WIRED

MUSIC CHANGED Nada Alhelabi’s life. Now she wants to use the power of music to transform the lives of women and men across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Born in Saudi Arabia, Alhelabi went on to study business in California; it was there that she first experienced the optimism, energy, and inclusivity of some of the world’s most legendary music festivals. “My love for music is unconditional,” she says. “Those festivals made me realize the positive impact that music can have and the power it has to bring people together.” When she returned to her home country, Alhelabi initially combined her working life with regular visits to concerts and festivals around the world—until the call of music became too strong to ignore. Leaving behind a successful career in management consultancy, she…

IF NUCLEAR FISSION IS associated with catastrophe, nuclear fusion is associated with delay and fraud. The joke about fusion, the synthesis of lab-grown stars, is that it’s always 10 years away. Or 20. Two lonely little isotopes, each with a pathetically low mass, are joined in holy electromagnetism in a massive artificial thunderclap. The remaining nucleus is smaller than the mass of the reacting nuclei, and the leftover mass is converted into light or heat by virtue of E = mc2. But what a utopia fusion seems to promise. Even with the jokes and equivocation and scams, it’s hard to be blasé about fusion’s stellar possibilities. So let’s indulge: Once fusion arrives, handmade suns, sources of unlimited clean energy, would—will—wipe out all human problems in a go. Our glorious pet stars,…

A DECADE AGO I lost 100 pounds. I did it in my web-nerd way—by building a custom content management system using the Django framework in the Python programming language. Every day I would enter calories ingested, calories expended through exercise, my weight, and whatever thoughts occurred to me. It became a job. I produced charts and compared the results of different kinds of exercise. I put it all online at OHLIH.com, which stood for One Huge Lesson in Humility. It worked very well. For the first time in my life my doctor seemed glad to see me. People noticed. They said: Are you going to open-source this? Sure I was! Of course, I knew that scientists had found, in study after study, that basically everyone who loses weight gains it back,…

BACK ON NOVEMBER 15, the 8 billionth person on the planet was born. Well, more or less. That was the date selected by United Nations demographers as the moment the world crossed the population milestone. It’s undoubtedly wrong—perhaps off by months or more—but there are roughly a billion more humans alive today than there were 11 years ago. Milestones make good headlines, but concentrating on a few big numbers can obscure other trends that really explain how the world has changed in the past decade. Just two examples: The proportion of people living in extreme poverty has steadily declined. (In 2010, 16.3 percent of the world lived on less than $2.15 a day; today only 9 percent of people live on the inflation-adjusted equivalent of such a pittance.) In India and…

IT’S BEEN SAID THAT ALGORITHMS are “opinions embedded in code.” Few understand this better than Abeba Birhane. While working on her PhD in cognitive science at University College Dublin, Birhane—who was born and raised in Ethiopia—realized no one was asking what goes into the huge data sets often used to train artificial intelligence systems. These data sets are typically scraped from the internet—a cheap and easy process but also one in which the AI can absorb the biases that inhabit the web and end up mirroring society, with all of its ugliness baked in. Ignoring this risks real-world harm: AI has been accused of underestimating the health needs of Black patients, for instance, and of making it harder for people of color to get mortgages. Birhane is on a mission to expose…

$300B How much noncompete clauses cost US workers every year, according to Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan, who recently proposed a rule to ban them. 495K Total number of public electric-vehicle chargers needed to meet US state and federal goals to prohibit new gas car sales by 2035. (Currently there are about 50,000.) 30% Estimated percentage of Ukraine’s territory—an area about twice the size of Austria—that has been contaminated with landmines and unexploded ordnance. 100 Olympic swimming pools’ worth of water blown skyward at faster than the speed of sound by last year’s eruption of the Hunga Tonga volcano in the South Pacific.…