Wired

In the game known as the streaming wars, Disney+ came out swinging, bringing with it a massive library of movies and TV shows—with new ones being added all the time. Watched everything on Netflix? Disney+ has a seemingly endless selection of Marvel movies and plenty of Star Wars and Pixar fare too. Problem is, there’s so much stuff that it’s hard to know where to begin. WIRED is here to help. Below are our picks for the best films on Disney+ right now.

Starting in late September, a set of four free Covid-19 test kits can once again be ordered online from the US government with just a few clicks and mailed directly to your home. The kits can be sent to every household in the US—even US territories and military addresses. Because you can still catch and spread the virus even if you’ve been vaccinated against the current variant, it’s good to have tests on hand so you can find out if you’ve been infected.

In 2004, Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov at the University of Manchester in England achieved a breakthrough when they isolated graphene for the first time. A flat form of carbon made up of a single layer of atoms, graphene is the thinnest known material—and one of the strongest. Hailed as a wonder material, it won Geim and Novoselov a Nobel Prize in physics in 2010.

Twenty years later, graphene is finally making its way into batteries, sensors, semiconductors, air conditioners, and even headphones. And now, it’s being tested on people’s brains.

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The PlayStation 5 was arguably one of Sony’s most controversial designs. After a few years, I have to admit it’s growing on me. The only downside is its gargantuan size, which made the PS5 Slim a welcome redesign. The upcoming PS5 Pro further iterates on the design, adding some welcome hardware upgrades. If you’re unsure which model is for you, we have some insight.

When security researchers in the past found ways to hijack vehicles’ internet-connected systems, their proof-of-concept demonstrations tended to show, thankfully, that hacking cars is hard. Exploits like the ones that hackers used to remotely take over a Chevrolet Impala in 2010 or a Jeep in 2015 took years of work to develop and required ingenious tricks: reverse engineering the obscure code in the cars’ telematics units, delivering malicious software to those systems via audio tones played over radio connections, or even putting a disc with a malware-laced music file into the car’s CD drive.

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AI data centers are so hot right now. Each time generative AI services churn through their large language models to make a chatbot answer one of your questions, it takes a great deal of processing power to sift through all that data. Doing so can use massive amounts of energy, which means the proliferation of AI is raising questions about how sustainable this tech actually is and how it affects the ecosystems around it. Some companies think they have a solution: running those data centers underwater, where they can use the surrounding seawater to cool and better control the temperature of the hard working GPUs inside. But it turns out just plopping something into the ocean isn’t always a foolproof plan for reducing its environmental impact.

India’s $13.9 billion aviation industry—projected to cater to over 300 million domestically by 2030—is a ticking time bomb.

This July, in the sweltering heat at the Delhi High Court, additional solicitor general Aishwarya Bhati announced that new rules on pilot duty and rest periods would not be implemented this year after all. Introduced by the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) in January, the rules were designed specifically to combat pilot fatigue. They were set to take effect in June, but were abruptly retracted. The hearing addressed a writ petition filed by the Federation of Indian Pilots (FIP), seeking clarity on when the new norms would be enforced. The DGCA’s response followed its request to airline companies in April for a tentative implementation timeline.

Last week, just hours after exploding pagers and two-way radios killed dozens of people in Lebanon and injured hundreds more, a peculiar new show appeared on podcast apps. Pager Protocol isn’t about the attacks aimed at Hezbollah members or the Israeli operatives believed to be behind them. It’s an ongoing AI-generated 10-part series created to rapidly turn those unprecedented events into a fictional podcast.

Launched September 18, the day of the walkie-talkie explosions, Pager Protocol is akin to an audiobook. Each episode consists of what amounts to about a chapter, or 10 to 12 minutes, of material. In the two episodes that have dropped so far, an AI-generated narrator tells the story of the director of a fictional intelligence agency, one of his globe-trotting agents, and a CIA analyst, all of whom are hot on the trail of a large order of pagers purchased by the devious (but thinly described) Crescent Shield terrorist organization. The names of the countries involved have been changed—Tel Aviv is now Zion City, for instance—but it’s fairly easy to glean who everyone is supposed to be.

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Bradley Tusk really wants people to be able to vote on their phones. For the past few years, Tusk, a venture capitalist, political strategist, and philanthropist, has been building new software to revolutionize the way people vote in the United States. In his new book, Vote With Your Phone: Why Mobile Voting Is Our Final Shot at Saving Democracy, Tusk argues that mobile voting could completely change elections.

Meta has dominated online social connections for the past 20 years, but it missed out on making the smartphones that primarily delivered those connections. Now, in a multiyear, multibillion-dollar effort to position itself at the forefront of connected hardware, Meta is going all in on computers for your face.

At its annual Connect developer event today in Menlo Park, California, Meta showed off its new, more affordable Oculus Quest 3S virtual reality headset and its improved, AI-powered Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses. But the headliner was Orion, a prototype pair of holographic display glasses that chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said have been in the works for 10 years.