Innehållsförteckning för May 2018 från WIRED

What’s it like to be inside a nuclear reactor? LA-based photographer Spencer Lowell found out when he visited the site of the 2011 meltdown in Fukushima, Japan (page 68). In a full Tyvek suit, gloves, and mask, Lowell stood beneath a massive steel structure where fission reactions once took place. “It was surreal,” he says. “It’s generally something that you don’t even get to go near, never mind go inside.” The enormity of the reactor, and the eerie emptiness of the surrounding towns, left Lowell awed by the monumental catastrophe. “I’ve always been a proponent of nuclear energy,” he says. “But you see something like this, and you question whether it’s really worth it.” When Brooklyn-based writer Amanda Schaffer first learned that a startup was conducting rogue clinical trials for…

FOOD DOESN’T ALWAYS pair so well with tech. The former is comforting and cultural, the latter cold and commercial. Lab-grown meat, transgenic crops, desserts extruded from the nozzles of 3-D printers: not exactly fodder for nostalgic childhood memories. ¶ But why not? asks Swedish designer Erika Marthins. “People often see technology as something alien,” she says. “But if you’re eating it, maybe that can help you understand it better.” Working with engineers and scientists, Marthins uses tech to add motion, sound, and visuals to food. She’s not suggesting anyone ingest metal or wires—but how about a lick of an augmented lollipop? There’s a secret message encoded on its surface by an algorithm. Or consider her robot gummies that wiggle on the plate. Soft robots are often made with silicone; her…

THAD STARNER HAD BEEN wearing a computer for a few years—an LED readout over his left eye, wired to a processor in a shoulder bag and a one-handed keyboard—when he came to Silicon Valley for a conference in 1998. His kludgy, cyberpunk rig was fascinating; two young techies walked up to ask him about it. “I said, ‘It’s a wearable computer,’” Starner recalls. “I gave them a demo.” He asked them for their business cards so he could demonstrate how he could enter their information into his computer’s address book. They handed them over. Guy Number One: Larry Page. Phone number at Stanford. Guy Number Two: Sergey Brin. They were working on some kind of web search project, they said. A decade later, Starner—by then a researcher at Georgia Tech—looked…

WHAT’S THE SHINIEST, most exciting new technology for transportation? Well, there are plenty of candidates! We’ve got the self-driving car and drones big enough to carry people. Elon Musk is getting ready to bore hyperloop tunnels. When it comes to moving humans around, the future looks to be merging with sci-fi. ¶ But from where I stand, the most exciting form of transportation technology is more than 100 years old—and it’s probably sitting in your garage. It’s the bicycle. The future of transportation has two thin wheels and handlebars. ¶ Modern tech has transformed the humble two-wheeler, making the bike-share model possible: You check out a bike from a docking station, use it for an hour or so, then return to any other docking station. The concept was tried back…

HTC Vive Pro BEST FOR: Holodeck dreamers HTC’s first Vive headset was the pinnacle of home VR; the new Vive Pro improves on every feature. Paired with a powerful PC, the Pro transforms your room into a near-limitless virtual gamescape. Cyberspace gets more immersive thanks to a higher-res display for each eye and integrated headphones with 3-D audio. The optional wireless adapter frees you from pesky cords. $799 Lenovo Mirage Solo BEST FOR: Casual enthusiasts The VR ideal is a stand-alone headset, with no phone or PC required. The Mirage Solo doesn’t require either, but it can play any of the mobile games available in Google’s Daydream store. Connect to Wi-Fi, and the Mirage Solo’s motion controller and space-sensing exterior cameras grant full freedom of movement, letting you duck and…

Ray Ozzie thinks he’s come up with an approach for accessing encrypted devices that attains the impossible: It satisfies both law enforcement and privacy purists. ____________ Step 1: Obtain warrant for locked, encrypted phone that is evidence in a criminal investigation. ____________ Step 2: Access special screen that generates a QR code containing an encrypted PIN. ____________ Step 3: Send picture of QR code to the phone’s manufacturer, which confirms the warrant is legal. ____________ Step 4: Manufacturer transmits decrypted PIN to investigators, who use it to unlock the phone. On December 2, 2015, a man named Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, opened fire on employees of the Department of Public Health in San Bernardino, California, killing 14 people and injuring 22 during what was supposed to…

THE SERVER RACKS in Synthego’s facility look like any other—big, nondescript black cabinets, whirring and blinking and venting heat. But inside the metal shelving, the company isn’t pushing around ones and zeros to keep the internet running. It’s making molecules to rewrite the code of life. Researchers at universities, agtech companies, and biopharma firms want to genetically modify organisms, but they don’t want to spend weeks building the Crispr tools necessary to do that. In comes Synthego: The biotech startup uses tech packed into those server cabinets to whip up hundreds of orders a day of guide RNA, the molecules that dictate which segments of DNA should get snipped out in editing. Software directs compressors and pumps to push chemical reagents into rows of instruments, mixing the fluids and catalyzing…

THE MAGIC IN SONY’S new entertainment system is that it doesn’t resemble a TV at all. The 4K HDR laser projector casts gleaming, lifelike video onto any surface above it. Pushed up against the wall, the coffee-table-sized unit projects an 85-inch image. Slide it out a foot, and the picture blooms to 120 inches. The speaker system stays fully concealed: a pair of glass tube tweeters in the aluminum legs, three midrange speakers hidden behind the front panel, a subwoofer on the bottom, and a rear driver that deepens the immersive effect. The projector’s eye is tucked just below the marble tabletop while the wooden shelf below provides ample space for your art books. $30,000…

IN THE LATE 1950S, A WEAPONS MAKER CALLED the Martin Company received a contract to build the first Pershing missile. It was to be the most sophisticated mobile weapons system on earth: 5 tons of metal and precision technology designed to deliver a nuclear warhead from up to 460 miles away. Should it ever be used, there would be no margin for error. It had to be perfect. And the US Army wanted it delivered quickly. The task of ensuring this timely perfection fell to Philip Crosby, a quality-control manager at Martin. To break with his industry’s wartime habit of tolerating small mistakes in feverish production, Crosby came up with a philosophy he would later call Zero Defects. The idea was, basically, to instill in workers the will to prevent…

Ask engineers what the future of communication looks like and they’ll show you a fiber-optic cable. Ask artists and they’ll conjure something like the Sleeve. For the past year, engineers at Nokia Bell Labs, the famed New Jersey research facility that birthed the transistor, have been developing this wearable armband with input from artistic collaborators. “We’re reductionist in our thinking; artists are divergent,” research lead Domhnaill Hernon says. The labmates are part of a program called Experiments in Art and Technology, founded in the ’60s and newly resurrected in partnership with the design incubator New Inc. In this right-brains-meet-left coalition, engineers and artists team up to explore big questions: Can humans communicate through touch? Is it possible to transfer empathy? What’s the successor to smartphones? The Sleeve tries to answer…

Chemotherapy is brutal. The drugs are delivered in near-toxic doses to penetrate tumor tissues, indiscriminately vanquishing the patient’s appetite, hair, and immune system alongside cancer cells. Scientists have tried everything from nanoparticles to homing-beacon bacteria to better target the disease. Now researchers at Germany’s Institute for Integrative Nanosciences are deploying a natural-born infiltrator: sperm. ¶ The team had been working for years on a robotic power-boost for slow swimmers—originally intended to help couples with low sperm motility conceive. But when they discovered that the sperm’s double-lipid-lined head could also be coaxed into carrying a payload of chemo drugs, they shifted their focus from inducing life to slaying reproductive cancer. ¶ The little guys won’t be going into battle naked. Using a two-photon laser, the scientists created a set of sperm…

Apple HomePod BEST FOR: Demanding audiophiles Few compact speakers, smart or otherwise, sound better than this 7-inch-tall cylinder. It listens to the sound waves bouncing around the room, then adjusts the output for pristine audio. Chat interactions are a bit limited for now, but Siri’s an ace DJ. The AI can play songs or podcasts from Apple Music and control connected outlets and smart LED bulbs. $349 Google Home Max BEST FOR: Inquisitive beat freaks We found the Assistant inside Google’s largest Home speaker smarter than other AIs, answering queries, bossing connected devices, and sending driving directions to a Pixel phone. It can also cue up audio from your fave streaming platform. The Max puts out a beastly thump, with enough low end to make the neighbors think Janelle Monáe…

THE NIGHT BEFORE THE MISSION, KENJI MATSUZAKI COULD NOT SLEEP. For more than a year, Matsuzaki and a team of engineers had been developing their little robot—a bread-loaf-sized, red and white machine equipped with five propellers, a transparent dome, front and rear video cameras, and an array of lights and sensors. Nicknamed Little Sunfish, it was engineered to operate underwater, in total darkness, amid intense radiation. And after three months of testing, training, and fine-tuning, it was deemed ready to fulfill its mission: to find and photograph the melted-down radioactive fuel that had gone missing inside the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. More than six years had passed since an earthquake and tsunami hammered northeastern Japan and reduced the Fukushima facility to radioactive ruin. In all that time, no one…

IN A PHOTO FROM 2009, Bill Halford, who was then 40 years old, looks like a schoolboy who hasn’t quite grown into his big ears. He wears an ill-fitting red shirt tucked into belted khakis; his jawline is square and his eyes are full of wonder. The picture was taken at Southern Illinois University, where he was a respected professor. A few years before, he had made a significant discovery—one that would determine the course of his life. Halford, a microbiologist, had taken an interest in the peculiar nature of herpes—how it lies dormant in the nervous system and reactivates to cause disease. Herpes is one of the most pervasive viral infections in the world, sometimes causing painful genital blisters, and it has frustrated scientists attempting to find a cure.…