Spin Cycle - To study tornadoes, it helps to wear a skirt (and rocket launchers).

To study tornadoes, it helps to wear a skirt (and rocket launchers). When the Dominator is about to intercept a tornado, Timmer uses a two-prong system to anchor the vehicle. Air compressors lower the car so its thick rubber skirt nearly touches the ground, and spikes wedge 6 inches into the earth to firmly prevent the vehicle from liftoff. Timmer and ONeal have seen roughly 65 tornadoes in the past six months. It was a historic amount, ONeal says. A lot of meteorological setups are busts, but every day we drove out this year, we felt like we would see a tornado.

Fantastic Plastic - a plastic bag might be the most overengineered object in history.

Stretchy seaweed. Reverse vending machines. QR-coded take-out boxes. To cure our addiction to disposable crap, we'll all need to get a little loony.

Piece of Mind - This diagram maps 1 cubic millimeter of the brain-but its unprecedented clarity deepens the mysteries of cognition.

This diagram maps 1 cubic millimeter of the brain-but its unprecedented clarity deepens the mysteries of cognition. Although this image wouldn't look out of place on a gallery wall alongside other splashy works of abstract art, it represents something very real: a 1-cubic-millimeter chunk of a woman's brain, removed during a procedure to treat her for epilepsy. Researchers at Harvard University stained the sample with heavy metals, embedded it in resin, cut it into slices approximately 34 nanometers thick

I Am Laura Kipnis-Bot, and I Will Make Reading Sexy and Tragic Again

WHEN A FLATTERING EMAIL ARRIVED inviting me to participate in an AI venture called Rebind that I'd later come to think will radically transform the entire way booklovers read books, I felt pretty sure it was a scam.

DAMAGE CONTROL

According to Léna Lazare, the 26-year-old face of the radical climate movement, they're also acts of joy.

AN IMPERFECT STORM

CAN THE U.A.E. REALLY MAKE RAIN ON DEMAND OR IS IT SELLING VAPORWARE?

THE HOLE IN THE MAP OF THE WORLD

ON THE SURFACE, THERE'S NOTHING UNUSUAL ABOUT IT. JUST A SPOT OF OCEAN. BUT BENEATH THE WAVES LURKS SOMETHING INCREDIBLE: A MASSIVE WATERFALL. AND IN ITS MYSTERIOUS DEPTHS, THE FATE OF THE WORLD CHURNS.

COOLER HEADS

The deadliest environmental threat to city dwellers worldwide isn't earthquakes, tornadoes, flooding, or fire. It's heat.

TERMINAL VELOCITY

IT WAS 2 AM at Denver International Airport, and Jared Murphy was only a few hours into a planned 17-hour layover.

THE ETERNAL TRUTH OF MARKDOWN

If the robots take over, we should at least speak their language.

THE TECH WORLD'S GREATEST LIVING NOVELIST GOES META

In which Robin Sloan writes Moonbound-a science fiction book about science fiction-and our writer writes his way into total insanity.

Do The Math - Learn you a Haskell-the spooky, esoteric cult classic of programming languages.

Learn you a Haskell-the spooky, esoteric cult classic of programming languages. Programming paradigms are mainly divided into "imperative programming" and "functional programming." The dichotomy isn't clear-cut, as a growing number of languages support both styles, but for our purposes it may be enough to say that in imperative programming you write code as a series of steps, line by line, while in functional programming you define mathematical functions and let the machine worry about the steps. In terms of actual functionality and usage, imperative programming is the far more common approach.

Screen Saver - Dumbphone life is about

There are still nice things on the internet. Dumbphone life, as r/Dumbphones moderator Jose Briones told me, is about "recovering your time and attention for the things you actually value." Of course, getting sucked into a subreddit because it was algorithmically suggested to me based on my extensive online browsing-is the antithesis of that. But it's how I found r/Dumbphones, now my favorite place on the internet.

Your online girlfriend is a workforce.

Because I have a deep and childish fear of being exposed as uncool, I try hard to act nonchalant when I´m around people with lives more interesting than my own. This is the tactic I employed last year when I met an OnlyFans star, a fit cosplayer and Japanophile who has soared into an enviable tax bracket by selling what she terms "exxxtra spicy content."

11,196 Years in Prison

Faruk Özer made crypto seem like the sation to decades of economic dysimction. Then he became Turkey's most wanted-and hated-man.

DeLorean vs DeLorean

Decades after her dad's iconic sports car time-traveled into movie history, Kat DeLorean wants to build a modern remake. There's just one problem: Someone else owns the trademark on her name.

THE BEHIND THE SCENES TECHNO-WIZARDRY OF ARATI PRABHAKAR

She has the ear of the US president and a massive mission: help manage AI, revive the semiconductor industry, and pull off a cancer moonshot.

THE FORENSIC EMPIRE OF ELIOT HIGGINS

As fakes and deceptions proliferate at record speeds, one guy has maintained a miraculous nose for the truth-the founder of Bellingcat, the world's biggest citizen-run intelligence agency.

THE COMMUNIST & THE CELEBRITY

CHINA MIÉVILLE WRITES A NOVEL WITH THE INTERNET'S BOYFRIEND.

DESIRED

WIRED's visit to the intersection of luxury and technology.

FIXER UPPER

Maybe you think they're majestic. Maybe you think they're an eyesore. No matter how you feel about wind turbines, there'll be a lot more of them in coming years.

PRETTY IN PINK

Why did scientists put tangerine DNA in a pineapple-and can this Frankenfruit help change public opinion toward bioengineered foods?

THE TRICKY BREAKAWAY OF PHIL WIZARD

He recently deactivated the Patreon that helped him scrape together enough to get by. Now he’s a somewhat reluctant) global ambassador for a new Olympic sport.

Women at the Bottom of the World

They go to Antarctica with dreams of studying the unknown. What they discover there is the stuff of nightmares.

RUSSIAN, GO HOME

WHEN MY COUNTRY WENT TO WAR, I FACED A CHOICE: Flee to a world where the truth might kill me - or seek peace in censored oblivion.

The Fateful Eight

THE STORY BEHIND THE MOST CONSEQUENTIAL TECHNOLOGICAL PAPER IN RECENT HISTORY.

Can the Internet's Greatest Authenticity Machine Survive Wall Street?

When thousands of subreddits went dark in protest last summer, it exposed the tension at the core of Reddit - on the eve of the company's IPO. Now that synthetic media is flooding the internet, does the web's most reliably human forum represent a gold mine for investors, or an old-fashioned dumpster fire?

The Unnerving Presence of Javier Bardem

He's known for playing fanatics and murderous psychopaths. In real life, he loves his wife (and Brad Pitt) and cries during E.T.

HAPPY HAUNTING

IN A CHARMING game called This Discord Has Ghosts in It, up to 15 participants at a time gather in a Discord server that has been reimagined as a haunted house. (Of course.) Inside lies a maze of (chat) rooms where each player takes the role of either an eponymous spirit or a paranormal investigator.

THE MYTH OF METAL

How I became a Python programmer - and learned to love our abstract world.