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21 Articles

MEETING THE MAYOR For this issue’s cover, Tom Cockram photographed London’s Mayor, Sadiq Khan—and found a kindred spirit: “It was amazing to step inside City Hall and to feel the energy of the place where it all happens. I knew Khan was a big boxing fan, as am I, so to break the ice, I got him talking about up-and-coming fights and his love for the sport. After the shoot, he showed me his office, where he has a beautiful Muhammad Ali photo, gifted to him from another Mayor. He’s done so much for London, so it was all such an honor.” ASPIRATION STATION Wilson Hennessy inaugurated WIRED’s new photo studio with this issue’s Gear shoot—and even got some self-improvement tips: “It was great fun, dreaming I could improve my 5k time with…

EDITOR’S ESSAY

Human beings love a mythical beast. But while there have been alleged sightings of Nessie or Bigfoot down the years—grainy photos and flickering Super 8—the rarest of them all has only been whispered about via online forums and opaquely worded earnings calls. Step forward, Project Titan. At the end of February, Apple revealed that this long-rumored program to develop a car was being axed. It had been the subject of fevered conjecture for around a decade, with a series of automotive engineers and designers hired by the Cupertino-based company. In many ways, the idea of an Apple car made absolute sense. The company has an imposing record in both hardware and software, allied to remarkable customer service, plus a customer base of people willing and able to pay for premium products. However,…

A switch is flicked, and a pharmacy sign flickers to life with a green glare. But this clinic prescribes seeds, not pills. The glass jars lining the shelves of this compact unit in central Plymouth, on the south coast of England, are filled with cow parsley, red clover and corn chamomile. It’s owned by Pollenize, a social enterprise that uses data analysis to diagnose and treat deficiencies in honeybees. With habitat loss, climate change, agrochemicals and a new wave of invasive hornets hounding Britain’s bee colonies, its founders believe artificial intelligence could be an unlikely trump card. When childhood friends Matthew Elmes and Owen Finnie cofounded Pollenize in 2018, AI was not part of the plan. As long-time sufferers of hay fever, their foray into beekeeping was just a stab at soothing…

IN THE GRIP OF AN IDENTITY CRISIS

I believe, with total conviction, that the tech industry should stop absolutely everything else it is doing—self-driving cars, large language models, spyware, teledildonics—and figure out how to stop making me log in to everything all day. I would passionately love to return to an era in which the most important software tool I use is something besides my password manager. If you are young, you may not remember the days when you would turn on a computer and … frankly that was it. You may only know the new world of infinite login chains: Wake up, hold phone to face, check email, find that the email app has decided you need to log in, open password manager, log in to that, and so on. Repeat the process for your work laptop,…

IN THE GRIP OF AN IDENTITY CRISIS

THE MYTH OF METAL

The German historian Oswald Spengler considered our age the age of abstraction. Nowhere is this more apparent than in programming, where abstraction isn’t just a conceptual convenience but an absolute necessity. Programmers like to talk about their tools (rather abstractly) as a “stack.” At the top of the stack—the surface most of us encounter first—are simple markup languages, HTML being the best known. At the bottom are the “bare metal” languages of the machine. Thus there is a hierarchy, and the further down in the stack you go, the less abstract—and, in a way, more difficult—programming gets. It’s not really metal down there, of course. It’s sand—impossibly thin layers of silicon dioxide that conduct electrical impulses in ordered patterns we experience as a screen showing us a rectangle with text on…

THE MYTH OF METAL

BASKING IN INDOOR SUNSHINE

As a storm rages outside, daylight shines in one tiny slice of north London. Despite the mid-winter gloom, the interior of Nat Martin’s home is cast in warm, diffused light—golden hour at 10am. Martin sits beneath the Sunday Light. Designed alongside fellow Royal College of Art graduate Sean Hammett, this chandelier for circadian rhythms casts 10,000 lux at eye level, equivalent to ambient daylight, and outstripping the measly 500 lux found in most well-lit offices. “When I switch it on at 6.30am every day, I feel euphoric,” says Martin, 29. “It’s the next best thing to a sunny day outside.” Sunday Light is powered by an LED 300 times brighter than a typical home light bulb, producing 30,000 lumens. However, this powerful glow is gently cast downwards via a diffuse reflective panel, coated…

BASKING IN INDOOR SUNSHINE

GEN-Z IS SPINNING ITS TECH LAYOFFS INTO LIKES

The tech layoffs keep coming—it’s thought 400,000 people lost jobs in the sector over the past two years—but workers are turning that P45 into content gold. Some document the moments after receiving the dreaded spontaneous calendar invite. A few share tears. Others circulate surreptitious clips of company-wide meetings or one-on-one termination calls. One woman who lost a job at TikTok last year made a TikTok about stealing “company assets” (aka snacks) on her last day. In January, Brittany Pietsch posted a Tik-Tok taken while she was being fired from a sales position with security firm Cloudflare. She told The Wall Street Journal that she didn’t regret her post and she’d already been contacted by other companies. The trend speaks to the ways younger workers have pushed back against corporate demands, but also…

GEN-Z IS SPINNING ITS TECH LAYOFFS INTO LIKES

THE EXTREME SPORT OF ICE CLIMBING IS AT RISK OF EXTINCTION

The valley is lit with dim winter light. In the distance, faint threads of smoke rise from a village toward the snowladen clouds. Beyond, there are whitewashed mountain peaks, snow-covered fir trees, and immense frozen waterfalls running down dark rock faces. It’s a typical winter scene in Switzerland’s Bernese Highlands—with one exception. Climbing one of those sheer walls of ice, solo, is Swiss mountain enthusiast and ice climber Dani Arnold. It is a skillful, tough, physical endeavor—a meticulous, cyclical dance of hacking axes and kicking crampons into the ice, finding stability, and then pushing and reaching for new fastenings higher up. Over and over, Arnold attaches and detaches his limbs from the ice. Foot by foot, he slowly ascends the icefall. Ice climbing is arguably the most treacherous mountain sport. It takes…

THE EXTREME SPORT OF ICE CLIMBING IS AT RISK OF EXTINCTION

SO YOU WANT TO REWIRE BRAINS

There’s a lot to like about brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), those sci-fisounding devices that jack into your skull and turn neural signals into software commands. Experimental BCIs help paralyzed people communicate, use the internet, and move prosthetic limbs. In recent years, the devices have even gone wireless. If mind-reading computers become part of everyday life, we’ll need doctors to install the tiny electrodes and transmitters that make them work. So if you have steady hands and don’t mind a little blood, being a BCI surgeon might be a job for you. Shahram Majidi, a neurosurgeon at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, began operating in clinical trials for a BCI called the Stentrode in 2022. (That’s “stent” as in a tube that often sits inside a vein or artery.) Here he…

SO YOU WANT TO REWIRE BRAINS

CREATING DRUGS FAR FROM THE PULL OF GRAVITY

Immunotherapy is one of the most promising new ways to fight cancer, but it takes forever. It works by mimicking or invoking the body’s own immune defenses to weed out and attack cancer cells. But the drugs that do this are typically administered intravenously—fed into the blood using needles, in a long and invasive process. Patients spend hours in hospital as the infusions are drip-fed into their veins. It would be much simpler and less painful if the drugs could be injected under the skin from the comfort of a patient’s own home. But that would need much higher concentrations of the drugs, resulting in a thick formula that’s too viscous to inject. There is an answer: If you crystallize the proteins in the drug instead, you can get a high concentration…

CREATING DRUGS FAR FROM THE PULL OF GRAVITY

FOR GIANT LIZARDS, PLEASE HOLD …

The first time someone invited me to a Slack Huddle—an audio call that happens inside the app—I didn’t know that I had to hang up at the end of it. I heard a series of descending bloops after my coworker signed off, so I assumed the huddle was over and moused away into the sad forest of a thousand open browser tabs on my computer. Then, after about 15 seconds, I started to hear something waft up from my Mac-Book speakers. A very gradual fade-in. Jazz guitar and a vibraphone—maybe a fake vibraphone?—with a saxophone improvising between phrases. Sampled drums, vaguely Latin. Synth strings. Such comically blatant muzak that I laughed out loud. The guffaw was followed by confusion. Where the heck was this music coming from, and why didn’t I hate…

FOR GIANT LIZARDS, PLEASE HOLD …

MEET THE DISNEY IMAGINEER BUILDING YOU A REAL-LIFE HOLODECK

Lanny Smoot builds lightsabers for a living. No, not like the ones kids used to create with flashlights and plastic tubes—realistic extendable ones, with penumbral edges and laser-blocking abilities. Like an actual Jedi. He’s whipped up giant electromagnetic eyes, too, as well as an omnidirectional HoloTile floor, which adapts to user movement and—like its spiritual parent, the Star Trek Holodeck—anticipates a world in which users can slap on an AR/VR headset and climb mountains or run marathons without leaving the room. Building gadgets normally cooked up by Star Wars directors or visual effects supervisors is Smoot’s whole deal. A research fellow at Disney, his job involves a lot of making the science and technology behind Imagineers’ ideas actually work. Smoot, who began his career at Bell Labs, holds more patents than…

MEET THE DISNEY IMAGINEER BUILDING YOU A REAL-LIFE HOLODECK

TALES FROM THE CRYPT(O)

A century ago, a commuter train carrying hundreds of passengers from Park Row to Brighton Beach, New York, took a perilous stretch of rail at seven times the appropriate speed. At the controls was Edward Luciano, a young and inexperienced driver with only two hours of training, brought in as a substitute to cover a strike. As chronicled in Uptown, Downtown, a 1976 book by Stan Fischler, Luciano was defeated by the confusing braking system, and the train derailed on a jinking set of curves, killing at least 93 people, and injuring hundreds more. The wreck led to a raft of safety improvements—among them, it is believed, the dead man’s switch, a failsafe now found in all kinds of modern machinery. A dead man’s switch can take the form of a handle…

TALES FROM THE CRYPT(O)

Smarter. Faster. Easier.

Wilson Airless Gen1 Basketball Wilson’s 3D-printed limited-edition basketball means more time playing, since you’ll never be scrambling to find the ball-pump needle, or obsessing over inflating it to the perfect pressure. Its polymer lattice structure precisely replicates a typical basketball’s bounce, flight, and feel, while the hexagonal holes allow air to pass through freely for crisp returns from the court. $2,500 wilson.com PERSONAL BESTS CRYONiC CRYO XC Cold-water therapy guru Wim Hof has nothing on CRYONiC. This 370 kg cryotherapy chamber will expose your body to all the much-lauded health benefits of extreme cold, no frozen lake required. It uses liquid nitrogen to create a frigid vortex down to a bone-chilling -150°C, colder than anywhere on Earth. Why? There’s evidence that cold therapy can reduce migraines, alleviate pain, have a positive effect on depression,…

Smarter. Faster. Easier.

Smoke and Mirrors

It’s a slate-gray Tuesday morning in January, and Sadiq Khan is marching through Camden Market trailed by a caravan of officials, press officers, and the hulking presence of his Metropolitan Police protection unit. The mayor of London bustles with a sleeves-rolled-up, CEOish energy. The 53-year-old is short—famously so—but bantamweight trim, sharpsuited but approachably tieless. When he pauses in front of a row of arcade claw machines to take questions from local media, he answers fast, in full sentences—lawyerly and reasonable—dropping his “t”s and “g”s in a way that was once a popular affectation of British politicians but which in Khan’s case is authentically south London. In contrast to the shambolic upper-classness of his predecessor in City Hall, Boris Johnson, Khan is something of a throwback: a politico of the Tony Blair era.…

Smoke and Mirrors

11,196 YEARS IN PRISON

Faruk Fatih Özer stood in front of a passport control officer at Istanbul Airport, A LINE OF impatient travelers queuing behind him. He pulled his face mask below his chin for the security camera. Surely he was nervous. The 27-year-old had unruly black hair, a boy-band face, and a patchy beard. Normally he overcompensated for his callow features by dressing in a pressed three-piece suit. But this spring day he wore black trainers and a navy-blue sweater hastily pulled over a white polo shirt, as if he had dressed in a dash. A small backpack was slung over his right shoulder. He looked like someone who could have been going on a last-minute day trip—or someone planning to never come back. At 5:57 pm on April 20, 2021, the guard stamped…

11,196 YEARS IN PRISON

WOMEN AT THE BOTTOM OF THE WORLD

THE TROUBLE IN ANTARCTICA Started in Boston. It was August 1999, and Stanford geologist Jane Willenbring was then a 22-year-old self-described “country bumpkin.” She had just arrived to start her master’s in Earth science at Boston University. As an undergrad with an oboe scholarship at North Dakota State University, she’d studied beetle fossils found in Antarctica and learned how, millions of years ago, the now frozen continent once pooled with freshwater lakes. “That’s not so different from the conditions we might expect in the future,” she says. She wanted to explore this critical science. “It seemed really important for future global climate change,” she says. Of all the geologists, few were more renowned than the one Willenbring had gone to Boston to study under: 37-year-old David Marchant. Marchant, a scruffy professor…

WOMEN AT THE BOTTOM OF THE WORLD

RUSSIAN, GO HOME

ONE My friend sets aside his cocktail, its foamy top sprinkled with cinnamon in the shape of a hammer and sickle, to process his disbelief at what I’ve just told him. “YOU WANT TO RETURN TO RUSSIA?” he asks. I met Enrico when I arrived in Stockholm eight months ago. He understands my situation as well as anyone. He knows that I fled Moscow three days after Russia invaded Ukraine; that my name, along with the names of other journalists who left, has fallen into the hands of pro-Kremlin activists who have compiled a public list of “traitors to the motherland”; that some of the publications where I’ve worked have been labeled “undesirable organizations”; that a summons from the military enlistment office is waiting for me at home; that since Vladimir Putin…

RUSSIAN, GO HOME

THE NERD-KING VIBES OF JENSEN HUANG

TALKING TO JENSEN HUANG should come with a warning label. The Nvidia CEO is so invested in where AI is headed that, after nearly 90 minutes of spirited conversation, I came away convinced the future will be a neural net nirvana. I could see it all: A robot renaissance, medical godsends, self-driving cars, chatbots that remember. The buildings on the company’s Santa Clara campus weren’t helping. Wherever my eyes landed I saw triangles within triangles, the shape that helped make Nvidia its first fortunes. No wonder I got sucked into a fractal vortex. I had been Jensen-pilled. Huang is the man of the hour. The year. Maybe even the decade. Tech companies literally can’t get enough of Nvidia’s supercomputing GPUs. This is not the Nvidia of old, the supplier of Gen…

THE NERD-KING VIBES OF JENSEN HUANG

The Fateful Eight

Eight names are listed as authors on “Attention Is All You Need,” a scientific paper written in the spring of 2017. They were all Google researchers, though by then one had left the company. When the most tenured contributor, Noam Shazeer, saw an early draft, he was surprised that his name appeared first, suggesting his contribution was paramount. “I wasn’t thinking about it,” he says. It’s always a delicate balancing act to figure out how to list names—who gets the coveted lead position, who’s shunted to the rear. Especially in a case like this one, where each participant left a distinct mark in a true group effort. As the researchers hurried to finish their paper, they ultimately decided to “sabotage” the convention of ranking contributors. They added an asterisk to each…

The Fateful Eight

HOLOGRAM FLICKERS. HE WAS NEVER ABOARD.

—@AAnderson_3, via X Honorable Mentions Robot bartender whispered, “Don’t drink this.” —@ikermondragon, via Instagram Biometric lock says I’m already inside. —@esudiro, via Instagram Leopold vaporized the concierge’s bloodied holokey. —@J_Lasky_writer, via X Broken LED flickers Morse code: RUN. —@damianfitz, via Instagram Zero gravity reveals hidden extraterrestrial homeland. —@01_PcP_01, via X Alien hotel from distant past decloaks. —@j.w.orlando, via Instagram Room service: Denied. Unknown life-form detected. —@erinsolari, via Instagram At Earthrise, guests saw only blackness. —Clara Hong, via email Want to submit a six-word story for us to consider? Look for the latest story prompt on Facebook, X, Instagram, and wired.com/six-word, where you can also see how we have illustrated past favorites.…

HOLOGRAM FLICKERS. HE WAS NEVER ABOARD.

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