Two hundred songs—that’s how many Matt Farley will record this month. That’s about 50 songs per week. He records whenever he’s not at his day job; over the past seven years, he has written more than 16,000 songs—he’s on keyboard, vocals, and occasionally guitar—available on iTunes and Spotify. Are they any good? No, of course not. But there sure are a lot of them. “I realized people will type weird stuff into search engines, and there’s not always songs for the stuff,” he says. “If you search for ‘love’ on iTunes or Spotify, you’re going to get something like 15 million songs. If you search ‘monkey,’ you’re going to get fewer.” So Farley decided to fill that gap.
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At the X games' Snowboard Big Air jump event, an entrant has about 2.4 seconds of air time in which to impress the judges. That's not a lot, but it's enough for Maxence Parrot. Last year's gold medalist bested the field with a flawless triple cork 1620: four and a half rotations, all while flipping off-axis three times. The key, he says, is visualization: “In my head I'm the filmer, and I see myself doing the trick.” Of course, physics helps too—here's how he pulls it off.
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Pity the owners of the $200,000 Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG electric. For them (and plebe Tesla and Leaf drivers), it's hard to find a charge out on the open road. So some plug-in owners make their home charging stations available through services like PlugShare.com—more than 4,500 hosts (and opportunities for awkwardness) in all. We cruised the forums and spoke to Forrest North, who oversees PlugShare for Recargo, for insight into the rules of the new e-road.
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Don’t buy another phone ever again. That’s a weird thing for us to say, right? We’re WIRED! But by the end of last year, it was fancy-ice clear that the distinction between phones and the other little touchscreen computers with over-the-air Internet connections had become blatantly artificial. The only reason we still have electronics with that Bell-ian name is so carriers can sell us a plan.
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The key to getting a wounded soldier from a battlefield to a hospital is stabilization—holding off the damage done by bullet or bomb for long enough to get to surgery. So faster evacuation is always better. Now the hospital can actually meet the injured partway—in the form of a Boeing C-17 Globemaster III, transformed into a flying triage unit. On board, doctors stabilize, monitor, and treat soldiers with high-level care so they make it safely home.
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Sky-high data rates are not uncommon when surfing overseas. Whether you’re fleeing for two days or two months, prepare for your global excursion before you board the plane.
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Bratislav Milenkovic Whether it’s a cruise liner or kayak, freighter or frigate, a boat’s voyage can last only as long as its victuals. Improvements in technologies for food preservation and preparation have allowed humans to explore, emigrate, and wage war overseas, says historian Simon Spalding in his new book, Food at Sea: Shipboard Cuisine From […]
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Yeast. Is there nothing it can't do? Scoop it up from nature and it makes alcohol. Fiddle with the genes and you can coax it to produce gasoline. Useful, but such synbio projects tend not to be cost-effective. Now, though, biochemists are genetically modifying yeast and algae to produce stuff with good enough profit margins that you could find it in the grocery store (or on the street corner).
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To understand what’s happening at the top of a snow-covered mountain, you have to dig. Granular analysis of snowflakes can tell local ski resorts and government agencies which layers of snow are destined for collapse. But that process isn’t exactly scalable.
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If, one day, you find yourself driving an electric car that recharges its featherweight high-capacity lithium batteries with sunlight collected from super-efficient solar cells covering its carbon-composite body, you'll have Solar Impulse 2 to thank. It's a plane powered by nothing but sunlight, and this March, Bertrand Piccard and his copilot, engineer André Borschberg, will […]
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Sure, a 90-second ferry ride is a fun way to access an airport, but Toronto has a better suggestion: walking. This spring, Billy Bishop Airport, on an island in Lake Ontario, will inaugurate an $82.5 million, 800-foot pedestrian tunnel—the world's first walkable underwater airport link.
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What's inside Hothands Super Warmers?
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Feel free to roam about the cabin. Or just pack this stuff, stay put, and let the hours fly by.
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Earbud jackasses playing their music loud enough for the entire train drive me crazy. How do I tell them to turn it down without seeming like a jerk?
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Facebook. Twitter. Instagram. World of Warcraft. Angry Birds. The most successful tech products have one thing in common: They’re addictive. And users don’t get hooked by accident.
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When Thomas Ella gets a text message on his smartphone, he can sometimes tell what it says without reading it. Instead, he feels it: An app called Mumble! “plays” the text as a pattern of vibrations, syllable by syllable, using higher-intensity vibrations when a message has exclamation points or capitalizations. After a few weeks of using the app, Ella developed a sort of tactile ESP, an ability to recognize texts as coming from particular friends and to distinguish a significant message that needs a reply from an “LOL” that doesn’t. “It’s cool,” he says, “to have a reason not to pull out my phone.”
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A ship of nerds, of which I am one. A secret font of geek culture. A pop-up community that inverts the classic rules of social hierarchy and celebrates new ones. Which should sound pretty great to me. It really should.
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In late May of 2012, a damaged package split open at a FedEx facility in Rancho Cordova, California, spilling dozens of boxed iPhones across the shipping room floor. A worker there contacted Apple, which, with the help of corporate security at Verizon, confirmed what FedEx personnel already suspected: The devices were contraband, likely bound for the black market.
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Type By Dirk Fowler It’s like a parody, spending time in a well-funded startup’s office, with exposed brick walls and Great Big Screens Showing User Numbers and Pie Charts, just down the street from a food truck pavilion, sipping on a cup of roasted-one-block-away designer coffee while debating iPhone 6 versus iPhone 6 Plus. But […]
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The new design for WIRED.com moves faster and gives us more tools to tell bigger and better stories. Rollout starts next month. “ A transition period,” University of Chicago economist George Stigler once said, “is a period between two transition periods.” The aphorism has become a kind of koan for people who try to initiate (and […]
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Every day when I wake up, I check Instagram. Then I look at Twitter to see what the One Directioners are talking about. I check Facebook to see how everybody from high school's doing. I go on Reddit to see what my weirdos are talking about. Then I go on Tumblr to see what my feminists are talking about. But there's something missing in all this new new media craziness, and that is something that uses celebrity news as a way to get into a really serious analysis of our culture.
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Sierra Designs Backcountry Bed 800 2-Season | $350 Peden + Munk From explorers to astronauts to students thumbing their way across the world, the sleeping bag has been an indispensable travel tool since the 19th century. Yet only recently was one created with side sleepers in mind. Instead of a perimeter zipper, Sierra Designs’ backcountry […]
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