December 11th, In 1951, in the laboratories of the French pharmaceutical company Rhône-Poulenc, chemist Paul Charpentier invented a drug that would change the field of psychiatry forever. Charpentier had no intention of fomenting a revolution; in fact, he was trying to create a better antihistamine. But by modifying an existing drug called promazine, he ended...
I switched to one router and reconfigured it, but the lights in my living room were too close together so it didn’t work in that room. The hall, where this motion detection would be most useful, only worked when I set the sensitivity to maximum, and even then it was inconsistent. If I walked down...
Although whole blood transcriptomics was useful, it provided only a general picture of what was happening. The scientists then turned to a technique called CITE-seq. This allowed them to figure out which cells express which genes differently in men and women, and which specific proteins they make. The best part is that CITE-seq could be...
And last month in a magazine Scientific reportsa separate group of researchers described how they used submarine cables off the coast of Chile, Greece and France to detect earthquakes. They compared this data with data from seismometers that tracked the same events, and they matched well. “We can, in real time, when an earthquake occurs,...
Later generations humans — or robots — may one day look back on this week as a watershed moment in how computers and humans interact. On Monday, CEO Sundar Pichai announced a new Google chatbot dubbed Bard based on the previously disclosed LaMDA AI bot. (Reportedly, he also did $400 million investment at big language...
Monitor A weekly column dedicated to everything that happens in the WIRED world of culture, from movies to memes, from TV to Twitter. When you work in journalism, you get a lot of emails. For example, the total number of incoming messages “wish on your worst enemy.” (At the time of this writing, I have...
Series Netflix Mysticala collaboration between Riot Games and Studio Fortiche, is an animated show based on the popular computer game. League of Legends. Science fiction writer Zach Chapman I loved Mysticaldespite never playing League of Legends. “You don’t have to have any knowledge of the game,” Chapman says in episode 536. Geek’s Guide to the...
At the beginning of February first Google, then Microsoft announced a major overhaul of their search engines. Both tech giants have invested heavily in building or buying generative AI tools that use large language models to understand and answer complex questions. Now they are trying to integrate them into search, hoping that they will provide...
In cryptocurrency economy, there is often a fine line between financial privacy and money laundering. Now one bitcoin “mixer” service called Sinbad.io is walking that tightrope in full view: just a few months after launching on the open web, it appears to have already become the money laundering tool of choice for the most prolific...
Prominent political figures, including US Senators Ron Wyden and Rand Paul, advance bills in the past have sought to restrict the FBI’s access to unminimized Section 702 data. The bill, originally put forward by lawmakers in 2017, known as the U.S. Rights Act, sought to curb the FBI’s “broad powers”, which they say are “shrouded...
