WIRED UK

CHARACTER ACTOR He’s billed as the complicated face of sci-fi, but Pedro Pascal—a specialist in gritty characters full of contradictions—is actually a delight: “We were going for moody lighting,” says Los Angeles-based photographer Peter Yang, of our cover star. “Pedro really played well to the different setups, going from funny to dramatic in a blink of an eye. He was cracking us all up.” THE BIG IDEA Mitch Payne had to channel Gulliver’s Travels for this issue’s Gear photoshoot, using ultra-realistic scale models to make tiny gadgets look massive: “WIRED always lets me get hands-on with cool new kit, but adding some shameless adult playtime while mixing and matching diggers and fire engines to tech products? Next-level fun.” HEMAL JHAVERI Jhaveri meets Pedro Pascal—star of The Last of Us, The Mandalorian, and, apparently, the nicest…

Remember the excitement about the return of the “Roaring Twenties”? As financial markets, juiced by quantitative easing, roared out of the global Covid pandemic, many future-gazers predicted the return of a gilded age similar to that of a century before, one that heralded a period of exceptional growth and prosperity. There is a tendency to think of the 1920s culturally: Cities from Chicago to Berlin experienced a surge of creativity in theater and music, while social progress saw women achieving equal voting rights in both the US and UK. What is sometimes forgotten is that it was also a period of immense technological advancement—radio became a mass medium (CBS, NBC, and the BBC were all founded in the 1920s), and there were rapid developments in automobiles, aviation, and electrical appliances for the…

Cesare Galli unscrews the lid of a liquid nitrogen canister and pulls out a sample of something invaluable: a pair of embryos from the northern white rhinoceros. The species is functionally extinct, ravaged by poaching and habitat loss. Since 2018, just two northern white rhinos remain—both female, and both unable to bear young. Galli is the founder of Avantea, a biotech company based in northern Italy that is hoping to bring the Northern white rhinoceros back from the brink. “When you eliminate a species from the ecosystem, you risk throwing everything off-balance,” he says. “Rhinos are maintaining the balance. The danger to their survival comes exclusively from us. It is our duty to make amends.” So far, Galli’s lab has created fourteen embryos, using artificial insemination to combine sperm from two deceased…

It’s been said algorithms are “opinions embedded in code”. Few understand that better than Abeba Birhane. During her PhD in cognitive science at University College Dublin, Birhane—who was born and raised in Ethiopia, and moved to Ireland to study—realized no one was asking what goes into the huge datasets often used to train artificial intelligence systems. These datasets are often scraped from the web for cost-effectiveness and ease. But that means AI can inherit all the biases of the data that feeds it. It mirrors society, with all the ugliness baked in. Ignoring this risks real-world harm. AI has been accused of underestimating the health needs of Black patients, for instance, and making it harder for people of color to get mortgages. Often, one only has to scratch the surface to find problems.…

In November 2022, Swiss scientists opened an eagerly awaited package from rural Ethiopia. It was full of shit. For two months, public health researcher Abdifatah Muhummed had been collecting stool samples from children in a remote, pastoralist community in Ethiopia’s Somali Region, as part of a global effort to catalog and preserve the diversity of human gut bacteria. He split each sample into four tubes, froze them at -80°C, and shipped two of them to Europe. Trillions of bacteria, fungi and other microbes live in the digestive tract. Many of them are beneficial to human health—influencing our metabolism and immune system, for example. But their diversity is under threat from industrialization, urbanization and environmental changes. When Muhummed analyzed some of the samples he’d collected—culturing them in petri dishes and adding a dye…

In Selmer, Tennessee, a truck carries parts between a GE factory and a warehouse, navigating roads and loading bays. One thing it’s not carrying: a driver. In November, this electric truck—called the Pod and made by Swedish startup Einride—became the first to negotiate a public road in the US, combining LIDAR, satellite and night-vision cameras to find its way, with help from a remote operator. Einride’s CEO Robert Falck and his cofounder and CMO (and wife) Linnéa Kornehed are proud of that autonomous milestone, but say they’re more focused on the power of electric vehicles to make a real difference in the climate crisis. Freight accounts for eight per cent of global emissions, and two thirds of that comes from trucks. In 2016, the couple decided to do something about it, building on…