Innehållsförteckning för July/August 2021 från WIRED

In June, Andy Greenberg dished up a scoop about one couple’s quest to fix the notoriously broken ice cream machines at McDonald’s. Gilad Edelman revisited the rationale behind Section 230, the landmark law that shields major tech corporations from liability over defamatory content on their platforms. And on WIRED.com (and page 62 in this issue), Megan Molteni writes about a scientist and a tenacious graduate student who unearthed an old scientific error with devastating consequences for the world’s response to Covid-19. Readers complain about defamation, appliances, and siloed science: RE: “FATAL FLAW” “One of the better examples of just how pernicious confirmation bias can be.”—@Roessler, via Twitter RE: “SACRED COMMANDMENT/FALSE IDOL” Once an internet platform is aware that a posting is false and defamatory, it should immediately delete it and…

CRYSTALS ARE THE pinnacle of atomic efficiency. From a tiny seed of highly organized atoms, their structure grows as surrounding molecules repeat a pattern, building atop one another. Photographers Wenting Zhu and Yan Liang built this composite image of a copper sulfate crystal by taking 33 closeups photographed with a microscope—and layering them atop one another. The image is one of more than 300 in their new collection, The Beauty of Chemistry, which plunges readers into the minute universe of molecules. In it, Zhu and Liang also use infrared thermal imaging and highspeed and time-lapse macro techniques to capture the chemical forms in all their remarkable beauty. In the early 1910s, crystals became our first window into the atomic world. Science writer Philip Ball, the docent for the book’s visual…

EARLY ONE MORNING, Linsey Marr tiptoed to her dining room table, slipped on a headset, and fired up Zoom. On her computer screen, dozens of familiar faces began to appear. She also saw a few people she didn’t know, including Maria Van Kerkhove, the World Health Organization’s technical lead for Covid-19, and other expert advisers to the Geneva-based organization. It was just past 1 pm in Switzerland on April 3, 2020, but in Blacksburg, Virginia, where Marr lives with her husband and two children, dawn was just beginning to break. Marr is an aerosol scientist at Virginia Tech and one of the few in the world who also studies infectious diseases. To her, the new coronavirus looked as if it could hang in the air, infecting anyone who breathed in…

ONE STICKY AFTERNOON in the summer of 2019, I experienced a form of joy so powerful it felt like a neurological event. The air in New York City had reached the level of humidity where sweat congeals into a semipermanent slime, and my train was delayed. As the wait dragged on I decided to walk home. Blinking the sun from my eyes as I exited the station, I saw another option parked by the curb: a cerulean-blue moped from Revel, gleaming and irresistible, and available to rent. Minutes later I was zipping down side streets in South Williamsburg, Brooklyn, with a cool breeze at my back and a big, dumb grin on my face. I turned onto a block where neighbors were hanging out on lawn chairs, blasting music from…

THERE IS A MUSIC-TECH controversy that rivals Bob Dylan’s choice to plug in his guitar at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. A year earlier, on April 10, 1964, the pianist Glenn Gould made a radical exit from live concerts. Gould played seven pieces to a packed house at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre in Los Angeles, including four fugues. He gave no indication that the program was his swan song. Then he strolled—he never stormed—away from his Steinway CD 318 and out the door of the concert hall, into the mild California air. A year later, he boarded a train for the desolate Northwest Territories of his native Canada. He never played another concert. When Arthur Rubinstein bet him in 1971 that he’d be back, Gould took the bet; when…

MY PRETEEN SON’S laptop had been warning us for months that it was ready to quit forever. The battery had stopped charging properly, the hinge was loose, and, after years of vigorous Minecraft commands, the W key had fallen off. When it finally died on New Year’s Day, West was stricken with panic. His eyes widened as he looked up at me and whispered in horror, “Oh no.” After our schools closed last spring, online gaming became his lifeline, his sole source of peer connection. I tried to convince him the situation wasn’t so bad: He’d been saving money to build a gaming PC for a year. Now that his laptop had died, I’d help him with the cost. But West was not reassured. He explained that he could buy…

FANG, JEFFREY DoorDash delivery guy, knows you judge his parenting skills, and he’ll join in your condemnation in a moment. He’ll explain that bringing his kids along on his Saturday night shift “made sense, until it didn’t,” and that in hindsight, he understands that it really, really didn’t. But right now, on the night of February 6, he’s not thinking clearly, and you’ll have to excuse him as he sprints pell-mell down a promenade of swank homes after the thief who just stole his phone. He sees the thief dive into the back seat of a silver sedan, and as the car accelerates Fang keeps running alongside and grabs the passenger door handle—less DoorDash Dad than some kind of bespectacled Jason Bourne. The phone, you see, is his “moneymaking tool”; it’s…

Mark Crane via Facebook Honorable Mentions SCHRÖDINGER’S CAT IS ACTUALLY A DOG. —@TYNANWRITES, VIA TWITTER YOU’RE THE OBSERVED. NOT THE OBSERVER. —@PARKERSTMAILBOX, VIA INSTAGRAM OUR LAST SECONDS APPEAR THE LONGEST. —PAUL HAGENAARS, VIA EMAIL ALL LOST SOCKS FOUND AT CERN. —FELIX QUARNSTRÖM, VIA FACEBOOK IT WAS SIMULTANEOUSLY HUGE AND MICROSCOPIC. —@CEZARY_Z, VIA TWITTER ASTONISHINGLY, UP WAS DOWN ALL ALONG! —CHRISTOPHER WALTON, VIA EMAIL ACTUALLY, THE TIDES PULL THE MOON. —@THE4LW, VIA INSTAGRAM A SEVENTH INFINITY STONE IS FOUND. —@TAAYYWELLS, VIA INSTAGRAM…

THANKS TO NFTS, half of my friends now hate the other half. I know because they send me messages about each other. “Ugh, more crypto garbage,” reads one DM. “I guess we need to destroy the planet for some stupid GIF.” And then, from someone else: “I do feel, at some level, that this is the most important thing that has ever happened to digital art.” Words to that effect. Everyone is sincere. You used to have to create a product to create a marketplace. Like Google: Make a search engine first, then sell ads. But now, with crypto, you can skip straight to the marketplace and the products will follow. (They don’t really—“decentralized applications” aren’t very interesting, but everyone says they’ll be good soon.) As we all know by…

STARTUP FUNDRAISING CAN be a blood sport, which also makes it great entertainment. Shark Tank first brought pitch decks to prime time in 2009, spawning an entire genre of investment-as-reality-TV. To name just a few: Meet the Drapers (hosted by venture capitalist Tim Draper), Cleveland Hustles (hosted by basketball legend LeBron James), Entrepreneur Elevator Pitch (exactly what it sounds like), The Profit (weirdly, for investing in failing businesses), Dragon’s Den (like Shark Tank but British), and Tigers of Money (like Shark Tank but Japanese). The latest shark in this tank is not on television but on the live audio app Clubhouse. Every Wednesday at 3 pm Pacific time, a new handful of startup founders looking for early-stage funding duke it out before a panel of angel investors on a show…

ELECTRIC BIKES KEEP getting lighter, more attractive, and more powerful. More eco-friendly than your car, they don’t require you to be a spandex superhero to move fast. The WIRED gear team has tried almost every kind of ebike there is, from heavy-duty cargo bikes to high-end mountain bikes. Here are some of the best rides available these days. BEST COMMUTER Batch Ebike The Gear team has tried many strong contenders for the cheapest, most reliable daily commuter, and Batch’s entry—the Honda Civic of ebikes—came out on top. Rather than splurge on fancy extras like a suspension seat post or light-up display, Batch spent money where it counts—on a high-end Bosch drivetrain, Shimano components, and Tektro hydraulic disc brakes. It’s not a particularly exciting ride, and you’ll have to buy your…

Amid all the sleepless hours that Todd Leetham spent hunting ghosts inside his company’s network in early 2011, the experience that sticks with him most vividly a decade later is the moment he caught up with them. Or almost did. It was a spring evening, he says, three days—maybe four, time had become a blur—after he had first begun tracking the hackers who were rummaging through the computer systems of RSA, the corporate security giant where he worked. Leetham—a bald, bearded, and curmudgeonly analyst one coworker described to me as a “carbonbased hacker-finding machine”—had been glued to his laptop along with the rest of the company’s incident response team. They were assembled around RSA’s glass-encased operations center in a nonstop, 24-hours-a-day hunt, all of them feeling a growing sense of…

BLOOD SPORTS. DEGENERACY LAWS. SLAVERY. INSIDE ROBLOX, THOUSANDS OF PLAYERS JOINED A FULL-FLEDGED FASCIST STATE MODELED AFTER THE ROMAN EMPIRE. DID THAT MAKE THEM FASHIES IRL? FERGUSON, A MIDDLE SCHOOLER IN ONTARIO, CANADA, HAD BEEN TAPPING OUT THE SAME FOURLETTER SEQUENCE ON HIS KEYBOARD FOR HOURS. W, A, S, D. W, A, S, D. He was steering his digital avatar, a Lego-manlike military grunt, in laps around a futuristic airfield. Although his fingers ached, he would gladly have gone on for hours more. Every keystroke brought the 11-year-old closer to his goal: scaling the ranks of a group in the video game Roblox. The group had rules. Strict rules. Players dressed as pilots and marines went around barking out orders in little speech bubbles. When Ferguson wasn’t running laps, he…