Innehållsförteckning för November 2016 från WIRED

01. The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln 02. Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63, by Taylor Branch 03. The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, by Robert A. Caro 04. The Fire Next Time, by James Baldwin 05. Andy Grove: The Life and Times of an American, by Richard S. Ted low 06. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, by Yuval Noah Harari 07. Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman 08. In Dubious Battle, by John Steinbeck 09. Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity, by Katherine Boo 10. The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, by Elizabeth Kolbert OBAMA’S PLAYLIST FOR STAYING FIT: 01.“Let’s Get It Started,” Black Eyed Peas 02.“Sinnerman,” Nina Simone 03.“If You Love Somebody…

“I DON’T MEAN to be morbid,” Eric Dishman told a friend as he was winding down his job at Intel. “But this may be the last time you see me.” Dishman, a longtime leader of the company’s health research division, was preparing to die. The kidney cancer he’d been diagnosed with in college had caught up to him two decades later. His kidneys had failed, and the chemo drug that kept him alive was incompatible with dialysis. But that friend happened to work for a DNA sequencing company, and he offered to analyze the genome of Dishman’s cancer cells. What could it hurt? Weeks later, Dishman got two 1-terabyte hard drives by courier, loaded with his genomic data. Another copy went to his doctors. And just days before he was…

TALIYA CARTER AGE 17 JOSHUA PIGFORD AGE 21 DERRICK BELL AGE 21 PROJECT EVX 818 BIODIESEL CAR LOCATION WEST PHILADELPHIA, PA KIMBERLY YEUNG AGE 9 REBECCA YEUNG AGE 11 PROJECT LOKI LEGO LAUNCHER LOCATION SEATTLE, WA HANNAH HERBST AGE 16 PROJECT BEACON HYDROELECTRIC GENERATOR LOCATION BOCA RATON, FL AUGUSTA UWAMANZU-NNA AGE 18 PROJECT UNDERSEA CEMENT MIXTURE LOCATION ELMONT, NY OLIVIA HALLISEY AGE 18 PROJECT EBOLA ASSAY CARD LOCATION GREENWICH, CT PAYTON KAAR AGE 21 KIONA ELLIOTT AGE 21 PROJECT BIKE-POWERED WATER SANITATION STATION LOCATION OAKLAND PARK, FL…

THE SECOND WEEK of August isn’t ordinarily a time given over to novelty and ambition in New York. The air is a jellied vapor of sweat and refuse, and anybody who can afford to be elsewhere is. But the vast Queensbridge housing complex was an unlikely scene of neon-vested hustle. ¶ The six-story brown-brick apartment blocks along 41st Avenue had been encased in green scaffolding and draped with long, heavy bolts of cream burlap, which gave the blunt rectilinear forms a veil of anticipation. Queensbridge had been recently named the beneficiary of millions of municipal dollars for neighborhood development, and the attitude, a young press secretary from the New York City Housing Authority told me, was one of “all hands on deck.” Workers mended the leaky roofs and repointed the…

ASK NOT WHAT the government can do for Silicon Valley; ask what Silicon Valley can do for the government. That’s President Obama’s tack, anyway. He presented WIRED with six challenges he feels the tech industry needs to address—just a few earth shaking problems the country could use some help with, that’s all. We reached out to six of the biggest names in the WIRED world, and we gave each of them a challenge from the president’s list. Then we asked: To get this done, what’s the industry’s best play? 1. Tackle inequality. Tim O’Reilly, investor and founder of O’Reilly Media Silicon Valley runs on stories. So does the economy in general. We create what we believe in. If we believe we can use technology to identify and solve big problems,…

BOBAKFERDOWSI Flight systems engineer, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California “I’m working on a mission to Jupiter’s moon Europa, and it’s absolutely fascinating—the idea that there might be an ocean under the icy surface, possibly a habitable environment. Space history buffs 300 years from now are going to look back on this and think it was a pretty amazing time to be alive.” NZINGAHGROSS Lead program budget analyst, NASA’s Johnson Space Center, Houston, Texas “We track everything from people and their time to a screw for a robot—it’s like managing multiple million-dollar personal bank accounts. When I see equipment I helped procure, I feel like I’m part of something bigger, even if I’m not an astronaut on the launch.” MARK KELLY Former astronaut; cofounder, director of flight crew operations, World…

CHRISTOPHER ANDERSON In 1999 Anderson was traveling on a boat full of Haitian refugees when it began to sink. The resulting images, published in The New York Times Magazine, won him new renown and the Robert Cap a Gold Medal. The Magnum photographer now focuses on portraiture, but until this issue he had never photographed the commander in chief. Planning the shoot was intense (the Secret Service wanted to know how many clicks his camera would make), but photographing President Obama was “strangely natural,” Anderson says. “He is so present in our everyday life that I almost felt I knew him when he walked into the room.” LAURENE POWELL JOBS Powell Jobs is president of the social-justice nonprofit Emerson Collective and cofounder of College Track, an organization that helps kids…

VIKTORIA MODESTA thinks of herself as a prototype. Born in Soviet Russia, where an accident at birth left her with a defect in her left leg, she spent her childhood in a great deal of pain. Reconstructive surgeries didn’t help, so when she was 20 and living in London, she decided to get a voluntary amputation below the knee. The operation freed Modesta to pursue her art: She sings in multimedia pop acts, and she rocks a different prosthesis depending on the performance. As the Snow Queen in the 2012 London Paralympics closing ceremony, she wore a limb covered in Swarovski diamonds. “That’s when I understood the concept of working on this futuristic identity and how limitless it could be,” she says. “It’s easy to transcend what you think makes…

PROBLEM Low yield Farmers will need to produce more food on less land, especially in the developing world. SOLUTION Money, seeds,and poop Seeds bred or engineered for specific soil and climate types and to resist pests or diseases will be key, as will business solutions like One Acre Fund’s combination of fertilizer, finance, and training. You get a big hit just by raising worldwide yields for 16 crops. And then you can stop turning forests into farms. PROBLEM Waste For every 100 calories of food grown, people eat only about 35. SOLUTION Sensors and apps Instead of arbitrary sell-by dates, how about biochemical bacteria monitors so people don’t trash good food? Apps can pair extra food with those who need it. University cafeterias are ditching trays, leading to a 50…

2 4 .11 FRONTI ERS PHOTOGRAPH BY CHRISTOPHER ANDERSON my favorite movie of last year was The Martian. Of course, I’m predisposed to love any movie where Americans defy the odds and inspire the world. But what really grabbed me about the film is that it shows how humans—through our ingenuity, our commitment to fact and reason, and ultimately our faith in each other—can science the heck out of just about any problem. ¶ I’m a guy who grew up watching Star Trek—and I’d be lying if I said that show didn’t have at least some small influence on my worldview. What I loved about it was its optimism, the fundamental belief at its core that the people on this planet, for all our varied backgrounds and outward differences, could…

FOR A WHILE THERE , Seres Ther apeutics was the most promising name in poop. Located in Cambridge, Massachusetts—in the same building as Crispr Therapeutics, one of the key players in gene editing today—the biotech company has been trying to transform medicine by harnessing the billions of bacteria in people’s intestines. Those bacteria, plus others that live in and on the body, make up the human microbiome, an invisible world that is only recently coming into focus. Scientists now know that the wrong balance of bugs in your gut—a delicate ecosystem that can collapse as you age, travel, or even take new medication—can lead to all sorts of distress. Seres is one of the first startups aiming to design treatments that would manipulate the microbiome to repair bad guts and…

Melt theWinter Chill WHITS EARTH NATION MINNESOTA With the heavy snowfall in Minnesota, rooftop solar heating can be tricky. So the nonprofit Rural Renewable Energy Alliance hangs solar panels on the south-facing side of houses to produce heat. The sun’s low arc across the winter sky means the solar “furnaces” get direct rays when they’re needed most. Plus, sunlight bouncing off the snow boosts efficiency by 8 to 12 percent. So far, the Alliance has installed furnaces for 400 low-income households, including eight on the reservation, where the poverty rate is double that of the state. Share the Photons STEAMBOAT SPRINGS, COLORADO This past summer, during a high tech barn-raising of sorts, locals put up solar arrays for low-income families. Colorado is the US leader in community solar, where households…

IN THE SUMMER of1995, a blistering heat wave settled over Chicago for three days. It killed 739 people, making it one of the most unexpectedly lethal disasters in modern American history. No statistical models of the heat wave predicted such a high death toll. Researchers in the American Journal of Public Health reported that their analysis “failed to detect relationships between the weather and mortality that would explain what happened.” Just as mysterious as the number of fatalities was the way they were distributed across the city. Several of the most deadly areas were entirely black and disproportionately poor, but so were three of the least deadly. Adjacent areas that looked alike—like Englewood and Auburn Gresham, two hyper-segregated black South Side neighborhoods with high poverty and crime—suffered vastly different…

01. 2001: A Space Odyssey because it captures the grandeur and scale of the unknown. 02. Blade Runner because it asks what it means to be human. 03. Close Encounters of the Third Kind because it is fundamentally optimistic. 04. Star Wars because it was fun and revolutionized special effects. 05. Star Trek (original series) because it uses science fiction to promote a humanistic ethic. 06. The Martian because it shows humans as problem solvers. 07. The Matrix because it asks basic questions about our reality—and looks very cool. 08. Cosmos because it fed my lifelong fascination with space.…