Happy Fourth of July, and welcome to another edition of The Monitor, WIRED's pop culture news roundup. This time around we have big news about The Walking Dead comics and a lot of updates on the lives of directors, from long-timers like Quentin Tarantino to newcomers like Andy Muschietti. Lights, camera, action. The Walking Dead […]
Read MoreAh, the great outdoors. The flora, the fauna, the welcome mystery of the open trail stretched before you. You’ve left it all behind (no cell service, no problems!) until … Wait. Where’s the map? Did you mean to turn left back there? What direction is the campsite anyway? Is it starting to get dark? Don't […]
Read MoreOn Sunday, Pride celebrations shut down a rainbow swath of San Francisco. In the shadow of the city’s iconic Coit Tower, chipmaker Intel held a nerdier and more select party. Tom Simonite covers artificial intelligence for WIRED. At the five-hour event, 100 attendees from startups, venture capital, and tech giants drank in semiconductor-themed cocktails and […]
Read MoreOur in-house Know-It-Alls answer questions about your interactions with technology. Q: What is the best cooler, from a physics perspective? A: First, a reminder from high school physics: Heat, on an atomic level, is the motion of molecules. The quicker they move, the hotter the solid/liquid/gas is. In a hot gas, this means molecules whizzing […]
Read MoreOne morning a couple of weeks ago, I handed my iPhone to my wife and asked her to help with a privacy experiment. She would use my handset to track my location for the next few days, and with only the software I already had installed. Like a lot of couples, my wife and I […]
Read MoreTomorrow afternoon at 12:55 pm ET, a total solar eclipse will streak across lower South America, giving thousands of eclipse enthusiasts—and millions of first-timers—gathered in Chile and Argentina an otherworldly thrill. And it will give scientists the opportunity to study the solar corona in a way only possible when an object the size of the […]
Read MoreWhen a rocket launches with some payload (like a satellite), it needs a fairing. The fairing, essentially the rocket's nose cone, is the covering on top of the payload that makes the spacecraft aerodynamic as it speeds through the Earth's atmosphere. But once the rocket gets past most of this air, it doesn't need the […]
Read MoreIn 1724, John Perceval, the first Earl of Egmont, wrote his cousin a letter admiring the gardens at Stowe House in Buckinghamshire. “What adds to the beauty of this garden is, that it is not bounded by walls, but by a ha-hah, which leaves you the sight of the beautiful woody country, and makes you […]
Read MoreMita Yun didn’t get into robotics to save the world. The lunar rovers she built as a student at Carnegie Mellon, and the software she developed as an engineer for Google—that stuff was just practice. The things Yun really wanted to make were friends. Yun had hungered for companionship since she was a little girl […]
Read MoreIf you're already at the stage where you can't help but wonder how you're going to spend the next few months until the release of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, here's some good news: At least you can wait impatiently on some high-end Star Wars-inspired furniture. Yes, high-end Star Wars furniture. The best item […]
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