware. A new report, published by The Information, says Google is working with chip…
Will Toledo hit the indie rock lottery one Monday last February. Chris Lombardi, founder of legendary independent label Matador Records, rang him up wanting to know more about the 11 albums the 21-year-old Toledo had published online in near anonymity since he was a teen. Lombardi had followed a tip to the Bandcamp page for…
A one-year-old girl diagnosed with incurable aggressive leukemia is now in remission after receiving “designer cells” from a donor. The therapy made use of a powerful new gene-editing technique that could eventually be used to treat an array of hereditary diseases. Layla Richards from London, England, is the first patient in the world to receive…
Crews working on water mains below New York City’s Greenwich Village made an appropriately spooky find for the week after Halloween: A 19th-century burial vault containing the remains of least a dozen people. NYC’s Department of Design and Construction reported the discovery yesterday as they began excavating the site, which is on the east side…
After seven years of political wrangling, President Obama has finally rejected the Keystone XL oil pipeline, a proposed infrastructure project that would have carried 800,000 barrels of oil a day from the Canadian oil sands to the Gulf Coast. The announcement comes weeks before a historic climate conference in Paris, at which world leaders are…
The residents of Lebanon, New Hampshire, recently discovered a time capsule hidden under the steps of their City Hall. Dated 1944, the capsule was in the form of a brown whiskey bottle. But sadly, there wasn’t any whiskey inside. Instead, it seems like it was just the set-up for a punchline 71 years in the…
Traditional gas masks are designed to seal to your face and neck, protecting you from breathing harmful chemical or biological agents. But they won’t work with full beards, which is a problem if you’re a Sikh warrior like Harjit Sajjan. His solution? Sikhs are rare in western militaries. The US, for example, has 1.4-million active…
A few weeks back, the humans of planet Earth worked themselves into a frenzy over the possibility that the Kepler space telescope had discovered an alien megastructure. Since then, the astronomers behind the hubbub have had their heads down, hunting for the technobabble that might lend credence to the wild theory. Surprise! They haven’t found…
You’d think that after seeing one Lego set getting smashed in slow motion you’d get tired of the idea. But nope, it’s endlessly entertaining. As long as Wired has the time and money to buy, build, and destroy all these Star Wars Lego sets, we promise we’ll keep watching. This time around it’s a 1,137-piece…
Guinness recently announced that they were making a change to their two century-old recipe, one that wouldn’t make any use at all of fish bladders. Wait, said many people. Guinness has fish in it? “There’s fish in Guinness’ beer” has been a popular food rumor for a long time now—and it’s sort of true, sort…
