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…
How Andy Weir Scienced the Lunar Colony in His New Book Artemis
In Elon Musk’s fever dreams, we’re already looping around the moon in spaceships. And possibly even vacationing in an elaborate lunar colony like the one Andy Weir imagines in his new novel, Artemis. Being Weir—he of the meticulously researched space-survival thriller The Martian—you know he just had to science the shit out of it. On…
Geneticists Trace an Australian Migration with Aboriginal Artifacts
A handprint, Mylar slides, a box of “cosmic crayons” from the early 20th century—these are some of the things tucked in a back room of the South Australia Museum, relics of expeditions into Australia's center. From the late 1920s through the 1970s, the University of Adelaide’s Board for Anthropological Research organized over 40 expeditions to…
Into the Vortex: Megacomputers and the Quest to Understand Superstorms
A monster was coming to central Oklahoma. Early in the evening of May 30, 2013, Cathy Finley and her partner, Bruce Lee, were driving along a back road near the small town of Guthrie, Oklahoma, 30 miles north of the state’s capital, when they spotted Tim Samaras and two members of his crew leaning against a white…
Cutting Carbs Won't Save You From Cancer
Half-eaten doughnuts hit the bottom of waste bins around the world this week, as news feeds spread word of a new dietary danger. Yes, headlines declared, a new study shows that sugar is the favorite food of cancer. Cancer. “This link between sugar and cancer has sweeping consequences,” wrote Johan Thevelein, a Belgian biologist and…
Museums Are Ready for the Next Natural Disaster. Are You?
This story originally appeared on Slate and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. When Superstorm Sandy ripped through New York City in October 2012, it did not discriminate. At the construction site of the new Whitney Museum of American Art, chief operating officer John Stanley recalls “mechanical equipment bobbing like corks” in the floodwaters. And at the Rubin…
Want to Really Teach a Robot? Command It With VR
Do me a favor and grab and object near you. Anything will do. Even if it’s something you’ve never handled before, odds are your brain automatically worked out how you should grasp the thing and with what force. It’s the kind of clever dexterity that makes you human. (You are human, I hope?) Ask a…
Why the US Solar Industry Doesn't Want Government Protection
Update: On January 22, 2018, President Trump approved a 30 percent tariff on imported solar panels, which will eventually decrease to 15 percent. Suniva was once among the top solar panel manufacturers in America. Then, in April, the Georgia company declared bankruptcy. A few days after, it revealed why: Foreign governments, like China, had subsidized…