News

While You Were Offline: Trump and Pelosi's War of Words Continues

Man, it's been a long week. Does anyone even remember it started with former White House counsel Don McGahn defying a Congressional subpoena at this point? Or that New York State had effectively closed a legal loophole that would allow them to charge people President Trump pardoned on a federal level? Does anyone recall the […]

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Elon Musk Gets a Boring Customer and More This Week in Car News

This week, WIRED Transpo checked out a few bits of tech that might not sound alluring—but oh, magic lives in the details. General Motors’ new electronic platform should unlock a whole new world of in-car software, at exactly the moment when customers begin to expect their vehicles’ gizmos run even more smoothly than their phones. […]

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The Quest to Make a Bot That Can Smell as Well as a Dog

The dogs still make Andreas Mershin angry. “I mean, I love dogs,” says the Greek-Russian scientist, in his office at MIT. “But the dogs are slapping me in the face.” He pulls up a video to show me what he means. In it, a black dog named Lucy approaches a series of six stations, each […]

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Inside the Hybrid Digital-Analog Lives of Children

Kids today are voracious technology consumers for sure, but they are also active participants—creators, collaborators, and even influencers. So parents have much more to wrestle with than some broad-brush notion of “screen time.” Whatever you think of Fortnite, when children play it they are working together as a team (that’s good!), in a tech-mediated environment […]

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Facial Recognition Has Already Reached Its Breaking Point

As facial recognition technologies have evolved from fledgling projects into powerful software platforms, researchers and civil liberties advocates have been issuing warnings about the potential for privacy erosions. Those mounting fears came to a head Wednesday in Congress. Alarms over facial recognition had already gained urgency in recent years, as studies have shown that the […]

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Chris Hughes Is Right: We Should Dismantle Facebook

The opening to Chris Hughes’ much-publicized New York Times essay yesterday—attacking the company that made him vastly wealthy—was almost Shakespearean in its drama. After describing his last personal meeting with the Zuckerbergs—in their house, sharing a hug in parting with Mark’s wife, Priscilla—he lays out in 6,000-word detail how the empire Mark Zuckerberg built should […]

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Climate Adaptation Isn’t Surrender. It’s Survival

Author’s note: On my show, Marketplace Tech, we’ve launched a series on the technology behind climate change adaptation. It’s called How We Survive. You can find the first week’s worth of special coverage here, and stories will be ongoing as this conversation and technology evolve. Here’s an unpopular opinion in some circles: We are going […]

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What the College Scandal Shallowfakes Reveal About the Rich

Photoshop played an outsize role in the odious college admissions scandal that broke earlier this year. Rick Singer, the concierge to the stars who pleaded guilty in March to money laundering and racketeering in a scheme to get rich children into luxury-brand colleges, used the software to graft the heads of teens onto the muscled […]

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Space Photos of the Week: The Shrinky, Wrinkly, Seismic Moon

To keep our personal and mortal concerns about aging in perspective, it helps to know we’re not alone. Turns out that the moon also shrinks and wrinkles as it gets older, just like the rest of us. A new paper published this week reveals that there’s more going on with the moon, seismically speaking, than […]

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A Stunning Quest to Photograph Australia's 10 Deserts

The Simpson Desert stretches 68,000 miles across central Australia, but it looks as surreal as anything on Mars. There are more than 1,100 parallel sand dunes, each a wind-sculpted ridge of quartz grains coated in iron oxide, which rusts over time, producing awesome red vistas that aerial surveyor Cecil Thomas Madigan noted, in 1946, "responded […]

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