Wired

We don’t know exactly what to call the online collaboration between Arcade Fire and Google that launched Monday morning, but it sure is neat. If music videos were invented for the web they might have looked something like this: The project uses the web browser itself as an artistic medium, showing off the HTML5’s potential for interaction and multi-paned viewing rather than just using the browser as a frame for a plain, television-style video.

Emil Dudek, a technology enthusiast, has spent the last eight years acquiring 583 calculators of 128 brands made in the 1970s, analyzing the technology and posting it all to his website.

It's that time of year again when kids load their backpacks with rented textbooks, school-sanctioned laptops and iPhones crammed with podcasts of English Lit lectures. When your kid heads back to school, chances are they’ll need a way to get there.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower signs the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, ushering in a civilian nuclear-power program in the United States.

Acer has long been the go-to bargain laptop. But what happens when the price gets high and performance stays flat?

There may not be quite as many bombs falling from the sky. But everything else about the air war over Afghanistan is way up — from spy flights to resupply missions. But so far, none of it has altered the course of the war.

The social news site Reddit staged a mini-rebellion Friday, deciding to run ads for a pro-marijuana legalization campaign for free, after Condé Nast executives ruled against taking payment for the ads.

A long-simmering bill in North Carolina that sought to make community-owned broadband networks much more difficult to establish was sponsored by a prominent state lawmaker and backed by incumbent ISPs, including the cable lobby. But it’s not like those ISPs actually wrote the now-discarded bill, right? Um ...

Oh snap, another Android phone. But this one's from Sony Ericsson and it is nothing if not capable.

Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen has filed patent lawsuits against some of the net's largest companies, including Google and eBay, alleging they are violating patents he owns on recommendations and displaying information to web users.

If you love Nokia hardware but wish for a better operating system, consider what some enthusiastic developers have done. Developers have hacked Nokia's internet tablets so the devices combine the body of Nokia and the brains of Android.

The Gadget Lab crew chats about iPods, Apple TV, tablets, femtocells and Dylan's fugly shoes.

Here's how and why two guys who love brain teasers proved you can travel downwind faster than the wind.

The Austin, Texas, sci-fi and humor mag Space Squid is aping the dead media meme by publishing its ninth issue on clay tablets, up now for auction on eBay and starting Friday at Armadillocon.

This amoeba-shaped depression on Mars, called Orcus Patera, has had planetary scientists scratching their heads for decades. Despite these sharp new images from the European Space Agency's Mars Express spacecraft, the crater's origin is a complete mystery. Orcus Patera, discovered in 1965 by the Mariner 4 spacecraft, is located near Mars' equator, between the volcanoes Elysium Mons and Olympus Mons. At 236 miles long, it would stretch from New York to Boston on Earth. Its rim rises over a mile above the surrounding plains, and its floor lies 1,300 to 1,900 feet below its surroundings.

This animation from the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico plots the positions of all the known asteroids in the solar system in 1980, and adds new ones as they are discovered. The pace and patterns of asteroid discovery give a neat visual illustration of the history of solar system exploration.

As scientists get used to the idea that Earth is in a new geological age, that the Holocene — the last geological age — has been replaced by Anthropocene, they're figuring out how it got to be that way. Two years ago, ecologists Erle Ellis and Navin Ramankutty at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, released a map of the world's biological areas, traditionally known as biomes. Similar maps were found on science classroom walls across the land, but theirs was different in one very fundamental way. They updated the definition of biome to reflect how human beings used the land.

The kids may be ditching wristwatches for time-telling smartphones, but manufacturers and designers still have some tricks just barely up their long sleeves. The trick seems to be making watches more like smartphones by packing in extra functions or forgoing utility altogether for pure aesthetics or prestige.

Blockbuster CEO Jim Keyes and a team of restructuring consultants reportedly met with all the major Hollywood studios last week to tell them about a plan to file bankruptcy before interest payments come due on nearly $1 billion in secured debt at the end of next month. The company might be able to survive by restructuring its debt, according to the Los Angeles Times — but even a restructuring could entail bankruptcy. Either way, the company is in big trouble.

The re-release of Avatar, which begins Friday, contains an extra nine minutes. Director James Cameron tells us what's been added. Plus, he fills us in on the planned sequels and his upcoming project with Guillermo del Toro.