Table of contents for Jun-15 in WIRED

WEB Dry Spell California is in the midst of a historic drought, and its implications stretch like tributaries—across not just the Golden State but the entire US. WIRED’s ongoing drought coverage, led by science writer Nick Stockton (@stocktonsays), explores the water crisis, from causes to solutions. ON THE WEB: www.WIRED.com/tag/california-drought Game On Gamers descend on Los Angeles in June for the annual E3 show. This year’s blockbuster questions: Will Halo 5 be as impressive as Microsoft hopes? What will save Sony’s holiday season now that Uncharted 4 is delayed until 2016? Follow WIRED’s Chris Kohler (@kobunheat) on Twitter, and track the latest at E3 on WIRED.com. ON THE WEB: www.WIRED.com/entertainment EMAIL Subscribe to our newsletter. Don’t miss out on the day’s biggest news. Sign up for WIRED’s email newsletter and…

PITY THE OWNERS OF WICKED STRONG. The Thoroughbred drew a sucky gate position and finished fourth in the 2014 Kentucky Derby, then tied with California Chrome for fourth place in the Belmont Stakes. No Triple Crown for him! On the other hand, his breeders would have paid a mere $35,000 for his mama to have a date with Hard Spun, his papa—a steal when you consider that stud fees can climb into the six-figure range. When superstud Tapit taps that, for example, he commands $300,000, and you can see why people pony up: His offspring earned a total of nearly $17 million in 2014. For bargain hunters, City Zip’s the sire to hire—his fee is a steal at only $40,000, but his offspring brought in a total of $11 million…

While services like Apple Pay aim to obsolescencize your credit card, another piece of plastic should start worrying about its home in your billfold: the driver’s license. In June, Iowa is expected to become the first state to test a digital license accessed via smartphone. ¶ Think back to your last airport adventure. Chances are you checked in for your flight using a boarding pass on your phone. Every day, TSA agents scan the licenses and passports of 1.8 million travelers using a device called an E-CAT, made by a company called MorphoTrust— which not coincidentally also makes hard-copy licenses for 42 states, including Iowa. So put all that tech together (as MorphoTrust has) and you have a digital driver’s license, complete with authentication and real-time updates. ¶ “The license…

IT’S HARD TO GET a good night’s sleep in orbit. Astronauts on the International Space Station see a sunrise every 90 minutes or so, which leads to some seriously messed-up internal clocks. Sleeping pills help a bit, but now scientists think they can game circadian rhythms more naturally—and effectively—with new light bulbs. ¶ Sleep is regulated in part by melatonin, a hormone the body produces when the eye detects darkness. “Light is the most important cue for resetting the clock,” neuroscientist Steven Lockley says. In a replica of the ISS crew quarters, photobiologists installed color- and brightness-adjustable LEDs, and volunteers came in for light baths at different intensities. The results: The lower the light, the more melatonin in volunteers’ blood, potentially improving their sleep. ¶ Now researchers are testing how…

WHILE IN A RECORDING session for the latest season of NBC’s Hannibal, composer Brian Reitzell (pictured) was unsatisfied with a scene in which a teacup shatters, then rewinds back together. The key, it turned out, wasn’t your average swell of strings. “I needed to break two sake bottles to add texture,” he says, “and then I swirled around chunks of broken glass in a bucket.” For someone who frequently maxes out Pro Tools with 256 distinct tracks of sound, it’s just another day at the office. ¶ Reitzell’s eerie, ever-present soundtrack is as much a part of the show’s success as Mads Mikkelsen’s disquieting performance as Hannibal Lecter. Most series have occasional light scoring accompanied by recognizable songs; Hannibal is nearly wall-to-wall ambient compositions. Reitzell, 49, who has also worked…

My wife makes fun of me for carrying the Roomba up to my home office during the day, but he keeps me company. When he’s not feeling well, I suffer along with him. When his infrared receiver broke, the poor little guy went blind. He was just crashing around the living room, unable to see the IR “gates” we had set up. He tried to escape out the back door. And then, saddest of all, he couldn’t find his way back to the dock and eventually ran out of juice just a few feet from home. —as told to senior editor Sarah Fallon, the wife…

Milwaukee M18 ½-Inch Compact Brushless Drill BEST FOR: Wellversed remodelers who require power and versatility With the M18’s two speed transmission and 18 clutch settings, you can go from sinking deck screws to mounting drywall in seconds. It has plenty of torque for drilling through rugged materials like metal, and the ½-inch all-metal chuck accommodates a wide variety of bit sizes. An efficient brushless motor will let you drill for days without recharging. $199 Black & Decker 20V Max Lithium Cordless Drill With AutoSense BEST FOR: Budding Bob Vilas who strip too many screws A rare blend of smarts and power makes this 2.7-pound rig the perfect drill for aspiring DIYers. In lieu of a standard manual clutch, an onboard sensor adjusts the torque and signals the motor to stop…

I used to own a pickup—a Toyota SR5 from the early ’90s, back when you could still get something smaller than the Leviathans stalking around new-car lots today. While I was out of town, I lent the truck to my friend Jonny. He crashed it into a taxi while I was on my first date with the woman I would marry a couple of years later. ¶ The insurance company totaled it, and I bought the most similar thing I could afford: an old SUV with a rusty bumper. It did what I needed. You could jam a sheet of plywood in the back, and its unfussy interior seemed impervious to the grime-caked tools I regularly threw into it. The lady and I took our first road trip in that…

340,000 likes on Facebook seat more than 47,500 tweets 1.55 million followers on Twitter 49,000 followers on Instagram When a blizzard dumped 2 feet of snow on Newark, New Jersey, just after Christmas in 2010, Cory Booker, who was then mayor, carefully monitored the storm from his Twitter account. He responded to tweets from residents, and he mobilized city workers. And when resident Linda H. (@msxmasbaby) tweeted, “Is there NE city volunteers 2 dig some1 out? I’m going 2 have medical procedure done,” he showed up with a shovel. That’s the way Booker rolls. He was early to social media and has made prolific use of it (47,500 tweets and counting) to connect with voters. So when he arrived in the US Senate in 2013, he was dismayed to discover just how out…

AQUACULTURE IS FAST BECOMING the main way that humans get their seafood fix. But fish aren’t cattle; they don’t turn passive when cooped up. So Trine Thorvaldsen is studying how to keep farmed fish from going on the lam. A labor health and safety expert, Thorvaldsen has been working for a Norwegian research institute, trying to figure out why her country loses around 200,000 captive salmon per year. (These escapees can wreak havoc on their wild brethren, polluting gene pools and spreading pathogens.) Her discovery: Often it’s not the fault of the increasingly complicated fish-farming gear but the people using it. “There was one instance in which fish were being pumped from one cage to another, but the workers didn’t realize there was no net to keep them,” Thorvaldsen says;…

LIGHTNING, FOR OBVIOUS reasons, is hard to study. But Martin Uman and a team of scientists at the University of Florida have a rig that enables them to make their own bolts of electrical power on demand. Their method: Head for a storm and send up a rocket on a string. ¶ To trigger the lightning bolts, Uman and company attach 4-foot-tall hobby rockets to a 2,300-foot spool of Kevlar-covered copper wire connected to a strike rod—or whatever they want the lightning to hit. As the rockets launch toward the thunderstorm, the wire unspools and a positive electrical discharge radiates 3 to 6 miles upward beyond the wire in a jerky zigzag. ¶ Once the positive current makes it to the clouds, it stops flowing for an instant. Then a…

senolytics n. pl. / 'sē-n -'li-tiks / A new class of antiaging drugs. Senolytics selectively kill off senescent cells, which naturally accumulate with age and contribute to the aging process by excreting harmful proteins. Elderly mice treated with senolytics show improved cardiovascular function and bone strength. crabot n. / 'kra-'bat / A robotic crane that reconfigures modular office buildings on demand. Proposed by Google for the company’s new Mountain View campus, crabots will make architecture as flexible as office furniture, allowing it to morph as business opportunities change. Orbis spike n. / ' r-bis 'spīk / The point in time when humans first dominated the planet, proposed as a “golden spike” in the geological record. The Orbis spike— orbis means “world” in Latin—occurred in 1610, when New World colonization caused…

JOHN DOERR WAS VISIBLY TENSE. The 63-year-old billionaire venture capitalist probably never imagined he would be sitting in a witness stand facing down the woman he once thought of as his surrogate daughter. The longtime king of Silicon Valley—seats on 80 boards, lead investor in Google, Amazon, and Netscape—was there to defend his firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, against charges of gender discrimination brought by onetime protégé Ellen Pao. Doerr argued vehemently that he supported women in his industry. ¶ Then Pao’s attorney played an audioclip of Doerr speaking onstage in 2008 in front of hundreds of fellow venture capitalists. The lighter voice of a less troubled man filled the courtroom. If you look at the founders of Google or Amazon or Netscape, Doerr’s recorded voice said, “they all…

1 Heil Sound PL2T Topless Boom Mount A silent boom is important when you’re tweaking its position. The Heil is as quiet as they come. It supports the heaviest of microphones, uses internal springs for effortless adjustment, and has a hollow channel to hide your mic cable and calm your OCD beast within. $120 2 Sony MDR7506 Professional Headphones Regular headphones for listening to music can color the sound—exactly what you don’t want when recording and editing. Your goal is accurate audio reproduction, and the MDR7506s deliver like no other at this price. You’ll appreciate their light weight and pro style too. $130 3 Shure SM7B Vocal Microphone A good mic will capture your dulcet tones while rejecting background noise and forgiving your less-thanperfect technique. Shure’s SM7B—the long-running studio champ—has…

Friends. Scandal. Desperate Housewives. These are the weapons in a fight against oppression. For April’s cover story (“Flash Mob”), senior writer Andy Greenberg went underground with the dissident groups trying to overthrow North Korea’s totalitarian government. Their strategy: Smuggle in USB drives loaded with Western media. Kang Chol-hwan, the defector in charge of the North Korea Strategy Center, believes this effort to introduce North Koreans to the outside world could help free the country within a decade. So the next time you nod off to a rerun of some cheesy American sitcom—i.e., tonight—remember that, halfway around the globe, that same show might be powering a revolution. RE: “FLASH MOB” “I JUST ORDERED KANG CHOLHWAN’S MEMOIR,THE AQUARIUMS OF PYONGYANG, FROM THE LIBRARY.” Disco Dream on WIRED.com RE: “LOST IN SPACE”: WILL…

POPULATION OF PARIS: 2,249,975 IN 2014 // 29.3 MILLION PEOPLE VISITED PARIS IN 2013 // NEARLY 1 IN 5 JOBS IN THE CITY ARE IN THE TOURISM INDUSTRY // AMERICANS ARE THE BIGGEST FOREIGN TOURIST GROUP, WITH MORE THAN 1.6 MILLION HOTEL CHECK-INS IN 2013 // THE EIFFEL TOWER WEIGHS 10,100 TONS PARIS IS HOME TO 143 MUSEUMS // THE LOUVRE, OPENED IN 1793, RECEIVES 10 MILLION ANNUAL VISITORS “Théâtre du Châtelet is one of Paris’ major cultural spots, with its original 19th-century auditorium. It offers an eclectic mix of performances, ranging from vocaloid (computerized) opera to ballet.” —Yves Guillemot, CEO and cofounder of videogame company Ubisoft, based outside Paris MUSEUMS AND MICHELIN-rated restaurants fill Paris like crème in a profiterole, but in June the City of Light boasts of…

MORE THAN 200 MILLION PEOPLE on the planet are subservient to the same invisible overlord: their blood glucose. High, low, just right? For many of these diabetics, it’s a medical Goldilocks game that entails four or more blood-test finger pricks a day and a jab in the thigh with a needle full of insulin at mealtimes. But new tech heading to market could ameliorate this bloody awful mess. Inhaled Insulin Huffing insulin is better than shooting insulin: Patients use a pipelike device from Afrezza to inhale a microfine insulin powder. Availability: It’s on the market now. One Drop Glucose Meter Razorfish cofounder Jeff Dachis started One Drop to redesign what he calls “one of the most unloved products on the planet.” Now you’ll feel like Jony Ive when you check…

In the most automated country on Earth, Tomotaka Takahashi and his army of cute yet cutting-edge humanoids are supercharging the robotics industry. Since he founded Tokyo-based studio Robo Garage in 2003, his tiny creations (usually around a foot tall) have climbed a 1,700-foot cliff in the Grand Canyon, scuttled 300 miles from Tokyo to Kyoto, and been launched to the International Space Station to study how bots can help humans endure isolation. When Takahashi was in elementary school, he fell in love with the classic Astro Boy manga. “At that time, I thought about becoming a robot-building scientist,” he says. Diminutive and doe-eyed, his devices’ kawaii look is intentional. Takahashi thinks the more approachable a machine looks, the more people will want to interact with it. His next project is…

THE TOOLBOXES of pro bike mechanics are a thrilling glimpse into a world of organization and obsessiveness. I work on my own bikes, but I don’t have the spectrum of perfectly arranged tools a professional uses to keep riders tearing along the race route at top speed. What I do have is the same set of stunning Allen wrenches that many ProTour mechanics rely on—these USAG T-handle hex keys. The precisely machined ends keep fragile bolts from rounding off, and the USAGs have a magical balance that shows how thoughtfully each one was designed. I can’t climb like a true contender, but at least I can work on my ride with the same tools.…

IN 1943, Vesta Stoudt had a job in a munitions factory where ammo cases were sealed with paper tape and melted wax. Worried the cases were too hard to open on the battlefield, Stoudt proposed a fix: Use waterproof cloth tape instead. Johnson & Johnson adapted surgical adhesive tapes to Stoudt’s specifications, and soldiers eventually repurposed the stuff for tent and boot repairs (they dubbed it 100-mph tape because it could hold together a speeding jeep). After the war, contractors employed it to hold together heating vents, and it came to be known as duct tape. But that was just the start. The combination of materials—a moisture-resistant layer of polyethylene, a strength-giving cloth mesh, and a sticky, rubber-based adhesive—have made duct tape the ultimate DIY product. It can fix a…