If you’re a pedestrian—and who isn’t?—this week’s WIRED Transportation missives are decidedly grim. If you’re riding in a car, American roads are only getting safer. According to figures from the US Department of Transportation released this week, vehicle-related deaths fell by 2.4 percent last year. But 6,677 pedestrians died in 2018, a 3.4 percent increase…

It's hard to know where to begin this week. Is it the story about presidential advisor Kellyanne Conway calling up a reporter to complain that they had mentioned her husband? Or is that tidbit about President Trump wanting federal agencies to cancel their subscriptions to The New York Times and The Washington Post? You know…

Of all the known particles in the universe, only photons outnumber neutrinos. Despite their abundance, however, neutrinos are hard to catch and inspect, as they interact with matter only very weakly. About 1,000 trillion of the ghostly particles pass through your body every second—with nary a flinch from even a single atom.Original story reprinted with…

In February, the Spanish pilot Daniel González climbed into a small aerobatic plane at the Sabadell Airport outside Barcelona and fired up its single prop engine. Once he was in the air, González began a steep climb for about six seconds before entering a nosedive. The plane’s rapid descent created a microgravity environment in the…

As I write this, massive fires are erupting all over California, and massive protests are erupting all over the world. Is the former a facet of the climate crisis? Is…

Your computer, your phone and your tablet all have default apps, the preloaded software that springs into action whenever a specific task needs doing. Click an image you've just received over email, for example, and it opens in your default image viewer. Follow a web link someone sends you, and your default web browser opens…

Welcome back to TechCrunch’s China roundup, a digest of the latest events that happened at major Chinese tech companies and what they mean to tech founders and executives around the…

Whereas Mr. Trash Wheel was purpose-built for Baltimore, The Ocean Cleanup designed its barge to be mass-producible. And it’s significantly higher tech: Baltimore’s barge uses a water wheel to power its conveyor belt, with solar power as backup, while The Interceptor is fully solar powered. Trash flows up its belt (Boyan Slat, founder and CEO…

Weave, a developer of patient communications software focused on the dental and optometry market, was the first Utah-headquartered company to graduate from Y Combinator in 2014. Now, it’s poised to…

The International Astronautical Congress met in Washington, DC, last week, and the conference was attended by NASA, the European Space Agency, and several private spaceflight companies, and the takeaway was clear: Humans are going back to the moon—that’s the plan, at least.NASA recently announced a human exploration program called Artemis, which is aiming for a…