Inhaltsverzeichnis für March 2019 in WIRED

“The beauty of working for WIRED is that you get to do something you’ve probably never done before, and you get to take some risks,” says Carl De Torres, the designer behind this issue’s cover and the illustrations for the cover story. We asked De Torres, who co-owns the studio StoryTK, to create imagery that would reflect Kevin Kelly’s story about the emerging “mirrorworld”—the convergence of the virtual and the physical. The results were … complex. “I know I’m onto something good when my graphics program is crashing and can’t understand what I’m trying to do,” De Torres says. “To me, that means you’re creating something new.” Will we ever find aliens? “The scientific community seems more hopeful than ever,” says Sarah Scoles, a frequent contributor to WIRED’S Science channel…

AFTER RAISING $200 MILLION in a Series H funding round last November, the culty salad chain Sweetgreen became the first-ever restaurant unicorn. Cold-pressed upstart Joe & the Juice is reportedly plotting a $1.5 billion IPO later this year. Now kale-scarfing, ginger-quaffing consumers have VCs salivating over salad. ¶ A new batch of food focused investment firms like the Kitchen Fund and Enlightened Hospitality Investments (run by Shake Shack titan Danny Meyer) are pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into fast-casual startups—or, as they say, “early-stage scalable restaurant concepts”—powered by AI and data-mining apps. ¶ Why all the fuss over lunch? These food platforms incorporate technology as a base ingredient. Nearly half of Sweetgreen’s customer orders are placed through its app; that data is used to tweak menu offerings and make…

IN THE SUMMER of 2006, Fidel Castro unexpectedly announced that he was temporarily handing over power to his brother. Turns out he needed to undergo intestinal surgery. Afterward, an anchor on state-run television read a statement, said to have been written by Castro, attesting that all was well. But there were no photographs of Fidel in recovery, no nine-hour radio address from his hospital bed. Rumors flew that the longtime Cuban leader had died. Then, about two weeks after the operation, the Cuban regime released a picture of the bearded leader wearing an Adidas jacket and holding the August 12, 2006, edition of the Cuban Communist Party newspaper, Granma. He was alive, at least as of that date. Fidel Castro had been verified. The Cuban regime was onto something. The…

1. We gradually become less attentive as we age—and not just because we stop giving a damn. The phenomenon is due to a shrinking “useful field of view,” the feature of visual attention that helps us recognize at a glance what’s important to focus on. Studies show that kids have a similarly limited field of view, hindering their ability to register the complete visual world around them. 2. TSA officials aren’t particularly attentive searchers. One experiment found that airport scanner operators were just 6 percent better than untrained test subjects at spotting hidden objects. Another study found that the fewer contraband items that had been discovered in a given time period, the more likely operators were to miss hidden objects. As a result, some airports have started regularly inserting images…

Actions From the people who brought you the iconic Moleskine notebooks, this new app keeps track of tasks, appointments, and reminders. Organize lists as obsessively as you want with custom color coding, and set reminders liberally if you need nudging. $12 per year Airmail This app for iOS devices streamlines your cluttered inbox with a hyper-personalized approach. You can tag messages with labels and colors of your choosing and customize swipe gestures to trigger specific actions. And yes, it has Undo Send too. $5 Pocket Pocket archives web articles, news stories, and online documents into a personal library so you can read them later in the app’s distraction-free interface. Use it to collect industry headlines, then sync them to your phone for offline reading on the train or the bus.…

1 Mavogel Cotton Sleep Eye Mask Need a nap? Block out the midday sun or harsh fluorescents with a sleep mask. This one uses stiffer material between the eyes that forms to the shape of your nose for maximum light-stifling, and the breathable cotton gives you sweat-free shut-eye. $14 2 Gaiam Performance Power Grip Yoga Mat Unfurl this mat for a quick Savasana or meditation. It’s got plenty of grip to hold your pose and enough cushion to make that concrete floor bearable. The natural rubber is only 4 mm thick; easily roll up the mat and stash it under your desk. $60 3 LuxFit Foam Roller When you can’t spare an hour for a midday massage, roll out your sore muscles on one of these. The extra-firm, high-density polypropylene…

SHEILA ADVENTO was not feeling well. It was July 6, 2003, and her mother’s house in northern New Jersey was filled with people. Sheila and her mom were there, along with Sheila’s boyfriend, sister, and brother-in-law—a slice of a huge extended family, many of whom, like Sheila and her parents, had immigrated to the US from the Philippines. They ate cheeseburgers and adobo and raised Pabst Blue Ribbon and San Miguel to toast one another, independence, good health, and freedom—almost all of which Sheila, who was 26, was about to lose. For days she’d been having headaches. Her stomach wasn’t right. She was starting to think she had the flu. She trudged to a basement bedroom to lie down. Family members took turns checking on her. When her mother, Peachie,…

DIRECT DEMOCRACY! UNIVERSAL BASIC INCOME! THE END OF LEFT AND RIGHT! ON THE NIGHT OF ITALY’S 2013 parliamentary elections, Paola Nugnes decided to stay late at her office and catch up on work. She skipped the rolling election coverage on TV. And by the time she finally left her architecture studio to go out, it was well past dark. When she arrived at Mumble Rumble, a nightclub in western Naples, at around 9 pm, Nugnes still hadn’t checked the news. The club was hosting a party for activists in a political movement Nugnes had been part of for the past six years. And as she walked in, the crowd erupted. Nugnes asked if her friend Roberto Fico, the most famous local figure in the group, had won his race for…

ON THE BRINK IN OUR JANUARY issue, Jon Gertner profiled a crumbling glacier whose demise could reshape the world’s coastlines, and Joshuah Bearman and Allison Keeley took us to the remote site of a meteorite impact. Then, in February, Charles Duhigg reported on the anguish and euphoria of working for Elon Musk at Tesla. Readers emoted with similarly impressive range. Re: “The Breaking Point”: Antarctica’s Thwaites Glacier is collapsing into the sea. When will it take the plunge? And what will it take to save our coastal cities? “I DON’T WANT TO RUIN CHRISTMAS OR ANYTHING BUT JESUS WEPT THIS IS SCARY.” Jon Birchall (@jonbir90) via Twitter Re: “Space Invaders”: After a chunk of rock plummeted from the heavens in remote Peru, meteorite hunters rushed to get a piece of…

TO RESUSCITATE A flooded Tesla, first extract any dead fish. Then strip out the leather—it may be infected with mold spores. And scrape salt from the car’s corroded high-voltage batteries. Finally, Rich Benoit explains, harvest parts from other damaged Teslas. (Don’t expect much support from the manufacturer, who’d likely prefer you just buy a new vehicle.) Benoit, a Boston-based IT manager, has been stripping apart e-cars for the past three years and chronicling the endeavors for more than 400,000 YouTube subscribers. Now he’s crowdfunding to open his own shop for totaled Teslas. In 2016, Benoit purchased his first fixer-upper, a waterlogged Model S rotting in a New Jersey auction yard, for just $14,000. “It was essentially a science experiment,” he explains over his day job’s lunch break. Tesla wouldn’t sell…

In 1909, when horseless carriages were all the rage, a magazine called Country Life in America advised new drivers on “the ethics of good roadmanship.” Motorists, it urged, should go slow to avoid spooking the animals pulling other vehicles. ¶ Today we face a similar anxious transition with the advent of driverless carriages, and that quaint term, roadmanship, is back in circulation. A new Rand Corporation report, commissioned by Uber, revives the notion as a basis for long-overdue safety standards in autonomous vehicles. ¶ Humans have to pass tests before they’re allowed behind the wheel, but there are still no comparable evaluations for computers. As a result, the report says, public streets have become a “living laboratory,” a dangerous experiment we didn’t consent to and can’t opt out of. ¶…

HUMANS PRICKED BY info-hunger pangs used to hunt and peck for scraps of trivia on the savanna of the internet. Now we sit in screen-glow-flooded caves and grunt, “Alexa!” Virtual assistants do the dirty work for us. Problem is, computers can’t really speak the language. Many of our densest, most reliable troves of knowledge, from Wikipedia to (ahem) the pages of WIRED, are encoded in an ancient technology largely opaque to machines—prose. That’s not a problem when you Google a question. Search engines don’t need to read; they find the most relevant web pages using patterns of links. But when you ask Google Assistant or one of its sistren for a celebrity’s date of birth or the location of a famous battle, it has to go find the answer. Yet…

WHEN PRODUCT DESIGNER Bill Stumpf was asked by Herman Miller to develop ergonomic seating for the 1990s workplace, he began by watching people at work. What he saw was pandemonium. Personal computers had freed employees to assume any position. They’d lean forward, squinting at the screen, or kick back, keyboards in their laps. With materials expert Don Chadwick, Stumpf built a chair as flexible as the restless startup worker. Introduced in 1994, the Aeron was designed to cradle a person in any posture. They engineered the tilt mechanism so the seat and backrest moved together in one motion for more supportive reclining. They also switched out leather upholstery for an elastic polymer mesh. The stretchy webbing—originally created to protect the elderly from getting bed sores—was added to let the body…

NO WORRIES! That’s the bot talking, offering a breezy response to a mildly apologetic email. Your coworker wants to reschedule a meeting? Sure thing! At a new time? That works! If you’ve opted in to Gmail’s Smart Replies, these exchanges should look familiar. The AI-generated shortcuts at the bottom of an email promise effortless effciency in exchange for a tiny piece of your digital humanity. But humans are proving eager to make the trade: More than 10 percent of all replies people send with Gmail now start with a suggested Smart Reply. Cool, thanks! ¶ The apps we rely on to stay productive at the office are being infused with ever larger helpings of artificial intelligence. They’ve been getting brainier for a while, but recent advances in cloud computing, neural networks,…

For the past couple of years, Steve Bannon—the former White House chief strategist and far-right impresario—has been trying to knit together Europe’s most strident populists into a supergroup called the Movement. He’s met with a host of nationalist leaders: Some have taken him up on the invitation; others see him as an unwelcome foreign influence. (Go figure.) Bannon has singled out Italy as “the center of the political universe” for its populist governing coalition between the left-leaning Five Star Movement and the anti-immigrant party Lega. But Five Star has held off on joining the Movement. Here’s how Bannon has fared with other leaders. BELGIUM Mischaël Modrikamen Cofounder of the Belgian People’s Party. Helped establish the Movement. FRANCE Marine Le Pen Leader of France’s far-right National Rally. Met with Bannon but…

Hello, Hollywood? I know I said I wouldn’t call again, but I can’t sleep, and it’s all your fault. For ages, summer—the season during which I flee the heat by watching superheroes punch super-baddies in AC-blessed theaters—has marked a very specific period in my equinoctial year. You began unraveling the cycle back in 2008, when Iron Man decided he owned the first weekend of May. The fifth month of the year is never summer. Period. Neither is the fourth month, but that didn’t stop you—greedy corporate time bandits!—from releasing Infinity War in April. Now, in a perversion of the Time Stone worthy of Thanos, Captain Marvel is coming out the first week of March. March! Great Gregorian gods, why? You’re messing with ancient circadian oscillations here. I’m so used to…

IN THE PAST two decades, astronomers have confirmed the existence of about 4,000 planets—out of an estimated 100-plus billion—in our galaxy. That’s way more than anyone knew about before the Kepler Space Telescope launched. All this is good news for alien hunters, whose work has always been on the fringe of scientific pursuits. After decades of ignoring and underfunding the search for extraterrestrial life, NASA is finally taking the idea seriously. The agency recently convened a gathering of scientists to figure out how best to sniff out “technosignatures”—evidence of ET technology. Here’s how, where, and why they’ll do it. Listening For Life While other types of an alien “Hi there!” might exist, astronomers have spent the most time searching for radio messages. They’re watching for something unnatural in an otherwise…

1 OluKai Waialua Lace An active commute doesn’t mean you have to look like you’re going to the gym. These office-friendly sneaks are made from lightweight mesh and rubber, with a seaweed-inspired tread that’ll help you keep a firm grip on your scooter’s deck. $90 2 Closca Stack Packable Helmet Even the best balanced two-wheelers among us can get into unexpected scrapes, so scoot smart. This lightweight, telescoping head protector pops up when you need it, and becomes a flat, backpackable oval when you don’t. $80 3 Mission Workshop Bomber It gets chilly scooting along at 15 mph. This slick, drizzle-repellent bomber isn’t just on trend. It has a stretchy and breathable layer of extra-warm insulation on the inside, making the shell handy for temps down to freezing. $580 4…

EVERY DECEMBER, Adam Savage—star of the TV show MythBusters—releases a video reviewing his “favorite things” from the previous year. In 2018, one of his highlights was a set of Magic Leap augmented reality goggles. After duly noting the hype and backlash that have dogged the product, Savage describes an epiphany he had while trying on the headset at home, upstairs in his office. “I turned it on and I could hear a whale,” he says, “but I couldn’t see it. I’m looking around my office for it. And then it swims by my windows—on the outside of my building! So the glasses scanned my room and it knew that my windows were portals and it rendered the whale as if it were swimming down my street. I actually got choked…