Kung Fu masters are jumping and AI unicorns are slumping, but first: a cartoon about Godzinfluencers.Here’s the news you need to know, in two minutes or less.Want to receive this two-minute roundup as an email every weekday? Sign up here!Today’s NewsChina’s AI unicorns can spot faces. Now they need new tricksChina’s artificial intelligence boom has…
There’s been a lot of creepy and concerning news about how Amazon’s Ring smart doorbells are bringing surveillance to suburbia and sparking data-sharing relationships between Amazon and law enforcement. News reports this week are raising a different issue: hackers are breaking into users’ Ring accounts, which can also be connected to indoor Ring cameras, to…
This story originally appeared on HuffPost and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.At a high-level event Wednesday at the United Nations climate summit, Swedish teen climate activist Greta Thunberg slammed world leaders for “misleading” the public with insufficient emission-reduction pledges and dove into the growing science that shows governments must act quickly to prevent…
This spring, a mysterious figure by the name of Quantum Bullshit Detector strolled onto the Twitter scene. Posting anonymously, they began to comment on purported breakthroughs in quantum computing—claims that the technology will speed up artificial intelligence algorithms, manage financial risk at banks, and break all encryption. The account preferred to express its opinions with…
Since July, a mysterious vaping-related lung illness has swept the country, sickening more than 2,200 people and killing 48. As the illnesses and deaths proliferated, so too did vaping bans. The city of San Francisco had already banned e-cigarette sales, and by September Massachusetts outlawed all e-cigarettes, followed by prohibitions against vaping products in Michigan,…
This time two years ago, it must have felt as though the long international campaign to eradicate polio—launched in 1988 and decades past its hoped-for end date—was at last nearing its goal. There were only 17 cases of naturally occurring polio in the world in 2017, half the number from the year before and incomprehensibly…
Hello, and welcome to another edition of The Monitor, WIRED’s pop culture roundup. What’s happening this week? Well, the WeWork saga is being turned into a TV show, and Marvel TV is shutting down. There’s also a trailer for the movie adaptation of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights. Here we go.Succession’s Cousin Greg Will Play…
What would I do without internet videos? It’s not just viral cat memes but also amazing humans like this guy, Xiao Qiang. In this short clip, the kung fu fighter appears to leap onto a bucket of water several feet off the ground—then bounce off the surface of the water like a trampoline. Whaaaat?It’s an…
Most stadiums are frigid by December. Sitting or standing for hours is hard enough on a nice day, but it can feel like torture when the sky is pelting you with snow, sleet, or rain. You don’t generate as much heat when you’re stationary, and drinking alcohol exacerbates body heat loss. If only it were…
Juan Carlos Castillo, a state official in rural Mexico, had never received a call like this before. What looked like a giant plastic jellyfish with a blinking LED had fallen from the sky onto a farmer’s field. “It really caused panic,” he says. “I imagined that it could be espionage.” Then Castillo noticed a phone…
