Wired

From wildfires in Canada to flooding in India, people across the world are dealing with the realities of climate change. The world recorded its highest temperatures ever this summer and the climate models for 2100 make sobering reading.

To tackle climate change we need a data-driven approach, using technology to help decarbonize the sectors that contribute to it. The transportation sector is the largest contributor to climate change in the US and Europe. Simply put, travel is in need of a long-overdue update. The good news is that, in 2024, we will kickstart that much needed moment for green mobility.

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. For one thing, the sender was Clancy Martin, a writer and philosophy professor I didn’t know personally but vaguely recalled had written about his misspent youth as a small-time jewelry-biz con artist, also being a serial liar in his love life. For another, they were offering to pay me. “Clancy up to his old ways!” I thought.

Don’t close this tab! I know there are few combinations of words less interesting than business, email, and compromise. I may as well have written an article about fiber, socks, and responsibility. But this isn’t a boring article; it’s an article about email con artists who, according to the FBI, are pulling in $26 billion a year by scamming people.

So yeah, business email compromise (BEC) scams are a big deal. The con artists behind this criminal enterprise will cold-email you, pretending to be someone you work with, in order to gain access to money or information. You might get an email that appears to be from your company’s CEO asking you to quickly do something like buy gift cards, or you might get an email that looks like it’s from an employee at your company asking you to change their direct deposit information. The scam itself can take a lot of forms, but the end goal is to somehow siphon money away from you or the business you work for.

If you’ve been keeping up with all the news out of WWDC 2024 this week, you’ll know that Apple is bringing the RCS (Rich Communication Services) messaging standard to iPhones later this year with iOS 18. That’s a win for Google, which has long backed RCS on Android. But what actually is RCS? And why does supporting it matter?

The short version: It’s an upgrade on the standard SMS/MMS texting standards that smartphones have been using from the start. It brings better support for all the cool features we’re used to in our messaging apps, like read receipts and images, and it adds some extra security layers too.

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We are now in the later stages of the first generation of life extension, which involves applying the current class of pharmaceutical and nutritional knowledge to overcoming health challenges. In the 2020s we are starting the second phase of life extension, which is the merger of biotechnology with AI. The 2030s will usher in the third phase of life extension, which will be to use nanotechnology to overcome the limitations of our biological organs altogether. As we enter this phase, we’ll greatly extend our lives, allowing people to far transcend the normal human limit of 120 years.

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Ray Kurzweil rejects death. The 76-year-old scientist and engineer has spent much of his time on earth arguing that humans can not only take advantage of yet-to-be-invented medical advances to live longer, but also ultimately merge with machines, become hyperintelligent, and stick around indefinitely. Nonetheless, death cast a shadow over my interview with Kurzweil this spring. Just minutes before we met, we both learned that Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize–winning psychologist and one of Kurzweil’s intellectual jousting partners, had suffered that fate.

Bryan Hance was sitting in his basement one Sunday afternoon in June 2020 when he got an email about a secondhand bike for sale. A BMC Roadmachine 02 from a Swiss company, the bike was painted the color of a traffic cone, with goblin-green racing stripes. It was gorgeous. The bicycle boasted some of the fanciest components anyone could buy, like sleek Zipp wheels and electronic shifting. It was the kind of ride that made other cyclists envy it and its owner as they blew past on a straightaway. Hance guessed that a bike like that probably cost $8,000. Yet it was being offered for a fraction of that amount.

Deep into my many-hour hang with the tech world’s greatest living novelist, Robin Sloan, he says something profound about science fiction. It’s the insight I’ve been waiting for, the key to understanding not just him but maybe all of storytelling. I glance down at my voice recorder, just to make sure it’s on. “Memory is full!” it says.

Full! With that mocking little exclamation point. I do not panic. Instead what happens is: I simply go insane. Part of me stays there with Sloan, chatting about sci-fi. The rest of me is, I don’t know how else to put this, yanked, as if by some cosmic cartoon cane, offstage, into the other-dimensional wings of reality, where time is irrelevant and space sort of fizzles. In that realm, I know my task: to come up with a way to write this profile, or perish.

Old robots never die, they simply fade away. (And probably rust a bit.) This week, Boston Dynamics said adieu to HD Atlas, the human-ish robot that debuted over a decade ago. And then promptly introduced its replacement.

For years, Atlas has scared us silly with cutesy dance moves and parkour flips that we just knew would one day lead to our annihilation as a species. The robopocalypse never came, of course, and Atlas just got cuter the more it fell off boxes, bounced off tables, rolled down grass hills, and jived to Dirty Dancing tracks.

The original version ofthis storyappeared inQuanta Magazine.

In recent decades, neuroscience has seen some stunning advances, and yet a critical part of the brain remains a mystery. I am referring to the cerebellum, so named for the Latin for “little brain,” which is situated like a bun at the back of the brain. This is no small oversight: The cerebellum contains three-quarters of all the brain’s neurons, which are organized in an almost crystalline arrangement, in contrast to the tangled thicket of neurons found elsewhere.