Innehållsförteckning för October 2022 från WIRED

“FUNDAMENTALLY, IT’S an electric business jet—it just happens to take off and land vertically,” says Alex Asseily, vice chair of German aerospace startup Lilium. He’s talking about Jet, the company’s all-electric, fixed-wing aircraft that recently soared over its first few regulatory hurdles and is expected to enter production next year. Just don’t call it a flying car—Asseily sees it as more of a minibus. It’s one of dozens of eVTOL (electric vertical takeoff and landing) aircraft being developed around the world. There are two main designs: The first, which includes those from Lilium and California-based Joby, has fixed wings like a plane but engines that tilt to change the angle of thrust, so it can take off and land without a runway—much like the UK’s groundbreaking Harrier fighter jet. The…

YOU, THE PROTAGONIST, are on a small fishing schooner off the coast of Norway. This is an Edgar Allan Poe story, so things aren’t going well. Your ship is trapped in a mile-wide whirlpool that grinds whales into pesto. Your younger brother just drowned in a perfunctory half-sentence. Your elder brother is clinging to a ringbolt near the bow. You’re astern, hanging on to a lashed-down empty water cask. The ship rides the maelstrom like it’s in the Indy 500, keel centripetally pinned to the black lane of water. Up to one side is the whirl’s edge, open sky, a brilliant moon. Down to the other is a rainbow, which smiles across the roiling mist of the abyss. ¶ Fear has driven your brother mad. You, however, take this chance…

BY THE TIME I MEET SAYAKA Murata, on a recent afternoon in June, the back of my linen dress is damp. It’s an oppressively humid summer day in Tokyo, the sun hidden by a thick blanket of gray, and we’re taking a stroll at the Shinjuku Gyoen National Garden, a 116-year-old park that becomes dense with crowds during the sakura blossom. Today, visitors are sparse; it seems we’re the only ones foolish enough to be out at noon. Looking at Murata’s long, collared black dress and black tights, I feel even hotter, but she seems unaffected, apart from a gentle glisten across her forehead. Maybe the subtle sheen is a source of pride for Murata, I think. After all, she’s not sure her body works like those of other humans.…

EVER SINCE Grand Theft Auto 3 pioneered the open-world genre in 2001, it seems like sprawling realms have become prerequisites for would-be blockbuster games. Our consoles are now packed with enormous, richly detailed 3D worlds to explore—and they just keep getting more expansive. By one calculation, GTA 5 is over six times larger than GTA 3; another estimate puts Elden Ring’s map at a massive 79 playable square kilometers. That got us wondering, which game is the biggest? Turns out, there’s no clear answer. Publishers generally won’t talk specifics, perhaps out of fear their in-game worlds will seem small in comparison to others. Of course, it isn’t the size that matters, it’s what you do with it that counts—diminutive maps often offer a more realistic and compelling experience. But that…

AT 11:12 PM ON August 15, 2021, Worth Parker’s phone pinged with a message. Sir. I hope you are well, it began. By any chance do you know any Marines who are on the ground right now? Parker did not. He was in his bed in Wilmington, North Carolina, 7,200 miles from “the ground” of Kabul, having retired from the United States Marines six weeks earlier. He was trying to stay as disconnected as possible, even shutting off notifications to all of his apps. But, as a self-described “49-year-old Luddite,” he’d accidentally left Facebook turned on. The message continued: My brother, who was an interpreter with the Special Mission Wing, and my father, who used to be the fixed wing aircraft squadron commander until he retired and then he worked…

MOST DRIVERS WHO head up to Alta Ski Area from Salt Lake City pay no mind to the nondescript turnoff from Utah State Route 210 that veers out to the left about 5 miles before the slopes. Some passing motorists may catch a glimpse of the black gate and the “No Trespassing” signs or see a plain white cargo van peeling off the main road and feel a twinge of curiosity. What they wouldn’t see, at the end of a winding lane, is a bunker-like concrete structure about the size of a two-story house, surrounded by a system of motion sensors and hidden cameras. Behind the structure’s loading door, a tunnel stretches some 200 feet into the solid granite mountain, leading to a series of vaults that constitute one of…

DID YOU KNOW that you can, right now, for free, go to Archive.org, the great online library of all things, and load up within your web browser an ancient, decrepit emulated computer—a DOS box from 1991, a black-and-white Mac, a green-and-black Apple II—and run the WordPerfect of yore, boot old Hyper-Card stacks, or use 1979’s VisiCalc as God intended? Perhaps this does not seem miraculous to you. Fair. Moore’s law has taken us from 250 billion or so CPU churns per year on the earliest Macs to a quintillion potential clock cycles on a good gaming PC, a healthy 4,000,000X increase. Anyone with sense might reasonably ask, What? Why use a shiny new computer to run old spreadsheets? And I might nod and shrug, but inside I am a translucent…

I USED TO WORRY about using too much electricity. If a family member forgot to turn off the AC, I’d snap at them: “What, you want the planet to cook extra fast?” If I found lights left on overnight, I’d fume. I was insufferable. In my defense, I’d been worrying about climate change ever since Jim Hansen’s 1988 landmark congressional testimony. With every blast of AC, I knew more carbon was being pumped into the atmosphere. So I turned into an energy miser. I’d go around the house turning off lights; if no one else was home, I’d leave the AC off, even on blazing days. Then something fundamentally shifted my psychology around electricity: I installed solar panels on my house. I quickly found myself awash in energy. The installers…

WHEN I WAS IN MIDDLE SCHOOL, my brother swiped the wire hangers from my closet. They went missing from the rest of the house too. Every night after calculus homework, he worked away at one gorgeous, obsessive task: knocking together suit after suit of chain mail armor. One night the hammering stopped and he made a rare appearance. Could our mom sew him a tabard with a cowl? She could and she did. With that under his arm, he and two friends made their way to a nearby avocado grove. I wasn’t allowed to follow, but I’d guess they suited up, bashed at each other with swords, and said things in British accents. Today you might call that Larp, short for “live-action role-play,” a term widely used to describe hours…