posted about 14 hours ago on wired news
Data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft show that the sizes and patterns of dunes on Saturn's moon Titan vary as a function of altitude and latitude. The dunes in areas that are more elevated or are higher in latitude, such as in the Fensal region pictured at bottom left, tend to be thinner and more widely separated, with gaps that have a thinner covering of sand. Dunes in the Belet region, pictured at top left, are at a lower altitude and latitude. The dunes in Belet are wider, with thicker blankets of sand between them. The Kalahari dunes in South Africa and Namibia, located in a region with limited sediment available and pictured at bottom right, show effects similar to the Fensal dunes. The Belet dunes on Titan resemble Earth's Oman dunes in Yemen and Saudi Arabia, where there is abundant sediment available. The Oman dunes are shown at top right.

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posted 1 day ago on wired news
On Saturday, Autodesk announced it is purchasing Tinkercad and reinstating the service. The move comes in time to prevent the previously announced shutdown of any accounts or services, and users can start creating new accounts immediately.

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posted 1 day ago on wired news
How many rings do you see in this new image of the galaxy Messier 94, also known as NGC 4736? While at first glance one might see a number of them, astronomers believe there is just one. This image was captured in infrared light by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope.

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posted 1 day ago on wired news
In the latest Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast author Rick Yancey talks about his new young adult survival novel The 5th Wave.

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posted 1 day ago on wired news
As one of just a few hundred limited-edition bikes produced by Cerv?lo's Project California division, the RCA is a neatly packaged compendium of its creator's two-decades-deep body of engineering knowledge.

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posted 1 day ago on wired news
When you?re an insomniac freelance writer who works from home, you end up seeing a lot of infomercials, and eventually, those things will wear you down. No matter how skeptical you might start off, you will eventually get to a point where you?ll start to wonder if there actually is somebody out there with a better way to fry eggs, chop tomatoes and make milkshakes in the comfort of your own home. I mean, television?s never lied to us before, has it? That?s why I wanted to actually check out a few of these things to see if they really were the life-changing innovations they purported to be. Today?s experiment: The Schticky.

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posted 2 days ago on wired news
This week, the broadcast TV networks announced their new shows for the 2013/2014 TV season. If you're overwhelmed by the choice, here are ten to watch.

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posted 2 days ago on wired news
Darpa is ending its experiment with small, close-flying spacecraft, but that doesn't mean the concept is dead.

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posted 2 days ago on wired news
The military doesn't want to take sexual assault cases out of the chain of command. But as scandals compile and Congress prepares to act, it may have to.

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posted 2 days ago on wired news
Wired senior editor Peter Rubin joins me to explore two Electronic Arts announcements that might prove quite telling of gaming's future.

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posted 2 days ago on wired news
So, there's a new trailer for director Guillermo del Toro's Pacific Rim. However, on another YouTube channel not so far away, there's also a new, not as sleek but equally entertaining trailer for Atlantic Rim ? the mockbuster by The Asylum. How do they stack up? Let's find out.

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posted 2 days ago on wired news
Star Trek Into Darkness costume designer Michael Kaplan readily admits that he wasn?t a Star Trek fan prior to being hired for the 2009 reboot. Still, with iconic sci-fi movies like Blade Runner and Armageddon under his belt, he was confident he could capture and improve the look of Starfleet, updating the occasionally clunky aesthetic of the original series into something long-time fans would still recognize and appreciate: ?I certainly want to please Trekkies.?

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posted 2 days ago on wired news
NASA scientists recorded the biggest explosion from a meteorite impact on the moon that they have seen in eight years of monitoring.

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posted 2 days ago on wired news
Tomorrow marks the official release of the DSM-5, a hugely influential diagnostic guide that defines disorders of the mind. Many experts say it's fundamentally flawed, and efforts to develop a better alternative have begun.

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posted 2 days ago on wired news
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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posted 2 days ago on wired news
Each week, Wired Design brings you a photo of 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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posted 2 days ago on wired news
Today's dubious lesson in technology as explained by movies: 1995's Evolver in which a teenage videogame fan wins an indestructible military robot in a contest and it works out pretty much exactly as you expect.

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posted 2 days ago on wired news
Edward Lorenz wasn't planning to spark a scientific revolution when he published his famous paper on weather models in 1963. But the unexpected behavior of his equations opened the door to an entirely new field: chaos theory. Fifty years later, Samuel Arbesman takes a look at what this new way of scientific thinking has wrought.

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posted 3 days ago on wired news
Anyone who has spent time in blustery, rainy climates knows the frustration of an umbrella defeated by the elements. In 2009, designer Federico Venturi experienced this frustration firsthand and, instead of throwing away the broken umbrella like everyone else does, decided to use it as inspiration for everything an umbrella should not be.

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posted 3 days ago on wired news
New materials. Outlandish technologies. Insane movements. Today?s watchmakers are engineering the most complicated mechanical timepieces ever.

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posted 3 days ago on wired news
[HTML1] It was a watch so beautiful, so elegant, so precise, that it could only have been meant for royalty. Then it vanished without a trace.    |    Photo: David Silberman/Getty Images The tiny Simca 1000 Sedan puttered through the winding streets of a tony enclave near Israel's presidential residence. The spring evening ...

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posted 3 days ago on wired news
Printable drones, limbs and ammunition. It's a far-out vision, but more and more military officers are starting to think that future troops will rely on 3-D printers to manufacture the tools of war.

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posted 3 days ago on wired news
It's hard to resist rubbernecking when we pass an accident on the freeway. What's happening is none of our business, but we do it anyway. This voyeuristic urge is what Danish photographer Nicolai Howalt wants to explore in his series, Car Crash Studies.

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posted 3 days ago on wired news
We are homogenizing our crops and homogenizing our people. And Big Pharma seems intent on pursuing a parallel attempt to create its own brand of human monoculture. With an assist from an overly ambitious psychiatry -- given tomorrow's impending release of the DSM-5 -- all human difference is being transmuted into chemical imbalance meant to be treated with a handy pill. Turning difference into illness was among the great strokes of marketing genius accomplished in our time.

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posted 3 days ago on wired news
I awoke aboard a boat, just before daybreak, which was weird. The last thing I remembered was being in San Francisco?s Moscone Center, wrapping up a four-hour Google I/O keynote liveblogging session. My last recollection was of Google CEO Larry Page taking questions from the audience and promoting a vision of a utopia where society could be free to innovate and experiment, unencumbered by government regulations or social norms.

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