Science, Spoken
WIRED
Get in-depth coverage of current and future trends in technology, and how they are shaping business, entertainment, communications, science, politics, and society.
Episodes
Mentioned books
Apr 29, 2019 • 9min
The Plan to Grab the World's Carbon With Supercharged Plants
In humanity’s battle against man-made climate change, the earth itself provides one of the most important weapons, a natural system that breathes in earth-warming CO2 and exhales oxygen. Yes, I’m talking about plants, engineered by nature itself over the course of millennia to harness the Earth’s natural conditions to turn sunlight and CO2 into oxygen and organic matter. Plants are the key to many climate change-fighting tactics.
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Apr 26, 2019 • 14min
The Meteoric Rise of Family Tree Forensics to Fight Crimes
Three hundred and sixty six days ago, CeCe Moore woke up to the headline that would change her world: “Suspected Golden State Killer, East Area Rapist arrested after eluding authorities for decades.
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Apr 25, 2019 • 8min
The Machine That Reads Your Mind (Kinda) and Talks (Sorta)
Edward Chang keeps a cybernetic implant at his desk, which seems almost calculatedly cool. Chang is a lean, low-voiced neurosurgeon at UC San Francisco. The cybernetic implant—more properly a Brain-Computer Interface—is a floppy, translucent plastic square about the size of my hand, embedded with a 16-by-16 array of titanium dots, each about the size of a cupcake sprinkle. This part sits on top of a brain.
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Apr 25, 2019 • 8min
What’s Known About the SpaceX Crew Dragon Accident
During a series of engine tests of SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft this past Saturday, the vehicle experienced what the company has characterized as an "anomaly." Based upon an unauthorized leaked video of the accident, the company was counting down toward a firing of the Dragon's SuperDraco thrusters when the vehicle exploded. SpaceX has not validated the video, but it is consistent with verbal accounts of the failure that have been shared with Ars.
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Apr 24, 2019 • 7min
In Automation, the Last Motion Will Come Before the Last Mile
We talk a lot these days about using robots to manage the problem of the "last mile." Say, getting a package to a doorstep from a local delivery center.Or picking up garbage from a backyard.Or delivering pizza. WIRED OPINION ABOUT Matt Beane is an Assistant Professor of Technology Management at UC Santa Barbara and a Research Affiliate at MIT's Institute for the Digital Economy.
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Apr 24, 2019 • 8min
Offshore Wind Farms Are Spinning Up in the US—At Last
On June 1, the Pilgrim nuclear plant in Massachusetts will shut down, a victim of rising costs and a technology that is struggling to remain economically viable in the United States. But the electricity generated by the aging nuclear station soon will be replaced by another carbon-free source: a fleet of 84 offshore wind turbines rising nearly 650 feet above the ocean's surface.
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Apr 23, 2019 • 7min
Ancestry.com’s Racist Ad Tumbles Into a Cultural Minefield
On Thursday, the world’s largest DNA testing company, Ancestry.com, pulled a video advertisement amid a cascade of criticism on social media. The ad, titled, “Inseparable” and cinematically shot to portray a gauzy, gothic moment on the streets of the Antebellum South, depicted a white man offering a black woman a ring and imploring her to “escape to the north” with him. In the captions, they are referred to as “lovers.
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Apr 23, 2019 • 7min
AI Could Predict Death. But What If the Algorithm Is Biased?
Earlier this month the University of Nottingham published a study in PloSOne about a new artificial intelligence model that uses machine learning to predict the risk of premature death, using banked health data (on age and lifestyle factors) from Brits aged 40 to 69.
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Apr 22, 2019 • 7min
You’re Not Getting Enough Sleep—and It’s Killing You
The whole world is exhausted. And it’s killing us. But particularly me. As I write this, I’m at TED 2019 in Vancouver, which is a weeklong marathon of talks and workshops and coffee meetings and experiences and demos and late-night trivia contests and networking, networking, networking.
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Apr 22, 2019 • 7min
New York’s Aggressive Climate Law Takes Aim at Skyscrapers
On Thursday, the New York City Council voted into law a sweeping set of rules to fight climate change, a metropolis-scaled version of a Green New Deal. And if the lawmakers and policy wonks who built the bills have their way, they’ll be a model for cities everywhere to cut carbon emissions and save the planet. The Climate Mobilization Act, an omnibus of a half-dozen bills, takes an aggressive posture to reducing carbon emissions from America’s most populous city. Those 8.
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