The Year the Alt-Right Went Underground
I was at what should have been a farmers’ market in Berkeley, California, last year when a throng of black-clad antifascists tried to scrap it out with far-right ralliers in the middle of a park named after Martin Luther King Jr. I watched scrawny college students get pummeled by hulking, be-swastika-ed ex-soldiers and ex-law enforcement…
Why Are So Many Dead Whales Washing Up in the Bay Area?
There’s no one way to describe the scent of a beached, rotting whale. See, it really depends on time and space: So long as you’re more than 20 feet away, you don’t smell a thing. But if you’re downwind, the sour stench will just about bowl you over. Its bite sits heavily instead of sharply…
Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio Isn't for Kids—It's for Oscars
In a piece of news no one was expecting to read Monday morning, Netflix announced that it's working on a reboot of the classic children's tale Pinocchio. OK, maybe that part wasn't entirely unforeseen. The story of a wooden puppet boy come to life is widely beloved—of course Netflix would want to make a movie…
How Fast Can a Tiny Van Go in Ant-Man and the Wasp?
It's time for another look at the Ant-Man and the Wasp trailer. Previously, I considered what would happen if you shrunk a building to the size of a suitcase while its mass stayed constant. But now I want to look at the van that gets tiny. So here's the scene (as far as I can…
Dark Phoenix Trailer Here to Remind You X-Men Still a Thing
Hello, and welcome to another edition of The Monitor, WIRED's look at all that's happening in the world of pop culture. Have you gotten over your Oscars hangover yet? Good, because we've got a new Dark Phoenix trailer, some sad news about The Suicide Squad, and Mahershala Ali's new sci-fi project all on deck. Step…
Darpa's Next Challenge? A Grueling Underground Journey
I can’t sit here and guarantee you a robot won’t take your job one day—capitalism kind of has a thing for automation. What I can tell you is that in the near future, robots will be doing jobs that no one wants to do. For instance, risking your life doing rescue operations after mining disasters.…
While You Were Offline: The Op-Ed Is Coming From Inside the House
Boy, oh boy. Technically, thanks to Labor Day, this past week was shorter work-wise than most. That said, the internet never takes a day off, so it was just as full as the rest. Think we're kidding? We're not. As proof, here's a series of unrelated tweets that represent just a fraction of what people…
How Facts Failed Us: Reckoning With Trump and Truth
From the nation’s founding, it’s always been fashionably American to rebel. Ours is a land of particular obsessions: food, war, success. Over time, though, our civic obsession with resistance, and how one deploys it for personal design, has taken an unsightly form. Just look to Donald Trump; he resists irresistible truth with the flagrant abandon…
Scientists Figure Out How to Make Muscles from Scratch
For the past several years, Nenad Bursac has been trying to make muscles from scratch. A biological engineer at Duke, Bursac came close in 2015, when his lab became the first to grow functional human skeletal muscle in culture. "Functional" being the operative word. Like the muscle fibers in, say, your bicep, the tissues could…
China Wants to Make a Mark in Space—But It'll Need a Little Help
In a China Global Television Network video from 2003, taikonaut Yang Liwei leans back in his orbital capsule, the overstuffed stripes of his spacesuit legs filling the frame. His helmet shield is up, so the viewer can gaze into his eyes as he speaks: “Greetings to people around the world!” His eyes move leftward, out…