Tabla de contenidos para February 2023 en WIRED

As CEO and Co-Founder of Midwam, based in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, Al-Muawad is using technologies such as holograms, augmented reality, and virtual reality to help trade fairs, historic sites, music venues, and cultural festivals tell unforgettable stories and create immersive experiences that leave lasting impressions on their visitors. The impact of these experiences can be profound. Al-Muawad says that many people have been moved to tears by some of the immersive content that Midwam produces. “By being innovative and creative, we can revolutionize the way people engage with art, heritage, and culture.” Khalid Al-Muawad CEO and Co-Founder of Midwam “To touch someone’s emotions that way is the strongest engagement that we can imagine,” he says. “It is testimony to the technology we use and the power of the story we…

THE CHAOS BEGINS at 5 am. The markets open, the traders arrive, and the auction floor heaves. Over the next six hours, gambles are taken, hands are shaken, and deals are made. This old-school scene is how fishers in Europe sell their catch to processors, who then slice, dice, and prepare the seafood for wholesalers, the last-mile delivery companies that supply restaurants, fishmongers, and supermarkets. Some 140,000 businesses make up the European seafood market, which trades more than $140 billion worth of fish every year. Despite those high numbers, the industry is mostly offline and resistant to disruption; aside from phone calls and emails, the grandest use of technology may be the occasional WhatsApp message. Edinburgh-based Rooser aims to push the market into the 21st century, however. Its seafood trading…

MAX LEVCHIN DOESN’T have a problem with the concept of borrowing. An immigrant from Soviet Ukraine, he took out loans to attend college in the US. In his early twenties, he persuaded Peter Thiel to fund the company that became PayPal. Since then, access to cash hasn’t been much of a problem for him. After PayPal, Levchin tapped the funds of Silicon Valley’s finest investors to build Slide, a suite of photo-sharing widgets that sold to Google, and a fertility-tracking app called Glow. But he kept one foot in fintech, and for the past 10 years has been running a company called Affirm, which takes a new approach to consumer lending. Lots of people, Levchin says, need access to credit. But that doesn’t mean they should use credit cards. I…

THERE WAS NO prospect of pumping more oil out of the old well. It was just a depleted cavern deep beneath the sun-baked Texas soil. But in July, some folks from a Houston-based biotech firm called Cemvita Factory came along and squirted a liquid into it. When they returned five days later, it was no longer an oil well—it had transformed into a hydrogen production plant. The liquid they spritzed down the bore hole was a carefully mixed cocktail of bacteria and nutrients. Once inside the well, the microbes began breaking down residual oil hydrocarbons—dregs that would be unprofitable to extract—in order to produce hydrogen and carbon dioxide. This field test, though small in scale, was a “huge success,” says Cemvita’s chief business officer, Charles Nelson, who would not comment…

Dear Cloud Support: “Everyone’s so gung ho about therapy these days. I’ve been curious myself, but I’m not ready to commit to paying for it. A mental health app seems like it could be a decent stepping stone. But are they actually helpful?”—Mindful Skeptic Dear Mindful, The first time you open Headspace, one of the most popular mental wellness apps, you are greeted with the image of a blue sky—a metaphor for the unperturbed mind—and encouraged to take several deep breaths. The instructions that appear across the firmament tell you precisely when to inhale, when to hold, and when to exhale, rhythms that are measured by a white progress bar, as though you’re waiting for a download to complete. Some people may find this relaxing, although I’d bet that for…

01 CHRISTMAS WAS RAPIDLY APPROACHing, and Amazon was facing a crisis. In the waning shopping days of 2014, the retailer was preparing to promote its deal of the day: the Amazon Kindle, delivered just in time for Christmas. Then it discovered a problem. Stock was running low within driving distance of Seattle, where the company is headquartered. Amazon turned to UPS to airlift more e-readers to the city, but with the holiday season in full swing, the parcel service was unwilling to divert more planes to appease its increasingly demanding client. Amazon, it appeared, would not be able to deliver its signature device to shoppers in its own backyard. The prospect of failure was unbearable to executives steeped in founder Jeff Bezos’ doctrine of customer obsession, according to a former…

OF ALL THE THREATS posed by Twitter since it fell under sketchy new management in October, one of them doubles as a promise. Twitter will devolve into pornography. Porn’s not my cup of tea, but you have to admire its ferocity and cunning. It’s a megagenre, something the poet-philosopher Timothy Morton might call a hyperobject, ungraspable in its ubiquity and scale. In effect, porn online behaves like a predator plant, saturating the pixels with flesh colors, choking off biodiverse memes, and sowing vast digital acreage with salt. Tumblr, which started as an artsy microblogging service in 2007, lost its allure when it was overrun by porn five years later. Chatroulette, which was founded in 2009 as a whimsical way to meet strangers, traded its lightheartedness for dick pics and leering…

On Cloudmonster These pavement-optimized kicks from the Swiss running gear brand On look ungainly, but they’re light and nimble shoes made for runners who need more padding than most models provide. The midsole is thick, with squishy cushioning, and the hollow loops that form the tread pull double duty, adding a burst of springiness while absorbing the injury-causing shocks of each footfall. On longer runs, all that billowy buttressing will make you want to go farther and faster than last time. $170 Coros Apex 2 Smartwatch makers are flooding the zone with more options for hardcore outdoor adventurers, and the rugged Apex 2 is one of our top picks. It connects to all five major GPS satellite systems and can track your location for 45 hours per charge. With GPS…

Alvaro Dominguez, ILLUSTRATOR 28.04: We have one Earth… “A 3D render of a robotic metallic earth with wires in synthwave style.” A 3D render of earth as a machine with a control panel and many buttons, rainbows, technology, sparkles and flowers” “An oil painting of pixelated planet Earth and robots flying around with a lot of rainbows in Jonas Wood style” “A 3D render of planet Earth with the face of a smily robot inside being part of mother board with monster truck wheels in the style of Jonas Wood” “A 3D render of the planet Earth dancing in a robot party, in the style of Jonas Wood, digital art” “An oil painting of pixelated planet Earth and robots flying around with a lot of rainbows in Jonas Wood style”…

PEDRO PASCAL is a little too nice, actually. Too many hugs. So many polite refusals of snacks. On the set of a photo shoot for this interview, there’s an evident tension inside him. He retreats into the aloofness of celebrity, but he is also eager to connect. He seems to enjoy having his picture taken, but he gets shy when the photographer moves in for a close-up. It’s in his nature to be open, but he holds a lot of himself back. He’s not too far off, in fact, from the anonymous bounty hunter he plays in The Mandalorian. He wants to take off the mask and let people see his face, but he doesn’t want to deal with the fallout. Too bad. Not only is Pascal returning for season…