Our Great City

These athletic aids — from bats to balls to hockey sticks — aren?t approved for official play, but they can give you the unfair advantage you deserve.

President Ulysses S. Grant signs a bill creating what we now call the National Weather Service. Forecasting models were simple but generally effective.

Bitly is just one of many tools that are trying to make sense of people's behavior on social networking services -- and put this information to use inside marketing departments. Like Bitly, the Vancouver, Canada-based HootSuite offers a "social dashboard" that seeks to analyze the performance not only of shortened links, but other media. Big names like IBM and Salesforce.com offer social analytics tools. And Google has gotten into the game with its acquisition of another Canadian outfit, PostRank.

The Marines think they have their data network of the future, an experimental communications system that can keep jarheads linked to sea bases 250 miles away. If it works, it'll be a big win for a Navy/Marine plan to take U.S. troops off of land bases where the locals don't want them. And it got its first test this week off the Atlantic coast during a massive wargame.

Check out this behind-the-scenes look at the making of the OK Go video seen during the Super Bowl, exclusive to Wired.

Google's daily brainteaser helps hone your search skills.

Om Malik's GigaOM has purchased media news organization ContentNext, paidContent's parent company, from the UK's Guardian News & Media.

The launch of Apple's next iPad is just around the corner, if the presence of leaked parts images are any indicator. Today, what reasonably seems to be the rear casing of the new iPad has popped up in photo form on the interwebs.

Benjamin Franklin kicks an informative and hilarious rhyme about transparency and First Amendment protections for pro and amateur photographers in the latest video from Joseph Gordon-Levitt?s open collaborative production company, hitRECord.

A team of researchers from across Europe and Asia has demonstrated a way of using laser heat to store data rather than magnetic fields, potentially increasing the speed of your hard drive by 100 times or more. Tom Ostler -- a physicist at the University of York, which led the research project -- tells Wired that this could not only allow allow your machine to save files much faster, but also reduce the machine's power consumption by avoiding traditional magnetic storage techniques.

Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the Web, testified Tuesday in a Texas courtroom, fighting to keep the web's most basic interactivity from being subject to licensing fees from a patent troll. If the fight fails, any website with interactive features may have to pay up to a little known firm called Eolas and the University of California.

A federal appeals court on Wednesday revived a Malaysian woman's legal fight against the United States' no-fly list, ruling she may challenge her two-hour airport detention on allegations she was wrongly singled out as a suspected terrorist. The detention sparked a legal odyssey that continues today, one questioning whether federal authorities may detain people on watchlists in U.S. airports with impunity.

The supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy may be constantly snacking on asteroids. A new study finds that an asteroid at least 12 miles wide falling into the black hole would account for the regular bright x-ray flares seen through telescopes.

Adobe is making a big splash into the cloud with its Creative Cloud service, launching an enhanced online version of its sought-after Adobe Creative Suite for $50 a month on a one-year contract.

European cave spiders (Meta menardi) protect their growing offspring using the most stretchable egg sac silk ever found.

Just about a year ago, Nokia announced it would be partnering with Microsoft to deliver Nokia-branded Windows Phones. One of the first handsets to spring from that relationship was the Nokia Lumia 800, and it's finally going to land in the U.S. on Feb. 14. Unfortunately, the 800 will only be available in a bundle with a few other products, and the phone itself is unlocked and unsubsidized.

It'll be a geological showdown for the ages, with North America, South America, Europe and Asia colliding head-on over the North Pole to create a supercontinent called Amasia.