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 S49A larger family worsens kids' cognitive development, suggests 30-year study   The average number of children per family in the United States has fallen dramatically, from seven in 1800 to fewer than two in 2018. That’s good news for kids’ cognitive development, suggests a recently published study.Over the past few decades, scientific research has shown that children in larger families perform worse in school, score lower on cognitive tests, and attain fewer years of education than kids in smaller families. Researchers theorize that additional children stretch parental resources thin, leaving parents with less time, energy, and money to devote to their kids’ development. For example, parents might read to children less, not have the time to ensure school attendance, or lack the savings to pay for tutors or after-school programs.
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S42The 5 Best 4K Blu-Ray Players  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 WIREDHow many video streaming services do you subscribe to? And how many of those reckon they can deliver you full-on, state-of-the-art picture and sound quality for your monthly fee? The answers are likely to be “plenty” and “almost all of them.” But true home-cinema aficionados know the truth: The best picture quality and the best sound quality are only available from a physical storage format. Which is 4K UHD Blu-ray.
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S38When AI can fake reality, who can you trust?  We're fast approaching a world where widespread, hyper-realistic deepfakes lead us to dismiss reality, says technologist and human rights advocate Sam Gregory. What happens to democracy when we can't trust what we see? Learn three key steps to protecting our ability to distinguish human from synthetic — and why fortifying our perception of truth is crucial to our AI-infused future.
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S51Contact-tracing software could accurately gauge COVID-19 risk  It’s summer 2021. You rent a house in the countryside with a bunch of friends for someone’s birthday. The weather’s gorgeous that weekend, so mostly you’re all outside—pool, firepit, hammock, etc.—but you do all sleep in the same house. And then on Tuesday, you get an alert on your phone that you’ve been exposed to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. How likely are you to now have it?
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S47The top 15 JWST images of 2023  Although it might seem that the world changed long ago from the Hubble era to the JWST era, the reality is that humanity’s greatest space-based observatory of all-time is less than two years old. It launched on Christmas Day, 2021, and required six months of deployment, commissioning, and calibration operations before it was ready to begin the primary phase of its life: full-time science operations. Since those milestones were achieved in July of 2022, JWST has been our cosmic workhorse, revealing the Universe in a whole new light, with unprecedented resolution and wavelength coverage to view the cosmos.While its first sets of spectacular images were released during 2022, this past year, 2023, represents the very first year that we had this remarkable observatory operating full-time, surveying the Universe near and far to reveal some of the most incredible views, plus many unexpected scientific discoveries, that pretty much no one could have anticipated. Here, without further ado, are my favorite JWST science images released in 2023.
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S63A Feel-Bad Movie in the Best Way Possible  The Iron Claw, a new biopic about the tragic Von Erich brothers, is rich with feeling and never despairing.Sean Durkin’s first film, Martha Marcy May Marlene, was about the complex aftermath of one woman’s escape from a modern Manson-esque “family” centered around sex and drug use. His second, 2020’s The Nest, looked at a high-society couple in 1980s Britain who buy a mansion and are subsequently haunted by the decision, struggling to stay above water as the property sucks up all of their money. Both movies were immersed in an atmosphere of gloom and anxiety that somehow didn’t overwhelm either; even as Durkin tormented his characters, he had real, obvious love for them.
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S36Eyeless Cave Spiders Can Still 'See' the Light  Some species of cave-dwelling spiders lack eyes but still maintain the ability to sense light, which likely protects them from the arid environments at the sunny mouths of cavesSpiders from the genus Leptonetela have undeveloped eyes--or sometimes no eyes at all--but can still sense light, scientists find.
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S43Sorry California, Amazon Will No Longer Sell You Donkey Meat  If you are planning to buy your donkey meat on Amazon this Christmas, you may have to look elsewhere. The world’s largest online retailer says it has stopped selling edible donkey in California, WIRED has learned.Amazon’s new policy kicked in after months of negotiations with the Center for Contemporary Equine Studies, a nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting horses. In February, the center filed a legal complaint alleging that Amazon’s sale and distribution of products that contain ejiao—an ingredient made with donkey skin that's popular in health supplements—violates a California animal-welfare law called the Prohibition of Horse Slaughter and Sale of Horsemeat for Human Consumption Act.
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S61The Subversive Worldview of Slow Horses  The third season of Slow Horses, Apple TV+’s magnificent, impertinent spy series, begins with a feint: two lovers chasing state secrets in Istanbul, followed by a thrilling boat chase across the Bosphorus that turns into a car chase that ends in tragedy. This is 007 territory, not the usual world of mangy MI5 rejects that the show has so adeptly built up. An adaptation of Mick Herron’s novels about a spy branch occupied by the supposed dregs of British intelligence, Slow Horses typically plays out in dirty cafés and gas-station forecourts, not the azure Instagram backdrops of European glitterati. So what are we doing here?The cold open, I think, exemplifies what makes the series better than virtually anything else on television right now—its ability to be both a riveting espionage drama and an absurd workplace comedy, without ever flubbing the mix. The show delights in upending our expectations about what a spy story should be. In the most recent episode of the third season, “Cleaning Up,” River Cartwright (played by Jack Lowden) finds himself in a clandestine MI5 storage facility where the only thing between him and a heavily armed private militia is a panicky Welshman named Douglas who can’t remember the security-override codes. The tension is excruciating, even as the dialogue is pure ham. (Will Smith, the show’s creator, was a co-producer and writer on Veep.) The contrast befits a series whose conceit is that the spies regularly saving Britain aren’t the immaculately groomed, borderline-sociopathic charmers who have dominated our screens for the best part of a century; instead, they’re the losers, the slovenly and objectionable problem children who get stuck with one another because no one else can stand them. These are heroes of Slow Horses.
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S60Great British Bake Off's festive Christmas desserts aren't so naughty after all  The Great British Bake Off (TGBBO)—aka The Great British Baking Show in the US and Canada—features amateur bakers competing each week in a series of baking challenges, culminating in a single winner. The recipes include all manner of deliciously decadent concoctions, including the occasional Christmas dessert. But many of the show's Christmas recipes might not be as bad for your health as one might think, according to a new paper published in the annual Christmas issue of the British Medical Journal, traditionally devoted to more light-hearted scientific papers.
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S66Trump Insists He Hasn't Read Mein Kampf  The former president told a crowd he’s not quoting Hitler when he says that immigrants are “destroying the blood of our country.”A little more than halfway into his speech in Waterloo, Iowa, last night, former President Donald Trump returned to his new favorite line.
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S62Our Forests Need More Fire, Not Less  The American history of wildfire suppression has contributed to today’s most destructive blazes.This fall, on a hike in Washington’s Olympic National Park, I found wildfire—or it found me. As I labored up a switchback trail, the air hung acrid with smoke from the half dozen fires that smoldered around the park. My windpipe burned and my head ached. The sun was a feeble orange disk; the mountains disappeared behind pale haze.
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S68The Colorado Ruling Calls the Originalists' Bluff  The disqualification of Donald Trump challenges the Supreme Court’s conservatives to follow through on their stated beliefs.The Colorado Supreme Court has left the justices of the United States Supreme Court in the very uncomfortable position of having to prove that they have the courage of their stated convictions.
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S57Lian Li has discovered a new frontier for LCD screens: $47 PC case fans  If you're trying to add lights to a PC case, you have lots of options: LED strips, CPU coolers with lights, case fans with lights, keyboards and mice with lights, motherboards with lights, GPUs with lights, sticks of RAM with lights, even fake sticks of RAM that go into your RAM slots so that you don't have un-RGB-ed spots in your setup.
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S67Xi Jinping Is Fighting a Culture War at Home  The Chinese leader seeks to restore an earlier era of ideological indoctrination and national unity—whether his society wants it or not.In October, a Communist Party–run television network in the province of Hunan aired a five-episode program called When Marx Met Confucius. In it, actors portraying the European revolutionary and the ancient Chinese sage pontificate on their doctrines and discover that their ideas are in perfect harmony. “I am longing for a supreme and far-reaching ideal world, where everyone can do their best and get what they need,” Marx says. “I call it a communist society.” “I also advocate the establishment of a society where everyone is happy and equal,” Confucius responds. “I call it the great unity of the world.” The program’s message is that modern Chinese culture should be a synthesis of Marxism and China’s traditions—a fusion achieved by another great philosopher, the Chinese leader Xi Jinping. “There has been endless debate about how traditional culture should be treated,” one scholar on the show explains. But finally, thanks to Xi’s wisdom, “the problem was truly solved, and people’s bound thoughts suddenly became clear.”
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S55S46We're Professional Gear Testers. Here's What We'd Buy Kids for Christmas  The only thing better than being a professional gear tester? Being the child of a gear tester. As a kid whose parent writes about gear for a living, you get a constant drip of new stuff to play with and opine on, but none of the obligation to rigorously test it.Our kids are pretty spoiled around here. Because of that, members of WIRED's Gear team tend to be especially choosey about what we gift kids during the holidays. We're looking for items that will get lots of playtime and maybe even promote desirable traits like creativity and STEM skills. Mostly we just want them to be happy and get the things they want—which often happen to be the things their friends have.
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S50Why NASA is turning to lasers for next-gen space comms  NASA’s recently launched asteroid hunter, Psyche, is designed to give us a look at a body that could resemble depths far within the Earth, where we can never go. But one instrument tagging along for a ride is exciting scientists who specialize in a completely different field — that of space communications. Since the dawn of the Space Age, they have depended on radio waves, just a sliver of the electromagnetic spectrum. But scientists hope to soon expand into another part of the spectrum. Their aim is to add lasers to our cosmic communications toolkit.The Psyche spacecraft’s main mission is to explore a 144-mile-long, potato-shaped asteroid with an orbit roughly three times farther from the Sun than Earth’s. A leading theory holds that the target asteroid, also named Psyche (16 Psyche, to be exact), is the metal core of a once hopeful planet whose rocky surface was stripped away by hit-and-run collisions in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
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S41New York's Airbnb Ban Is Causing a Christmas Crunch  Christmas is in full swing in New York City; lines snake through Midtown as tourists oggle department store windows and the Rockefeller Center tree, and the Union Square Holiday Market is bustling with vendors and shoppers. All the while, hotel prices are up and vacancies down compared to the 2022 holiday seasonâand there are almost no short-term rentals, like Airbnbs, for people to book.It's too soon to say there's no room at the inn this holiday seasonâsearches on Airbnb for places to stay during Christmas and New Year's Eve in New York City bring up hundreds of hotel rooms, rooms in apartments, and rentals claiming to be exempt from new rules in the city. But many of the short-term whole apartment rentals that Airbnb was known for are gone.
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S44Snow Sports Are Getting More Dangerous  Many people meet Dale Atkins for the first time on their worst days—ice climbers who are stranded and injured, skiers that have been swallowed by an avalanche. Atkins, a skilled mountaineer as well as a climatologist and former weather and avalanche forecaster, is one of the experts on Colorado’s Alpine Rescue Team that local sheriffs call to the rescue.In some ways, planning for and executing those rescues is becoming more complicated because of climate change. Weather fueled by climate change can elevate hazards on the mountain, whether through weird winter rain, blizzards, droughts, or summer wildfires. Each extreme impacts the landscape with a potentially fatal danger. And faced with such unpredictability, experts can’t shake the fear that their work is shifting away from recreational rescues toward disaster response.
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S33New At-Home STI Test Could Help Stop the Spread of Infection  Experts hope a recent FDA approval for the first commercial at-home test for sexually transmitted diseases may help increase access to testing and curb rising ratesChecking for sexually transmitted infections (STIs), which are notoriously underreported and stigmatized, may soon get easier now that U.S. authorities have recently approved the first commercial at-home test kit for STIs other than human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). The kit tests for gonorrhea and chlamydia from a vaginal swab or urine sample that can be collected in the privacy of one’s home. The samples are mailed to a lab for analysis, and people with positive results are put in contact with a physician. Experts say that the Food and Drug Administration approval this past November could lead to far more STI testing in the U.S., but questions remain about how officials will handle the approval of other, similar tests in the future.
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S372023 Ripple Rewind  From evolving workplace trends to achieving your goals, Wharton professors explain this year’s key research insights.In this special episode, listen to curated excerpts from this year’s Ripple Effect podcast, where Wharton professors discuss a range of trending business topics.
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S34Scientist Discover How to Convert CO2 into Powder That Can Be Stored for Decades  A team of scientists has figured out how to convert planet-warming carbon dioxide into a harmless powdery fuel that could be converted into clean electricityCLIMATEWIRE | A team of scientists from Massachusetts has developed a process to convert one of the world's most threatening planet-warming emissions — carbon dioxide — into a powdery, harmless fuel that could be converted into clean electricity.
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S59S56S35How Search Engines Boost Misinformation  “Do your own research” is a popular tagline among fringe groups and ideological extremists. Noted conspiracy theorist Milton William Cooper first ushered this rallying cry into the mainstream in the 1990s through his radio show, where he discussed schemes involving things such as the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, an Illuminati cabal and alien life. Cooper died in 2001, but his legacy lives on. Radio host Alex Jones’s fans, anti-vaccine activists and disciples of QAnon’s convoluted alternate reality often implore skeptics to do their own research.Yet more mainstream groups have also offered this advice. Digital literacy advocates and those seeking to combat online misinformation sometimes spread the idea that when you are faced with a piece of news that seems odd or out of sync with reality, the best course of action is to investigate it yourself. For instance, in 2021 the Office of the U.S. Surgeon General put out a guide recommending that those wondering about a health claim’s legitimacy should “type the claim into a search engine to see if it has been verified by a credible source.” Library and research guides, often suggest that people “Google it!” or use other search engines to vet information.
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S40The Best Stand Mixers for Cakes, Cookies, and All the Carbs  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 WIREDThe secret to making fluffy sponges, perfectly peaked meringues, and house-warming loaves is in the equipment you use. Mixing, kneading, and whisking by hand may feel wholesome, but why bother when you can get a stand mixer to do the hard work for you? Whether you’re a seasoned baker or a total novice, stand mixers are not only convenient and easy to use, but also look great on the kitchen countertop.
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S69Winners of  More than 4,000 entries were received from professional and amateur photographers around the world in this year’s landscape-photography competition. Judges of the 10th International Landscape Photographer of the Year contest narrowed the field down to a “Top 101” and then further, to award several category prizes and the International Landscape Photographer of the Year award, which went to Tony Hewitt. The organizers were once again kind enough to share some of this year’s top and winning images below. Monument Valley. Top 101. Monument Valley, Arizona. #
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S21Message 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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S24How reindeer help fight climate change  It's just after lunchtime, and darkness is already falling. Tiia Jeremejeff, a reindeer herder in northern Finland, jumps on a snowmobile to go and feed her family's herd, who are kept in a large enclosure in the winter. Her breath freezes almost instantly in the bitter cold – it's -15C (5F) here in Kierinki, 110km (68 miles) north of the Arctic Circle. There is a thick cover of snow in the forest, some 20cm (7.9in) deep."It's not easy, being a reindeer herder," says Jeremejeff, a woman of Sami descent whose livelihood and culture is tightly intertwined with reindeer-herding. "It's a harsh climate and we have to go out and feed them no matter how cold it gets."
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S31New Class of Antibiotics Discovered Using AI  A deep-learning algorithm helped identify new compounds that are effective against antibiotic-resistant infections in mice, opening the door to AI-guided drug discoveryAntibiotic resistance is among the biggest global threats to human health. It was directly responsible for an estimated 1.27 million deaths in 2019 and contributed to nearly five million more. The problem only got worse during the COVID pandemic. And no new classes of antibiotics have been developed for decades.
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S53S5S70The Most Unsettling 'Christmas Carol'  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.Over the past few years, I’ve reminded you of the best Christmas specials and talked about some classic Christmas music. This year, it’s time to clear the field for the greatest adaptation of the greatest Christmas story.
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S20Taupo: 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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S65The Hypocrisy Underlying the Campus-Speech Controversy  Conservative lawmakers can’t seem to decide how they feel about government influencing private institutions’ speech policies.Earlier this month, Congress held a dramatic hearing with the heads of three private corporations that manage important forums for public debate. Members of Congress criticized these leaders in the strongest possible terms for their alleged failure to stem harmful speech on their property. The White House weighed in the next day to denounce the leaders’ equivocal answers, and both the Biden administration and Congress have announced multiple investigations into whether these and other institutions have violated federal law by not cracking down on this speech.
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S48You probably won't retire when your parents did--here's why that's not all bad news  Lynda Gratton challenges the idea of retiring at 60, advocating instead for a multi-stage life. She argues that with increasing life expectancy and technological changes, we need to redesign work. Gratton, a Professor of Management Practice at the London Business School, proposes a flexible approach that allows individuals to customize their lives through lifelong education, diverse work options, and delayed retirement. She encourages self-reflection and courage to embrace this new paradigm, urging viewers to make work enjoyable, exciting, and a continuous learning experience.
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S45Arizona's Secretary of State Is Already Sick of Election Conspiracy Theories  The man charged with administering Arizona’s elections isn’t concerned about the state’s ability to securely hold elections. But he’s going to have to persuade millions of other people to feel the same way.Adrian Fontes, a Democrat, was elected Arizona’s secretary of state in 2022. A lawyer who previously worked as a prosecutor in Colorado and Arizona, and served as the Maricopa County Recorder before taking office, Fontes must now take on the role of convincing the state’s voters that its elections are legitimate.
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S16NVIDIA's CEO on Leading Through the A.I. Revolution  With the explosive growth of generative AI, businesses are beginning to integrate artificial intelligence into all aspects of their operations, products, and services. This shift is posing a particularly difficult challenge for leaders, who must quickly learn enough about this new technology to make sound decisions for their companies, in the short- and long-term.
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