Technology

Check out our inaugural episode of Cocktail Party Science, in which host Chuck Cage, senior editor Nicole Dyer and Web editor Megan Miller talk to Eric Hagerman, author of Your Sewer on Drugs. Youll get a behind-the-scenes account of what it was really like to dive into the manholes of San Diego in the name of science.

Its better to be seen and not heard. This condescending counsel dispensed to unruly adolescents is doubling as an unofficial recommendation for athletes in the upcoming Olympics in Beijing, China. With a location immersed in controversy, Olympic committees worldwide have threatened to spank any athlete who smuggles a soapbox into his gym bag.

Soon after the Nintendo Wiis release, hackers immediately began uncovering ways to use its unique motion-sensing controller to interface with other things—PCs, musical instruments, you name it. But Tom Tlalim, an Israeli-born composer who now lives in the Netherlands, may have outdone them all: His full-body, eight-piece suit of Wiimotes interfaces fully with custom software to turn his entire body into an electronic instrument that responds to his every motion. In his suit, Tlalim doesnt play songs. He dances them.

The annual Toy Industry Association's Toy Fair is every kids dream: A whole conference center packed with games, robots, balls, hula hoops, slime guns, Smurfs, and just about any other instrument of fun that you can imagine. Come to think of it, its every adults dream, too.

Gaming giant Electronic Arts recently announced its intention to buy Take Two Interactive, the shop behind violent titles like Grand Theft Auto and Max Payne, plus the unsettling but ridiculously creative BioShock. Since EA isnt known for Mature titles, some in the gaming community feared theyd soften those edgier games. But EAs CEO has some encouraging words for fans. Regarding those games, he said in a call with Multiplayer, I wouldnt change a line of code.

This Saturday, Japan launched a satellite, Kizuna. If all goes well, starting in July Kizuna will provide commercial users with the fastest Internet on Earth. Less speedy is the faster-than-fiber-optic connection speeds that the average user can access with just an 18-inch-wide dish. Those speeds will be available to offices and homes in remote areas, places that dont have the necessary telecommunications infrastructure.

New York City has just been destroyed by a 40-foot-tall deluge. Pirates battle around a giant, violent whirlpool. Without years of work by the 2007 Scientific and Technical Oscar winners, none of those images would have made it to a computer—and then a multiplex—near you.

A couple years ago, a Web sensation was born when a bunch of people started posting photos of cute animals—mostly kittens—doing funny stuff, mostly with computers, and captioning these photos in the weird pidgen of baby talk and IM slang now known as lolspeak."

Today at a press conference at Google's Mountain View, California headquarters, the X Prize Foundation announced the 10 official competitors for its $30 million Google Lunar X Prize. It will not be an easy thing to win. To qualify, a team must land a privately funded spacecraft on the moon, rove at least 500 meters, and beam a particular set of video, pictures and data back to earth. Oh, and ideally it will do this within the next four years, because after December 31st 2012, the purse drops to $15 million.

Last night at approximately 10:26 EST, after a long buildup of preparations, the Navy took the controversial step of shooting down a dead U.S. reconnaissance satellite from its low-Earth orbit. The satellite, which is about the size of a school bus, was destroyed to prevent a potentially hazardous impact with Earth, the military has said. It was moving faster than 17,000 mph at an altitude of 133 nautical miles above the Pacific when a modified SM-3 anti-ballistic missile launched from the USS Lake Erie, a Ticonderoga-class AEGIS missile cruiser, reportedly made impact.

Yesterday Nintendo announced that the WiiWare channel—which will offer a range of additional games, including an installment of the popular Final Fantasy, along with tools for developers to create new ones—will launch May 12. According to GameSpot, Nintendo of America says that there are already more than 100 projects in the works, and a healthy slate of those games will be ready to go on launch day. Giving a bigger pool of developers a chance to find new ways to use the Wii should prove interesting theres more room for creative applications.

Also, a week after the channel launch, Nintendos Wii Fit will go on sale.

Fancy yourself a writer? There's probably no better time in history for the connectionless (and even talentless!) to get their work into the hands of potentially adoring fans. While the traditional publishing industry is stagnating, self-publishing is booming—growing by some 30 percent each year. Though still just a fraction of the industry as a whole, if it continues to take cues from technological breakthroughs, there's no question its role will expand.

Sick of limiting your iTunes purchases to five authorized computers?

Starting next week, nanophysics and biomimicry get celebrated alongside sculpture and painting at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Design and the Elastic Mind, MoMAs most science-centric exhibition to date, explores recent collaborations among scientists and designers. The results—teddy bears impregnated with the chicken pox virus, lollipops that deliver a visual explosion with every lick—are sometimes far out.

The Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue is on stands once again this year, and controversy's a-brewing. The firestorm isnt over body paint or a potential ‘slip, but a photograph from five years ago. While Roger Clemens and former trainer Brian McNamee cant agree on how to spell HGH, there is consensus that Clemens wife Debbie was injected with the human growth hormone by McNamee prior to her photo shoot for the 2003 swimsuit edition (though they disagree on the details).