On Monday evening, Maggie Guterl and Will Hayward set out for the 60th time on a 4-mile loop through the hickory-covered hills of central Tennessee. It was dark and rainy on day three of the Big’s Backyard Ultra, a running race of fiendish design. There's no set distance, and no set total time, just endless…

Care for some of the sickest Americans is decided in part by algorithm. New research shows that software guiding care for tens of millions of people systematically privileges white patients over black patients. Analysis of records from a major US hospital revealed that the algorithm used effectively let whites cut in line for special programs…

Google has its own perfume—or at least one team of the company’s researchers does. Crafted under the guidance of expert French perfumers, the mixture has notes of vanilla, jasmine, melon, and strawberries. “It wasn’t half bad,” says Alex Wiltschko, who keeps a vial of the perfume in his kitchen.Google’s not marketing that scent anytime soon,…

In March, police in an Atlanta suburb embarked on a surveillance experiment in the hopes of reducing crime in the area. Along public roads near the local Six Flags amusement park, officers from the Cobb County Police Department installed 13 solar-powered automatic license-plate readers from Flock Safety, an Atlanta-based startup on a mission to “eliminate…

Hello, welcome to The Monitor, WIRED's roundup of all things pop culture. Today we have a lot of news from Disney—both from Marvel and Lucasfilm. Meanwhile, HBO is filling its coffers for the streaming wars. Here we go.Bob Iger Is Not Here for Famous Directors Talking Trash About MarvelRecently, as readers of this roundup may…

In her memoir, Becoming, Michelle Obama describes making the transition from a fancy job in a law firm to working in Chicago's City Hall. She writes that the lobby was "alarmingly and upliftingly packed with people," including couples getting married, people lodging complaints, babies in strollers, and old ladies in wheelchairs. She was enthralled by…

I would like to stop carrying around the Galaxy Fold now. It is oddly shaped and heavy. It weighs down my bag even more than other phones do.But the design is novel; it's centered around a flexible OLED display. That means when it’s expanded, when it unfurls itself to the world, it becomes a device…

If you watched carefully earlier this month, you could almost see Mike Pompeo’s political life flash before his eyes as he sat for seven minutes, almost unblinking, under withering cross-examination by—of all people, he must’ve thought—a local Nashville TV reporter.With question after question, WSMV’s Nancy Amons grilled the increasingly uncomfortable secretary of state about the…

For investors, the next 5 years won't be as easy as the last 10 Rory O’Driscoll Contributor Enterprise software investor Rory O'Driscoll led Scale Venture Partners’ investments in Box, DocuSign,…

Amazon shares fell by nearly 7%, or $118.38, in after-hours trading on Thursday after the company reported its first earnings miss in two years. Financial analysts had predicted that the…