On August 10, 2015, Google CEO Larry Page shocked the business world by announcing he was restructuring the company he cofounded into a holding company called Alphabet. Page would head the new entity, and Google itself would be one of a number of companies under Alphabet’s control—like Google X, Google Fiber, Google Ventures, and Nest—each…

Symbols fail us. Case in point: Headlines this week reporting that California senator Kamala Harris was suspending her presidential campaign and, in doing so, ceding her chance to become the first black woman to win the Democratic Party’s nomination. When Harris initially announced her bid on Martin Luther King Day, less than a year ago,…

For the last decade, the hackers behind Evil Corp have led a sustained assault on the bank accounts of thousands of victims across dozens of countries. By steadily evolving malware known as Bugat, they indiscriminately siphoned tens of millions of dollars from unwitting victims. Thursday, the FBI indicted Evil Corp’s alleged leader: Maksim V. Yakubets,…

Good day, and welcome to The Monitor, WIRED’s roundup of the biggest news in pop culture. What’s happening in the world right now? To start, people are showing up in big numbers to watch Watchmen. Also, Taylor Swift is (maybe) going to the Sundance Film Festival, and there’s a new Mulan trailer. Let’s dive in.Watchmen…

For the last year, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft has been circling a large asteroid named Bennu that regularly passes uncomfortably close to Earth. The spacecraft has been painstakingly mapping the asteroid’s rocky surface using a suite of cameras and other instruments that will help it determine where to land next year. Once NASA selects a final…

When residents of Hawaii fled the massive eruption of the Kilauea volcano in May 2018, volcanologist Cheryl Gansecki and colleagues grabbed a homemade metal shield, tough boots, and shovels. The blast was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to do some amazing science—the Super Bowl of volcanoes.Today, Gansecki and two other squads of scientists have published their findings…

Have you heard the good news? Self-driving cars will solve all our problems. If you believe the headlines, autonomous vehicles will reduce traffic congestion, improve commutes, save lives, and even solve “the loneliness epidemic.” Proponents of the technology often add another item to that list: these miracle automobiles will increase autonomy for older people. “Driverless…

Martin Scorsese needed a favor. Well, not a favor, exactly—it'd cost quite a bit of money. He needed to make Robert De Niro young again. It was fall of 2015, and Scorsese, knee-deep in production on Silence, was having Thanksgiving dinner in Taiwan with Pablo Helman, one of Industrial Light & Magic’s veteran visual effects…

Just before midnight somewhere in the western United States, a white pickup truck’s high beams light up a stretch of dark highway.The driver slows as his three passengers peer through the cab’s front and rear windshields, looking for the headlights of any cars that might catch them in the act of trespassing.“Let’s be prepared to…

Uber’s just-released U.S. Safety Report sets forth in some detail the number of fatal accidents, and the good news is that the overall rate per mile is about half the…