Captain Marvel and the Long, Strange History of Female Superhero Names
Before Captain Marvel was Captain Marvel, someone else was Captain Marvel. And that someone else was a dude. Someone else was Captain Marvel before him, too. The nominatively deterministic history of Captain Marvel—Carol Danvers, Earth pilot with alien superpowers, hero of a Marvel movie coming out in March—in fact is also the history of women…
Crispr’d Food, Coming Soon to a Supermarket Near You
For years now, the US Department of Agriculture has been flirting with the latest and greatest DNA manipulation technologies. Since 2016, it has given free passes to at least a dozen gene-edited crops, ruling that they fall outside its regulatory purview. But on Wednesday, March 28, the agency made its relationship status official; effective immediately,…
Marvel's Shang-Chi Movie Just Got a Director
Welcome, once again, to The Monitor, WIRED's column devoted to the pop culture world. What's been happening this week? Well, aside from Captain Marvel's continued dominance, we've got an Oscar-winning documentary landing on Hulu and some good news for Marvel's first Asian American-led movie. Strap in, it’s gonna be a bumpy (but fun!) ride. Marvel's…
Let's Use Physics to Model a Curving Soccer Ball
It's that World Cup time of the year—so that means it's also time to talk about soccer physics. What about the impossible kick? The "impossible" kick has a ball leave the ground and then take a curved path while in the air. Of course it's not actually impossible, but it is difficult to pull off.…
The Real Reason The Meg Feasted at the Box Office
Late last week, it seemed as though the very expensive, very Stathamy underwater thriller The Meg was on its way to becoming a dead shark. Even though the film—an adaptation of the 1997 novel by Steve Alten—had an online fanbase more than 20 years old, most predictions pointed toward a relatively low opening weekend at…
A Blood-Based Cancer Test Gets Its First Results
The bets on liquid biopsy keep getting bigger. Last month, Silicon Valley unicorn Grail Inc. raised a third round of financing to develop its blood-based tests for early cancer detection. That brings its total up to $1.5 billion since 2016, putting it among the top three most heavily funded private biotech companies in the US.…
The 13 Best Movies You Didn't See in 2018
Last year, folks in the US spent $11 billion going to the movies. Yet the bulk of those people, and those dollars, went to the mega-blockbusters—the Panthers, the Venoms, the Avengerseseses. Even though indies are getting a renaissance thanks to streaming services, there's just not the same thriving middle-class that there was in decades past,…
Stephen Hawking, a Physicist Transcending Space and Time, Passes Away at 76
For arguably the most famous physicist on Earth, Stephen Hawking—who died Wednesday in Cambridge at 76 years old—was wrong a lot. He thought, for a while, that black holes destroyed information, which physics says is a no-no. He thought Cygnus X-1, an emitter of X-rays over 6,000 light years away, wouldn’t turn out to be…
Did Captain Marvel Save Stan Lee's Best Cameo for Last?
Long before he did one of his now-famous cameos in a Marvel movie, Stan Lee appeared as himself in a film about a bunch of slackers killing time in suburbia. Mallrats was Kevin Smith's second movie after the breakout success of Clerks, and for his follow-up Smith swapped out deep nerdery about Star Wars for…
The Best Albums of the Summer Were Exercises in Reinvention
Summer is a time of intense polarities, of feverish abandon and earned languor. There’s heat and purpose waiting to be seized in those unexpected, life-altering summer nights: on the dancefloor, at the bar, among friends. There’s equal chill, though, in the loss and grief that surface: historically, fatalities spike during hotter months. Yet summer, at…