Tabla de contenidos para Jul/Aug 2019 en WIRED UK

THE ARCTIC ARMY This issue, photographer Benedict Red grove joins the British and Norwegian military on Nato manoeuvres in Bardufoss, for some Arctic acclimatisation: "I was warned that temperatures could drop to -30°C, so I stuffed my bag full of hand warmers, thermals and woollen socks. But on arrival, it was an unusually balmy 3°C – a reminder, perhaps, of the main reason for our story: the impact of a warming climate on international relations across the Arctic. The Royal Marines on training were equipped for traversing by land, air and fjord, and we pulled off our adventure without any casualties - save for one lost snowshoe, one dropped camera and one pair of very cold feet, thanks to some leaky waders." THE TIMBERLAKE TUMBLE Dur infographic on StockX is…

A group of players skydive on to an island and fight until a single survivor remains. Sound familiar? “Battle royale” has fast become the go-to video game mode. The most popular in the genre, Fortnite: Battle Royale, has almost 250 million players and earned Epic Games $2.4 billion (£1.8 billion) in 2018 – a record take in gaming history. In February 2019, EA Games joined the fight with Apex Legends, which gained ten million players in 72 hours (it took Fortnite two weeks). Even stalwart mega-franchises such as Call of Duty and Battlefield now include battle royale modes. WIRED tracks the genre’s manoeuvres. Bomberman 1983 Released in 1983 and now owned by Konami, Bomberman was the first game to introduce a “last man standing” multiplayer mode – a key component…

SKIJORING Royal Marines practise crosscountry skiing near Bardufoss, Norway, which includes skijoring – being tugged, on skis, behind a Viking all-terrain vehicle. “It manoeuvres the blokes into position,” says Captain Roger King of 40 Commando’s Charlie Company. “It’s often difficult to get out the back of a Viking and get your skis or snowshoes on.” The Marines wear camo whites over their winter gear. Elevation: 68m Av winter temp: -10°C ICE DIVING Sgt Vegard Lauritsen of the Norwegian Army’s Brigade Nord emerges from the water of the Gratangen fjord. He uses a wrist-mounted depth gauge to track the fjord floor and searches visually for obstacles that may prevent landing craft from dropping vehicles or personnel here. “The good thing about diving is it’s always at least 1°C in the water,”…

What’s next for AI? Apparently, it’s AL – or Artificial Life. The Barbican Centre’s exhibition “AI: More than Human”, on until August 26, is an exploration of the present, past, and future of man-made minds and organisms. The display has both artistic installations and projects by academics and researchers, such as Alphabet-owned DeepMind, and Neri Oxman, a professor at the MIT Media Lab. Oxman’s experiment, called The Synthetic Apiary, is a community of honeybees raised in a light-, humidity-, and temperature-controlled room to simulate a perennial spring. The bees are fed synthetic pollen and sugared water instead of actual flowers and rainwater; strange as it may sound, the insects have fared well – the queen has even laid eggs. For those less concerned about the eventuality of bees being killed…

Botanicals. Such a simple word for something that produces such complex flavours. For Johnny Neill, the founder of Whitley Neill Gin, it’s the alchemy of teasing new experiences from herbs, fruits and berries that made him continue with a family tradition that goes back eight generations, to 1762. “I spend a huge amount of time handcrafting different gins using new botanicals,” he says. Mini stills are used to understand flavour profiles – and once they know a combination is likely to work, they create a larger recipe and measure the effect. “I love the experimental aspect,” says Neill. “As well as looking for botanicals that interest me personally, we listen to Whitley Neill’s fan base when creating new flavours,” he adds, ensuring they develop exactly what gin drinkers love. ‘I…

From interacting with artificial intelligence to collaborative creation, the workplace of tomorrow will demand whole new categories of abilities from employees. To ensure students can rise to the challenge, education will need a future-focused rethink – everything from subjects to schoolhouse The first step – start them young. “Primary and secondary schools need to be rethought for this century, with digital technology embedded in teaching, not banned,” says Neil Morris, Dean of Digital Education at the University of Leeds. “Kids need to learn to manage digital tools the same way we’ve learned to use any skills throughout evolution.” Morris began enacting these changes while teaching neuroscience: “I had 400 students staring at me, the only voice in the room, and it didn’t feel authentic.” He introduced Who Wants To Be…

Norway is one of the world’s richest nations – mostly thanks to the discovery of oil deposits in the North Sea half a century ago. Easy access to capital, coupled with a desire to move the economy beyond fossil fuels, has created fertile ground for startups. In the past, “many of the country’s brightest heads used to go into developing world-leading oil exploration and extraction systems,” says Magnus Wanberg, CEO and founder of Oslo-based startup reMarkable. But in recent years, many of them, “now pre-loaded with world-class engineering skills from incredible engineering projects,” he adds, have been transitioning into other industries, including the startup sector. 070 The capital, Oslo, is Norway’s main startup hub, attracting not only local talent but also entrepreneurs from Berlin, London and Stockholm. A report by…

According to a recent MIT report, senior managers spend some 23 hours of the working week in meetings – with four in every ten rated as poor by participants. As remote working gets ever more prevalent, and with half the UK workforce expected to contribute to organisations from outside the office by 2020, we’re all going to be tabling and talking a lot more. While we can’t promise to make conclaves more interesting, technology can at least make them a little less painful. Interactive board “A connected meeting room isn’t a nice-to-have anymore,” says Sri Srinivasan, senior vice president at Cisco. “It’s a must-have.” The company’s Webex Board allows participants to contribute remotely, and to save and recall ideas for future use. Video phone Every meeting room needs a phone.…

When Greta Thunberg first downloaded Instagram in June 2018, the Swedish schoolgirl used the app to post pictures of herself posing with her rescue dog, Roxy. There was Roxy in the snow, Roxy at sunset, even Roxy at an open-air theatre. It was an ordinary 15-year-old girl’s Instagram in many ways, though there were also hints – a photo of homegrown tomatoes, multiple shots of fields and lakes – that Thunberg was passionate about the natural world. Indeed, just a month before, she had won a climate change essay competition run by Swedish daily newspaper Svenska Dagbladet. “I want to feel safe,” she wrote. “How can I feel safe when I know we are in the greatest crisis in human history?” At the age of 12, Thunberg gave up meat…

11.11.2016 On November 11, 2016, under the bright lights of the Peter Mokaba Stadium in Polokwane, South Africa, the home side prepared to face Group D rival Senegal in a qualifying match for the 2018 FIFA World Cup. South Africa had not beaten Senegal since January 2015. This was a game they had to win to make it to the finals. The match started slowly. The first 42 minutes were goalless. Neither team looked likely to score, when a South African player found space and took a shot at the Senegalese goal. The ball clearly deflected off defender Kalidou Koulibaly’s knee, but the referee, a Ghanaian named Joseph Lamptey, awarded South Africa a penalty, signalling that Koulibaly had handled the ball. Defender Thulani Hlatshwayo slotted the ball past Senegalese keeper…

GETTING GRETA Creative director Andrew Diprose spent an afternoon with the current star of eco-activism, Greta Thunberg: “Shooting with Greta was such a pleasure – and very different to working with other WIRED cover subjects. Her personality and Asperger syndrome meant she wasn’t full of the chit-chat that often goes with a typical shoot. (Her English, by the way, is impeccable.) Greta understood exactly what we were looking for – no faffing around. It was so refreshing to work with an individual with such influence who has zero ego. During the protest outside Parliament, while some of the crowds of children and adults were vying for her attention, a few formed a wall around her, shielding her from a barrage of press requests. People feel quite protective about her, and…

“I DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU’D SAY IT IS that we’re doing, but it isn’t really watchmaking,” says Guy Sémon, admiring a multimillion-dollar scanning electron microscope recently installed in his research facility at TAG Heuer’s Swiss headquarters. Down a hallway, an entire room has just been readied to receive a much larger transmission electron microscope – the kind of machine that can see individual atoms. The fast-expanding facility, where every whiteboard, window and compatible surface seems scrawled upon with equations, goes under the grand title of the TAG Heuer Institute. Sémon, its founder and CEO, is nevertheless low key in describing his latest activities there. “It’s a combination of mathematics and cooking,” he says with a shrug. The 57-year-old former naval pilot and aeronautical engineer has been cooking up remarkable horological advances…

Hermès Arceau L'Heure de la Lune Price $25,500 Case White gold Calibre H1837 Diameter 43mm hermes.com Montblanc Heritage Perpetual Calendar LE100 Price €25,000 Calibre MB 29.22 Diameter 40mm montblanc.com Girard-Perregaux Bridges Cosmos Price CHF 345,000 Diameter 47mm Calibre GPO9320 girard-perregaux.com THAT MAN’S OLDEST WAY of monitoring the passage of time – the cycle of the heavens – should remain a popular trope of watch design is perhaps hardly surprising; but that something so whimsical should be the subject of considerable inventiveness, and even innovation, perhaps is. For instance, in 2015 the niche horologist Andreas Strehler, who knows a thing or two about gearing ratios, devised a Moon-phase display so accurate that it entered the book of Guinness World Records, on the basis that (so long as it remains running) the…

01 IWC – PILOT’S WATCH SPITFIRE BRONZE IWC has the distinction of being one of the “Dirty Dozen” watch companies commissioned by the MoD to make “Wristlet Watch Wearable” watches issued to soldiers during WWII. Building on this heritage, it has converted its Spitfire pilot’s watch from a rather polite, silver-dial affair into a bold, military offering. The timepiece features a deep green dial and 39mm bronze case that will take on a rough-hewn patina over time, along with an engraving of a Spitfire plane on the case-back. It also debuts the 72-hour power reserve Caliber 32110. £4,590 iwc.com 02 VERTEX – MP45 BLACK Vertex was the sole British member of the Dirty Dozen (others included Jaeger-LeCoultre, Longines and Omega), and the brand was revived in 2016 by the great…

DESPITE THE QUALITY OF its products, the watch industry often comes in for criticism. Some say it’s old-fashioned; others that it can appear misogynistic. Most would agree it’s painfully slow to adapt. However, change is afoot. Over the past couple of years, a new generation of brand bosses has swept the industry. Most of this new breed are in their forties. Some are Silicon Valley acolytes. There are even a few women now running watch brands. All appear to be fanatical about experimenting with new ideas and speaking the common language of people-before-product. So, is the old-school Swiss watch-brand boss dead? If this paradigm shift is real, it was christened by Richemont Group chairman Johann Rupert, who at the end of 2016, told his shareholders he’d had enough of “grey…

In our 11.17 issue, WIRED published a feature on China’s social credit rating system. Written by the academic and author of Who Can You Trust?, Rachel Botsman, the piece was a richly researched examination of the methods developed by the Chinese state to rate its citizens via a national trust score. The story detailed ways in which the behaviour of citizens is rewarded and “corrected” through social engineering driven by the concept of “sincerity”. According to the official policy document, “It will forge a public opinion environment where keeping trust is glorious. It will strengthen sincerity in government affairs, commercial sincerity, social sincerity and the construction of judicial credibility.” The Chinese system is yet to be integrated, so government data and that of corporates aren’t aggregated – for now. But…

There are 20 drivers in a Formula One championship. Look at the 2019 line-up and you’ll see competitors from 15 different countries and at varying stages in their career. The youngest, McLaren’s Lando Norris, is just 19; the oldest, Sauber’s Kimi Räikkönen, is 39. But they have one thing in common: they are all men. This isn’t unusual. Only two women have raced in an F1 Grand Prix: Maria Teresa de Filippis in the 1950s and fellow Italian Lella Lombardi in the 1970s. While there have been female development and test drivers in F1 since then, no women have competed in a race for over 40 years. Lombardi remains the only female driver ever to have scored points. A new motor racing series aims to redress the balance. W Series,…

Go to a tech event, and you will likely notice at least one chunky, pewter-coloured band on someone’s finger. This is the Oura ring, a sleep tracker from the startup Oura Health, based in the Finnish city of Oulu. Each ring packs in infrared LEDs to measure heart rate, a sensor that can capture variations in body heat, and a 3D accelerometer. Oura co-founder Petteri Lahtela (right) was working on IT for chronic disease management when he learned about the impact of stress, and the importance of sleep. “We wanted to develop something that would help people understand how their body responds to their lifestyle,” he says. The team decided on a ring because wrist devices were not accurate enough and heart-rate belts can be uncomfortable. They found inspiration in…

Few German bureaucrats have offices as grand as Andreas Mundt’s. As the president of the Federal Cartel Office, or Bundeskartellamt, Mundt works from what was once known as Bonn’s “White House” – the seat of the West German government until reunification in 1990. “We got lucky,” Mundt says, looking around the wood-panelled room. Like his office’s former occupants, Mundt has some potentially world-shaping plans. One involves altering the way global technology companies do business. In February 2019, Mundt’s agency – in charge of preventing any one company from having too much power in the German economy – issued a groundbreaking decision against Facebook. The Bundeskartellamt believes Facebook has abused its dominant position among global social media platforms – and the sheer scale of the data it can collect. Mundt’s office…

Health-tech startup FacePrint aims to diagnose Parkinson’s disease from Facebook photos, but it started with a journey down the YouTube rabbit hole. Around three years ago, founder Erin Smith, then a high-school student in Kansas, was watching an interview with actor Michael J Fox, the star of Back to the Future who was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease at the age of 29. Smith, who is now 19, noticed something odd about the way Fox smiled: his facial expressions seemed forced and emotionally distant. “Michael J Fox is a really interesting case study, because you can go back to the films and create a timeline of when these facial differences started to occur,” Smith says. A few years prior, Smith had been obsessed with the TV show Lie to Me, starring…

Hot Chip’s distinctive blend of humanism- and house-inflected electronica has been defying categorisation since Joe Goddard and Alexis Taylor burst out of the wreckage of the late-90s electroclash movement with their 2004 debut album Coming on Strong. Ahead of their latest, A Bath Full of Ecstasy, WIRED spoke to Goddard and Taylor about the evolving electronic scene, open-source synthesizers and making music for desperate times. WIRED: A Bath Full of Ecstasy is your seventh album. How do you keep things fresh? AT: Philippe Zdar from Cassius and Rodaidh McDonald, who’s produced for The XX and David Byrne, brought new energy into the room [both are producers on the new album]. Philippe has an amazing recording studio and his mixing is dramatic in a way that reminds me of Royal Trux or Iggy and The…

‘The girls grasp it faster than the adults. They can structure their thinking and solve problems’RUTH LOCKYER HEAD OF EARLY YEARS, STREATHAM & CLAPHAM PREP It’s a Sunday morning at East Dulwich Picturehouse in South London, and a group of three- and four-year-old children is playing – but not with cars or dolls. Instead, they are learning coding. One of the children, Rocco, turned four a week ago and has been attending classes for six months. During this time, he has created an animation of a giraffe and a zebra in a bedroom. “I want the giraffe to chase the zebra so that he can fight him,” he says. His mother chimes in: “Don’t you mean play with him?” Rocco smiles and shakes his head. That’s a no. Rocco created…

Marta Krupinska, the head of Google for Startups UK, has two missions: to support and champion startups taking on big social issues, and reducing bias in hiring while widening participation in UK tech. In fact, she thinks the two go hand in hand. “How can we bring more women or more people from minorities into tech?” she says. “When we start solving problems that matter to these people, rather than how to get to polo games quicker.” Krupinska is also working to ensure that this year’s cohort of six startups will be financially attractive, particularly to “patient” capital, such as the Mustard Seed VC fund in the long term, rather than seeking quick exits. The 31-year-old serial startup founder is based at Google Campus near London’s Silicon Roundabout. At the…

Ailsa Bay 1.2 Sweet Smoke is produced with scientific precision – it’s the first whisky to not only calculate the peat flavour, but also a sweetness measurement. That balance – 22 parts per million peat and 19 parts per million in sweetness – makes Ailsa Bay the ultimate whisky for molecular mixology, a science-led method of cocktail design. Consider the “Electric Martini” concocted by Matt Whiley, European bartender of the year, head of award-winning cocktail bars Scout in London and Sydney, and author of The Modern Cocktail. Whiley uses evaporators, blenders, filters, centrifuges and ultrasonic homogenisers to break down spirits, liqueurs and other components for re-assembly into scientifically-designed drinks – Ailsa Bay’s own precision makes it the perfect ingredient for such exacting concoctions. Inspired by the advanced technology at the…

 IN FEBRUARY 2018, the NHS published the Topol Review, an independent report carried out by cardiologist Eric Topol. In the paper, he explores how genomics, digital apps and AI are transforming healthcare for all, making diagnostics more robust and treatments more effective. At WIRED Health, we heard from the experts behind the disruption From HIV to anxiety and ageing, the possibilities of gene therapy are endless We will be made into gods by the neo-biological revolution, Jane Metcalfe (previous page) – founder of NEO.LIFE and co-founder of WIRED Ventures – announced to the 2019 WIRED Health conference at the Francis Crick Institute in London. It’s the next stage of the digital revolution – and it’s already happening. WIRED Ventures created WIRED magazine in 1993 as the “Rolling Stone of technology”. NEO.LIFE aims…

AVERITAS AVeritas, manufactures unique "in house" designed and assembled contemporary mechanical wrist watches. High end luxury without the high end price. Engineering expertise, concept flair, and philosophical prospective blended into stunning timepieces for today’s gentleman. Bold statement looks with classic perspective. AVeritas, "Time as an Art Form". Visit averitas.com FORMID A one-of-a-kind, active seat designed by an architect. The first made-to-measure seat built from structural paper to fit you in your formal office. All are compatible with haptic feedback and an app to keep you physically fit. Discover more at formld.ca OUTSIDE GANG These high quality cooler tables are made for barbecues and parties. Fill with ice and keep drinks chilled for 16+ hours. It’s what your entertaining area has been missing. Get 10% oft with code ‘WIREDID’ on outsidegang.com…

When it comes to watches and power, the more you have, the greater the complications you can drive. Yet marshalling that resource properly is often overlooked in favour of simply squeezing in another barrel. Not so with Vacheron’s latest. Revealed at the SIHH this year, the platinum and slate-coloured-gold Traditionnelle Twin Beat Perpetual Calendar has fairly typical dimensions – 42mm case; 10mm thick – but up to a gargantuan 65 days of power. “It’s like cars – you can either increase the size of the gas tank, or you reduce the car’s consumption of gas,” says Christian Selmoni, style and heritage director of Vacheron Constantin. It’s a feat achieved by using different frequencies; one oscillator beats at a low 1.2Hz (10,800 vibrations per hour) – a sort of standby mode;…

Angelus U51 Tourbillon Diver 5-Day Price CHF 32,800 Diameter 45mm angelus-watches.com Cartier Santos Noctambule Price £tbc Diameter 39.8mm Height 9.8mm Calibre 9612 MC cartier.co.uk Audemars Piguet Code 11.59 Price CHF 175,000 Case Rose gold Calibre 2948 Diameter 41mm audemarspiguet.com IT’S NOT EASY TO DESIGN a watch movement. At its simplest, more than a hundred parts, some nearmicroscopic, are crammed into a few cubic centimetres. For reasons of efficiency and integrity, the moving parts are mounted to a solid disc – the mainplate – and held in place with other relatively sturdy plates, commonly known as bridges. And if it were a matter of engineering, there the story would end. But watchmakers are proud craftsmen. The idea of reducing the structure of a movement to its bare bones (hence “skeletonisation”)…

Omega is celebrating the 50th anniversary of the first Moon landing – after all, its Speedmaster Professional chronograph accompanied the Apollo 11 astronauts. Of course, only the actual space travellers got to wear an authentic “Moon Watch” – but an all-gold commemorative edition of 1,014 was unveiled in November 1969. Inscribed “To mark man’s conquest of space with time, through time, on time”, they were given to astronauts, Nasa staff – and President Nixon. It’s this watch that has been recreated for the 50th. The exterior faithfully replicates the retro style of the original 42mm model, but the materials and technology have taken a giant leap: the burgundy bezel is ceramic; the case is made of “Moonshine Gold” (a fade-resistant gold palladium alloy); and the old Calibre 861 has been…

LET’S FACE IT: A FINE mechanical watch is, in spite of its inherent timeliness, a deliberate anachronism. That delicate, tick-tick-ticking concoction of wheels, springs and levers is based on ancient principles that have barely changed in 200 years, keeping worse time than the plastic digital that fell out of your cereal box in 1986. Even more remarkable is that watchmakers have tried to improve things over the centuries, but got little further than George Daniels’ recent Co-axial invention – and only Omega gets dibs on that. So what is it that ties Switzerland’s tweezer-wielding boffins to their workbenches, when they could easily be enticed down from the Jura mountains by any of Geneva’s micro-engineering firms? How were the thronging halls of horology’s Geneva and Basel trade shows so Alpine fresh…

Bulgari Octo Finissimo Tourbillon Carbon £poa bulgari.com Hublot Classic Fusion Ferrari GT Titanium £18,200 hublot.com Nomos Tangente Sport Neomatik 42 date £3,980 nomos-glashuette.com Mondaine Essence White £169 mondaine.com Tudor Black Bay Chrono S&G This new 41mm two-tone chronometer uses the MT5813 movement, which starts its life as a Breitling B-01, before being modified in-house by Tudor. £4,890 tudorwatch.com Swatch Flymagic €1,500 swatch.com Seiko Prospex SLA033 This is a modern version of the 6105 – known as the “Willard”, after the model was worn by Martin Sheen as Captain Willard in Apocalypse Now. Limited to 2,500 pieces. €4,350 seikowatches.com Chanel J12 black ceramic & steel £4,675 chanel.com Ulysse Nardin Freak X From £19,100 ulysse-nardin.com Luminox Sport Timer 0900 Series 30th Anniversary £945 luminox.com Zenith DEFY Inventor £15,500 zenith-watches.com Ressence Type 2 e-Crown…

Welcome to Ashgabat, the capital of the central Asian nation of Turkmenistan, a metropolis notable for three architectural accomplishments. First, it holds the world record for the highest concentration of white marble-clad buildings – in 2013 (the last year for which official records are available), there were 543 in an area of 4.5 million square metres. Second, the city has the highest number of fountain pools in a public space – the Ashgabat Fountain, which sits on the road from the airport to the city, includes 27 synchronised and fully-programmable fountains in an area of about 15 hectares. And third, there is the world’s largest enclosed Ferris wheel – a 47.6m-diameter affair at the Alem Cultural and Entertainment Centre in the south of the city that cost £57m to build.…

In an office in Shoreditch, London, Edward Miller and Huub Heijnen are building a 3D digital map of the world – not for humans, but for phones, drones and self-driving cars. “We are building a map for these devices to understand the world,” explains Miller, co-founder and CEO of Scape Technologies. And not only geographically, but being able to identify objects nearby – such as knowing that an octagonal red sign means “stop”. Since launching in 2016, Scape’s focus has been hyper-accurate localisation, without expensive sensors or imprecise satellite signals. GPS is accurate to about five metres: fine for humans; potentially disastrous for self-driving cars – most of which use sensors that tend to be “large, heavy and power hungry”, according to Miller. He sees the future of localisation in…

INSTANT VINTAGE_ Aveine Aerator Negating centuries of tradition in a single pour, Aveine’s “smart” wine aerator uses a piezoelectric precision pump to accurately control the speed of the reaction wine has with air. The result promised is a perfectly aerated glass, instantly. You can also adjust the equivalent aerating time from a few minutes up to a full 24 hours; and with the help of the app (iOS, Android), you can scan the wine label to figure out precisely how long is needed to get the best from the grape. £tbc aveine.paris/en KITCHEN COMMANDER_ Samsung Family Hub 4.0 It may not look much different from previous Family Hub designs, but Samsung has updated its flagship side-by-side fridge-freezer with some genuinely smart features. The 29in Wi-Fi connected touchscreen with 5W speakers…

Good digital etiquette isn’t just about being nice; it’s also central to productive work. Ever lost hours to your inbox because of pointless email threads? Wasted time trying to make a video call work when you could have just picked up the phone? Been distracted by non-stop Slack notifications because someone keeps spamming the main channel with memes? Email is still the go-to means for office communication, but while it may have been around for longer than the world wide web, it remains perilous territory. Meanwhile, collaborative tools such as Slack and Google Hangouts have introduced a new dynamic to the digital workplace – not to mention a colourful range of new opportunities for embarrassing faux pas. Here are some etiquette primers across five tools of the modern workplace, so…

Alarm yourself Wake up with a buzz at an off-kilter time, like 4.22am Review your data Audit your calendar every three months to see where time goes Set consequences Make yourself pay for not following up on commitments Get strategic Think about goals in positive steps: Wish, Outcome, Obstacle, Plan THE SLEEP OPTIMISER For many hoping to be extra productive, getting up early is a priority. Michael Affronti, senior vice president of product at business communications company Fuze, has been setting his alarm at 4.22am every day for the past 15 years – he claims the disorienting off-set hour wakes him up faster. “I’ve been hacking how I can get the most high-quality sleep possible,” he says, adding that for him, that’s around five hours a night. Affronti follows a…

Angela Saini’s new book explains why they are wrong People wondered whether gene therapy could some day cure cancer. Researchers imagined they would find genes for everything from being tall to being gay, whether we might even build designer babies by tinkering with our DNA. And two scientists working for the National Cancer Institute in the United States wrote a fairy tale. Their protagonist is a well-meaning geneticist who one day begins to wonder why some people use chopsticks to eat their food and others don’t. Of course, the hero does what all good experimentalists do: he rounds up several hundred students from his local university and asks them how often they each use chopsticks. Then he sensibly cross-references that data with their DNA and begins his hunt for a…

IN THE AUTUMN OF 2010, Mei Mei Hu, a management consultant for McKinsey in New York, received an unexpected invitation from her mother, Chang Yi Wang, to join her for the Christmas holiday in Shanghai. Mei Mei always had a complicated relationship with her mother. “Chang Yi is very particular and exacting – which is part of her genius,” Mei Mei explains, sitting in a restaurant in Cold Spring Harbor, a former whaling community on Long Island’s North Shore. She’s tall and slim, with dark hair in an unruly pony tail. A few years after she was born in Great Neck, a New York suburb, in 1983, her family moved to a large colonial house in Cold Spring Harbor. “I remember coming back from school with a test score of 98…

An official partner of the MoD, thanks to its tough new Armed Forces collection, Bremont presents Broadsword, an automatic. Besides taking on the callsign of Richard Burton’s Major Smith in Where Eagles Dare, its military cred is further enhanced by the inclusion of a rugged 40mm steel case, which has been emblazoned on the reverse with the emblems for Her Majesty’s Armed Forces. £2,595 bremont.com (For more military watches, see p34) Cover: TAG HEUER CARRERA CALIBRE HEUER 02T TOURBILLON NANOGRAPH TAG’s latest features its carbon nanotube balance-spring – a radical new material that exceeds silicon in handling magnetic fields, shocks and temperature fluctuations. The case continues the carbon theme, while inside, beneath an openworked dial, a yellow tourbillon whirs. £20,750 tagheuer.com (To see how the balance spring is made, go…

Bell & Ross BR 03-92 Bi-Compass Price £2,990 Diameter 48mm Case Ceramic Calibre BR-CAL.302 bellross.com Singer Reimagined FlyTrack Concept Price £tbc Diameter 43mm Case Titanium singerreimagined.com GRAB SOME PAPER AND DRAW A simple watch: a circle, 12 circumferential notches and two radial hands. Now, what’s staring up at you? Would you spend thousands of pounds to happily stare back, 80 times a day on average? Assuming that’s a no, it’s plain to see: the quotidian utility of a timekeeper, squeezed into wrist size, asks a lot from any watch designer. Until the sixties and seventies, “watch design” per se wasn’t even talked about. And by the time Jack Heuer, Gérald Genta and Jorg Hysek finally tore up the rulebook, the new era was to be short-lived – cheap quartz technology…

“I DIDN’T EVEN WANT TO start guessing what women want, so I decided to create a watch embodying everything I love about the women in my life; creating a mechanical sculpture from that starting point.” For good or bad, that was how MB&F founder Max Büsser described how, after 14 years, he embarked on making his first women’s watch. It is an incredible piece of machinery, as you would expect from a brand that brought you such wonders as a clock contained in the abdomen of a spider. Indeed, as MB&Fs go, the Legacy Machine FlyingT (right) is a restrained affair. The dial is a sleek, black enamel pool; a line of diamonds encircles the bezel and tracks the line of the lugs, while the tiny time-telling disc is at…

DO PEOPLE BUY WATCHES ONLINE? For watch brands and retailers heavily invested in prime real estate around the world, the answer has traditionally been that a watch is something you need to handle, try on and experience. It’s an old-school mentality, but this is largely an old-school industry; even though many major brands have had functional e-stores for a decade or more, the received wisdom is that their overall contribution is small. Analysts agree. Rene Weber, a watch industry specialist from Zurich-based bank Vontobel, put the market for online watch sales at no more than five per cent of the global total. So why, then, did the Richemont group, one of the world’s largest luxury conglomerates, spend an estimated €200m (£173m) to buy the digital-first company Watchfinder in June 2018?…