Listen to David Bowie's First Album in 10 Years for Free Online (Legally)

You don’t have to wait until March 12 to find out whether David Bowie’s first album in a decade is more Tin Machine than Low; the long-awaited The Next Day is already available, streaming in full on iTunes for a limited period pre-release.The stream continues Bowie’s current interest in previewing content from the album for free online before release; videos for both...

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Watch Darpa's Robotic Dog Throw Cinder Blocks With Its <em>Head</em>

Flesh-and-blood dogs merely fetch. The robotic pooch that Darpa funds can throw.Boston Dynamics’ BigDog started life as a headless four-legged robot capable of hauling soldiers’ gear along rough and uneven terrain. The BigDog’s upgrades and follow-on robots are expanding the boundaries of robotic motion, courtesy of cash from Darpa’s Tactical Technology Office. Its...

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Bradley Manning Takes 'Full Responsibility' for Giving WikiLeaks Huge Government Data Trove

FORT MEADE, Md. — Wearing his Army dress uniform, a composed, intense and articulate Pfc. Bradley Manning took “full responsibility” Thursday for providing the anti-secrecy organization WikiLeaks with a trove of classified and sensitive military, diplomatic and intelligence cables, videos and documents.In the lengthiest statement to a military tribunal Manning has provided since his nearly...

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Army's Demonic Numbers for Budget Cuts: 6, 6, and 6

The entire U.S. military is terrified of the impending budget cuts scheduled to hit Friday. But the Army thinks the cuts are demonic. “The fiscal crisis that we face today can be summed up by three numbers: six, six and six,” Maj. Gen. Karen E. Dyson, the director of the Army’s budget office, told reporters on Wednesday. Seriously.Dyson’s talking about three different figures that hit this...

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Freescale's Insanely Tiny ARM Chip Will Put the Internet of Things Inside Your Body

Chipmaker Freescale Semiconductor has created the world’s smallest ARM-powered chip, designed to push the world of connected devices into surprising places.Announced today, the Kinetis KL02 measures just 1.9 by 2 millimeters. It’s a full microcontroller unit (MCU), meaning the chip sports a processor, RAM, ROM, clock and I/O control unit — everything a body needs to be a basic tiny computer.The...

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ISPs Now Monitoring for Copyright Infringement

The nation’s major internet service providers on Monday said they are beginning to roll out an initiative to disrupt internet access for online copyright scofflaws.The so-called “Copyright Alert System” is backed by the President Barack Obama administration and was pushed heavily by record labels and Hollywood studios.The plan, more than four years in the making, includes participation by...

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Wired Space Photo of the Day: Glowing Gas in Omega Nebula

This image is a colour composite of the Omega Nebula (M 17) made from exposures from the Digitized Sky Survey 2 (DSS2). The field of view is approximatelly 4.7 x 3.7 degrees. Image: ESO/Digitized Sky Survey 2. Acknowledgment: Davide De Martin. [high-resolution]Caption: ...

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That Syncing Feeling

“Smart, or stylish?” That’s the question facing casual watch aficionados looking for a new, high-tech addition to their collection.On one hand (er, wrist), you’ve got the Pebble and other smartwatch upstarts, which come with built-in smartphone connectivity, customizable screens, and burgeoning developer communities eager to feed their app ecosystems. They also, by and large, look like uninspired...

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PayPal's New U.K. Card Reader Exposes Inferior U.S. Tech

PayPal has released a new mobile card reader in the U.K., which wouldn’t seem like big news — we already have a bunch of those here in the U.S., including PayPal’s. But there’s a difference: the overseas version crushes anything available stateside.This superiority isn’t because PayPal has come up with some big breakthrough. It’s because the underlying payment technology on which its based,...

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RIAA Says Google's Anti-Piracy Search Algorithm Is Bogus

The Recording Industry Association of American said Thursday that Google’s algorithm change to lower rankings of sites with “high numbers” of copyright-infringing removal notices has had no “demonstrable impact on demoting sites with large amounts of piracy.”“The sites we analyzed, all of which were serial infringers per Google’s Copyright Transparency Report, were not demoted in any significant...

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Homebrew Hardware Intersects With Sweet Sounds at Music Hack Day San Francisco

Music Hack Day San Francisco took over the offices of tokbox this past weekend for two days of getting creative with digital music. The results, as always with Music Hack Days, were a mix of the practical and the absurd.Every Music Hack Day — part of an ongoing series of events around the world — offers participants 24 hours to conjure up inventive new ways of interacting...

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Ubuntu Linux Primed for Life on Tablets

We all knew it was coming. Once Canonical unveiled the “Unity” interface for Ubuntu — its version of the open source Linux operating system — we could see that the company was taking Ubuntu onto tablets. But now the new is official: A tablet version of the OS will arrive next year.The question is whether developers will actually build applications for it.Linux already has an app deficit, and...

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New Whale Species Unearthed in California Highway Dig

By Carolyn Gramling, ScienceNOWChalk yet another fossil find up to roadcut science. Thanks to a highway-widening project in California’s Laguna Canyon, scientists have identified several new species of early toothed baleen whales. Paleontologist Meredith Rivin of the John D. Cooper Archaeological and Paleontological Center in Fullerton, California, presented the finds Feb. 17 at the annual...

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<cite>Halo</cite> Creator Unveils Its Next Masterpiece, a Persistent Online World

"Citadel": Concept art from Bungie's Destiny.BELLEVUE, Washington — Destiny, the new game from the creator of Halo, isn’t just another shooter. It’s a persistent online multiplayer adventure, designed on a galactic scale, that wants to become your new life.“It isn’t a game,” went the oft-heard tagline at a preview event on Wednesday. “It’s a world where the most important stories are told...

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The Quirky World of Competitive Snow Carving Comes to California

Team Truckee entered the competition late, after Team Russia was unable to get visas in time. Their sculpture: "Rising Tide."The weekend at Northstar ski resort in Truckee, California, is beautiful, sunny, and in the 30s. For eight teams of snow carvers from around the world, though, it’s terrible — the melty snow is sloppy, hard to carve, and even dangerous.Teams of three from Finland, Japan,...

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Odds of Death by Asteroid? Lower Than Plane Crash, Higher Than Lightning

Most people in the U.S. woke up to a spectacular sight this morning: videos from Russian dashboard cameras showing a fireball in the sky crashing down to the Earth. The 15-meter meteorite impacted the atmosphere and exploded above the Chelyabinsk region of central Russia, injuring an estimated 1,200 people and causing roughly 1 billion rubles ($33 million...

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Animals' Love Lives Look a Lot Like Ours

For most of the 20th century, animals weren’t allowed to have emotions. Your dog didn’t actually love you—it (and it was an “it” back then) was just a stimulus–response machine conditioned to act a specific way in a specific situation. Scientists who said otherwise—that animals actually had minds capable of thoughts and emotions—were accused of “anthropomorphizing” and ridiculed by their peers. Even...

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DC Comics Under Fire for Hiring Anti-Gay Author Orson Scott Card to Write <em>Superman</em>

Ahead of the release of this summer’s Superman film Man of Steel, DC Entertainment is launching a new digital anthology of short comics starring the last son of Krypton entitled Adventures of Superman. Unfortunately, the series is being launched with a story written by Ender’s Game author and outspoken homophobe Orson Scott Card, leading to an online backlash against both the project...

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Why Software Developers Should Learn the Thriller Dance

As the CEO of Urban Airship — a Portland, Oregon company that offers tools for building mobile software applications — Scott Kveton oversees a team of 121 employees, including 75 developers and other technical types. One afternoon, Barb Stark walked into his office, and in typical fashion, she unloaded a plan to further the education of these hard-core programmers. “I need you to just say...

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Judge Dismisses Axl Rose's $20M <cite>Guitar Hero</cite> Lawsuit

Two years ago, Guns N’ Roses frontman Axl Rose brought a $20 million lawsuit against Guitar Hero III maker Activision for the inclusion of his former bandmate Slash in the 2007 videogame. Rose claimed that his deal with the company to license the song “Welcome to the Jungle” for use in the game included a promise from Activision that no images of Slash would be used...

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