Sommaire pour December 2017 de WIRED

IN OUR OCTOBER ISSUE, Brian Raftery wrote about the making of Blade Runner 2049’s gritty, rain-soaked dystopia. Fans responded with adoration and a surprising (OK, not so surprising) depth of knowledge about the props we featured. Jessica Bruder’s dispatch about the CamperForce, nomadic retirees who flock to Amazon warehouses each fall, drew readers who hailed it as a tale of resilience and others who were horrified by the retirees’ working conditions. Michelle Dean dissected the complex backstory of the fact-checking site Snopes—stoking an ongoing conversation about truth and its gatekeepers in America today. @WIRED / MAIL@WIRED.COM Re: “Meet the CamperForce: Inside the grueling, nomadic lives of Amazon’s RV-dwelling retiree army” “THIS IS THE MODERN VERSION OF THE GRAPES OF WRATH.” maltboy1 on WIRED.com “This is all of our futures, I…

ATTENTION, KONDO WANNABES WITH KARDASHIAN HABITS: A new crop of startups is peddling concierge services for your junk. In June, VC firms including GV and Sequoia Capital invested $64 million in Clutter, an on-demand storage service that comes to your home to photograph, barcode, and catalog your stuff, then hauls it to remote storage facilities. (Closet plans start at $59 per month; any item can be returned to your doorstep within 48 hours.) Comparable stuff-wrangling startups are also drawing VC interest: This spring, MakeSpace closed a $30 million Series C round by 8VC, and Trove, cofounded by former Uber exec Michael Pao, secured $8 million from Greylock Partners. As the number of renters rises— Freddie Mac estimates millions of homeowning baby boomers will downsize to become renters by 2020—and cities…

ON MAY 21, 2015, armed FBI agents stormed Xiaoxing Xi’s house. The Temple University physics professor was handcuffed, stripsearched, and interrogated. He was suspended from his job and denied access to his lab. The FBI believed Xi was a spy. He was told he could face 80 years in prison. But Xi had done nothing wrong. Four months later, prosecutors dropped the charges against him. Now Xi is fighting back with a lawsuit, claiming he was wrongfully prosecuted, based on some innocent work-related emails collected under a US surveillance law known as FISA Section 702. You might not recognize the bureaucratic name, but you know its effects. Born of the Bush-era wiretaps and made infamous by Edward Snowden, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is the tool that…

BALL FUMBLERS rejoice: You’ve got a pro athlete option. This year 13,000 esports players armed with keyboards and joysticks participated in thousands of videogame tournaments, earning close to $100 million in prize money. The industry will more than double by 2020, and different games will be dominated by different countries. For now, South Korea has the winningest StarCraft players, while the US takes the gold for wave dashing in Super Smash Bros. Melee. So keep jungling and ganking in Dota 2. It’s not slacking, future e-athletes— it’s training.…

DANGLING LIKE A piñata from a polyester rope, I’m inching up a 1,000-year-old tree named Grandfather. This forest in Northern California’s Santa Cruz Mountains is said to be the only place where one can legally climb a redwood. I’ve covered about 100 feet in 30 minutes, halfway to the top. Suspended in my saddle—a sort of swingmeets- diaper— I try to maneuver around a thick branch and accidentally send myself careening away from the craggy trunk. I panic and make the mistake of looking down at the tiny people below. But it’s too late to turn back. Tree Climbing Planet founder Tim Kovar, who organized the excursion, glides over. Though the master climber has scaled more than 5,000 trees, this undertaking is exceedingly rare, he says. “More people have been…

THE FIRST TIME THE POLICE ARRIVED ON HER DOORSTEP, IN MARCH OF 2015, COURTNEY ALLEN WAS ELATED. She rushed to the door alongside her dogs, a pair of eager Norwegian elkhounds, to greet them. “Is this about our case?” she asked. The police looked at her in confusion. They didn’t know what case she was talking about. Courtney felt her hope give way to a familiar dread. Three days earlier, Courtney and her husband, Steven, had gone to the police headquarters in Kent, Washington, a suburb of Seattle, and reported that, for the past few months, they had been the victims of a campaign of online harassment. They had found a fake Facebook page under Steven’s name with a profile picture of Courtney, naked. Emails rained down in their inboxes;…

IN AN ORDINARY HOSPITAL ROOM IN LOS ANGELES, A YOUNG WOMAN NAMED LAUREN DICKERSON WAITS FOR HER CHANCE TO MAKE HISTORY. She’s 25 years old, a teacher’s assistant in a middle school, with warm eyes and computer cables emerging like futuristic dreadlocks from the bandages wrapped around her head. Three days earlier, a neurosurgeon drilled 11 holes through her skull, slid 11 wires the size of spaghetti into her brain, and connected the wires to a bank of computers. Now she’s caged in by bed rails, with plastic tubes snaking up her arm and medical monitors tracking her vital signs. She tries not to move. The room is packed. As a film crew prepares The room is packed. As a film crew prepares to document the day’s events, two separate…

1) Broca’s area This “speech center,” located in the frontal lobe, is one part of a complex network that is thought to play an important role in forming words and sentences. It turns transitory thoughts into intentional utterances, making it a focus of the research to let you text and type from your brain. 2) Sensory cortex Scientists have helped the paralyzed feel again by connecting artificial touch sensors on a robotic arm to the sensory cortex. Right now, sensations are mostly limited to pressure of varying intensity, but more advanced systems could deliver a bevy of artificial sensory delights to virtual reality users. 3,4) Auditory and visual cortices Cochlear implants were an early success story in brain-computer interfaces, transmitting small electrical pulses to nerves deep within the ear and,…

DOING THE KESSEL RUN in less than 12 parsecs is an amazing feat. So is assembling a 7,500-piece Lego version of the starship that did it. To build the model for our annual gift guide (Wish List, page 51), we enlisted about 20 staff volunteers (and a few kids) to build the Danish toy giant’s new plastic-brick Millennium Falcon. Four days, 400 pages of instructions, and a Death Star’s worth of candy later, construction of the legendary fighter was complete. “When the last piece was locked into place, we played the Star Wars theme,” says WIRED gear fellow Jordan McMahon. “It felt like we were part of something I’ve loved since I was a kid.” Watch a time-lapse video of the process at tinyurl.com/wired-millenniumfalcon. THE MOST COMMON PIECE IN THE…

Dwayne Johnson belongs to the world, the whole of it. His bald pate reflects goodness, goodwill, and the sun. His biceps, big as puppy heads, are better at cradling than at smashing. One arch of that People’s Eyebrow could reroute a North Korean nuke. And now he’s starring in December’s Jumanji reboot. Sorry, WHAAAT?! My childhood was—like yours— laced with fear, wanting, and a growing sense of magic lost. I read and reread Chris Van Allsburg’s Jumanji, about a brother and sister who play a board game that brings their moves (and some jungle animals) to life, and in it I glimpsed the whimsy-killing nature of the adult world. Even the overproduced 1995 film was tinged with an Allsburgian regret, which Robin Williams, as a boy sucked into the game…

twistron n. / 'twis-'trän / A new yarn, made of carbon nanotubes, that generates electricity when stretched. It could be used to harvest energy from ocean waves or be woven into pants for some real power walking. brane craft n. / 'brān 'kraft / A spacecraft that’s a flying membrane—picture an oversize napkin studded with thrusters —designed to trap bits of orbiting space junk. EroS n. / 'er-'?s / A love potion for single-celled organisms much like our own wee ancestors. Short for extracellular regulator of sex, the EroS protein, spit out by a bacterium, causes the normally asexual blobs to engage in DNA-swapping orgies. Hence … us?…

A:Imagine being eaten by a cave bear. Or a saber-toothed cat. Imagine, with that first gash of claw or incisor, instantaneously transitioning from being a person to being food. Imagine what it feels like, the first, dangling bits of you being rent apart, ground up and ingested, while the rest of you watches. ¶ Very unpleasant stuff. And yet for much of human history we lived acutely under such a threat. Just think how hard it must have been to relax! If prehistoric humans were anything like modern animals, one way they fended off predators was by vigilantly monitoring the creatures around them for signs of danger, in case they saw the terror coming a split-second sooner. ¶ There were subtler benefits to watching other people too—particularly when they didn’t…

That the 404 should have crossover appeal seems fitting. It is near-universal and inherently emotional: pure disappointment, the announcement of an unanticipated problem. It’s also a reminder that technology, and the web in particular, is made by humans, and therefore fallible. The internet, after all, is hardly a well-oiled machine; it’s more like a version of The Garden of Earthly Delights built by unidirectional hypertext and populated by broken links, corrupted image files, and incomplete information. Not long after it appeared, the error code began to enjoy, or endure, its share of lore. In the early 2000s, the idea bubbled up that the 404 came from, well, room 404; that this room housed the web’s first servers, at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research, in Switzerland); that World Wide…

BRAINGATE This consortium of universities and hospitals has developed an interface composed of tiny electrodes implanted in the motor cortex that decode neural activity. It can record brain signals and translate them into actions— restoring movement to limbs, “typing” words on a computer. The record for brain-controlled typing is about eight words a minute, but expect that number to improve as neural decoding strategies advance and human trial subjects spend more time with more sophisticated interfaces. DARPA The Defense Department’s secretive research arm is funding the development of systems that can engage in “two-way” communication with the brain by recording electrical output from up to a million neurons at a time. This could lay the groundwork for better brain-controlled prosthetics, as well as sensory restoration, but it requires a huge…

FILMMAKER GUILLERMO DEL TORO is a virtuoso maker of monsters—from the Pale Man of Pan’s Labyrinth to Pacific Rim’s Kaiju, they’re wondrous yet terrifying. But the star of his new film, The Shape of Water, is no mere beast, del Toro says: “He’s a leading man.” The Cold War fairy tale depicts a doomed romance between a captive fish-man and a mute janitor (Sally Hawkins). Del Toro collaborated with sculptors for three years to perfect his amphibian, from the creature’s Renaissance nose to his statuesque derriere. (It’s carefully shaped from foam latex.) We asked the beastmaster to dissect his work. Gleaming Eyes “In sculpting the white of the eye, the imperfections are important. His acrylic eyes are backed by a reflective material so they catch the light, like a coyote’s…

OUTFITTED WITH A 3-D tracker and motorized capsules, the CyberTouch Glove was a $15,000 mitt that vibrated as you handled virtual objects onscreen. That was way back in 2000. Today such haptic technology—vibrating actuators and electrical impulses that stimulate your skin receptors and nerve endings— has become both cheaper and increasingly advanced, allowing VR gamers to feel real-world discomfort. “Any VR engineer aims to make the game indistinguishable from reality,” says Greg Burdea, a haptics researcher at Rutgers University. “By introducing sensorial overload— sound, sight, touch, even pain—you addict the user.” For these players, the more immersive the experience, the greater the thrill. Eventually such technology will evolve beyond your living room to aid in tasks like simulating surgical procedures or training soldiers. • HaptX Glove Pain level: Gloveless snowball…

LAST WINTER, the sportswear giant Adidas opened a pop-up store inside a Berlin shopping mall. The boutique was part of a corporate experiment called Storefactory—a name as flatly self-explanatory as it is consistent with the convention of German compound nouns. It offered a single product: machine-knit merino wool sweaters, made to order on the spot. Customers stepped up for body scans inside the showroom and then worked with an employee to design their own bespoke pullovers. The sweaters, which cost the equivalent of about $250 apiece, then materialized behind a glass wall in a matter of hours. The miniature factory behind the glass, which consisted mainly of three industrial knitting machines spitting forth sweaters like dot-matrix printouts, could reportedly produce only 10 garments a day. But the point of the…