One 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 […]
Read MoreIt may be known as the “everything store,” but there are some things, in fact, that Amazon does not sell. The ecommerce giant maintains a list of restricted product categories that ranges from weapons such as firearms, to booze and tobacco products, to pets, to kite strings for the niche sport of kite fighting. And […]
Read MoreLast week, Reddit quarantined "r/The_Donald," a pro-Trump message board, after the company determined that the subgroup had encouraged and threatened violence. Likewise, Twitter is signaling that it will flag—but not remove—posts by government officials who violate its rules. As with YouTube’s demonetization (rather than deletion) of anti-gay videos, these are welcome, but insufficient measures. WIRED […]
Read MoreThe more than 2 billion iPhones sold since Apple first launched it exactly 12 years ago have done a lot of good for their owners, but it seems like they’ve been bad news for the planet. Building that many devices requires a lot of metal, plastic, glass, and other natural resources. Some of them, including […]
Read MoreAxon, creator of the Taser, did something unusual for a technology company last year. The Arizona corporation convened an ethics board of external experts to offer guidance on potential downsides of its technology. Tom Simonite covers artificial intelligence for WIRED. Thursday, that group published a report recommending that the company not deploy facial recognition technology […]
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