This composite image of a galaxy illustrates how the intense gravity of a supermassive black hole can be tapped to generate immense power. The image contains X-ray data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory (blue), optical light obtained with the Hubble Space Telescope (gold) and radio waves from the NSF's Very Large Array (pink).
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Why do we binge watch? One way to answer this question is to say, well, we binge on TV for the same reason we binge on food. And these psychological factors are no doubt apt. But the anthropological ones are perhaps just as useful and a little less obvious because culture is a thing of surfaces and secrets, and the anthropologist is obliged to record the first and penetrate the second to figure out what?s really going on.
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The Xbox One could have been the true center of your TV universe that let you throw all those other boxes away.
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Better Place's plan to create a world full of electric vehicles that swap their batteries when they run out of juice is reportedly dead.
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BMW's bikes have always been an amalgamation of form and function, which makes them more purposeful than pretty. The Concept Ninety finally manages to balance the two.
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Tomorrow sees the 30th anniversary of the release of Return of The Jedi. To celebrate, here are 30 things you might not have known about the movie.
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We're only days away from the new Netflix-only season of Arrested Development, but it still can't come soon enough. Here are four clips to hold everyone over until Sunday.
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Everybody remembers Apple's remarkable George Orwell-inspired 1984 Super Bowl ad. It's still talked about as one of the greatest Super Bowl ads of all time. But buried in the company's marketing vault is another landmark video from the same year. It wasn't inspired by Orwell. It was inspired by Dan Aykroyd.
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We look at a possible future for Xbox One that's not a box at all.
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Scientists have built a remote-controlled electronic device that is absorbable by the human body.
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Attorney General Eric Holder signed off on the controversial warrant application that the Justice Department used to obtain the personal emails of a Fox News reporter.
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This weekend, three planets will nestle together in the western sky at twilight to form a rarely seen glowing triangle. With good timing and a bit of luck you should be able to see it without a telescope.
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For two short years he was King of England, one of the most powerful men in the world. Then he was killed, desecrated, and dumped in a hastily dug grave, the location of which would be forgotten and rediscovered, centuries later, under a parking lot. So ends the tale of Richard III, which over the last several months has played out like a Game of Thrones episode combined with CSI and told by archaeologists.
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Attorney General Eric Holder is on record the Department of Justice supports legislation that generally would require the government to get a probable-cause warrant to read your e-mail. That we're having this discussion is because federal law, dating to the President Ronald Reagan administration, allows the cops to access your e-mail without a warrant if it's been stored in the cloud at least six months. For years, Congress has been debating changing the law that we'd expect to be the norm in some third-world, despotic nation. Now its time for the United States, and Holder in particular, to show the world, and the American public, that he means what he says. It's time for the Justice Department to begin honoring the Fourth Amendment and start getting a warrant to access the public's e-mail and other stored content, civil rights groups say.
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Obama wants to close Guantanamo and capture more terrorists than he kills. But unless Obama is about to get way radical, this is kind of an either/or situation.
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Buyers hit the brakes on purchasing hobbyist 3-D printers in the past year, even as industrial-grade printers are playing a larger role in manufacturing finished parts rather than prototypes.
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No longer satisfied with hiding in standard-issue tech-company hives, Apple, Facebook, and Google have embraced Architecture with a capital A.
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Each week, Wired Design presents one of our favorite buildings, showcasing boundary-pushing architecture and design involved in the unique structures that make the world's cityscapes interesting. Check back Fridays for the continuing series, and feel free to make recommendations in the comments, by Twitter, or by e-mail.
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The CIA offers an electronic search engine that lets you mine about 11 million agency documents that have been declassified over the years. It's called CREST, short for CIA Records Search Tool. But this represents only a portoin of materials declassified by the CIA, and if you want unfettered access to the search engine, you'll have to physically visit the National Archives at College Park, Maryland.
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A citizen science project called Calbug, which launched this week, hopes to recruit volunteers to help digitize field notes for more than a million insect and spider specimens held by nine natural history museums in California.
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All this time, I've been thinking about Ouya the wrong way.
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Canadian photojournalist Brett Gundlock traveled to Cher?n, Mexico last year to find out how things had changed for residents in that town after they confronted a violent Mexican cartel that had been illegally harvesting timber in the area.
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A roundup of odd ways humans and wild animals crossed paths this week compiled by Jon Mooallem, author of the upcoming book Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America.
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When it came to developing a mobile app, Nextdoor took it slow - an approach that looks like it will pay off.
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The folks at PlanetSolar have beat their own record for crossing the Atlantic in a solar-powered boat.
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