Tabla de contenidos para March 2018 en WIRED

IN OUR JANUARY ISSUE, Lauren Smiley explored a company that created digital avatars to serve as caretakers for the elderly. Former bomb disposal officer Brian Castner traveled to Iraq to profile an investigator tracing the supply chain for the Islamic State's weapon factories. Novelist and writer Nathan Hill chronicled the burgeoning careers and rigorous training of the athletes in Overwatch League, a professional league of videogamers. And in our cover story, Mara Hvistendahl went to China to document a new social credit system firsthand—and examine what it says about the entities that collect our data en masse. Re: "Live Long and Prosper": Silicon Valley's immortalists will help us all stay healthy. "MAYBE INSTEAD WE SHOULD LEARN HOW TO BE LESS TERRIFIED OF DEATH". Woofer on WIRED.com Re: "The Terror-Industrial Complex":…

FORGET FREE-RANGE, antibiotic-free, and grass-fed—tomorrow’s burger will be lab-cultured. Scientists are creating a new slaughterhouse-free food group called clean meat: edible animal protein grown in a vat. Stem cells are extracted from animals, brewed in a bioreactor, fortified with nutrients like amino acids and glucose, and structured around collagen “scafolds.” It’s not just about cultivating the ideal boneless chicken wing: These miracle meats could reduce the planet-depleting land and water use of traditional animal agriculture by more than 80 percent. “From an investment standpoint, this is potentially a trillion-dollar market opportunity,” says New Crop Capital partner Christopher Kerr, leading VCs to grab a stake in their labstock of choice. Last year, DFJ, Atomico, Fifty Years, and others invested $17 million in Memphis Meats’ in vitro beef, chicken, and duck. Sergey…

THE FIRST FULLY AUTONOMOUS ground vehicles hitting the market aren’t cars or delivery trucks—they’re robo-farmhands. The Dot Power Platform is a prime example of an explosion in advanced agricultural technology, which Goldman Sachs predicts will raise crop yields 70 percent by 2050. But Dot isn’t just a tractor that can drive without a human for backup. It’s the Transformer of ag-bots, capable of performing 100-plus jobs, from hay baler and seeder to rock picker and manure spreader, via an arsenal of tool modules. And though the hulking machine can carry 40,000 pounds, it navigates fields with balletic precision. Farmers map their land using an aerial drone or GPS receiver, upload that data to the Dot controller—a Microsoft Surface Pro—then unleash the beast into the field. The tireless machine can run…

('klep-tō-pri-'dā-shǝn) n. A strategy for maximizing energy intake by consuming prey that has itself just eaten. Recently, 25 sea slugs were served an underwater buffet to study their tastes. Offered a choice of brine shrimp and hydroid polyps (small coral-like organisms), the slugs opted for polyps that had swallowed the shrimp—a clever caloric twofer. Using a novel feeding strategy, they were jumping the line in the food chain to devour their prey and the prey of their prey. Researchers dubbed this kleptopredation, using the Greek word, kleptes, for thief or cheater. ¶ Of course, the criminal trope is only a metaphor; human standards of fair play hold no sway in the animal kingdom. (Though some have taken the term full circle to call out human rapacity: The Daily Kos cited…

See this fancy pink water bottle I’m holding? Now watch as I bash my head in with it. This is not, I assume, what the makers of the $38 “beauty essential” intended. What they promised was “glamour sipping like a boss.” They wanted me to “be brave.” Maybe they even meant it—insofar as any millennial-focused, direct-to-consumer startup knows I endure a daily torrent of push notification-enabled psychic assaults and wishes to soothe me with aspirationally charged branding. Look, I’m all for selfcare. But this glossy next-level shit—products that can’t just be products anymore but instead must be mystical vehicles through which to attain some higher state—makes me feel worse. What if there’s a day I don’t feel glamorous? Or brave? Suddenly I’m not even living up to my water bottle’s…

YOU TOTALLY PREPARED for this trip. You booked the flights months ago. You have all the best sights saved in Google Maps. But then you land in Munich or Kigali or Buenos Aires and realize you can’t even identify the sign pointing toward baggage claim, much less tell your cabbie where you’re headed. Luckily your phone can now do those things for you. Whether you use Siri or Google Assistant, or if you download the SayHi or iTranslate apps, you have in your pocket a pretty capable real-time language translator. ¶ Right now this translation tech is still in its infancy and primarily eases logistical complexities. With Google Translate, you can point your camera at a street sign to verify it says Downtown This Way and not There Be Dragons.…

BERLIN-BASED PHOTOGRAPHER Mustafah Abdulaziz has traveled the world to capture the primal relationship between people and water. When he arrived in Copenhagen’s harbor to take the photos for our story on journalist Kim Wall (“The Final Voyage,” page 60), Abdulaziz was met with limited daylight, freezing rain, and a vast area to cover: “The assignment was to explore the space, and the weather was really disagreeable. So the photos have a moody, foggy feeling.” In college, Angela Watercutter studied the American Film Institute’s top 100 list and remembers noting the number of movies directed by women: zero. So Watercutter, an editor for our culture desk, was thrilled to profile Ava DuVernay, the director of the new adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time (page 90). The force behind Queen Sugar and…

CLAIRE L. EVANS has discovered the solution to our social media woes: “Go back to BBS.” She means bulletin board systems, those grunge-era digital hangouts, like the Well and Echo, where users linked up based on mutual interests and supported one another. (So civilized.) Earlier this year, Evans even installed BBS server software on her Raspberry Pi to test her theory. “That kind of small-scale, self-policed social media could serve as a balm to us all,” she says. ¶ As the author of a jaunty new history of women in computing, Broad Band, Evans spent years uncovering the contributions of tech’s forgotten foremothers, from the developers of early compilers and Arpanet protocols to the makers of radical videogames and, yes, inclusive preweb forums. (Nearly half the users of Echo, which…

AS CERTAIN FORWARD-THINKING magazines predicted last year (ahem), VR’s first mass culture moment has arrived not as a device but as a destination. There’s far more immersive potential in a dedicated VR facility—with its stagecraft and highend components—than what’s currently possible in your living room. Already, companies like the Void and Star VR are running bespoke experiences where you can roam imaginary worlds untethered, and Imax has installed virtual reality centers in three of its multiplexes. Next up: A new outfit called Dreamscape Immersive promises to supercharge the escapism of “location-based” VR. ¶ The key is a nifty motion-capture algorithm. By putting trackers on your hands and feet, plus a laptop on your back, Dreamscape can extrapolate what your limbs are doing. The result is a system that brings your…

TO CAPTURE THAT decisive moment in a narrow Tokyo alley or a vast Berlin platz, you need to exercise not only patience but discretion. While potential photographic subjects would shy away from a DSLR-wielding tourist, barely a soul would notice a box as compact as Leica’s CL. Pair it with an ultrasharp 18-mm f/2.8 prime lens—it sticks out less than an inch, keeping the CL on the DL. The superfast autofocus, bright electronic viewfinder, and well-placed manual controls allow for quick composition, while the 25-megapixel APS-C sensor produces results worthy of printing and mounting prominently. Plus, wirelessly sending images to your phone for a quick Instagram update is perfect for stoking the jealousy of friends back home.…

1 Rimowa Limbo Multiwheel Electronic Tag BEST FOR: Impatient jet-setters This roller lets fliers on select airlines—Lufthansa, Swiss, EVA Air, and Austrian, with more soon—check their luggage using the airline’s app; your bag tag is sent to the tote’s E Ink display. While there’s no feature for tracking your bag’s whereabouts, the app does confirm when it’s stowed in the cargo hold. $1,065 2 Raden A28 BEST FOR: Chronic overpackers Raden’s polycarbonate case’s minimalist style disguises its inner smarts. The companion app uses the handle’s digital scale so you won’t get surprised by extra fees at check-in, and its geolocating feature helps pinpoint your suitcase at baggage claim. Be sure to ask if the bag’s phone-boosting battery can be checked on your flight. $395…

Section I One day in late February of 2016, Mark Zuckerberg sent a memo to all of Facebook’s employees to address some troubling behavior in the ranks. His message pertained to some walls at the company’s Menlo Park headquarters where staffers are encouraged to scribble notes and signatures. On at least a couple of occasions, someone had crossed out the words “Black Lives Matter” and replaced them with “All Lives Matter.” Zuckerberg wanted whoever was responsible to cut it out. “‘Black Lives Matter’ doesn’t mean other lives don’t,” he wrote. “We’ve never had rules around what people can write on our walls,” the memo went on. But “crossing out something means silencing speech, or that one person’s speech is more important than another’s.” The defacement, he said, was being investigated.…

1. A DNA sequence (the gene drive) that includes a gene slicing tool called Crispr-Cas9 is slotted into the eggs of a rat (let’s call her Minnie), instructing it to knock out the gene for female fertility. 2. Minnie is then released to mate with a wild rat. The fertilized egg in Minnie begins to develop into a new rat (Bianca). Because Bianca had an engineered parent, she ends up with one engineered chromosome (with a gene drive) and a corresponding normal one. Cells in Bianca begin to develop into rat parts: eyes, ears, heart—and eggs. It’s in the creation of those eggs that the gene drive goes to work. 3. The chromosome with the gene drive sends out the gene-cutting Crispr-Cas9 to snip its partner, the normal chromosome. To…

A three-week trip by train, bus, and plane with two kids through the bomb cyclone while editing a 10,000-word cover story; dodging perpetually gridlocked SF traffic by bike; finishing N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy—stunning!; my lifelong quest to figure out what’s wrong with my gut; 25 years with PTSD, fighting back toward the light; helping my nephew move into off-campus housing and wishing we had brought hazmat suits; the Gear team walking an aggregate of more than 100 miles in four days at CES; watching dear friends journey into parenthood—with twins; Phish’s 12/30/17 version of “Down With Disease” at Madison Square Garden; “the HR Benefits Department is somehow on this thread, could we please be removed?”; crossing the street at CES by going through three casinos, stopping for ice…

I “BEWARE OF BUGS in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.” That was how Donald Knuth, the author of The Art of Computer Programming (1968), expressed the difference between pristine mathematics and buggy reality. “When programming, you abstract away the entire physical world as much as possible, because it’s messy. But then it comes back and bites you,” Paul Ford, cofounder of the platform builder Postlight, told me. “You end up in these situations where 80 percent works, 19.9 percent is hard but there’s an answer that makes sense, and the last 0.1 percent is absolutely insane.” That fragment of chaos—the specter of unreason in the world—opens up room for magical thinking. For programmers, bugs become not so much human errors as super natural…

THERE’S HOPE FOR A tastier, healthier, more robust tomorrow: high-tech new food preservation methods that fend off the bad stuff (bacteria, spoilage) while protecting the good (flavor, texture, nutrients). Scientists are experimenting with everything from microwave sterilization to blasts of plasma to ensure food stays appetizing longer—even without refrigeration. That salmon dinner you bought on Monday? It’ll taste just as fresh a week later. And it’ll be just as good for you. Blue Blast BEST FOR: Berries, nuts Scientists at Scotland’s University of Strathclyde pioneered a technique that bombards fluids with high-intensity blue light, which produces a form of oxygen that’s lethal to pathogens. It’s now being adapted for use on berries and other foods. Micro Rays BEST FOR: Frittatas, mac and cheese, salmon With microwave-assisted thermal sterilization, packaged food…

USED TO BE, you’d browse the paper over breakfast, on the subway, in bed at night. Then news went online and became something you read at your desk (often, truth be told, your work desk). However, with the rise of smartphones, staying current once again became a portable experience; now phones are fast replacing PCs as the device of choice for getting our daily fix. But that small screen changes the game. For starters, since it’s harder to navigate—like reading a paper in the dark with a flashlight—fewer people visit the websites that editors so carefully curate. That’s bad news for traditional media outfits. Here’s a look at how we consume the news today. TWO-THIRDS OF CONSUMERS YOUNGER THAN 35 PREFER TO LET ALGORITHMS, NOT EDITORS, CHOOSE THEIR NEWS. 1 Smartphones…

VIRTUAL REALITY, as it’s been promised to us by science fiction, is a singular realm of infinite possibility. Star Trek’s Holodeck, Yu-Gi-Oh!’s Virtual World, Snow Crash’s Metaverse: Each is the all-powerful experience generator of its world, able to accommodate a character’s any desire. Novelist Ernest Cline sharpened this vision in his 2011 debut, Ready Player One, which hits theaters in March courtesy of Steven Spielberg. While the story is set in the strife-torn meatspace of 2045, most of its action unfolds in a vast network of artificial worlds called the OASIS. And in the tradition of reality playing catch-up to sci-fi, the OASIS has become the endgame for real-world VR developers, many of whom are actively trying to replicate its promise. Are they making progress? Absolutely. Are they doing it…

Sitata You just fell down the stairs of your Barcelona Airbnb, and it feels like you broke something. No need to panic if you have this app. Sitata provides emergency numbers and the location of hospitals and other key facilities based on your location. FREE Haven Install this app on a cheap Android burner, then leave the phone in your hotel room to act as a digital spy. Haven uses the camera, mic, and other sensors to detect motion and sound. It then sends photos and audio of any activity to your primary device. FREE SaferVPN Connecting to the internet over public hot spots leaves you vulnerable to hackers and scammers. Tunnel into a virtual private network with SaferVPN, which offers encrypted web browsing worldwide through one of 700 private…

2016 March Facebook suspends Benjamin Fearnow, a journalist-curator for the platform’s Trending Topics feed, after he leaks to Gizmodo. May Gizmodo reports that Trending Topics “routinely suppressed conservative news.” The story sends Facebook scrambling. 2016 July Rupert Murdoch tells Zuckerberg that Facebook is wreaking havoc on the news industry and threatens to cause trouble. August Facebook cuts loose all of its Trending Topics journalists, ceding authority over the feed to engineers in Seattle. November Donald Trump wins. Zuckerberg says it’s “pretty crazy” to think fake news on Facebook helped tip the election. December Facebook declares war on fake news, hires CNN alum Campbell Brown to shepherd relations with the publishing industry. 2017 September Facebook announces that a Russian group paid $100,000 for roughly 3,000 ads aimed at US voters. October…

CHATBOT: A computer program designed to converse with humans. SOCIALBOT: An especially schmoozy chatbot—one that can engage in extended small talk, not just cue up music and take down grocery lists. HANDCRAFTING: A labor-intensive technique for programming chatbots that involves writing explicit rules and templates. MACHINE LEARNING: A type of AI that learns to perform a task by analyzing patterns in data, rather than by relying on rules written by people. SEQ2SEQ: A machine learning technique used to generate a plausible next sentence in a dialog given the previous sequence of words.…

Late fall in the redwood forests of Northern California, it gets cold. Not wrap-yourself-in-furs cold—we’re still talking 51 degrees—but the kind of cold that demands layers, lest it sink into your bones. Nevertheless, in November 2016, when I visited her movie set near Eureka, director Ava DuVernay was coatless. Just a thermal with a cotton shirt over it, jeans, and a knit hat. The young stars of DuVernay’s film were in very lightweight shirts, pretending to be lost in unfamiliar (and, one assumes, warmer) woods, and she wasn’t about to let them be the only ones on her set enduring the chill. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but every time they have to have their jackets off, she takes her jacket off,” producer Jim Whitaker whispered to me as…