On 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 […]
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 […]
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