WIRED June 2020

We Have One Earth For the April issue, we devoted the entire magazine to the other crisis of our time: climate change. In its pages, Mary Annaïse Heglar summoned each of us to collective climate action; Adam Rogers pedaled through San Francisco with the head of the city’s transportation office; Samanth Subramanian followed the cargo shipping industry’s attempt to get off sludge-like heavy fuel oil; Virginia Heffernan wrote about the anthropological endeavors of Impossible Burgers; Emma Marris visited California farms in an effort to separate GMO fact from hype; and readers responded. Readers share their optimism, skepticism, and tales of green living: When people talk of conservation, going electric, carbon taxes, they ignore the much bigger fact that the world needs 5 times to 10 times the current power produced to eliminate slums…

Vibrating, near-hallucinatory, the Manú National Park in Peru is among the most biodiverse places on earth. Just about every one of the park’s 4.3 million acres, where the Tropical Andes meet the Amazon Basin, seethes with raw biology—at least 1,300 species of butterflies and 650 of beetles; numberless white-lipped peccaries, tufted capuchins, green anacondas, turquoise tanagers. Flora and fauna to infinity. It’s also the zoomed-out version of a landscape closer to hand: the one that runs up our noses and through our twisted guts. What human flesh lacks in jaguars, it makes up for in microorganisms of every stripe: 10 to 100 trillion swarming creatures, thousands of distinct species of bacteria, viruses, fungi, archaea, and protozoa, which means our bodies at any given minute may contain tens of millions of…

Dani Bell was a British copywriter who hankered for her own marketing startup. Like many founders today, though, she faced a roadblock. She couldn’t code. Normally, an entrepreneur in that situation would need to spend money, and maybe even raise it, to hire developers. But Bell did something different: She bolted together software from various online services. Bell used a point-and-click tool called Webflow to build her site and a client-management tool to let customers order services. Airtable, an online spreadsheet, let her store details about each job. And she glued many of these pieces together by cleverly using Zapier, a service that uses if-then logic to let one online app trigger another. (Whenever Bell creates a new task for one of her contractors, for example, Zapier automatically generates a…

The president calls SARS-CoV-2 the “invisible enemy.” Sure, at some 0.000003 inches across, the virus evades the naked eye. But luckily for us, virologists have a tool to render the pathogen quite visible, thanks to British physicist Joseph John Thomson. In 1897, Thomson discovered the electron, a particle too teensy to be measured. Just over 30 years later, scientists proved it’s also a wave that magnets can bend, just as lenses deflect light. Those discoveries birthed the electron microscope and fuzzy pictures, or micrographs, of the virosphere. Today virologists can watch pathogens attack cells. That’s what those yellow dots (aka SARS-CoV-2) are doing in this 30,000X magnification of vervet monkey cells. “People think we’re trying to make them look scary,” says microscopist John Bernbaum, whose team at the National Institute of…

ROLI LUMI KEYS When you have no option but to stay inside, it’s a great time to take up a hobby that educates and entertains. Roli Lumi teaches you the basics of playing piano while brightening the mood with a light show. The keys are 85 percent the size of those on a regular piano, and all 24 of them are illuminated in a rainbow of hues—each note is a different color. Play the pressure-sensitive plastic ivories as they flash to guide you through the lessons in the companion app. A larger device makes it easier to follow notes scrolling down the screen; the app is available for iOS and Android, but it’s best on an iPad. The selection is a bit lacking (I can only play that Imagine Dragons tune…

ECONOMY PANASONIC RP-805N With stellar sound, these headphones punch well above their modest price tag. Three levels of noise abatement outwit any external audio distraction, and 20 hours of battery life guarantees you a lot of uninterrupted jams. My favorite feature is the sensor on the right earpiece. Cup your hand over your ear to pause your tunes and pipe in sound from the real world—perfect for quick conversations with your family during the work-from-home day or late night listening sessions. BUSINESS SONY WH-1000XM3 Like the Panasonics, these also have a nifty feature where you can touch the earpiece to hear the outside world, but these headphones add even more impressive noise reduction, better sound quality, and other bells and whistles that make them some of my favorites right now. You’ll get a third more…