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The hexagonal slices of wood don’t look like much. There’s the shape, sort of interesting in its architectural way, and the neutral wood color. A few are studded with bright, white lights, right in the center, which is fun. And the way the hexagons, each the size of a manhole cover, have been bunched into clusters feels natural and sensible. Surely a Fibonacci sequence is hiding somewhere in there...

You probably learned how to track your heart rate in school: Put your finger on a pulse point, like the inside of your wrist, and count how many pulses you feel in a minute. That yields your heart’s beats per minute, or bpm. Cool trick! you thought. And you promptly forgot about it. But your heart rate can be a useful piece of data. It’s a reliable metric for setting fitness goals that puts your c...

In my eight years on college campuses—first as a student, and then as the girlfriend of a grad student—my cheap, beater bike was stolen four times. Once, the wheels were gone. Another time, the seat. Twice, it just vanished into the ether, leaving only a busted U-lock and broken dreams in its wake. Even if the bike itself only cost fifty or a hundred bucks, the inconvenience was annoying. Learn mo...

Back-to-school shopping might evoke memories of wandering through big box store sales and throwing Trapper Keepers and pencils into a shopping cart. But nowadays, you're more likely to hunch over a laptop to hunt for great prices than you are to fight for a parking spot at the local mall. If you're looking for college essentials, or a great laptop or tablet, we have a few suggestions. Learn more a...

I often worry I'm an under-reactor. It's not that things don't affect me, or that I'm needlessly stoic—born-and-bred Midwesterners like me tend to be level-headed. (Or at least as even-keeled as one can be in 2018.) This is a purely performative kind of reaction I'm talking about: I don't add the "angry" face to Facebook posts from old high-school classmates, don't "heart" nearly as many tweets as...

Among the heads of publicly traded companies, Tesla’s Elon Musk might just be the most whimsical, the most impish, the most delightfully trolly. But Musk may be ready to give up that distinction. On Tuesday afternoon, the electric carmaker CEO tweeted that he was considering taking the company private, and that he had secured funding to do so. https://twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Vis...

The work of polemicists like Sarah Jeong, recently hired to The New York Times editorial board, is to make arguments in public space. Polemicists can be insufferable. They get to be gadflies and think themselves Socratic. They’re belligerent. They have a reputation for laziness and Twitter addiction; they often shun shoe leather. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Many of my car journeys are within a mile of my house, hauling toddlers and groceries to and fro. It would be much easier, more fun, and better for the environment, if I could replace at least a few of those trips with an electric cargo bike. However, a few hurdles stand in my way. The first is cost. I loved the versatility and power of the R&M Load, but at $7,000, it costs as much as my current c...

Seattleites got a serious scare on Friday evening when an airport employee stole a large turboprop airplane owned by the Alaska Air Group from the area’s Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, and took it for an unauthorized flight. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If policymaking is never easy, and military policymaking is very difficult, it stands to reason that space military policymaking is basically impossible. Yet today, in a speech at the Pentagon, Vice President Mike Pence announced the formation of a sixth branch of the US armed services: a SPACE FORCE! But can that really happen? Well, let’s proceed with the go/no-go. SPACE FORCE! President Donald...

Welcome to Replay, our weekly roundup of all the gaming news and happenings you might've missed while you were, y'know, playing games. This week, we've got Elon Musk's attempts to put games in cars, Valve's return to actually making games, and the biggest fighting game tournament in the world. Ah, Elon Musk. Your Teslas may be losing money, but you're never going to run out of ideas, no matter how...

A funny thing happened in the six years since Samsung first announced its line of Galaxy Note smartphones. A few things happened, more accurately. In an effort to compete with the Note, other phone makers started making large-screened phones, and later, edge-to-edge displays. Big phones got better-looking, in general. Many were imbued with powerful graphics processing. And eventually, the software...

The shark wasn't working. It was the mid-'00s, and Jan de Bont—director of such big-screen velocities as Speed and Twister—was showing off a small sculpture of carcharodon megalodon, the ancient shark that was to be the star of his next film, Meg. Based on Steve Alten's 1997 book, about a deep-sea diver who encounters a prehistoric underwater beast, Meg had been the subject of a million-dollar mov...

Would you like a Mod to go with that Moto? After three iterations of the Moto Z, it’s clear that Motorola still believes in its line of snap-on magnetic phone accessories. And it should. There are a lot of intriguing Mods you can buy, including a photo printer and a fancy Hasselblad-branded camera, and they all work interchangeably with these Z phones. Unfortunately, Moto Mods haven’t become a sel...

Squeeze the trigger of a gun and a spring unwinds. A bolt lurches forward. On that piece of precision-milled steel is a firing pin that ignites a spark and initiates a sequence of events which, if the human will is powerful enough and mechanical tolerance is not exceeded, often ends in death. And tolerance for Martin Kok was running out. As a teenager living north of Amsterdam, Kok sold fish and l...

Saturn may be photogenic, but Mars is our nearest neighbor. As the planet approached its closest point to Earth, Hubble had a look. Yes, those summertime dust storms are raging on, and the swirling red particle clouds are in sharp contrast to the bright white polar caps. But also making cameos in the image are the two moons of Mars, Phobos and Deimos. They’re tiny: Phobos is 14 miles across, and D...

It's 1981, in a version of reality where the Cold War was waged not human to human, but human to extraterrestrial enemy from beyond the stars. To fight, we developed robot bodies to wear in space; these Ship-Selves are advanced and almost unkillable, weapons and homes and clothes and identities all rolled into one. And, of course, we got teenagers to pilot them. Learn more about your ad choices. V...

A few years ago, I took a weekend wilderness survival class. Deep in the remote woods of Oregon’s coast range, we strung plastic sheets up with fishing line for shelter and practiced signaling with tiny pocket mirrors. Enthralled, I watched as the instructor slowly teased a cotton ball daubed with petroleum jelly into a roaring campfire. Survival class aside, fire starting isn’t one of my skills....

Once upon a time, there was a fringe news outlet with a loud and dissenting opinion. A fatal shooting, it claimed, was not at all what it seemed to be: It was a hoax, orchestrated by some shadowy force—probably Communists—bent on replacing freedom with dictatorship. This was untrue, but that didn’t stop the outlet from naming and insulting alleged collaborators. And so the media outlet was sued fo...

In singularly unsurprising news, Brookstone has filed for bankruptcy. The company will shutter its remaining 101 mall storefronts, officially closing out an era that began its fade years ago. Even if you won’t mourn its disappearance—even if you haven’t stepped inside a mall since the Mallrats era—it’s worth a moment of appreciation, and a full accounting of what’s been lost. Learn more about your...

It was a book that drove me away from books. This wasn’t a trauma of distaste, or indulgence: not a literary bad mussel, not waking up on the floor of someone's house with a swimming head and the knowledge that I could never again be within smelling distance of their first editions. My aversion was borne of fear. The fear took root in 2016—which, while decidedly not-great in general, was very much...

Back in the last presidential campaign season, reporters on the tech and politics beats began noticing a rise in far-right memes that supported Trump. Memes being memes, these seemed initially like weird, off-color jokes. They wondered: What the hell is going on? Was this shitposting ironic or serious? Or both? Either way, it seemed newsworthy. The memes were climbing the trending lists on every s...

Quick, think of a California hotbed of technological might. There’s Silicon Valley, duh. And enterprising Silicon Beach, down in the state’s sunny, laidback southland. But cast thine eyes north, young techies, past the agricultural innovation stronghold at UC Davis and the domed, white capitol building where the bureaucrats and public officials controlling the nation’s largest state economy play....

The fact that you're even reading these words represents a victory. Wordpress-powered websites publish more than 77 million posts each week. The New York Times runs about 150 stories every day. (Here at WIRED, it's more like 15 or 20.) Last year, 687.2 million books were sold in the United States—and that's just print versions, not e-books. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.co...

Consuming pop culture is my job. Well, writing about it is my job, but that makes keeping tabs on movies, television, podcasts, Twitter/Instagram feeds, and everything else a professional necessity. Yet, there's one high-protein item that always seems to be missing in my media diet: books. It's not that I don't read them—I've got two to three going at any given time—it's that I feel like I don't r...