Technology News

What should you play next on your PS5 or PS4? From Fallout 4 to Ghost of Tsushima, Sony’s subscription service has a ton of great video games.

Protect your eyes in style while you lounge, run, paddle, or work on your computer outside.

If you need an easy, cheap, fast way to scan your 35-mm film, Valoi’s Easy35 is, er, the easiest way we’ve found to digitize images.

Sitting at a desk for hours? Upgrade your WFH setup and work in style with these comfy WIRED-tested seats.

We mischievously asked our reviewer to use nothing but this distraction-free keyboard computer with virtually no display for a whole week. Annoyingly, he loved it.

Enlarge / The surface of Ryugu. Image credit: JAXA, University of Tokyo, Kochi University, Rikkyo University, Nagoya University, Chiba Institute of Technology, Meiji University, Aizu University, AIST (credit: JAXA)

An asteroid that has been wandering through space for billions of years is going to have been bombarded by everything from rocks to radiation. Billions of years traveling through interplanetary space increase the odds of colliding with something in the vast emptiness, and at least one of those impacts had enough force to leave the asteroid Ryugu forever changed.

When the Japanese Space Agency’s Hayabusa2 spacecraft touched down on Ryugu, it collected samples from the surface that revealed that particles of magnetite (which is usually magnetic) in the asteroid’s regolith are devoid of magnetism. A team of researchers from Hokkaido University and several other institutions in Japan are now offering an explanation for how this material lost most of its magnetic properties. Their analysis showed that it was caused by at least one high-velocity micrometeoroid collision that broke the magnetite’s chemical structure down so that it was no longer magnetic.

“We surmised that pseudo-magnetite was created [as] the result of space weathering by micrometeoroid impact,” the researchers, led by Hokkaido University professor Yuki Kimura, said in a study recently published in Nature Communications.

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Enlarge (credit: Géza Bálint Ujvárosi / EyeEm via Getty)

Ruth Ann Norton used to look forward to seeing the blue flame that danced on the burners of her gas stove. At one time, she says, she would have sworn that preparing meals with the appliance actually made her a better cook.

But then she started learning about the toxic gasses, including carbon monoxide, formaldehyde and other harmful pollutants that are emitted by stoves into the air, even when they’re turned off.

“I’m a person who grew up cooking, and love that blue flame,” said Norton, who leads the environmental advocacy group known as the Green & Healthy Homes Initiative. “But people fear what they don’t know. And what people need to understand really strongly is the subtle and profound impact that this is having—on neurological health, on respiratory health, on reproductive health.”

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New research has uncovered a social world full of cheating, cooperation, and other intrigues, suggesting that viruses make sense only as members of a community.

Enlarge (credit: Benj Edwards)

In July last year, OpenAI announced the formation of a new research team that would prepare for the advent of supersmart artificial intelligence capable of outwitting and overpowering its creators. Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s chief scientist and one of the company’s co-founders, was named as the co-lead of this new team. OpenAI said the team would receive 20 percent of its computing power.

Now OpenAI’s “superalignment team” is no more, the company confirms. That comes after the departures of several researchers involved, Tuesday’s news that Sutskever was leaving the company, and the resignation of the team’s other co-lead. The group’s work will be absorbed into OpenAI’s other research efforts.

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I’ve spent years struggling to find a chair that conforms to my back, rather than the other way around. My search might be over.

Lend depth and drama to your gameplay, no matter what device you have.

This adorable laptop stand, keyboard, and trackpad folds into a little book for you to carry it around.

Here’s a guide to all the models—plus case recommendations and hidden software tricks to try.

Good news! Microsoft has finally made it possible to use the Widget Board on Windows 11 without being subjected to an onslaught of clickbait news articles.

Enlarge (credit: SEAN GLADWELL)

Unraveling how consciousness arises out of particular configurations of organic matter is a quest that has absorbed scientists and philosophers for ages. Now, with AI systems behaving in strikingly conscious-looking ways, it is more important than ever to get a handle on who and what is capable of experiencing life on a conscious level. As Christof Koch writes in Then I Am Myself the World, "That you are intimately acquainted with the way life feels is a brute fact about the world that cries out for an explanation." His explanation—bounded by the limits of current research and framed through Koch’s preferred theory of consciousness—is what he eloquently attempts to deliver.

Koch, a physicist, neuroscientist, and former president of the Allen Institute for Brain Science, has spent his career hunting for the seat of consciousness, scouring the brain for physical footprints of subjective experience. It turns out that the posterior hot zone, a region in the back of the neocortex, is intricately connected to self-awareness and experiences of sound, sight, and touch. Dense networks of neocortical neurons in this area connect in a looped configuration; output signals feedback into input neurons, allowing the posterior hot zone to influence its own behavior. And herein, Koch claims, lies the key to consciousness.

In the hot zone

According to integrated information theory (IIT)—which Koch strongly favors over a multitude of contending theories of consciousness—the Rosetta Stone of subjective experience is the ability of a system to influence itself: to use its past state to affect its present state and its present state to influence its future state.

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Plus: Sony Music tries to keep its catalog out of the clutches of AI, there’s a towering new Lord of the Rings Lego set, and Google’s new AI features march onto the web.

Plus: Three arrested in North Korean IT workers fraud ring, Tesla staffers shared videos from owners’ cars, and more.

A vast constellation of celebrities, from Kelly Ripa to the McDonald’s mascot Grimace, have helped push dairy sales.

Enlarge / Packaging for Wegovy, manufactured by Novo Nordisk, is seen in this illustration photo. (credit: Getty | Jakub Porzycki)

With the debut of remarkably effective weight-loss drugs, America's high obesity rate and its uniquely astronomical prescription drug pricing appear to be set on a catastrophic collision course—one that threatens to "bankrupt our entire health care system," according to a new Senate report that modeled the economic impact of the drugs in different uptake scenarios.

If just half of the adults in the US with obesity start taking a new weight-loss drug, such as Wegovy, the collective cost would total an estimated $411 billion per year, the analysis found. That's more than the $406 billion Americans spent in 2022 on all prescription drugs combined.

While the bulk of the spending on weight-loss drugs will occur in the commercial market—which could easily lead to spikes in health insurance premiums—taxpayer-funded Medicare and Medicaid programs will also see an extraordinary financial burden. In the scenario that half of adults with obesity go on the drug, the cost to those federal programs would total $166 billion per year, rivaling the programs' total 2022 drug costs of $175 billion.

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This is a 60 percent keyboard with most of the perks of larger, more spacious boards.