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Electric and alternative-fuel bikes are the future of individual transportation not because of their fuel efficiency but because they are extremely cool. That's right. Creators of eco-friendly motorcycles are pushing the limits of their designs to make them desirable to a biking community that sees little difference between their (relatively) efficient gas engines and the new-fuel wave of alternatives. Riding bikes is all about the cool factor, so the crazier and more technologically advanced they get, the more people will want to ride them, clean fuel or not. Gaze upon the alt-fuel bikes most likely to break the mold of motorcycle design in the near future. Left: The ENV Fuel Cell Bike Intelligent Energy's...
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Five hours into their assault on West Point, the hackers got serious. The SQL [structured query language] inserts that came earlier were just pablum intended to lull the Army cadets into a false sense of security. But then the bad guys unleashed a stealthy kernel-level rootkit that burrowed into one workstation, started scraping data and "calling home." It was a highly sophisticated attack, but this time the bad guys were really good guys in wolves' clothing. For four days in late April, the National Security Agency -- the nation's most secretive repository of spooks, snoops and electronic eavesdroppers -- directed coordinated assaults on custom-built networks at seven of the nation's...
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A Stanford University professor wants to make cars that know what you're up to. The technology will make it easier for your car to protect you -- and for insurers and advertisers to hassle you.
  
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Billionaire investor Steve Novogratz doesn't see the price of gas coming down any time soon, but that might not be a bad thing as rising energy prices help drive investment in greener technologies that the world needs.
  
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A senior NASA research scientist answers your questions about the agency's Bed Rest Study, in which participants are paid $17,000 to lie in bed for 90 straight days.
  
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Even though no official deal exists, the proposed advertising partnership between the two internet giants draws the wrath of various consumer groups who fear Google will smother the online advertising market.
  
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A couple of new anti-Obama web videos are previewing what could be likely avenues of attack from Republican communications strategists in upcoming months -- exploiting voters' fear of the unknown.
  
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A clever stealth campaign featuring guys jumping into blue jeans bounces to the top of the YouTube charts.
  
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Fisker Automotive's $80,000 sedan hits the road, and we've got pics!
  
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The Pirates of the Caribbean director gets set to train his lens on a much creepier underwater world.
  
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Olympus' E-420 is the lightest and smallest DSLR on the market. It also happens to take some damn fine pictures, thanks to top-notch optics and easy usability.
  
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Why did the U.S. Army pull its web page on a "nonlethal weapon" that sends "microwave transmission[s] of sound into the skull[s] of persons or animals?"
  
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Microsoft has released potential directors in a hostile takeover of Yahoo, in what the Wall Street Journal calls a "clear sign" the Redmond giant is really, truly walking away. Will this defining moment end once and for all the speculation which has helped Yahoo shares to remain comfortably above pre-takeover-talk levels? Of course not.
  
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Microsoft isn't saying much -- though Bill Gates does keep saying they are going to go it alone now. But having attempted to independently create a search that would rival Google, and then to try to buy into the game by taking over Yahoo, what exactly is "Plan C?"
  
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Facebook agrees to deploy 40 new safeguards it says will protect users from sexual predators and cyberbullies. The move is endorsed by 49 states and Washington DC, which have been negotiating with the number-two social network on the measures for months. The holdout state? Texas -- which says they do not go far enough.
  
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Google still hopes to link up with Yahoo on advertising, a deal that would almost certainly be lucrative to both companies and make Yahoo a tougher takeover target for, say, a certain Redmond software concern. Google co-founder Sergei Brin says there was a two-week test last month but doesn't say how far along the talks are.
  
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News from Portfolio.com 
Also on Portfolio Dove: We Didn't Airbrush our 'Real Beauties' TV Networks Scale Back on Once-Lavish Ad-Sales Fetes The $1.7 Million Car of Your Auto Erotic Dreams Subscribe to Portfolio magazine From way over in Indonesia, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates let it be known that Microsoft never needed to buy Yahoo to make headway in search and advertising. It just kind of wanted to. "We have always felt we could do very well on our own and now that's the path we are focused on," Gates told AP in Jakarta on Friday. "The standard strategy for us...
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No matter how beautiful the sex animations are in your favorite virtual playground, they can't compete with the movement of your own body. How soon will we be slipping gracefully into motion-capture suits or using 3-D cameras to capture those uniquely natural moves and engage our entire bodies in online sexual adventures, rather than limping along with keyboard and mouse? Sooner than you might think. Kevin Alderman, who's already infamous for the sex animations his company Strokerz Toyz creates for Second Life, is developing a wireless, consumer-level motion-capture suit that's expected to hit shelves in 2009. "Right now only a dozen or so sites on the web offer downloadable mocap...
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1941: British destroyers capture a German submarine, U-110, south of Iceland. The British remove a naval version of the highly secret cipher machine known to the Allies as Enigma, and then they let the boat sink -- to keep the fact of their boarding secret. The Enigma machine, used by the Kriegsmarine to encode and decode messages passing between shore command and ships at sea, was taken to Bletchley Park in England, where cryptographers including computer pioneer Alan Turing succeeded in breaking the naval code. The Germans, assuming U-110 had foundered with her secrets intact, failed to realize that their code was broken. The subsequent information passing before British eyes helped the Allies enormously in the Battle...
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 : Courtesy Te Papa Museum
Scientists at the national museum of New Zealand, Te Papa, have recently completed dissections of several enormous squids, including pieces of a colossal squid -- the largest invertebrate ever caught. The female specimen weighs more than 1,000 pounds and measures 26 feet long. The squid's resemblance to fiction's monsters of the deep, including its dinner-plate-size eyes, has attracted global interest. Scientists now believe the cephalopods can grow even larger, to more than 45 feet long, with a corresponding increase in weight. In this gallery, we take you into the gritty, visceral business of defrosting and preserving this Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni, known in English as the colossal squid. Left: Researchers at...
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TorrentSpy lawyers said the torrent-tracking service won't pay the $111 million judgment a U.S. judge levied against it. Attorney Ira Rothken said he would appeal one of the nation's largest copyright penalties. The search engines' owner, he said, has filed for bankruptcy.
  
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The eco-geeks aboard the carbon-neutral, biodiesel-powered Earthrace trimaran have completed the first leg of their trip around the world. And they're on pace to do it in record time.
  
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The social networker plans to allow its customers to share their personal data with websites operated by Yahoo, eBay and others, a move that would change the nature of social networking.
  
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Turn last night's dinner into a piece of scientific scuplture by cleaning a chicken's bones and reassembling the skeleton. Follow our guide in Wired's How-To Wiki.
  
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Trippy CGI visuals take the checkered flag in the Wachowski brothers' new movie, with actors planted firmly in the back seat.
  
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Los Angeles County, following New York's lead, is declaring property a public nuisance if it's used to counterfeit copyrighted music and videos. Among the reasons: "It's detrimental to the public health, safety and welfare" of the public at large. Penalties range up to $1,000 for violation and properties can be shuttered.
  
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Wired Science's Brandon Keim reports from The New Yorker conference, "Stories from the Near Future," which features visions of the next decade presented by the biggest names in science, technology and culture.
  
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Get a peek at the dark visual style of the upcoming straight-to-DVD animated flick.
  
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The Defense Department is keeping plump war-time budgets fat to fund a "longer war on terrorism" with lots of new gear. A new $165 billion House defense-spending bill goes well beyond what troops need on the ground in Iraq -- $50 billion is allocated for the latest manned and robotic aircraft, as well as new aerial and weapons systems.
  
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Climate change threatens many animals -- but with any luck, some will handle weather shifts with as much aplomb as Parus major, a colorful songbird also known as the great tit. In a study published today in Science, ornithologists from the University of Oxford tracked the egg-laying times of great tits in Wytham, England. Since the mid-1970s, temperatures in Wytham have risen steadily, hastening the start of spring by two weeks. The birds have followed suit, timing their breeding to coincide with earlier hatches of their favorite food source, a species of moth caterpillar. The birds' adaptation appears to be based in what's known as phenotypic plasticity -- the ability of a...
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