Innholdsfortegnelse for September/October 2024 i WIRED

RE: KURZWEIL “His techno-optimism seemed harmless to me when I was 18, and now seems monstrous.” —@E_Baillieul, via X RE: “SHE CONTAINS MULTITUDES” It was easy for me to understand why you felt conflicted about selling content to men while posing as some young, attractive woman. When I did it, I felt bad too, especially when I realized that these marks were just normal people who didn’t know any better. They just wanted to spend time talking to a beautiful and fun woman, just like anybody else. I received DMs on Reddit from people who had grown suspicious of the models they had sent money to. I did my best to explain how the industry works behind the scenes, and I’ve even shared screenshots with them of some of the…

REED TIMMER HAS been chasing storms for more than two decades, since he intercepted his first tornado in northern Oklahoma as an undergrad majoring in meteorology. During that time, Timmer, who typically logs more than 50,000 miles on the road each year, has intercepted countless tornadoes, each one helping to further his extreme-weather knowledge. “We still don’t completely know what happens inside a tornado,” says Edgar ONeal, a weather journalist who is Timmer’s chase partner. ¶ Enter the Dominator. This is the third iteration of Timmer’s custom-built tornado mobile, which he initially rolled out in the late 2000s. The current Dominator has the chassis of an F350 and weighs 10,000 pounds, enabling it to withstand the debris, gorilla hail, and 150-mph winds that accompany the most powerful of storms. According…

ALTHOUGH THIS IMAGE wouldn’t look out of place on a gallery wall alongside other splashy works of abstract art, it represents something very real: a 1-cubic-millimeter chunk of a woman’s brain, removed during a procedure to treat her for epilepsy. Researchers at Harvard University stained the sample with heavy metals, embedded it in resin, cut it into slices approximately 34 nanometers thick, then scanned each slice with an electron microscope. Machine-learning experts at Google then used AI to turn the 2D images into a 3D interactive “cell atlas.” Even this small fraction of the 3D reconstruction is astonishing in its detail, revealing an estimated 57,000 cells and 150 million synapses. It shows cells that unexpectedly wrap around themselves, pairs of neurons that seem like mirror reflections of each other, and…

1 IN THE SKIES OVER AL AIN, IN THE United Arab Emirates, pilot Mark Newman waits for the signal. When it comes, he flicks a few silver switches on a panel by his leg, twists two black dials, then punches a red button labeled FIRE. A slender canister mounted on the wing of his small propeller plane pops open, releasing a plume of fine white dust. That dust—actually ordinary table salt coated in a nanoscale layer of titanium oxide—will be carried aloft on updrafts of warm air, bearing it into the heart of the fluffy convective clouds that form in this part of the UAE, where the many-shaded sands of Abu Dhabi meet the mountains on the border with Oman. It will, in theory at least, attract water molecules, forming small…

THE PLACE Gate Change Gnar THE PORTAL Strava THE PROMISE Race anyone, anytime IT WAS 2 AM at Denver International Airport, and Jared Murphy was only a few hours into a planned 17-hour layover. His options at this quiet hour, in the expansive halls of the concourse, were pretty much nil. There would be no nibbling on ahi tartare at the Crú Food & Wine Bar for at least another seven hours, and the Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory’s signature caramel apples had long since been cached for the night. Some may have looked upon this over-night interval as a welter of halogen-lit misery. But Murphy, a competitive runner since high school, was an avid user of the exercise app Strava, and he frequently checked the app while traveling to see…

IN THE BEGINNING was the Word, and the Word was in plaintext, and the Word was in plaintext because plaintext was the Way. It was good. On the sixth day—I’m skipping ahead here—the internet was born. The Word needed to be rewritten in HTML. Now there were two Words. It was not good. On the eighth day, after a bit of rest, Markdown was born. Markdown made it possible to bring forth the Word as HTML on the web, PDF in the library, LaTeX in the publishing house, even Microsoft Word DOC in the office—all generated from the same plaintext. The people saw that in this form the Word was more flexible. It was good. The internet rejoiced and put Markdown in all the things. This is where the real…

WHEN A FLATTERING EMAIL ARRIVED inviting me to participate in an AI venture called Rebind that I’d later come to think will radically transform the entire way booklovers read books, I felt pretty sure it was a scam. For one thing, the sender was Clancy Martin, a writer and philosophy professor I didn’t know personally but vaguely recalled had written about his misspent youth as a small-time jewelry-biz con artist, also being a serial liar in his love life. For another, they were offering to pay me. “Clancy up to his old ways!” I thought. My role, the email explained, would involve recording original commentary on a “great book”—Clancy suggested Romeo and Juliet, though it could be any classic in the public domain. This commentary would somehow be implanted in…

—@almguedes, via Instagram Honorable Mentions The simulations run in separate containers. —Charles Mallio, via email They’ve gone foraging for mushroom clouds. —@zyanmc, via Instagram Visit Earth. Wipe memory. Rinse. Repeat. —@jayhawk, via Instagram We aren’t ready for harvest yet. —Paul Gazis, via Facebook They downloaded our experience and left. —@42andprime, via Instagram Most species invent the couch first. —Antti Karjalainen, via Facebook We live in a bad neighborhood. —Angelo J. Falanga, via Facebook Want to submit a six-word story for us to consider? Look for the latest story prompt on Facebook, X, Instagram, and WIRED.com/six-word, where you can also see how we have illustrated past favorites. Disclaimer: All #WIREDSIXWORD submissions become the property of wired. Submissions will not be acknowledged or returned. Submissions and any other materials, including your name…