The Best of WIRED

Machine learning algorithms that digested decades of weather data were able to forecast 90 percent of atmospheric measures more accurately than Europe’s top weather center.

The creator economy is fragmented and chaotic. This guy can (almost) make sense of it.

Stefan Thomas lost the password to an encrypted USB drive holding 7,002 bitcoins. One team of hackers believes they can unlock it—if they can get Thomas to let them.

Netflix, Spotify, Twitter, PayPal, Slack. All down for millions of people. How a group of teen friends plunged into an underworld of cybercrime and broke the internet—then went to work for the FBI.

Yes, charging your phone overnight is bad for its battery. And no, you don’t need to turn off your device to give the battery a break. Here’s why.

The Alexa voice platform and other deep learning projects have made Amazon an AI leader.

Large language models like AI chatbots seem to be everywhere. If you understand them better, you can use them better.

In 1995, a WIRED cofounder challenged a Luddite-loving doomsayer to a prescient wager on tech and civilization’s fate. Now their judge weighs in.

Search Atlas displays three sets of links—or images—from different countries for any search.

How a confused, defensive social media giant steered itself into a disaster, and how Mark Zuckerberg is trying to fix it all.

From protecting privacy to saving the free press, it may be the single best way to fix the internet.

Sixty years ago, a sharecropper’s son invented a technology to identify faces. Then the record of his role all but vanished. Who was Woody Bledsoe, and who was he working for?

The company’s new facial-recognition service comes with limitations to prevent abuse, which sometimes lets competitors take the lead.

A chess program that learns from human error might be better at working with people or negotiating with them.

The green-tech guru is backing an energy storage breakthrough that could power the future.

In a dramatic departure, Google is open sourcing software that sits at the heart of its online empire.

IoT is a security hellscape. One cryptography has a plan to make it a little bit less so.

MobileCoin aims to make cryptocurrency transactions quick and easy for everyone, while still preserving privacy and decentralization.

Social media platforms repeatedly use so-called dark patterns to nudge you toward giving away more of your data.

Everything you ever wanted to know about qbits, superpositioning, and spooky action at a distance.

A researcher explains quantum computing in terms anyone can understand.

Historian Yuval Noah Harari believes sci-fi has the power to shape public opinion.

Schools are adding ethics classes to their computer-science curricula. The reading assignments: science fiction.

Large data sets provide intriguing—and dismaying—insights into who we're drawn to and how much that matters for our romantic happiness.

At its core, "artificial intelligence" is a perilous belief that fails to recognize the agency of humans.

Shared by 1465, including David Epstein

As psychedelic therapies for mental health go mainstream, companies are recruiting chemists to create patentable versions of hallucinogens. Critics say it’s all a bad trip.

Using a custom encryption scheme within music notation, Merryl Goldberg and three other US musicians slipped information to Soviet performers and activists known as the Phantom Orchestra.

Crypto dreamers want to free us from Big Tech and exploitative capitalism—using only the blockchain, game theory, and code. What could possibly go wrong?

It's comforting to believe that another advanced civilization would develop if humanity met its end. Not so fast.