We like to think modern culture moves at a dizzying pace, fueled by a relentless parade of new works of music, literature, and technological design. Change in nature, by contrast, seems to follow a slower trajectory as genetic mutations over generations give animals bigger teeth, say, or a better camouflage. But maybe the opposite is…
This story originally appeared on Yale Environment360 and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.As public concern about plastic pollution rises, consumers are reaching for canvas bags, metal straws, and reusable water bottles. But while individuals fret over images of oceanic garbage gyres, the fossil fuel and petrochemical industries are pouring billions of dollars into…
Li Yang grew up in what he thought was a boring town. It was called 404, like the error code, and sat a couple hours from the nearest city, in the sun-beaten Gobi Desert of western China. There was no commercial movie theater—just a zoo with a handful of cages, several small video game arcades,…
Hello, welcome to an all-new edition of The Monitor, WIRED’s entertainment news roundup. What’s been happening the last few days? Lots of television news. Let’s dig in.HBO Likely Won’t Make a Second Season of WatchmenHave you been wondering what happened to Regina King after she stepped into that pool in the season finale of Watchmen?…
“Techlash,” the rising public animosity toward big tech companies and their impacts on society, will continue to define the state of the tech world in 2020. Government leaders, historically the stewards of protecting society from the impacts of new innovations, are becoming exasperated at the inability of traditional policymaking to keep up with the unprecedented…
On the outskirts of Zahle, a town in Lebanon’s Beqaa Valley, a pair of aid workers carrying clipboards and cell phones walk through a small refugee camp, home to 11 makeshift shelters built from wood and tarps.A camp resident leading them through the settlement—one of many in the Beqaa, a wide agricultural plain between Beirut…
Your life’s probably a mess. Unless you’ve got maid service, your place is full of dust, dirt, pet hair, and doughnut crumbs like the rest of us. Even if you employ a maid, they won’t be around when you fumble popcorn into your couch on Netflix night. And if you have a robot vacuum for…
End-to-end encryption is a staple of secure messaging apps like WhatsApp and Signal. It ensures that no one—even the app developer—can access your data as it traverses the web. But what if you could bring some version of that protection to increasingly ubiquitous—and notoriously insecure—Internet of Things devices?The Swiss cryptography firm Teserakt is trying just…
Monday, January 20, 2020. By Farley Katz, with cartooncollections.com. While we’re asking questions, what are robots? The definition, it turns out, has been confusing from the very beginning. Every weekday, WIRED publishes a new cartoon about the worlds of science and technology. Check back here for more laughs throughout the rest of the week. And…
Pop quiz! What’s the difference between Automatic Emergency Braking, Collision Imminent Braking, Autonomous Emergency Braking, Collision Intervention, Autonomous Braking, and a Dynamic Brake System?Trick question: nothing. All six of those terms have been used by important auto industry organizations—regulators at the US Department of Transportation, standards developers at SAE International, and influential research organization Thatcham…
