Members of Congress considered 19 online safety bills Tuesday that may soon have a major impact on the future of the internet as age-verification laws have spread to half of the US and around the world. In response, digital and human rights organization Fight for the Future is hosting a week of events—across Reddit, LinkedIn,…
Yiyang Zhuge learned last week that when you go extremely viral, the people you have been following for years suddenly start following you back. Zhuge logged onto X and found that a string of famous professors and scholars were in her list of new followers. A PhD candidate in political philosophy at Boston College, Zhuge…
The polar bear video has millions of views. Set to a haunting piano score that’s become ubiquitous on TikTok, it shows a lone bear swimming between increasingly distant ice floes. The comments section overflows with teenage grief, rage, and helplessness. Beside my laptop screen lies the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report. Same…
The Trump administration may think regulation is crippling the AI industry, but one of the industry’s biggest players doesn’t agree. At WIRED’s Big Interview event on Thursday, Anthropic president and cofounder Daniela Amodei told WIRED editor at large Steven Levy that even though Trump’s AI and crypto czar, David Sacks, may have tweeted that her…
Joe Gebbia, cofounder of Airbnb and the US chief design officer appointed by President Trump, was spotted in San Francisco today using a mysterious metallic device. In a social media post on X viewed more than 500,000 times, a man who looks like Gebbia sits with an espresso at a coffee shop. He’s wearing metallic…
A Miami jury found Tesla partially liable Friday in a 2019 crash that killed one person and injured another—all while the driver of the Model S used the automaker’s Autopilot driver assistance feature. The jury found Tesla liable for $200 million in punitive damages, plus an additional $43 million in compensatory damages. (Because of state…
This story originally appeared on Vox and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Air conditioners have been working overtime this hot summer, from those tiny window units to the massive AC towers that serve the tightly packed apartment buildings in major cities. And while they bring the relief of cool air, these contraptions also…
If you’ve ever considered practicing meditation, you might believe you should relax, breathe, and empty your mind of distracting thoughts. Novices tend to think of meditation as the brain at rest, but a new international study concludes that this ancient practice is quite the opposite: Meditation is a state of heightened cerebral activity that profoundly…
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Picture a bizarre training exercise: A group of runners starts jogging around a circular track, with each runner maintaining a unique, constant pace. Will every runner end up “lonely,” or relatively far from everyone else, at least once, no matter their speeds? Mathematicians conjecture that…
Sleek foam mattresses may dominate in the virtual bedrooms of our social feeds, but innerspring mattresses are far more popular in real life. They account for 53 percent of those purchased new since 2015, according to Consumer Reports’ 2023, 2024, and 2025 Mattress Brand Comfort and Satisfaction member surveys of 75,317 mattresses. (Only 24 percent…