Science

SAN FRANCISCO--It turns out al-Qaida's leader and his cohorts aren't the biggest threat to our cybersecurity. You are.

Six years ago, Osama bin Laden represented the nightmare scenario for the computer security establishment. But more immediate cyberdangers lurk on the horizon. Experts attending the RSA conference that began here today say it's you--Mr. & Mrs. Computer User--who keep goofing up.

In fact, they contend, the future of cybersecurity hinges less on a latter-day version of spy-versus-spy against shadowy terror groups than on a more serious effort to instill best practices. Listening to their heeding was something akin … Read more

This post was updated at 3:52 p.m. PST with more details.

Science fiction impresario Arthur C. Clarke is dead, according to published news reports.

And as of 3 p.m. PDT Tuesday, the Wikipedia article on Clarke has also already been updated with a banner across the top that reads, "This article is about a person who has recently died."

Clarke was the author, or co-author, of dozens of fiction and non-fiction books. But he will likely always be best known for his novel 2001: A Space Odyssey, which he later turned into a landmark film … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--If ever a mathematician could be excited about a date, today would be it.

That's because it's Pi Day, March 14, or, for you Americans, 3/14. And since pi--the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter--is casually said to be 3.14159, today's the big day.

That's why I spent a big part of my day at the Exploratorium here for the science museum's 20th annual Pi Day celebration.

The brainchild of longtime Exploratorium employee Larry Shaw, the day's festivities celebrated the popular irrational number with a series of pi-related … Read more

Update July 19, 2008: Escape from Berkeley is now scheduled for Oct. 10-13, 2008.

If you're a regular reader of Geek Gestalt, but not of its sister blog, Green Tech, I thought I'd point you to an entry I just posted there about what sounds like one heck of a cool event scheduled for this summer.

The so-called Escape from Berkeley race will task contestants with getting their non-petroleum-based fuel vehicles from the famously liberal Bay Area city to the famously outrageous Sin City, Las Vegas, over the July 4 weekend.

Part Burning Man, part Power Tool Drag Races, … Read more

Over at Wired today, the eagle-eyed Ryan Singel has a story about a new U.S. government initiative intended to root out terrorists working and playing in virtual worlds.

As Singel writes, the so-called Data Mining Report (click here for PDF) from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence includes information about "Reynard," a "seedling effort to study the emerging phenomenon of social (particularly terrorist) dynamics in virtual worlds and large-scale online games and their implications for the Intelligence Community."

The Data Mining Report continues, suggesting, "The cultural and behavioral norms of virtual worlds … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Get ready for toxic microbes to come packaged in a video game SKU.

Longtime and much-revered designer Steve Meretzsky's Bac Attack, a game that pits man's strategic ingenuity against the march of armies of bacteria, was the winner of Thursday's Game Design Challenge at the Game Developers Conference here.

The challenge, an annual GDC event hosted by GameLab CEO Eric Zimmerman, and a session that always plays to an energized, standing-room-only audience, traditionally pits three well-known designers against each other to come up with a concept for a game that meets some unusual criteria.

In past … Read more

At long last, there's a ship date for Spore.

Electronic Arts announced Tuesday that the much-anticipated new game from The Sims creator Will Wright will ship on September 7.

The company announced that the game--which tasks players with advancing a character progressively from primordial ooze to small tribes to cities to civilizations and into space--will launch worldwide on PCs, Macs, Nintendo DS, and mobile phones.

Previously, the company had said it would launch the game simultaneously on PCs and Macs, but had said nothing about timing or that the DS and mobile versions would come out at the same … Read more

There are all kinds of virtual worlds these days: Those for kids, for adults, centered around fantasy battles, and even those centered on space.

But no one has a better hold on space than NASA, and that agency is now considering creating its own virtual world, according to the BBC.

"The virtual world would be aimed at students and would 'simulate real NASA engineering and science missions,'" the BBC wrote, adding that the space agency has put out requests for vendors interested in producing the virtual world.

The idea behind the so-called massively multiplayer online game would be … Read more

MILFORD, Utah--I need your help.

I was driving through this tiny western Utah town on Road Trip 2007, and I saw this contraption by the side of the road as I zipped by.

It was so bizarre looking that I had to go back to see it. Fortunately, there wasn't another car in sight, so I simply popped the car into reverse and backed up.

It was there, just off the road, looking like it hadn't been used in decades. Kind of like a display piece. And it reminded me of the steampunk revival that has been going … Read more