Table of contents for Autumn 2025 in WIRED UK

FOR DECADES, ALLIES of the United States lived comfortably amid the sprawl of American hegemony. They constructed their financial institutions, communications systems, and national defense on top of infrastructure provided by the US. But right about now—as these infrastructures start to mirror the platforms of American Big Tech in a particularly grotesque way—they’re probably wishing they hadn’t. Back in 2022, Cory Doctorow coined the term “enshittification” to describe a cycle that has played out again and again in the online economy. Entrepreneurs start off making high-minded promises to get new users to try their platforms. But as users and advertisers get locked in by network effects, collective action problems, and high switching costs, the tactics change. The platform owners start squeezing users, then vendors, even as the platform fills with…

GEAR NEKO HEALTH “It’s a bit like walking into a Black Mirror episode, isn’t it?” The powder-blue uniformed staff at healthcare company Neko Health are not completely unaware of the first impressions its softly lit, butter-yellow health center might give to a newcomer. Thankfully, I’m not walking into some kind of dystopian nightmare—I’m here to get the 50-minute, £300 annual preventative check-up that has more than 10,000 people on its waitlist. The scan is the brainchild of Spotify founder Daniel Ek, who teamed up with industrial engineer Hjalmar Nilsonne in 2018, with the hope of disrupting healthcare in a similar way to how Spotify did with music. The first scans began in Sweden in 2023, and have now expanded to London, with more health centers planned around Europe and beyond.…

Smart Kitchen Geometry Made from Swiss Krono U-162 melamine and 0.7-inch chipboard, this galley-style kitchen makes the most of every inch with pre-installed appliances, electrics, and plumbing (the ovens and fridge-freezer are housed in a standalone unit). Designed by Vitaliy Ivakhov for Ukrainian Product Design (the UK’s umbrella organization for Ukraine-based manufacturers), it packs in a sink and drying racks, a hob zone, kettle point, lighting, phone-charging station, and pop-up multi-plug socket in one ingenious setup. £12,890 ukrainianproduct.design Nagatani-en Yaki Yaki San Donabe Grill Pan Once preheated on a gas stove or in the oven, this tabletop cooking companion, made from coarse Iga Clay, retains heat and is slow to cool, drawing out your food’s natural “umami” flavor. The 13-inch grill pan weighs a solid 9.3 pounds and can be…

A decade ago, the UN set 17 sustainable development goals. The idea, at least, was that by 2030 all 193 member states would make measurable progress in everything from poverty to hunger, health to education. Last June, the UN reported just 17 percent were on track. Since then, the outlook has only deteriorated, as governments around the world have made radical cuts to international aid budgets. The severity and swiftness of the cuts mean the path ahead will be rocky. The coming year is likely to mark an unwelcome milestone—the first significant step back in development progress this century. Take HIV alone: a study in The Lancet HIV predicted the cuts will cause up to 2.9 million additional HIV-related deaths by 2030. Yet those goals were never intended to rest…

AT FIRST, THE two bowls of fruit on Bryan Johnson’s kitchen island look perfect. They’re brimming with plump kiwis, hardy avocados, and ripened bananas. These are the food of the gods, I figure, for a man who aspires to live like one. But then I look closer. A lone orange, its skin flecked with mold, sits adjacent to two lemons, both almost entirely consumed by a layer of white fuzz. Something, it seems, is rotten in the estate of Johnson. That estate, it’s worth noting, is a predictable one. Johnson’s home in Venice, California, is the angular, concrete-floored template of a dwelling you’d assume is owned by a man. Specifically a man who worked in tech, made his millions, and subsequently embarked on a midlife, post-wealth search for purpose. All…

A new drug usually starts with a tragedy. Peter Ray knows that. Born in what is now Zimbabwe, the child of a mechanic and a radiology technician, Ray fled with his family to South Africa during the Zimbabwean War of Liberation. He remembers the journey there in 1980 in a convoy of armored cars. As the sun blazed down, a soldier taught 8-year-old Ray how to fire a machine gun. But his mother kept having to stop. She didn’t feel well. Doctors in Cape Town diagnosed her with cancer. Ray remembers going to her radiation treatments with her, the hospital rooms, the colostomy bags. She loved the beach, loved to walk along the line where the water met the land. But it got harder for her to go. Sometimes she…

Powerful stuff Photographer Ashley Myers met the would be superhumans embracing performance-enhancing drugs: “It isn’t every day that I get to document what feels like groundbreaking history. The schedule had a little slot for outdoor portraits; the high sun in juxtaposition to a dark ballroom showcasing the Enhanced Games documentary. I found a lot of people needed to hear more to have a better idea on if they fully agree with it, including me. But isn’t that what changing the future does to us?”…

YES OR NO: Do you have any idea what “wellness” is? Depending on where you live and which online rabbit holes you’ve tripped into, your answer to that question—and your actual definition of wellness—may vary widely. And yet, we’re in a moment where wellness is the holy grail du jour, sometimes at the expense of our actual health. There’s the softer version of wellness, one characterized by some combination of smoothie consumption and aspirational TikTok videos. Then there are the more hard-line (and health hazardous) variations involving everything from (basically) bleach drinking to parasite cleanses to “wellness farms” designed to wean you off antidepressants. Regardless of which wellness doctrine you ascribe to, one thing is clear: The business of wellness, now worth, by one estimate, more than $6.3 trillion worldwide,…

IN THE EARLY 2010s, researchers in Mexico City noticed that sparrows and finches at the national university were lacing their nests with cigarette butts. The birds would collect the butts—mostly smoked—carefully remove the outer paper layer, and weave fibers from the filters into their homes, among the twigs and grass. This sort of dubious yet intriguing lifestyle choice will be familiar to anyone who follows health trends. It seems weird—but does it make some kind of backward sense? In this case, the birds were vindicated: The more cigarette filter fibers the nests had, the fewer parasites they harbored, probably because nicotine repels bugs. There are drawbacks, though: Chicks raised in butt nests are more likely to develop blood cell abnormalities. Again, familiar. While we may not want to follow this…

This was supposed to be the MDMA revolution About this time last year, legal, prescription MDMA looked like a sure thing. After decades of clinical research, political wrangling, and aggressive promotion, the popular underground club drug was set to be tamed and medicalized, with a stamp of approval from the US Food and Drug Administration. Then, it wasn’t. In a stark change of course, the FDA rejected the MDMA therapy it had been considering by a 10-1 vote. The decision derailed psychedelic medicine for the foreseeable future. Except for one thing—an unexpected lifeline from the Trump administration. In May, the FDA’s new commissioner, surgical oncologist Marty Makary, appeared on cable news to declare MDMA and other Schedule 1 narcotics “a top priority for this FDA and this administration.” Elsewhere, Mr.…

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Summer. For teens not at work, it’s hot, it’s boring, and it’s an ideal time to close the door and spend about every waking moment watching, playing, texting, streaming—anything but talking—on the phone. With almost half of teenagers in the US saying they’re online almost constantly, the adults in their lives are growing more desperate to drag them off. Families are establishing screen-free zones in their homes, states are banning phones in schools, and a new kind of summer camp has emerged: digital detox camps, which can cost around $2,000 a week, and promise to wean attendees off screens by going cold turkey for the summer. WIRED spoke to the founder and director of one such organization. Taking a cue from your average summer camp, the program forces kids to…

WHEN DONALD TRUMP moved back into the White House, the United States was years into its Cancer Moonshot, a multibillion-dollar Democratic effort to halve cancer deaths by 2047. There was a kind of stalemate: New cases of the disease were emerging about as often as before; deaths were ticking steadily lower; the US Food and Drug Administration was approving new treatments, if not quite as quickly as anyone wanted. But the taps of federal funding were open as never before, from the Department of Defense to the Environmental Protection Agency to the largest funder of cancer research in the world, the National Institutes of Health. But then Trump decided that American science research was, somehow, too woke. He paused NIH grant-making for more than two months, holding up an estimated…

After my birth, my mother became allergic to the world. That’s the only way I knew how to put it. So many things could set her off: new carpeting, air fresheners, plastic off-gassing, diesel. Perfumes were among the worst offenders. On top of that, she developed terrible food allergies. The sound of her sniffing became the chorus of my childhood. Some days she couldn’t get out of bed. I’d peek into her darkened room and see her face pinched in discomfort. Her joints ached, her head swam. Doctors suggested that maybe she was depressed or anxious. “Well, you’d be anxious too if you couldn’t lick an envelope, couldn’t pick up your daughter in a car,” she’d reply. She tried allergists, got nowhere. Finally, she found her way to holistic health,…