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 S32AI's single point of failure   "The world's most important advanced technology is nearly all produced in a single facility," says AI expert Rob Toews. He describes how one company in Taiwan, TSMC, manufactures nearly all the most advanced semiconductor chips — a crucial technology that powers everything from phones to electric vehicles to next-generation artificial intelligence — and breaks down how geopolitical tensions in the region could paralyze the global field of AI.
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S29Golden Mole That Swims through Sand Rediscovered after 86 Years  The iridescent, blind De Winton’s golden mole was last seen in 1937 and later declared officially lost. But scientists have since rediscovered it by tracking its environmental DNADe Winton’s golden mole was rediscovered in November 2023 through environmental DNA tracking after not being sighted since 1937.
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S31What will happen to marketing in the age of AI?  Generative AI is poised to transform the workplace, but we still need human brains for new ideas, says marketing expert Jessica Apotheker. She explores how marketers can find their niche in the world of AI based on their preference for data or creativity, offering a pragmatic and hopeful look at the future of business.
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S30The World Got Failing Grades on Climate Action. Here's How COP28 Aims to Fix That  The main negotiations at the COP28 climate meeting will aim to address how countries plan to fix shortcomings in their plans to reduce planet-warming emissions, as highlighted in the “Global Stocktake”Men wearing thawbs walk past a billboard promoting the transition to renewable energies at the UNFCCC COP28 Climate Conference the day before its official opening on November 29, 2023 in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
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S50S62Trump's Plan to Police Gender  After decades of gains in public acceptance, the LGBTQ community is confronting a climate in which political leaders are once again calling them weirdos and predators. Texas Governor Greg Abbott has directed the Department of Family and Protective Services to investigate the parents of transgender children; Governor Ron DeSantis has tried to purge Florida classrooms of books that acknowledge the reality that some people aren’t straight or cisgender; Missouri has imposed rules that limit access to gender-affirming care for trans people of all ages. Donald Trump is promising to nationalize such efforts. He doesn’t just want to surveil, miseducate, and repress children who are exploring their emerging identities. He wants to interfere in the private lives of millions of adults, revoking freedoms that any pluralistic society should protect.During his 2016 campaign, Trump seemed to think that feigning sympathy for queer people was good PR. “I will do everything in my power to protect our LGBTQ citizens,” he promised. Then, while in office, he oversaw a broad rollback of LGBTQ protections, removing gender identity and sexuality from federal nondiscrimination provisions regarding health care, employment, and housing. His Defense Department restricted soldiers’ right to transition and banned trans people from enlisting; his State Department refused to issue visas to the same-sex domestic partners of diplomats. Yet when seeking reelection in 2020, Trump still made a show of throwing a Pride-themed rally.
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S38Google's Gemini Is the Real Start of the Generative AI Boom  The history of artificial intelligence has been punctuated by periods of so-called "AI winter," when the technology seemed to meet a dead end and funding dried up. Each one has been accompanied by proclamations that making machines truly intelligent is just too darned hard for humans to figure out.Google's release of Gemini, claimed to be a fundamentally new kind of AI model and the company's most powerful to date, suggests that a new AI winter isn't coming anytime soon. In fact, although the 12 months since ChatGPT launched have been a banner year for AI, there is good reason to think that the current AI boom is only getting started.
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S39Why It Took Meta 7 Years to Turn on End-to-End Encryption for All Chats  Since 2016, the social behemoth now known as Meta has been working to deploy end-to-end encryption in its communication apps. CEO Mark Zuckerberg even promised in 2019 that the data privacy protection would roll out by default across all of the company's chat apps. In practice, though, it was a wildly ambitious goal fraught with technical and political challenges, and Meta has only been able to move toward it in gradual, incremental steps. But this week the company is finally starting its full rollout.“It's been a wild ride," says Jon Millican, a software engineer within Meta's messenger privacy team. “I suspect this is the first time that something’s been end-to-end encrypted with all of the constraints that we’re working with. It’s not just that we’re migrating people’s data, but it’s actually that we're having to fundamentally change a bunch of the assumptions that they work with when they’re using the product.”
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S63The Sanctions Against Russia Are Starting to Work  Economic penalties gain force over time, and for average Russians, the pain is finally setting in.Now that Russian President Vladimir Putin finds himself in a war of attrition, his only chance at victory depends on outlasting both Ukraine and its military supporters. He isn’t merely counting on the demoralization of the Ukrainian people and on “Ukraine fatigue” in the West; he’s also assuming that his own country has the stamina for a long and brutal fight. Yet after nearly two years in which Putin has largely succeeded in insulating most of his subjects from the war, the effects of Western sanctions—coupled with the astronomical and growing human and monetary costs of the conflict—are finally beginning to cause pain for the Russian general public.
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S3728 Delightful Gift Ideas for Music Lovers and Audiophiles  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 WIREDWhether you're trying to find a turntable so Mom and Dad can bust out their vintage vinyl collection, or you want to give the gift of great sound to a young music lover or a middle-aged audiophile, it can be tough to find great-sounding gear that doesn't cost an arm and a leg. That's where we come in. Each year, we spend hundreds of hours listening to the latest and greatest gear around, looking for the elusive products that bring the best possible sound for the money.
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S33S55S59A War on Blue America  During his term in the White House, Donald Trump governed as a wartime president—with blue America, rather than any foreign country, as the adversary. He sought to use national authority to achieve factional ends—to impose the priorities of red America onto Democratic-leaning states and cities. The agenda Trump has laid out for a second term makes clear that those bruising and divisive efforts were only preliminary skirmishes.Presidents always pursue policies that reflect the priorities of the voters and regions that supported them. But Trump moved in especially aggressive ways to exert control over, or punish, the jurisdictions that resisted him. His 2017 tax bill, otherwise a windfall for taxpayers in the upper brackets, capped the federal deductibility of state and local taxes, a costly shift for wealthy residents of liberal states such as New York and California. He moved, with mixed success, to deny federal law-enforcement grants to so-called sanctuary cities that didn’t fully cooperate with federal immigration agents. He attempted to strip California of the authority it has wielded since the early 1970s to set its own, more stringent pollution standards.
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S61Civil Rights Undone  In late 2020, even as the instigators of insurrection were marshaling their followers to travel to Washington, D.C., another kind of coup—a quieter one—was in the works. On December 21, in one of his departing acts as attorney general, Bill Barr submitted a proposed rule change to the White House. The change would eliminate the venerable standard used by the Justice Department to handle discrimination cases, known as “disparate impact.” The memo was quickly overshadowed by the events of January 6, and, in the chaotic final days of Donald Trump’s presidency, it was never implemented. But Barr’s proposal represented perhaps the most aggressive step the administration took in its effort to dismantle existing civil-rights law. Should Trump return to power, he would surely attempt to see the effort through.Since the legislative victories of the civil-rights movement in the 1960s, legal and civil rights for people on the margins have tended to expand. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968 were followed by voting provisions for Indigenous people and non-English speakers, a Supreme Court guarantee of the right to abortion, increased protections for people with disabilities, and formal recognition of same-sex marriage. The trend mostly continued under presidents of both parties—until Trump. Though his administration could be bumbling, the president’s actions matched his rhetoric when it came to eroding civil-rights enforcement.
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S69The Hybrid-Car Dilemma  Michael Treiman is something of a professional electric-vehicle evangelist. As the vice president of sales for ChargeSmart EV—a company that sells electric charging stations, mostly to businesses and municipal offices—his job is to convince people that EVs are the future, and that it’s time to start planning for them. But on his personal time, you won’t find him in an electric car. Or, rather, a fully electric car: He owns a 2022 Chrysler Pacifica plug-in hybrid. For his family of five, he told me, none of the few three-row electric SUVs for sale right now can match what the hybrid minivan can do. With the Pacifica’s small battery that powers the car for short trips and boosts its MPG, “we have gotten over 1,500 miles out of a single tank of gas,” he said.The humble hybrid is having a moment. While this year is shaping up to be the biggest year for EV sales America has ever seen, it has also been marred by staggering production challenges and uneven demand from consumers. Americans are still wary of electric vehicles’ higher prices, limited battery ranges, and inadequate local charging infrastructure. As a result, some carmakers are dialing back their electric sales goals, battery-plant plans, and even the tough love they once had for car dealers reluctant to go all-in on EVs. Meanwhile, hybrid sales are growing at a rate that slightly outpaces EV growth, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Hybrids now make up nearly 10 percent of new car sales, a proportion that’s more than doubled since 2020. Unlike EVs, hybrids burn gasoline and create tailpipe emissions, but they generally create far less tailpipe pollution than their purely gas counterparts. The latest Toyota Sienna minivan, for example, comes only in hybrid form and has nearly half the CO2 emissions of its non-hybrid predecessor.
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S47Humans may be the most powerful evolutionary force on Earth  “Anthropogenic” is a key word of our time. It means caused by, and/or originating with, humans. It’s generally used to refer to climate change. But anthropogenic warming isn’t the only thing we’re collectively causing here on earth. Humans have become a major evolutionary force. In fact, we may be the most powerful evolutionary force going. We are driving rapid evolution—contemporary evolutionary change—in other species at rates that seem to be faster than anything else in history, barring the five great mass extinctions of earth history.In their introduction to a special issue of Philosophical Transactions: Biological Sciences on human influences on evolution and the ecological and societal consequences thereof, Andrew P. Hendry, Kiyoko M. Gotanda, and Erik I. Svensson list some of the anthropogenic factors influencing evolution today, which include
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S41The 19 Best Movies on Apple TV+ Right Now  When it comes to originals, Netflix and Amazon have the deepest libraries of prestige movies. But ever since CODA won the Best Picture Oscar, it’s become clear that some of the best movies are on Apple TV+.As with any streaming service, not every film on the roster is a winner, but from Billie Eilish documentaries to Sundance darlings, Apple’s streaming service is building up a strong catalog to run alongside its growing slate of beloved TV shows.
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S45Jellyfish surprise scientists by learning without a brain  Could a jellyfish tell you why the ocean is near the shore, or think of things never thunk before — if it only had a brain? Maybe, but jellyfish don’t have brains. They instead have simple nervous systems dispersed throughout their transparent bodies. For this reason, it has been long thought that they are incapable of learning beyond a basic level, and research seems to back up this notion.In 2021, biologist Ken Cheng wrote a systematic review of learning in cnidarians — the phylum that consists of jellyfish, hydras, and sea anemones. He found substantial evidence of habituation among these animals, meaning they can grow accustomed to a stimulus. In other words, super basic learning.
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S57S48Devices that could change how we measure blood pressure  If just by looking at our watch or cell phone we can know, in real time, our heart rate, the number of steps we take, the calories we burn and the hours of sleep we got the night before, why can’t we also know our blood pressure?Blood pressure is the force that the blood exerts against the arterial walls. It is defined by two values: systolic, or maximum pressure, which is the thrust of the blood pumped through the body by the contraction of the heart; and diastolic, or minimum pressure, which occurs when the heart relaxes. The American Heart Association considers blood pressure to be normal when it does not exceed pressures of 120 mmHg systolic and 80 mmHg diastolic — which we see presented as 120/80 mmHg.
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S64Harness the Power of Suggestion for Your Happiness  Want to stay current with Arthur’s writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out.I remember once, at summer camp in the 1970s, 3,000 miles from home, I came down with a nasty case of strep throat. Before I could call my parents or go to the nurse, the coolest kid in camp took me aside. “You know it’s all in your head, right?” he said. “Just decide you don’t have a sore throat, and you won’t.” He was very cool, so it made sense to my early-adolescent brain to take his medical advice. Two days of extreme willpower later, I had a fever of 103 and couldn’t swallow.
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S40Elijah Wood and Mike Tyson Cameo Videos Were Used in a Russian Disinformation Campaign  For around $340, actor Elijah Wood can record you a personalized video wishing you happy birthday. John McGinley, best known for his role in medical TV show Scrubs, will give you a lengthy pep talk for around $475. Priscilla Presley will record a clip talking about everything from Christmas shopping to Graceland for around $200.These celebrities all use the video-sharing platform Cameo to quickly snap homemade videos for fans who pay them for the honor. They can be seen celebrating anniversaries, lightly roasting people, or offering advice. This summer, however, some videos have been weaponized by an unknown Russian group, which has crudely edited the clips and used them as part of its wide-ranging information warfare tactics against Ukraine.
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S51S53S67Netanyahu Should Quit. The U.S. Can Help With That.  The Israeli prime minister’s approach to the Palestinian problem has proved disastrous. The Biden administration must use its influence to help Israel choose a new leadership.When a nation suffers a surprise attack, the most obvious costs are the sheer loss of life and the immediate damage to national security. But another casualty can be the nation’s underlying strategic assumptions about the world it inhabits. This happened to the United States on 9/11, when terrorism went from a third-tier annoyance to the foremost security challenge the U.S. faced, and a new and little-known enemy emerged as its primary foe.
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S35The Best Gifts for Book Lovers  There's nothing quite like losing yourself in a book. You might not be able to transport your loved ones into their favorite stories, but you can help them spruce up their cozy reading corner. If there's anything we've learned from #BookTok, it's that there are tons of accessories to upgrade those reading sessions. If someone on your gift list is rather bookish, you're in luck. We've put together our favorite gifts for book lovers, and we've tested every one of these gadgets.Special offer for Gear readers: Get WIRED for just $5 ($25 off). This includes unlimited access to WIRED.com, full Gear coverage, and subscriber-only newsletters. Subscriptions help fund the work we do every day.
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S60Trump Isn't Bluffing  “We pledge to you that we will root out the Communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical-left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, that lie and steal and cheat on elections,” Donald Trump said this past November, in a campaign speech that was ostensibly honoring Veterans Day. “The real threat is not from the radical right; the real threat is from the radical left … The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave than the threat from within. Our threat is from within.”What immediately leaps out here is the word vermin, with its echoes of Hitler and Mussolini. But Trump’s inflammatory language can overshadow and distract from the substance of what he’s saying—in this case, appearing to promise a purge or repression of those who disagree with him politically.
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S43What was it like when the first atoms formed?  When it comes to our world, our Solar System, and all the planets, stars, and galaxies we can detect within our Universe, we find that they’re all made up of the same ingredients: atoms. And from the subatomic particles that bind together to make those atoms — electrons and atomic nuclei — we find that neutral atoms in turn interact and link up to form more complex structures: simple and complex molecules, some of which can eventually give rise to macroscopic structures and even life. It’s one of the most impressive facts about the Universe: that the laws and contents of the Universe exist in such a way that they admit even the possibility of complex structure. When we look, that’s precisely what we find within it today.But for hundreds of thousands of years, dating from the instant of the hot Big Bang, it was impossible to form even a single atom. Even though it only takes minutes to form atomic nuclei and leave the Universe in a state where electrons and those nuclei are steeped in a mere background bath of photons and neutrinos (and antineutrinos), it takes hundreds of thousands of years for atoms to stably form. It takes a huge amount of cosmic evolution, and a number of important evolutionary steps, in order to create them. Here’s the story of how the first atoms were formed.
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S66A Soulless Holiday-Shopping Strategy  It’s a difficult question, to be sure. But if you consult a holiday gift guide, the query shifts. What do you get for a dad? Then the answer becomes as clear as an oversize whisky ice cube: a book about an old president, something for golf or the grill, or—oh, a steak subscription! Your own dad’s personal taste might not be accounted for, but the deed will be done.There are many understandable reasons for being bereft of gift ideas. Perhaps you’re a loving friend and family member but you’ve just never had a talent for gifting. Maybe you have a dozen people to buy for and not nearly enough time. Possibly you need to find something for your third nephew who’s visiting, and, frankly, you don’t know anything about him. In any of these scenarios, recommendation lists can be tempting. They’re also massively popular; plenty of people want to outsource the labor of product research and feel comforted by the support of an expert in whatever they end up choosing. Unfortunately, the gift-guide industrial complex is likely to lead you astray.
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S68The 10 Best Films of 2023  Cinema continued to wobble back to its feet in 2023: Blockbuster events such as “Barbenheimer” proved that audiences had an appetite for more than just superhero movies at the box office, while the rippling effects of the writers’ and actors’ strikes forced Hollywood to examine the unsettling implications of the past decade’s streaming revolution. But as usual, the art form itself didn’t really suffer, especially if you knew where to look, and curating my list of the year’s best films proved extra difficult.So strong were this year’s offerings that my honorable mentions include excellent films by some of my most-loved auteurs—Ferrari (from Michael Mann), May December (Todd Haynes), The Holdovers (Alexander Payne), and The Killer (David Fincher), all worthy additions to totemic bodies of work. There were wonderfully challenging entries, such as Ari Aster’s unhinged Beau Is Afraid, and Jonathan Glazer’s chilling The Zone of Interest, designed to rattle the viewer in their seat; Bradley Cooper’s Maestro takes the staid biographical film in directions I couldn’t have anticipated, as did Matt Johnson’s winsome Blackberry.
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S58S46Genome editing reverses autistic behaviors in mice  A team of Chinese scientists has used gene therapy to correct a mutation that caused mice to exhibit autistic behaviors like hyperactivity, repetitive self-grooming, and abnormal social interactions. Once the mutation was fixed, the animals’ behavior returned to normal. The experiment, described November 27 in a paper published in the journal Nature Neuroscience, is the first successful attempt to use genome editing to reverse autistic behaviors in an animal model of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). ASD refers to a variety of conditions characterized by challenges with social skills, repetitive behaviors, and poor communication. These behavioral difficulties can range from barely noticeable to profoundly debilitating. ASD affects about one in 36 children in the U.S.
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S42"Den of Wolves" Will Be a Sci-Fi Heist--With a 'Power Fantasy' Soundtrack  Following two years of preproduction, game developer 10 Chambers finally announced its new heist gameâDen of WolvesâThursday during the 2023 Game Awards. Set in 2097 in a highly corrupt city located in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, it is, according to narrative director Simon Viklund, the kind of game "where you're supposed to feel like a badass." For Viklund, who also serves as the game's composer (he did the compositions for PayDay: The Heist and PayDay 2, too), that means "the music needs to, like, [grunt noise]."True to its name, Den of Wolves' fictional city is a place where basically anything is legal as long as it is done in the pursuit of supercharged innovation and groundbreaking technology. Imagine PayDay meets Cyberpunk 2077 set in a metropolis that's a mixture of Venice and Hong Kong. The concept is quite different from 10 Chambers' previous work with horror game GTFO, but it structurally plays to the studio's core strength: four person co-op games.
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S52Meta defies FBI opposition to encryption, brings E2EE to Facebook, Messenger  Meta has started enabling end-to-end encryption (E2EE) by default for chats and calls on Messenger and Facebook despite protests from the FBI and other law enforcement agencies that oppose the widespread use of encryption technology. "Today I'm delighted to announce that we are rolling out default end-to-end encryption for personal messages and calls on Messenger and Facebook," Meta VP of Messenger Loredana Crisan wrote yesterday.
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S443 rebellious creators tell us the meaning of life  In this episode of Dispatches from The Well, Kmele Foster continues his search for the meaning of life inside the minds of some of the world’s most creative visionaries. Godfrey Reggio revolutionized film with his experimental documentaries. Steve Albini is preserving the spirit of music by committing to analog recording. Fred Armisen turned his creativity into a career by combining his passion for music and comedy. Kmele sat down with each of these creators and asked them about the “why” behind their existence.
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S54S36White Supremacists Are Celebrating Vivek Ramaswamy's 'Great Replacement' Rant  For months, GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy has been dog-whistling to supporters of extremist far-right ideologies and wild conspiracy theories like QAnon. On Wednesday night, at the fourth Republican presidential debate, Ramaswamy went full tilt: After blasting the three other debaters for turning on former president Donald Trump, Ramaswamy argued, without evidence, that the January 6 Capitol riot was an inside job, the 2020 presidential election was stolen, the government had lied about 9/11, and the "deep state" was responsible for all these things.Then, Ramaswamy claimed that the "great replacement theory is not some grand right-wing conspiracy theory, but a basic statement of the Democratic Party's platform." The great replacement theory is a widely-debunked conspiracy that the liberal establishment, along with a cabal of "global elites," is encouraging the immigration of people of color in order to "replace" white voters.
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S49White House threatens to veto anti-EV bill just passed by US House  The White House's plan to boost electric vehicle adoption came under heavy fire in Congress on Wednesday. Five Democratic Representatives joined the Republican majority to pass a bill that would prohibit the US Environmental Protection Agency from enacting stricter new corporate average fuel efficiency regulations that would require automakers to sell many more EVs by the year 2032.
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S70How Trump Has Transformed Evangelicals  Donald Trump and American evangelicals have never been natural allies. Trump has owned casinos, flaunted mistresses in the tabloids, and often talked in a way that would get him kicked out of church. In 2016 many people doubted whether Trump could win over evangelicals, whose support he needed. Eight years later, a few weeks away from the Iowa caucuses, evangelical support for the former president and current Republican frontrunner is no longer in question. In fact, there are now prominent evangelical leaders who have come to believe that Trump is “God’s instrument on Earth,” says Tim Alberta, a staff writer at The Atlantic and author of the new book The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism. How did evangelicals shift from being reluctant supporters of Trump to among his most passionate defenders? How did some evangelicals, historically suspicious of politicians, develop a “fanatical, cult-like attachment” to Donald Trump? And what happened to the evangelical movement as some bought into Trump’s vision of America and others recoiled?
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