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When we put out the call to show us your best superhero costumes, we knew Wired.com readers would be up to the task. And we weren't disappointed: From the Thing to the obscure Scarlet Spider, it's clear that you people know and love your superheroes. And apart from a slightly odd fascination with Edward Scissorhands (who was represented in two separate entries -- and who is really only a superhero among the emo crowd), we're completely cool with that.

Left: The winning entry is "Used Electronics Man," by Ryan Peters. Peters built the suit out of old electronics parts while taking summer school in college, and wore it to class one day. Peters' creation combines the aesthetic of Robocop with the ingenuity of Peter Stark's Iron Man suit, so although it's not strictly speaking a superhero costume, it's a worthy champion for the Gadget Lab contest.

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Justin Fields' amazing custom-built costume is an incredibly faithful tribute to Marvel's super-strong, scaly behemoth. The Thing was a close second to Used Electronics Man when the Gadget Lab polls officially closed, although subsequent, unofficial voting has since propelled him to the top of the reader's choice list.

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Thomas Boggs' entry is an obscure Spider-Man clone known as the Scarlet Spider. Yes, folks, this is an actual superhero -- a supervillain, actually -- not just some failed attempt at a Spider-Man costume. Boggs' effort includes an impressive pair of web-shooters.

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Jessica Hurst's costume is an over-the-top tribute to a British cartoon that came to life in a quickly-forgotten 1995 movie of the same name. The only thing missing from this awesome getup? A mutant kangaroo sidekick.

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Never fear, the "comfortably armored superhero of softly padded justice" is here! Reader "JD" submitted this entry, which is made entirely of industrial-grade carpet underlayment, found in a local dumpster. Now that's recycling, folks.

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Crystal Foley sent in this photo of herself as one of the X-Statix, an attempt by Marvel at creating a more poppy, cynical brand of superhero. "I even made the stuffed Doop!" Foley writes.

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David Martindale writes, "This is me when I'm super." We give him points for chutzpah: Since his "costume" exists entirely on the Photoshop plane, it's a dubious entry for this contest. The bike is amazing, though.

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One of two submissions in the Scissorhands category, this one was sent in by Robert O'Brien. One criticism: The blades look a little dull.

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Ed Steel's costume owes more to the classic, 1960s-era TV show than the more recent Heath Ledger reinterpretation of the Joker in Dark Knight. Still, we like it: He's got the demonic grin down pat.

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Marc-Antoine L. Frenette and companion pose as Captain Jack Sparrow, a superhero among pirates.

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Clare McDermott strikes a pose as Barbarella, complete with futuristic ray gun. You go, girl!

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Wikipedia defines an aquitard as "an impermeable layer along an aquifer." It's not clear to us how that translates into bicycle helmets and spandex, but it must make sense to Sarah Crane, who submitted this photo with the note, "We are aquitards. Our super power is the ability to stop water."

1993: DNA testing identifies nine bone fragments found in an unmarked grave in a Siberian forest near Ekaterinburg as those of Nicholas II -- the last czar of Russia -- and members of his family.

The identification, made by British scientists working with Russian colleagues, ended a 75-year mystery surrounding the whereabouts of the Romanovs, the last ruling family before the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the birth of the Soviet Union.

Drs. Peter Gill and Kevin Sullivan of the British Forensic Science Service in Birmingham were able to establish with near certainty that the remains found in the Koptyaki Forest indeed belonged to Nicholas, the Czarina Alexandra, four of their five children (the remains of Prince Alexei were not recovered), the family's personal physician and three servants.

Despite some subsequent criticism of the scientific methodology employed in the nuclear- and mitochondrial-DNA testing, the 1993 findings are considered to be accurate.

Nicholas and his family were arrested by the Bolsheviks, who were then engaged in a struggle with the Mensheviks, or Whites, for control of Russia following the country's collapse during World War I.

Although the Bolsheviks originally planned to put Nicholas on trial for crimes against the Russian people, the sudden approach of White troops caused the Red Guard to panic. Fearful that the czar might be rescued, the guard commander, with Lenin's approval, executed the Romanovs on July 17, 1918, in the basement of the Iptiev House, the Ekaterinburg mansion that served as their makeshift prison.

As the lab tests eventually determined, the bodies were taken to Koptyaki and buried in a mass grave. Further testing in Great Britain established the mitochondrial-DNA haplogroup and sequences for the Romanov family line.

The Soviet Union kept mum about the family's fate until finally admitting, in 1926, that they were dead. Although two Russians -- a movie producer and an ethnographer -- claimed to have discovered the grave in 1976, the burial site remained a closely guarded state secret until the USSR itself ceased to exist in 1991.

The mystery remained fixed in the popular consciousness throughout most of the 20th century, and there was no shortage of crackpots and frauds emerging from obscurity claiming to be Princess Anastasia or some other down-at-the-heels member of the czar's family.

Once the remains were examined, tested and identified, they were laid to rest in the imperial crypt in Sts. Peter and Paul Cathedral in St. Petersburg on July 17, 1998, exactly 80 years after the Romanovs' execution. The Russian Orthodox Church canonized the czar and his family in 2000.

Complete closure came earlier this year when DNA testing on some newly unearthed bone shards identified Prince Alexei, the last missing Romanov.

Source: Various

Carbon nanotubes have been around for more than a decade, but so far they haven't shown up anywhere outside of R&D labs and tennis racquets.

Now, two separate groups of researchers have recently published papers demonstrating advances in creating, sorting and organizing carbon nanotubes so they can be used in electronics.

Because they are so small and could potentially replace two of the basic components of modern microchips (conductors and semiconductors), nanotubes have continued to pique the interest of electronics researchers. And that interest continues to grow, especially as the current technology used to make chips for electronics begins to reach its physical limits.

The trouble is that, until recently, making nanotubes was a somewhat random affair: You'd mix the required ingredients, grow a batch of nanotubes, and then sort through the resulting batch to see what you got. Researchers had no effective way to grow exclusively metallic or exclusively semiconducting nanotubes, and even ordering the nanotubes in regular patterns was a challenge. That has made using nanotubes on an industrial scale impractical to the point of impossibility.

"An ant is incredibly strong for its size. But nobody uses ants to do useful work, because they all run around in different directions," says Mike Mayberry, the director of components research for Intel. (Mayberry was not involved in the research.)

And so nanotubes have grown for the past 15 years -- knotty and bent -- since the single-walled variety were discovered in 1993 by IBM researcher Donald S. Bethune and NEC researcher Sumio Ijima. As molecular oddities, carbon nanotubes have always been fascinating. Each nanotube is made of a "sheet" of interlocked carbon atoms, rolled up into a single- or multi-walled cylinder. Although each cylinder is a single, narrow molecule no more than a nanometer (nm) or two in diameter, the molecules can grow up to several centimeters in length -- or 30 million times their width. A human hair that long would stretch 1.5 miles.

Even better, these strange carbon molecules exhibit great physical strength because they're held together by atomic bonds. They've also got unusual electrical properties: Depending on which way the sheets of carbon are rolled up, nanotubes are either metallic, making them good electrical conductors, or semiconducting, making them potentially useful components for the logic components of microchips.

A paper -- presented last month at the VLSI Symposium by Nishant Patil, Albert Lin, Edward R. Myers, H.-S. Philip Wong and Subhasish Mitra, all of Stanford's electrical engineering department -- addresses the problem of getting the nanotubes straightened out so they could be put to work in chips.

To be useful in large-scale chip manufacturing, nanotube components will have to be integrated with existing silicon-based chips. Unfortunately, growing nanotubes on silicon wafers produce a disorderly mess. The authors tackled that problem by growing the nanotubes on crystalline quartz, where they grow in orderly rows, then transferring them to a silicon wafer.

"If you grow carbon nanotubes on silicon, you will see that the carbon nanotubes are really unruly, like a bowl of thin rice noodles," says Mitra. "If you use a quartz wafer, the nanotubes are largely aligned with each other. They still have kinks and bends and so on, but they're pretty good."

Even if the nanotubes are reasonably straight, the problem of selectively creating semiconducting and metallic carbon nanotubes remains. Another paper, published last week in Science by Stanford and Samsung chemical engineers Melburne C. LeMieux, Mark Roberts, Soumendra Barman, Yong Wan Jin, Jong Min Kim and Zhenan Bao, reports that by changing the substrate on which the nanotubes are grown, manufacturers can control what kind of nanotubes form. Using a substrate of aminosilanes, the resulting nanotubes were almost entirely semiconducting, while substrates of aromatic compounds (such as phenyls) produced metallic nanotubes.

That's a more effective way of getting the right kind of nanotube than previous techniques, which involved sorting nanotubes after they are made using electrical or magnetic fields -- and which weren't usable on a commercial scale.

Nanotubes might be coming on the scene just in time, as modern chipmaking technologies approach their physical limits. Current cutting-edge chip technology creates circuit elements that are 45nm wide, and the next-generation technology, expected in prototype form later this year, will be 32nm. (Smaller circuits are faster and also allow chipmakers to pack more components into a single chip, making processors more powerful and capable.) That's getting pretty close to the limit of current technologies for two reasons: leakage and light.

As silicon-and-copper circuits get smaller, electricity leakage and heat dissipation become proportionally greater problems than they are with larger circuits. By contrast, a nanotube circuit could potentially be as small as 1 or 2nm, and it would be extremely efficient, even over comparatively long distances.

Also, the photolithography techniques used to etch microchip circuits are running into a physical barrier: The components are smaller than the wavelengths of the light used to etch them. Going smaller will require a completely different technology.

"Lithography is running out of steam," notes Subhasish Mitra, a co-author of one of the nanotube papers.

While industry researchers welcomed the new papers, they cautioned that it will be quite awhile before nanotubes are used inside microchips.

"These techniques and others are all steps in the right direction. They're good progress along the way," says Mayberry.

In the meantime, however, nanotubes might find applications on a larger scale than the inside of a chip. For instance, Mayberry notes that Intel has done research into using nanotube-based wiring as the interconnecting wires between different sections of microchips, or even as part of a chip package's cooling system.

Forty years ago, if you wanted to see a full-length movie with no interruptions you needed to spend the evening in the company of those with a similar desire to sit in the dark and do nothing.

Twenty years ago, you could bring the movie home, but you needed to get out of the house long enough to have a public argument with your significant other at the video store. Ten years ago, Netflix started to send the movies to you, but you still needed to get to your mailbox, which for most people involves mandatory pants.

Being generally anti-pants, I recently picked up the Netflix Player, a device that allows you to stream movies directly into your home. Being a recluse has never been easier!

The device works quite nicely. It's easy to set up, easy to use and the image quality is arguably better than a garage-sale VHS tape. The main limitation is in the movie selection. Not everything is available for instant download, and what is available is often somewhat ... perverse. For instance, you can watch Young Guns II, but not Young Guns. That's something like Round Table coming out with an all-crust pizza.

There is one area where Netflix is chock-full of options, though, and that's in the realm of the documentary. As it turns out, pretty much anything that can be documented has been, and it's all ready to be poured into your lap like so much hot soup. You're going to need some help sorting through this mountain of movies.

Luckily, most documentaries come in one of three varieties.

Educational

First off, there's the sort of documentary you can get high school extra credit for watching. These are about old things, or scientific things. These are easy to spot, because the title tells you what the movie's about and why you should care.

Possible titles:

• Turning Point: The Battle of Stalingrad
• Seismology: When the Earth Kills
• Wordsworth: You Probably Know a Couple Lines From Some of His Poems

Irritational

The second sort of documentary involves a director who wants you to throw off the shackles of convention and/or oppression and get really steamed about some variety of injustice. For some reason, these titles are always weird half-puns. I'm not sure why lackadaisical wordplay goes hand-in-hand with social activism, but that's how it works.

Possible titles:

• Standing on the Shoulders of Victims: The Glando-Meditech Scandal
• Children of the Scorn: The Glade Valley School District Free Lunch Voucher Distribution Controversy
• John B. Scanvander: Rebel Without an Original Subtitle

Cultivational

The third type of documentary is about some semi-obscure band, artist or quirky person with a cult following. These are marketed to people who are already fans of the subject, so the moviemakers don't need to explain what the documentary is about. In fact, the more obscure the title, the better -- that makes the fans feel smart for "getting it."

Possible titles:

• Shocking Blue: The Bananarama Story
• David Em: Rendered
• Meryn

Bonus: Quick-Pick Picture Mode

When in doubt, you should go with something with a dinosaur, a penguin or a fighter plane on the cover when choosing a documentary. They're all pretty good, and it's a proven fact that penguin, fighter plane and dinosaur documentaries are being made faster than you can actually watch them, so you'll never run out.

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Born helpless, nude and unable to provide for himself, Lore Sjöberg eventually overcame these handicaps to start development on a documentary about a dinosaur-penguin-fighter pilot.

Discover the perfect app for the job only to learn that it's optimized for Ubuntu? Don't worry, there are several options for running that Linux application on your Microsoft desktop. Follow this guide to unlock a world of free software options within Windows XP and Vista.

Tesla Motors turns to Detroit and hires one of the sharpest engineers around to lead the development of its forthcoming all-electric sedan.

Dealing with Google or Microsoft map APIs can be a pain. A JavaScript library called Mapstraction helps take the pain out of geocoding and allows you to tinker with maps in ways the other APIs won't. Our guide helps you get started embedding maps with Mapstraction in four easy steps.

A new service lets users build tiny virtual worlds that they can decorate with video and images imported from YouTube, Facebook and other websites.

Liberal and libertarian bloggers have hired the political media consultants behind Ron Paul's online fundraising "moneybomb," set to go off on Aug. 8, the day Richard Nixon resigned.

New enhancements to Google's online mail application give users more control over their privacy. Gmail now keeps a log so you can monitor your account, and it lets you sign off from a remote computer.

What's the airline-industry jargon for unconventional wisdom? Southwest Airlines.

By some estimates, the country's major carriers have consumed perhaps $100 billion in capital during the past decade, but Southwest Airlines continues to be profitable. It's been in the black for 33 consecutive years and, last week, for the 127th consecutive quarter, it paid a modest dividend. Its balance sheet, with about $3 billion in cash on hand and $600 million in available credit, is the envy of an otherwise fuel-price-ravaged industry.

Its competitors among the network carriers—American, United, Delta, Continental, Northwest and US Airways—are shrinking passenger capacity by more than 10 percent and grounding hundreds of aircraft starting in the fall. Southwest will add a handful of daily flights. It will take delivery of another dozen aircraft next year and still plans to grow by 2 to 3 percent. And Southwest now carries more passengers annually (101 million last year) than any other U.S. carrier, a nifty trick for an airline that didn't fly outside Texas at the dawn of deregulation in 1978.

Even the fickle financial markets, which have long discounted Southwest's relentless growth and steady profits, have finally taken note. As oil prices doubled in the past year, share prices of the six network carriers have slid, with the drop-offs ranging from 76 to 94 percent. Southwest's decline has been more modest, within a point of the Dow's 21 percent 52-week drop. As a result, Southwest's market capitalization yesterday (about $9.7 billion) is now more than the combined $5.7 billion market cap of its Big Six competitors.

What does Southwest know that no one else in airlines does? It keeps things simple and consistent, which drives costs down, maximizes productive assets, and helps manage customer expectations.

One Plane Fits All

Unlike the network carriers and their commuter surrogates, which operate all manner of regional jets, turboprops, and narrow-body and wide-body aircraft, Southwest flies just one plane type, the Boeing 737 series. That saves Southwest millions in maintenance costs—spare-parts inventories, mechanic training and other nuts-and-bolts airline issues. It also gives the airline unique flexibility to move its 527 aircraft throughout the route network without costly disruptions and reconfigurations.

Point-to-Point Flying

Network carriers rely on a hub-and-spoke system, which laboriously collects passengers from "spoke" cities, flies them to a central "hub" airport, and then redistributes them to other spokes. Not Southwest. Most of its flying is nonstop between two points. That minimizes the time that planes sit on the ground at crowded, delay-prone hubs and allows the average Southwest aircraft to be in the air for more than an hour longer each day than a similarly sized jet flown by a network carrier. Southwest's avoid-the-hubs strategy also pays dividends in on-time operations. According to FlightStats, Southwest's 78 percent on-time performance in June is eight percentage points higher than the industry average and higher than that of any of its major competitors.

Simple In-Flight Service

Business travelers haven't always loved Southwest's über-simple service, but it's looking better and better as competitors cut back. There is just one class of service, a decent coach cabin that is slightly more spacious than those of Southwest's competitors. There are no assigned seats. There have never been meals, just beverages and snacks. Keeping it basic allows Southwest to unload a flight, clean and restock the plane, and board another flight full of passengers in as little as 20 minutes compared with as much as 90 minutes on a network airline. Airline efficiency experts say that the savings allow each Southwest jet to fly an extra flight per day. Extra flights mean extra revenue.

No Frills, No Fees

As other carriers have rushed to remove perks and pile on fees and restrictions, Southwest has kept its customer proposition streamlined and transparent. The airline only sells one-way fares and only in a few price "buckets." That not only keeps costs down—complex fare structures are expensive to manage—it convinces fliers that they are getting value for money. Prices are all-inclusive too. Southwest doesn't have fuel surcharges, doesn't charge for standby travel or ticket changes, and continues to permit travelers to check two pieces of luggage free. And since every seat on every flight is virtually identical, travelers know exactly what they will get when they make a purchase.

Strong Management

The public face of Southwest Airlines for a generation, hard-drinking, chain-smoking, always-leave-'em laughing Herb Kelleher, finally stepped away from the carrier earlier this year. Kelleher's bonhomie masked the discipline that Southwest has had throughout its history. The airline has always avoided fads and eschewed anything that increased costs or complicated the basic travel proposition. When it has changed—last year it ended its infamous cattle-call boarding process to favor its most frequent fliers and highest-fare customers—it has done so without slowing down the movement of aircraft. Management ranks are lean, but well compensated and, most importantly, productive. I once calculated that the top executives of Southwest generated 10 times more revenue per dollar of compensation than did the C-suite types at some of the network carriers.

A Relatively Happy Workforce

Network carriers have railed for decades about the power of their employee unions. But guess who's the most unionized carrier in the nation? Southwest, of course. The airline says that 87 percent of its employees belong to a union. Southwest has never had a strike, and now that the network carriers have whacked away at salaries and benefits, Southwest staffers are generally the highest paid in the industry. But since Southwest has about 30 percent fewer employees per aircraft than its network competitors, it has the lowest non-fuel C.A.S.M. (cost per available seat mile) of any of the major carriers.

Aggressive Fuel Hedging

Rampaging fuel prices now represent around 40 percent of an airline's costs, but, as usual, Southwest Airlines has been ahead of the curve. Since 1999, the airline's aggressive fuel-hedging program has saved it an estimated $3.5 billion. In the first quarter, for example, it paid $1.98 a gallon for fuel, approximately a dollar less than its network competitors. And Southwest's future position is admirable: It is 70 percent hedged at $51 a barrel through the end of the year and 55 percent hedged at the same price next year.

In a world of $140-a-barrel oil, suggesting that any airline is a guaranteed winner is beyond hubris. But this much can be said: Southwest Airlines is sitting on a pile of cash and fuel hedges and has a proven and easily adaptable service model. And history shows that Southwest has comfortably survived every airline-industry downturn, then grown rapidly and profited hugely when the business cycle turns.

The Fine Print…

British Airways announced last week that it would buy L'Avion, the French carrier that flies all-business-class jets between Newark and Paris. B.A. says that it will integrate L'Avion with its own boutique carrier, OpenSkies, which launched last month. L'Avion was the last of the four independent all-business-class trans-Atlantic carriers that have launched since 2005. The others—Maxjet, Eos, and Silverjet—all folded in the past seven months.

The vice president's office cuts six pages of congressional testimony linking man-made factors to climate change and environmental damage, but a well-placed Democrat at the EPA blows the whistle.

Media and online moguls are descending on Allen & Co. investment bank's annual retreat in Sun Valley in search of new acquisitions and alliances and perhaps the opportunity to retool their businesses. High on this year's agenda: the internet's increasing fragmentation and the old media / new media fight for online advertising revenue.

An eco-conscious motorcycle fanatic hopes to bring a touch of green to the Isle of Man TT next year with what he calls the world's first high-speed zero-emissions grand prix.

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In the 105 years since the Wright Brothers took to the air, dreamers, engineers and aviation buffs have designed every kind of airplane imaginable in a never-ending quest to fly higher, faster or further. Some were innovative, some were beautiful and some even made history. Others, well, let's just say they must have looked good on paper.

Here's a tribute to some of those that surely looked better on paper.

Tupolev TU- 144

The Concorde gets all the love, but Russia's Tupolev TU-144 was the first supersonic transport and the only commercial plane to exceed Mach 2. The "Concordski" was fast but plagued by bad luck. Three crashes -- including a dramatic mid-air breakup during the 1973 Paris Air Show -- relegated it largely to a lifetime delivering mail. It was mothballed in 1985 but briefly brought back a few years later as a research plane.

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The Comet was the premiere commercial jet airliner and a landmark in British aeronautics when it first flew in 1949. Today it's better known for its atrocious safety record. Of the 114 Comets built, 13 were involved in fatal accidents, most of them attributed to design flaws and metal fatigue.

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The “Spruce Goose” was either a brilliant aircraft years ahead of its time or the biggest government boondoggle ever. By far the largest aircraft ever conceived -- its wingspan was 319 feet -- the Spruce Goose was intended to be a military transport plane. But it wasn't finished until well after World War II ended, rendering it both obsolete and irrelevant. It only flew once.

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The Zubr was as useless as it was ugly. Not only was it incapable of flying with the landing gear retracted, the airframe was so highly stressed the plane could disintegrate without warning. If that wasn't enough, it couldn't take off with a payload much heavier than a few cartons of cigarettes. The Polish Air Force had a few in its fleet during World War II, but none of them saw combat.

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Cool name, lousy plane. Dr. William Christmas didn't know the first thing about planes when he designed one for the U.S. Army Signal Corps, and it showed. He didn't think the plane needed wing struts, so of course the wings fell off during the plane's maiden flight in 1918.

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With its carbon-composite construction, unique design and rearward-facing turboprop engines, the Starship was a groundbreaking aircraft. But it was slow, difficult to fly and a bear to maintain. It took to the air in 1989, but Beechcraft only sold a few of the 53 it built.

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The Hiller VZ-1 hovercraft must have looked good on paper, because it sure didn't look good in the air. The idea was simple -- a fan provides lift and the pilot steers by shifting his weight. The Defense Department loved it until it saw the Pawnee in flight. It was good for just 16 mph and it tended to be uncontrollable. The project was killed in the late 1950s.

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Defense Department projects are famous for cost overruns, and General Dynamic’s flying wing bomber was a doozy. The Flying Dorito was the most troubled of the stealth aircraft projects the Pentagon embraced during the 1980s, experiencing problems with its radar systems and use of composite materials. When the projected cost of each plane ballooned to $165 million, a Secretary of Defense named Dick Cheney killed it in 1991.

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With its anemic engine, poor maneuverability and gunner blocking the pilot's view, the B.E. 2 was doomed from the start. German aces had no problem shooting them down during World War II, making it just about useless as a fighter. It had no problems against German Zeppelins, though, so the plane lived out its days attacking them instead.

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The XB 15 was the largest plane ever built in the United States until the Spruce Goose came along. The heavy bomber was so massive it had passageways in the wings and bunks for the crew. But big planes need big engines and no one made one big enough to give the XB any kind of speed for its maiden flight in 1937. The plane maxed out at 200 mph, and the U.S. Army Air Corps killed the project. The only XB ever built saw duty as a cargo plane in the Caribbean during World War II.

The authorities said the judge who presided over Hans Reiser's jury trial is backing a deal to reduce the murder's first-degree conviction to second-degree. The deal would lower his sentence to 15-to-life from 25-to-life. The plan was hatched after Reiser led authorities to where he his his wife's body, which was discovered Monday in a wooded area about a half mile from his California house.

1908: Kinemacolor, the first successful color motion-picture process is demonstrated at a scientific meeting in Paris.

1908? Really? It seems as if most of the '30s movies were produced in black-and-white, with the occasional color blockbuster like Gone With the Wind. Even the 1940s seemed to reserve color for big-budget productions. Were color movies really around 100 years ago?

Yes. But no.

British inventor Edward Turner actually received a patent on a three-color motion picture process in 1899. The problem is, his system didn't work all that well. He teamed up with Charles Urban, an American expatriate who was already a force in the fledgling British film industry, in 1901. Turner died soon thereafter, and Urban put Albert Smith on the project.

Smith couldn't make Turner's process function and decided in 1906 to try a simpler two-color system using standard black-and-white film. But, instead of exposing the then-standard 16 frames a second, the new process exposed 32 frames. A spinning wheel of transparent filters exposed alternate frames in red and green. A similar wheel was used to project the film, and just as persistence of image makes movie frames merge into seemingly continuous motion, so the viewer's brain merged the two partial-color images into full color.

Sort of. The system was notoriously deficient in presenting blues and getting a true white. And because the red frame and the green frame were shot 1/32 of a second apart, rapid motion caused color fringing where the red and green images didn't exactly overlap. (Not that we've ever seen a digital entertainment technology that blurs with rapid motion. Oh, no.)

Urban previewed the system for the press in London before giving it a scientific debut in Paris, where film pioneers Auguste and Louis Lumière attended. Kinemacolor got its name in 1909 and was used to film George V's coronation as emperor of India at the Delhi Durbar in 1912.

The process was more economical than the frame-by-frame hand tinting employed by some producers at the time, which sometimes used stencils to create several hundred color prints for commercial distribution. Kinemacolor also spawned some offshoots, including color-wheel systems that exposed side-by-side, rather than alternating, red and green images.

Kinemacolor had plenty of drawbacks. It was one thing for a top-notch cinematographer to synchronize the spinning color wheel with the camera shutter, but quite another to expect projectionists all over the world to master the complicated system, even if their employers were willing to pay for the expensive equipment. Urban also had to fight patent battles. Then came World War I, which -- besides its tremendous toll in blood -- devastated European economies.

Kinemacolor never caught on in the United States, some say because of opposition from the Motion Picture Patents Co., a trust of producers and film-stock suppliers (namely Eastman) that had huge power in the film industry.

Starting in the late teens, it also had to face a superior technology, one that used stationary prisms instead of moving wheels to film and project color separations. Devised by MIT-trained engineers in Boston, it was called: Technicolor.

Source: Various

Police recover the body of Hans Reiser's murdered wife at a construction site in the Oakland Hills.

Epidemiologists are tracking global disease by parsing Google News sources and public health list-serves into data that could provide an early warning about the next big disease outbreak.

The Movable Type blogging engine is easy to set up and customize. This Webmonkey tutorial covers the basics of templates, plug-ins and everything you'll need to inject some personality into a vanilla MT installation.

The company that owns the 7-Eleven ATMs implicated in a massive leak of PIN codes issues a statement announcing that it doesn't anticipate issuing any statements.

Curious about that wheat-gluten allergy that runs in the family? Wondering if you're more likely to develop cancer than your mate? There are several options for testing the stuff your genes are made of, ranging from online DNA-sequencing shops to home-brew basement kits. Grab your cotton swabs and confront your future.

The Golden Army's creatures incubate in Guillermo del Toro's fertile imagination, then evolve from simple concept art to bizarre onscreen glory.

As the Senate takes up the FISA bill on Tuesday, an odd amendment from New Mexico Democrat Sen. Jeff Bingaman appears to be the last real hope for those who want a court to rule on the legality of Bush's spying program.

Netroots activists are using a wiki and Barack Obama's social networking tool to try and change the senator's mind on an upcoming vote on overhauling warrantless wiretapping legislation.

Scientists have been able to stop cancers in mice from spreading, using nanoparticles infused with cancer-fighting drugs. The technique allows for much smaller doses of the drug, which carries heavy side effects.

Is Hans Reiser competent or incompetent? Reiser, the developer of the ReiserFS filesystem, was convicted in April of killing his wife, Nina Reiser. Some of his lawyers think he's competent and others don't. The difference could mean the being sentenced to prison or a mental institution.

Think riding the bus makes you immune to rising fuel prices? Think again. Transit systems are getting hit hard, and they're raising fares to make up for it.

A thoroughly modern plague -- high fuel prices -- sends the Planet Express crew back in time. Catch a sneak peek at the third direct-to-DVD space adventure.