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We finally have our first look at the World Trade Center’s skyscraper, thanks to a Wired exclusive today. But wasn’t this building already unveiled years ago? And wasn’t it designed by someone else? Wasn’t it under construction? Your memory serves. 2 World Trade Center was originally designed by the British architect Lord Norman Foster back…
People who are transitioning genders want to look like the sex they’re transitioning to. Hormone therapy can help with that, since the characteristics that help us distinguish men and women by sight—breasts, relative muscle mass, the shape of the face, and so forth—are created by the sex hormones our gonads start secreting at puberty. Both…
Your digital camera has become far more than just a tool for snapping birthday pics. It’s a full-on portable cinematography tool. And with Edelkrone’s new compact Pocket Skater 2 dolly, you can easily capture professional-looking tracking or moving shots. The three-wheeled Pocket Skater 2 is easily the smallest dolly you’re going to find that can…
If you have an Apple device new enough to have TouchID, you’ll need to start thinking of new passcodes for iOS 9. Apple is getting rid of the four-digit passcode* in its upcoming software upgrade. *Correction: I didn’t look through the options closely enough before hitting publish. While the new default is six-digits, you can…
Studying fluid dynamics is one of the most spectacular fields of physics, not least because smoke vortices and fluid currents are beautiful at every scale. Imagine watching them take shape from your office chair at work every day. This cool photo of Laser Doppler velocimetry and particle image velocimetry was taken at the MAX Fluid…
Given Disney’s amusement parks are packed full of audio-animatronic characters, it only makes sense that the company’s research division would be hard at work finding ways to make them even more lifelike. Researchers may have found a cheap solution to making artificial muscles, using conductive sewing thread you can find in any fabric store. Synthetic…
This amazing time lapse shows frog eggs transforming into tadpoles in a mere 30 seconds. The spawn of frogs is so impressive and so sudden and so perfect that it’s easy to forget how complicated it is for Mother Nature to do that beautiful thing where she gives birth to life. Watch it all in…
Apple’s monster developers conference yesterday featured a parade of software announcements, Apple employees excitedly discussing their “big” karaoke potluck, and Drake. We obsessively liveblogged the whole event, but these are the keynote highlights below. iOS 9: Everything You Need To Know iOS 9 is here. But what we saw on stage at Apple’s World Wide…
He was known as “The King of Western Swing,” but Spade Cooley achieved a far darker shade of fame when he was convicted of brutally murdering his estranged wife, Ella Mae, in 1961. It was an abrupt about-face for a man whose public persona was previously defined by his namesakeTV show. The Oklahoma-born, Oregon-raised Cooley…
Using a similar approach that allowed MIT to see through walls using just wifi signals, researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara, led by Yasamin Mostofi, have found a way to count crowds of people—with a surprising degree of accuracy—using just basic wifi hardware. But the technique doesn’t involve just keeping tabs on how…
Sure, Peggy Carter has been kicking ass and taking names since The First Avenger, but it’s taken her getting a TV show of her own to finally get some merchandise. Some of you may be displeased that it’s another Funko Pop toy, but for now, I’m going to take all the miniature Hayley Atwells I…
Cars, motorcycles, trucks, airplanes, mopeds, tanks, fighter jets, ships, trains, big rigs and so on. We’ve figured out that those are the vehicles that work out best for our purposes and our world and our needs. But we had a lot of missteps and weird ass experimental vehicles along the way. Here are 8 crazy…
The announcement took up just two seconds of the keynote address at yesterday’s Apple Worldwide Developer’s Conference, but it seems that the iOS 9 update of HealthKit will finally add menstrual cycles to the enormous list of trackable data it can follow. The oh-so-brief screenshot flashed up on the big display implies that the app…
At Apple’s big developers conference yesterday, Tim Cook introduced a lot of products aimed to kill off the competition. The most ambitious was Apple Music, a Beats-powered music service, that Cook says, will change the way you listen to music forever. The target is everyone—Spotify, Pandora, Sirius—but no one seems scared. Technology is filled with…
The Soylent experiment may not have revolutionized the way we eat forever, but Silicon Valley isn’t content to let the kitchen go undisrupted. Meet June, a countertop device powered by carbon fiber wands that wants to make interacting with your oven more like interacting with your phone. On paper, June sounds a lot like a…
So it’s time to choose your next laptop—your trusty companion for the next few years, the hardware that will keep you connected and handle everything from essay writing to Netflix binging. But how do you narrow down the wealth of options out there? With our short and simple guide, that’s how. Choose your OS Pick…
After three years of non-stop digging, the tunnels for Crossrail, London’s new subway system, are finally complete. And while psasengers won’t be running through the tunnels for another three years, Transport for London has sent down a bunch of drones and timelapse cameras to give us a much better feel for what’s been happening under…
I don’t use Spotify. Or Rdio. Or even Pandora very often. Sometimes I want to hear a particular song; mostly I just want a good tune that’s relevant to my interests without thinking about it. Basically, I’m the perfect customer for Apple Music, which promises to be the one music app to rule them all.…
Children smudging their hands onto every available surface is normally gross and annoying — unless, that is, the available surface in question is a sterile plate, which you then incubate in a petri dish. The image was created by Tasha Sturm, who used sterile plates and tryptic soy agar to capture the handprint from her…
I was born in Spain to Spanish-speaking parents, who in their infinite wisdom, brought me up speaking English. I’ve always resented missing the opportunity to be brought up bilingual — adults seem to have such a tough time learning languages, compared to children. But why is that? YouTuber Tom Scottexplores the fascinating — and often…
