Tabla de contenidos para Mar/Apr 2020 en WIRED UK

Heston Blumenthal flips through a small notebook. Inside are sketches and handwritten notes in beautiful calligraphy. On one page, he stops and indicates a mesh of thick scribbles that slowly resolves into the shape of a human skull. “Twenty-three degrees,” he says. “The angle that the spinal column enters the cranium is the same as the tilt of the Earth on its axis.” Blumenthal is one of Britain’s most famous chefs – his scientific, multi-sensory approach has won six Michelin stars for The Fat Duck and The Hind’s Head in the Berkshire town of Bray, and Dinner in London. His signature is misdirection: a tangerine is shaped from chicken liver, playing cards melt into chocolate. He has a wide range of interests: over a couple of hours, conversation veers from…

When Fabian Bolin was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia at the age of 28, the investment banker turned actor was given a 60 to 70 per cent chance of recovery. “I felt like my life was ruined,” he says. “And I had a bunch of questions – not so much about the practicalities of the cancer itself, but more about life with cancer. What happens on a normal Tuesday? How should I eat or exercise to maximise the chance of survival?” Unsatisfied with doctors’ answers in London and his native Sweden after the diagnosis in May 2015, he turned to social media – his Facebook post was shared more than 30,000 times. The mental side of cancer can be as tough as the physical symptoms: patients often feel lonely, fearful…

As a nurse in Denmark, Casper Slots got used to seeing the pain that ill-fitting artificial bone implants caused in patients. Some were left in permanent discomfort, or had their faces disfigured by “one size fits all” prostheses available to hospitals. In 2012, he enrolled in a masters course in medical engineering and welfare, where he met Martin B Jensen. They began work on a better solution to off-the-shelf implants and, in 2017, founded Particle3D, a startup with a single mission: printing bone. Currently, customised medical implants generally use non-degradable materials such as polymer or titanium that don’t behave like organic matter. In their research, Slots and Jensen found a substance that would not only replace damaged bone, but encourage new bone to grow back. “I would like to help…

Gustav Soderstrom, Spotify Throughout his 11-year tenure at Spotify, Gustav Söderström has been VP of products, chief product officer – and now head of R&D, leading more than 1,500 people across product, design, data, technology and engineering, reporting directly to CEO Daniel Ek. This, plus his experience as an investor and adviser, means Söderstrom has plenty of opinions on successful product development. How do you tell if an idea is good? Söderström uses modelling tools to simplify messy problems, and frameworks such as Hamilton Helmer’s 7 powers to assess ideas. He also works with the notion of Socratic debate: his team thoroughly probe one another’s proposals, battle-testing them on a theoretical level before moving forward. “I think it’s remarkably effective versus actually writing code and shipping products, which is a…

OakNorth founder Rishi Khosla jumps off his treadmill desk and barrels into a meeting room to talk with WIRED. He applies this same attitude to business: extreme energy and zero time-wasting. Khosla, 44 (above), met co-founder Joel Perlman as students at the London School of Economics in the late 90s, founded challenger bank OakNorth in 2015, and has grown it into the UK’s most valuable fintech, worth $2.8 billion, in less than four years. But what’s most remarkable in an industry obsessed with scaling is that OakNorth made a profit within six months of launching. They followed a very simple mantra: don’t spend money you can’t get back. “Some people just say, ‘I’ve raised X, therefore I’ve got X to spend’. Our whole approach was different,” Khosla explains. Both entrepreneurs,…

One bright morning in summer 2019, technology investor Saul Klein gave a presentation to a crowd, including several MPs, crammed into Phoenix Court – a coworking space of which Klein is a co-founder, and headquarters of his LocalGlobe VC organisation. The thrust of Klein’s talk was that the UK had its own Silicon Valley: King’s Cross. The north London area’s seediness had been displaced by the £3 billion King’s Cross Central redevelopment, and the arrival of the cream of global tech, science and culture. Current residents Facebook, DeepMind and Google are building sprawling new headquarters there; Expedia, Universal Music, a YouTube space for creators, Central Saint Martins art school, the British Library, the Francis Crick biomedical research institute and legions of startups have also moved in. King’s Cross, said Klein,…

In The Peripheral, iconic sci-fi author William Gibson introduced the “Jackpot”, a cascade of global catastrophes that wipes out much of the human race, along with an ingenious take on time travel that allows digital communication – including telepresence – across alternate timelines. Its main character, Wilf, lives in post-Jackpot London: he becomes entangled in the aftermath of a murder whose only witness lives in an alternate, run-down America. Gibson’s new book, Agency, returns to the same fictional setting – but in this instalment, one of the timelines is ours. Well, nearly. In the “stub” inhabited by Agency’s protagonist, user-testing guru Verity, Americans didn’t vote Trump into office and Brits didn’t vote for Brexit. It’s not without its troubles, though: nuclear tensions in the Middle East are threatening to set…

“I’ve cancelled my gym membership because I’m saving money by using Centr, created by Chris Hemsworth. I’m really impressed with the classes, exercises and dietary recommendations. They try to work like a little life-coach – quite successfully in my own case.” “I love the podcast Feel Better, Live More, as you get quality information, simply delivered. There are expert discussions about how mind and body interact – identifying the root causes of our problems lets us make empowered choices to assist ourselves.” “Dewo is a personal assistant app that tries to give people more time to be productive. You can’t get into ‘deep work mode’ in 30 minutes, so it organises your day in a way that helps you find focus without being interrupted by meetings or notifications.”…

Every startup dreams of scaling quickly, but it brings challenges that force founders to adapt and deal with the growing pains of an expanding team. meeting room space,” says “I’ll tell you the biggest issue: Sophie Adelman, co-founder of London-based apprenticeships startup WhiteHat. “Physical space is an under-appreciated unc problem.” Adelman and Euan Blair (above) launched WhiteHat in 2016 to “democratise "demc access to the best careers”, caree1 offering an alternative to university unive, by recruiting and training young people as apprentices for roles in businesses including BP, Facebook, Google and Warner Music. WhiteHat’s approach has three aspects: a digital marketplace that matches candidates’ profiles with potential opportunities; access to coaching and educational resources; and a community similar to a university alumni network. In 2019, WhiteHat doubled the number of…

Caroline Roche, Bumble When Caroline Roche joined Bumble in 2014, the dating startup had just a handful of staff compared to almost 150 employees globally today. As chief of staff, she works closely with a six-strong People and Culture team. “As a team grows, it’s inevitable that company culture needs to grow and scale with it,” Roche says. Central to achieving this is keeping the company’s mission – which for Bumble is helping people “create empowering connections in love, life and work” – squarely at the centre of all decisions. How do you attract talent? Roche says that a strong mission that resonates with people should help with recruitment, especially for a consumer brand, adding that Bumble’s location in Austin, Texas, offers tech workers a change of pace from San…

Gandalf arrives on roller-blades It’s morning in the cafeteria at X – formerly Google X – and Astro Teller, X’s Captain of Moonshots, glides over dressed in coarse grey robes and a pointed hat, carrying porridge. Jedi stroll past to their desks, gripping coffee. Star Fleet officers queue for breakfast. This, it should be said, is unusual – it’s Halloween. But X is a surreal place. Outside, self-driving cars loop around the block. Sections of strato-spheric balloons, designed to broadcast internet to remote places, hang in the lobby. Robots wheel around, sorting the recycling. Teller likens X to Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory; it seems only fitting that there be costumes. Even standing inside X – a former mall in Mountain View, California – it’s hard to articulate exactly what X…

38 The percentage of former WeWork employees in November 2019 who were worried about having WeWork on their CV, according to Blind, an anonymous professional network 9 billion Kilometres cycled by Strava users across the globe in 2019. Cyclists in the UK accounted for 937.2 million of those 183.7 METRES Length of the world’s longest egg noodle, cooked up by Japanese chef Hiroshi Kuroda in September 2019 17.3 The percentage of the gender pay gap in the UK in 2019. In 2018 it was 17.8 per cent – an improvement of just 0.5 1 hr, 50 mins Average amount of time a person in the UK spent daily on social media in 2019 – four minutes less than in 2018. Eighty per cent of internet users reported using YouTube 1.8…

Levi’s x Cooperative Porto Alegre recycled denim £15-£40 levi.com A capsule collection of one-of-a-kind accessories made out of repurposed denim, 100 per cent of net proceeds go back into the co-op’s work. The project fosters work opportunities for refugees in Italy by providing tailoring and dressmaking training. Wolfskin Tech Lab Sapporo coat £790 jack-wolfskin.co.uk Ultra long and deceptively lightweight, the Sapporo is windproof, water repellent, breathable, and 90 per cent filled with goose down certified by the Responsible Down Standard. Part of the Wolfskin Tech Lab collection, it’s an on-the-go duvet day. Tumi International Dual Access Carry On £995 uk.tumi.com Master the art of travelling light with Tumi’s Alpha 3 case and its main compartment dual entry, suit bag, USB port and lock. The fabric is engineered to reveal a…

Karen Palmer makes the ultimate reaction videos. In her latest work, Perception iO, you take the viewpoint of a police officer confronting a “suspect” who may be black or white. A screen-mounted camera tracks your expressions and eye movement as you react to the volatile situation. Your responses determine whether you call for help, go for an arrest, or even shoot – allowing you to examine your own implicit bias on race, gender and mental health. In collaboration with the research lab ThoughtWorks, Palmer has created a machine learning tool that can distinguish between anger, fear, surprise and calmness. The technology is not dissimilar to what Amazon has been selling to police forces and businesses. The US pharmacy chain Walgreens is already eye-tracking in its stores. And the EU is…

From the Extinction Rebellion protests to individual champions – such as WIRED cover-star Greta Thunberg – to sustainable initiatives launched by international brands, environmentalism was top of the agenda in 2019. In December 2019, WIRED teamed up with premium American luggage brand TUMI and Waves For Water, a guerilla humanitarian organisation dedicated to providing clean water, to host a reader event at TUMI’s Regent Street store in London. With an expert panel including Damien Mignot (TUMI’s Europe General Manager), Jenica Dizon (Waves For Water’s Philippines Operations Director), Gwilym Pugh (influencer, activist and adventurer) and WIRED’s Executive Editor Jeremy White, discussions were centered on sustainability, the future of travel and how brands such as TUMI can be more socially responsible. Even though it’s possible to get lost in the white noise…

Boss RC-10R A league apart from your typical loop pedal, the new RC-10R allows real-time creativity and sequencing thanks to two unique song sections, intros/endings and rhythm fills, so you can link between verses and bridges seamlessly. There’s also a huge built-in 280-rhythm style library, onboard storage for 99 phrase memories and 50 user rhythms. £263 boss.info 0C/95M/95Y/0K Patek Philippe Aquanaut 5167A Singapore Grand Exhibition This classic 40mm steel Aquanaut is elevated by a vivid red rubber strap and minute track – the hue is a nod to the signature colour of Singapore, the city in which this watch debuted – and it’s limited to 500 examples. If you can’t snag this highly sought-after piece, unlimited editions in white gold with blue and green dials were announced at Basel. £poa…

When London healthtech startup BenevolentAI secured a $90 million (£68 million) cash injection from Singaporean sovereign fund Temasek in September 2019, the deal valued the business at $1 billion. Not too shabby for a six-year-old company whose ambition to dramatically change the way drugs are discovered and developed remains largely unrealised. In reality, the $1 billion valuation was a come-down for BenevolentAI, which in April 2018 had been valued at twice that sum, after raising $115 million from a number of undisclosed US investors. The problem was that one-time star investor Neil Woodford was an early backer of BenevolentAI. He was forced to wind up his Woodford Equity Income fund following a long period of underperformance. As the largest unquoted company in the portfolio and the biggest holding in Woodford’s…

Canggu is a place where people go to feel rich The clicking of keyboards in the Balinese town’s co-working spaces is drowned out only by the roar of mopeds. Over smoothie bowls and lattes, western immigrants – expats, as they prefer to be known – talk about themselves, loudly. A local woman will massage your body, silently, for the equivalent of a few pounds. Everyone is very good-looking. Everything is very cheap. The town, once a stop-off for backpackers en route to Ubud’s yoga studios and hippy scene, has become a hub for self-described “digital nomads”. In Canggu’s cafés, barefoot westerners run companies from MacBook Pros. When not talking Facebook ads or cost-per-click, they socialise exclusively with each other. “The thing is, not many Indonesians are on a level with…