Why Nevada's Execution Drug Cocktail Is So Controversial
A district court judge today halted the execution of Nevada death row prisoner Scott Dozier—a man who has repeatedly expressed his desire to die—hours before he was scheduled to be put to death with an untested injection of three drugs: midazolam, fentanyl, and cisatracurium. The temporary injunction hinges on midazolam, a sedative produced by pharmaceutical…
Cats Bad at Nabbing Rats But Feast on Other Beasts
In the summer of 2017, Michael Parsons found the urban rat haven of his dreams: A Waste Management transfer station—aka a literal trash heap, aka rat paradise—in Brooklyn, New York. For nearly two years, the behavioral ecologist and visiting scholar at Fordham University had been searching for a place to observe the city-dwelling rodents in…
Jeff Bezos and the Clock That Will Outlast Civilization
WIRED ICON Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon, orbital enthusiast GOES LONG The 10,000-year clock1 Inventor and computer scientist Danny Hillis spent the 1980s and early ’90s designing machines worthy of the new millennium. But by 1995 he realized that he had never given much thought to what lay on the other side of…
How to Measure Things That Are Astronomically Far Away
If you want to find the size of a basketball, you can use a normal meter stick to measure the diameter. You should get a value of around 0.24 meters. Please don't use inches—they are just harder to deal with. Anyway, you probably aren't using Imperial units since there are only three countries that officially…
The Dismal Science Remains Dismal, Say Scientists
When Hristos Doucouliagos was a young economist in the mid-1990s, he got interested in all the ways economics was wrong about itself—bias, underpowered research, statistical shenanigans. Nobody wanted to hear it. “I’d go to seminars and people would say, ‘You’ll never get this published,’” Doucouliagos, now at Deakin University in Australia, says. “They’d say, ‘this…
At ClinicalTrials.Gov, Untested Stem Cell Clinics Advertise for Free!
Macular degeneration is the most common cause of vision loss among the elderly. But for some people with the disease, a shot of stem cells to the peeper was all they needed to see again. For others, treatment left them permanently blind. What gives? Stem cell treatments like the one described above—happening every day in…
What Is a Robot?
Click:Ferraz Shawmut B300519 – PC71UD13C315TF Fuses Editor’s note: This is the first entry in a new video series, HardWIRED: Welcome to the Robotic Future, in which we explore the many fascinating machines that are transforming society. And we can’t do that without first defining what a robot even is. When you hear the word “robot,”…
In 'Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2,' Planet Sovereign Defies Physics
One of the great things about movies set in space is that the writers have the opportunity to come up with some fantastically crazy situations. Just look at the planet Sovereign, revealed at the beginning of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2. Don't worry about why the Guardians are on this planet too much—instead, let's…
Sex, Drugs, and the Inside Lane: Recapping the 2017 World Championships of Track
Nicholas Thompson: Malcolm, hello! Welcome back from vacation. And also welcome to WIRED.com! We’ve been chatting about Olympic and World Championship track for five years now, but this is the first time we’re doing it here. Let’s start with the moment when one of your favorite runners got defeated. Sir Mo Farah is perhaps the…
Scientists Inject Ferrets' Brains With Rabies to Study … Vision?
When ferrets get a rabies shot in a neurobiology lab, they don't get infected with the virus—or even inoculated against it. They get a brain hack that might just explain how your brain handles vision, and maybe even your other senses, too. In a lab at Dartmouth, scientists are experimenting with targeted injections of a…