Innehållsförteckning för August 2018 från WIRED

TO DOCUMENT THE irrational and at times deadly journeys people have taken in search of millionaire Forrest Fenn’s hidden treasure (“For All to Seek,” page 82), photographer Daymon Gardner, who is based in New Orleans, had to embark on an epic trek of his own: five days, three states, five flights, and 1,400 miles of driving. Does he think the prize, said to be a chest full of diamonds, rubies, emeralds, and gold, really exists? “Before I met anybody involved, I definitely questioned that. I want to believe in people. If this is a hoax then he’s a monster,” Gardner says. “I don’t want to believe it’s a hoax. I got the sense that the treasure really is out there.” Each summer, Stephen S. Hall grows tomatoes in his Brooklyn…

LOOK AT ALL THE PRETTY DRONES. Hovering above sports stadiums from Houston to Pyeongchang, many hundreds of them have lately sparkled in artful murmuration. On a recent Time magazine cover, 958 drones pixelated the sky. The world record, 1,374 LED-bedazzled microbots, was set by Chinese company EHang UAV in May. So­called drone swarms—the phrase people have taken up with gusto—are having their biggest, buzziest year ever. ¶ It’s an evocative word, swarms, and innocuous enough when applied to one of Intel’s drone light shows. But it’s tinged with alarm—if drones can dance at twilight, they can also attack. Sure enough, a gang outside Denver sent a small fleet to harass FBI agents on a raid earlier this year. In Syria, rebels reportedly sicced a squadron of quadrotors on a Russian…

WE’LL NEVER KNOW who said it first, nor whether the coiner spoke sheepishly or proudly, angrily or slyly. As is often the case with offhand remarks that turn into maxims, the origin of It’s not a bug, it’s a feature is murky. What we do know is that the expression has been popular among programmers for a long time, at least since the days when Wang and DEC were hot names in computing. The Jargon File, a celebrated lexicon of hacker-speak compiled at Stanford in 1975 and later expanded at MIT, glossed the adage this way: A standard joke is that a bug can be turned into a feature simply by documenting it (then theoretically no one can complain about it because it’s in the manual), or even by simply…

Tucked in the emerald backlands of Fayetteville, Georgia, inside a cavernous soundstage at Pinewood Atlanta Studios, Mara Brock Akil is in full field marshal mode. In 24 hours—after five months of taping between Los Angeles and Atlanta—she will wrap the first season of Love Is ___, her latest TV series. ¶ Right now Brock Akil is sweating, and not because filming has come down to the wire. It just so happens that the AC is broken. Scattered about the set, large electric fans expel ribbons of cool air that give little relief from the jungly May heat that has crept into the studio. “We should’ve worn our bathing suits today,” Brock Akil jokes to the script supervisor before returning her attention to the two monitors in front of her, where…

IN OUR JUNE ISSUE, contributing editor Garrett M. Graff reported on special counsel Robert Mueller’s time as a lieutenant in the Vietnam War and how it made him the man he is now. Andrew Rice profiled Federal Communications Commission chair Ajit Pai, whose repeal of Obama-era net neutrality rules has inspired volumes of internet vitriol. And editor in chief Nicholas Thompson sat down with French president Emmanuel Macron to discuss artificial intelligence and the role that France can play in developing the technology. These stories sparked visceral responses, but readers also appreciated the nuanced examinations of these prominent figures. Re: “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, Technologie”: For the president of France, AI is the next revolution. “THE GUY GETS IT.” Nathan Benaich (@NathanBenaich) on Twitter “Macron is a smart guy, and it…

In 2013 a virus jumped from an animal to a child in a remote Guinean village. Three years later, more than 11,000 people in six countries were dead. Devastating—and Ebola was a well-studied disease. What may strike next, the World Health Organization fears, is something no doctor has ever heard of, let alone knows how to treat. It’s come to be known as Disease X. ¶ Since René Descartes adopted the letter x to denote a variable in his 1637 treatise on geometry, it has suggested unknowability: the mysterious nature of x-rays, the uncertain values of Generation X, the conspiratorial fantasies of The X-Files. It’s also been used as code for experimental—in the names, for instance, of fighter jets and submarines. That’s an apt association: Disease X may leapfrog from…

ONCE UPON A TIME, a bot deep in a game of tic-tac-toe figured out that making improbable moves caused its bot opponent to crash. Smart. Also sassy. ¶ Moments when experimental bots go rogue—some would call it cheating—are not typically celebrated in scientific papers or press releases. Most AI researchers strive to avoid them, but a select few document and study these bugs in the hopes of revealing the roots of algorithmic impishness. “We don’t want to wait until these things start to appear in the real world,” says Victoria Krakovna, a research scientist at DeepMind. Krakovna is the keeper of a crowdsourced list of AI bugs. To date, it includes more than three dozen incidents of algorithms finding loopholes in their programs or hacking their environments. The specimens collected…

SENNHEISER’S NEW HD 820 headphones solve the one imperfection of the German company’s coveted HD 800s. See, the previous model has an open-back design, which gooses the audio but lets ambient noise leak in—and all of Bowie’s histrionic sighs leak out. This year, Sennheiser put a lid on the 800s. Two lids, actually: The high-definition dynamic drivers in the HD 820s are covered with curved Gorilla Glass panels. The caps’ concave design reflects errant sound waves into a resonance-abating absorber to keep the audio crisp. The music retains the detail found in the open design, minus the pesky leakage. In an elegant touch, the clear glass leaves the intricate, shiny transducers visible, like the rear crystal on a mechanical Swiss watch. Über-phones like these require a dedicated amplifier; pair them…

As a kid, Swedish product designer and builder Love Hultén obsessed over circuits. “I used to tear electronic toys apart, trying to understand their insides,” he says. Hultén attended the local design school in his native Gothenburg and, while there, discovered his true calling in the woodshop. The cases he crafted were a perfect complement to the creative electronic projects he’d been experimenting with since his youth. Hultén went on to a career making expressive and tactile synthesizers, retro-inspired game consoles, and other truly funky audiovisual contraptions that combine the organic and the electronic. 1 Studio Space Hultén’s studio is located in a Gothenburg community called Konstepidemin. The buildings were originally constructed to house the sick and dying during mid-1800s cholera epidemics. “My studio is in the basement where the nurses…

1 self-pruning Discovered in a Florida tomato field in 1914, this mutation affects the plant’s size, shape, and compactness. This variation alone can change the wild, prawling shrub into the orderly, compact crop familiar to gardeners. 2 self-pruning 5g This affects the tomato’s day-length sensitivity apparatus, allowing it to be grown during shorter summers at northern latitudes. 3 fasciated Wild tomatoes possess only two tiny seed chambers; this mutation, dating to the pre-Columbian era, allows tomato plants to develop more seed chambers and thus increases the size of the fruit. 4 jointless-2 Originally reported in a wild tomato species from the Galapagos Islands in 1956, this mutation eliminates a break point in the middle of the stem, just above the fruit, facilitating mechanical harvesting. 5 lycopene beta-cyclase The tomato gets its red color from an…

An epic riddle. An eccentric storyteller. A missing person. When a man vanishes in the wilderness on a hunt for hidden treasure, his family takes to the internet to find him. EVERYBODY IS SEARCHING for something. Paul Ashby’s search began with an unexpected phone call on July 8, 2017. It was a Saturday night in Townsend, Tennessee, a small town just outside Great Smoky Mountains National Park. An affable Army vet with gray hair, a goatee, and wire-frame glasses, Paul worked as a concierge at a rustic event space called the Barn. He was dressed in his usual top hat and coattails that night, greeting guests who were attending a wedding. Paul had lived in Townsend, off and on, since 1974. In 1990, he separated from his wife and moved…

EARLIER THIS YEAR, Amazon successfully patented an “ultrasonic tracker of a worker’s hands to monitor performance of assigned tasks.” Eerie, yes, but far from the only creative method of employee surveillance. Upwork watches freelancers through their webcams, and a UK railway company recently equipped workers with a wearable that measures their energy levels. By one study’s estimate, 94 percent of organizations currently monitor workers in some way. Regulations governing such conduct are lax; they haven’t changed since the 19th century. ¶ The most common snooping techniques are relatively subtle. A system called Teramind—which lists BNP Paribas and the telecom giant Orange as customers on its website—sends pop-up warnings if it suspects employees are about to slack off or share confidential documents. Other companies rely on tools like Hubstaff to record…

Infanticide In a survival simulation, one AI species evolved to subsist on a diet of its own children. Space War Algorithms exploited flaws in the rules of the galactic videogame Elite Dangerous to invent powerful new weapons. Body Hacking A four-legged virtual robot was challenged to walk smoothly by balancing a ball on its back. Instead, it trapped the ball in a leg joint, then lurched along as before. Goldilocks Electronics Software evolved circuits to interpret electrical signals, but the design only worked at the temperature of the lab where the study took place. Optical Illusion Humans teaching a gripper to grasp a ball accidentally trained it to exploit the camera angle so that it appeared successful—even when not touching the ball.…

1 Naim Audio Uniti Star BEST FOR: Stream-curious audiophiles With a built-in CD player that rips tracks to a local drive, the Uniti Star eases the pain of parting with your CDs. Naim’s app summons your newly captured tunes and streams hi-res songs from cloud services. The hardware is pricey, but you get premium guts like a 70-watt-per-channel amp and a huge, velvet-smooth volume knob. $5,995 2 Bluesound Powernode 2 BEST FOR: Proud digital natives Bluesound’s more modestly priced streamer can access oodles of cloud music services and radio stations—including hi-res offerings—or play a local library stacked with FLACs. Basic panel controls are supplemented by the excellent BluOS Controller app. The integrated 60-watt-per-channel amp can power any speakers, from tiny to towering. $799…

Forrest Fenn announced his treasure hunt by publishing this poem, which contains nine clues to the chest’s location. Thousands of Searchers have converged online to posit their theories on what the clues are and what they might mean. As I have gone alone in thereAnd with my treasures bold,—1I can keep my secret where,And hint of riches new and old. Begin it where warm waters halt—2And take it in the canyon down,Not far, but too far to walk.—3Put in below the home of Brown.—4 From there it’s no place for the meek,The end is ever drawing nigh;There’ll be no paddle up your creek,—5Just heavy loads and water high. If you’ve been wise and found the blaze,—6Look quickly down, your quest to cease,But tarry scant with marvel gaze,—7Just take the chest…