Tabla de contenidos para September / October 2024 en WIRED UK

Although this image wouldn’t look out of place on a gallery wall alongside other splashy works of abstract art, it represents something very real: a 1-cubic-millimeter chunk of a woman’s brain, removed during a procedure to treat her for epilepsy. Researchers at Harvard University stained the sample with heavy metals, embedded it in resin, cut it into slices approximately 34 nanometers thick, then scanned each slice with an electron microscope. Machine-learning experts at Google then used AI to turn the 2D images into a 3D interactive “cell atlas.” Even this small fraction of the 3D reconstruction is astonishing in its detail, revealing an estimated 57,000 cells and 150 million synapses. It shows cells that unexpectedly wrap around themselves, pairs of neurons that seem like mirror reflections of each other, and…

In 1996, the United States hit peak potato. Americans were eating 64 pounds of the vegetables each year—more than at any point since modern records began. A record-breaking harvest had flooded the country with so many spuds that the government had to pay farmers to give them away. In the White House, the Clintons were foisting potatoes—fried, marinated, boiled, garlicked—onto princesses and presidents at official dinners. “It was a crazy time,” says Chris Voigt, whose long career as a potato-pusher started in the late 1990s. “You could buy buckets of French fries.” But as Voigt made his way up in the potato industry, all the way to executive director of the Washington State Potato Commission, the American potato was undergoing a dramatic shift in fortunes. The average American now eats…

Electric cars might provide mad, silent thrust, but their engineering DNA is less apparent in the EV age, leaving carmakers more reliant on design, brand power, and other types of technology to differentiate their cars. But soon there’ll be a choice again—between the conventional radial-flux motors that have powered almost every EV until now, and something radically different: Axial-flux motors. The principle behind axial-flux isn’t new. The pancake-shaped motor was first demonstrated by Michael Faraday in 1821, but in the intervening two centuries nobody figured out how to mass-produce one reliably, and so the radial-flux motor became the norm. In a flat, axial-flux “pancake-shaped” motor, the stator (the part that doesn’t move) and rotors (the part that does) are discs, sitting alongside each other less than a millimeter apart, the…

1 IN THE SKIES OVER AL AIN, IN THE United Arab Emirates, pilot Mark Newman waits for the signal. When it comes, he flicks a few silver switches on a panel by his leg, twists two black dials, then punches a red button labeled FIRE. A slender canister mounted on the wing of his small propeller plane pops open, releasing a plume of fine white dust. That dust—actually ordinary table salt coated in a nanoscale layer of titanium oxide—will be carried aloft on updrafts of warm air, bearing it into the heart of the fluffy convective clouds that form in this part of the UAE, where the many-shaded sands of Abu Dhabi meet the mountains on the border with Oman. It will, in theory at least, attract water molecules, forming small…

—@almguedes, via Instagram Honorable Mentions The simulations run in separate containers. —Charles Mallio, via email They’ve gone foraging for mushroom clouds. —@zyanmc, via Instagram Visit Earth. Wipe memory. Rinse. Repeat. —@jayhawk, via Instagram We aren’t ready for harvest yet. —Paul Gazis, via Facebook They downloaded our experience and left. —@42andprime, via Instagram Most species invent the couch first. —Antti Karjalainen, via Facebook We live in a bad neighborhood. —Angelo J. Falanga, via Facebook Want to submit a six-word story for us to consider? Look for the latest story prompt on Facebook, X, Instagram, and wired.com/six-word, where you can also see how we have illustrated past favorites.…

Satellites go through a lot. As they hurtle around our planet at up to 17,000 miles an hour they must cope with the extreme vacuum of space and vast temperature swings, all while trying to precisely train their antennas back to Earth. And that’s after launch, during which they’ll be shaken like a can of paint and blasted with deafening noise. To get them ready for this ordeal, all satellites are painstakingly tested before dispatch, ensuring every loose bolt is tightened and all the electrics are in exquisite working order. That used to require trips to multiple locations for different tests, but in the UK, the newly opened National Satellite Test Facility (NSTF) in Oxfordshire offers a full satellite health-check under one roof. “The industry said they needed a onestop-shop…

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was in plaintext, and the Word was in plaintext because plaintext was the Way. It was good. On the sixth day—I’m skipping ahead here—the internet was born. The Word needed to be rewritten in HTML. Now there were two Words. It was not good. On the eighth day, after a bit of rest, Markdown was born. Markdown made it possible to bring forth the Word as HTML on the web, PDF in the library, LaTeX in the publishing house, even Microsoft Word DOC in the office—all generated from the same plaintext. The people saw that in this form the Word was more flexible. It was good. The internet rejoiced and put Markdown in all the things. This is where the real…

Reed Timmer has been chasing storms for more than two decades, since he intercepted his first tornado in northern Oklahoma as an undergrad majoring in meteorology. During that time, Timmer, who typically logs more than 50,000 miles on the road each year, has intercepted countless tornadoes, each one helping to further his extreme-weather knowledge. “We still don’t completely know what happens inside a tornado,” says Edgar ONeal, a weather journalist who is Timmer’s chase partner. Enter the Dominator. This is the third iteration of Timmer’s custom-built tornado mobile, which he initially rolled out in the late 2000s. The current Dominator has the chassis of an F350 and weighs 10,000 pounds, enabling it to withstand the debris, gorilla hail, and 150-mph winds that accompany the most powerful of storms. According to…

THE PLACE Gate Change Gnar THE PORTAL  Strava THE PROMISE Race anyone, anytime It was 2 am at Denver International Airport, and Jared Murphy was only a few hours into a planned 17-hour layover. His options at this quiet hour, in the expansive halls of the concourse, were pretty much nil. There would be no nibbling on ahi tartare at the Crú Food & Wine Bar for at least another seven hours, and the Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory’s signature caramel apples had long since been cached for the night. Some may have looked upon this overnight interval as a welter of halogen-lit misery. But Murphy, a competitive runner since high school, was an avid user of the exercise app Strava, and he frequently checked the app while traveling to see…

Making a purchase decision online can be complicated. There are more brands, products and services to choose from than ever before, and more channels, devices and formats through which to engage with them. Whether people are looking for clothing, holidays, or insurance, it’s not surprising that many suffer from indecisiveness and choice-overload. Advances in AI—and generative AI in particular—could give consumers new tools to cut through this complexity. Generative AI is a type of artificial intelligence that has recently upended the world’s understanding of what computers can do. Unlike conventional machine learning, it is not task-specific, and it is not about classifying data. Instead, it possesses a broad range of abilities, and excels at creative tasks such as making imagery, prose, or videos. It has a notable aptitude for using…

What do you get when you cross a Land Rover Defender, a Bentley, and a boat? The Yangwang U8: a vast hybrid SUV from the upmarket sub-brand of Chinese electric car giant BYD that can drive on—yes, on—water. The Land Rover bit is obvious thanks to the U8’s chunky styling, massive scale (at 5.3 meters, it’s as long as the Defender 130), and claimed ability to drive just about anywhere due to four electric motors and clever hydraulic suspension. The Bentley factor also doesn’t take much explaining, since the U8’s cabin takes a big step up from the plastics and synthetic leathers used in BYD’s lesser cars like the Seal and Atto 3. Here there are acres of napa leather, plush headrests, massage seats with heating and cooling, and open-grain…

A PLASTIC BAG MIGHT BE THE MOST OVERENGINEERED OBJECT IN HISTORY. Some years back, I stopped by a French deli to buy some big chunks of cheese and carried them home in a plastic bag. The cheese was so heavy that the bag stretched and bulged, and the handle dug painfully into my hands. But the bag didn’t break. That’s because of the magical chemistry of plastic—essentially, oil turned solid, with carbon and hydrogen atoms that line up in repeating units to form long, noodle-like molecules. These molecules are pliable and strong, which is what makes plastic so widely useful. And so durable: I unpacked the hunks of Camembert and Havarti and shoved the bag into the back of a kitchen drawer. When I stumbled upon it a few weeks…