WIRED MAGAZINE
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11 Futuristic Ways to Improve Our Cities, From Robotic Rats to Talking Trash Cans
As smartphone-toting citizens prod
municipal officials, cities around the world are embracing high-tech
solutions to lots of problems.
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Where Energy Companies Test What’ll Happen if Their Oil Spills
Grant Harder Oil pipeline leaks are bad.
And that means pipeline operators and companies developing leak-sensing
technologies are in a bind—they need to test their inventions without
actually letting gunk seep into the earth. So they turn to a Canadian
company called C-Fer Technologies. “There are few spots where you can
dump oil on the […]
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Meet the 20-Year-Old Who Built a YouTube Product Review Empire
Marques Brownlee is a YouTube sensation.
The tech-review prodigy has 1.8 million subscribers—more followers than
Kanye West, Marvel, or Disney Animation.
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Sleep-Deprived Bees Do Weirder Waggle Dances
Sleep deprivation makes people talk
nonsense—which led animal behaviorist Barrett Klein to wonder if
worn-out honeybees might also have trouble communicating with the waggle
dances they use to share directions to food and hives.
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Too Many Cooks: Product Reviews Have Made Online Shopping Too Complicated
“The Internet created a massive choice
problem and then started to solve it with reviews and
recommendations...But now there’s a new choice problem: choice of
review. Too many reviews are as bad as no reviews.”
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Kitchen and Bar Gear That’ll Make You Want to Stay Home for Dinner
From an updated cast iron skillet to top-notch cocktail muddlers, this kitchen and bar gear will help you win the dinner party.
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Here’s How You Milk Snakes to Make Antivenom
Get bitten by a rattlesnake and your
problems won’t stop at the excruciating pain and grotesque swelling.
After a few hours you’ll be black and blue from all the broken blood
vessels—and if the venom-induced hemorrhaging spreads to your brain, you
could have a stroke. Luckily there’s a cure: antivenom made by
scientists at the National Autonomous University of Mexico’s Institute
of Biotechnology, with an assist from some very special horses.
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A Sad Fact of Life: It’s Actually Smart to Be Mean Online
I'm generally upbeat on Twitter. Many of
my posts are enthusiastic blurts about science or research in which I
use way too many exclamation points!! But I've noticed something: When I
post an acerbic or cranky tweet, it gets recirculated far more widely
than do my cheerier notes. People like it fine when I'm genial, but when
I make a caustic joke or cutting comment? Social media gold. This is
pure anecdata, of course. Still, it made me wonder if there was any
psychological machinery at work here. Is there a reason that
purse-lipped opinions would outcompete generous ones?
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The Woman Who Bravely Mashed Up Cosmopolitan and Cosmos
You might know comedy writer Megan
Amram's must-follow Twitter feed, but the 27-year-old from Portland,
Oregon, is also a rising star—she has written for the Oscars and Kroll Show, and has a staff gig at Parks and Recreation. What comes after conquering the Internet and TV? Satirical pseudoscience textbooks, apparently. Amram's Science ... for Her!,
out this week, won't teach you much about science, but it will make you
laugh out loud. It also delivers a legitimate critique of sexism—with
frequent detours into the absurd.
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The Music at Your Next Rave Could Be Produced in the Cloud
Thomas Porostocky Desk Monkeys have
gotten used to autosaved text. But electronic music producers are out of
luck if their MacBook dies in the middle of an inspired recording sesh.
That's a problem programmer Steve Martocci was focused on fixing when
he coded Splice, a tool that can back up musicians' files to the cloud.
[…]
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Meet the Bartender Who’s Using Science to Reinvent the Cocktail
Dave Arnold is not a typical bartender.
As head of Manhattan bar Booker and Dax (and before that a kind of
culinary engineer for molecular gastronomy outpost wd~50), Arnold
perfects his boozy recipes with equipment out of a science lab.
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An Architect Whose Wild Structures Imitate Cells
Architects like to poach design elements
from the life sciences—a DNA helix here, a spherical nucleus there. But
Cornell architecture professor Jenny Sabin goes even more
interdisciplinary. “I'm not interested in just making buildings from
beautiful forms in biology,” she says. Her experimental installations
draw from just about every department on campus. One of Sabin's […]
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Want to Kill Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria? Forget About Antibiotics
Damn bacteria. The wily things keep
mutating, developing resistance to antibiotics. The good news:
Researchers are developing new approaches, and many can target specific
bacterial strains. These strategies could save our skins (and guts and
lungs).
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This High-Tech Greenhouse Tests What Crops Will Survive Climate Change
It may have a glass roof and be filled
with plants, but the Advanced Crop Lab at the Durham, North Carolina,
headquarters of agricultural biotech firm Syngenta does a lot more than a
typical greenhouse. Scientists can program its dozens of rooms with
individual climates in order to test new crops that might flourish in
our sweltering, drought-filled future.
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Formaldehyde and Chicken Eggs: What’s Inside a Flu Shot
Caren Alpert Flu virus All flu vaccines
start with flu viruses: genetic material packaged in an envelope of
proteins and fats, studded with yet more proteins—antigens—that push the
body’s immune system into action. With thousands of possible flu
variants out there, the World Health Organization looks at info from 141
labs around the world to […]
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Ingenious Tap System Serves the Perfect Beer Every Time
Different beers require different gas
levels. So Los Angeles brewpub owner Gabe Gordon built his own system to
regulate the pressure and temperature of each the 22 beers he has on
tap.
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Charting the World’s Easiest—And Most Punishing—Marathon Routes
November’s New York City Marathon is a
little bit Jekyll-and-Hyde, combining benevolent descents with sinister
climbs; the equally prestigious Boston course gifts a runner with
merciful downhills. And if the there-and-back Whiskey Row race in
Arizona looks too hellish, head to Berlin.
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Planes, Trains, and Spy Gear: Here’s What to See in DC
“Whether you’re conservative or liberal,”
says (controversy-courting) former mayor Marion Barry Jr., “whatever
your taste is, you can find it in DC.” Plus, now’s the best time to
visit. The swampy summer weather is over, and with the midterm elections
looming, the politicians are out of town.
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This Guy’s Quest to Track Every Shot in the NBA Changed Basketball Forever
Kirk Goldsberry Jeff Wilson As a kid,
Kirk Goldsberry was a rabid basketball fan. But this was the 1980s, and
living near Penn State meant his house wasn't quite close enough to
Philadelphia to get 76ers games on TV. And so, casting about for a team,
he latched on to Dominique Wilkins and the Atlanta […]
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The Three Breakthroughs That Have Finally Unleashed AI on the World
The AI on the horizon looks more like
Amazon Web Services—cheap, reliable, industrial-grade digital smartness
running behind everything, and almost invisible except when it blinks
off. This is a big deal, and now it's here.
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The Laborers Who Keep Dick Pics and Beheadings Out of Your Facebook Feed
Inside the soul-crushing world of content
moderation, where low-wage laborers soak up the worst of humanity, and
keep it off your Facebook feed.
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How Building a Black Hole for Interstellar Led to an Amazing Scientific Discovery
Kip Thorne looks into the black hole he
helped create and thinks, “Why, of course. That's what it would do.”
This particular black hole is a simulation of unprecedented accuracy. It
appears to spin at nearly the speed of light, dragging bits of the
universe along with it. (That's gravity for you; relativity is
superweird.) In theory it was once a star, but instead of fading or
exploding, it collapsed like a failed soufflé into a tiny point of
inescapable singularity. A glowing ring orbiting the spheroidal
maelstrom seems to curve over the top and below the bottom
simultaneously.
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Letter From the Editor: Confronting a New Breed of Internet Horror
I haven't watched any of the ISIS
beheading videos, and I don't plan to. At this writing there have been
four, depicting the decapitations of two journalists, an aid worker, and
a tourist. As The New York Times' David Carr and others have pointed
out, the people who carried out these despicable acts edited their […]
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Big Hero 6 Proves It: Pixar’s Gurus Have Brought the Magic Back to Disney Animation
John Lasseter is tearing up. His eyes are
shining and his lashes are moist. He reaches out a warm hand to cover
mine and looks deep into my eyes as he talks. He's feeling things,
powerful things, and it's impossible not to feel them too. From any
other studio executive, this would come across as insincere, even
manipulative, but Lasseter, chief creative officer of Walt Disney
Animation Studios and Pixar, is quite possibly the most earnest,
emotional, enthusiastic man working in Hollywood. So check your cynical
heart at the door of his toy-crammed office. His emotions—and his
tears—are real.
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Play Around With Our Interactive Disney Cover
For our cover, photographer Art Streiber,
who has shot Star Wars aliens, Muppets, and Steven Spielberg for
previous WIRED covers, aimed his lens at Lasseter and Catmull. Then our
design team partnered with Disney animators to surround Lasseter and
Catmull with some of the characters that have appeared in Disney
Animation films since they took over. Click on each of the characters,
from Big Hero 6 stars Hiro and Baymax, to Princess Tiana, Olaf, and
Wreck-it-Ralph, to watch them in action.
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