Interesting articles from Wired

Wired is one of our top magazines choices, along with World, National Geographic, and Scientific America.

Here are a few articles I thought were a good read.

1. Disable Your Passport's RFID Chip

"All Passports by the US State Department after January 1 will have always-on radio frequency identification chips, making it easy for officials-and hackers- to grab your personal stats. Getting paranoid about strangers slurping up your identity? Here's what you can do about it. But be careful-tampering with a passport is punishable by 25 years in prison."

1) RFID-tagged passports have a distinctive logo on the front cover; the chip is embedded in the back.

2) Sorry, "accidentally" leaving your passport in the jeans you just put in the washer won't work. You're more likely to ruin the passport itself than the chip.

3) Forget about nuking it in the microwave- the chip could burst into flames, leaving telltale scorch marks. Besides, have you ever smelled burnt passport?

4) The best approach? Hammer time. hitting the chip with a blunt, hard object should disable it. A nonworking RFID doesn't invailidate the passport, so you can still use it.

Jeanna Wortham



2. Manhattan Projects

The world's cities are getting taller (click on the "story images" to the left on the home page and you can see the graphics for the story) – and fast. Between 2001 and 2012, almost as many skyscrapers will be constructed as were built in the entire 20th century. While vertical metropolises like Hong Kong and New York continue to mint monoliths, the most dramatic changes are happening in lower-profile places. Thanks to globalization and the steady migration of people to urban cores, cities that once had only a few high-rises are morphing into mini-Manhattans. Miami, for example, had only five skyscrapers (buildings more than 150 meters, or 492 feet, tall) in 1999 but will have 71 by 2012. Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, will soar from two in 1999 to 90 by 2012. Here's a snapshot of the world's fastest-changing skylines.

– Patrick Di Justo

3. The Plague Fighters: Stopping the Next Pandemic Before It Begins

"HIV, Ebola, SARS — any of the world's most horrifying diseases are caused by animal viruses that made the jump to humans. Now a UCLA scientist thinks he can stop the next pandemic before it even starts."

4. Race to the Bottom

"A maverick Australian prospector is planning to scoop untold riches - gold, silver, copper - from the bottom of the ocean. Is it a cleaner way to mine or the beginning of an environmental disaster?"