More Evidence Exxon Misled the Public About Climate Change
This story originally appeared on Mother Jones and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Two years ago, Inside Climate News and Los Angeles Times investigations found that while Exxon Mobil internally acknowledged that climate change is man-made and serious, it publicly manufactured doubt about the science. Exxon has been trying unsuccessfully to smother this slow-burning PR crisis ever…
Teen Pregnancy Researchers Regroup After Trump's HHS Pulls Funding
Back in May, when Jennifer Hettema first saw the Trump administration’s proposed budget, it took her a while to find the bad news. But buried in a Health and Human Services appendix, there it was: a $100 million line through the nation’s teen pregnancy prevention program. A psychologist and public health researcher at the University…
Looks Like Google Bought Favorable Research to Lobby With
Officially, the online search giant Google’s mission is to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” According to two new reports—one from The Wall Street Journal and one from the nonprofit, nonpartisan Campaign for Accountability’s Google Transparency Project, the company doesn’t just organize. When Google wishes it had information that’d maybe…
The Streaming Service Trying to Take Queer Content Global
Revry's "office" in Glendale, California feels an awful lot like off-campus college housing. There's a fireplace that looks like it hasn't seen a flame in decades. There's a slightly tattered leather couch, some pillows featuring Wonder Woman, Star Wars, and Steve Jobs. A copy of the club-kid makeup portrait book Getting Into Face sits the…
The Crazy-Ambitious Effort to Catalogue Every Microbe on Earth
The microbes living on Earth are so plentiful as to be innumerable. Untold. Countless. Not in the hyperbolic sense, but the literal, gobsmacking sense. "It's estimated there are 100 million times as many bacteria as there are stars in the universe," says microbiologist Rob Knight, director of UC San Diego's Center for Microbiome Innovation. "And…
Telemedicine Is Forcing Doctors to Learn 'Webside' Manner
No one knew exactly when the girl would die, but everyone knew it would be soon. A 12-year-old with end stage cancer, the child's parents had recently moved her from the hospital to her home in the suburbs of Los Angeles. Some days later the girl's breath quickened, and her father phoned the family's hospice…
Hitman 2 Is My 'Forever Game'
Everyone is pining for a forever game. Hitman 2 might be mine. I first heard the term "forever game" during the press buildup for No Man's Sky. It denotes the idea of interactive infinity—a game that you can play forever, the one game to rule them all. A forever game means that you don't need…
Best-Ever Algorithm Found for Huge Streams of Data
It’s hard to measure water from a fire hose while it’s hitting you in the face. In a sense, that’s the challenge of analyzing streaming data, which comes at us in a torrent and never lets up. If you’re on Twitter watching tweets go by, you might like to declare a brief pause, so you…
Give Sandra Oh the Emmy, but Killing Eve Deserved More Nominations
All week, WIRED's Culture team will be writing endorsement letters for various Emmy nominees in advance of next Monday's awards ceremony. Next up: senior associate editor and aspiring assassin Angela Watercutter. In the spring of 2018, nearly three decades and some 75 roles into her career, Sandra Oh gave the performance of a lifetime. That’s…
The Robots Will Be Soft and Cuddly and Heal Their Own Wounds
Poke a hole in a human and something remarkable happens. First of all, you go to jail. But meanwhile, the wound heals itself, filling in the missing tissue and protecting itself from infection. Poke a hole in a robot, however, and prepare for a long night of repairs. The machines may be stronger than us,…