Tabla de contenidos para December 2018 en WIRED

Twice a year, wired welcomes a group of five editorial fellows to do everything from gear and photography research to fact-checking and video producing. The current crop, who depart at year’s end, have their fingerprints all over this issue. Reporting fellow Rebecca Heilweil writes about nonlethal weapons and 3D-printed body parts in the Alpha section, while products fellow Pia Ceres offers suggestions for holiday gifts in Wish List (page 35). Research fellow Kelsey Lannin fact-checked Tom Simonite’s story about the DIY AI movement (page 82), and photography fellow Halie Chavez shot three of the photos on this page. Finally, check out video fellow Briana Flin’s work on the debut of our video series, Tech Effects, available on WIRED.com and WIRED’S new streaming app. “You have to be OK with looking…

ELECTRONICS OFTEN DON’T mesh well with flesh and blood. Cochlear implants can irritate the scalp; pacemaker wires dislodge; VR headsets weigh heavily on the face. That’s why, for the past six years, Michael McAlpine has been Frankensteining alternatives. A mechanical engineer at the University of Minnesota, he creates prototypes of bionic body parts with nice, soft components—some of them alive. The key to his electro-organic organs is his custom-made 3D printer, which McAlpine loads with silicones, metals, and human cells sourced from the university’s med school. (They come in a gel-like culture so they stay happy and functional, he says, while they’re handled.) His 3D-printed “ear,” made by enveloping a coil antenna in living matter, requires electrically conductive silver nanoparticles and cartilage-forming cells, while his “spinal cord” calls for neuron-forming…

1. The five traditional senses keep us alert and alive: Hot pans burn, loud noises startle. Within our bodies, a sixth sense, known as interoception, perceives the state of—and threats to—our internal organs. From pangs and cramps to shortness of breath, it warns us when something is off. Hung-over from a wild bender? Waves of nausea in the presence of alcohol are interoceptive warnings to lay off the juice. 2. One easy way to test your interoception is to find a quiet room and try to sense your pulse (without touching an artery). Even babies can perform a version of this. Shown a TV show with dancing cartoon characters, 5-month-olds can tell when the animations are moving in time with their own beating hearts—a sign that self-awareness starts young. 3.…

IN HONOR OF WIRED’S 25th birthday, our October issue engaged in a little reflective self-examination. But as ever, we also dared to predict what lies ahead, by assigning the task to 25 icons of the digital revolution and the people they believe will lead us into the future. Readers helped us sort the WIRED from the tired. Re: “The Future Was So Delicious, I Ate It All”: One obsessed academic sat down to read every issue of WIRED in chronological order. “SO YOU GUYS ARE PRETTY BIG FANS OF YOURSELVES, YEAH?”Shawn Putnam via WIRED.com “During the past year I really enjoyed WIRED. I found the introspective pessimism refreshing and the articles informative. But the latest issue, WIRED@25, reminded me of why I never liked the ‘militant optimism’ of WIRED and…

THE TWINKLING OF a starry night sky is romantic, sure. But for astronomer Dominika Wylezalek, “it’s a nightmare.” That’s because Wylezalek studies galaxies billions of light-years away, and all that finicky glimmering—she’d call it “turbulence”—gets in the way. So she and her colleagues at the European Southern Observatory fire up this Star Wars–worthy laser canon in northern Chile to measure distortion in the atmosphere and improve the astronomical image. The device shoots four 22-watt laser beams—each nearly a foot in diameter and 4,000 times as powerful as a laser pointer—into the sky, where they radiate at a wavelength of 590 nanometers, exciting sodium atoms in the upper atmosphere. When the atoms get whipped into a frenzy, they emit photons that shine like stars. Those artificial stars form reference points for…

01 Ride the Lightning Vanmoof banishes bulky batteries by hiding a 504-watt-hour cell inside this ebike’s 42-pound frame. The front-wheel motor has a city-shrinking 93-mile range, can pump out 500 hill-killing watts, and will hit 20 mph. Even if some knuckle-head conquers the built-in lock, a GPS tracker will help you (well, the cops) recover your steed. Vanmoof Electrified S2 | $3,398 02 Galaxy Notes Perhaps the best gift is a gentle reminder of how tiny we are in the universe. Each postcard in this set of 50 features an image of the cosmos, from ancient star maps to NASA archival photos, like Apollo 16’s shot of the far side of the moon. Pin them up for inspiration, or buy some stamps (remember those?) and mail them to distant stargazers.…

SOMETIME AROUND 1 AM ON A WARM NIGHT last June, Fei-Fei Li was sitting in her pajamas in a Washington, DC, hotel room, practicing a speech she would give in a few hours. Before going to bed, Li cut a full paragraph from her notes to be sure she could reach her most important points in the short time allotted. When she woke up, the 5 3 expert in artificial intelligence put on boots and a black and navy knit dress, a departure from her frequent uniform of a T-shirt and jeans. Then she took an Uber to the Rayburn House Office Building, just south of the US Capitol. Before entering the chambers of the US House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, she lifted her phone to snap a…

HAVING GNAWED THEIR way across the Bering Land Bridge with their iron-glazed teeth, beavers by the tens of millions straight-up built North America. They worked like rodent Romans, subjugating the deciduous forests with formidable infrastructure: canals, lodges, dams that can last centuries, and deep still-water pools used to float building materials. By clear-cutting trees and blocking streams, the nocturnal, semi-aquatic creatures also damaged the environment in some of the same ways humans do. Much later, beavers unexpectedly became the toast of a rarefied academic circle at the University of Toronto, where they inspired, of all things, media theory. In The Fur Trade in Canada, Harold Innis, a political economist known for originality and intellectual derring-do, chronicled a fierce four-way battle for domination of Canada from the 17th to the 20th…

WHEN ALEX JONES crashed the congressional hearings looking into big tech platforms back in September, Lord Voldemort kept coming to my mind. Even if you haven’t read the Harry Potter books, you probably know that almost no one in the wizarding world will speak this archvillain’s name aloud; he is referred to only as “he who must not be named” or “you know who.” In the final book, Voldemort puts a curse on the name, so that merely uttering it acts like a beacon for the wizard’s crew of Death Eaters. Eager to communicate something crucial about the evil lord’s latest plot to his friends, Harry at one point blurts out Voldemort’s name. What follows are many, many scary pages. Jones is a kind of real-world Voldemort. Speak his name…

WHEN KING GEORGE III of England began to show signs of acute mania toward the end of his reign, rumors about the royal madness multiplied quickly in the public mind. One legend had it that George tried to shake hands with a tree, believing it to be the King of Prussia. Another described how he was whisked away to a house on Queen Square, in the Bloomsbury district of London, to receive treatment among his subjects. The tale goes on that George’s wife, Queen Charlotte, hired out the cellar of a local pub to stock provisions for the king’s meals while he stayed under his doctor’s care. More than two centuries later, this story about Queen Square is still popular in London guidebooks. And whether or not it’s true, the…