Glass Isn’t Perfect—But It Says a Lot About Heroism in 2019
There's one big question at the core of writer-director M. Night Shyamalan's new movie Glass: Who gets to be a hero? In the real world, a hero can be anybody. Someone who does the Heimlich maneuver in a diner, a firefighter, Colin Kaepernick. In movies (and TV and books and comics), though, the people folks…
Health Care Is Hemorrhaging Data. AI Is Here to Help
Artificial intelligence used to mean something. Now, everything has AI. That app that delivers you late-night egg rolls? AI. The chatbot that pops up when you’re buying new kicks? AI. Tweets, stories, posts in your feed, the search results you return, even the people you swipe right or left; artificial intelligence had an invisible hand…
Cantina Talk: Rose Tico Is the Resistance's One True Hero
We're not saying people are starved for Star Wars content right now, but when a Reddit theory that doesn’t even pretend to be true gets multiple write-ups, it’s possible that maybe Disney should try and get some new material out there sooner rather than later. But that doesn't mean there's no news from the Lucasfilm…
How the ‘Religious Freedom Division’ Threatens LGBT Health—and Science
When Marci Bowers consults with her patients, no subject is off limits. A transgender ob/gyn and gynecologic surgeon in Burlingame, California, she knows how important it is that patients feel comfortable sharing their sexual orientation and gender identity with their doctor, trust and honesty being essential to providing the best medical care. But Bowers knows…
'We're in the Business of Programming People's Lives'
Josh Harris may have been the first internet millionaire in New York. As founder of Jupiter Communications and New York’s first online media portal, Pseudo.com, he rode the web 1.0 dotcom boom to a fortune of $85 million. But as the 1990s ramped up, his view of what the internet would do to us darkened,…
This Robotic Pollinator Is Like a Huge Bee With Wheels and an Arm
You like eating, yes? Apples, oranges, berries? For these foods we can thank bees and their extraordinary pollinating powers. Unfortunately, to show our appreciation, humans are killing off bees in staggering numbers—destroying their habitats and poisoning them with pesticides. And at the same time, our population is skyrocketing, which means if we can't get our…
The Future of Work: The Trustless, by Ken Liu
“Recent technological advances have led to speculation that smart contracts might largely, or entirely, displace the apparatus of contract law.” —“Contracts Ex Machina,” Duke Law Journal (2017) “It’s 6:30 already, Katie,” the mousy man tells me. “How much longer to fix the contract?” “It’ll be done when it’s done,” I say, without taking my eyes…
There's Nothing Noble about Science’s Nobel Prize Gender Gap
We scientists are pretty good with numbers. Whether it’s tallying the number of galaxies in the universe or probing reagent reactions that last mere femtoseconds, nothing quantitative seems beyond our reckoning. But lately it seems that scientists have gotten a little too comfortable with some very small numbers. WIRED OPINION ABOUT Brian Keating (@drbriankeating) is…
Jack Dorsey on ProPublica's Experimental Journalism
WIRED ICON Jack Dorsey, cofounder of Twitter NOMINATES ProPublica, investigative journalism nonprofit I discovered ProPublica about two years ago and became interested in it right away because of its mission: To expose abuses of power and betrayals of the public trust by government, business, and other institutions, using the moral force of investigative journalism. It’s…
Demonstrations of Bernoulli's Principle You Can Try at Home
Recently, I wrote about how it's possible to explain the lift from an airplane wing without mentioning Bernoulli's principle, which … well … ruffled a few feathers. Some people interpreted it as me saying the whole Bernoulli thing was bogus, which is obviously not the case; it's just that you don't need to invoke Bernoulli's…