Tabla de contenidos para February 2019 en WIRED

For this month’s Gadget Lab photo shoot, visuals manager Beth Holzer and associate photo editor Lauren Joseph took the section’s Create theme literally. They gathered set pieces at a salvage yard, where they found a plexiglass bench that once lived in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Back at the studio, they hammered and hot-glued items together, lugging concrete blocks to support a 50-pound forming machine and rigging up smaller tools with fishing wire. The coarse materials suited the gadgets (page 31), which include a carbide mill and a soldering iron. Joseph said the whole thing had its operating-room-like moments: “Glue! Tape! Hurry, before it falls!” To report this issue’s cover story, former New York Times journalist Charles Duhigg spent six months tracking down dozens of current and former…

TO HELP CURE the planet’s ailments, Zhen Dai suggests antacid. In powdered form, calcium carbonate—often used to relieve upset stomachs—can reflect light; by peppering the sky with the shiny white particles, the Harvard researcher thinks it might be possible to block just enough sunlight to achieve some temperature control here on Earth. Dai’s work calls for a custom-designed test balloon that, pending an independent committee’s green-light, is set to release up to a kilogram of calcium carbonate 12 miles above the US. Small onboard propellers will stir the payload into the air—in what will be the first solar geoengineering experiment in the lower atmosphere. Though this one’s highly localized, expansive sun-dimming schemes carry risks. Crops may shrivel, and developing countries might disproportionately suffer the side effects. Dai has spent her…

MOST PARENTS DISMISS video games as a mind-dulling distraction from their kids’ studies. Little do they know all that button-mashing could translate into a fat college fund. Over the past five years, esports have grown into an estimated $906 million industry, with recruiters, coaches, and dedicated arenas. Nearly 200 US colleges are offering around $15 million per year in scholarships for the esports elite, and university teams can earn millions more in tournament prizes. Unsurprisingly, Silicon Valley is getting in on the market: PlayVS, a startup that organizes high school esports leagues, has raised $46 million from investors like Diddy and Adidas. Game recognize game. 1 Pay for Play The average esports scholarship student receives $4,800 in tuition awards a year, according to the National Association of Collegiate Esports—but some…

BACK IN THE 1990s, when Tim Berners-Lee and his team were creating the infrastructure of the World Wide Web, they made a list of the error codes that would pop up when something went wrong. You’ve surely encountered many of them: “404 Not Found,” which pops up if you click on a dead link; “401 Unauthorized” when you hit a page that needs a password; and so on. Here’s one you probably haven’t seen—and its absence from your life speaks to why the promise of the early web seems increasingly out of reach: “402 Payment Required.” That’s right: The web’s founders fully expected some form of digital payment to be integral to its functioning, just as integral as links, web pages, and passwords. After all, without a way to quickly…

FIRST INVENTED BY an entrepreneurial medical supplier named Sundel Doniger, the X-acto—an all-purpose cutting tool beloved by craftspeople, hobbyists, and artists—was initially popular with military surgeons, who liked the speed at which blades could be swapped into the aluminum handle. But medicine was a crowded field; more than 350 scalpel designs clamored for space on the operating table. Then one day, an X-acto employee needed to fix a print ad. This was in the literal cut-and-paste days, of course, so Doniger handed the guy a scalpel—stat!—and sliced open a new market. Even in the age of Photoshop, the X-acto is still what designers reach for when they need to create something IRL. (Photoshop’s slice tool icon resembles an X-acto.) The company now makes 20 different blade shapes and sizes that…

Let’s Create! Pottery HD Between sessions behind an actual potter’s wheel, prototype your next throw by pinching and shaping a virtual lump of clay. The app even employs AR to let you “place” a digital 3D render of your glazed and fired ceramic on your real-world mantelpiece. $5 Procreate 4 This powerhouse of visual creation is loaded with more than 130 brushes, so you can dial in every texture and shape in your mind’s eye. Paint at high resolution, then edit your work with a layer system powerful enough to rival most desktop apps. $10 Assembly Hate pixels? Love lines, curves, and shapes that can be scaled as big as you want without losing resolution? Use this app to build vector-based designs like logos, party invitations, or posters. Bonus: You…

IN RETROSPECT, IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN A CLUE. But in early 2010, when Kamni Vallabh first began to complain that her eyesight was failing, there didn’t seem to be much cause for concern. She was 51; maybe middle age was catching up with her. Maybe the harsh western Pennsylvania winter—two record-breaking blizzards in as many weeks—was wearing her down. The previous summer, Kamni had been in good health. She’d single-handedly organized her daughter Sonia’s wedding, 300 guests drinking and dancing in the family’s backyard in Hermitage, a tight-knit former steel town. But by her birthday, that March, it was clear that something was seriously wrong. Once a poet, Kamni could barely string a sentence together. She was distractible, easily confused; when she misplaced the TV remote, she’d look for it…

QUOTE-UNQUOTE UNHEALTHY food. That’s how Christy Harrison, one of a new group of rogue dieticians, describes Chicken McNuggets. I can’t get enough of how she, formerly a food purist and determined orthorexic, uses that quote-unquote locution on her podcast Food Psych, a deceptively sweet piece of heresy that takes aim at the pieties, sophistries, and perils of diet culture. At its heart, Harrison’s podcast is an intensive project of pop deconstruction—and if liberation is your goal, it works. It’s ecstatic. It’s terrifying. But while an antidiet project can almost certainly make you happier, freer, and more productive than you are now, you may also be fatter. So there’s that. A podcast about dieting that might lead to weight gain? Yes, I realize: no. But a friend pushed Food Psych on…

There’s a ghostwriter in my machine. And it’s no Lee Israel—she’d balk at all the fast-flying verbal inanities. I speak of Smart Reply, Google’s answer, in the form of a triad of autogenerated responses, to the problem of email. Just the other day, it saw fit to butt-reply to a frenemy of mine, “I’ll be there!” This in response to an invitation I had planned to ignore. Not only do I now have to attend; I must be excited! about! it! Call me a jaded, post-privacy millennial, but I never cared that Google mined our missives for $$$. It’s always been Google’s internet; we’re just living in it. But dragnetting my epistolary efforts to approximate my verbal style at its most insipid? “No thanks!” Language is codable, duh—Claude Shannon said…

When President Trump tweeted a video of himself body-slamming the CNN logo in 2017, most people took it as a stupid joke. For Cesar Sayoc, it may have been a call to arms: Last October the avowed Trump fan allegedly mailed a pipe bomb to CNN headquarters. ¶ No one told Sayoc to do it, but the fact that it happened was really no surprise. In 2011, after the shooting of US representative Gabby Giffords, a Daily Kos blog warned of a new threat the writer called stochastic terrorism: the use of mass media to incite attacks by random nut jobs—acts that are “statistically predictable but individually unpredictable.” The writer had in mind right-wing radio and TV agitators, but in 2016, Rolling Stone accused then-candidate Trump of using the same…

1. Most substances make a clean break between their liquid and solid states. But liquid crystals straddle the boundary: They flow smoothly, like water, while maintaining a crystalline structure. A tiny jolt of electricity aligns the molecules in the same direction and allows them to rotate light—an effect you see when the pixels in your LCD television or smartphone flip on and off to form pretty images. 2. Our body’s natural lubricant, saliva, does double duty by sloshing away bacteria and neutralizing your mouth’s acidity. There’s high demand for the liquid. Human salivary glands pump out about a quart a day—a Big Gulp! The dry-of-mouth can always purchase backup sprays, gels, and swabs on the $1 billion artificial saliva market. 3. Packed with enough dissolved oxygen, liquid becomes breathable. While…

AFTER YOU SCULPT your next great MoMA-worthy miniature, reproduce your work with a machine that captures every contour. Just smaller than a microwave, the Mayku FormBox uses heat and suction to create precise molds out of plastic. Connect a vacuum cleaner hose to the FormBox, then lay your template—say, a seashell—on the forming bed, beneath a frame that holds a half-millimeter-thick sheet of thermoplastic. After the plastic is heated to 284 degrees Fahrenheit, slide the tray down to encase your object. The Mayku powers on the vacuum, which sucks the plastic tightly around the model. Once it cools, you’re left with a mold that replicates the intricate whorls and rivulets in your piece. Fill the mold with concrete, plaster, or molten chocolate for a perfect (and maybe delicious) echo of…

ROBERT TAFT JR. was feeling good. It was just after 10 o’clock on a morning in January 2018—the beginning of what promised to be another flush day in a new era. For nearly 22 years, medical marijuana had been legal to consume in California. But since the year began, anyone 21 or older could legally buy cannabis. Taft had spent five years preparing for this moment. And for the past two weeks, since California’s Proposition 64 went into effect, his business had been booming. Taft’s dispensary, a squat, chartreuse and gray shop called 420 Central in the Orange County city of Santa Ana, was bringing in up to 600 people a day—more than five times as many as the month before, when only medical marijuana patients were allowed. Taft dropped…

A FEW DAYS BEFORE THE 2016 ELECTION, journalist Andrew Sullivan wrote this about Donald Trump: “He has no concept of a nonzero-sum engagement, in which a deal can be beneficial for both sides. A win-win scenario is intolerable to him, because mastery of others is the only moment when he is psychically at peace.” I’m not sure dominating other people is the only occasion when Trump feels at peace. Presumably there’s a moment during what is reportedly his standard McDonald’s meal—two Big Macs, two Filets-O-Fish, and a chocolate milkshake—when all seems right with the world. Still, in Trump’s hierarchy of bliss, dominance does seem to rank at the top. “I love to crush the other side and take the benefits,” he wrote in a book called Think Big. “Why? Because there…

The young Tesla engineer was excited. Ecstatic, in fact. It was a Saturday in October 2017, and he was working at the Gigafactory, Tesla’s enormous battery manufacturing plant in Nevada. Over the previous year, he had been living out of a suitcase, putting in 13-hour days, seven days a week. This was his first real job. And now a colleague had tracked him down to say that Elon Musk—Elon Musk!—needed his personal help. The previous year, Musk had made an audacious announcement: His company, which was known—fetishized, actually—for its luxurious electric vehicles, would soon begin manufacturing a new sedan that it planned to sell for just $35,000, putting it within reach of the middle class. The Model 3, Tesla hoped, would transform the auto industry by proving that a mass-produced,…

AIRBNB’S “LIVE LIKE A LOCAL” fantasy can quickly morph into a nightmare when your host’s sun-dappled apartment photos turn out to conceal a roach infestation. But hotels can be so homogeneous. Now a new crop of startups is offering a hybrid alternative: apartment hotels, lodging that promises the comfort and roominess of a homestay (minus the flaky homeowner) with the consistency and in-room amenities of a hotel. ¶ New York–based upstart Domio—which just raised a $12 million series A—snags long-term leases on buildings or units in mixed-use apartment complexes, then converts them into sleekly furnished pads with hotel-esque perks. Last year, competing apartment-hoteliers TurnKey and Sonder raised $31 million and $85 million, respectively. These companies claim to offer travelers prices up to 25 percent lower than similarly sized hotels by,…

AS WE’VE TAKEN our small-screen destiny into our own hands—skinny bundles, “over the top” content, a device-agnostic smorgasbord of streaming—our hands have become empty, idle. Channel surfing feels futile, if not obsolete. TV is no longer a remote-controlled menu to peruse as much as it’s a Tube Goldberg machine carrying our eyes from one diversion to the next. Choice is everywhere; agency, not so much. ¶ Algorithms forever recommend what to watch. Autoplay functions cue up the next episode without waiting for your input. With nothing left to do but gaze and glaze, a viewer’s chief responsibility is to not fall asleep (lest you wake to find yourself five episodes into an unwitting binge of Hell’s Kitchen). It’s strange, then, given its role as the architect of programmatic passivity, that…

California law says local municipalities get to set their own limits on how cannabis can be sold.* But even if an area has banned storefront pot sales, that doesn’t mean you can’t still find a local shop on Weedmaps. CITY OF BAKERSFIELD Storefronts banned? Yes Licensed storefronts: 0 Storefronts listed on Weedmaps: 21 CITY OF LOS ANGELES Storefronts banned? No Licensed storefronts: 170 Storefronts listed on Weedmaps: 371 CITY OF ANAHEIM Storefronts banned? Yes Licensed storefronts: 0 Storefronts listed on Weedmaps: 10 CITY OF FRESNO Storefronts banned? Some Licensed storefronts: 0 Storefronts listed on Weedmaps: 7 CITY OF SANTA ANA Storefronts banned? No Licensed storefronts: 19 Storefronts listed on Weedmaps: 18 *County policies apply only to unincorporated areas, so individual cities often set their own, separate cannabis policies.…