: You will never catch us yawning at an airport gate. You won't find us desperately rereading the in-flight magazine, and we never ... ever ... cross the thresholds of hotel business centers. We are the quartermasters in the battle to stay connected, productive, and entertained — and we do not travel unprepared. As wired gadget editors, we make it our mission to see every new product. As avid gadget-fiends, we make damn sure that the best of them end up in our personal arsenals. This is our current must-have list, the gear we reach for whenever an eticket pops into our remotely accessible inbox. Left: Tod's Cartella computer bag $1,600 Enter for a chance to win the Wired Wish List Bag (yes, Tod's Cartella tote, pictured), filled with today's hottest technology and products on the cutting edge of design. : $249: $275: $18: $40 (base unit) : $170 (60 GB): $399 : $500: $7 (set of three): $465: $500: $100: $10: $199/year: $100: $450: $34: $55: $30: $9: $40: $1,900 : $850: $200 (16 GB)

Check out eight examples of how you can use CSS and little else to make beautiful data visualizations: bar charts, scatter plots and even standards-based sparklines.

Buried glaciers discovered on Mars are closer to the planet's equator than any previously known water ice on the planet. The glaciers could be a source of drinking water for future astronauts.

Criminals better watch their steps, as a Univerisity of Buffalo computer science professor develops a search engine for shoe prints left at crime scenes. With funding from the Justice Department, professor Sargur Srihari hopes his computational forensics will make life easier for shoe-identification experts, and harder for criminals.

If the auto industry is tanking, the venerable British carmaker either didn't get the memo or doesn't care. With a perfectly straight face, Bentley unveils its $350,000 Azure T at the L.A. Auto Show.

At long last, you can hear what looked like the ultimate rock 'n' roll vaporware. For free.

Sleek design, excellent image quality and handy interface make this little Fujifilm snapper stand out from the crowd of point-and-shoots.

YouTube has quietly started testing out real HD quality videos on a smattering of its content, a development that is getting attention from viewers in message boards and blog forums. The new format could be a big move for YouTube, as the video quality is over 80MB, which means that they are probably the same H.264 encoded mp4 files available in the iTunes store.

John McCain has two words for Jackson Browne: You're welcome. That's the gist of a response to Browne's lawsuit that the McCain campaign's sampling of his classic (or, as they put it, "long-ago published") "Running on Empty" implied that the famously lefty singer-songwriter was endorsing the maverick but nevertheless Republican presidential candidate.

Google's voice-recognition mobile app for the iPhone has trouble with British accents, it would seem. Unless when say "MySpace" you mean "sex."

Microsoft is giving an early holiday gift to people who pay for all-you-can-listen access to the Zune digital music store: 10 songs to keep each month, included in the $14.99 monthly subscription fee. The decision may appeal to people who have been reluctant to test out the subscription model, preferring to own their music instead of rent it.

Director J.J. Abrams gives us his vision in this prequel to the original. Kirk is there, and so are Spock, Bones and Scotty. But is this really Star Trek we're watching? The preview clips are a little vague.

A member of the Army's controversial combat anthropology program is accused of second-degree murder for killing Kandahar native Abdul Salam in Afghanistan. Don Ayala supposedly shot the Afghani villager in the head, after Salam set one of Ayala's Human Terrain Team co-workers on fire.

: When a giant sperm whale rammed a whaling vessel in 1820, the deadly encounter inspired Herman Melville's classic novel, Moby Dick. Melville's story, inspired by real-life man-versus-beast mayhem from the 1800s, made it to movie screens in the 1950s. Director John Huston's Moby Dick was evidence of Hollywood's growing fascination with giant, thrashing creatures. Here are some of the best beasties ever captured on celluloid. Left: Captain Ahab (played by Gregory Peck) battles the great white whale in Moby Dick. : A giant squid battles Captain Nemo (played by James Mason) in Walt Disney's 1954 production, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. : Another great white terror of the deep surfaced in 1975's Jaws, directed by Steven Spielberg. The blockbuster scared beachgoers and spawned three sequels. : Not nearly as big as a whale, a giant squid or a great white shark, the Gill Man nevertheless emerged from murky waters to menace humans in 1954's Creature From the Black Lagoon, by director Jack Arnold. : In a battle of the box office titans, Godzilla battles King Kong in the 1962 Japanese film, Kingu Kongu tai Gojira. Only unlucky structures get between the behemoths in director Ishirô Honda's movie. : Bigger isn't always better. Suspense master Alfred Hitchcock turned seemingly innocuous seagulls into a giant, crowdsourced flying nightmare in 1963's The Birds. : A dinosaur foolishly liberated from the Forbidden Valley goes on a rampage in The Valley of Gwangi

The first device from RIM to carry a full touch sensitive screen seeks to not only match the iPhone in terms of performance but also kick its ass in areas where Cupertino's wunderkind falls short. But all is not well with the Storm.

1820: The whaling ship Essex is rammed and sunk by a sperm whale 2,000 miles off the west coast of South America. The ordeal of the crew inspires Herman Melville's classic, Moby Dick. The Essex was an aging vessel from Nantucket, which at the time possessed the largest whaling fleet in the world. The three-masted ship was 87 feet long and weighed 238 tons. She was captained by George Pollard Jr., at 28 already an experienced whaler. By November 1820 the Essex had been at sea for over a year (three years out was not uncommon), surviving an early knockdown in an Atlantic squall and a rough passage around Cape Horn. Once the ship reached the fertile Pacific whaling grounds, however, things began looking up. If the risks of whaling were many, the rewards could be great. Whale oil was prized as a lighting fuel. A successful voyage could make a captain wealthy, and meant a good payday for the crew as well. The Essex had taken its share of whales and on Nov. 20 appeared ready to take a few more when a pod was sighted off the starboard beam. The ship's three remaining whaleboats — one had been destroyed by a whale's flukes during an earlier hunt — were dispatched for the kill. As the harpooning began, First Mate Owen Chase, commanding one of the whaleboats, looked back and saw a large sperm whale, which he estimated at 85 feet, approaching the Essex. As he watched helplessly, the whale propelled itself into the ship with great force. Some crewmen on board were knocked off the

You might not have realized it, but the next great battle of cryptography began this month. It's not a political battle over export laws or key escrow or NSA eavesdropping, but an academic battle over who gets to be the creator of the next hash standard. Hash functions are the most commonly used cryptographic primitive, and the most poorly understood. You can think of them as fingerprint functions: They take an arbitrary long data stream and return a fixed length, and effectively unique, string. The security comes from the fact that while it's easy to generate the fingerprint from a file, it's infeasible to go the other way and generate a file given a fingerprint. Originally created to make digital signatures more efficient, hashes are now used to secure the very fundamentals of our information infrastructure: in password logins, secure web connections, encryption key management, virus and malware scanning, and almost every cryptographic protocol in current use. Without cryptographic hash functions, the internet would simply not work. At the same time, there isn't a good theory of hash functions. Unlike encryption algorithms, there are no secret keys involved; this makes it harder to mathematically define exactly what hash functions are. The National Institute of Standards and Technology, NIST, is holding a competition to replace the SHA family of hash functions. "SHA" stands for "Secure Hash Algorithm." It was developed by the NSA in 1993 to replace the commercial MD4

Hans Reiser, the 44-year-old Linux guru who was convicted in April of killing his wife, is seeking a new trial. But Reiser, who killed wife Nina Reiser, waived his right to appeal in exchange for his sentence to be reduced from 25-to-life to 15-to-life. The deal included leading authorities to the hills in Oakland, Calif., where he buried his 31-year-old wife who was divorcing him.

The National Review Online is courting financial contributions by offering "new opportunities for access" to its editors and writers. Not to be outdone, here's the skinny on Threat Level's new sponsorship drive. Break out your wallet. We're going cheap.

The woman accused of making unauthorized use of MySpace to inflict emotional harm on a 13-year-old girl, who then committed suicide, "fully intended to hurt and prey on Megan Meier's psyche," a federal prosecutor charged Wednesday, as opening statements began in the first federal cyber-bullying trial.

Apple quietly installed copy protection in its new MacBooks, blocking some honest customers from watching iTunes movies on their external displays.

The Defense Department's geeks are spooked by a rapidly spreading worm crawling across their networks. So they've suspended the use of so-called thumb drives, CDs, flash media cards, and all other removable data-storage devices from both their secret and unclassified nets, to try to keep the worm from multiplying any further.

Using the hair of a woolly mammoth preserved in the Siberian tundra, scientists have reconstructed 80 percent of the mammoth genome, raising the possibility of one day resurrecting the beast.

Physicists have detected electrons over Antarctica that could be the first ever direct evidence of the mysterious dark matter that scientists say makes up 20 percent of the universe.

Store geolocations inside a My Maps mashup and access the data anywhere on the web. The RSS feed produced by Google can be read by other services, or on your own site with the Google Maps API.

Use an open source development kit to easily transform your website into an iPhone App with JavaScript access to location and accelerometer.

The all-electric Mini-E BMW unveiled Wednesday might very well be the perfect urban EV — if only the privilege didn't come attached with such a ridiculous price tag.

Honda unveils a three-seater hydrogen vehicle at the L.A. Auto Show, betraying the automaker's resilient confidence that fuel cells are the energy source of the future.

Trying to make a point of some kind, the government produces a Google map mashup marking the best places to buy medical marijuana in the City by the Bay.

Microsoft's new Windows antivirus package will furnish XP, Vista and 7 users free protection from viruses, spyware and other malware, starting in the second half of 2009. While it'll replace Microsoft's current paid service, we don't suggest throwing away any third-party solutions just yet.

To help make Photoshop more flexible and bit easier to work with, Adobe releases Configurator — an add-on that makes it easy to customize Photoshop panels to suit your needs. The real power of Configurator lies in the ability to swap your creations and download tools from other Photoshop users.

A compound similar to THC, the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana, improves memory in rats in low doses, and could help stave off Alzheimer's disease.

The Nissan Cube, a 30-plus-mpg minimobile, looks like a marshmallow, and will bring Japan's love of small cars to the United States.

To help journalists who are losing their jobs, Six Apart offers them a pro account on TypePad. It's a $150 start.

Witnesses in the so-called MySpace suicide trial include Ron and Tina Meier, the parents of the 13-year-old girl who committed suicide, and Ashley Grills, a former employee of Lori Drew's who helped set up the phony MySpace account that was allegedly used to harass Meier up to the day of her death.

Location-based social network Shizzow has launched in the tech-friendly Bay Area, following months of private beta testing in Portland. Like the location granddaddy Dodgeball, Shizzow focuses on connecting people in real life. Now you can easily let friends know which coffee shop's WiFi your laptop is soaking up today.

A set of long-lost photographs of microscopic images, among the first ever taken, has resurfaced at a museum in San Francisco. These beautiful microphotographs mark a turning point in 19th-century science from idealized illustrations to real images of individual specimens.

The Nokia N82 is still the best phonecam on the market. Fine optics and a good image-editing suite pal around with GPS, Bluetooth, WiFi and a music player to make this one well-rounded rig.

1981: Citing their socially destructive effects, Philippines President Ferdinand Marcos bans videogames in his country. Filipinos are given two weeks to hand over or destroy their game consoles. Marcos was no stranger to imposing draconian solutions. The Philippines lived under martial law throughout the 1970s, Marcos' way of dealing with the increasingly radical elements — a restive university population and a resurgent Communist movement, mainly — that grew in opposition to his corrupt regime. In this case, though, he was responding to pressure from parents and educators, who claimed that games such as Space Invaders and Asteroids were a "destructive social enemy, the electrical bandit" that was weakening the moral fiber of the young and turning them into a generation of obsessives. While ample evidence exists — including testimonials from game players themselves — to support the argument that excessive videogaming can be both highly addictive and behavior altering, it's probably safe to characterize Marcos' reaction as a tad heavy-handed. It was not without its supporters, however, nor was the Philippines the only country to impose restrictions on videogames. Marcos' outright ban on all videogames, though, was unique at the time, at least in the so-called free world. Just this year, Afghanistan's Islamic government proposed an absolute ban on videogames, while also considering the outlawing of dog- and bird-fighting, and billiards. In the We

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: Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.comUnless you're a deeply geeky watch aficionado, a frequent patron of Barney's or a protesting student during the French labor strikes of the mid-1970s, then you've probably never heard of Lip. Time to get educated. Thirty-five years ago the European watch manufacturer pioneered some of the geekiest tech and most innovative design ever found in a timepiece. But all was not to be well for Lip. A volatile political and labor climate in France shattered the 141-year-old company and led to it being closed for nearly 15 years. After numerous false starts, Lip was jump-started back to existence in the 1990s. Since then the watchmaker has enjoyed a quiet resurgence by returning to its nerdy roots and hiring back many of the original designers of these timepieces. These reissued watches are both technically and physically identical to their DeGaulle-era counterparts. Here are a few of our favorites. Left: Originally conceived in 1973 by Roger Tallon, designer of the TGV high-speed train, the Lip 200 "Dark Master" set the design standard that all Lip watches would follow for the next 30 years.: Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.comAnother watch invented by Roger Tallon in 1975, the Lip Diode featured one of the first digital displays ever found on a timepiece. : Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.comA fairly radical departure from conventional design, the Baschmakoff Jump Hour was the 1972 brainchild of Prince Francois Baschmakoff, an illustrator and package designer hire

With two supercomputers reaching petaflop-per-second speeds, and a crop of other petascale rigs in the making, science will get a major boost.

A supposedly fan-made YouTube clip shows a two-wheeled tribute to the rockin' videogame, set to the tune of a 1999 punk song.

Facebook's new application vetting program is designed to help you decide which Facebook apps to trust — but the program bears a striking resemblance to basic, mob-style extortion schemes and might leave you wondering why it's necessary.

Threat Level's David Kravets will be on justin.tv at 11 a.m. PST Wednesday discussing the Recording Industry Association of America's five-year litigation campaign. Kravets will discuss the conflicting judicial rulings about what level of proof is required for the RIAA to prevail in a file sharing case to alerting readers that damages are as high as $150,000 per copyrighted music track.

This isn't your typical survivor horror videogame. These tips will keep you the blood bath going just a little bit longer.

The 222,000-student Tennessee public university system is bracing for layoffs and class reductions as part of a $43.7 billion budget shortfall, but Tennessee lawmakers have approved a $9.5 million measure requiring university internet filtering to prevent the sharing of copyrighted music and other works. The Recording Industry Association of America hailed the nation's first-of-its-kind measure.

Solid out of the box, the latest World of Warcraft expansion adds hours of glitch-free new content to the expansive fantasy world.

Even though GM and Chrysler are pulling out of the expo, the L.A. Auto Show promises a look at some new hybrids, electrics and muscle cars.

Jury questionnaires show 80 percent of the potential jurors in the MySpace suicide trial have heard of the case, and half already hold "devastating opinions" of the defendant, says Drew's defense lawyer. Is a fair trial possible?