WIRED UK September / October 2022

A TIMELESS ARCHAEOLOGIST Adémidé Udoma and Michelle Helena Janssen made the images of David Wengrow, archaeologist and co-author of The Dawn of Everything: “Meeting David was very special—we usually move in the music and fashion scene, so to photograph an archaeologist was exciting, and he was full of wild stories about his work. We wanted to capture him as a pioneer of our time, and took inspiration from Irving Penn’s classic portraits. The shoot was really fun, apart from the bit where (my assistant) Ivor and I almost put our backs out building the set…” ADVENTURES IN PHOTOGRAPHY Kendrick Brinson hit the Florida trails to photograph Amelia Winger-Bearskin, a developer who wants to make code more ethical: “Some people need coaxing to get a good shot, but Amelia said her father was a…

A decade ago, no technology conference presentation was complete without a slide that showed a graph with a steep incline from left to right demonstrating the empirical regularity with which the number of transistors on integrated circuit chips increased over time. Moore’s law—named for Intel cofounder Gordon Moore—described a doubling of processing speed every eighteen months, which impacted not just the capability of consumer and industrial products, but also their price. This forecasting model successfully tracked progress from the Intel 4004, the first commercially produced CPU, all the way to today’s semiconductors. Moore’s law was the credo of nineties and noughties tech evangelists, who argued that the progress it described was evidence of a great acceleration that would guide humankind to an era of abundance, one in which humans would be…

Jet, from German aerospace startup Lilium, is an electric, fixed-wing aircraft which has soared over its first few regulatory hurdles, with a production model due next year. But, says vice-chairman Alex Asseily, it’s more like a flying minibus than a car. “Fundamentally, it’s an electric business jet—it just happens to take off and land vertically,” he says. It’s just one of hundreds of designs being developed for eVTOL (electric vertical take-off and landing) aircraft, according to the Vertical Flight Society. There are two main categories: The first, including those from Lilium and California-based Joby, has fixed wings like a plane, but engines that can tilt to change the angle of thrust so it can take off and land without a runway. The second type, popularized by German startup Volocopter, and Chinese…

Users of cryptocurrency—a technology born out of anti-state libertarian roots and often maligned as a money laundering tool—are not, on the whole, fans of institutional functions such as tax returns, bank accounts, and wills. However, even people with sizable sums of cryptocurrency can’t take it with them. Crypto-assets such as bitcoin, ether, or the infamous NFTs are stored in digital “wallets”, which (unless managed by a centralized platform or exchange) can only be accessed using a twelve-word password. If a young crypto-billionaire were to meet their maker in an untimely private-jet disaster, Lambo crash, or yachtwreck, and they hadn’t left their passwords scrawled somewhere in their penthouse, they’d risk depriving their loved ones of a potentially hefty inheritance. And it can get worse: when the CEO of crypto-exchange QuadrigaCX died in 2018,…

Since Grand Theft Auto 3 first pioneered the genre in 2001, it seems every blockbuster game needs a sprawling open world to call its own. Today, our consoles are packed with enormous, richly detailed 3D worlds for us to explore—and it seems they’re only getting more expansive. By one calculation, GTA5 is over six times larger than GTA3; another estimate puts Elden Ring’s map at a massive 30.5 playable square miles. But have you ever wondered, which is largest? Our intrepid explorers discovered that it’s a question with no clear answers: Publishers are unwilling to talk specifics, perhaps out of fear their titles will lose out on the long-distance crown. Of course, we all know it isn’t the size that matters, it’s what you do with it that counts—diminutive maps…

Officina Stellare is known as the “Ferrari of telescopes”. Based in Sarcedo, a village in northern Italy, the company manufactures space telescopes for Earth and space observation, and is globally renowned for the quality of its lenses. Chief business development officer Gino Bucciol and his cofounders Riccardo Gianni and Giovanni Dal Lago launched Offcina Stellare in 2001. “We immediately started with big clients like NASA,” says Bucciol. Offcina Stellare carries out all work in-house and has managed to attract talent from all around the world. Over the past couple of decades, the sky has become crowded as the number of private outfits scrambling for a piece of the space industry has boomed. As of 2022, space companies number some 10,000 globally—a renaissance that has been dubbed the “New Space Economy.” Officina Stellare builds…