Indholdsfortegnelse for August 2017 i WIRED

WHEN CUBAN AMERICAN photographer Lisette Poole was tasked with capturing Havana residents who are hacking their way around their country’s lack of internet infrastructure (“Viva el Internet,” page 68), she knew what her subjects were going through. The Bay Area native, who has been living and working in Cuba since 2014, says that when it comes to filing assignments or catching up on email, she has to vie for the same limited public Wi-Fi as everyone else. “It totally changes the pace of my workday,” says Poole, who doesn’t have home internet access. “Just getting basic things done, getting in touch with people, can be really tricky.” Her still untitled book, documenting the last days of the “wet foot, dry foot” migration policy, comes out in 2018. Chat Session In…

Having nearly run out of eyerolling Avengers conjoinings and bastardized reboots, Hollywood execs have landed on an even lazier way to sell movie tickets: 3-D releases of beloved classics. The latest victim of this desecration? Terminator 2. Twenty-six years since Schwarz enegger launched his motor cycle off a culvert wall and into our hearts, the ultimate action flick is back in multiplexes, now promising three dimensions of taut Terminator flesh. But T2 won’t be the good kind of 3-D. That would require specialized cameras that didn’t exist in the ’90s—which James Cameron, of all people, should know, since he had to invent them to make Avatar. (Hasta la vista, integrity.) Yeah, maybe he’ll make that semi look like it’s barreling right at you, man, so shelling out a bajillion bucks…

HEY, MAN,” says the officer sauntering up to your car. The nonchalant greeting might seem insignificant—but it’s not. If you’re white, that cop is statistically more likely to lead with “Hello, sir.” Jennifer Eberhardt, a social psychologist at Stanford University, heads a team of computational linguists, engineers, and computer scientists that is developing speech- recognition and transcript-analysis software for policing. Using machine intelligence, the system scans transcripts from body-camera footage to recognize patterns of racial disparity. Eberhardt refined her computational tools over a twoyear study of the Oakland Police Department, scrutinizing more than 36,000 statements from traffic stops. The resulting data found that officers were more likely to ask questions of black drivers, less likely to state a reason for pulling them over, and less likely to use respectful language.…

MEET MARK. At 16 feet tall and 12 tons, Mark was built by Gui Cavalcanti and Matt Oehrlein to do one thing: destroy other machines. The two engineers are the founders of MegaBots, a startup almost as absurd as it is destructive. The company plans to stage bouts between piloted death mechs in an international fighting-robot league that promises to be a sort of Monster Trucks meets Pacific Rim. ¦ This iron giant (official name: Mk. III) is a metallic menace. “We’re designing robots to be badass and entertaining,” says Mega- Bots CEO and Boston Dynamics alum Cavalcanti. “Oh, and we would like to not die in the robot.” The first fight, between Mark and a mech named Kuratas, built by Japan’s Suidobashi Heavy Industry, is slated for late August…

THERE’S THE MARVEL UNIVERSE, and then there’s the Larval Universe, and the star of the latter is the black soldier fly. In its squirmy maggot phase, it feasts on our messes—and can in turn be feasted on by farmraised fish and fowl. Lucky grubs that reach winged adulthood live only a week, spending that time so frantically looking for sex that they don’t eat, sting, or bite. A true superhero, in other words, that sustainabilityconscious organizations are now eager to exploit. It Eats Anything Aiming to reinvent the toilet, sanitation company The BioCycle is using black soldier maggots to convert waste into products like biodiesel. Meanwhile, EnviroFlight feeds leftovers from brewing and ethanol production to larvae, whose poop makes a lovely food for prawns. It Eats Quickly Composting is great,…

DON’T GUNK UP your artfully appointed living room with artlessly boxy speakers. The Danes at Bang & Olufsen have designed a sonic solution for you. The wall-mounted BeoSound Shape is assembled from three flavors of hexagonal tiles: speakers, amplifiers, and echoabsorbing noise dampers. Mix and match the modules to build a unique array that's ideal for your dwelling, then select a color scheme that matches your Mondrian. The modules all connect to a brain called the Core, and its algorithm spreads the signal to the speakers. By ditching the typical left-right stereo arrangement, it transforms every seat in the room into a sweet spot. So relax, enjoy the tunes, and gaze at your personal sound sculpture $4,025 and up…

1 Revo SuperConnect BEST FOR: Multicultural dabblers It may look like a ’60s relic, but the Revo’s performance is anything but retro. An excellent wireless speaker pack aged with the usual streaming goodies (Spotify Connect, Bluetooth, DLNA), the SuperConnect can also quickly access more than 31,000 internet radio stations. From Brussels boogie to Saigon psych, the selection is staggering. And loud: The 3.5-inch speaker pumps out some serious dBs. 1 $400 2 Tivoli Audio Model One Digital BEST FOR: Wholehouse broadcasters Tivoli’s first woodbedecked table radio arrived back in 2001, and it was a hit with consumers and critics. Now, the beloved Model One has been fully ushered into the streaming age. In addition to pulling in terrestrial FM signals, this 9-inch boom box can stream TuneIn, Spotify, Tidal, or…

THE FIRST VOICE YOU HEAR ON THE RECORDING IS MINE. “HERE WE ARE,” I SAY. MY TONE IS CHEERFUL, BUT A CATCH IN MY THROAT BETRAYS HOW NERVOUS I AM. THEN, A LITTLE GRANDLY, I PRONOUNCE MY FATHER’S NAME: “JOHN JAMES VLAHOS.” “Esquire,” a second voice on the recording chimes in, and this one word—delivered as a winking parody of lawyerly pomposity—immediately puts me more at ease. The speaker is my dad. We are sitting across from each other in my parents’ bedroom, him in a rose-colored armchair and me in a desk chair. It’s the same room where, decades ago, he calmly forgave me after I confessed that I’d driven the family station wagon through a garage door. Now it’s May 2016, he is 80 years old, and I…

GOOD THINGS really do take time. Like Apple’s new campus: Thirteen years after Steve Jobs and Jony Ive first discussed the future headquarters, and eight years after architect Norman Foster drew up sketches, the spaceship-like building became reality. In June, writer Steven Levy gave readers an exclusive look at a unique company’s unique building. Apple is one-of-a-kind, but plenty of tech fifirms in other parts of the country have Apple-ish aspirations, as Vauhini Vara writes in “Silicon Valley, USA.” They may not have the name recognition of their West Coast counterparts, but they’re creating their own niche ecosystems—no jaw-dropping buildings needed. Re: “One More Thing” “THIS IS ARGUABLY ONE OF THE BEST-WRITTEN ARTICLES ABOUT APPLE SINCE JOBS DIED.” Michael on wired.com “That cover photo’s got Dan Winters written all over…

BACK IN THE DAY, advertisers would surmise your desires from your Google searches and social media posts. Now you betray your feelings not just with your fingers but with the very beating of your heart. Hundreds of brands, from Honda to Microsoft, are investing in so-called emotion AI: mood-ring-esque tech that purports to track your body’s subtle cues to assess—and often profit from—your headspace. Here’s how those biometric tells reveal your state of mind. Facial Muscles Computers read faces the same way humans do: by absorbing a vast range of expressions and interpreting their subtle differences. Emotiontracking company Affectiva analyzed more than 5 million faces in 75 countries to develop the facial recognition software being deployed by behemoths like Coca- Cola and CBS in market testing. Brainwaves Electroencephalograms (EEGs) are…

June 1984 Japanese manga series Dr. Slump debuts Poop-Boy, a chattering pile whose coiled design will influence the future soft-serve emoji. September 2000 Telecom company KDDI launches the first unchi emoji—Japanese for poop. October 2008 Google introduces an animated load orbited by flies for Japanese webmail users. Poo: big in Japan. April 2015 Software company SwiftKey reports that Canadians deploy the ordurous emoji more than anybody else. December 2015 The emoji’s popularity is explosive; Google trades its fly-swarmed turd for the more approachable grinning swirl. November 2016 An election year splash: Pranksters plop a beaming poop emoji onto Trump’s campaign website. January 2017 Sony announces Sir Patrick Poo-ert, err, Stewart as Emoji’s dark horse. Director Tony Leondis says he sought “the perfect upper-crust gentleman.” July 2017 The Emoji Movie premieres…

1 Braven 405 If your Jacuzzi parties last all day and night, Braven’s 405 is your best bet. It’s an enduro-DJ with 24 hours of battery life—almost enough to play every Prince album. Tip it back on the handy kickstand to shoot the good vibes all the way up to the balcony. Yes, it gets loud enough to project that far. $80 2 UE Wonderboom The audio that comes out of the Wonderboom is as plump as the speaker itself. The 10-hour battery provides enough juice for long dog-day afternoons. It’s also super-totable: The elastic loop means you can carabiner it to your pack or zip-tie it to your handlebars. And since it floats, you don’t have to worry about dropping it into the drink—or the punch bowl. $100 3…

THE COMPLEX WORK of composer Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith defies expectations. Her technique of blending synthesizers, acoustic instruments, and electronicsounding human voices has made the 30-year-old musician a star among the next generation of post–New Age synthesists. This aural alchemy—including the recordings for her upcoming release, The Kid—is composed and created in a tiny 10- by 20-foot garage located outside of LA. Smith calls it her “sound sculpture studio,” but it’s really a construction site: a place where waveforms are layered like bricks to build towering walls of sound. — 1 From Russia With Filters You’ve never heard of Gorbachev-era Russian synths? The Polivoks (top) is one particularly crude example that some find tricky to play. On the plus side, its “dual voice” construction lets you play two notes at once,…

Ambitious? Absolutely. Possible? Maybe. here’s some free advice: Don’t try to break into Andy Rubin’s house. As soon as your car turns into the driveway at his sprawling pad in the Silicon Valley hills, a camera will snap a photo of your vehicle, run it through computer-vision software to extract the plate number, and file it into a database. Rubin’s system can be set to text him every time a certain car shows up or to let specific vehicles through the gate. Thirty-odd other cameras survey almost every corner of the property, and Rubin can pull them up in a web browser, watching the realtime grid like Lucius Fox surveying Gotham from the Batcave. If by some miracle you were to make it all the way to the front door,…

THE WAY WE RESPOND TO AUTOMATION DEPENDS ON WHAT WE DECIDE IT MEANS TO BE A MAN, OR A WOMAN. ROBOTS ARE COMING for our jobs—but not all of our jobs. They’re coming, in ever increasing numbers, for a certain kind of work. For farm and factory labor. For construction. For haulage. In other words, bluecollar jobs traditionally done by men. ¶ This is why automation is so much more than an economic problem. It is a cultural problem, an identity problem, and—critically—a gender problem. Millions of men around the world are staring into the lacquered teeth of obsolescence, terrified of losing not only their security but also their source of meaning and dignity in a world that tells them that if they’re not rich, they’d better be doing something…

sex czar n. / 'seks 'zär / A new government post in Spain charged with stepping up procreation. The country’s birth rate has fallen due to economic stagnation—many Spaniards can no longer afford to raise a family. The appointment gives new meaning to the term “stimulus package.” ensilication n. / en- ' si-li-'k?-shen / Preserving vaccines without refrigeration by encasing the antigens in silica, the precursor of glass. consensual telepathy n. Engaging in thought-mingling with another person via neural implants. It’s the latest fever dream of Elone.” ensilication n. / en- ' si-li-'k?-shen / Preserving vaccines without refrigeration by encasing the antigens in silica, the precursor of glass. consensual telepathy n. Engaging in thought-mingling with another person via neural implants. It’s the latest fever dream of Elon Musk, whose Neuralink…

I CLAMBERED OUT of a speedboat onto a tiny Indonesian island in the Halmahera Sea. It had taken three days of island hopping in March 2016 to find this sandy stretch of Pulau Plum, where I set up my tripod for an unobstructed view of the horizon. The sky was obscured by clouds—a bad sign, since I was there to photograph my sixth total solar eclipse. As a filmmaker, I travel the world chasing these spectacles, in which the moon passes between the Earth and the sun, fleetingly covering it. The sand cooled and the temperature dropped as planet, satellite, and star aligned. Amid the clouds, the jet-black pearl of the moon was surrounded by fiery flashes from the chromosphere, an inner layer of atmosphere at the edge of the…

THE NEW GOP REGIME looks to be catastrophic for science: The first Trump budget proposed slashing funding on everything from ocean research to satellites. And work on climate science? “We consider that to be a waste of your money,” Trump’s budget director said. Science is under attack; there’s no other way to put it. Apart from marching in the streets and waving signs, what can scientists do? ¶ Run for office. The country desperately needs more egghead lawmakers. Right now, Capitol Hill has almost none. The House and Senate are acrawl with lawyers, bankers, and businesspeople but somehow manage to repel people trained in the process of gathering data and testing hypotheses in order to better understand reality. ¶ Yet, my God—aren’t those precisely the skills you want in today’s…

1 Ernie Ball Music Man St. Vincent Signature Guitar Designed by Annie Clark herself, this mahogany guitar is one versatile ax. The trio of DiMarzio mini humbuckers can be played in five configurations, offering bite and warmth in equal measure. The tremolo adds soulful warbles to your solos. $2,099 2 George L’s Guitar Cable Your cable has two jobs: Don’t screw up the sound, and don’t fall apart. Running 20 feet (or longer, if you need it), George’s cables are sturdily built with nickel, brass, or gold plugs and offer dead-quiet, interference-free sound. Choose a bright color to stand out from the rest of your band. $48 and up 3 IK Multimedia iRig 2 HD This simple adapter connects your guitar directly to your iPhone. The latest model has an…

ON MARCH 13, 2004, a gaggle of engineers and a few thousand spectators congregated outside a California dive bar to watch 15 self-driving cars speed across the Mojave Desert in the first-ever Darpa Grand Challenge. (That’s the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon’s skunkworks arm.) Before the start of the race, which marked the first big push toward a fully autonomous vehicle, the grounds surrounding the bar teemed with sweaty, stressed, sleep-deprived geeks, desperately tinkering with their motley assortment of driver less Frankencars: SUVs, dune buggies, monster trucks, even a motorcycle. After the race, they left behind a vehicular graveyard littered with smashed fence posts, messes of barbed wire, and at least one empty fire extinguisher. ¦ What happened in between—the rush out of the starter gate, the switchbacks…