Table of contents for May / June 2022 in WIRED UK

Nestled among the sycamores of Budapest’s bucolic City Park sits an undulating roof, punctured by 100 circular holes. Some of the woodland rises through, becoming part of the architecture. Mottled sunlight seeps through the hybrid canopy, whose ceiling is lined with more than 30,000 origami-style golden leaves that twinkle above an open floorplan stretching into the parkland. This is the work of Sou Fujimoto. Known for his cloud-like design for London’s Serpentine Pavilion, and his L’Arbre Blanc (The White Tree) tower block in Montpellier, where balconies branch out in different directions, the Japanese architect has long evoked the organic in his creations. Given the green setting, Fujimoto was a natural fit to design the House of Music. Its innovations follow his vision: “The building’s shape has no classical straight angles,”…

Rocket launches are exciting—but for SpaceX’s Falcon 9, the real action happens in the minutes after launch, when the 41m-tall first stage flies back to Earth in a controlled descent, landing either back at the launch site, or out at sea on an autonomous drone ship. Since the company first achieved this technological milestone in 2015, it has become routine, and has enabled the company to dramatically slash the cost of reaching space by reusing boosters as many as 11 times (and counting). WIRED has visualized this astonishing feat of engineering with a timeline of launches showing booster reuse and the cadence of lift-offs. Data is taken from the unofficial docs.spacexdata.com.…

While greenkeepers relish the challenge, for most of us, mowing the lawn is simply a chore. Cut it too short and you end up with bare patches; let it grow too long and the mower gets clogged. Then there’s the noise, the mess, and the fact it eats into your precious free time. But thanks to Husqvarna’s cutting-edge range of emission-free all-electric robotic lawn mowers, there is a better way—one that saves you hours, improves your lawn, and never forgets to get the job done. Once installed, your Husqvarna Automower® Robotic Lawn Mower uses advanced navigation and built-in sensors to plot a course around your garden, and no matter how complex its shape, your lawn will always look its best. The Automower® Connect app enables you to control and monitor…

Teenage Engineering computer-1 case Best known for DIY synthesizers, Teenage Engineering has distilled its knowledge of CNC laser-cutting to create the fold-together computer-1 case. At just 10 litres it won’t hold a PC gaming behemoth, but this zingy RAL 2004 orange hue trades power for punch. £195 teenage.engineering Brompton T Line At just 7.45kg, the titanium-framed T Line is Brompton’s lightest ever bike—it’s 2kg less than the exceptional P Line, and almost 4kg lighter than the classic C Line. The bike’s titanium comes from aerospace engineering experts CW Fletcher in Sheffield, and instead of simply using existing components, Brompton has tweaked virtually every aspect of the bike—apart from its peerless folding mechanism, of course. A carbon fork, crank, and carbon-based seat post help shed the grams, while a 4-speed rear…

With no formal training as a luthier, Germany-based industrial designer Robin Stummvoll—founder of Verso Musical Instruments—has completed a three-year-long project to pare down the electric guitar to its absolute minimum parts, hugely reducing the amount of materials used to make each instrument. “There’s a guitar made in the 70s by Allan Gittler [held in the MoMA design collection] that is basically just a steel rod with steel frets welded on,” says Stummvoll. “It’s really the minimum a guitar needs to be, but it’s very complicated to build it and very expensive. So my approach was for something that can be built in a smaller shop, yet creates a new perspective on luthierie.” Rather than a lump of wood, the body of the Verso Cosmo is a carefully bent sheet of…

SIDDHANT WAS 14 WHEN HE LEARNED OF THE WATCH. HIS FATHER, A LOW-WAGE WORKER ON THE INDIAN RAILWAY, WAS TRYING TO SAVE UP FOR IT, TUCKING AWAY A FEW RUPEES WHEN HE COULD. Made of steel, the watch had in its dial a sketch of a portly man, his face framed by round glasses and his broad shoulders clad in a wide-lapelled jacket. It was his father’s hero, Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, the man most responsible for weakening the caste system’s grip on Indian society. After school, Siddhant liked to ride his bike down the crowded streets of Nagpur, India, past groups of kids playing cricket, to a squat concrete building where his father rented a modest office with his friends, all anti-caste activists. Inside, he’d find the men sitting in…

If you were in San Francisco in June 1989, and were minded to attend an event highlighting the latest in telecommunications technology, you may have encountered people demonstrating a set of goggles named the EyePhone system, which was paired with sensor-laden gloves that enabled users to manipulate objects in a virtual environment. Had you requested the price from the manufacturer, VPL Research, it would have been in the region of $250,000. If you were watching the Superbowl in February 2022, you would have seen a slightly unsettling advertisement featuring a discarded animatronic dog for the Oculus Quest headset, the hardware for Facebook’s social VR platform named Horizon Worlds. Facebook, or Meta as it now calls itself, is betting the future of the social network on a virtual world. According to…

Over a decade as a special agent with the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS), Tigran Gambaryan has seen it all. From plundered crypto-exchange Mt. Gox, to darknet marketplace Silk Road and the corrupt cops stealing its funds, to child pornography site Welcome to Video, to the scam involving the hacking of 130 VIP Twitter profiles, Gambaryan was the point man in nearly every major investigation involving bitcoin or cryptocurrency. “I’m a dinosaur in the crypto world,” he says. “When I first started, Silk Road was one of the only places where you could spend your bitcoins, other than buying pizza.” Blockchain investigation was a new field—but also familiar terrain. “I was a financial investigator, my thing had always been ‘follow the money’,” Gambaryan says. Following that mantra, he would work…

As a nerdy, nature-loving kid growing up in France, Barbara Belvisi daydreamed about how life on other planets might be sustained: giant sci-fi domes filled with lush plants and exotic flowers like the ones she’d painted on her bedroom walls. But adult life beckoned: her studies focused on finance and business, and she went on to build a career investing in “deep tech”—venture-capital-speak for companies whose progress relies on innovations in science or engineering. In 2014, she cofounded Hardware Club, a community dedicated to nurturing and advising startups creating physical, connected products and robotics by hooking them up them with manufacturers. Hardware Club Venture Capital followed soon after, and has offices in Paris, San Francisco and Tokyo. Now, she’s realizing her childhood fantasies as the founder and CEO of Interstellar…

The race to remove CO2 from our atmosphere is on—and the answer may be under our feet. The top meter of the world’s soil holds over three times the amount of carbon currently in our atmosphere—and could potentially suck up even more. This is good news for farmers. The exploding carbon removal market, driven by companies and individuals desperate to offset their own emissions by purchasing carbon credits, is willing to pay farmers to use sustainable agricultural practices and sequester carbon in their fields. The problem? Currently, the process of verifying whether a field has sucked up additional carbon involves regular soil sampling and lab work. Cloud Agronomics, a startup based in Boulder, Colorado, says it has the answer. While studying at Brown University, David Schurman (CIO) met Jack Roswell…

Hong Kong- and Shenzhen-based company Enhanced Robotics has created Sportsmate 5, an exoskeleton designed for athletes and casually sporty people alike, in the hopes that it will become the first-ever consumer exoskeleton (right now, these machines are developed for either military or medical use). The idea is to help athletes run faster or for longer without getting too tired, while also being an all-inclusive device that can spice up your bodyweight workout. The project has raised over $150,000 on Kickstarter, and the first devices are expected to ship in May, at a price of around £1,000. Sportsmate 5’s plastic girdle is fitted with two small motors, or actuators, powered by a lithium-ion battery. The actuators control two segmented metal rods, which in turn are clasped to a pair of fabric…

ON JANUARY 6, 2021 as a crowd of Donald Trump supporters began gathering for a rally near the foot of the Washington Monument, Elies Campo was spending a poignant afternoon at his family’s home in Tortosa, Spain. January 6—the feast of the Epiphany, or Three Kings Day—is the high point of the holiday season there, when relatives visit and children open their presents. And Campo, a 38-year-old Spanish engineer who lives in Silicon Valley, had been largely stranded away from home since the start of the coronavirus pandemic. As he moved through the house, Campo was surrounded by uncles and aunts and cousins, and he got to hold a couple of their babies for the first time. His mind was about as far from the United States as it could…

Ekpar Asat, founder of one of the most popular Uyghur-language websites, started his career as many tech entrepreneurs do: in 2007, he turned his college project into a successful news site and forum, in his case, called Bagdax. It brought him a degree of celebrity in the Chinese western region of Xinjiang: Asat, also known as Mr Bagdax, was invited both to provincial government events and to the offices of China’s tech giants. Even if the platform had to adhere to China’s strict censorship rules—at one point, four policemen were tasked with monitoring it—its user base quickly grew to over 100,000 users. In early 2016, however, this cautious bonhomie came to an end. Asat was swept up in a mass detention campaign alongside a reported 1 million members of Uyghur…

For as long as technology startups have been spectacularly on the rise, many more have been spectacularly in decline. Failure is a near certainty when starting a company. Even founders with the right credentials, cash, and customer base regularly see their businesses crash and burn, while only the lucky ones manage to pivot their way out of a death spiral. Would-be entrepreneurs encounter booby traps everywhere they turn. Three recent books break down these threats and how founders can confront them. Lak Ananth offers counterintuitive advice: Don’t avoid failure—anticipate it. He’s a managing partner at the venture capital firm Next47 and a veteran of the first dotcom boom. His book, Anticipate Failure, suggests that startups fall short due to problems in seven areas: product, technology, team, timing, business model, customers, or…

At the start of 2020, Bolt was flying. After a rocky start, the Estonian ride-hailing startup had relaunched in London to great success, and was challenging Uber in more than 100 cities across the world, hitting a valuation of £1bn. For young founder Markus Villig, it was a vindication of his lean approach: instead of pouring VC money into drones and lawsuits, Bolt concentrated on cutting prices for consumers, and it was winning thousands of them. Then—less than a year after Bolt’s London launch—the pandemic hit, and the company was forced to slam on the brakes. Late last year, WIRED spoke to the 28-year-old Villig about how his company has navigated both Covid and the post-pandemic landscape in one of the tech industry’s most turbulent sectors. This conversation has been…

Doug Fraser spent six months of 2017 planning an event at the legal weed store he manages north of Seattle. He booked food trucks and glass blowers, and more than a thousand people showed up. Fraser worked a 12-hour shift that day, though he did not get stoned, as state regulations do not allow cannabis industry employees to partake on the premises. Before he went to bed that night, he took a small hit of oil—a modest reward for a hard day’s work. The next morning, Fraser woke up early and drove back to the pot shop. When he clocked out at 6 pm, he couldn’t wait to get home. His 1998 Volvo was barreling up Interstate 5 at 81mph when a cop pulled him over. Fraser felt silly for…

Honorable Mentions DON’T UPGRADE. I’M A GOOD BOY. —BENJAMIN LOPEZ BARBA, VIA EMAIL LET’S GO FOR A LONG SPACEWALK. —@COLINGROOM, VIA INSTAGRAM MY META DODO ONLY EATS NFTREATS. —@TRANSISTOR_RESISTOR, VIA INSTAGRAM ONE HOUR TO FINISH PRINTING REX. —@RYANREITZ, VIA TWITTER MY CLONED WOOLLY MAMMOTH NEVER SHEDS. —@ANDYMEDICI, VIA TWITTER WOULD YOU LIKE TRADITIONAL OR NONPOOPING? —MARC LEWIS, VIA EMAIL THE CRYSTALOIDS QUICKLY OUTLAWED PET ROCKS. —KASSIDY HELFANT, VIA EMAIL NINE LIVES LATER, NINE MORE LIVES. —@BILYBEL, VIA TWITTER Every month, we ask for a new six-word story on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Submit your ideas there, along with the hashtag #WIREDSIXWORD. And visit the archive at wired.com/six-word to see how we’ve illustrated our favorites.…