Table of contents for Summer 2025 in WIRED UK

SOME PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES helped send humans to the moon, some are cooking up new leukemia drugs, and some exist just to fuck with you. Brainfuck is a minimalist “esoteric language,” or “esolang,” made up of just eight non-alphabetic characters. Esolangs are experimental, jokey, and intentionally hard-to-use languages created to push the boundaries of code (and your buttons). In Brainfuck, part of the basic “Hello, World” program looks like. <-.<.+++.------.---, which makes any normal person want to say “Goodbye, World.” Most esolangs don’t even look like computer code at all. Here’s one way to print “HI” in the Shakespeare Programming Language: Basically, Hamlet and Ophelia are “variables” to which numerical values get assigned. The nouns “Lord” and “King” each have a value of +1, and adjectives such as “sweet” and “beautiful”…

Slovenian photographer AndreJa Ravnak, who won Travel Photographer of the Year in 2023 for her awe-inspiring landscapes—a selection of which you can see here—grew up with a love of travel. “I always wanted to seek the beauty of this planet and explore different cultures, go out of my comfort zone,” she says. An architect by training, she started taking photos about 15 years ago. Soon, she was organizing photography trips and working with Digital Camera Slovenia, a travel photo magazine. “It’s all about creativity,” she says. Ravnak mostly uses her Canon EOS R6 camera with a Sigma 60-600mm sport lens, but here she shares tips that can elevate anyone’s photos—even those shot using the camera in your pocket. Don’t be that “Instagram traveler” Avoid getting sucked into photographing the same…

The worst part of travel is the planning: the faff of finding and booking transport, accommodation, restaurant reservations. The latest wave of AI agents, such as OpenAI’s Operator and Anthropic’s Computer Use claim they can take such dreary, cumbersome tasks from befuddled travelers. Challenge accepted! I fancied a last-minute weekend away, so I tasked Operator, which is available to ChatGPT Pro subscribers, with booking me something budget-friendly, with good food and art, and I’d prefer to travel by train. The tool opens a browser window and starts much as I would, searching for destinations accessible by rail. It scrolls a couple of articles, then offers two suggestions: Paris or Bruges. I recently went to Paris, I type in the chat. Let’s do Bruges! Operator goes on to look up train…

In the 1990s, shortly after the end of the offcial Space Race, another battle began. Airline opponents British Airways and Virgin Atlantic competed over the best business class offering, finding themselves in what one newspaper nicknamed a “bed war”. At the time, business class seats could recline but not lie flat; airlines wanted to change this without cutting capacity. First to launch was BA’s “Project Dusk” in March 2000. Sacrificing a few inches in the aisles and placing seats in a “yin-yang” formation enabled the world’s first fully flattening business seats. (Virgin, of course, followed up with a double bed.) Today, business class without a bed sounds as alien as economy class without a little bag of pretzels, and the offering is fairly standard: While there was once such a…

I KNOW THIS IS UNCONVENTIONAL, but I’m going to start by telling you the ending. Or at least, the ending as it stands today. Most of the people involved in this story wind up either dead, maimed, spending months in a mental hospital, languishing in jail, or going underground. It’s a tragedy from almost any angle, especially because, at the outset, most of these people were idealists committed to doing as much good as possible in a world they saw as beset by existential threats. In spite of those aims, or perhaps in pursuit of them, over the course of this story their lives will devolve into senseless violence. And by the time we reach the present, six people will be killed, two others presumed dead by suicide, and at…

SCHRÖDINGER’S COMPUTER This is the year of quantum science and technology. Literally: The United Nations said so. But no amount of pomp and hype can make something true. The fact is, it’s been the year of quantum nearly every year for many, many years now. It’s always the next big thing. It’s always just about here. Well, is it? Really? Nearly a century ago, Erwin Schrödinger poked fun at quantum principles by comparing them to a cat that’s both alive and dead. Today, quantum computing finds itself in just such a state: a superposition of here and not-here, a series of world-changing breakthroughs that are, at the same time, also colossal letdowns. So what’s the real story? Let’s open the box and find out. —THE EDITORS 1981 1985 1992 1994…

One day soon, at a research lab near Santa Barbara or Seattle or a secret facility in the Chinese mountains, it will begin: the sudden unlocking of the world’s secrets. Your secrets. Cybersecurity analysts call this Q-Day—the day someone builds a quantum computer that can crack the most widely used forms of encryption. These math problems have kept humanity’s intimate data safe for decades, but on Q-Day, everything could become vulnerable, for everyone: emails, text messages, anonymous posts, location histories, bitcoin wallets, police reports, hospital records, power stations, the entire global financial system. “We’re kind of playing Russian roulette,” says Michele Mosca, who coauthored the most recent “Quantum Threat Timeline” report from the Global Risk Institute, which estimates how long we have left. “You’ll probably win if you only play…

Clinging to my surfboard in deep water, I try to steady my breathing and resist looking back at the massive machine and swelling wave thundering towards me. A coach grips a board beside me, and two more are on a jet ski nearby. I’m having a surf lesson in the world’s largest artificial wave pool, at Surf Abu Dhabi. The size and shape of the wave is designed for me as a beginner, created by a hydrofoil pulled from one side of the pool to the other by a rope and two huge winches. The wave hurtles closer with a terrifying roar. Before I know it, I feel a gentle push—my signal to stand—and I attempt to get on my feet with some semblance of grace. I let go of…

Cricket pasta. Fungus cheese. Invertebrate beef. These aren’t the foods of a fanciful sci-fi future—they’re available on menus around the world right now. The companies behind these innovations hope they can tackle climate change, food security, and animal welfare. So where can you eat them? Join WIRED on a global tour of cutting-edge cuisine. GERMANY: Fungal cheese German food tech startup Formo claims to produce the world’s first alternative cheese product (left), made with a fungus called koji. The company’s cream cheese and camembert replacements are available in supermarkets across Germany and Austria. CHINA: Plant-based eggs and dumplings China’s government has embraced alternative future foods, including plant-based eggs, available at fast-food chain Dicos, and black truffle-flavored “peanut meat” dumplings, intended to mimic pork mince. USA: Cow-free milk Berkeley-based food tech…

London to New York in three hours. Paris to Sydney in 12. The allure of super-sonic travel is clear. “Time is the one thing we can’t get more of,” says Blake Scholl, CEO of Colorado-based Boom Supersonic. Are things about to speed up again? Concorde’s last flight in 2003 marked the end of commercial supersonic travel. “[It] was so expensive just due to the fuel cost,” says Chris James, an expert in hyper-sonics at the University of Queensland in Australia. “It became a plane for the rich.” Boom is betting on a change in fortunes, and has been testing its demonstrator plane, the XB-1, over the Mojave Desert in California. By 2028, it aims to launch Overture, a 3x larger, 64-seat aircraft. American Airlines and Japan Airlines are already waiting.…

1.4 BILLION Number of international overnight tourists globally in 2024—a rise of 11 percent on 2023 and bringing the figures back to 99 percent of pre-Covid 19 levels. 28.6 meters Thought to be the largest wave ever surfed, at Portugal’s Praia do Norte, by German surfer Sebastian Steudtner. It’s yet to be confirmed; Steudtner holds the current record of 26.21m. 3.3 meters The highest man-made surf wave, at Tenerife’s Siam Park. $ l.9 trillion Estimated total 2024 export revenues from tourism—3 percent higher than pre-pandemic. 18-19 hours Duration of the current longest commercial flight, operated by Singapore Airlines between New York’s JFK airport and Singapore Changi. The flight covers around 15,000km. 64 days, 22 hours, 19 minutes, 5 seconds The longest ever crewed flight, flown by Bob Timm and John…

TEN YEARS AGO this summer, in a quiet back room of WIRED’s headquarters, I made an AR-15 “ghost gun”: an untraceable, semiautomatic rifle with no serial number, created in near-total privacy, fully outside of America’s system of gun control. More specifically, I made the gun’s lower receiver, the body of that rifle and the only part of it that’s treated as an actual firearm under US law. Fabricate that one relatively simple piece yourself with a power drill, a 3D printer, or a CNC milling machine—I tried all three—order the rest of the components online, and you’ve built your own very deadly weapon without encountering any regulation whatsoever. In the decade since then, gun control laws and DIY weapon makers have been caught in a cat-and-mouse game with no apparent…

RENAULT didn’t just design a car—they issued a challenge. Unveiled as a “car for change,” the Emblème concept is more than a sleek electric prototype—it’s a rolling thesis statement about the future of mobility. Co-developed with over 20 partners, Renault Emblème poses a bold question: what happens when a mainstream automaker designs its way to net zero without compromising customer needs? Can a family car—with a spacious, comfortable and hightech design—achieve unprecedented decarbonization? The result is a versatile, 4.8-meter family vehicle, with a verified full lifecycle carbon footprint of just five tonnes. For context, that’s roughly the emissions cost of manufacturing a single EV battery. “Electrification alone won’t get us to climate goals,” says Cléa Martinet, Director of Sustainable Development. “We needed a systemic approach. Renault Emblème is the outcome…

You’d be hard pushed to find a modern hotel that doesn’t have Wi-Fi, regardless of how off the beaten track it professes to be. As long as one accepts that a true off-grid retreat requires a healthy dose of willpower in order to achieve full technological abstinence, then the following five options offer locations in which to zone out and power down. With enough distractions on hand—usually of the majestic natural variety—these are highly conducive environments to undergoing a digital detox, from lush jungle surroundings to the infinite blackness one only finds a quarter of a mile beneath the Earth’s surface. 1. Juvet Landscape Hotel, Valldal, Norway Juvet’s star is flying high thanks to high-profile screen cameos, first in Alex Garland’s Ex Machina, then as a set piece location in…

We’ve all been there after a long trip—staring blankly at emails, counting the hours until bed. Yet when 2am hits, you’re still wide awake, mindlessly doomscrolling, trapped in the grip of jet lag. That’s the price for crossing time zones too fast. Our internal clock, or circadian rhythm, governs everything from sleep to digestion to hormones, and uses light to maintain its natural 24-hour cycle. But when we land in a new time zone and day suddenly turns to night, this rhythm is thrown off balance. Most travelers adjust within a few days, perhaps with the help of a melatonin pill. But in the meantime, jet lag throws off sleep, mood, and metabolism. A complete cure for jet lag is unlikely, but scientists have found ways to help our bodies keep…

ON PAPER, THE FIRST candidate looked perfect. Thomas was from rural Tennessee and had studied computer science at the University of Missouri. His résumé said he’d been a professional programmer for eight years, and he’d breezed through a preliminary coding test. All of this was excellent news for Thomas’ prospective boss, Simon Wijckmans, founder of the web security startup C.Side. The 27-year-old Belgian was based in London but was looking for ambitious, fully remote coders. Thomas had an Anglo-Saxon surname, so Wijckmans was surprised when he clicked into his Google Meet and found himself speaking with a heavily accented young man of Asian origin. Thomas had set a generic image of an ofce as his background. His internet connection was laggy—odd for a professional coder—and his end of the call…

ALMOST NO ONE HITS IT BIG IN MUSIC. The odds are so bad it’s criminal. But on a late spring evening in Louisville, Kentucky, Mike Smith and Jonathan Hay were having that rare golden moment when everything clicks. Smith was on guitar. Hay was fiddling with the drum machine and keyboard. Dudes were grooving. Holed up in Hay’s living room, surrounded by chordophones and production gizmos, the two musicians were hoping that their first album as a jazz duo would finally win them the attention they’d been chasing for years. ¶ It was 2017. The men, then in their forties, were longtime collaborators and business partners—though they made an odd couple. Smith owned a string of medical clinics and wore tight shirts over his meticulously maintained muscles. He lived in a…