When Google sibling Sidewalk Labs announced in 2017 a $50 million investment into a project to redevelop a portion of Toronto’s waterfront, it seemed almost too good to be true. Someday soon, Sidewalk Labs promised, Torontonians would live and work in a 12-acre former industrial site in skyscrapers made from timber—a cheaper and more sustainable…
While platforms like Facebook offer 21st-century advertising tools that harness advanced computation to target ads and change behavior, they are only using 20th-century PSAs against coronavirus. Given the exponential challenge we’re up against, passive links to information and videos from the Centers for Disease Control and World Health Organization are woefully insufficient to keep the…
A little after 6 pm ET on Wednesday, the system started blinking red for iOS developer Clay Jones. Like many devs, Jones uses a Google product called Crashlytics to keep tabs on when his app stops working. Out of nowhere, it registered tens of thousands of crashes. It also pointed to the cause: a chunk…
The undeniable surrealness with the Covid-19 pandemic may be to blame, but in case you didn’t notice, Mother’s Day is coming up fast. Like, really fast.If you’re in need of a last-minute Mother’s Day gift, you have some obstacles to overcome. This year, traditional presents might not be safe or available. You can’t exactly bring…
“Games are very rapidly solved these days,” says Ion Hazzikostas, the game director of World of Warcraft.Hazzikostas, known to the World of Warcraft community as Watcher, has developed the 16-year-old massively multiplayer online role-playing game since 2008. On a call with WIRED, he reminisced about how, early in the history of games, before raid walk-through…
Football fans have always been convinced that referees are biased against their team, and for a while, they were actually right. In the years after the Second World War, teams in England were significantly more likely to lose when playing away, due largely—it’s thought—to the influence of the boisterous home support on the decision making…
It’s all in the beans. Nothing will improve your morning coffee like making the switch to whole beans that you freshly grind right before you brew.First, you must find high-quality, freshly roasted beans. We suggest visiting your local coffee roaster. I’ve been able to pick up bulk bags from my local roaster (Jittery Joe’s Roasting…
Crawling along the world’s river bottoms, the larvae of the caddis fly suffer a perpetual housing crisis. To protect themselves from predators, they gather up sand grains and other sediment and paste them all together with silk, forming a cone that holds their worm-like bodies. As they mature and elongate, they have to continuously add…
As if it weren’t enough that the new coronavirus can steal away your ability to breathe and make your immune system turn against you, now we know this fearsome pathogen can also literally curdle your blood. News of the “bizarre, unsettling” complication—one that’s been killing young and middle-aged patients with Covid-19—made headlines last month. “…
Hello, and welcome to another edition of The Monitor, WIRED’s entertainment news roundup. This week we’ve got news about Star Wars, Kraftwerk, Joe Exotic, and Tom Cruise (who may or may not be going to space). Let’s get going.Taika Waititi Is Going to Direct a Star Wars MovieYou know who’s great at spicing things up…
