In an Amsterdam prison during the Nazi occupation, Sal Bramson drew his cell on pieces of cotton cloth. He added handwritten explanations and sent these messages to his mother, concealed inside a shirt collar among the prison laundry. The cloth could travel because it passed as something ordinary. Its material was part of what made communication possible.

As offshore wind development expands along the U.S. Atlantic Coast, understanding its potential effects on marine ecosystems is increasingly important.

Airbnb says its upcoming AI agent will help travelers plan trips, compare options, manage bookings, and get assistance throughout their stay.

For devout leaf peepers, timing is everything. A new study led by researchers from Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment shows that leaf nutrient levels affect the onset of fall color. The findings, published in Nature Communications, could improve leaf drop forecasts and carbon cycle tracking.

How we feel about taking a break from our screens could tell us something important about the way we behave online, according to new research from the University of Bath and Goethe University Frankfurt. Researchers have developed the first validated scale specifically designed to measure people’s attitudes toward temporarily reducing their digital consumption, finding considerable differences in how positively people view the prospect of switching off.

I found discounts of up to half off some of the top WIRED-tested TVs.

Around 450 million metric tons of plastics are produced worldwide each year. The major share of this sheer volume is used only once and then winds up in an incinerator or in landfills. This also applies to so-called polyolefins, which include polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP). As packaging materials and films, they account for approximately half of our plastic consumption.

This week on “Uncanny Valley,” we discuss the historic blue wave that swept the midterms and delivered a rebuke to the Trump administration, Big Tech, and data centers.

People are often asked simple questions, such as the price of the cheapest flight to a particular destination. But the answers—and how they are perceived—can reveal far more than the cost of that trip itself. For example, whether a person believes that the response “It’s $200” means $200 or assumes that the figure has been rounded up or down depends on their perception of the person giving the answer.

Investigating a scientific question is often a complex process. As an astrophysicist studying some of the most energetic phenomena in the universe, I know that finding answers requires much more than reading scientific papers or understanding existing theories. Astrophysical research involves collecting observations, analyzing data, building physical models and comparing their predictions with observations. These tasks require different scientific tools, databases and modeling software and can take considerable time even for experienced researchers.

Excerpted from INTHE COMPANY OF PANDAS: My Life with the World’s Favorite Bear by Dr. Brandie Smith. Copyright 2026 © by Dr. Brandie Smith. Reprinted by permission of Atria Books, an Imprint of Simon & Schuster, LLC. WHEN YOU take care of pandas, your primary responsibility is to make more pandas. I was told point-blank during my interviews to become curator, “Your job is to get the panda pregnant.” I had a PhD in population genetics, and while I’d picked up considerable experience with endangered-species reproduction at the theoretical level, my hands-on experience was limited. But nothing helps you adapt quickly to a new job like being asked to help the world’s most famous bear survive as a species.  When I arrived at the National Zoo, it had been almost three years since the birth of Mei Xiang and Tian Tian’s first cub, Tai Shan. There are usually two years between births, so the mood at the zoo was not worried, but determined. I was added to the weekly panda meeting, which included the curator, keepers, veterinarians, scientists, and even the zoo’s director—at the time I started it was John Berry, but segued to Dennis Kelly in 2010—as we pored…

Researchers at Tohoku University and the Japan Atomic Energy Agency (JAEA) have successfully controlled a unique quantum phenomenon—the quantum-geometric nonlinear Hall (QgNLH) state—using electric current for the first time. The breakthrough was achieved by revealing and exploiting the coupling between the spin structure and the QgNLH state in an electrically switchable chiral antiferromagnet.

A new biomechanical study has uncovered how elite volleyball players control ball spin during jump serves, offering fresh scientific insight into one of the sport’s most decisive offensive skills.

As Anthropic maintains its vow to keep ads out of Claude, the rest of the AI chatbot industry is racing to win over advertisers without antagonizing users.

Detecting a single photon is a challenge in itself. But what if you also want to know exactly how many photons arrive at a particular point at the same time? Physicist Erik Baalbergen is working on light detectors that can do just that. They form a key building block for the optical quantum computer of the future.

Serve Robotics announced alonsgside its third-quarter earnings that it will launch a new business line called Physical AI Services to offer customers its connectivity and data tools.

Antarctic blue whales appear to be creeping back from the brink of extinction after 50 years of protection. A new study estimates the total population at 4,018, up from 418 after the last reported whale catch in 1973.

Octopuses are extraordinarily versatile. From walking across the seabed on their eight arms to jetting through the water, manipulating tools and squeezing through unimaginably tight spaces, the flexibility of octopuses almost defies belief. “Octopuses can change their body shape to squeeze through tiny holes, almost like water flowing through a gap, so their size doesn’t always limit where they can go,” says Wenci Xin from the National University of Singapore.

In the lab, octopuses used specific moves to slip arms and a bulbous body through tiny holes. The finding could inspire new body plans for soft robots.

Octopuses are famous for navigating their way through a tight squeeze. Even among invertebrates, their ability to compress themselves into seemingly impossibly tiny passageways is an impressive sight. But for years, marine biologists have remained perplexed by how these cephalopods routinely manage their maneuvers. “There is no information about how octopuses squeeze through an opening far smaller than [their] body diameter,” Wenci Xin, a marine biologist at the National University of Singapore, said in a statement. Xin and her colleagues recently provided Mayan octopuses (Octopus maya) and young common octopuses (Octopus vulgaris) with a chance to show off their skills. Their findings, published in a study today in the Journal of Experimental Biology, show that there may not necessarily be a “one size fits all” approach for octopuses. First, the team needed some measurements. Previously, researchers assumed that an octopus’ stiff cranial case of cartilage that protects its central nervous system also dictates the limits of how small it can scrunch. Knowing this, Xin measured the distance between each specimen’s eyes to approximate the cartilage sheath’s width. In this case, the space between each octopus’ eyes ranged between about 0.6 and 1.3 inches wide. The team then constructed customized, clear…

A journalist is being raked over the coals after she was caught using AI to edit a photo of an election night party of Michigan Democrats. The journalist, Olivia Reingold, is a staff writer for The Free Press, a conservative, billionaire-aligning media outlet best known for ragging about perceived instances of “wokeness” in culture and attacking critics of Israel. As part of her coverage, Reingold posted a photo on X singling out a woman in a gaudy outfit, seemingly to make a point: that Michigan Democrats are rich and opulent, disconnected from the American working class.  “So far at Abdul El-Sayed’s election night event I’ve spotted, Valentino heels, a Chanel bag, a Moncler jacket, Rolex watches, and a YSL bag among other designer items,” she wrote, referring to the Democratic candidate who prevailed in the Michigan senate race, much to the chagrin of Islamophobes. Initially, the post was mocked for being frivolous, out of touch, and a poorly conceived hit piece. But soon, observers noticed that the image had a suspiciously glossy sheen characteristic of AI-image generation. Some ran it through image detectors which flagged it as either AI-generated or edited, containing watermark data from an OpenAI model. Others pointed…

A soft implant that attaches without stitches lowered blood pressure in rats, pointing toward a way to treat hypertension with less damage to surrounding tissue. Nearly half of all adults in the United States have high blood pressure, a leading cause of heart disease. Medications and changes to diet or lifestyle can help, but roughly […]

A group of genes may give some fire ants an advantage, increasing their chances of growing larger and potentially becoming queens, according to a new study from the University of Georgia.

If you want to see how private schools in the U.K. can reinforce segregation between children of different social classes, the London Borough of Southwark provides a good example.

An outbreak of highly pathogenic avian influenza virus that nearly wiped out an Illinois farmer’s backyard flock also spread to a domestic cat and wild rats on the farm, an analysis of the animals by the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory and the University of Missouri Veterinary Medical Diagnostic Laboratory found.

NASA is developing a navigation system that could allow lunar rovers to travel farther, move faster, and avoid dangerous terrain without constant human guidance. Known as High-speed Intelligent Robust Autonomous Terrain Exploration (HI-RATE), the technology could change how vehicles operate on the Moon, particularly when astronauts are not present to control them. NASA Wants Lunar Rovers to Make Their Own Driving Decisions Driving across the Moon presents challenges that ordinary autonomous vehicles rarely encounter. The lunar surface contains loose regolith, scattered rocks, steep slopes, and craters that can threaten even carefully planned journeys. Lighting conditions also vary dramatically, creating deep shadows that complicate navigation. For future missions, these obstacles present more than a technical inconvenience. NASA wants lunar vehicles to cover greater distances while requiring fewer instructions from astronauts and ground controllers. That capability could determine how efficiently crews explore locations far from their landing sites. According to NASA, the HI-RATE project is designed to combine advanced navigation software, perception sensors, and powerful onboard computers into an integrated autonomous driving system. The agency explains the purpose of navigation software in its project description: “Navigation software enables a rover to determine its location, detect hazards, plan routes, and control its movement.”…

An observational study links sugar rationing in early life to lower adult anxiety and depression risks, raising the possibility that our earliest diets have lasting mental health implications. Could the amount of sugar we consume before birth and during infancy influence our mental health decades later? An experiment rooted in postwar Britain suggests that the […]

Get a head start on holiday shopping with discounts on WIRED-tested headphones, laptops, and TVs.

This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image provides a lesson in galactic history. The sparkling collection of stars is named Messier 30 (M30) after the French astronomer Charles Messier, who cataloged M30 and other diffuse objects that might be mistaken for comets in the early telescopes of Messier’s time. M30 lies about 27,500 light-years away in the constellation Capricornus.

How do cells respond to drugs? A new microscopy technique could provide more precise answers to this question in the future. Researchers from Bielefeld University and the University of Vienna have developed a method as part of the European CHEM-SCAN project that makes the smallest cellular structures visible while also showing how their molecular environment changes.

With a huge and still-growing catalog of exoplanets, researchers are anxious to take the next steps: trying to infer what conditions are like on them, either by imaging them directly or by capturing the light that has passed through their atmosphere. Both are substantial challenges, given the presence of stars that are far, far brighter than light that has come to us via the planet. While telescopes can be fitted with devices called coronagraphs that block out much of a star’s light, there are limits to their effectiveness, caused by noise from subtle variations in the telescope’s configuration and pointing between observations. Now, researchers have developed a new software package that optimizes a physical model of the telescope in a way that allows us to better model these differences, producing low-noise imaging of exoplanets. Point spreads Central to this work is the concept of a point spread function. If you use a telescope to image a single point of light, it will not appear that way in the actual image. Instead, it will be slightly blurry and spread out, due to imperfections in the telescope hardware and the limits of our ability to keep it pointed accurately through the time…

More than 80 percent of congressional candidates backed by the pro-science PAC 314 Action won, including Michigan senator-elect and epidemiologist Abdul El-Sayed.

Meta’s AI agent can now take calls as a customizable animated avatar, ahead of the launch of a Tamagotchi-like wearable designed to bring Muse to life.

After his party suffered a historic defeat in this week’s midterm elections, president Donald Trump’s Truth Social is following suit. Shares of the social media platform’s parent company, Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG), hit an all-time low after Trump’s candidate picks were roundly rejected by American voters. As it turned out, investors weren’t finished. Shares plummeted another ten percent on Thursday, compounding major losses. The stock temporarily even dropped below the $4 mark, a dismal abyss after the $80 share price the company recorded in March 2024 shortly after merging with a blank check acquisition company to go public. Given the company’s catastrophic financials — TMTG reported a staggering $238 million loss while making less than $2 million — it’s perhaps the clearest sign yet that the venture is more an indicator of Trump’s popularity than a viable business. Now that the president’s approval rating is at a record low, hovering at just 33 percent as his party gets shellacked nationally, it’s no wonder his social media play isn’t faring much better. As it became clear that it wasn’t picking up much actual market share as a Twitter clone, the company made various efforts to pivot to everything from prediction…

There is magic in the traditional songs of the Awajún, an Indigenous people of northern Peruvian Amazonia. Otago linguist Dr. Simon Overall has been visiting this area for over 20 years and explains what gives these songs their powers.

Research published in the journal Ecology analyzed 12 years of records from a population of degus in central Chile, revealing that these endemic rodents managed to withstand nearly a decade of megadrought but disappeared locally following the extreme drought of 2019.

An observational study of middle-aged men links animal protein to lower testosterone and plant protein to higher levels, but the differences are small, and their health effects remain unclear. A protein-rich meal gives the body amino acids, the building blocks it needs to make and repair tissues, including muscle. Testosterone helps regulate muscle growth and […]

Ancient Maya communities made extensive use of liquid mercury and a red, mercury-containing pigment called cinnabar to decorate buildings, pottery and burial sites. Unsurprisingly, as previous research has shown, this led to mercury contamination of soils and reservoirs at some Maya sites. And that pollution may have spread even farther into their territory and caused the collapse of two lake ecosystems, according to a study published in the journal Science Advances.

Meta warns that growing political opposition to data centers could threaten future AI investments, as communities push back against massive infrastructure projects.

OpenAI’s newest cybersecurity model comes out as AI labs face scrutiny of their work to protect digital infrastructure.

Voters across the US have sent data center developers packing, in a bruising defeat for the tech lobby across local and state battlegrounds. The midterm elections on Tuesday saw 41 anti-data center ballot measures go up for a vote across 10 states, a blend of moratoriums on new developments and measures meant to clear the way for further data center expansion. The results were nearly total: after the dust settled, only a single measure’s outcome was favorable to the AI industry, CNBC reported. By itself, the state of Ohio accounted for 21 of the proposals, every single one of which saw voters reject any advances from the data center lobby. The lone exception to the 41 ballot measures came from Harwood, North Dakota, where citizens voted “no” to adding an additional review stage to data center zoning procedures. Candidates who embraced an anti-data center message also far outperformed their opponents. As CNN observed, Democrats picked up gubernatorial seats in Nevada, Ohio, Texas, and Georgia by running candidates who were outspoken against the unpopular facilities. That said, there are signs that rhetoric alone wasn’t enough to win the day. Anti-data center messaging failed to secure Republican wins for figures like Texas…

New high-resolution speleothem records from China and India, together with isotope-enabled climate models, show that abrupt glacial ocean circulation recoveries took centuries, not decades—a finding with important implications for how we assess future Atlantic circulation change. The work is published in the journal Science.

Hair dyes help people express style and cover gray hair but often contain skin-irritating chemicals.

Over the past 100,000 years, hooved mammals that migrate have experienced a higher rate of extinction compared to nonmigratory species, according to a study being published Nov. 5 in the journal PLOS Biology by Joel Abraham at Princeton University, U.S., and colleagues.

Cannabis is one of the most commonly used psychoactive plants today. However, it is difficult to determine archaeologically how cannabis was used in prehistoric times. Plant parts such as flowers, leaves and resins are perishable and therefore rarely survive. It is known that cannabis served various purposes, such as the production of oil or fiber, and was not used solely as medicine or a drug.

Researchers at the Wyss Institute at Harvard University, Boston Children’s Hospital, and Harvard Medical School (HMS) have developed FIND, a drug discovery platform that searches large libraries for molecules that modulate binding interactions between two proteins. FIND uses DNA nanoswitches to select drug candidates based on their effects on these protein-protein interactions, rather than simply whether they bind to a single target protein, giving it a key advantage over conventional binding-based screening.

With gravity’s effects mitigated, atoms orbiting Earth on China’s space station reached about 10 trillionths of a kelvin.

The use of cannabis is documented across cultures stretching back thousands of years, but it frequently relates to harvesting the plant for hemp and other non-psychoactive products. That said, one Bronze Age society of horseriders living in present-day Russia called the Scythians may offer the oldest example of intentionally ingesting cannabis for its intoxicating properties. In the Eurasian steppes of Siberia, archaeologists have discovered a princely Scythian tomb complex featuring an estimated 1,000 cannabis seeds intentionally placed among the dead. “The seeds show that cannabis played an important role in the rituals surrounding the burial,” Gino Caspari, an archaeologist at the University of Bern in Switzerland, explained in a statement. These weren’t simply symbolic objects, either. As Caspari and his colleagues detail in a study published today in the journal Science, human hair samples from the central burial room indicate Scythian royals also partook in cannabis use. Traces of CBN and THC were identified in strands of human hair from the tomb. Credit: Caspari et al. The Scythians were a group of ancient eastern Iranian nomadic equestrians renowned for their horseback skills. The community migrated from Central Asia into present-day Ukraine and southern Russia beginning in the eight and ninth…

NASA has unveiled a revised strategy to return American astronauts to the Moon by 2028, placing SpaceX and Blue Origin at the center of an accelerated Artemis campaign. The plan includes a new orbital test mission in 2027, competing lunar landing systems, and a lighter spacesuit designed to speed up humanity’s return to the lunar surface. NASA’s New Artemis Strategy Puts the 2028 Moon Landing in Focus NASA outlined the next phase of its Artemis program, detailing changes intended to reduce technical risks and accelerate crewed lunar exploration. The announcement builds on a briefing held October 23, when NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman and senior agency leaders described their approach to restoring American access to the lunar surface. Rather than proceeding directly to a landing attempt, NASA intends to use Artemis III as a dedicated Earth-orbit test mission in 2027, followed by the first crewed lunar landing under Artemis IV in 2028. The revised sequence places greater emphasis on verifying spacecraft interactions before committing astronauts to lunar operations. It also gives two commercial partners an opportunity to demonstrate their systems under operational conditions. NASA considers the changes part of a broader strategy to establish a sustained American presence on the Moon…

New findings from a Siberian tomb offer the earliest direct evidence for human marijuana use