This article was taken from the May 2011 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by ...

YOUNGSTERS in California can start learning to drive when they are 15½ years old. They need to have completed at least 30 hours of driver's education (usually done in high school or online) and to ...

IIIF provides researchers rich metadata and media viewing options for comparison of works across cultural heritage collections. Visit the IIIF page to learn more. This is a replica of the portion of a ...

As you might expect from its name, the "Difference Engine" is a strangely difficult object to describe. You might start by imagining the side of a large crib with uprights ringed by small metal wheels ...

NOT to belittle the success Tesla Motors has had with its Model S luxury electric car—outselling its petrol-powered equivalents since being launched last year—the prospects for battery-powered ...

For those who haven’t yet heard, a band of number-crunching nostalgists took the concept design for Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine No. 2, and turned it into a real, fully functional machine. But ...

Englishman Charles Babbage (1791–1871), an eccentric, ingenious mathematician, decided that existing tables of computations included far too many errors: the day's textbooks came with errata sheets ...

An early calculator designed by Charles Babbage and subsidized by the British government. Employing wheels and rods, which others had experimented with earlier, the project was started in 1821 but ...

"The machine works exactly as Babbage intended. There's not a single logical design flaw in the entire design," says its builder Doron Swade. And 248 gears of iron, brass and steel. The first digital ...

Conventional gaming wisdom holds that World of Warcraft is such a lean, mean GPU-conserving machine that it will run on everything from a 386 to a scientific calculator from the early 1970s. Rumor has ...