Wired

1987: Thousands of physicists crowd a ballroom at the New York Hilton for a hastily arranged marathon session on high-temperature superconductivity. The event generates so much excitement that it is later referred to as the “Woodstock of Physics.” Discovered in 1911, superconductivity is a phenomeno

Cisco Tuesday announced a new router, the CRS-3, that it says is capable of delivering 322 terabits per second. Now, we don’t usually cover routers and similar enterprise hardware here in Gadget Lab, but this one’s worth a brief mention. Let’s leave aside Cisco’s breathless hype (it will “forever ch

1837: The U.S. Patent Office approves Thomas Davenport’s application for a patent on an “Improvement in Propelling Machinery by Magnetism and Electro-Magnetism.” We’d call it an electric motor. Davenport was a Vermont blacksmith and an amateur tinkerer, not a trained scientist or engineer. When he h

While magazine, newspaper and book publishers wrestle with the logistics and technical details of publishing to the Apple iPad, Scribd has an alternative: a “send-to-device” feature that lets people send documents to their e-readers or smartphones for reading on the go. The new feature, reported in

Review: Kayland Zephyr Hiking Boots Hikers usually have to choose between boots that are lightweight and boots that are protective and supportive. Kayland’s Zephyrs override that dilemma with a polyurethane exoskeleton that gives the boots leatherlike rigidity, while keeping them lightweight (about

Someday, you’ll be able to fit as much data in a small, square CompactFlash card as AT&T carries on its entire network in a week. In theory at least, version 5 of the CompactFlash standard will allow CF cards to hold 188 petabytes of data. By comparison, that’s equivalent to 188,000 one-terabyte dri

Sturdier than your average bumbershoot

A new app invites you to command your iPhone in the same way that Captain Kirk addressed the Enterprise’s computer. Siri’s visual interface displays a transcription of what you say, then hands the data off to an appropriate web service or search engine. Siri, an artificial intelligence-based voice-r

Sun’s erstwhile CEO Jonathan Schwartz announced his retirement Wednesday night in a uniquely geeky way: With a haiku posted to Twitter. Financial crisis Stalled too many customers CEO no more Schwartz’s decision to announce his departure in the form of a short, Japanese lyric was, perhaps, a veiled

Verizon’s MiFi was one of our favorite products of 2009: It takes a 3G wireless data signal and turns it into a Wi-Fi hot spot. Now Sprint has one-upped Verizon with the Overdrive, which takes a 4G signal and turns it into a Wi-Fi hot spot. On Sprint’s WiMax-based 4G network, the Overdrive, which is

I give a quick, 3-minute overview of the top gadget trends that we predict will dominate CES — and the consumer electronics industry in 2010.