Indholdsfortegnelse for April 2022 i WIRED

$20M → Amount that the Russian cybercrime organization Trickbot—notorious for targeting hospitals and health care providers—invested in its own infrastructure and growth in 2021. 18K → Number of empty flights that Lufthansa expected to fly this winter simply to maintain takeoff and landing rights at European airports amid the pandemic. 40% → Percentage of food grown worldwide that goes to waste—about 2.5 billion tons a year. 65K → Number of satellites that are expected to be orbiting Earth a few years from now, making up about one in 10 lights visible in the night sky.…

I’m kind of an anxious, obsessive texter. I never quite know what to say, but the worst is when I see someone typing—in iMessage, in Slack, whatever—and then they stop typing. And ultimately send nothing! What were they going to say? Am I allowed to ask? Surely I’m allowed to ask.—NERVOUS ENERGY Dear Nervous, You’re certainly not alone in dreading this quirk of digital communication. The ellipsis, one of the most common indicators that someone is typing, is meant to create a sense of anticipation, recalling the pauses in fictional dialog or the ominous cliffhanger (to be continued …) that begs us to follow the dots, like a breadcrumb trail, to the narrative’s conclusion. To watch the symbol disappear without the expected message is to experience the sinking disappointment we…

SIGHT ISOLATES, SOUND INCORPORATES. This was the signature insight of Walter Ong, the tech philosopher who considered spoken language superior to written language and a greater stimulus to intimacy and imagination. A proud phonocentrist, Ong further believed that heroism lives almost exclusively in speech. This rings true. There are many heroic calls to arms—think of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky defying the Russian invasion—but heroic emails are few. Social media has long pitched its tent in the domain of logos—the word. Twitter and Facebook may seem rambunctious, but they’re mostly made of silent symbols. Such written language, in Ong’s analysis, will always engender the arrogance of “the last word”; distraction; disengagement from the shared human struggle to make meaning; and neurotic repetitiveness—backing and filling, skimming, rereading, parsing, sharing, screenshotting. By contrast,…

RIDING AN ELECTRIC kick scooter isn’t the coolest way to get around—whooshing by while stock-still and upright makes you look like a penguin on wheels—but reducing our reliance on gas-guzzling cars is cool. If bikes aren’t your thing, fold-up escooters are another eco-friendly way to travel relatively short distances—at legal speeds of course. (Be sure to check your local laws.) BEST BUDGET SCOOTER Gotrax Apex The value here is, frankly, pretty darn amazing. At 32 pounds, it’s lighter than the Segway, and it’s easy to fold up. A bell and a display are integrated into the handlebar. It can go up to 15 mph. The Apex doesn’t offer the smoothest ride, but it handles poor roads satisfactorily. The 250-watt motor struggles with any kind of incline, and lots of hills…

On a white restaurant tablecloth in San Francisco, under the glow of a stained-glass dome ceiling with images of laurels, fleurde-lis, and a ship, rested a portion of metal the size of a shallot. Around it one day in the summer of 2018, three men were having lunch. Jacques Vallée, a French information scientist, was explaining to Max Platzer, editor of a top aeronautics journal, how the metal had come into his possession. The story wound back more than four decades, he said serenely, to an unexplained episode in Council Bluffs, Iowa. On a cold Saturday night in late 1977, fire-fighters and police had responded to calls about a roundish, reddish object with blinking lights that hovered above the treetops in a public park, then dumped a bright mass onto…

A coyote sauntering by in the park at 3 pm, and some guy warning everyone on the path for the next half-mile; running into someone I ghosted 14 years ago and 7,500 miles away; collecting peregrine falcon calls on the Merlin Bird ID app; the “close pass” while cycling (every single time); making plans to visit Europe; rain even though Alexa says it’s not raining; first date in seven years; saving a bird and a mouse from kitty clutches; nearly getting stuck behind a garbage truck; the weird dove that took up residence on my windowsill; bonding with a dog up for adoption at the local Petco; moving the car five minutes before the street sweeper goes by; eagerly awaiting spectroscopy findings from Trappist-1; hoping I would see Eriogonum truncatum…

WHAT IS A REAL APE? For OpenSea, the internet’s most popular NFT marketplace, answering that question is pretty much a no-win proposition. Last year, Bored Apes—cartoon images of apathetic primates in varied states of dress, linked to unique cryptocurrency tokens—skyrocketed in popularity. Now the cheapest cost $309,000, and OpenSea is crawling with imitations, rip-offs, and arch satires of the whole phenomenon (itself full of veiled imitations and rip-offs). Late last year, two accounts on Open-Sea, called Phunky Apes Yacht Club (PAYC) and PHAYC, respectively, started hawking mirror-image versions of the original Bored Apes—minting primates that faced left instead of right. Both claimed to be thoughtful parodies of the coveted simians and not straight-up copypastas like the hordes of other apes clogging the platform. In December, OpenSea banned the flipped-ape projects,…

THERE ARE MANY ways to label a hunk of beef. Take a stroll down the meat aisle of a grocery store in the US and you’ll be presented with a smorgasbord of descriptors: rib eye, Angus, antibiotic-free, hormone-free, grass-fed, vegetarian-fed. But soon you might see yet another designation: low-carbon. In November, the US Department of Agriculture approved a first-of-its-kind program that will allow beef producers to market their meat as “low-carbon” if they can show that their cattle are raised in a way that emits 10 percent less greenhouse gases than an industry baseline. On first glance, the plan sounds like a step in the right direction. But some scientists worry that the labels might mislead consumers by dramatically understating the climate effects of raising cattle. They have a point.…

Shokz OpenRun Pro Bone-Conducting Headphones RATING: 8/1O $180 WIRED It’s the first Shokz headset we like enough to keep using. Doesn’t plug up or cover your ears while you listen to music, so you can still hear the sounds of the world around you. Rich, full audio. Simple controls. Flexible semicircular design. 10-hour battery life. TIRED Audio is the tiniest bit muffled. (Makes sense: The sound has to travel through a lot of cartilage and bone on its way to the inner ear.) Doesn’t turn off automatically. Button placement is somewhat unintuitive. People nearby can hear your tunes. —Eric Ravenscraft Sony A7 IV Mirrorless Camera RATING: 9/1O $2,498 WIRED One of the best entry-level mirrorless cameras available. New 33-megapixel sensor features incredible resolution. Upgraded autofocus system is faster and easier…

Even by the standards of the Trump White House, the crisis that unfolded on the morning of May 29, 2020, was a memorable one. That Friday, a handful of staffers found themselves crammed into a West Wing office around a phone, some listening in guarded disbelief. Mark Zuckerberg was on the line, asking for a word with the president. Minneapolis was in its fourth day of mass protests, which had not relented since George Floyd was killed under the knee of police officer Derek Chauvin. Early Friday morning, around 1 am Eastern, President Donald Trump had published a 102-word philippic to his Facebook and Twitter pages. He pledged the support of the US military and appended a hellish augury: “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.” Among Facebook’s leaders in…