The Best of WIRED

The power to fight human diseases put genome editing on the map. But similar technology could help crops withstand the stress of climate change.

Forget return-to-office mandates. The most sought-after talent want ultimate flexibility. Their bosses need to get on board.

A Portuguese island created a village for remote workers, promising community to the newcomers and prosperity to the locals—then delivered on neither.

It’s all the same features, but none of the distractions or annoying notifications.

The next generation of video game characters could be powered by AI, making them more engaging and challenging.

Or how, exactly, platforms die.

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

A former world champion teams up with the makers of AlphaZero to test variants on the age-old game that can jolt players into creative patterns.

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.

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.

Thinking machines think just like us—but only up to a point.

Drills involving swarms of drones raise questions about whether machines could outperform a human operator in complex scenarios.

«So many robots were involved in the operation that no human operator could keep a close eye on all of them. So they were given instructions to find—and eliminate—enemy combatants when necessary.»

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.

Alexa can tell you the weather. Siri knows a few jokes. In China, voice-computing company iFlytek built similar smart assistants beloved by users. But its tech is also helping the government listen…

By pointing lasers tuned to a precise frequency at a smart assistant, researchers could force it to unlock cars, open garage doors, and more.

At 22, Marcus Hutchins put a stop to the worst cyberattack the world had ever seen. Then he was arrested by the FBI. This is his untold story.

You want to be productive. Software wants to help. But even with a glut of tools claiming to make us all into taskmasters, we almost never master our tasks.

«Whatever the cause, today this is known as the Zeigarnik effect, and psychologists who study task management say it’s part of why so many of us feel perpetually frazzled by the challenge of organizing work and life.»

Lee Holloway programmed internet security firm Cloudflare into being. But then he became apathetic, distant, and unpredictable—for a long time, no one could make sense of it.

In this article for Wired, cultural correspondent Richard Clarke tracks the origins, the day-to-day functioning and the likely future of Wikipedia. He discusses how its founders first regarded it as an adjunct to another site; how “Wikignomes” keep the site up and running; how Alexa and Siri depend on Wikipedia for answers and will depend on it even more in the future; and why everyone who uses Wikipedia still remains slightly reluctant to cite it as a source. Clarke’s lively writing and lucid insights will captivate anyone who uses Wikipedia – that is, pretty much everyone.

All pandemic long, scientists brawled over how the virus spreads. Droplets! No, aerosols! At the heart of the fight was a mysterious error in decades-old research.

«They plucked the size of the particle that transmits tuberculosis out of context, making 5 microns stand in for a general definition of airborne spread. Wells’ 100-micron threshold got left behind.»