Secret of AA: After 75 Years, We Don’t Know How It Works

Source: Wired
Published: Jun 23, 2010
Length: 21 minutes (5,360 words)

Steve Jobs: The Next Insanely Great Thing

Steve Jobs has been right twice. The first time we got Apple. The second time we got NeXT. The Macintosh ruled. NeXT tanked. Still, Jobs was right both times. Although NeXT failed to sell its elegant and infamously buggy black box, Jobs’s fundamental insight—that personal computers were destined to be connected to each other and live on networks—was just as accurate as his earlier prophecy that computers were destined to become personal appliances. Now Jobs is making a third guess about the future. His passion these days is for objects.

Author: Gary Wolf
Source: Wired
Published: Feb 1, 1996
Length: 24 minutes (6,169 words)

Behind Foursquare and Gowalla: The great check-in battle

Source: Wired
Published: Jun 1, 2010
Length: 17 minutes (4,319 words)

The Man Who Could Unsnarl Manhattan Traffic

Source: Wired
Published: May 24, 2010
Length: 11 minutes (2,943 words)

Exclusive: How Google’s Algorithm Rules the Web

Want to know how Google is about to change your life? Stop by the Ouagadougou conference room on a Thursday morning. It is here, at the Mountain View, California, headquarters of the world’s most powerful Internet company, that a room filled with three dozen engineers, product managers, and executives figure out how to make their search engine even smarter. This year, Google will introduce 550 or so improvements to its fabled algorithm, and each will be determined at a gathering just like this one.

Source: Wired
Published: Feb 22, 2010
Length: 18 minutes (4,546 words)

The Future of Money: It’s Flexible, Frictionless and (Almost) Free

Source: Wired
Published: Feb 22, 2010
Length: 40 minutes (10,188 words)

Fraud U: Toppling a Bogus-Diploma Empire

Source: Wired
Published: Dec 21, 2009
Length: 15 minutes (3,825 words)

Learn to Let Go: How Success Killed Duke Nukem

Featuring a swaggering, steroidal, wisecracking hero, Duke Nukem 3D became one of the top-selling videogames ever, making its creators very wealthy and leaving fans absolutely delirious for a sequel. The team quickly began work on that sequel, Duke Nukem Forever, and it became one of the most hotly anticipated games of all time. It was never completed.

Source: Wired
Published: Dec 21, 2009
Length: 32 minutes (8,066 words)

The Troubles of Korea’s Influential Economic Pundit

Source: Wired
Published: Oct 19, 2009
Length: 13 minutes (3,275 words)

An Epidemic of Fear: How Panicked Parents Skipping Shots Endangers Us All

The underlying argument has not changed: Vaccines harm America’s children, and doctors like Paul Offit are paid shills of the drug industry. To be clear, there is no credible evidence to indicate that any of this is true. None. Twelve epidemiological studies have found no data that links the MMR (measles/mumps/rubella) vaccine to autism; six studies have found no trace of an association between thimerosal (a preservative containing ethylmercury that has largely been removed from vaccines since 20011) and autism, and three other studies have found no indication that thimerosal causes even subtle neurological problems.

Source: Wired
Published: Oct 19, 2009
Length: 28 minutes (7,151 words)