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Smash! Bang! Success! The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the arm of the Department of Transportation charged with reducing the number of Americans killed on the road, yesterday released the results of the crash test for the Tesla Model 3: five stars in every category. The perfect score is a welcome ray of sunshine during a (tweet)stormy stretch for Tesla—just yesterday, Bloomberg...

Of the many acronyms engineers spend their lives internalizing, few are more valuable than KISS: Keep It Simple, Stupid. Constrain the problem, reduce the variables, and make life as easy as possible when designing novel systems—like, say, a self-driving car. The world is a messy, complicated place. The less of it you need to solve, the closer you are to having a working product. Learn more about...

A handful of years ago, a small pharmaceutical company quietly acquired the rights to an old but commonly used antibiotic. Few noticed until last week, when the new owner did something that’s recently become common in the world of pharmaceuticals: It abruptly raised the price. A lot. The manufacturer is called Nostrum Laboratories, and the drug for which it hiked the price—by more than 400 percent...

Amazon is hosting a hardware launch event this morning at its Seattle headquarters, and has invited the press into the Spheres, Amazon’s urban botanical gardens, to show off the new products. It’s widely expected that Amazon will announce several new Alexa-equipped hardware products or device partnerships, adding to an already expansive line of Echos and other smart devices. Learn more about your...

Far-right YouTube is the internet age equivalent of conservative talk radio: It’s a place for ultra-conservative commentators to react vehemently, personally, emotionally to the news of the day and the creeping horrors of American progressivism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In downtown Chicago, near where the river meets the lake, the city gets a bad case of Escheritis. The streets double—sometimes triple!—into three dimensions, dropping below each other and folding around the basements and sub-basements of skyscrapers, cutting across the river on bridges hanging below other bridges, and eliding into drivable strata in ways that cities generally promise not to do. In...

WIRED ICON Anne Wojcicki, cofounder and CEO of 23andMe NOMINATES Keller Rinaudo, cofounder and CEO of Zipline Keller Rinaudo began his career as the cocreator of Romo, a tiny toy robot. But for the past five years his work has been, well, bloodier. His company, Zipline, uses autonomous planes to deliver medical supplies—vaccines, pharmaceuticals, and blood—to hard-to-reach places. Learn more about...

How true does my online persona have to be? I like to be really curated. But my significant other is very honest. Too honest if you ask me. Who’s right? Should we be our raw authentic selves, or strike a pose? This feels like a quintessential dilemma of the digital age, but artists and philosophers have been grappling over this one for centuries, really. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit pod...

Changing notions of what customers want from cars have pushed automakers to do plenty of weird things. They’ve unmoored the driver’s seat from the left side of the car, revived the rotary engine, and turned windshields into screens. BMW, though, is most likely the first to put down carpeting in the cabin of a cargo jet. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

As Japan entered the 1960s, everything seemed to be in motion. Construction swept through Tokyo as the city prepared to host its first Olympic Games. The TÅkaidÅ Shinkansen, the original bullet train, sped along the southern coast of Honshu. More cars filled the roads. The only thing not moving, it seemed, were people’s legs. Prosperity fostered convenience, which encouraged inactivity—or so a doc...

Every hurricane season, news reports divide the country’s coast into two camps. You’ve got the leavers, who brave miles-long traffic jams as they make for higher ground. And the stayers, defiantly boarding up windows, stockpiling provisions, and kicking back on their couches—that’s how their parents and grandparents did it, anyway. Like most dichotomies, it’s a false one. It ignores a third group:...

Of the many challenges facing the nascent flying car industry, few turn more hairs gray than power. A heavier aircraft needs more power, which requires a bigger battery, which weighs more, thus making a heavier aircraft. You see the dilemma. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

On Wednesday, Apple introduced not one but three new phone models to the world: the iPhone Xs, Xs Max, and Xr. They all seem fine. But take note of what Apple took away. As of this week, it no longer sells the iPhone SE. Which in turn means the age of small smartphones has officially come to an end. When Apple debuted the iPhone SE in 2016, it was remarkable not just for its diminutive 4-inch scre...

In today’s transportation landscape, opening the Lyft app on your phone is a sign of intent. It means that wherever you’re going, you’ve decided you won’t be biking, or walking, or taking the bus. Maybe you’ll share the ride with a stranger, but you’re definitely making the trip in a car. Lyft cofounder and president John Zimmer is trying to rejigger that timeline. Learn more about your ad choices...

In 2012, North Carolina legislators passed a bill that barred policymakers and developers from using up-to-date climate science to plan for rising sea levels on the state’s coast. Now Hurricane Florence threatens to cause a devastating storm surge that could put thousands of lives in danger and cost the state billions of dollars worth of damage. The hurricane, which is expected to make landfall on...

If you've been to a club, festival, pool party, or bar mitzvah in the past few years and taken a peek at the DJ booth, you've seen somebody using Traktor. The widely beloved app, made by the Berlin company Native Instruments, lets a performer seamlessly mix together tracks from their MP3 library to make a non-stop, fluidly changing DJ set. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com...

Snap's camera-enabled Spectacles get an update today with two new styles of frames. The new sunnies look less like the circular Spectacles of yore, and more like something a knock-off Anna Wintour might wear, were she interested in being on the other side of the paparazzo's lens. They come with all the capabilities of Snap’s second generation Spectacles: improved image quality, dual microphones, a...

Of the growing numbers of US car buyers who go for SUVs and pickups, most do it because they look good, they have a nice high seating position, and they’re handy for that odd weekend they hit up Home Depot. Their cars will never get really dirty, or make use of their improved ground clearance, and off-road capabilities. There exists, however, a smaller class of buyers who really need those capabil...

The thing to remember about Elon Musk smoking a blunt with Joe Rogan is not that he took just one hit, or that he didn’t seem to know what a blunt was, or that he whiffed on an opportunity to show off just how useful his “not a flamethrower” can be. It’s that it came 130 minutes into his two-and-a-half-hour interview with Rogan, for the former Fear Factor host’s podcast, livestreamed on YouTube. L...

Government sclerosis is no match for the hot take industrial complex. Since President Trump ordered the Department of Defense to prepare for a sixth military branch in June—an order that has stalled, since it requires congressional approval—the debate over this proposed Space Force has become so clouded by partially-informed, mostly-partisan rhetoric, there’s barely enough light for an honest appr...

Yuval Noah Harari, author of the best-selling books Sapiens and Homo Deus, is a big fan of science fiction, and includes an entire chapter about it in his new book 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. “Today science fiction is the most important artistic genre,” Harari says in Episode 325 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you are, say, over the age of three, chances are someone has told you not to climb into a van, parked in an alley, with a bunch of strangers. But this was for science, mom, and the very nice trio that beckoned a reporter within turned out to be rather entrepreneurial spirits, who just want to create a good night’s sleep. A good night’s sleep in any context, really, but especially for the 23 pas...

Adam Fincham is trying to make waves with a Tupperware full of agave and an avocado. Internal waves, specifically—the kind that exist in stratified fluid. Fincham is standing at a metal chef’s table in the kitchen at Kelly Slater’s Surf Ranch, in toasty Lemoore, California. A chef is in the kitchen preparing salmon grain bowls for the assemblage of pro surfers hanging around outside, but Fincham i...

To commemorate Nike’s 30th anniversary of its iconic “Just do it” campaign, the sportswear goliath on Monday released a series of striking black-and-white ads featuring tennis champion Serena Williams, pro-skateboarder Lacey Baker, and NFL wide receiver Odell Beckham Jr. Its most controversial placard, though, was a close-up image of former 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick overlaid with the mess...

Because I work from home, and because my dogs are the best dogs, we are in contact all day, every day. We're a three-headed, ten-legged Hydra, rotating around each other as we move from my office to the living room to the kitchen. Whatever I do, they're usually there too—whether that's sleeping at night, pacing around my living room, or feeding my kids. And unfortunately, whatever happens to me, u...