The space shuttle era is officially over....
Mary H.K. Choi on the Super Powers of Lois Lane
Illustration: Leo Espinosa
Lois Lane makes a crummy first impression. She’s thin-lipped, strident, and self-involved; you can see how Clark Kent’s disguise of bumbling-plus-birth-control-specs could dupe her so handily (despite there never having existed such a black-haired, blue-eyed, 6?3?, 225-pound reporter-mancake—unmarried, heterosexual, or otherwise—in the history of movable type). Yet as a journalist interviewing an indestructible space alien, she devolves into a hair-flipping, loin-scrambled giggle of a girl. She’s supposed to be a watchdog, a serious reporter, but over seven decades of...
The Space Shuttle??s Impact on Pop Culture
- By Rachel Swaby This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
- June 28, 2011 |
- 12:00 pm |
- Wired July 2011
Kinect Hackers Are Changing the Future of Robotics
The Kinect lets people navigate the digital world through gestures rather than mouseclicks.
Illustration: Justin Wood
For 25 years, the field of robotics has been bedeviled by a fundamental problem: If a robot is to move through the world, it needs to be able to create a map of its environment and understand its place within it. Roboticists have developed tools to accomplish this task, known as simultaneous localization and mapping, or SLAM. But the sensors required to build that map have traditionally been either expensive and bulky or cheap and inaccurate. Laser arrays cost a few thousand...