Innehållsförteckning för December 2023/January 2024 från WIRED

IF KATE KALLOT has her way, small-scale farmers across Africa will soon be able to access the power of artificial intelligence and satellite technology. Her mission is to help them maximize yields of cassava, coffee beans, and other crops that form the backbone of the continent’s economy. From the Nile Delta down to the Cape of Good Hope, a constellation of six satellites will keep watch over the 11.7 million square miles of the continent, monitoring soil quality, moisture, and vegetation. The data collected will then feed a machine-learning model that’s designed to measure crop health and predict yields for the season. At the ground level, farmers will receive SMS alerts warning them of potential flash floods, pest infestations, and other factors that will affect their crops. Kallot is the…

WHAT WOULD YOU do with the world’s biggest camera? Probe the very structure of the universe? That’s what, come 2024, scientists at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile will finally get to do. The observatory, named for the late astronomer and dark-matter pioneer, is under construction at the 9,000-foot peak of Cerro Pachón in the Andes. It will house the largest digital camera in history, a telescope with a massive 8.4-meter-wide mirror, and a fast-pivoting mount to peer into the universe as never before. “The major strength of this technology is to see faint objects and the dynamic universe—things that are changing,” says Sandrine Thomas, deputy director of construction at the observatory. “That gives us a lot of information about the beginning of the universe, galaxies, and objects in…

I SEE YOU, READER. You drink the probiotic seltzer, with its gut-improving bacteria, and the fiber-filled prebiotic. You regularly consume eclectic fermented foods and burly amounts of kale to diversify those precious microbes in your digestive tract. Because, after all, what isn’t the microbiome responsible for? It’s been all the rage for the past few years, with scientists hoping it could help treat everything from immune disorders to mental illness. How exactly that will work is something we’re just starting to explore. This spring, the effort got a boost when UC Berkeley biochemist and gene-editing pioneer Jennifer Doudna, who won a Nobel Prize in 2020 for coinventing Crispr, joined the pursuit. Her first order of business, spearheaded by Berkeley’s Innovative Genomics Institute: fine-tuning our microbiome by genetically editing the microbes…

OF THE THREE YOUNG MEN WHO BUI LT MIRA I FIT the profile of a cybercriminal, least of all Josiah White, who could lay perhaps the most direct claim to being its inventor. Josiah had grown up in a rural county an hour south of Pittsburgh. He was the youngest of four children in a closeknit Christian family, all homeschooled, as his mom put it, to better “find out how God had created them and what he had created them to pursue.” She describes the thin, dark-haired baby of the family as a stubborn and independent but unusually kind child, who would sit beside the new kid in Sunday school to make them feel welcome. Josiah’s father was an engineer turned insurance salesman, and the family lived in a fixer-upper…

THERE’S AN EPIDEMIC of loneliness, haven’t you heard? The causes seem obvious: the pandemic, climate change, wars, so much more. But we’ve been here before as a species. This isn’t the first time Everything Happened Too Much All at Once. What’s different is the way a lot of people are soothing themselves, via crowdsourced therapy on social media. Whether it’s people using therapeutic language to describe garden-variety social phenomena (“gaslighting,” for instance, has become a synonym for “lying” or “misleading”), or actual therapists dispensing advice through Tik-Tok or retweet-ready articles about, say, how we’re surrounded by malignant narcissists, these practices can have perverse effects. To be sure, articles excoriating the “weaponizing of therapy-speak” have multiplied in the past year or so. But the backlash often skirts the heart of the…

Dear Cloud Support: “I kind of want to live in the metaverse. There will be all the same stuff as my regular universe—friends, work, shopping, entertainment—but it will somehow be more thrilling. When I move, will I still be myself?”—Virtual Horizons Dear Virtual, It’s hard to believe that only two years have passed since we were promised the new dispensation—the digital universe where, as Mark Zuckerberg put it, we would “be able to express ourselves in new, joyful, completely immersive ways.” In the metaverse, brain surgeons in Scotland would operate on patients in New Zealand, and friends would gather in simulated space stations, luxurious alpine retreats, and enchanted forests. The soaring promo video at 2021’s Meta Connect suggested that the metaverse would remain untainted by the limitations of the real…

MORE TAXIDERMIED ANIMALS live in Zack Snyder’s office than seems normal. A lioness. A beaver. A duck. Also a wide collection of axes, swords, and guns—the weapons used to fell the wild beasts, maybe? The effect should be unsettling, but it isn’t, because Snyder himself is warm, chatty, accommodating. And the space, tucked into a mountainside in Pasadena, California, turns out to be less a man cave than a fan cave: Snyder’s shrine to his creative life. The swords and guns are merely props from his movies, like Babydoll’s katanas from Sucker Punch. The photo of Wonder Woman above the sofa, where she’s holding a few severed heads? Huge and sepia-toned, it’s oddly alluring. Being in Snyder’s office, in fact, is a bit like watching one of his many stylized…

I BELIEVE, WITH total conviction, that the tech industry should stop absolutely everything else it is doing—self-driving cars, large language models, spyware, teledildonics—and figure out how to stop making me log in to everything all day. I would passionately love to return to an era in which the most important software tool I use is something besides my password manager. If you are young, you may not remember the days when you would turn on a computer and … frankly that was it. You may only know the new world of infinite login chains: Wake up, hold phone to face, check email, find that the email app has decided you need to log in, open password manager, log in to that, and so on. Repeat the process for your work…

JETTYJAMEZ AND AutumnRaynn have been live on TikTok for more than three weeks straight. In that time, spanning more than 500 hours, nothing much of note seems to have happened in their apartment, but a lot has happened with the people watching. The young couple has as many as nine cameras around their home: several in the bedroom, including one taped to the ceiling that stares down menacingly at the bed, a few in the living room, and even one above the toilet. If they leave the house, they take the audience with them. Their stream presents all of the camera angles in a grid, and at any given time thousands of people may be watching and commenting. Over the weeks, their audience has skyrocketed to over 2 million followers.…

Read more expert reviews at wired.com. Contributing product reviewers: Boone Ashworth, Michael Calore, Julian Chokkattu, Nena Farrell, Scott Gilbertson, Simon Hill, Matt Kamen, Christopher Null, Adrienne So, Louryn Strampe, Ryan Waniata, and Jeremy White. Photo assistant: Taka Mark Kasuya BLESSED BE THE FRUIT The Raspberry Pi debuted a decade ago as a tiny computing platform for tinkerers and hobbyists. Now the 4-inch circuit board has grown powerful enough to serve as a household’s primary computer. The Pi 5 is twice as fast as the previous model, with a new 2.4-GHz CPU, a more efficient GPU, and an updated power management controller, all made with custom silicon developed by Raspberry’s in-house engineers. There’s support for dual 4K displays this time too. Users pushing their Pi hard 24/7 will want to…

IN THE MORNING ON OCTOBER 21, 2016, SCOTT Shapiro got out of bed, opened his Dell laptop to read the day’s news, and found that the internet was broken. Not his internet, though at first it struck Shapiro that way as he checked and double-checked his computer’s Wi-Fi connection and his router. The internet. The New York Times website was offline, as was Twitter. So too were the websites of The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, the BBC, and Fox News. (And wired.) When Twitter intermittently sputtered back online, users cataloged an alarming, untold number of other digital services that were also victims of the outage. Amazon, Spotify, Reddit, PayPal, Airbnb, Slack, SoundCloud, HBO, and Netflix were all, to varying degrees, crippled for most of the East Coast of…

IN THE YEARS AFTER HE SAT IN HIS CONNECTICUT home and watched his digital life implode, Scott Shapiro became a kind of Mirai fanatic. The Yale Law professor eventually read the source code that Paras published on Hack Forums, printing it out, poring over its mechanics, and marveling at its well-polished design. Years later, he would write a case study of Mirai in his book Fancy Bear Goes Phishing, which tells a history of the internet through a series of extraordinary hacking events. Among other things, Shapiro now sees the Mirai case as a rare model of actual restorative justice in cybercriminal law. It shows, he argues, a positive alternative to putting young hackers in prison when, in many cases, their online behavior contrasts so sharply with their real-world selves.…