Category: BUYSEMPERFI

This Christmas I will leave the frigid state of Iowa to spend the holidays with my daughter, Kristil, in Paris. Despite my excitement at reuniting with her after a year apart, I’m also grappling with the unintended strain digital tools have put on our relationship during past visits.

Before the plane even touches down at Charles de Gaulle, I’ll likely be taking pictures and posting to social media. As a freelance writer who lives in the digital world, I’m driven to document. As a mother to my only child, who has been living abroad for nearly six years, I am eager to seize every moment of our visits. My daughter is a digital minimalist and prefers to use technology with purpose. This contrast in our perspectives has become a source of conflict.

Growing up in a single-parent household, Kristil was determined to forge her own path early on. It didn’t surprise me when my 12-year-old daughter, having read about the harmful effects of having technology in her bedroom, approached me with a determined look in her eyes. She requested my help moving her television and computer to another room in our apartment. She was already aware of the negative impact of being too connected.

As a teen, dreaming of attending a top university, Kristil read Cal Newport’s How to Become a Straight-A Student. Later, having earned a scholarship to Columbia University, she aligned herself with another of Newport’s insights—Digital Minimalism. Advocating for a more deliberate engagement with technology, she spoke about eliminating digital clutter.

A year later, the difference in our digital engagement patterns became even clearer. As an empty nester with extra time on my hands and a budding freelance writing career, I explored the virtual landscape. But as I was setting up new accounts on Instagram and Twitter, Kristill was eschewing hers.

I was sitting at my desk one afternoon when a message popped up from Kristil, who was living in Sweden while studying for her master’s degree. “Mom, I think I’m going to deactivate my Facebook,” she texted. “But I’ll still have Messenger, so don’t worry.”

I panicked. With an ocean separating us, social media helped me feel more connected to Kristil. Her likes and comments on my Facebook posts meant far more than she realized. Though I tried to remain calm, three messages later, I lost my composure. “Why are you isolating me?” I asked. “We have so few ways to connect as it is,” I said, my response a mix of confusion and hurt. It took a phone call for me to realize the truth—that I was projecting my fears and insecurities onto Kristil. She wasn’t distancing herself from me, she was setting boundaries around her social media use, a concept I had yet to grasp.

In a cavernous theater lit up with the green shapes of camels and palms at COP28 in Dubai, ecologist Thomas Crowther, former chief scientific adviser for the United Nations’ Trillion Trees Campaign, was doing something he never would have expected a few years ago: begging environmental ministers to stop planting so many trees.

Mass plantations are not the environmental solution they’re purported to be, Crowther argued when he took the floor on December 9 for one of the summit’s “Nature Day” events. The potential of newly created forests to draw down carbon is often overstated. They can be harmful to biodiversity. Above all, they are really damaging when used, as they often are, as avoidance offsets— “as an excuse to avoid cutting emissions,” Crowther said.

The popularity of planting new trees is a problem—at least partly—of Crowther’s own making. In 2019, his lab at ETH Zurich found that the Earth had room for an additional 1.2 trillion trees, which, the lab’s research claimed, could suck down as much as two-thirds of the carbon that humans have historically emitted into the atmosphere. “This highlights global tree restoration as our most effective climate change solution to date,” the study said. Crowther subsequently gave dozens of interviews to that effect.

This seemingly easy climate solution sparked a tree-planting craze by companies and leaders eager to burnish their green credentials without actually cutting their emissions, from Shell to Donald Trump. It also provoked a squall of criticism from scientists, who argued that the Crowther study had vastly overestimated the land suitable for forest restoration and the amount of carbon it could draw down. (The study authors later corrected the paper to say tree restoration was only “one of the most effective” solutions, and could suck down at most one-third of the atmospheric carbon, with large uncertainties.)

Crowther, who says his message was misinterpreted, put out a more nuanced paper last month, which shows that preserving existing forests can have a greater climate impact than planting trees. He then brought the results to COP28 to “kill greenwashing” of the kind that his previous study seemed to encourage—that is, using unreliable evidence on the benefits of planting trees as an excuse to keep on emitting carbon.

“Killing greenwashing doesn’t mean stop investing in nature,” he says. “It means doing it right. It means distributing wealth to the Indigenous populations and farmers and communities who are living with biodiversity.”

In October 2018, a UC Davis veterinarian approved Animal 13 for use in a Neuralink experiment. She was six years old when she received her Neuralink implants. According to her pre-project physical exam and echocardiogram, Davis staff did not observe any medical abnormalities prior to her surgery, only noting that she had superficial scratches on her lips and minor lip trauma as part of a “suspect pair fight.”

Beginning in November 2018, Animal 13 was regularly sedated with ketamine and hooked up to scientific instruments for “neuro recordings.” After one of these sessions the following month, Davis staff observed that the skin near the implants felt warm to the touch, the records show.

Over the next three months, her implants became infected. She was euthanized in March 2019. Her autopsy notes “numerous bacterial cultures” and evidence of brain swelling.

A doctoral candidate who conducted research at Davis’ California National Primate Research Center (CNPRC) told WIRED in September that, in their view, “there’s no real indication that these animals were terminal, and in fact, their age suggests that they weren’t.” The doctoral candidate added that, without more information, there was “there’s no real way” they could be certain.

A “scope of work and budget” document between Neuralink and UC Davis reviewed by WIRED lends some legitimacy to Musk’s claims that certain animals may have been terminal prior to their surgeries. The document details the amounts that Neuralink was to pay for UC Davis labor, equipment, and primates at each phase of its experimentation at the university. “The first stage of this work will be to test and refine our implantable devices,” the document reads, describing these tests to be performed “ideally with culled animals.”

While the document goes on to describe the six adult rhesus macaques who were to undergo these “terminal procedures” during this phase as being “in robust health,” the doctor WIRED spoke to points out that the budget indicates that this group of monkeys was discounted “because they are animals that are considered terminal,” they say.

However, the doctor explains that because animals 11 and 13 were meant to survive their initial implantation surgery, they were likely not part of this phase of Neuralink’s experimentation.

Neuralink did not respond to a request for comment for this article or any of our previous coverage of the experiments at Davis.

This week’s letter from the Physicians Committee marks the second time the organization has written to federal regulators asking for a securities fraud investigation into Musk’s comments about Neuralink’s monkeys. After Musk made similar statements about the Neuralink experiments in a post on his social networking app X (formerly Twitter), the organization wrote to the SEC alleging that the Neuralink CEO was deliberately misleading investors. Four members of the US House of Representatives have also asked the SEC to look into these claims of whether Musk committed securities fraud.

“When dealing with alleged animal welfare violations as egregious as those leveled against Musk, there needs to be greater urgency to hold him accountable,” US representative Earl Blumenauer told WIRED in a statement last month.

Last week, the SEC told Blumenauer that it could not confirm or deny whether it is investigating Musk’s comments.

“Musk has continued to make misleading and false claims about experiments conducted on monkeys by Neuralink,” the Physicians Committee letter alleges. “We urge the SEC to investigate this matter and penalize Neuralink and Musk appropriately.”

After tense and protracted negotiations, delegates at the UN climate conference COP28 have agreed on a deal that calls on countries to transition away from fossil fuels. It is the first time that nations have agreed to such a transition, and marks a major step forward in climate ambitions. But delegates have warned that parts of the text are still not strong enough and that the real work of reducing greenhouse gas emissions is all still ahead of us.

“While nobody here will see their views completely reflected, the fact is that this document sends a very strong signal to the world,” US climate change envoy John Kerry said in a speech at the close of the conference. “We have to adhere to keeping 1.5 [degrees Celsius of warming] in reach,” he said, referring to the climate target set out in the Paris Agreement in 2015.

Going into the conference, many delegates had hoped that the final deal would ask countries to phase out fossil fuels altogether—perhaps an unlikely prospect given that this COP was hosted by the United Arab Emirates, a major oil-producing state and OPEC member. An earlier draft of the agreement was greeted with widespread disappointment as it contained only a weak reference to “reducing both consumption and production” of fossil fuels and a list of actions countries “could” take to reduce emissions.

The final agreement ramps up the ambition from this earlier draft, specifically calling for “deep, rapid, and sustained reductions in greenhouse gas emissions” that would keep global heating to below the 1.5 degrees Celsius target. The text also calls for a tripling of renewable energy capacity by 2030 and substantial reductions in non-carbon dioxide emissions globally by 2030—gases such as methane, which has a very high global warming potential.

“It’s a brilliant turnaround from the text two days ago, and the negotiators have pulled a rabbit out of the hat,” says Piers Forster, interim chair of the Climate Change Committee in the UK. “By dropping the controversial language on phase out and unabated [fossil fuels], they have been able to include language on the necessary transition away from fossil fuels this decade. This gives all 198 countries the mandate to go home and deliver strong domestic policies to affect the transformative change.”

As the final text has to be agreed by every party at the conference, this agreement is full of compromises that will leave many countries disappointed. “This was the best deal that was politically possible,” says Jennifer Allan, a senior lecturer in international relations at the University of Cardiff who is at COP28. “Countries are relatively equally unhappy.”

E3 is finished, for good this time. The Entertainment Software Association confirmed today that the event will not be happening in 2024 or any time thereafter, bringing 28 years of the video game industry’s most prolific trade event to a sudden, unceremonious end.

E3’s demise isn’t wholly unexpected. The annual event, a three-day pageant (with press conferences leading up to its showfloor opening a day or two before), was once the pinnacle of showcases for companies’ forthcoming titles and consoles. As platforms like Twitch grew more popular, however, gamemakers and publishers no longer needed to rely on a trade show to make a splash. With the show’s poor attendance at what would be its final in-person event in 2019, and the ESA’s troubles with reviving the show post-pandemic, the writing has been on the wall. In April, following news that the ESA was again canceling the summer event, the reason was obvious: Streaming killed E3.

“Thanks to streaming platforms like Twitch and YouTube, companies now have the power to deliver news to consumers in-person and online simultaneously, without the need for public relation firms or journalists,” I wrote at the time. “Nintendo, for example, has perfected this with Nintendo Direct, its series of hyped and tightly controlled prerecorded marketing events. Similarly, [The Game Awards creator Geoff] Keighley’s [Summer Game Fest], built during a time when no one could safely gather, is envisioned as a digital-savvy event that can run without the need for a physical presence. Between game companies creating their own events and Keighley’s growing chokehold on the streaming space, thanks to the popularity of The Game Awards, E3 is largely redundant.”

ESA president and CEO Stanley Pierre-Louis said as much in his comments to The Washington Post announcing the end of the event, adding that although fans were invited to attend in E3’s sunset years, it was more of a business and marketing confab. Companies, he said, now “have access to consumers and to business relations through a variety of means, including their own individual showcases.”

The gaming world just doesn’t need E3 the way it used to. The Game Awards and Summer Game Fest are now associated with big announcements and trailer reveals. E3 hasn’t been relevant in nearly five years.

I started covering the video game industry in 2012 and attended my first E3 the following year. At the time, E3 was the pinnacle of gaming events—an all-hands-on-deck-affair where videogame journalists routinely filed several stories per day while running from big-hype promo events to big-hype meetings with game companies. (During my first year, I filmed a video wrapup with a 101-degree fever I’d developed by the week’s end.) Gamers expected such coverage, and read it devoutly.

The visual curiosity of television called to Tierra Whack at a young age. “I was glued to the TV. If it wasn’t cartoons, it was music videos from Missy Elliott to Ludacris, Busta Rhymes and Eminem. They were my favorite people to watch,” she said last week at LiveWIRED, the 30th anniversary event for WIRED held at The Midway in San Francisco. “It just drew me in. I’m like, ‘I want to be like them. I want to be in the TV.’”

In the years that followed, the Philadelphia-born rapper made good on her girlhood ambitions. An experimentalist with a taste for the Black avant-garde, Whack broke onto the music scene in 2018 with Whack World, a 15-track, 15-minute-long mini-album brimming with invention and whimsy. Its release—acclaimed by fans, critics, and veteran music artists like Flying Lotus and Erykah Badu—was unlike anything else at the time: a twisting, playful trip through Whack’s jamboree of a mind. It was a concept immaculately primed for a generation of digital natives raised on Instagram and fluent in the transitory nature of social media trends (each song was capped at one minute apiece).

Speaking with WIRED’s design director Alyssa Walker about the comforts and challenges of creativity, Whack explained how the genesis of her artistic process often begins with a visual. “I have to see something—whether it’s an image, a color, a pattern. Just anything. I just have to feel [it], and then I start to form this almost movie clip in my head,” she said. “Because everything I’m doing, it has to be a movie, it has to be a film.”

Tierra Whack performs at LiveWIRED in San Francisco.

Photograph: Kimberly White/Getty Images

Don’t let their fluff fool you: Your cat was built for murder. Felines, no matter how chonky, eepy, or boopable, are remarkably adaptable obligate carnivores, down to eat just about anything that fits in their mouth.

Well-intentioned (or … threatening?) gifts of dead birds, rats, and lizards are familiar to outdoor cat owners—even my shockingly uncoordinated indoor cat has killed a spider or two in her day. But an analysis published today in Nature Communications, led by Auburn University ecologist Christopher Lepczyk, reveals that there’s shockingly little that cats don’t eat.

Compiling evidence from a century of research from across the globe, Lepczyk’s team identified over 2,000 animal species eaten by cats—and that’s only what scientists have recorded so far. Of those species, 347 are at risk of extinction, and 11 have since been listed as extinct in the wild (or for good). Scientists have known for ages that feline predation is an ecological nightmare, but “it’s a challenging problem that we still have yet to deal with,” says Peter Marra, dean of the Earth Commons Institute and biology professor at Georgetown University, who was not involved in this study.

My cat slept through Marra’s video call, barely out of frame, blissfully ignorant of the ecological damage she caused in her wayward youth. She’s a sweet, perfect angel baby, and many doting cat parents feel the same about their own kitties. Could the solution to this environmental problem … really be to get rid of them? “Cats are embedded in our culture,” Marra continues. “It gets confusing when we start to talk about taking one life to save another.”

Since they were domesticated in the Middle East nearly 10,000 years ago, cats have traveled pretty much everywhere humans have. To thrive in so many different environments, felines became opportunists. While some animals, like pandas and koalas, stick to a limited menu of specific foods, “cats are not diet specialists,” says Marra. “They’re just trying to make ends meet.”

Lepczyk has spent the last two decades compiling evidence of what cats eat—first as a curiosity-driven side project, then as a full-blown scientific endeavor. Hundreds of peer-reviewed journal papers, doctoral dissertations, government reports, and magazine articles over the past century contain reports of cat diets around the world, but until now, the information had never been fully synthesized and laid out. So his team, comprising researchers from North America, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand, pulled every report of cats eating things they could find, and added each species listed as cat food to a database. “It’s not rocket science that we’re doing here,” Lepczyk says. “But it was needed.” Finding out exactly what animals are affected by cats will inform future conservation and policy, hopefully keeping both at-risk species and loving pet owners happy.

Striking product images draw you in, don’t they? Even when you’re not sure what the doohickey is, or does, you know you want it, or at the very least want to know about it. The Mutalk certainly has striking product images—but not in a good way.

Shiftall’s creation is a “Bluetooth mic that isolates your voice, making it difficult for others to hear,” but the brand promo pics offer equal parts bafflement and amusement. A guffaw followed by, “Is it a portable Monsters, Inc. Scream Extractor?” is, we’d wager, not the first impression Shiftall’s marketing team are after.

But we’re professionals at WIRED, and the Bluetooth isolating microphone gimp mask is a new category for us. So let’s strap it on, get to work, and pray to Marsellus Wallace that no one sees us.

Designed for discreet conversations in public places, shy people, ebullient gamers, and shouty bosses, the Mutalk supposedly offers a simple solution to a common issue. But does it work, does it need to work, and will it make a difference to your home, office, and remote working existence? And will anyone ever speak to you again once they know you use it?

How Does It Work?

Looking like some sort of fever dream techno horse bridle, the sound-suppressing Mutalk straps on to your head for prolonged conversations.

Shiftall

The Mutalk “utilizes the Helmholtz resonator principle” to achieve a sound muting effect when the user talks into it. This principle deals with the transfer of acoustic resonance through different materials, the main example of which is blowing across the top of a bottle with different amounts of liquid inside—but the principle has also, more practically, been used in car mufflers to alter the pitch and reduce exhaust noise.

That description undermines Hermann von Helmholtz’s legacy, but, essentially, when you talk into the Multalk mouthpiece, your words transmit clearly to the Bluetooth microphone but are muffled for anyone listening close by.

To use, you simply connect the 183-gram mask to your phone’s Bluetooth, the same way you would a pair of headphones. There is a 3.5-mm headphone socket for hands-free conversations, although the Venn diagram for people prepared to invest in conversation-muting Bluetooth microphones and those still using wired headphones is pretty small.

In terms of features, it’s all rather simple. There’s no fancy frequency tweaking app. It uses Bluetooth 5.1, and has USB-C charging (one hour) and an eight-hour battery life. It’s also impossible to ignore the removable head straps, moisture-absorbing cushion, and washable rubber mouth pad. Washable. Rubber. Mouth. Pad.

What Are You Wearing?

Shiftall’s device does lower the sound of your voice significantly for office video meetings but you will likely experience “feelings of self-consciousness”, according to our reviewer.

Shiftall

As a man prepared to wear the Dyson Zone in public, I didn’t think wearable tech could get any more embarrassing, but how wrong I was. Wearing the Mutalk was hysterically funny for my work colleagues, disturbing to children, and “completely unacceptable” for my wife.

Using an Eero mesh system without the Eero Plus subscription limits you to a basic set of options. You can schedule Wi-Fi downtime, set up a guest network, and use your Eero as a smart home hub. That might be enough for most, but here’s what you get if you subscribe. First, it’s worth noting that Eero used to offer a two-tiered subscription. Eero Secure was $3 per month or $30 per year and included advanced security, content filtering, ad-blocking, activity insights, and VIP support. Eero Secure+ was $10 per month or $100 per year and added third-party apps 1Password (password manager), Encrypt.me (VPN), and Malwarebytes (antivirus), as well as DDNS for remote network access. 

Select internet service providers still offer Eero Secure, but the only option for everyone else is the rebranded Eero Plus, which includes everything listed above for $10 per month or $100 per year. The subscription also now includes Internet Backup, which allows you to add secondary backup networks (alternative Wi-Fi or hotspot connections) that the system can use, should your main Wi-Fi network go down. 

Eero Plus is relatively expensive considering features like parental controls and real-time security are often provided for free by router manufacturers like Asus and Linksys. If you need the bundled apps, Eero Plus is arguably worth it, but even if it’s the only way to get the best Eero experience, it’s hard to justify such a high cost. Thankfully, in keeping with the brand ethos, everything is super easy to use, and the parental controls are among the best. Keep an eye out for the frequent discount offers. If you feel the subscription cost is too high, we suggest you choose a different mesh system.