WIREDNovember 2018的目錄

‘‘I’ve always been excited by space,” says Ian Allen, who photographed our cover story on Jeff Bezos’ company Blue Origin. Allen has shot several NASA landmarks in his career, but he’d never witnessed a rocket launch. “It was definitely fascinating. I didn’t realize how quickly the thing comes down and lands,” he says. His fellow spectators were also memorable. “It’s a crazy world they live in,” adds Allen, who, like Bezos, lives in the Seattle area. “The director Peter Berg was there, as was a 50-person film crew, and the crowd included an astronaut and a famous pilot.” Get a glimpse on page 54. When she began covering the 2016 presidential election for wired, Emma Grey Ellis dove into the internet’s darkest corners to report on the fake news and…

1. When turkeys strut, their leg muscles work as shock absorbers to boost energy efficiency. That gam action inspired a prosthetic exoskeleton for humans: The lightweight contraption is outfitted with a spring and clutch that take the impact off the user’s calf muscle. In experiments, a person wearing the braces while walking expended 10 percent less energy. 2. Though it has a brain, the lamprey—an eel-like beast—doesn’t need it to wiggle about the deep. Neurons along the creature’s spinal cord can act independently via signals called central pattern generators, or CPGs. A slithering machine inspired by the lamprey, the AmphiBot, has 10 body modules, each with its own onboard computer that mimics a CPG. The bot keeps swimming, undaunted, even after collisions. 3. Cockroaches can react in 1⁄50 of a…

People used to show up in plastic surgeons’ offices with photos of movie stars, asking for Angelina’s lips or Jon Hamm’s chin. Today they come with selfies, asking to look like themselves. Not the human selves that mock us all in fitting-room mirrors, of course, but the sparkling, digitally embellished versions that increasingly populate our social feeds. ¶ On platforms like Snapchat and Instagram, users now routinely deploy filters and tools like Facetune for selfie-improvement, fashioning reflections that better capture their true inner beauty. Swipe away acne or wrinkles. Swipe again for big soulful eyes, a thinner nose. You can even change the shape of your face. ¶ Such fixes used to be just for glamour shots of celebrities. But nowadays, with flawless skin and symmetrical faces all over social…

Big-name chefs and home cooks alike are embracing the mad science of fermentation’s funky flavors. While some parts of the world—particularly Asia—have rich histories of using fermentation, more people across the US are making their own kimchi and sauerkraut, brewing kombucha in their kitchens, and working fermentation into their everyday cooking. In the recently published book The Noma Guide to Fermentation, from the famous Copenhagen restaurant, chef René Redzepi and Noma’s fermentation lab director, David Zilber, have created an indispensable manual for home cooks and pro chefs interested in exploring this growing trend. Fermentation is the art of controlling bacteria, nurturing conditions that discourage bad bugs (think rot or even poison) while encouraging specific good ones that produce heady flavors and textures. Fermented foods are products of a happy, scientific…

IN THE SPRING of 2016, an artificial intelligence system called AlphaGo defeated a world champion Go player in a match at the Four Seasons hotel in Seoul. In the US, this momentous news required some unpacking. Most Americans were unfamiliar with Go, an ancient Asian game that involves placing black and white stones on a wooden board. And the technology that had emerged victorious was even more foreign: a form of AI called machine learning, which uses large data sets to train a computer to recognize patterns and make its own strategic choices. Still, the gist of the story was familiar enough. Computers had already mastered checkers and chess; now they had learned to dominate a still more complex game. Geeks cared, but most people didn’t. In the White House, Terah…

THE FIRST TIME Stephanie Dinkins met Bina48, in 2014, she worried the thing was dead. “She was turned off,” Dinkins says. Switched on, Bina48 whirred to life, 32 motors animating its facial expressions behind a layer of frubber. Dinkins caught the robot’s stare and knew she’d found her muse. Bina48 had been conceived several years earlier by Martine Rothblatt, the polymathic entrepreneur. Rothblatt fashioned the AI-powered bot in the likeness of her wife, Bina, training its speech patterns on a database of Bina-isms. The humanoid now sits on a table (bodiless, like a Roman bust) above a friend’s garage in Bristol, Vermont, forever conjuring the real Bina: brown eyes, brown skin, brown highlighted wig. In other words, Bina48 looks like a black woman—and that struck Dinkins, an art professor at…

Every single gosh-darn good-for-nothing day, some piece of “frictionless” “seamless” “user friendly” technology craps out on me. Touch ID fails—cool. Bluetooth can’t connect—awesome. If I’m on the road, Google Maps freezes at the most crucial turn. If I’m watching TV: “Sorry, we could not reach the Netflix service.” Are you sorry, Amazon “Dumpster” Fire TV? Remember that time I voice-searched “Jake Gyllenhaal movies” and you stopped working for two months? The worst part is, I tolerate all these glitches with an equanimity bordering on the psychopathic. Patiently, methodically, I back up my data and do a full-system reset; I run updates; I consult user manuals and message boards; I restart the system again—calm in the knowledge that I’ll succeed. Code is complex, I tell myself. These are magical devices. The…

CALL IT FRANCHISING 2.0. The tech industry is setting its sights on the little guy, looking to turn ambitious go-getters into small-business owners. Tech companies provide the tools and support; you supply services. ¶ Bedeviled by last-mile delivery costs, Amazon began enabling entrepreneurs to launch their own package-delivery hubs this summer. Starting at a relatively modest $10,000, “delivery service partners” can lease fleets of 20 to 40 Amazon-branded vans. (A KFC, by contrast, costs $1 million to open, plus a one-time $45,000 franchise fee.) The ecommerce giant negotiates deals on vehicles, uniforms, fuel, and insurance; the entrepreneurs hire and manage their own employees. Earnings are based on the number of Amazon vehicles leased, length of route, and number of successfully delivered packages. ¶ In August, Austin-based e-scooter startup Goat announced…

Good design is contemporary, relevant and conclusive says Stefan Diez, a German industrial designer who takes ideas and turns them into beautiful objects. “If an object or a design or a product has a strong idea, everything falls into place in a very natural way,” he says. If that object is a television, at its essence is simplicity of design, stunning colour and an experience that offers a portal to reality. Typically the centrepiece of a room, a television must fit seamlessly within its environment while producing a cinematic theatre. An aesthetic of minimalism is key here, but not in the traditional sense; it is about using furniture to focus a space on a particular aspect of life. “A good interior describes the priorities of your life without giving everything…

Born way back in the atomic age, super-slippery Teflon’s impervious chemistry has stuck around. POLYTETRAFLUOROETHYLENE will not dissolve in acetone or ether or concentrated sulfuric acid. When Roy Plunkett first found it coating some storage canisters in 1938, he tried to destroy the substance with just about every technique known to science. A young employee at DuPont, Plunkett had been hired to develop a new refrigerant. But when he cooled and compressed a gas he was testing, a waxy white powder unexpectedly formed—that stuff he couldn’t eradicate. The material was brought to the attention of US Army general Leslie Groves, director of the Manhattan Project, who commissioned DuPont to design a plant that used polytetrafluoroethylene seals and gaskets. (The noxious chemicals needed to produce weapons-grade uranium corroded virtually every other…

JEREMY SMITH IS standing alongside a flatscreen the size of a small dinner table, giving a demo of a new app. Wearing a KEEP AUSTIN BEAUTIFUL shirt and cargo shorts, he balances a laptop on his left palm while his right hand scrolls around a map of an Austin neighborhood. “You enter an address here in this lower bar and wait a few moments,” he tells the room, while typing awkwardly on his perched laptop. After a noticeable lag, 20 or so map pins appear on the screen, similar to what you see if you search for a taqueria on Yelp or want to rent one of the electric scooters that have recently taken over downtown Austin. “Hit the list icon in the upper right-hand corner and you’ll see a…

Kevin and Julia Garratt had spent nearly all of their adult lives in China. A devout Christian couple in their fifties with an entrepreneurial streak, they operated a café called Peter’s Coffee House, a popular destination in the city of Dandong, according to Trip-Advisor. Dandong is a sprawling border town that sits just across the Yalu River from North Korea. For tourists and expats, the Garratts’ coffee shop—just a short walk from the Sino-Korean Friendship Bridge—was a hub of Western conversation and comfort food. “After time in North Korea a decent cup of coffee was one of those things I was really looking forward to,” one Australian tourist wrote in early 2014. “Peter’s was a perfect place.” The Garratts had come to China from Canada in the 1980s as English…

THE VIDEOGAMES OF Tetsuya Mizuguchi have chased a singular, mystical effect—one the celebrated designer first experienced 30 years ago, in 1988, when he wandered into an arcade in Tokyo. A young college student at the time, Mizuguchi enjoyed the shooters and racing games but was mesmerized by a colorful, musical waterfall of 2-D blocks. “I put many coins into that machine,” Mizuguchi remembers. “It was such elegant perfection.” ¶ Tetris would not only become one of the most enduring entertainments of the age, it would also inspire much of Mizuguchi’s career, leading to a trilogy of brain-entrancing games: 2001’s Rez sent players flying through spacey wireframe landscapes; his 2004 follow-up, Lumines, paired falling shapes with the time-based elements of a rhythm game; Child of Eden, which came out in 2011, turned…

BEHOLD THE RAINBOW INNARDS of a mouse, the first creature to be x-rayed in 3-D color. Traditionally, you’d see only bone illumined among the fleshy bits. But the MARS scanner, armed with particle-detecting tech used in CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, counts individual photons bouncing through the body, tracking their energy levels to calculate the varying densities of bones and tissues. AI-powered processors then render the various viscera in whatever colors Phil and Anthony Butler prefer. From their base on New Zealand’s South Island, the father-and-son scientists spent years collaborating with CERN on techniques for sharpening medical imaging, and in 2007 they scanned their first subject, an apple from lunch, followed by wisdom teeth, Antarctic clams, mice, and, earlier this year, Phil’s wrists and ankles—MARS’ debut shots of a live human.…

MAKING COFFEE IS a science, so brew it in something that looks like it’s on loan from a chem lab. Siphons—also called vacuum pots—traditionally use butane heat sources. Bodum’s Mocca instead uses the red-hot glow of a 430-watt halogen Beam Heater to bring the water to just below boiling. Pressure from the heat forces the liquid up into the hopper, where it mingles with the grounds. Switch the heater off after four minutes, and the brewed coffee passes through a filter and back into the globe. The result is a well-rounded brew with the toastiness of French press, minus the grit. Like your cuppa cooler? Use the control knob to fine-tune the temperature you desire. After brewing, the heater can also be used to keep the coffee warm above its…

After using an app-powered sous vide wand to cook your Thanksgiving turkey in a temperature-controlled bath, you’ll never go back to roasting. 1 ChefSteps Joule The drawer-friendly Joule is our top pick. Its magnetic foot easily affixes to the bottom of a pot for secure sous-viding, and its 1,100-watt heating element is the best in its class. The app’s step-by-step recipes help you adjust cooking times based on the thickness of your cuts of meat. One downside: No on-device display means you have to use an app to control the wand. $199 2 Anova Precision Cooker 4.0 Connect this 900-watt wand to your smartphone over Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, and you can start dinner from the living room. Anova’s app contains over 1,000 recipes, including dozens of ways to cook beef.…

Dyson Since 2011, British inventor James Dyson has been accusing China of hacking the trade secrets of his eponymous fan and vacuum empire. DuPont In 2014, a man in California was convicted of stealing DuPont’s formula for titanium dioxide—a white pigment used in everything from paint to Oreos—on behalf of the Chinese government. American Superconductor This maker of wind turbines lost more than a billion dollars after its Chinese partner company, Sinovel, used a spy to steal source codes for the machines. Westinghouse In 2010, while Westinghouse was building a few power plants in China, a hacker stole specs for how the company designs and routes the pipes running through its generation facilities. Military Projects In addition to helping Chinese hackers steal plans for the C-17, Chinese-Canadian businessman Su Bin…