WIRED

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Get in-depth coverage of current and future trends in technology, and how they are shaping business, entertainment, communications, science, politics, and society.

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A Secret Space Plane Just Landed After a Record Stay in Orbit 29.10.2019 5:55

The old space shuttle landing facility at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center received an unusual visitor early Sunday morning when the Air Force’s secretive X-37B space plane autonomously returned from orbit after a record-breaking mission. For the last 780 days, the Air Force Research Laboratory used the space plane as an orbital platform for classified experiments. Learn more about your ad choices. Vis...

Ocean Cleanup’s New Plastic-Catcher … Kinda Already Exists? 29.10.2019 8:12

A little over a year ago, a group called The Ocean Cleanup launched an unprecedented campaign to rid the seas of plastic, complete with an unprecedented device: a 600-meter-long, U-shaped tube that was meant to passively gather debris in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch for a ship to come along and scoop up and take back to land. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Kincade Fire: The Age of Flames Is Consuming California 28.10.2019 8:07

Right on cue, Northern California has plunged back into wildfire hell. This time two years ago, the Tubbs Fire was ripping through Santa Rosa and other communities north of San Francisco, killing 22 and destroying 5,000 homes. And last year on November 8, the Camp Fire virtually obliterated the town of Paradise, killing 86 and burning an astonishing 20,000 structures to the ground. Learn more abou...

Can We Plant 20 Million Trees for 2020? The Math Says Yes 28.10.2019 7:53

There's a lot of power in a rough estimate. If you’re trying to figure out whether something is worth doing, you could really go deep into the weeds trying to capture all the costs and benefits. But here’s the thing: Usually you don’t need an exact answer in order to make the right decision. For example, say you’re having a big party, a hundred people, and you want to make special decorated cupcak...

The Most Diabolical Race and the Rise of Women Endurance Stars 25.10.2019 15:55

On Monday evening, Maggie Guterl and Will Hayward set out for the 60th time on a four-mile loop through the hickory-covered hills of central Tennessee. It was dark and rainy on day three of the Big’s Backyard Ultra, a running race of fiendish design. There's no set distance, and no set total time, just endless laps around a four-mile course, which participants must complete once an hour. To win, y...

Why Did Oklahoma’s Sooner Schooner Tip Over? 25.10.2019 10:42

College football is all about traditions, and most schools have some signature thing they do at games. Mississippi State has the headache-inducing din of cowbells. Arkansas fans summon their team to the field with a hog call. “Woooo Pig Soooie!” The Oklahoma Sooners have the Sooner Schooner. It's a little covered wagon pulled by a pair of enthusiastic ponies—you know, a prairie schooner—that caree...

NASA Wants to Send a Probe to the Hellish Surface of Venus 24.10.2019 8:05

With all the talk about sending humans to the moon and eventually Mars, it can be easy to forget there are other planets worth exploring. But a team of researchers at NASA has set its sights on Venus, Earth’s closest neighbor and one of the least understood planets in the solar system. Since the first (crash) landing on Venus in 1966, by a Soviet probe, spacecraft have only survived a total of a f...

NASA's New Space Suits Will Fit Men and Women Alike (for Once) 24.10.2019 8:45

When NASA designed its first space suits, they were tailored to fit the all-male crews who flew in the early 1960s and landed on the moon in 1969. But as NASA has become a more diverse agency, both in space and on the ground, the limitations of its suits have become a growing source of embarrassment. Since the final Moon mission in 1972, more than 40 American women have flown on the space shuttle...

The Bizarre Aye-Aye Isn’t Giving Us the Finger After All 23.10.2019 7:21

If it seems too good to be true, the old cliché goes, it probably is. And it doesn’t get much gooder than the bizarre hand of the aye-aye, a specialized lemur that uses a hyper-elongated middle finger to tap along hollow tree branches, listens for grubs within, gnaws a hole in the wood, and reaches that middle finger inside to fish out the food. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoic...

Scientists Are Literally Spinning Up Lab-Grown Meat 23.10.2019 7:48

When Cypher is selling out his compatriots over dinner with Agent Smith in The Matrix, he muses: “I know this steak doesn’t exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realize? Ignorance is bliss.” In a simulation like the Matrix, ones and zeroes represent every nuance of that steak—the texture, the...

Andrew Yang Wants a Thorium Reactor by 2027. Good Luck, Buddy 22.10.2019 10:08

Presidential candidates are in the business of making big promises, and few of the Democratic contenders for the 2020 nomination have promised more than Andrew Yang. An entrepreneur turned politico, Yang has styled himself as the techie’s candidate. His platform is defined by its embrace of high-tech solutions for a variety of social problems and earned him endorsements from Silicon Valley heavywe...

A New Crispr Technique Could Fix Almost All Genetic Diseases 22.10.2019 9:12

Andrew Anzalone was restless. It was late fall, 2017. The year was winding down, and so was his MD/PhD program at Columbia. Trying to figure out what was next in his life, he’d taken to long, leaf-strewn walks in the West Village. One night as he paced up Hudson Street, his stomach filled with La Colombe coffee and his mind with Crispr gene editing papers, an idea began to bubble through the caffe...

How Chaos Will Unfold if Trump Opens the Tongass to Logging 21.10.2019 8:09

The Trump administration this week proposed ending the so-called Roadless Rule, which banned logging, development, and road construction in Alaska’s Tongass, the biggest national forest in the US. If the USDA Forest Service has its way, it would “remove all 9.2 million acres of inventoried roadless acres and would convert 165,000 old-growth acres and 20,000 young-growth acres previously identified...

All Hail the Blob, the Smart Slime Mold Confounding Science 21.10.2019 8:11

It’s official: Humans are canceled. If we’re not intent on slowly destroying the planet, then we’re getting busy being downright nasty to each other online. But in a world increasingly devoid of human role models, there are some unlikely sources of inspiration out there. Wired UK This story originally appeared on WIRED UK. Enter The Blob—a yellowish chunk of slime mold set to make its debut at the...

The NFL's Helmet Tests Are Brainless 18.10.2019 8:11