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Fourteen years ago, I was paralyzed with Guillain-Barre syndrome, a rare autoimmune disease that left me unable to walk for nearly a year. Mine was an unusual case in its severity but the pathology of the condition is well understood: As in all autoimmune diseases, my immune system was behaving like an army gone rogue.…

Alexa, are you eavesdropping on me?I passive-aggressively ask my Amazon Echo this question every so often. Because as useful as AI has become, it’s also very creepy. It’s usually cloud-based, so it’s often sending snippets of audio—or pictures from devices like “smart” doorbells—out to the internet. And this, of course, produces privacy nightmares, as when…

SWIPE UP TO VOTE FOR ME!—@dmcdev via InstagramHonorable Mentions:Twitter analytics determines 2040 presidential winner. Alan Grover Daniel via FacebookRandomly selected leader is Citizen 42034. @abhshkshtty via InstagramFor the people. By the droids. Steve Fabian via FacebookMathematics draws districts; cryptography verifies votes. @boomerdell via InstagramTurn off the internet for good. Colin Kiernan via FacebookHumans vote artificial…

Sahil Lavingia published the first chapter of his planned book Building A Billion Dollar Company in 2012. Lavingia, who was 19 at the time, had never built a billion-dollar company. Nor would he.The title was aspirational, but at the time the goal didn’t seem out of reach. His e-commerce startup Gumroad raised a $7 million…

Skip Article Header. Skip to: Start of Article. Philosophy professor Peter Boghossian enjoys sci-fi shows like The Expanse. Courtesy of Amazon StudiosPhilosophy professor Peter Boghossian has watched a staggering amount of sci-fi TV, and has opinions on everything from recent hits like Watchmen and The Expanse to older shows like Charlie Jade and Lexx. “Every…

Time is moving fast. It feels like New Year’s Eve was just yesterday, but it’s already the middle of January. Before we slide through the end of the month, we’ve got some discounts for you. Some of our favorites this week include affordable TVs from TCL—they might come in handy for the upcoming Super Bowl—and…

In a trailer for Wonder Woman 1984, our hero is under attack from some goons with guns. At one point (around 1:20 in the clip), she grabs one of the pistols and pulls back the slide, causing it to eject a round. As the bullet tumbles out (in slow motion), she hits it off to…

For a brief moment in human history, we thought we knew how to make a vehicle. Stick a drivetrain in a frame, slap two to four wheels on it, and hop on. The resulting form factors—cars, bicycles, tricycles, mopeds—have worked for 200 years, and much longer if you count the horse-drawn carriage among such devices.But…

Giant stashes of data are valuable assets to corporations in industries from fossil fuels to finance. Artist Refik Anadol sees pools of data as something else—material for what he calls a new kind of “sculpture.”Anadol creates mesmerizing art installations by seeking out interesting data sets and processing them into swirling visualizations of how computers capture…

The revelation that MIT’s Media Lab aggressively sought the financial support of the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, and tried to keep his donations secret, has left the once-prestigious “future factory” in chaos. Its director since 2011, former WIRED contributor Joichi Ito, was forced to step down in September and the university still has not…