Stan Lee, the avuncular, controversial longtime writer and publisher of Marvel Comics, died Monday in Los Angeles. He was 95 years old. Popping a big character death on people like that was just the kind of thing Lee liked. “Stan Lee—dead! No! No, it can’t be!” The man who first understood that with great power […]
There’s a reason some people laugh when I say that mindfulness meditation can save the United States—that it can dampen the political polarization now dividing the country; that it can defuse the hatreds that have propelled the word “tribal” into our political vocabulary and have led serious commentators to compare the US in 2017 to […]
Hello, dear reader, and welcome to another edition of The Monitor, WIRED's look at all that's new and news in the world of pop culture, from casting news to TV show renewals. What’s on the docket today? The Walking Dead is getting (another) new season, Anya Taylor-Joy and Edgar Wright are teaming up, and Disney […]
Imagine you're a scientist. You published a paper in a reputable journal a couple of years ago, and that paper has made an impact in your field of study. It has shaped your own research and has inspired others to pursue similar lines of investigation. Thanks to that paper, you're enjoying a certain status among […]
Update: SpaceX successfully launched and re-landed its Falcon 9 rocket on a mission to resupply the International Space Station. On Monday, SpaceX is poised to end a 40-day launch drought in the United States with a cargo run to the International Space Station. The commercial space outfit will fire off its 12th resupply service mission […]
Her name is Bear 409—Beadnose to her fans—and she had been crowned Katmai National Park’s Fattest Bear of 2018. On Tuesday, she edged out her competition, Bear 747—an ursidae so rutund his belly nearly scrapes the ground—by 4,000 votes in an online competition. GIFs of her impressive transformation from svelte salmon snatcher to a half-ton […]
Unlike its screen-based sibling industries, gaming has seen relatively little technological upheaval in recent years. That's not to say that everything's great—because it is really not—just that games are as popular as ever, if not more so. Perhaps fittingly, game development feels like it's in a better place than just a few years ago; sure, […]
At 7:37 am Eastern time on Saturday, a Cygnus cargo ship jam-packed with over three tons of crew supplies and hardware will blast toward the International Space Station atop Orbital ATK’s Antares rocket. ISS resupply missions aren’t just about making sure astronauts never run out of toilet paper. (Those folks keep a six month stockpile […]
Destiny 2's latest expansion is lush, creative, and a vital shot of energy to a game that has been limping since it released. And I'm just not that into it. Destiny 2: Forsaken begins with a bang, as it kills one of its star characters, Cayde-6, a smart-alec gunslingin' scout who was never as funny […]
Brains, beyond their signature achievements in thinking and problem solving, are paragons of energy efficiency. The human brain’s power consumption resembles that of a 20-watt incandescent lightbulb. In contrast, one of the world’s largest and fastest supercomputers, the K computer in Kobe, Japan, consumes as much as 9.89 megawatts of energy—an amount roughly equivalent to […]