WIRED August 2018

TO DOCUMENT THE irrational and at times deadly journeys people have taken in search of millionaire Forrest Fenn’s hidden treasure (“For All to Seek,” page 82), photographer Daymon Gardner, who is based in New Orleans, had to embark on an epic trek of his own: five days, three states, five flights, and 1,400 miles of driving. Does he think the prize, said to be a chest full of diamonds, rubies, emeralds, and gold, really exists? “Before I met anybody involved, I definitely questioned that. I want to believe in people. If this is a hoax then he’s a monster,” Gardner says. “I don’t want to believe it’s a hoax. I got the sense that the treasure really is out there.” Each summer, Stephen S. Hall grows tomatoes in his Brooklyn backyard,…

IN OUR JUNE ISSUE, contributing editor Garrett M. Graff reported on special counsel Robert Mueller’s time as a lieutenant in the Vietnam War and how it made him the man he is now. Andrew Rice profiled Federal Communications Commission chair Ajit Pai, whose repeal of Obama-era net neutrality rules has inspired volumes of internet vitriol. And editor in chief Nicholas Thompson sat down with French president Emmanuel Macron to discuss artificial intelligence and the role that France can play in developing the technology. These stories sparked visceral responses, but readers also appreciated the nuanced examinations of these prominent figures. Re: “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, Technologie”: For the president of France, AI is the next revolution. “THE GUY GETS IT.” Nathan Benaich (@NathanBenaich) on Twitter “Macron is a smart guy, and it is refreshing to see…

I WAS WALKING through a Hasidic neighborhood in Brooklyn with another parent I’d just met at a child’s birthday party. “I like it here,” he observed. “But the people smell bad.” Hgst. Someone has commented on the odor of an entire people. A bad moon rose. Then another. All around us were men in tzitzit, fedoras. I stabbed at the map on my phone. “I don’t smell anything,” I lied; the air was thick with the hot scent of political anguish. “Really?” he said. “Cigarette smoke bugs the shit out of me.” He pressed the heels of his hands onto his eyelids. I was in the company of an anti-Semite. I made my getaway. The guy’s annoyance has annoyed me for a year. So I set out to win an argument with him—in…

LOOK AT ALL THE PRETTY DRONES. Hovering above sports stadiums from Houston to Pyeongchang, many hundreds of them have lately sparkled in artful murmuration. On a recent Time magazine cover, 958 drones pixelated the sky. The world record, 1,374 LED-bedazzled microbots, was set by Chinese company EHang UAV in May. So­called drone swarms—the phrase people have taken up with gusto—are having their biggest, buzziest year ever. ¶ It’s an evocative word, swarms, and innocuous enough when applied to one of Intel’s drone light shows. But it’s tinged with alarm—if drones can dance at twilight, they can also attack. Sure enough, a gang outside Denver sent a small fleet to harass FBI agents on a raid earlier this year. In Syria, rebels reportedly sicced a squadron of quadrotors on a Russian…

THE RECIPE FOR the phone of tomorrow may call for some unlikely biological bits: the eyeball of a beetle, the fine hairs of a cricket, the scales of a butterfly wing. In everything from cameras to batteries, researchers are pursuing biomimicry—basically, copping nature’s secrets. A deft synthesis of engineering and entomology, the resulting breakthroughs could make the next generation of devices smarter, lighter, and more sustainable. We explored the latest research to envision the bug-fortified phone of the future. Sugar-Powered Battery Virginia Tech researchers built a biobattery for portable electronics that uses synthetic fuel to convert glucose into electricity, just like insects stockpile glycogen as energy. The battery stores more than 10 times the energy of a standard lithium-ion battery—and doesn’t have a track record of exploding. Sony is exploring the tech. Wide-Angle…

EARLIER THIS YEAR, Amazon successfully patented an “ultrasonic tracker of a worker’s hands to monitor performance of assigned tasks.” Eerie, yes, but far from the only creative method of employee surveillance. Upwork watches freelancers through their webcams, and a UK railway company recently equipped workers with a wearable that measures their energy levels. By one study’s estimate, 94 percent of organizations currently monitor workers in some way. Regulations governing such conduct are lax; they haven’t changed since the 19th century. ¶ The most common snooping techniques are relatively subtle. A system called Teramind—which lists BNP Paribas and the telecom giant Orange as customers on its website—sends pop-up warnings if it suspects employees are about to slack off or share confidential documents. Other companies rely on tools like Hubstaff to record…