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 S69Ancient Buddhist painting can help you understand the art of Zen   For months, conservators at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco were hard at work fashioning a display case for Six Persimmons, the 13th-century ink painting at the center of their upcoming exhibit, “The Heart of Zen.” Its owner, the Kyoto National Museum in Japan, had provided the conservators with an extensive list of requirements concerning not just the material and measurements of the case itself, but the quality of the air inside it.Even to seasoned museum workers, the demands of the Kyoto team appear extreme, bordering on unreasonable. That is, until you consider the history of the art involved. Painted on a scroll by the famed Chinese monk Muqi, Six Persimmons is as fragile as it is coveted. For centuries, this minimalist still life of autumn fruit was owned by a wealthy Japanese family that only displayed it during their exclusive tea ceremonies. After ending up in the hands of Daitoku-ji, a Buddhist temple in Kyoto, it was moved to the National Museum — not to be displayed, but stored. “Heart of Zen” not only marks the first time Muqi’s masterpiece will be shown to the public since 2019, when it was exhibited at the Miho Museum, but also the first time it will be shown outside Japan.
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S67Sam Altman's Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond  More details of Sam Altman's sudden ousting as CEO of OpenAI have emerged, with several senior researchers quitting the company, and executives and investors from across the industry expressing shock and confusion at what is increasingly being perceived as a board coup.Hours after Sam Altman was booted from the company by its board, Greg Brockman, another OpenAI cofounder and the company's chairman, quit in protest. Brockman later posted details of Altman's removal suggesting that the company's chief scientist, Ilya Sutskever, had orchestrated the effort to remove the CEO.
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S68What Sam Altman's Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI  Sam Altman always insisted that he wasn’t the most important person at OpenAI despite being its CEO. As he traveled the world this year meeting world leaders—the world’s unofficial ambassador of AI—Altman would soft-pedal his role, even as he stole glances at his phone to keep up with what was happening in OpenAI’s luxe San Francisco offices.“We have an incredibly great team here that can do a lot of things, so mostly, I defer to them,” he told me in May when I asked him how the company ran in his absence. “But some things only a CEO can do—some HR thing of the moment, or you have to kill some project, or something with a major partner.” Those items would accumulate on his phone and at the end of the day he’d bat out responses. Then he would go back to speechifying, meeting developers, and taking tea with prime ministers.
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S70"Iron Man" material made from DNA and glass is 4x stronger than steel  One of the cool things about science fiction is that it can inspire real science and innovation. Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea emboldened underwater exploration. William Gibson’s Neuromancer influenced the development of the internet, while Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash popularized the concept of the metaverse. Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy introduced the idea of e-books — in addition to giving us the answer to life, the universe, and everything.Who knows what other real advances science fiction will successfully inspire? Flying cars? Space cities? Iron Man suits?
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S65SpaceX's Starship Lost Shortly After Launch of Second Test Flight  SpaceX's Starship failed its test flight this morning when the automated flight termination system triggered, and engineers lost contact with the craft about 10 minutes into its journey. This marks the company's second attempt at sending a Starship on a near-orbital trip, a 90-minute voyage that would have gone almost around the world. An initial test flight also failed in April, exploding four minutes after liftoff and flinging debris throughout the surrounding area.As before, today's launch took place at SpaceX's Starbase facility in Boca Chica, Texas. But this time, all of the 33 Raptor engines appeared to ignite properly, and the Starship's stage separation from the Super Heavy booster worked more or less as planned. The vehicle survived max q, or the point in its ascent when it's under the most pressure from the atmosphere and its own velocity. About three minutes after launch, the Starship successfully separated from the Super Heavy booster, after which the booster exploded, something SpaceX officials typically refer to with the euphemism "rapid unscheduled disassembly," or RUD.
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S60Short Naps Have Major Benefits for Your Mind  I have a confession: I nap. Most days, after lunch, you will find me snoozing. I used to keep quiet about it. Other countries have strong napping traditions, but here in the U.S. it is often equated with laziness. In 2019 a U.S. federal agency even announced a ban on sleeping in government buildings.I'm going public about my nap habit now because, despite what bureaucrats may think, sleep scientists are increasingly clear about the power of the nap. That shift is part of the relatively recent recognition that the quality and duration of sleep are public health issues, says physiologist Marta Garaulet of the University of Murcia in Spain.
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S66The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry  If you work at a spy agency tasked with surveilling the communications of more than 160 million people, it’s probably a good idea to make sure all the data in your possession stays off the open internet. Just ask Bangladesh’s National Telecommunication Monitoring Center, which security researchers found connected to a leaky database that exposed everything from names and email addresses to cell phone numbers and bank account details. The data was likely just used for testing purposes, but WIRED confirmed at least some of the data is linked to real people.A fight is brewing in the United States Congress over the future of a powerful surveillance program. Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is set to expire at the end of the year. With the December 31 deadline quickly approaching, members of Congress and civil liberties groups are criticizing Section 702 for enabling the “incidental” surveillance of Americans’ communications and “abuses” by the FBI. While a privacy-preserving update to the program has been introduced in Congress, some 702 critics remain concerned that lawmakers will push through reauthorization using other, “must-pass” legislation.
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S59A love letter to timekeeping: How clocks have shaped our world  It goes without saying that a watchmaker would be fascinated by watches. I started my training in the art of traditional artisanal watchmaking 20 years ago – using centuries-old techniques to create little machines that can tell us the time of day. Horology – the art and science of timekeeping – is a world of extremes. There is a radical contrast between the microscopic components on my work bench and their connection to the vastness of the Universe around us.To mark the 60th anniversary of Doctor Who, we're exploring the big questions about time, including the science of time travel, how clocks have shaped humanity, and even the mind-bending temporal consequences of flying into a black hole. Read and watch more from Time: The Ultimate Guide.
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S64The Legion Go Could Have Been a Great Handheld. Windows Wrecked It  If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more. Please also consider subscribing to WIREDSince the Nintendo Switch dropped in 2017, the gaming industry has chased the dream of bringing as many games as possible into a handheld form factor. The Steam Deck (and its recent iterative upgrade) have come the closest, but most other attempts have been plagued with massive problems. In the chaotic battle for third place, Lenovo’s Legion Go makes a compelling case.
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S62New Models Could Predict Climate Change Effects with Unprecedented Detail  Scientists have proposed a network of supercomputing centers that would focus on local climate impactsScientists have used computer models to predict global warming's implications for more than five decades. As climate change intensifies, these increasingly precise models require more and more computing power. For a decade the best simulations have been able to predict climate change effects down to a 25-square-kilometer area. Now a new modeling project could tighten the resolution to one kilometer, helping policymakers and city planners spot the neighborhoods—or even individual buildings—most vulnerable to extreme weather events.
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S63The real gold of our economy is in our hands  The vast majority of our time at work is spent trudging through redundant and outdated workflows, says operations visionary Salvatore Cali. Laying out the most common time-wasting pitfalls, he urges policy leaders and businesses to reevaluate what they ask of both employees and consumers. "By rethinking the true purpose of each task, you will discover what is waste and what is the real gold of your company: the creation of value," says Cali.
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S61Poem: 'In Conversation with Elizabeth Fulhame'  She has a map spread at her feet, a lit carpet of gold citiesand silver rivers, each tributary wire-drawn with the tipof a squirrel's tail. Everything is very damp.It seems like a dream, even in the dream. Saucers of silkline the sills like a grand banquet for clothes moths.The round table (pocked with scorch marks) throngs
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S58S2S3S4S5Taupo: The super volcano under New Zealand's largest lake  Located in the centre of New Zealand's North Island, the town of Taupo sits sublimely in the shadow of the snow-capped peaks of Tongariro National Park. Fittingly, this 40,000-person lakeside town has recently become one of New Zealand's most popular tourist destinations, as hikers, trout fishers, water sports enthusiasts and adrenaline junkies have started descending upon it.The namesake of this tidy town is the Singapore-sized lake that kisses its western border. Stretching 623sq km wide and 160m deep with several magma chambers submerged at its base, Lake Taupo isn't only New Zealand's largest lake; it's also an incredibly active geothermal hotspot. Every summer, tourists flock to bathe in its bubbling hot springs and sail through its emerald-green waters. Yet, the lake is the crater of a giant super volcano, and within its depths lies the unsettling history of this picturesque marvel.
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S6Message sticks: Australia's ancient unwritten language  The continent of Australia is home to more than 250 spoken Indigenous languages and 800 dialects. Yet, one of its linguistic cornerstones wasn't spoken, but carved.Known as message sticks, these flat, rounded and oblong pieces of wood were etched with ornate images on both sides that conveyed important messages and held the stories of the continent's Aboriginal people – considered the world's oldest continuous living culture. Message sticks are believed to be thousands of years old and were typically carried by messengers over long distances to reinforce oral histories or deliver news between Aboriginal nations or language groups.
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S7Did Australia's boomerangs pave the way for flight?  The aircraft is one of the most significant developments of modern society, enabling people, goods and ideas to fly around the world far more efficiently than ever before. The first successful piloted flight took off in 1903 in North Carolina, but a 10,000-year-old hunting tool likely developed by Aboriginal Australians may have held the key to its lift-off. As early aviators discovered, the secret to flight is balancing the flow of air. Therefore, an aircraft's wings, tail or propeller blades are often shaped in a specially designed, curved manner called an aerofoil that lifts the plane up and allows it to drag or turn to the side as it moves through the air.
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S8Bringing back California's redwood forests  Only 5% of California's redwood forests have never been logged. An initiative to restore these forests is gaining momentum, aided by research showing that redwoods store more aboveground carbon than any forest on Earth.Lyndon Johnson signed the bill that established the Redwood National Park in California 55 years ago. It was a long time coming, with proposals blocked in the 1920s, 30s and 40s by an industry that was beavering through the most valuable timberlands on the planet. When the National Park Service recommended a park again in 1964, bipartisan support in the Senate, a nod from President Johnson and, I believe, the trees' own power to inspire eventually got a deal through Congress.
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S9Science News Briefs from around the World: December 2023  The explosive secret behind Saturn’s rings, a Scandinavian arrow frozen for 4,000 years, the world's deepest-known virus, and much more in this month’s Quick HitsScientists discovered a previously unknown ninth species of pangolin by using contraband bits of the animals' natural armor confiscated in Hong Kong and Yunnan. The anteaterlike creatures are among the world's most trafficked animals, prized for meat and distinctive scales that some believe have medicinal properties.
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S10COVID Caused a Baby Bump when Experts Expected a Drop. Here's Why  Birth rates tend to decline during economic recessions or disasters, so many experts predicted that the COVID pandemic would prompt people to have fewer children. A recent study of fertility trends in the U.S. from 2015 through 2021, however, reveals there was actually a baby bump.Demographers expected to see a decline in birth rate in December 2020, nine months after COVID became a pandemic. But the decline started earlier than that. It was driven largely by a drop in births to people born outside the U.S.—especially people from China, Mexico and Latin America—who would have traveled here but were prevented by pandemic restrictions. Some of them would have been coming as immigrants, whereas others would have been visiting to secure U.S. citizenship for their babies before returning home.
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S11'Heartbreak' Stars Cause Enormous, Tumultuous Waves in Their Partners  As the tide rolls in on an ocean beach, waves crash in a spray of saltwater and foam. Light-years from Earth a similar scene is playing out on a vastly larger scale as waves of hot gas swell to the height of three of our suns and then collapse onto the surface of a supergiant star, according to a recent study in Nature Astronomy.In eccentric two-star systems called “heartbeat” stars, one star distorts its partner's shape as they orbit each other—a bit like how the moon creates ocean tides as it orbits Earth. These stellar tides of hot gas, which typically bulge to a height of about 0.1 percent of the star's overall diameter, cause variations in the star system's brightness that astronomers can detect on Earth.
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S12New Results Reveal How to Build a Nuclear Clock  Nuclear clocks could shatter timekeeping records. Now physicists are learning how to build oneFrom satellite navigation to GPS, the world runs on ultraprecise timekeeping, usually based on atomic clocks. These devices use energy sources, such as lasers tuned to specific frequencies, to excite electrons orbiting atomic nuclei. The electrons jump or “transition” to a higher energy level before falling back down to a lower one at rapid, regular time intervals—an atomic clock's “tick.”
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S13The Precarious Rise of Disposable Vapes  To live in London in 2023 is to be perpetually engulfed in a cloud of cloyingly sweet vapor. The scent of Blue Razz Lemonade replaces traffic fumes; Banana Ice covers the rancid smell of rubbish.Disposable vapes are everywhere. Sleeker-looking than their bulkier, refillable counterparts, easier to get your hands on, and cheaper too, their use has exploded in popularity among adults—and, alarmingly, among young people.
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S14How to Choose the Right Laptop: A Step-by-Step Guide  Buying a laptop is an exercise in confusion. Even if you know what everything means and know exactly what you want, finding it can be difficult. Heck, just navigating the manufacturers' websites to locate the model you want is frustrating. We hope this guide will help you navigate the morass of modern laptops. Below is a section on every major component you'll want to know about when you browse for a PC. We break down the jargon and try to explain things on a practical level.Updated November 2023: We've updated specifications, examples, and our minimum suggestions for both Intel and AMD chips. We've also added some notes on the new Chromebook Plus laptops.
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S15The Best Luxury Gifts for Those Who Enjoy the High Life  If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more. Please also consider subscribing to WIREDThey say it’s better to give than to receive—but whoever came up with that particular idiom had clearly never looked at one of WIRED’s elevated gift lists. Bank-account-incinerating prices aside, we’d be very happy to be on the receiving end of any of these splendid items as, diverse as they are, each represents the pinnacle of their art, the zenith of exclusivity, and the very boundary of good taste—which only makes us covet them all the more.
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S16The Real Reason EV Repairs Are So Expensive  In June this year, a Hyundai Kona rolled into a repair shop in Cheltenham, England. Humming gently, as electric vehicles do, it seemed to be running just fine. But the insurance company wasn’t ready to sign it off. The car had been in a minor collision, which had caused damage to its battery casing. Another repair shop, about an hour’s drive away, had been asked to replace the casing, but they didn’t know how.And so, the car ended up here in Cheltenham, in front of Matt Cleevely, owner of Cleevely Motors. When he and his colleagues opened up the vehicle, they were stunned. Sure, the metal casing had a few light scratches—minor marks made by one of the car’s rear suspension arms, which had got jolted during the incident—but nothing more.
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S17How OpenAI's Bizarre Structure Gave 4 People the Power to Fire Sam Altman  When Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and other investors formed the startup behind ChatGPT as a US not-for-profit organization in 2015, Altman told Vanity Fair he had very little experience with nonprofits. "So I'm just not sure how it's going to go," he said.He couldn't have imagined the drama of this week, with four directors on OpenAI's nonprofit board unexpectedly firing him as CEO and removing the company's president as chairman of the board. But the bylaws Altman and his cofounders initially established and a restructuring in 2019 that opened the door to billions of dollars in investment from Microsoft gave a handful of people with no financial stake in the company the power to upend the project on a whim.
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S18Your "immune resilience" greatly impacts your health and lifespan  It is a mystery why humans manifest vast differences in lifespan, health, and susceptibility to infectious diseases. However, a team of international scientists has revealed that the capacity to resist or recover from infections and inflammation (a trait they call “immune resilience”) is one of the major contributors to these differences.Immune resilience involves controlling inflammation and preserving or rapidly restoring immune activity at any age, explained Weijing He, a study co-author. He and his colleagues discovered that people with the highest level of immune resilience were more likely to live longer, resist infection and recurrence of skin cancer, and survive COVID and sepsis.
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S19Analog computing is undergoing a resurgence  This article is an installment of Future Explored, a weekly guide to world-changing technology. You can get stories like this one straight to your inbox every Thursday morning by subscribing here.To ensure the technology of tomorrow is both smart and sustainable, we may need to revive a technology of the past: analog computing.
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S20S21Cities: Skylines 2's troubled launch, and why simulation games are freaking hard  If this hugely ambitious city builder simulation would have been released some time ago, patched over and over again, and updated with some gap-filling DLC, it would be far better off. It could be on its slow-burn second act, like No Man’s Sky, Cyberpunk 2077, or Final Fantasy XIV. It could have settled into a disgruntled-but-still-invested player base, like Destiny 2 or Overwatch 2. Or its technical debts could have been slowly paid off to let its underlying strengths come through, as with Disco Elysium or The Witcher 3.
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S22S23Photos of the Week:  A pogo-stick-record attempt in Pennsylvania, airport-fauna management in Brazil, lenticular clouds above Corsica, continued cleanup from Hurricane Otis in Acapulco, a heat wave in Brazil, holiday light shows in England, continued Israeli air strikes in Gaza, and much more Police officers work to contain protesters trying to enter the train station in Barcelona, Spain, on November 11, 2023. Riot police briefly clashed with about 2,000 pro-Palestinian protesters who stormed and occupied a commuter train station. #
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S24What the  The series succeeded not because it had a clear political philosophy, but because it understood the power of entertainment above all.Hollywood was never going to stop making more Hunger Games movies. Based on Suzanne Collins’s best-selling dystopian young-adult novels, the first four films released from 2012 to 2015 collectively grossed nearly $3 billion worldwide. They dominated pop culture: Jennifer Lawrence became a bona fide movie star; videos on how to replicate her character’s side braid flooded the internet; the phrase hunger games became shorthand for any kind of intense competition. We saw a wave of copycat franchises—Divergent, The Maze Runner, and The Mortal Instruments, among many, many others—that never reached The Hunger Games level of success.
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S25How the Hillbillies Remade America  A massive and forgotten migration reshaped the liberal approach to poverty and realigned America’s political parties.On April 29, 1954, a cross section of Cincinnati’s municipal bureaucracy—joined by dozens of representatives drawn from local employers, private charities, the religious community, and other corners of the city establishment—gathered at the behest of the mayor’s office to discuss a new problem confronting the city. Or, rather, about 50,000 new problems, give or take. That was roughly the number of Cincinnati residents who had recently migrated to the city from the poorest parts of southern Appalachia. The teachers, police officials, social workers, hiring-department personnel, and others who gathered that day in April had simply run out of ideas about what to do about them.
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S26The Other Ozempic Revolution  On Labor Day weekend, 35 excited guests arrived at a campground in Newark, Ohio, for a retreat dedicated to “fat joy”—a place where people could swim, dance, do yoga, roast marshmallows, and sleep in cabins with others who had been made to feel guilty about their weight. The point of Camp RoundUp was “really diving into the joy of being at summer camp, the joy of being a fat little kid again,” Alison Rampa, one of the organizers, told me.She and a friend, Erica Chiseck, had created Camp RoundUp to counter the shame and stigma that fat Americans report experiencing because of their size. They wanted to establish somewhere that “ladies and theydies” could feel comfortable in shorts or a swimsuit, with no awkwardness in the lunch line over portion sizes or second helpings.
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S27An Unlikely Source of Greenhouse-Gas Emissions  Chunks of carbon-rich frozen soil, or permafrost, undergird much of the Arctic tundra. This perpetually frozen layer sequesters carbon from the atmosphere, sometimes storing it for tens of thousands of years beneath the boggy ground.The frozen soil is insulated by a cool wet blanket of plant litter, moss, and peat. But if that blanket is incinerated by a tundra wildfire, the permafrost becomes vulnerable to thawing. And when permafrost thaws, it releases the ancient carbon, which microbes in the soil then convert into methane—a potent greenhouse gas whose release contributes to climate change and the radical reshaping of northern latitudes across the globe.
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S28Walton Goggins, Zadie Smith, and Lauryn Hill  This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer reveals what’s keeping them entertained. Today’s special guest is Conor Friedersdorf, a staff writer and the author of our Up for Debate newsletter.
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