Tabla de contenidos para Jan / Feb 21 en WIRED UK

WATCHING THE DETECTIVES Ricardo Nagaoka spent some time photographing the scene of a very old crime for our feature on the researchers combining DNA and genealogy to identify unnamed human remains, and so close the coldest of cases. “The air was thick with smoke from the California fires and the Sun a red blot as I neared Dubois, Idaho,” says Nagaoka. “The caves where an unnamed victim had lay in pieces for decades was in the empty desert – just telephone poles and barbed-wire fences. Being inside the cave with Deputy Sheriff Clements, the space felt impossibly immense – and when I was there by myself, I definitely stared to feel scared of the dark.” IN THE EVENT OF AN EMERGENCY The timing of WIRED Health: Tech was either completely…

Street lamps flicker, ambulance sirens blare, and a crowd on onlookers starts to gather. It’s 3AM in Peckham, and local teenager Jerome Jacobs lies on the ground after seemingly falling from the balcony of a tower block; he clutches an unlocked phone. You, a budding Met detective, are handed the phone and asked to analyse Jerome’s texts, pictures, and social media posts to piece together the story of how he ended up dead on the pavement after returning from a night out with friends. This is the premise of Dead Man’s Phone, a mobile investigation game developed by London-based studio Electric Noir, whose first episodes were released in beta version throughout 2020. Company founders Nihal Tharoor and Benedict Tatham first came up with the idea of telling an interactive story…

To make sense of the infodemic that exploded in the wake of Covid-19, you don’t need to go all the way back to the cover-ups and misconceptions surrounding the disastrous 1918 Spanish flu – just look to the blight decimating Italy’s olive trees. It was 2013 when the first branches began to wither on olive trees in Apulia, the “heel” of the Italian peninsula. Soon, whole plants would turn brown, dry out and die. Today, olive trees keep dying in the millions, and the reason is something we’re all familiar with: an epidemic. The culprit is Xylella fastidiosa, one of the most dangerous plant bacteria in the world. It travels from plant to plant through the saliva of common spittlebugs, clogging the plants’ vessels and making them die of thirst.…

There are three kinds of light, says Carmen Palacios-Berraquero, CEO and co-founder of Cambridgebased quantum photonics company Nu Quantum. Chaotic light – like a light bulb; coherent light – think lasers; and single-photon sources – the smallest units of light, which Nu Quantum specialises in. “Photonic quantum technologies are about manipulating information – processing, communicating and securing information that can be encoded in single particles of light,” she says. Photons have some useful properties: they can’t be tampered with without alerting both sender and recipient, while quantum entanglement enables stronger cryptography. But creating them is a challenge: only a handful of companies can reliably either emit or detect single photons. Nu Quantum hopes to do both. The company was spun out of research at Cambridge University’s Cavendish Lab. Palacios-Berraquero had…

Each year, up to 13 million tonnes of plastic waste ends up in the world’s oceans. Images of beached whales, their stomachs packed with plastic, have become a harrowing reminder of our pollution crisis When it comes to single-use plastics, the worst offender is flexible plastic packaging. Bags and wrappers make up a quarter of all UK consumer plastic packaging, yet only four per cent is recycled, as it’s too complex, dirty and lightweight for separation and recycling technologies to handle – a failure of the recycling system and of product design. “There’s no question that plastic packaging is a vital industry,” says Daphna Nissenbaum, CEO and co-founder of TIPA, an Isreali firm that is leading the field of packaging innovation. Founded in 2010, the company has a simple goal:…

1. A universal coronavirus vaccine In May 2020, Matthew Memoli, director of the Clinical Studies Unit at the US National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) Laboratory of Infectious Diseases, published a piece in the journal Nature in which he urged the scientific community not to repeat the mistakes of the past. While vaccine developers across the globe were racing to develop a vaccine for Covid-19 – as of October 2020, there were more than 190 in development – Memoli argued this was not enough. Instead, he outlined a more ambitious target. “We must go further,” he wrote. “We must work towards a universal coronavirus vaccine with broad protection against a diverse number of coronaviruses.” Memoli’s reasoning is that history tends to repeat itself. From SARS to MERS to the SARS-CoV-2 virus…

Our annual trends briefing is on sale now and is packed with insights for the year ahead – from the mainstreaming of psychedelic therapies to reforming taxation in a world of remote work, the acceleration of synthetic photosynthesis to a shift in financial lending models and the threat to the interoperability of communications technologies – as identified by some of the world’s leading thinkers. Here’s a sneak peek at a few big ideas……

Science Nọ 3 PHOTOSYNTHESIS IS THE SOURCE FOR much of the world around us. It produces wood for our buildings, fibres for our clothes, food to sustain life and much more, including medicine, dyes, rubber and, of course, fossil fuels. Indeed, our current society burns in one year what photosynthesis took one million years to make, leading to the enormous amounts of carbon now present in our atmosphere. In 2021 we will move towards harnessing this extraordinarily powerful process. Photosynthesis is a two-step process, taking place first in light and then in dark. In daylight, a leaf uses the energy in photons from sunlight to separate water into its elemental components of oxygen and hydrogen. The oxygen is released into the atmosphere; the hydrogen is stored as a component of…

SIGN OF THE TIMES For our Change Everything special feature, we decided to hark back to some of the original changemakers, from the Suffragettes to Greenham Common and BLM, by commissioning some custom type from Anthony Burrill that had a punchy, activist feel. Never one to miss an opportunity to take it to the next level, WIRED’s group creative director mounted the headline and headed to a convenient Extinction Rebellion event for a bit of socially distanced social action, while photographer Nick Wilson captured the moment. We think Greta would approve (though she didn’t make the list). A SOFT ROCK CLASSIC Kerry Hughes was behind our crafty masthead logo this issue – a recurring theme in her work is exploring how materials can be manipulated to create something unexpected, such…

It’s fair to say that 2020 has been a bumpy ride. A global pandemic has brought hardship to millions, stretched governments to their limits, adversely impacted businesses and organisations of all sizes and, tragically – at the time of writing – taken the lives of over 1.3 million people, many of them working on the frontline to combat the disease. Yet there are glimmers of light: vaccine-makers Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna have reported success in large-scale trials. Both are working on mRNA vaccines, which use simple synthetic messages written in genetic code to incite an immune response – beyond Covid-19, this could fundamentally change the way we manufacture future vaccines. It’s welcome news, but governments will still need to work domestically and multilaterally to develop large-scale vaccination programmes. While the virus…

After his five-year-old son was diagnosed with autism in early 2019, Mayur Gondhea left his position as a financial modeller to go freelance. His workload was unsustainable: Gondhea was spending at least one day a week completing applications to his local authority to ensure his son got the best education possible. He was aware that employment prospects for autistic people can be dire; less than 16 per cent of autistic adults are in full-time employment in the UK. Yet studies have found that autistic people, who may struggle with social interaction, can also possess a variety of desirable skills including improved focus, long-term memory and logical thinking. Later that year, Gondhea came up with the idea for CubeLynx Limited; a boutique corporate finance consulting firm that recruits and trains financial…

A single strand of RNA has brought humanity to its knees. For all our technological sophistication, we spent much of 2020 in conditions that would have been familiar to our medieval forebears: in quarantines, locked down amid a new and poorly understood disease. The challenging search for solutions to the Covid-19 pandemic is forcing us to rethink our approach and attitude toward innovation, and question whether our obsession with its role in modern society has done us all a disservice. Indeed, many of the sacred cows surrounding this process have stood in the way of the kind of collaborative efforts needed to bring new goods, services and technologies to scale. They have – albeit inadvertently – made it harder, not easier, to make bold and much-needed new solutions readily available,…

KEF Crimson Red special edition LS50 Wireless II speaker system £2,250 uk.kef.com KEF’s latest system combines all-in-one wireless capabilities and a 12th-generation Uni-Q driver array with Metamaterial Absorption Technology for distortion-free sound. It can also be completely personalised, thanks to the new KEF Connect app. Westland Garryana Edition 5 Whiskey £160 thewhiskyexchange.com Part of Westland’s Outpost Range, Edition 5 blends Washington Select pale malt spirit with Bairds heavily peated spirit for a palette of rich barbecue with cacao butter, charred maple and clove. Maison Lanson Le Blanc de Blancs & Le Black Réserve £59.99 and £54.99, 750ml. Available exclusively at Selfridges Maison Lanson unveils two new cuvées: the complex, citrussy Le Black Réserve, and the more honeyed Le Blanc de Blancs. Bremont Hawking Limited Edition Watch £7,995 bremont.com This classic,…

LEGO Star Wars 75290 Mos Eisley Cantina Re-enact that “Han shot first” moment with the fantastically detailed 3,187-piece LEGO Star Wars set of the Cantina in Mos Eisley spaceport. This gorgeously detailed model packs in the iconic horseshoe bar, a Dewback, two landspeeders and 21 minifigs – including Figrin D’an and the Modal Nodes. £319.99 lego.com 7L Origin System 3L Waterproof Outer Seven Layer (aka 7L) is a Manchester-based outdoor brand, founded around the US Marine principle of only needing seven layers of clothing for all eventualities. The result is a capsule collection of adaptable, highly technical items – 50 per cent of which is made in Britain. Our pick is the 3L Waterproof Outer jacket manufactured from 100 per cent recycled polyester and a recycled hydrophilic monolithic membrane with…

In 2013, at a press event in London, most expensive hamburger ever was revealed. The result of years of research, it cost €250,000 (£221,000) to produce. Unlike every beef burger that had come before it, this one had been grown in a lab. Seven years later and Mosa Meat, the startup born out of that breakthrough, now produces a single patty that costs just €9, and the price is set to come down further. In September, Mosa Meat raised €47 million in funding to scale up its operation, taking it from lab experiment to production at pre-industrial volumes. There are roughly 1.5 billion cows on the planet. According to one 2014 study, beef production uses 28 times more land and 11 times more water than poultry and pork. Each cow…

Using CRISPR to edit disease out of our DNA The Nobel Prize-winning technology could enable everything from personalised therapies to designer-crop cultivation Two weeks before she received the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, biochemist Jennifer Doudna spoke to WIRED Health from her house in California to talk about her discovery of gene editing technique CRISPR, which she compared to “molecular surgery”. “CRISPR is really a way to alter the DNA in cells and organisms in ways that allow precise correction of disease-causing mutations,” she said. “It also allows scientists to do all sorts of manipulations of genetic material in living cells and organisms. It gives them the ability to alter the details stored in the genome of any cell types and any organism, allowing us to both understand and manipulate…

PSYCHEDELIC MEDICINE WILL BEGIN TO cross over into the mental health mainstream in 2021. In both Europe and the US, medicines regulators have eased restrictions on using MDMA to treat post-traumatic disorder (PTSD), and on psilocybin – the active substance in magic mushrooms – to treat depression. 2021 will bring new clinical trials of psychedelics. Clinical research into psychedelics has boomed in the past five years and investors are taking note. The US Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), which researches the topic, reached a $30 million (£23m) fundraising target in 2020, on top of $80m of historical funds. This money will enable the completion of a phase-3 trial in the use of MDMA to treat PTSD, which will be necessary to achieve Food and Drug Administration approval. In the…

ZERO-CARBON POWER OUTSTRIPPED fossil fuel in the UK’s electricity mix in 2020 for the first time since the industrial revolution. Back then, Thomas Edison’s Holborn Viaduct coal plant – opened in 1882 and the world’s first coal-fired power station – could light 1,000 lamps. Today, a single rotation of a Scottish wind turbine can power a home for a day. The challenge of green power is that while we humans are creatures of routine – we get up, travel and cook at the same time, creating predictable peaks and troughs in demand – wind and sunshine are less predictable. This causes fluctuations in power that our engineers at National Grid Electricity System Operator (ESO) must smooth out by balancing supply and demand. But consumers also have their part to play…

THE RISK MODELS THAT BANKS USE TO help inform their commercial-lending decisions have been dealt a blow by Covid-19. The pandemic has presented a crisis where historical correlations do not hold. In 2021 we will find new ways of assessing risk that use forward-looking as well as backward-looking data. This will make lending smarter and better for everyone. Traditional risk models are based on historical data, but the dynamics of the Covid-19 crisis mean that extrapolating from the past may now be a less helpful approach. Pandemics are by their very nature situations that are hard to predict or plan for. We can make assumptions based on what we have seen with similar events in the past, but no two are the same, so any view of them needs to…

There are 1.6 billion cattle on Earth, and their burps and farts are a big problem. Cows expel methane, a gas approximately 84 times more potent than carbon dioxide (CO2) when it comes to warming the planet. UK-based company Zelp has developed a potential solution: a burp-catching face mask for cows, designed to reduce their methane emissions by 60 per cent. The firm was founded by brothers Francisco and Patricio Norris, whose family run a farming business in Argentina. “Methane is one of the biggest contributions to global warming, and we found that methane mitigation tools in agriculture are under-researched,” Francisco Norris says. “There isn’t a lot of innovation occurring within the field.” Generally, solutions to the livestock industry’s methane problem have come in the form of feed additives inhibiting…

Anthony Dickens was driving down the M40 when he had an epiphany. It was around 2005, and the designer and amateur musician had been trying to think of ways to improve on the guitar that would create something “different and powerful”. He landed on the idea of placing a wheel underneath the strings, which could spin and automatically strike them in a pre-set rhythm, creating something that was part stringed instrument, part programmable sequencer. Back at home, he gutted an old acoustic and made a prototype, but then life got in the way and it sat in his bedroom until recently, when he decided to revive the project. For the last two years, he’s been working on a new prototype at Makerversity at London’s Somerset House alongside Luke Perkin, an…

Stealth’s inside job Logging in with a lick Something you are Stealth scans and stores the pattern of the palatal rugae – the rough folds behind the teeth in the roof of the mouth. These are unique to individuals, and you’re less likely to leave your mouth print lying around – unlike passwords or fingerprints, which can be lifted and reproduced. Something you know The device is also designed to take advantage of the tongue’s unique sensitivity. It can deliver different sensations to the tip of the tongue – the user then responds to specific sensations with a gesture or movement of the tongue. Knowing which gesture matches which sensation is akin to a password that no one can eavesdrop on. Something you have Unlike a fob or a smartphone…

CAREER MOVES SAM WILSON AND FIONA INGLIS HAVE A lot in common. Both studied sciences – infectious diseases for Inglis, zoology for Wilson – before switching to web development; both began apprenticeships at Edinburgh software business Foritt during the coronavirus pandemic; and both have gone straight into the third year of Edinburgh Napier University’s software development degree. Yet they’ve never met. Thanks to coronavirus, their experience embarking on a new career – from finding jobs to being interviewed and then inducted – has been handled remotely. “I’ve not seen our office yet,” says Wilson. “It’s not ideal, but there are worse things to be upset about.” Inglis agrees: “I do look forward to when I get to be physically with my co-workers, but there are some upsides – the work-life…

What’s good for the planet must also be good for business. As nations grapple with our shared responsibility to tackle the climate crisis, the companies we invest in must play a role in redressing the balance between economic success and environmental destruction. By 2050, the world’s population will hit ten billion people, and global food production will have to increase by 50 per cent. “Food security challenges are causing deforestation, loss of biodiversity, water overuse and pollution,” says Mayssa Al Midani, senior investment manager for nutrition at Pictet, a leading wealth and asset management company. “We don’t just invest in food companies, but the businesses that will help secure our future food supply and health while mitigating the negative impacts on the planet.” One in ten people – that’s 815…

Sarah Gilbert, professor of vaccinology, The Jenner Institute/University of Oxford selects Teresa Lambe, associate professor and Jenner investigator, The Jenner Institute I’m nominating Associate Professor Teresa Lamb, who has been leading on immunology assessments in the Oxford-led trials of [Covid-19 vaccine candidate] ChAdOx1 nCoV-19. Professor Lambe has assembled a team to work with our UK trial sites and international collaborators to ensure that we get high-quality immunology data from our clinical trials in the shortest possible time. Marietje Schaake, international policy director, Stanford University Cyber Policy Center selects Laura DeNardis, professor at the School of Communication, American University Laura DeNardis is a visionary of technology and the power battles that come with digitisation and connectivity. While excitement over efficiency drew millions to the internet, she pointed to the coming war…

It was in August 1979, while searching for arrowheads inside Idaho’s Civil Defense Caves – ancient lava tubes running from Yellowstone National Park, partly repurposed as a cavernous fallout shelter during the Cold War – that the family found it: a human torso in a hessian sack, buried 20cm below the sediment. The identity of the deceased – whose other body parts were missing – and how they ended up in a cave just east of Dubois was debated from the beginning. Clark County Sheriff Earl Holden guessed that the clothing on the torso – a pin-striped shirt, white cotton T-shirt, knitted maroon sweater and black woollen trousers with braces – dated back 60 years or so, and jotted in his notes that they were the kind of thing a…

Politics Nọ 2 IT TOOK A PANDEMIC FOR US TO REALISE that many people are able to study, work and organise their everyday life independently from their habitual geographical location. Online has made borders redundant and challenged the very nature of nation states. In 2021, states will have to respond. So far states have been built on the idea that most people live at fixed addresses and work for specific employers. They and their employers pay taxes to the government, which redistributes them back through society – schools in people’s neighbourhoods, doctors close to home, and so on. But if remote work and remote schooling function well when someone is outside these institutions, shouldn’t they function just as well when they are on another continent? This will be a significant…

culture Nọ 5 ONLINE WILL BECOME THE “THIRD PLACE” where we do much of our socialising in 2021. As the Covid-19 pandemic has disrupted the distinction between the workplace and the home space, we are starting to look beyond video calls and turning to virtual worlds to give us the same experience as our favourite gathering places. The pandemic saw sharp increases in the numbers of players across many gaming platforms. With schools closed and outdoor opportunities limited, players flocked to Epic Games’ Fortnite. There are now 350 million registered Fortnite players, compared to 250 million in March 2019, helping propel the company to a $17.3 billion (£13.3 billion) valuation. Nintendo’s Animal Crossing: New Horizons, which offers wholesome co-operation and virtual outdoor adventures, drove Nintendo’s operating profits up 428 per…

THE TECHNOLOGIES AND STANDARDS that underpin communication are, for the most part, global and interoperable. From the microprocessor architectures that power everything we do, to the standards set by bodies such as the Internet Engineering Task Force, which oversees the way the internet works, and 3GPP, which has a similar role for mobile communications, we have developed an inexorable tendency to commonality. We all use Intel- and ARM-designed microprocessors in the devices we own. Our mobile phones can work pretty much anywhere on the planet. Transport Layer Security protects our online lives whatever browser we use and whatever service we are using – something that has been critical during the Covid-19 pandemic. Common standards mean that designs can be checked once by all interested parties and having many different, interoperable…