Tech
Elon Musk Promises a Really Truly Self-Driving Tesla in 2020
February 20, 2019Elon Musk is no stranger to bold predictions, and on Tuesday, he lobbed another one at self-driving tech doubters: The Tesla CEO said the electric carmaker’s full self-driving feature will be completed by the end of 2019. And by the end of 2020, he added, it will be so capable, you’ll be able to snooze […]
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Audi Cars Tell You How Fast to Go to Catch All Green Lights
February 19, 2019The challenge is as old as the stoplight itself: How to time your pace through town so you hit green light after green light, nixing any time spent twiddling your thumbs at red lights. Go too slow, and you’re forever lurching forward trying to squeak through yellows. Go too fast, and you soon reach red […]
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Netflix Just Canceled ‘Jessica Jones’ and ‘The Punisher’
February 19, 2019Hello, and welcome to a slightly-late-because-of-President’s-Day presentation of The Monitor, WIRED’s look at all that’s good (and sometimes bad) in the world of pop culture. What’s up for today? Well, Netflix just cancelled its last two Marvel shows, the creator of #OscarsSoWhite is going to the Oscars, and there still isn’t gender parity in Hollywood. […]
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Is That Dagobah? No, Just a Real-Life Magical Forest
February 19, 2019With its gnarled trees, moss-covered boulders, and misty ambience, Wistman’s Wood—a remnant of an ancient forest near Devon, England—has captured the imaginations of visitors for thousands of years, inspiring legends about druids and supernatural hellhounds. When Neil Burnell visited on a family holiday as a child, he was reminded of Dagobah, the swamp planet where […]
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Would You Pay $6,000 for Vision-Quality VR?
February 19, 2019Parked in a Berlin platz at night, the concept car gleams, city lights dancing off its sinuous lines. I crouch down next to its hood to admire its shape, and as the paint twinkles, a word etched on the tire catches my eye. SPEEDGRIPP. Though faint, each letter looks pristine and unbroken, like the tire’s […]
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The Government’s New Weather Model Faces a Storm of Protest
February 19, 2019The government’s new weather forecast model has a slight problem: It predicts that outside temperatures will be a few degrees colder than what nature delivers. This “cold bias” means that local meteorologists are abandoning the National Weather Service in favor of forecasts produced by British and European weather agencies. For the past few weeks, the […]
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Evenflo Gold Smart Convertible Car Seat Review: Safety First
February 19, 2019When you made that first drive home from the hospital with your newborn, you probably had the car seat professionally installed. You probably triple-checked each strap and swerved around every crack in the road, quaking with love and paranoia. It would never occur to you that four years later, you might be the kind of […]
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Will AI Achieve Consciousness? Wrong Question
February 19, 2019When Norbert Wiener, the father of cybernetics, wrote his book The Human Use of Human Beings in 1950, vacuum tubes were still the primary electronic building blocks, and there were only a few actual computers in operation. But he imagined the future we now contend with in impressive detail and with few clear mistakes. More […]
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Russian Hackers Go From Foothold to Full-On Breach in 19 Minutes
February 19, 2019In the handwringing post mortem after a hacker breach, the first point of intrusion usually takes the focus: The phishing email that Clinton campaign manager John Podesta’s aide accidentally flagged as legit, or the Apache Struts vulnerability that let hackers get access to an Equifax server. But Dmitri Alperovitch, chief technology officer of security firm […]
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The Confounding Climate Science of Lab-Grown Meat
February 19, 2019A future in which your hamburger is grown from animal cells in a lab is rapidly approaching. The idea is that by culturing meat in a vat, you not only cut down on animal slaughter but greatly reduce emissions, on account of cattle taking a lot of energy to raise and butcher and ship. Not […]
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