Within a few years, your car may become a hub of interconnected devices, media and online services. And you thought it was for getting you around town. I recently spent a little time in a tricked-out 2009 Corvette whose dashboard included some proof-of-concept technology to integrate the car with a

When the tentacled aliens from Gliese 581g arrive on Earth, they’ll probably be riding a YikeBike. At least, that’s how the YikeBike looks. In reality, it’s made for the posteriors of humans, not the glistening thoraxes of our future Gliesean overlords. It’s the most compact electric bicycle ever ma

SAN FRANCISCO — HP’s diminutive Veer might be named that because the company wants to emphasize that it’s swerving in a different direction than most phone makers. And it is: In a gadget season dominated by 4-inch and bigger smartphones, the webOS-based Veer looks positively petite. It feels like a

It may be hard to believe as you read Wired on your iPad, but heating oil and metal plumbing pipes were hot tech topics just 100 years ago. They were businesses, too, on which inventors pinned their hopes and corporations placed their bets in the form of factories, salesmen, and marketing budgets. F

The internet has run out of room. Like a prairie with no more vacant land to homestead or a hip area code with no more cellphone numbers, the pool of available numeric internet addresses has been completely allocated as of Thursday (.pdf). With that, the frontier has closed. The internet — in its cu

An Amazon.com security flaw allows some customers to log in with variations of their actual password that are close to, but not exactly, their real password. The flaw lets Amazon accept as valid some passwords that have extra characters added on after the 8th character, and also makes the password c

Robots that look like oversized hockey pucks, dune buggies or refrigerators may be practical for cleaning floors, exploring Mars or dispensing beer, but it’s the walking robots that capture our imagination. The trick is making them use their legs to walk efficiently, not like stiff-legged metal mons

I was very happy to appear on the NPR and WBUR radio program On Point last week, for an hourlong discussion of haiku with the host, Tom Ashbrook. Guests included Frogpond editor George Swede and economist Stephen Ziliak (the author of an essay called “Haiku Economics” in the most recent issue of Poe

Most of the tablets released in 2011 will be Android-based, but a few stalwarts are sticking with Windows. We recently got a closer look at two tablets shown off in Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer’s CES 2011 keynote: The Acer Iconia and the Asus Eee Slate EP121. Together, they show the potential — and t

A game currently in development by Mattel will let you play Angry Birds in real life. The iPhone and iPad game has been near or at the top of the Apple App Store’s “most popular” list for months, and has been downloaded more than 50 million times. It’s been praised for its realistic physics engine,

If you don’t like the options for 3-D content, go out and make some of your own. That’ll be an increasingly practical option in 2011, thanks to a handful of new 3-D consumer cameras and camcorders. Previously, you had to be a pretty serious stereophotography enthusiast to make 3-D images or video. T

U.S. iPhone customers have been eagerly awaiting a Verizon-branded iPhone almost since day one. Starting February 10, they’ll have that option. Verizon announced Tuesday that it would soon offer the iPhone 4 on its 3G network. The 16-GB model will cost $200 and a 32-GB model will go for $300, both w