Innehållsförteckning för April 2023 från WIRED

FOR THE MODEST price of 10,000 mana tokens (about $7,000) per day, back in January anyone could have rented parcel 27,87 in Decentraland, a 3D virtual world that runs on the Ethereum blockchain. Renting the land would have given the tenant the right to build anything on it—a shop, an event space, an art installation, whatever. But the real winner would be the landlord, who goes by Beatrix#7239, their virtual pockets lined with cryptocash. Not every property is as pricey as parcel 27,87, which is centrally located, near where people first spawn into Decentraland. However, a market for leasing virtual real estate is beginning to take shape, creating a new source of income for metaversian landowners. Brands like Mastercard and Heineken have long been able to rent Decentraland plots via…

In October of last year, an enormous new creature appeared on the seabed of the Pacific Ocean, about 1,400 miles south-west of San Diego. It was a remote-controlled, 90-ton machine the size of a small house, lowered from an industrial ship on a cable nearly 3 miles long. Once it was settled on the ocean floor, the black, white, and Tonka-truck-yellow contraption began grinding its way forward, its lights lancing through the darkness, steel treads biting into the silt. A battery of water jets mounted on its front end blasted away at the seafloor, stirring up billowing clouds of muck and dislodging hundreds of fist-sized black rocks that lay half-buried in the sediment. The jets propelled the lumpy stones into an intake at the front of the vehicle, where they…

WHERE MY SON was little, my mom started collecting his outgrown clothes to give to strangers on the internet. She would meet these people through Buy Nothing, a project that had been created by two women from Bainbridge Island, Washington, not far from her home in Seattle. The mission of Buy Nothing, which had a local cult following, was to revive old-fashioned sharing among neighbors. People were organized by town or neighborhood into Facebook groups, where they could post what they needed, or no longer needed, and their neighbors would respond accordingly. What made this different from Goodwill, Craigslist, or other freebie groups was that the people in your group always lived close by, and—because Buy Nothing was hosted on Facebook—everyone’s names and photos were visible, and messaging other members…

Audio-Technica AT-LP2022 The Japanese company Audio-Technica chose to celebrate its 60th anniversary by doing something totally sober and rational: releasing a transparent record player. The platter and 30-mm-thick chassis are made from heavy, high-density acrylic that keeps sound-degrading vibrations to a minimum. The spin and signal collection are handled by a belt drive and a carbon-fiber tonearm. It sounds fantastic, thanks in part to its ultra-squishy shock-absorbing feet. The limited-edition model (only 3,000 are being made) is an especially fine way to showcase colored or clear vinyl as a sort of sonic artwork. If you’re not quite flush enough to spring for one of these rarities, or if you’re just terrified of smudges, Audio-Technica also sells the AT-LP7 ($849), which has nearly the same fidelity and looks almost identical,…

IN THE VILLAGE of Melness, a frayed twist of bungalows and old stone buildings on Scotland’s desolate northern shore, April is a month of new beginnings, when the dark and strung-out Highland winter finally unfurls into a tentative spring, and pregnant ewes balloon like airships in the wind-swept hills. As the 2015 lambing season neared its start, the villagers began the usual preparation of their small plots of rented land, called crofts, for farm and pasture. Behind the crofts and croft houses was the bog: an immense, bronze-hued ocean of deep peat, stretching into the horizon. For Dorothy Pritchard, a retired schoolteacher and chair of the Melness Crofters’ Estate, an organization that owns and manages the crofting land, this spring would be stranger than usual. Over the past several weeks,…

WHEN HIGH SCHOOL English teacher Kelly Gibson first encountered ChatGPT in December, existential anxiety kicked in fast. While the internet delighted in the chatbot’s superficially sophisticated answers to users’ prompts, educators like Gibson were less amused. If anyone could ask ChatGPT to “write 300 words on what the green light symbolizes in The Great Gatsby,” what would stop students from feeding their homework to the bot? Speculation swirled about a new era of rampant cheating and a death knell for essays, even education itself. “I thought, ‘Oh my God, this is literally what I teach,’” Gibson says. But amid the panic, some enterprising teachers began to see ChatGPT as an opportunity to redesign what learning looks like. After her initial alarm, Gibson became one of them. She spent her winter…

I. IN A NONDESCRIPT house on a quiet street in a middle-class suburb of Houston, Texas, Alaa Allawi hunched over his black and gold laptop. It was early 2017, and Allawi ranked among the top 10 vendors on AlphaBay, at the time the dark web’s biggest bazaar for all manner of illegal wares. Every week he moved dozens of packages of illegal narcotics: cocaine, counterfeit Xanax, and fake OxyContin. An order came in from a young marine in North Carolina. He wanted Oxy. Allawi went about fulfilling the order, choosing from among the bags of powders and chemicals strewn about his attic and garage. He had precursor chemicals, binding agents, and colored dyes from eBay, as well as fentanyl—a synthetic opioid 50 times more potent than heroin—from China. “Man, you…