May all your Christmases be Wired

With only one week left until Christmas, why not avoid wading your way through the hordes of shoppers looking for the perfect gift for the loved one that infuriatingly "doesn't mind" what you get them and instead treat them to a years subscription to Wired for only £24. The gift that keeps on giving will deliver your special someone 12 issues over 12 months at 42 percent off the retail price. 

Wired is a technology and science magazine for those who want the latest in innovation and breakthrough research. Covering topics as broad as design, architecture, culture, the economy, politics and philosophy, Wired will keep you informed and up-to-date. Whether you want to read our in-depth features, our high-end product breakdowns, our guides on how to do just about anything, or you want business advice from Will.i.am, there's something for everyone.

A 12-month subscription to our print edition also gives you complete access to 12 issues of our digital magazine, which includes additional video and interactive content. With the launch of our gorgeous new iPhone and iPad app it has never been a better time to buy a subscription to Wired.

If you know someone with a curious mind with an interest in the future of technology, science and culture, then gift them 12 glorious copies of Wired magazine today.

Read more: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-12/18/wired-subscription-for-christmas

German physicists reveal concept for boiling water in one picosecond

Wired.co.uk's kettle takes two minutes to boil, which means it takes at least five minutes to make a decent cup of tea. This isn't good enough. Fortunately, physicists from the Hamburg Centre for Free-Electron Laser Science (CFEL) have devised a novel concept that could mean we'll soon be boiling our water in just half a picosecond. To give you some perspective, a picosecond is one trillionth or one millionth of one millionth of a second and is to one second as one second is to 31,700 years -- if you were to travel at the speed of light for half a picosecond, you'd move an impressive 0.15mm. In other words, it's fast.

Tea, however, is not their priority. In a report for the scientific journal Angewandte Chemie the physicists behind the theory explain how this concept could potentially reveal new and interesting ways of experimenting with water. "Water is the single most important medium in which chemical and biological processes take place," explains Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY) scientist Oriol Vendrell from CFEL, a cooperation of DESY, the University of Hamburg and the German Max Planck Society. "Water is not just a passive solvent, but plays an important role in the dynamics of biological and chemical processes by stabilising certain chemical compounds and enabling specific reactions."

Read more: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-12/17/boil-water-in-one-picosecond

Brain activity helps predict which Beatles track you're listening to

A team of neuroscientists has used functional magnetic resonance imaging to identify how the brain processes music, before incorporating machine learning to predict exactly what piece of music they were listening to.

The Danish and Finnish team, from Aarhus University and the Universities of Jyväskylä and Helsinki respectively, asked 15 volunteers to listen to a 16-minute excerpt from the Beatles album Abbey Road once each while having their brains imaged. Data on the resulting activity was then fed into a computer algorithm, which used regularised regression machine learning techniques to identify the areas of the brain that would be most helpful in predicting what musical features would come next in any given piece of music. 

Read more: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-12/17/decoding-music-brain-activity

This signal-blocking Faraday cage might drive you crazy

Way back in the 1830s, Joseph Faraday created what today could be considered a cruel and unusual torture device. Faraday, an English scientist, built what is now known as the Faraday cage, an enclosed space constructed out of conductive material that blocks electromagnetic signals from entering or exiting.

So things like your cellphone, laptop or radio? Inside this cage, those Wi-Fi and cellular signals would be rendered totally useless. Of course, at the time Faraday was alive, this was less about driving smartphone-addicted citizens totally insane than it was about furthering the field of electromagnetism, but the principle remains the same: it is a place to disconnect.

Read more: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-12/17/life-size-faraday-cage

The 10 best memes of 2013

In the great history of the internet, 2013 will be known as the Year of the Doge. The cute Shiba Inu that misspelled his internal monologue in Comic Sans captured everyone's heart for at least a few seconds these last few months (hey, that's all the time it takes on the internet). And that is why Doge -- "dog" in his own special lexicon -- is also the best meme of 2013.

He beat out some stiff competition, topping internet crack like Harlem Shake, [Intensifies], You Had One Job, Twerking (seriously, he beat twerking!), Attack on Titan Opening Parodies, Raise Your Dongers, Moon Moon, "The Fox (What Does the Fox Say?)," and Actual Advice Mallard for the top honors, according to the  results of a poll released today by the web wizards at Know Your Meme.

Read more: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-12/16/best-memes-2013

First 'bona fide' diamond-bearing rock discovery made in Antarctica

Rock formations that typically contain diamonds have been found in Antarctica for the first time -- but we'll probably never dig them out of the heavily protected region. 

A team from The Australian National University's Research School of Earth Sciences made the discovery, reported in the journal Nature Communications, in the northern region of the Prince Charles Mountains, East Antarctica. Samples from the slopes of Mount Meredith revealed the presence of a formation with all the mineralogical markings of kimberlite, a type of igneous rock that commonly contains diamonds. 

Kimberlite pipes are the vertical formations of this rock that occur on every continental crust on the planet -- now including Antarctica. Diamonds are formed deep within the mantle up to 200km beneath the crust when carbon-rich minerals are subjected to extreme heat and pressure and become tetrahedral crystalline structures. Rising to the surface millions of years later during eruptions, they are preserved in igneous rock, often in these pipe networks of kimerlite rock. 

Read more: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-12/18/antarctic-diamonds

Brain scans suggest those in vegetative state react emotionally to loved ones

A team of Israeli neuroscientists has shown that the regions of the brain responsible for processing emotional significance and autobiographical information are activated in a group of people deemed to be in a vegetative state (VS). In two patients the amygdala -- the region of the brain responsible for processing memory and emotional attachments -- was activated simply when the researchers asked them to think of a loved one, suggesting a level of awareness in VS patients never before identified.

"We showed that patients in a vegetative state can react differently to different stimuli in the environment depending on their emotional value," said Haggai Sharon, coauthor on a paper published in PLOS ONE detailing the results. "It's not a generic thing; it's personal and autobiographical. We engaged the person, the individual, inside the patient." 

Read more: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-12/17/vegetative-state-emotional-reactions

Study: the origin and physics of the emperor penguin huddle shuffle

A team of penguin researchers who published a paper in 2011 describing the dynamics of the emperor penguin huddle has now proposed a model that explains the origins of the wave that travels through the huddle.

As the only vertebrate species that breeds through the Antarctic winter, penguins are well known for their huddling behaviour, which sees them form tight triangular lattice formations in order to conserve heat and energy. As part of the previous study, researchers discovered that the waves moved at 0.12 m/s through the huddle, with each penguin moving every 30-60 seconds. Until now though it was not known what governed the waves or if they were all caused by the same penguin.

Read more: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-12/17/penguin-huddle-physics

EA founder's tablet game to help kids learn emotional skills, tackle bullying

Founder of EA, Trip Hawkins, is working on a game for tablet which aims to teach positive social and emotional behaviours to children.

The game, IF..., comes from Hawkins' latest company, If You Can, and features anthropomorphic animal characters who must make moral choices. It's being created with children around six- to 12-years-old in mind and was prompted by concerns about suicide, bullying and cyberbullying.

Read more: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-12/16/trip-hawkins-emotional-learning-game

The woman who built the Lego Hogwarts just made a 200,000-piece Rivendell

Alice Finch, best known as the woman who brought a more-or-less exact replica of Hogwarts to Emerald City Comicon in March, is back. This time, she teamed with fellow Lego architect David Frank and created an insane 10-foot-by-5-foot replica of Rivendell from J.R.R. Tolkein's The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings that uses approximately 200,000 bricks -- including Gungan shields dressed up as elvish windows, pieces of Boba Fett's Slave I ship turned into the green siding of Arwen's tower, and multiple Darth Vader Lego men in the role of the Nazgûl (!!). It's brilliant.

Read more: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-12/16/lego-rivendell