Table of contents for January 2019 in WIRED

GOOD NEWS FOR obsessive symptom Googlers: There’s a new form of quick, cheap health care—no trip to the doctor required. Climbing insurance deductibles are fueling a boom in telemedicine—medical care by phone, online messaging, or video chat—particularly for life’s more awkward (and pharmaceutically lucrative) ailments. Within the past 15 months, men’s wellness startups Roman, Hims, and Keeps have emerged to offer virtual care for maladies like erectile dysfunction, premature ejaculation, and hair loss. ¶ After filling out an online questionnaire, users are connected with a licensed physician who consults via phone, messager, or video and can prescribe medication remotely. The meds are delivered to your door, often at a steep discount. Keeps provides generic Rogaine for $10 a month, compared with up to $29 at drugstores, while Roman offers generic…

MOST ELECTRONICS SUFFER a debilitating aquaphobia. At the littlest spillage—heaven forbid Dorothy’s bucket—of water, our wicked widgets shriek and melt. Microsoft, it would seem, missed the memo. Last June, the company installed a smallish data center on a patch of seabed just off the coast of Scotland’s Orkney Islands; around it, approximately 933,333 bucketfuls of brine circulate every hour. As David Wolpert, who studies the thermodynamics of computing systems, wrote in a recent blog post for Scientific American, “Many people have impugned the rationality.” The idea to submerge 864 servers in saltwater was, in fact, quite rational, the result of a five-year research project led by future-proofing engineers. Errant liquid might fritz your phone, but the slyer, far deadlier killer of technology is the opposing elemental force, fire. Nearly every…

Your phone is ruining your life. It’s nothing to be ashamed of, really. We’ve all become so absorbed in the blinking, bleeping monsters in our pockets that even the gadgetmakers have started dispensing salves for excessive phone use. One of their more out-there “solutions”: Start carrying two phones. There’s a certain counter intuitive logic at work—shouldn’t we have fewer phones? Maybe. But out of this existential panic, those who created our screen dependency and those who are committed to helping us fight it have come up with a tantalizing (and tantalizingly profitable) fix. It’s not about getting off your phone, per se. It’s about getting on a different one. This is the phone that will help you live your best life—a life in which Instagram, Slack, Facebook, and email are…

ANTARCTICA’S VAST THWAITES GLACIER IS COLLAPSING INTO THE SEA. NOW SCIENTISTS ARE RACING TO ANSWER TWO QUESTIONS: WHEN WILL IT TAKE THE PLUNGE? AND WHAT WILL IT TAKE TO SAVE OUR COASTAL CITIES? Science season in Antarctica begins in November, when noontime temperatures at McMurdo Station climb to a balmy 18 degrees Fahrenheit and the sun hangs in the sky all day and night. For a researcher traveling there from the United States, the route takes time as well as patience. The easiest way is to fly from Los Angeles to Christchurch, New Zealand—a journey of 17 hours, if you’re lucky—and then to McMurdo, a charmless cluster of buildings that houses most of the southern continent’s thousand or so seasonal residents and both of its ATMs. McMurdo isn’t the end…

“In the early 21st century, perhaps the most important artistic genre is science fiction … [It shapes] how people understand the most important technological, social, and economic developments of our time.”—Yuval Noah Harari, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century HALF OF BEING human, give or take, is the work we do. Pick up a shift. Care for the sick. Fix the plumbing. Audition for a part. Sometimes it’s all we think about—and fret about, especially as technology comes for our jobs. Just search “future of” and autocomplete does the rest: Do you mean “future of work”? Freaking Google, surfacing our collective anxieties yet again. Economists and organizational behaviorists and McKinsey consultants crunch the numbers and tell us, with great surety, how we’ll spend our days. The careers and callings of…

“Roughly half of Americans would feel better about the concept of a robot caregiver if there was a human operator who could remotely monitor its actions at all times.”—“Automation in Everyday Life,” Pew Research Center (2017) THE THING IS BEEPING at Brad. > Begin EOL protocol. OK? > Beep. > OK to begin? All he needs to do is accept. Click it and the action cascade will download to his tablet, setting into motion the procedure. End of Life. > Beep. The patient is a woman, maybe late forties, around the age of Brad’s mom. Her insurance covers only Basic Bedside Manner, which should, in theory, make it easier for Doctor Brad, because at the Basic level he doesn’t have to perform the enhanced EOL script with its awkward dialog,…

“When normalized on a per 1,000-short-ton basis, the estimates indicate that 1,000 tons of recycled material attributes 1.57 jobs, $76,030 in wages, and $14,101 in tax revenues.”—“Recycling Economic Information Report,” Environmental Protection Agency (2016) “JUST MOVE THEM,” Iggy said. He and Jia were climbing down a ladder, her first. Now she’d stopped. Iggy had a big bag over his shoulder and couldn’t fit into the narrow compartment until she got out of the way. Fighting back a gag, Jia extended her arm through a curtain of coils. They were warm and clammy. She squeezed through. Past the coils was a larger space, and the air was cooler. Iggy scrambled in behind her. “AJ showed you this?” she asked. Iggy put down the pack, put his hands on his knees. Breathed…

IN 1897, WILLIAM JAMES, the celebrity philosopher, was offered $400 to lecture at Harvard on the quaint subject of immortality. As a marquee speaker on the Gilded Age circuit, James could be selective about his gigs, and he almost declined. Realism had superseded romance in philosophy, and the keenest intellectuals now styled themselves as “cerebralistic materialists”—devotees of the idea that life ends when the brain’s activity does. If James was going to have to talk about angels and harps, even a decent fee would not be worth the scorn from colleagues. In the end James cashed the check and gave an exquisitely weird lecture, published as Human Immortality, which argued that while individual minds might perish, a collective “mother-sea” of consciousness lives forever. The lecture then took an abrupt turn.…

“KEEP COMING BACK to the mirror,” Armond said to me. “Keep crushing it.” He froze for a split second, then ghosted without saying goodbye. I was alone with my reflection, sweating, trying to decide whether “Keep coming back to the mirror” was encouraging, ominous, or oddly metaphysical. That’s what working out with this full-length, internet-connected mirror—simply called Mirror—is like. For $1,495 up front and a $39-per-month subscription fee, you can stream both live and on-demand classes like yoga, boxing, and cardio or barre workouts, all led by certified instructors like Armond. You simultaneously watch these instructors floating in space on the Mirror and assess your own form. They stand in some faraway studio, looking at your screen name and shouting instructions into a microphone. If wearable tech quantified fitness and…

1. For the time being, Thwaites is held in place by a bump in the sea-floor. Once it pulls off this so-called grounding line, it’ll begin to collapse more quickly. 2. Glaciologists have identified a second bump about 45 miles behind the current one. They call it the Ghost Ridge, and there’s hope it could significantly slow Thwaites’ decline. 3. Seismologists study the area under the glacier by setting off small explosive charges in the ice and listening for the reverberations. 4. A floating ice shelf defends Thwaites from the assaults of ocean currents. As it disintegrates, more and more of the glacier becomes vulnerable, and more icebergs end up in the sea.…

“When your robotic lover tells you that it loves you, should you believe it?”—“Robots, Love, and Sex: The Ethics of Building a Love Machine,” IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing (2012) LATE JUNE. SWELTERING, airless English summer heat. 4,165 days since the financial crash. 1,112 days since Charlie Barrett—described by everyone, including his mother, as a nice young man, considering—graduated with a degree in English, eyewatering debt, and a thundering case of impostor syndrome. And three days since the girl who made everything bearable, the girl who held his heart between her hands like an egg and hated it when he called her a girl, even though she was the only girl, The Girl—three days since she had told him to pack up his dignity and leave. It was two months…

“It seems like journalists are used to being in charge of editorial processes.”—“Algorithms for Journalism: The Future of News Work,” The Journal of Media Innovations (2017) NEWS BREAKS LIKE a rain cloud, or a daydream. Roy arrives at his desk just in time to claim the story: Rival militias started a gunfight at a federal water pipeline that they both wanted to steal from. Nine people dead, another 17 injured. Roy feels a bump of pleasure as he shifts from weary commuter to seasoned journalist, digging into the bare-bones wire-service report to turn it into an article, with quotes from law enforcement and details about both groups. (The Clean Hands Militia say they just want to be left alone inside their walled-off commune; the Big-Wheelers aim to destroy the government—and…

“Human enhancement with in-the-body technologies introduces new potential for both individual opportunity and individual exploitation.”—“Cyborgs, Robots and Society,” Technologies (2018) IT’S NOT LIKE I haven’t thought about killing the humans since I hacked my governor module. But then I started exploring the company servers and discovered hundreds of hours of downloadable entertainment media, and I figured, what’s the hurry? I can always kill the humans after the next series ends. Even the humans think about killing the humans, especially here. I hate mines, and mining, and humans who work in mining, and of all the stupid mines I can remember, I hate this stupid mine the most. But the humans hate it more. My risk-assessment module predicts a 53 percent chance of a human-on-human massacre before the end of the…

REMEMBER ALL THOSE classics you devoured in comp-lit class? Neither do we. Research shows that we retain an embarrassingly small sliver of what we read. In an effort to help college students boost that percentage, a team made up of a designer, a psychologist, and a behavioral economist at Australia’s RMIT University recently introduced a new typeface, Sans Forgetica, that uses clever tricks to lodge information in your brain. The font-makers drew on the psychological theory of “desirable difficulty”—that is, we learn better when we actively overcome an obstruction. (It’s why flash cards create stronger neural connections in the brain and are a better method for recalling facts than passively studying notes.) Sans Forgetica is purposefully hard to decipher, forcing the reader to focus. One study found that students recalled…

ANTARCTICA IS THE DRIEST, highest, windiest, and, of course, coldest continent. Since it’s nearly uninhabitable for humans, it’s also the cleanest. That makes it the perfect place to launch an odyssey aimed at persuading people to curb their plastic-pitching habits. ¶ In late November, Dutch couple Liesbeth and Edwinter Velde were preparing to set out on a 3,000-mile roadless trip across the world’s most treacherous landscape, from Union Glacier base camp to the South Pole and back. Their ride is a 52-foot-long, solar-powered snow rover partially 3D-printed from waste plastic. Neither traveler was an experienced engineer, but two years ago, starting with plastic from their trash bin and a commercial 3D printer, Edwin designed a lightweight, honeycomb-shaped block he dubbed the Hex-Core. He partnered with custom material makers DuFor and…

Panasonic Lumix DC-GX9 A smidge bulkier than the other models here, the GX9 offers added capability, like a 20.3-megapixel sensor and a full array of manual controls. Rich black-and-white film simulation modes and focusing features suited for astrophotography make it an alluring portal to artistic experimentation. It also plays nice with nearly any micro four-thirds lens. $1,000 (body only) Sony RX100 VI The most recent camera in Sony’s revered RX100 line is its best yet, with a massive 1-inch, 20-megapixel sensor that slurps up color and detail no smartphone camera can match. In an elegant touch, sliding the electronic viewfinder up and into position also powers on the camera, putting you in shooting mode with an easy flick of your thumb. $1,200 Ricoh GR III The GR III squeezes a…

1 Monoprice True Wireless Earphones The world is going wireless, but leaping into the cable-free future can be costly. The sound-to-price ratio on these Bluetooth buds is outstanding. They’re sweatproof and get up to four hours per charge. Between listening sessions, slip them into the compact charging case that holds 15 hours of revitalizing power. $50 2 Motorola Moto X4 You don’t have to fork over $1,000 to Cupertino for a sleek smartphone. The Android-powered Moto X4 is proof. The 5.2-inch LCD screen is vivid, with impressively deep blacks. It has an all-day battery, takes killer photos, can withstand a dunk in the toilet, and will work on all four major wireless carriers. $350 3 Amazon Echo Dot The latest Echo Dot is a two-for-one bargain. You get a smart Spotify-ready speaker with…

“Recent technological advances have led to speculation that smart contracts might largely, or entirely, displace the apparatus of contract law.”—“Contracts Ex Machina,” Duke Law Journal (2017) “IT’S 6:30 ALREADY, Katie,” the mousy man tells me. “How much longer to fix the contract?” “It’ll be done when it’s done,” I say, without taking my eyes off the lines of LegalEase on the screen. A shipment of drone parts from Busan to Boston should have been simple enough to arrange. One of the primary design goals behind LegalEase was to offer “a syntax that doesn’t frighten lawyers.” They’d write up a human-readable smart contract, which would then be compiled into byte code for execution on the Res Iudicata blockchain. But a lot of old-timers like Glenn never got the hang of the…

“The nature of these jobs, which often involve heavy physical demands and risk of injury … makes them difficult to fill and has led to concerns about an ongoing shortage in paid caregivers.”—“Automation in Everyday Life,” Pew Research Center BRIDIE HELD THE dropper centered over her left eye and couldn’t see it. She tried shifting it right. Better. But the sparkling whiteness of her blind spot had spread. Again. She needed to talk with her pharmacist. This prescription wasn’t working. She squeezed the dropper’s bulb anyway. After the medicine’s sting faded she ducked into her burnoose and stepped out onto the balcony. Across the street Lillian, her newest recruit, hung laundry on lines strung from porch roof and stair railings to branches of the high, dusty bushes that protected her…

A collaboration between WIRED and Epic Magazine. On the morning of September 15, 2007, station I08BO—an infrasound monitoring post for the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty near La Paz, Bolivia—picked up a series of atmospheric vibrations. It was an explosion at very high altitude, and there was something streaking across the sky, heading southwest at 27,000 mph. A few minutes later, at about 11:45 am, a brilliant fireball flashed over Carancas, a tiny village at 12,000 feet in Peru’s remote altiplano, a high plain bounded by the Andes. For those on the ground, this celestial visitor was the brightest thing anyone had ever seen in the sky. A local radio host witnessed the blaze descend behind a hill-top statue of Jesus and rushed to his station to announce the arrival of a…