It’s a comfortable 63.3 degrees on the roof of Wired headquarters, with a slight 3-mph breeze, and the barometer is at 30.14 inches and rising. A few blocks away, it’s 61.1 degrees and there’s a 4-mph breeze from the northwest. There was a little mist yesterday, 0.06 inches of precipitation to be ex

Game of Thrones opens with violence, nudity, foul language and a soundtrack dominated by cello and kettledrums. A medieval-looking haze of smoke hangs over the computer-generated cities of Westeros. Mud and filth fill the castles. Characters drop their silks and furs to engage in flesh-smacking sex

One of the first planes to dock at Virgin America’s new San Francisco International Airport terminal was a spaceship. Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo arrived hitched between the twin fuselages of WhiteKnightTwo, its mothership and launch platform. “For the first time we’ve brought the spaceship and W

Considering the expense, precision and difficulty of manufacturing computer chips, you would think the engineers designing them are pretty serious people. But it’s not all business inside a chip fab, as these microscope photos reveal. In fact, the designers of microchips frequently hide tiny cartoon

Gallivanting billionaire Richard Branson is well on his way to space. Now he plans to explore the deepest parts of the ocean as well. Branson announced his undersea exploration venture, Virgin Oceanic, on Tuesday. Unlike his suborbital-space-flight company, Virgin Galactic, the new venture is not ac

The portable computer was born 30 years ago this weekend, when Adam Osborne unveiled the Osborne 1 in San Francisco. Osborne, a journalist and book author, made the transition to entrepreneur on the strength of his personality, ambition and vision. And for a short few months, his computer company wa

A strange legacy of the Japanese power system’s infancy in the late 1800s is complicating efforts to keep Tokyo supplied with electricity. The problem, as explained by IDG News Service’s Martyn Williams, is that half of the country uses power whose current alternates at 60 Hz, while the other half g

Silicon chips have billions of transistors in every square inch. But sometimes there’s enough room left over for chip engineers to insert a little joke. While using a scanning electron microscope to examine the microcircuitry of a chip found in Samsung’s Galaxy Tab and Galaxy S phone, consulting com

I get to play Rambo in this video, which showcases some of the office warfare weaponry Wired recently tested. My favorite: the Z-Curve Bow. The video’s webpage is here, and talented intern Christina Bonnington wrote a the roundup review of office weapons.

“In an all-white environment, the white version of the iPad 2 will have a better chance of hiding from predators.” via Gallery: Apple’s Jobs Unveils Upgraded, More Colorful iPad 2 | Gadget Lab | Wired.com.

SAN FRANCISCO — Sony is blurring the line between portable game consoles and larger consoles currently trapped inside TV cabinets. With a high-resolution screen, a powerful processor and graphics card, and massive amounts of memory, the upcoming Sony NGP will be closer to the capabilities of a PC or

Intel’s new high-speed port technology is called Thunderbolt. But what is it, exactly? Think of Thunderbolt (formerly code named “Light Peak”) as two cables in one. One is a fast PCI Express cable for transferring data, and the other is DisplayPort, for driving an external display. A Thunderbolt cab