Here's a brain teaser: Your task is to move a single line so that the false arithmetic statement below becomes true. IV = III + III Did you get it? I

World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee addresses the media during the International World Wide Web conference in Hyderabad, India, Thursday, March 31, 2011. Photo: Mahesh Kumar A/AP The inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, testified in a courtroom Tuesday for the first time in his life. The web pioneer flew down from Boston, near where he teaches at MIT, to an eastern Texas federal court to speak to a jury of two men and six women about the early days of the web. His trip is part of  show all text

The mother of all patent troll trials unfolds in Texas where Google, Amazon and Adobe are fighting a patent claiming ownership over online video, image rotation and search auto-complete. We explain and start a series. The city of Tyler, Texas is better known as the nation’s “rose capital” than as a hotspot of the technology industry. It’s a quiet, conservative city of about 100,000, full of wide streets and big trucks. This week, though, Tyler is the site of a remarkable battle over the history...  show all text

A one-of-a-kind website enabling the online sale of pre-owned digital-music files got a legal boost late Monday when a federal judge refused to shutter it at the request of Capitol Records. It could be short-lived boost, however. ReDigi, which opened in October, says it’s a modern-day, used-record store that provides account holders with a platform to buy and sell used MP3s that were purchased lawfully through iTunes. The platform’s technology does not support other digital files such as those ...  show all text

Mobile is half of #FB, but it’s a revenue black hole — Evan Hansen (@evanatwired) February 1, 2012 “Facebook was not originally created to be a company,” Mark Zuckerberg writes in the company’s IPO filing. It also wasn’t created to be a part of the mobile web. Facebook for iOS. Image via iTunes' App Store Facebook may be the last great company of the desktop age. It’s beaten back Friendster, MySpace and a half-dozen other pretenders, and — at least so far — is successfully holding off both Tw...  show all text

Image: NASA/NOAA In recent weeks, a pair of high-resolution images of the Earth has captivated the public. Taken by the Suomi NPP satellite, these pictures portray our planet’s incredible beauty with 8,000- by 8,000-pixel and 11,500- by 11,500-pixel detail. How were these highly detailed images created? The satellite flies 512 miles above the Earth, but the images appear as if they were taken from a much higher perspective: an altitude of 1,242 for the first image and 7,918 miles for the second.  show all text

<< Previous | Next >> << Previous | Next >> View all HOLLYWOOD — Spider-Man and his gloppy Lizard nemesis slug it out amid the skyscrapers of New York City in an action-crammed new trailer for The Amazing Spider-Man. New footage, including a trailer and an additional sizzle reel, was screened here Monday in 3-D, with director Marc Webb hosting the first look for fans and members of the press. The international simulcast featured new web-slinger Andrew Ga...  show all text

Photo: Some girl named Jen/Flickr A Colorado woman ordered to decrypt her laptop so prosecutors may use the files against her in a criminal case might have forgotten the password, the defendant’s attorney said Monday. The authorities seized the Toshiba laptop from defendant Ramona Fricosu in 2010 with a court warrant while investigating alleged mortgage fraud. Ruling that the woman’s Fifth Amendment rights against compelled self-incrimination would not be breached, U.S. District Judge Robert Bl...  show all text

Roboticists at the University of Pennsylvania’s GRASP are able to get as many as 20 of their autonomous microcopters to fly in formation and perform complex maneuvers flawlessly. In an impressive new video, the GRASP — General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception — team makes their swarm of flying microbots flip, change direction, navigate through obstacles and even fly figure-eights with jaw-dropping agility and precision. GRASP has since 2010 made remarkable advancements in the capabi...  show all text

By Mark Brown, Wired UK Last week, NASA released its 2012 version of the famous “Blue Marble” image. By using a planet-pointing satellite, Suomi NPP, the space agency created an extremely high-resolution photograph of our watery world. The photo centered on the western hemisphere, highlighting North and Central America. It went viral and got even more hits on Flickr than the iconic “Situation Room” photo, taken at the time of the assassination of Osama bin Laden. Now, responding to public dem...  show all text

<< Previous | Next >> Toxic barbs on a cucumber’s skin, nanoscopic flakes of metal and a mouse’s technicolor eyeball (above) are just a few of 2011′s top science visualizations. A panel of judges picked the best of more than 200 entries from 33 countries for the 2011 International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge. “I think because information technology tools and visualization tools have advanced, people have found ever-increasingly clever ways to disp...  show all text

Mark Zuckerberg giving the keynote at SXSW conerence in 2009. Credit: Jim Merithew/Wired.com On Wednesday, Facebook filed the prospectus for a $5 billion initial public offering. Here is CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s letter to potential investors. Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission — to make the world more open and connected. We think it’s important that everyone who invests in Facebook understands what this mission means to us, how we make...  show all text

Google has quietly announced changes to its Blogger free-blogging platform that will enable the blocking of content only in countries where censorship is required. Twitter announced technology last week addressing the same topic. It said it had acquired the ability to censor tweets in the countries only where it was ordered removed, instead of on an internet-wide basis. Twitter’s announcement via its blog sparked a huge online backlash. The microblogging service was accused of becoming a censor...  show all text

American officials have complained for years that U.S. networks were crawling with Russian and Chinese hackers. On Tuesday, the nation’s top intelligence official told Congress that there’s a new danger to America’s information security: Iran. Too bad he didn’t provide much evidence to back up the claim. “Russia and China are aggressive and successful purveyors of economic espionage against the United States,” Director of National Intelligence James Clapper noted in his prepared testimony (.pdf)  show all text

Photo: Anindito Mukherjee/Corbis The meeting took place a week before Bill Gates retired from Microsoft, and the topic was open source software. It was the summer of 2008, and for years, the open source community had viewed Microsoft as public enemy number one. Seven years earlier, CEO Steve Ballmer had referred to Linux as a “malignant cancer,” and as recently as the previous summer, Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith and licensing chief Horacio Gutierrez had told Fortune Magazine that Linux...  show all text

Unfortunately, learning through book osmosis doesn't make the learning strategies list (image courtesy of Flickr user jemsweb, cc license) Taking notes during class? Topic-focused study? A consistent learning environment? All are exactly opposite the best strategies for learning. Really, I recently had the good fortune to interview Robert Bjork, director of the UCLA Learning and Forgetting Lab, distinguished professor of psychology, and massively renowned expert on packing things in your brain ...  show all text

Stacy Peralta's newest skateboarding documentary, The Bones Brigade: An Autobiography, chronicles the lives of the young skateboarding team and their impact on the culture. Photo: Grant Britain SALT LAKE CITY, Utah — There were many laughs and some tears, but mostly the crowd switched between adoring focus and roaring applause at the Sundance Film Festival screening of Stacy Peralta’s newest skateboarding documentary, The Bones Brigade: An Autobiography at Salt Lake’s Rose Wagner Performing Arts  show all text

Amazon Video image courtesy Amazon Everyone knows that Amazon wants to extend its digital media offerings. Any online retailer of analog media would. Its executives know the long-term trends for sales of DVDs, Blu-Rays and their players. The company that dominates e-book and e-reader sales was already beaten first to digital music by Apple. Jeff Bezos never wants that to happen again. Everything from the Kindle Fire’s video support, to cloud storage for Amazon Video On Demand, to free subscript...  show all text

<< Previous | Next >> The sun is waking up. After several quiet years, it bombarded the Earth with two consecutive solar storms this week, which generated many nights of spectacular auroras seen from backyards around the Northern Hemisphere. A relatively powerful flare burst from the sun’s surface on Jan. 19, throwing off charged particles that reached our planet on Jan. 22. But this was nothing compared to the enormous flare that erupted the next day. The biggest so...  show all text

An example of what Twitter's censorship will look like Internet scorn for Twitter’s announcement Thursday that it would censor tweets was swift and unforgiving. But even free-speech and other experts were divided Friday on the service’s move that it might censor tweets if required by law in ”countries that have different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression.” Like Yahoo and Google before it — and for the same reason, becoming a global powerhouse — Twitter has confronted an inconven...  show all text

Our good friends at Google run a daily puzzle challenge and asked us to help get them out to the geeky masses. Each day’s puzzle will task your googling skills a little more, leading you to Google mastery. Each morning at 12:01 a.m. Eastern time you’ll see a new puzzle, and the previous day’s answer (in invisitext) posted here. SPOILER WARNING: We leave the comments on so people can work together to find the answer. As such, if you want to figure it out all by yourself, DON’T READ THE COMMENTS!...  show all text

A year ago, electronic textbook publishers turned down David Johnston’s big idea: the first interactive marine science textbook. Johnston, who runs a marine biology lab at Duke University, wanted the digital tome to show undergraduate students what his scientific field has to offer. But e-book publishers said the subject matter was too niche and the requested features too expensive to make financial sense. “When we approached them, they essentially told us we were too small,” Johnston said. Fru...  show all text

NASA released this incredible new high-res image of the Earth, taken by the recently launched Earth-observing satellite, Suomi NPP. The image, which centers on North and Central America, has been nicknamed “Blue Marble 2012″ after the famous “Blue Marble” image (below) taken during the Apollo 17 mission in 1972. The original Blue Marble, featuring the Arabian Peninsula and Africa, is one of the most well recognized photographs of all time. Suomi NPP is designed to help improve weather forecasts...  show all text

On Tuesday night, U.S. special operations forces secretly entered Somalia and freed two humanitarian aid workers — one of whom, Jessica Buchanan, is a U.S. citizen — from captivity by Somali kidnappers. Not a single member of the U.S. raiding team was harmed; neither were the hostages. All nine Somali captors, whom Pentagon spokesman George Little described as “heavily armed,” were killed. The AP reports that the same Navy SEAL Team that killed Osama bin Laden last year was involved in the Soma...  show all text

A mysterious group is prowling the network of tunnels below Paris, secretly refurbishing the city's neglected treasures.

Google cleared $37.9 billion in 2011 revenue, which equates to more than $3 billion a month, mostly from those little text ads next to your search results that neither you or anybody you know will admit to ever clicking on. Insurance and finance buys for Google Adsense words accounted for $4.2 billion of that total — more than 10 percent — according to Larry Kim, the founder of Wordstream, a company that sells software to analyze text ad campaigns and commissioned the infographic above. The most  show all text

The Supreme Court ruled unanimously Monday that law enforcement authorities need a probable-cause warrant from a judge to affix a GPS device to a vehicle and monitor its every move. The decision (.pdf) in what is arguably the biggest Fourth Amendment case in the computer age, rejected the Obama administration’s position. The government had told the high court that it could even affix GPS devices on the vehicles of all members of the Supreme Court, without a warrant. “We hold that the government...  show all text

<< Previous | Next >> Jeff Widener holds his photo of Tank Man in Tienanmen Square from 1989. Photo: Tim Mantoani << Previous | Next >> View all The Tank Man of Tienanmen Square. Muhammad Ali standing over Sonny Liston in victory. The portrait of the Afghan Girl on the cover of National Geographic. Many of us can automatically recall these photos in our heads, but far fewer can name the photographers who took them. Even fewer know what those photographers look like...  show all text

Megaupload, the popular file-sharing site, was shuttered Thursday and its executives indicted by the Justice Department in what the authorities said was “among the largest criminal copyright cases ever brought by the United States.” Seven individuals connected to the Hong Kong-based site were indicted on a variety of charges, including criminal copyright infringement and conspiracy to commit money laundering. Four of the members of what the authorities called a five-year “racketeering conspirac...  show all text

Igor Stravinsky. Photo: Wikimedia/Library of Congress. Congress may take books, musical compositions and other works out of the public domain, where they can be freely used and adapted, and grant them copyright status again, the Supreme Court ruled Wednesday. In a 6-2 ruling, the court said that, just because material enters the public domain, it is not “territory that works may never exit.” (.pdf) The top court was ruling on a petition by a group of orchestra conductors, educators, performers,...  show all text