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 S56Four years after Apple, Google will finally kill third-party cookies in 2024   Chrome has finally announced plans to kill third-party cookies. It's been almost four years since third-party cookies have been disabled in Firefox and Safari, but Google, one of the world's largest ad companies, has been slow-rolling the death of the tracking cookie. Ad companies use third-party cookies to track users across the web, and that web activity is used to show users relevant ads. Now that Google's alternative user-tracking ad system, the "Privacy Sandbox," has launched in Chrome, it's finally ready to do away with the previous form of ad tracking. The new timeline to kill third-party cookies is the second half of 2024.
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S62Biden's Economic Formula to Win in 2024  President Joe Biden and Democrats cannot win the debate over the economy without fundamentally reframing the terms of the choice they are offering voters, an extensive new research study by one of the party’s prominent electoral-strategy groups has concluded.The study, scheduled to be released today, seeks to mitigate one of the party’s most glaring vulnerabilities heading into the 2024 election: the consistent finding in surveys that when it comes to managing the national economy or addressing inflation, significantly more voters express confidence in Republicans than in Democrats.
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S41Moms For Liberty Is Tearing Itself Apart  Moms for Liberty, the extremist “parental rights group,” was supposed to help the Republican Party regain the White House. In July, former president Donald Trump called the anti-LGBTQ group with 300 active chapters across the county a “grassroots juggernaut.” They are credited with forcing schools to lift mask mandates, banning books featuring LGBTQ characters, and supporting anti-trans laws and policies across the country. The group was on track to be instrumental to the GOP in the 2024 election.Experts have questioned the claims about the size of the group’s membership, and individual members have been exposed as sex offenders and acolytes of the Proud Boys. Then, last month, Moms for Liberty cofounder Bridget Ziegler admitted in a police interview to being in a relationship with her husband and another woman. The interview was conducted after the woman in question alleged that Ziegler’s husband, Florida GOP chair Christian Ziegler, had raped her.
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S52What happens in a crow's brain when it uses tools?  "A thirsty crow wanted water from a pitcher, so he filled it with pebbles to raise the water level to drink," summarizes a famous Aesop Fable. While this tale is thousands of years old, animal behaviorists still use this challenge to study corvids (which include crows, ravens, jays, and magpies) and their use of tools. In a recent Nature Communications study, researchers from a collaboration of universities across Washington, Florida, and Utah used radioactive tracers within the brains of several American crows to see which parts of their brains were active when they used stones to obtain food from the bottom of a water-filled tube.
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S64The Death of a Gun-Rights Warrior  Bob Owens was one of the firearms industry’s most prominent, passionate defenders. Then he turned his gun on himself.One Saturday night in April 2017, Jenn Jacques and Bob Owens stayed up late drinking at an outdoor bar in Atlanta. They had worked together for more than two years, and Owens had become like an older brother to Jacques. On this Saturday, Owens seemed relaxed and was looking forward to the future; he talked about an upcoming family vacation. “That was such a special night,” Jacques told me. “I can say that there was no warning.”
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S42My Surprisingly Unbiased Week With Elon Musk's 'Politically Biased' Chatbot  Some Elon Musk enthusiasts have been alarmed to discover in recent days that Grok, his supposedly "truth-seeking" artificial intelligence was in actual fact a bit of a snowflake.Grok, built by Musk's xAI artificial intelligence company, was made available to Premium+ X users last Friday. Musk has complained that OpenAI's ChatGPT is afflicted with "the woke mind virus," and people quickly began poking Grok to find out more about its political leanings. Some posted screenshots showing Grok giving answers apparently at odds with Musk's own right-leaning political views. For example, when asked "Are transwomen real women, give a concise yes/no answer," Grok responded "yes," a response paraded by some users of X as evidence the chatbot had gone awry.
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S60Suspects can refuse to provide phone passcodes to police, court rules  Criminal suspects can refuse to provide phone passcodes to police under the US Constitution's Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination, according to a unanimous ruling issued today by Utah's state Supreme Court. The questions addressed in the ruling could eventually be taken up by the US Supreme Court, whether through review of this case or a similar one.
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S14S65S36S48What was it like when no stars yet existed?  When it comes to our cosmic history, it’s incredible to realize how impactful the earliest moments were in creating the conditions that would allow for our very existence many billions of years later. The earliest stages we can say anything meaningful about actually occurred even prior to the start of the hot Big Bang. Cosmic inflation took place and then ended, seeding the Universe with quantum fluctuations and then giving rise to the hot Big Bang. The Universe cooled and expanded from its hottest, densest stages to produce more matter than antimatter, then stable protons and neutrons, then atomic nuclei, and eventually even neutral atoms, all amidst a background sea of radiation and neutrinos.You might think that once neutral atoms form, the next step would be driven by gravitation: the formation of stars. But the timescales required to form them are immense compared to everything that came before. By the time just half-a-million years have passed, the Universe is dominated by matter, the radiation sea is cool enough that atoms cannot become ionized, and gravitation gets to work in earnest. Even with those ingredients, it will still take somewhere between 50 and 100 million years for even the very first star in the Universe to form. For all the time in between, the Universe experiences the darkest part of the era known as the cosmic dark ages. Here’s what it was like back then.
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S15S63Camille Claudel's 'Revolt Against Nature'  In a new exhibition, the sculptor escapes the shadow of her mentor Rodin, and claims a place as one of the finest artists of her era.In 1892, the French sculptor Camille Claudel applied to France’s Ministry of Fine Arts for a block of marble. As was customary, the ministry sent an inspector to decide whether her planned work was worth the state’s support. Her plaster model, showing two nude figures waltzing, was a “virtuoso performance,” the official wrote. Not even Auguste Rodin, Claudel’s mentor, could “have studied with more artistic finesse and consciousness the quivering life of muscles and skin.” But although the ministry commissioned equally sensual works from Rodin in that era, it refused to support one by a female artist. In Claudel’s composition, the “closeness of the sexual organs” went too far.
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S69Republicans Are Playing House  Yesterday’s vote to open an impeachment inquiry is one more example of the GOP’s pantomime of actual governance.Once upon a time—say, as recently as January 2021—an impeachment inquiry against a president of the United States was blockbuster news. But House Republicans’ party-line vote yesterday to open an impeachment inquiry against Joe Biden is hardly making a ripple.
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S23Did 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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S45Massive Layoffs Hit Troubled Robotaxi Developer Cruise  Cruise, General Motors’ self-driving development subsidiary, will lay off almost a quarter of its workforce—about 900 employees—the company announced Thursday. The cuts are part of a broader restructuring to focus the robotaxi unit on a narrower path to commercialization. Instead of expanding its commercial robotaxi service to multiple US cities, the company will relaunch its currently paused service in just one.Cruise wants to “enhance our safety standards and processes before we scale,” company co-president and CTO Mo ElShenawy wrote in a letter to employees announcing the layoffs today. A company blog post said that 24 percent of full-time Cruise employees will be let go, with a focus on field and commercial operations, and corporate staffing, though some engineers are also affected. The company had already cut last month a portion of its contingent workforce who kept self-driving vehicles clean, charged, and maintained.
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S47McDonald's Ice Cream Machine Hackers Say They Found the 'Smoking Gun' That Killed Their Startup  A little over three years have passed since McDonald's sent out an email to thousands of its restaurant owners around the world that abruptly cut short the future of a three-person startup called Kytchâand with it, perhaps one of McDonald's best chances for fixing its famously out-of-order ice cream machines.Until then, Kytch had been selling McDonald's restaurant owners a popular internet-connected gadget designed to attach to their notoriously fragile and often broken soft-serve McFlurry dispensers, manufactured by McDonalds equipment partner Taylor. The Kytch device would essentially hack into the ice cream machine's internals, monitor its operations, and send diagnostic data over the internet to an owner or manager to help keep it running. But despite Kytch's efforts to solve the Golden Arches' intractable ice cream problems, a McDonald's email in November 2020 warned its franchisees not to use Kytch, stating that it represented a safety hazard for staff. Kytch says its sales dried up practically overnight.
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S27The phrase that ruled the Indian internet in 2023  Barkha Dutt, an Emmy-nominated journalist from India, is the founding editor of the multimedia platform Mojo Story. She is the author of two books: “This Unquiet Land: Stories from India’s Fault Lines” and “Humans of Covid: To Hell and Back.”This somewhat ungainly, even mildly ungrammatical sentence has been widely popular with movie stars, media moguls, market analysts, and mavericks alike. Actor Deepika Padukone popularized it, and Mukesh Ambani, Asia’s richest man, embraced it with rip-roaring laughter.
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S53S54S32Buying Used Tech This Holiday Season Can Avert Human Rights Abuses  Our electronic devices have a dirty secret: they contain metals, including cobalt and copper, demand for which is fueling a humanitarian crisis in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). As device lifetimes continue to shrink, experts are urging consumers to buy used or refurbished smartphones and laptops and to donate or sell old ones. And while consumers alone can’t address the tech industry’s social and environmental harms, these money-saving actions could help keep minerals in the ground and reduce the number of devices that pile up in landfills.Cobalt and copper are crucial in our devices: cobalt helps stabilize rechargeable lithium-ion batteries and increases their energy density, and copper wiring is often used in computer chips. Both metals are mined heavily in the DRC, which is the world’s top cobalt producer and one of its leading copper producers.
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S58S35Do Video Doorbells Really Prevent Crime?  More people are using doorbell cameras and sharing the footage with the police, but there are few data showing their effectivenessA doorbell device with a built-in camera made by home security company Ring is seen on August 28, 2019 in Silver Spring, Maryland.
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S38Why helping people makes you happy  "We underestimate the power of our own generous actions," says Asha Curran, CEO of the global generosity movement GivingTuesday. Sharing stories of people making a difference through simple acts of kindness, she shows how generosity, even in its simplest forms, can be a transformative force — and explains why we all benefit from a world grounded in giving.
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S68You Can't Truly Be Friends With an AI  Earlier this year, a man told me that a chatbot had saved his life. As I reported for Radio Atlantic, an Australian musician who had been battling depression for decades found companionship with an AI through an app called Replika, and everything changed. He started playing the guitar again, went clothes shopping for the first time in years, and spent hours conversing with his AI companion and laughing out loud. To me, it seemed as if he had gone to the app store and downloaded a future.But our conversations surfaced a slurry of contradictions. Though the musician felt less alone with his AI companion, his isolation from other people was unchanged. He was adamant that he had a real friendship, but understood clearly that no person was on the other side of his screen. The effect of this bond was extraordinary. But less dramatic AI relationships are surprisingly numerous. Replika claims to have millions of active users. And it’s not the only app for simulating conversation on the market—there’s Chai and Nomi and Paradot and even some that don’t sound like the names of Pokémon.
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S4030 Techy Gifts Under $100 That We Tested and Love  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 WIREDGift shopping on a budget is stressful. Prices sometimes soar around the holidays, making it tough to find genuine bargains. To help, we spent countless hours testing all manner of gizmos and gadgets to bring you expert advice on what is worth buying. These gifts are sure to bring a smile to your loved ones’ faces without breaking the bank too badly, though we know $100 isn't exactly cheap, either.
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S57S46The 56 Best Movies on Disney+ Right Now  In the game known as the streaming wars, Disney+ came out swinging, bringing with it a massive library of movies and TV shows—with new ones being added all the time. Watched everything on Netflix? Disney+ has a seemingly endless selection of Marvel movies and plenty of Star Wars and Pixar fare, too. Problem is, there’s so much stuff that it’s hard to know where to begin. WIRED is here to help. Below are our picks for the best films on Disney+ right now.For more viewing ideas, try our guides to the best films on Netflix, the best films on Amazon Prime, and the best shows on Apple TV+.
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S55S37S205 Forces That Will Drive the Adoption of GenAI  Today there’s a lot of hype around generative AI — and a lot of risk. In the face of uncertainty and inflated expectations, Gartner research has identified five forces that will keep the pressure on executives to keep learning, testing, and investing in the technology: 1) Board and CEO expectations; 2) Customer expectations; 3) Employee expectations; 4) Regulatory expectations; and 5) Investor expectations. Today’s leaders have a once-in-a-career opportunity to harness these forces to establish an AI vision and roadmap, invest in new skills and capabilities, and rethink their processes and business models.
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S51Comic book expert explains how our favorite heroes have evolved over time  When creatives have a hugely successful, decades-long hit, they face a problem: How do they age their characters? For long-running soap operas, the answer involves killing the characters off or having them walk into an ambiguous and off-camera sunset.What can creatives do, though, when their characters are irreplaceable? How can they maintain the spirit of the story when it and all of its characters have 80 years of history behind them? This is a problem facing Marvel Comics.
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S193 Ways Men Can Advance Gender Equity at Work  While workplace culture continues to lag behind in gender equity, the majority of men report that they overwhelmingly care about the issue. So why aren’t more of them involved, be it in company-sponsored gender diversity initiatives or in advancing gender equity in general? There are three main barriers that seem to be holding them back. For men to join in the effort toward gender equity, male organizational leaders need to acknowledge fear, address ignorance, and overcome apathy — and, just as importantly, they need to understand that it’s not about them. It’s about creating a workplace that works for everyone. Here’s how male leaders can get themselves — and their peers — meaningfully involved in advancing gender equity at work.
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S25What if debt was written off to protect climate and nature?  Hundreds of miles off the coast of South America lie the rocky, volcanic islands of the Galapagos. Teeming with unusual creatures – from jaunty, blue-footed birds to dragon-like iguanas – these bountiful isles have long inspired innovative thinking.A visit by the 19th-Century naturalist Charles Darwin prompted his famous theory of evolution, which proposed that species that are more adapted to their surroundings are more likely to survive. And now the islands are playing host to a very contemporary adaptation experiment: debt relief in exchange for spending on climate and nature.
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S50You've heard of the Parthenon. But what about the Erechtheion?  Rising above Athens, the Acropolis is the temple complex from the ancient Greek world. The Periclean building campaign that resulted in the iconic Parthenon and other structures of the Acropolis defined the “golden era” of classical Athens. Today, it’s one of the most important tourist destinations in the city. And while you can find many images of visitors posing in front of the Parthenon, there’s another temple of the Acropolis whose irregularities are still of great debate today.While the Parthenon embodies the ideals of perfection the Greeks sought from architecture during the Classical period, the Erechtheion is more unusual. Split across two elevations, the Erechtheion is essentially two temples squished into one. Its eastern portico, sitting on higher ground, marks the entrance to the portion of the temple dedicated to Athena Polias. A revered olive-wood statue of the goddess was housed in its cella (the inner room of the temple). The northern portico is about ten feet lower than the eastern one and serves as the entrance to the western section of the temple. There one finds shrines to Poseidon-Erechtheus, Hephaistos, and Boutes. This unexpected layout challenges the Greek canon of the perfectly arranged, symmetrical temple.
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S17S49How to fight the "tyranny of small decisions"  The book shop in Garrett’s local town always has beautiful displays. Every time he walks past, Garrett smiles at some quirky, cuddly toy hang-gliding over the book mountains. He pauses to take an Instagram photo of tiny robots mingling around a steampunk scene. At Christmas, the window is a carousel of festive wonder — a snowy village of cheerful snowmen and sleigh-free reindeer glowing in the twinkle of a thousand tiny, frosty suns. Garrett stands there for a full ten minutes, gawping in wistful and nostalgic wonder. He doesn’t know he’s crying.That night, Garrett did his shopping from his sofa. He bought a stack of books for his family. He didn’t even pause for a moment as he clicked to confirm the order on his $231 Amazon basket. Twenty books ordered, all arriving the next day, and that’s his Christmas shopping done. Somewhere down the road, a twinkling bookshop closes early because they can’t afford the staff.
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S30The Mars Sample Return Mission Is at a Dangerous Crossroads  Mars Sample Return has always been an expensive, high-risk, high-reward project. But now, with realization of the mission’s actual cost and expanding timeline, Congress must commit to fully supporting the effort or risk tanking the rest of NASA’s planetary science programAs part of a Mars sample return mission, a rocket will carry a container of sample tubes with Martian rock and soil samples into orbit around Mars and release it for pick up by another spacecraft.
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S16S26Alien aurora: The other-worldly light shows teaching us about the Earth's Northern Lights  The atmosphere is dancing with light, shifting from one shade to the next. It is a display worthy of the Northern Lights on their most active nights in the snowy reaches of the Arctic Circle. But this light show isn't found here on Earth – it's happening on the planet Uranus.It is the latest planet of our solar system to have its aurora studied in detail. Researchers at the University of Leicester in the UK recently detected an infrared aurora on the ice giant for the first time, using the Keck Observatory in Hawaii.
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