Tabla de contenidos para April 2019 en WIRED

Friends, readers, I have something to confess: A few days ago, I got an offer to Meet a Lovely Russian Woman in my EarthLink email inbox. Yes, there it is: I still have an EarthLink account. I swear I just use it for my Amazingly Cat account. And Facebook. I was intrigued. Russian women? I’m not even tempted by women, Russian or otherwise. But I was suddenly curious about who else was flooding my EarthLink account, so I started examining the senders in my mushrooming inbox: *Legendz XL, 1ink.com (to be fair, I do need new ink), /*/Male-Enhancements, ***Cannabis***, ///RemoveMoles//. All of them tucked between offers to buy fresh catnip. And Facebook notifications. As I scrolled through, I felt something stir. A rush of warmth, of love, surged through my…

PRESENTED BY The Wired Café @ CES (Consumer Electronics Show) was steps away from the craziness of the Tech West Convention Center and provided an oasis for invited guests and partners to relax and experience the newest innovations that our brand curates. In addition to on-site activations from our sponsors Arrow Electronics, National Geographic and Harley-Davidson that kept our 1000+ guests entertained and engaged, Wired also hosted guided tours of Tech West, providing insights into the trends that are set to shape the upcoming year.…

Something weird is happening around climate change. Republicans are deciding it’s real. Three years ago, only 49 percent of Republicans thought so, but by last December it was 64 percent, as a Monmouth University poll found. That’s a huge jump in a short time and is all the more astonishing given that the Republican president and many of his party’s politicians pooh-pooh the global emergency. Meanwhile, other parts of the electorate are really freaking out. Last year, the percentage of those who say they’re “very worried” about global warming shot up from 21 percent to 29 percent, according to a poll by Yale’s and George Mason University’s programs on climate change communication. Those who’ve studied this shift say it’s because of the recent waves of unsettling, climate-related news. The problem…

$130 WITHINGS MOVE ECG I’ve long thought Withings wearables are the kind of smartwatches that most people actually want to wear. The French company eschews “wrist-computer” designs, opting instead for devices that look and feel like analog watches and—hallelujah!—don’t need to be recharged every night. Withings’ first smartwatch that tracked your activity, the Activité from 2014, even had “SWISS-MADE” emblazoned on it. Smartwatches have grown more sophisticated since then, thanks to an explosion in health-tracking apps and the proliferation of sensors to feed them. So even if you hate the battery-draining displays and toylike straps of nerdwatches, it’s hard to beat their health-measuring features. Which is why Withings’ Move ECG smartwatch caught my eye. Like its forebears, the new model appears to be simply a stylish watch, but it can record…

Matteo Franceschetti began optimizing his life long before he started a tech company dedicated to sleep: heart rate monitored on an Apple Watch, a ketogenic diet, Peloton exercise bikes—one at home, one in the office. But sleep? The time he spent between the sheets felt, to him, unquantified and underutilized. Looking to squeeze more out of his unconscious hours, Franceschetti created Eight Sleep, to “unlock the full potential” of slumberland. The company’s latest invention is a “smart mattress” that tracks every toss and turn, manipulates each sleep cycle, scores each night’s rest, and then uses machine learning to “tune” the bed to your preferences. Franceschetti’s mattress ($2,295 for a queen size) hacks the whole sleep experience, starting with thermoregulation—warming as you drift off, then dropping a few degrees, he says,…

Back in the 1980s, researchers began to notice a strange pattern in the genes of many microbes. There would be a stretch of DNA that read the same forward and backward, then a stretch of what looked like junk, then another palindrome, and so on. No one knew what the segments were for, but they were striking enough that a pair of scientists in Europe dubbed them “clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats,” or Crispr for short. As it turned out, the mysterious sequences were an immune system. When a microbe was exposed to a new virus, it would cut a swatch of the invader’s DNA (the junk) and store it safely between two dividers (the palindromes). That way, if the virus ever returned, the microbe could simply consult its…

CONCERN LEVEL REVIVED VIRUSES A bioterrorist, armed with basic lab equipment and online databases filled with genetic blueprints for deadly viruses, could conceivably re-create a fatal disease like smallpox or the Spanish flu. Illnesses with relatively small genomes, like polio, are easier to resurrect than more genetically complex diseases like smallpox or herpes. MICROBIOME INTERLOPERS Microorganisms inhabit our guts, mouths, and skin and help us in many ways. A rogue microbe slipped into the mix could, in theory, cause our good bugs to produce harmful chemicals. In practice, this would be really hard to do, but the novelty of this technique put it on the list of top concerns. SOUPED-UP BACTERIA Because their genomes are more stable, bacteria tend to be easier to modify than viruses. While you might not…

“WHAT DID YOU LEARN WHILE REPORTING YOUR STORY THAT INTRIGUED YOU THE MOST?” “From 2015 to 2017, the most active 0.1 percent of Reddit commenters were responsible for 12 percent of the comments on the site.”—Robert Peck (page 38) “That’s Princess on the cover, a genetically dehorned cow, but calling her by that name is a little taboo. Scientists aren’t supposed to give their research subjects nicknames—they get too attached, potentially distorting their results. And yet, inevitably, they do.”—Gregory Barber (page 50) “In 1972, most cystic fibrosis patients died before the age of 10. Today, people living with CF routinely live into their late thirties, old enough to have children of their own.”—Megan Molteni (page 56) “While it might sometimes feel like robocalls are inescapable, robocalling is actually only a…

Every year, in late January, a small group of beetle-browed scientists, politicians, and journalists gather at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, to ponder the end of the world. This is a day of solemn kitsch: the unveiling of the Doomsday Clock, the minimalist midcentury dataviz that, since 1947, has been adjusted to dramatize the imminence of global catastrophe. But that’s too many syllables. Let’s use the shorthand: doom. And it’s close at hand. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, the nonprofit group that maintains the clock, used to set the hands based entirely on the probability of nuclear hellfire. Then in 2007 they added climate change to their calculus and, in 2017, cyberwar. The clock’s setting is largely impressionistic. To rough out a relative idea of how safe or…

THE NEXT BIG ONE I have superpowers, OK? One of them is predicting earthquakes. Don’t go showing me “government” “reports” disproving my awesome abilities. Twice already this year, I have shaken awake before my house has. So you will believe me when I tell you, unblessed mortals, that my seismological Spidey sense discerns a Third Event. This catastrophe won’t involve literal tectonics. What I’m detecting is the quivering instability of the metaphorical. You know, the platforms, the slabs of virtual bedrock underlying my life. Entertainment platforms. Social media platforms. Delivery platforms. Dating platforms. Security platforms. Platforms—here’s where meaning truly crumbles—as a goddamn service. Every day they shift beneath my feet. I wobble and sideways-leap, a manic hopscotcher, from one digi-plane to the next, deplatforming and replatforming, slacking to Zoom (cross-platform…

$199 RING DOOR VIEW CAM If you live in an apartment building or a condo, you probably don’t have a hardwired doorbell you can rip out and replace with a smart option. Good news then: Ring’s new battery-powered Door View Cam slots into any existing peephole for an easy fix to that dilemma. Call up the feed from the motion-detecting camera through your phone or any Alexa-enabled device with a screen, and use the two-way talk feature to tell strangers to buzz off. If you pay for a $30 yearly cloud-storage subscription, you can check out videoclips from the last 60 days—helpful if you want to sneak a peek at your teen’s comings and goings while you’re out of town or take a gander at who has been sniffing around…

Shelley Chang was working as a business analyst for a computer company in 2010 when she met Jason Ho through some mutual friends. Ho was tall and slender with a sly smile, and they hit it off right away. A computer programmer, Ho ran his own company from San Francisco. He also loved to travel. Less than a month after they met, Ho surprised Chang by buying a plane ticket to meet her in Taiwan, where she’d temporarily relocated. Soon they were talking about visiting Japan together for four weeks. Chang was a bit apprehensive; they didn’t know each other well. But she decided to take the gamble. Ho, as it turned out, had a very strict and peculiar itinerary planned. He’s fond of ramen dishes, and to fit as…

CAS9 It started with Streptococcus pyogenes. Seven years ago, the bug that causes strep throat, toxic shock syndrome, and flesh-eating disease supplied researchers with their first gene-snipping nuclease, Cas9. Though still widely used, Cas9 isn’t perfect. For one thing, it’s bulky. To get a nuclease to its target gene, you sometimes have to smuggle it across the cell border inside a virus. The larger the nuclease is, the less editing you can squeeze into a single trip. Another problem: S. pyogenes has afflicted humans for so long that many of us may carry an immunity to Cas9, making it an iffy editing tool. CAS12E The US Department of Energy’s Joint Genome Institute maintains a database of microbial DNA from various unsavory places, including a Superfund site in California and a…

What could go wrong? TO THE ANCIENT GREEKS, THE CHIMERA WAS a ferocious creature—part lion, part goat, and part snake. The first chimera that Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte ever created, in 1992, was considerably less intimidating: It consisted of an embryonic mouse limb grafted onto the wing of an embryonic chicken. Belmonte was a young scientist at the time, working in a lab in Heidelberg, Germany. He was transfixed by the mysteries of gene expression—the biological signals that govern how an animal develops—and the pure potential that lurked in embryonic cells. Take any vertebrate: a chicken, a pig, a human. At maturity, they are dramatically different organisms, but they start out nearly identical. Belmonte began to wonder: If a mouse limb could live on a chicken’s wing, what else might…

In October 1854, a government entomologist was inspecting some farmland outside the town of Ottawa, in northern Illinois, when he came upon a disturbing scene in a cabbage patch. The large outer leaves of the vegetables were “literally riddled with holes, more than half their substance being eaten away.” With each step he took around the ravaged cabbages, tiny swarms of little ash-gray moths rose from the ground and flitted away. This was, it appears, the first record in the United States of the diamondback moth, an invasive pest that in its larval form shows a fondness for cruciferous vegetables. By the late 1800s the moths were chewing through the leaves of cabbages, brussels sprouts, collards, and kale from Florida to Colorado. To fight this invasion, farmers started bombarding their…

In our March issue, WIRED senior maverick Kevin Kelly (not pictured above) imagined the coming hegemony of augmented reality, with virtual worlds layered upon the physical; Darren Loucaides explored what happens when techno-utopians actually run a country; and David Dobbs told the stories of hand transplant patients grappling with the procedure’s long-term toll. Readers debated whether our vision was clairvoyant or distorted. “IN MEDICINE, JUST BECAUSE SOMETHING CAN BE DONE DOESN‘T MEAN IT SHOULD BE DONE.”—Robert Weber via mail@WIRED.com RE:“RIGHT AWAY THEY WERE MINE” After she lost her hands, an intricate hand transplant technique aimed to make her whole again. Then came the side effects. “Thank you for this article. In 1971, my left arm was severed by an airplane propeller and then reattached by a surgical team in Los…

In old spy novels, when two secret agents need to communicate with each other out in the field, one of them often leaves a document in an assigned place—tucked in the hollow of a tree trunk or between the pages of a certain library book. Once the first agent has safely vacated the scene, the second one moves in to fetch it. ▪ This maneuver—called a dead drop—may seem straightforward. But if you think about it, there’s a serious hitch: Somehow, the location of the dead drop has to be prearranged. ▪ This isn’t just a problem with the genre conventions of spy thrillers. For thousands of years, this was, in fact, a fundamental flaw in human communication. Whether you were Caesar, Napoleon, or a spy using shortwave radio during…

These are the rules: Users of /r/aww aren’t allowed to post about dogs that are dying, or sick, or just back from the vet. No posts about cats just adopted off the street; no bird-with-an-injured-beak stories. Cheerful descriptions of animals, however, are very much on point. Accompanying an image of a huge dog in a car’s passenger seat: “This is Ben. He has a beard. And he is human sized. We get fun looks in traffic.” Next to an image of a cat under elaborate blankets: “Our cat is obsessed with blanket forts, so we made him this.” These standards of adorable positivity are important to me, because I’m one of the moderators of /r/aww, the cute animal subreddit. In case that seems trivial, allow me to remind you of…

AT AROUND 11:30 AM ON JULY 1, 2014, A SCIENTIST FROM THE FOOD AND DRUG ADMINISTRATION WENT INSIDE ROOM 3C16, A COLD-STORAGE AREA AT THE NATIONAL INSTITUTES OF HEALTH LABS IN BETHESDA, MARYLAND. IN BETHESDA, MARYLAND. THE FDA HAD BEEN using the space since the early 1990s to store samples for biological research but had been cleaning it out in preparation for a move to a nearby campus in Silver Spring. The scientist who entered saw 12 mysterious cardboard boxes on a crowded shelf in the far left corner of the storage space and pried one open to see what it contained. Inside, dozens of long vials were packed in rolls of white cotton and sealed with melted glass; many of the labels were worn to the point of illegibility.…

If your phone is ringing, there’s a near 50 percent chance it’s a robocall on the other end—and a 100 percent chance that you will be irritated if it is. Some 130 million robocalls are dialed each day. The first federal law against autodialed calls was enacted in 1991; limits and exceptions were patched in over time. Yet only a small fraction of robocallers are penalized. Why? Several reasons. Robocallers constantly change numbers, evading investigators. Enforcement is iffy. (As of April 2018, the Federal Trade Commission had fined telemarketers $1.5 billion for Do Not Call and robocalling violations combined, but collected only $122 million, or 8 percent.) The bottom line: Despite close to 4 million complaints a year, robocalls are on the rise. Here is a primer on some of…