Innehållsförteckning för June 2017 från WIRED

FOR $150, you can buy a Crispr kit online and use it to engineer heartier gut bacteria in your kitchen. That’s thrilling, but the technology is giving Jennifer Doudna, an inventor of the gene-editing method, nightmares. Easy genetic modification could mean cures for cancer (yay!), kitty-sized pigs (squee!), and, yes, designer babies (ack). In her new book, A Crack in Creation, Doudna urges innovators to slow their roll. Here she considers the daunting prospects and promises of the monster-maker she created. 1. Perfect children The prospect of editing human embryos to make people super athletic and acne-free is disturbing, Doudna says. Though it may one day be safe to fix mutations, the procedure could trigger unforeseen illnesses or disabilities. 2. Species rebirth It may be tempting to resuscitate the woolly…

WHEN I FIRST MOUNT THE BICYCLE—a sturdy Rocky Mountain Blizzard with 4.8-inchwide tires—and push, I barely move. I grit my teeth, throw my weight onto the pedal, and the bike ekes forward. We power our way along Polar Bear Point among glistening, 6-foot-thick ice caps and sunning ringed seals. After a short time, my legs wobble like jelly. ¶ It took five flights to reach the Arctic Watch Wilderness Lodge on Canada’s Somerset Island, roughly 500 miles north of the Arctic Circle. The lodge’s eight-week season begins in June, just as the pack ice that blankets the Northwest Passage begins to fissure and melt. But the family that runs the place is at home in the desolation. The patriarch, Richard Weber, is the world’s most traveled North Pole explorer. His…

A DEDICATED HACKER can pwn your PC in seconds. The ORWL? Not so much. It looks like the offspring of a Mac Mini and a flying saucer, and it’s nearly impervious to the probing eyes—and code—of data snoops, botnet admins, or the Thought Police. Sure, the 6-inch puck rocks crafty encryption. And for the paranoid, one of the software options is the security-first Qubes OS. But it’s physically guarded too: It can be accessed only with your password plus your NFC key fob. If you roam out of Bluetooth range, the ORWL locks itself. Plus, an accelerometer shuts down the machine if it’s moved while you’re gone. As a failsafe, the motherboard is enclosed in a mesh sleeve that can’t be unscrewed, cracked, or even bored through, thanks to a…

YOU LOCK YOUR FRONT DOOR. You mash the button on your car’s key fob until the alarm beeps. You even have some overbearing antivirus software making your computer run slower. But you probably don’t think about whether anyone’s trying to get into your phone. You should: It’s a gold mine of data, passwords, and secrets, all on the other side of a four-digit passcode or a fingerprint scan—locks that can easily be picked by someone with the right tools. “If the entire United States government wants to hack your phone,” says Alex Thurber, general manager of mobile solutions at BlackBerry, “they’re going to get in.” ¶ While no smartphone is truly unhackable, they’re not all equally porous. Lots of companies are working to build devices that make it very hard…

So, you’re hosting a dinner and a dispute arises about the pre– Twin Peaks work of Mädchen Amick. Your AI sidekick will settle it in a flash, right? With the internet at its fingertips, you would think so. We put Google Home and Alexa to the test, challenging them with real questions from a real trivia quiz. The answers speak for themselves. 1. Who is Batman’s butler? HOME: Alfred Pennyworth [and then a New York Daily News story]. ALEXA: Sorry, I can’t find the answer to the question I heard. 2. Four presidents have won the Nobel Peace Prize. Name all four. HOME: According to Christian Science Monitor, the other US presidents who have won the Nobel Peace Prize are, in chronological order, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Jimmy Carter.…

As voice assistants invade our homes, they give beleaguered parents a screen-free way to entertain their offspring. But of all the obligations technology helps us delegate, should we really add bringing up baby to the list? Mattel thinks so. Earlier this year the company announced the Nabi Aristotle, an Echo-like speaker/baby monitor mashup designed for children and their parents. It will eventually offer plenty of pluses, like foreign language lessons and forced politeness—when Manners Mode is on, you have to say “please” to complete any prompt. But Aristotle will also read your tyke a bedtime story and soothe your wailing infant. It seems like children-being-raised-by-AI should happen at the end of the dystopian arc, not the bare beginning. But it makes a certain kind of sense: When in life are…

DO YOU HEAR THE ONE about the Russian hacker who meddled in the affairs of another country? In April, “Chasing the Phantom” told the story of Evgeniy Bogachev—a_k_a Slavik—who used a botnet to steal millions from US banks and spy on computers in the Ukraine. Oh wait, you thought we were talking about Donald Trump’s election campaign? Ha ha, no. But now that you mention it, Trump is a comedy gold mine, one we dug into for a package on humor and power (“Are You Laughin’ at Me?”). It’s always cathartic to make fun of our overlords, after all, and when those people are blustery, thin-skinned Twitterholics, well, the jokes (almost) write themselves. @WIRED / MAIL@WIRED.COM Re: “Chasing the Phantom”: The hunt for Russia’s most notorious hacker “THIS ARTICLE’S NARRATIVE,…

WHETHER YOU REALIZE IT OR NOT, emoji have gender, and it’s not just in the hair or clothes. “Even with generic smileys, there’s a tendency to view them as masculine by default,” says Paul Hunt, a designer who sits on the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee. (That’s the international body that regulates the pictographic canon—doy.) For people who don’t believe gender is either-or, not seeing themselves in their emoji can be difficult, even harmful. So this year Hunt created the first-ever set of genderless faces. ¶ Inclusion has actually been the goal all along. But Apple—which, like every provider, iterates on top of Unicode’s baseline designs—started assigning genders when emoji got careers. For iPhone users, Unicode’s “information desk person” was recast as “information desk lady,” and “construction worker” became “male construction worker.”…

WHOEVER SAID SIZE isn’t everything never had to push a giant airplane across the sky. That’s why GE’s new turbofan engine is enormous: Built using lightweight carbon fiber and 3-D printing, the GE9X is as wide as a Boeing 737 fuselage (yes, it’s a plane engine the size of another plane) and will eventually power Boeing’s 777X, the biggest twinjet ever. Despite its heft, though, the behemoth is cleaner, quieter, and more fuel-efficient than its predecessors. Flight-testing starts this year, and by 2020 you might see a GE9X from seat 36A. Sculpted Fan Blades Improved 3-D-design software enabled engineers to create more-aerodynamic blades. These are made of carbon fiber, not titanium, substantially lessening the load on the engine. High-Pressure Air Compressor The more densely packed the air is, the less…

Your first mission on the path to an AI-enabled household is to choose your smart connected speaker. It will be your central command module, the device you talk to when you need to get stuff done. Although more AI assistants are on the horizon, the big two are Amazon Echo and Google Home. Neither is perfect, and each has its own strengths and weaknesses. Your decision should hinge on how you’ll use it, so here’s some baseline info to get you thinking. HACKER POWER-UP: GOOGLE HOME + WEMO SWITCH + ELECTRIC FIREPLACE = OK GOOGLE, FLAME ON A NOTE ABOUT PRIVACY If your paramount concern in life is privacy, turn back now. Google Home and Amazon Echo are constantly listening, and they send some of what you say back to…

Google Maps’ alternate route (except for that “shortcut” to Tahoe through the Sacramento River delta); Duolingo’s chatbots; “Alexa, snooze”; Google Translate camera for Japanese Sizzler menus; pre-commit git hooks; Spotify’s new algorithmically generated Daily Mix playlists; I faked being smart; extrah3ddy AI-augmented crops; the Charlie Parker jazz bot; Oscar Isaac and Sonoya Mizuno tearing up the dance floor in Ex Machina; another Star Wars marathon weekend; Google Assistant reminding me not to burn the chocolate chip cookies; the hourly chime from a device that I can’t seem to find in my house. WIRED is a registered trademark of Advance Magazine Publishers Inc. Copyright ©2017 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Printed in the USA. Volume 25, No. 6. WIRED (ISSN 1059–1028) is published monthly by Condé Nast, which is a division…

Trot On 5K Fridays, employees at this fitness app run the Moffett Loop in Palo Alto. In December, the year’s fastest Trotter wins a $5,000 prize. OR Gusto Tardiness has a cost at this HR startup. For each minute you’re late to certain meetings, you owe the room that many push-ups. Tictail In the Stockholm office of this designer ecommerce platform, employees must ditch their footwear at the door. (Office slippers are tolerated.) OR Swaid The Silicon Beach UX-design firm is board-shorts-and-flipflop- friendly four days a week— but Formal Friday is no joke. No button-down shirt, no worky. Joosd One week a month, the juiceheads at this Mountain View startup bid adieu to solid foods. They swear that a flushed-out body cavity is the secret to higher clarity. OR Nootrobox…

WHETHER YOU FIRST KNEW # as a number sign, the pound symbol, or a tic-tac-toe board, its incarnation as the hashtag has changed language for millions around the world. Sure, it can indicate where you’re posting from (#OvalOffice) or what you’re posting about (#FakeNews). But it has also shaped elections, launched social movements, and transcended its meaning as a mere keystroke to become a defining symbol of the digital age. Its story started on a bare-bones social-networking site called Twitter back in 2007, when early adopters began developing tools to organize their tweets. Chris Messina Former Google and Uber developer lead, early hashtag proponent Stowe Boyd Former research head at Gigaom Biz Stone Twitter cofounder Nate Ritter Web developer Heather Gautney Sociologist CHRIS MESSINA: Ten years ago we were at…

KEEP IT TIGHT Look in the Mirror Start your security assessment with what’s known as a threat-modeling exercise. Ask yourself what you want to protect and from whom, and estimate the likelihood that the specific parties would compromise your data. Plug the highrisk holes first. Everything else, you can sweat a little less. Master Your Passwords A good password manager generates, stores, and updates all your passwords with a button press. The actual passwords are encrypted and accessible solely by you, but the system is only as good as your master password. Use a key generated by the Diceware method, which randomly selects words to build a complex but easy-toremember phrase. Ditch Touch ID It’s a neat way to quickly unlock your phone, but your fingerprint sensor is also one…

Though we have yet to attain our ideal vision of the smart home—robots scurrying to fetch our slippers, breakfast, and a perfect pour-over—we now have the tools for establishing verbal dominion over our connected devices. The best option for exercising this power is Amazon Echo; the openness of its platform means Alexa can interact with an army of internet-of-things, er, things. You have to load up Alexa with the relevant skills and install some new gadgets. But after the initial effort, you can relax and enjoy your coffee as your digital minions carry out your commands. 1 . Light the way Since you’re already replacing those inefficient incandescents with LEDs, spend the extra dough and get smart LEDs. Most connect to Alexa via an inexpensive hub, but some can accept…

the Lost Spirits Distillery is just another boxy, early-20th-century building along the frayed edge of downtown Los Angeles. At first the inside appears similarly uninspired: deep and unfinished, littered with cardboard boxes, plumbing fittings, spools of wire, inscrutable items made of copper, a forklift. The usual crap. But what’s this then? A heavy black curtain bisects the industrial space from floor to ceiling, nearly from the front door to the back. Bryan Davis, the distillery’s founder and co-owner, pulls aside some folds and beckons me in. It’s dark; my eyes adjust slowly. I’ve stumbled into a nighttime clearing deep in a tropical jungle—lush foliage and flowering vines lit by dozens of flickering candle lanterns. Are those crickets and cicadas and an occasional Jurassic Park bellow I hear? Yes. Yes, they…