The Global Fund is a worldwide campaign to defeat HIV, tuberculosis (TB) and malaria. I am proud that, as a co-founder of the fund, the UK has had a huge role to play in working towards this goal. To date, 50 million lives have been saved. Since its inception, the Global Fund has reduced the combined death rate from these three diseases by half in the countries it invests in. This week, as Liz...
A multimillion-dollar spacecraft collided head-on with an asteroid the size of a football stadium on Monday in an unprecedented test of Nasa’s capacity to defend Earth from a doomsday scenario. Nasa’s craft successfully crashed into the asteroid Dimorphos 6.8m miles from Earth. The mission, known as Dart (Double Asteroid Redirection Test), marked humanity’s first attempt at moving another...
Feeling unhappy, depressed or lonely could speed up the ageing processes more than smoking or even certain diseases, researchers have suggested. While everyone has an age based on their date of birth – their “chronological age” – they also have what is known as a “biological age”, based on the ageing of the body’s functions, influenced by genetics, lifestyle and other factors. Studies have...
With a surface hot enough to melt lead, crushing atmospheric pressure and clouds of sulphuric acid, Venus might not sound like the most enticing destination for human exploration. But a group of experts are advocating that our other nearest neighbour, rather than Mars, should be the initial target for a crewed mission to another planet. There are notable downsides. Walking on the surface would be...
Imagine you go to a zoology conference. The first speaker talks about her 3D model of a 12-legged purple spider that lives in the Arctic. There’s no evidence it exists, she admits, but it’s a testable hypothesis, and she argues that a mission should be sent off to search the Arctic for spiders. The second speaker has a model for a flying earthworm, but it flies only in caves. There’s no evidence...
Scammers just found a new phishing lure to play with: Google Drive. A flaw in the Drive is being exploited to send out seemingly legitimate emails and push notifications from Google that, if opened, could land people on malicious websites. The scam itself is nothing new – messages asking you to click on dodgy links are as old as the internet itself – but could catch a lot of people off guard. The...
And so began the aforementioned adventure — a game played out via SMS with a sexting robot. Sext Adventure was created by Kara Stone and developed by Nadine Lessio to explore “multiple possibilities of computer sexuality and technological mediation of intimacy”. Stone told Wired.co.uk that she was inspired to use text messaging as a medium after playing Lessio’s Cat Quest...
In his new book Unintended Beauty, British photographer Alastair Philip Wiper captures the “accidental aesthetics” of the technological revolution near his base in Copenhagen and across the world, finding artistry in research facilities, industrial sites – and the robotics of a sex doll. Oral sex with a sex robot head built by California-based RealDoll (pictured, above) is not advisable. A...
Belle. Jasmine. Ariel. What did they all have in common? Aside from a freakishly small waist, each of the Disney heroines also had giant, perfect eyes with expressions ranging from wide-eyed excitement, to narrow-eyed suspicion. Enough’s enough, said computer graphics experts at Disney Research Zurich and ETH Zurich. If they can figure out a way to enable people to “feel” 3D...
In Germany, they call him the “Facebook hunter”. He’s been described as one of Europe’s most powerful protectors of data privacy, has locked horns with US tech titans, and earned a troublemaker reputation across Europe. In over a decade as the data protection commissioner for the German city-state of Hamburg, Johannes Caspar has attempted to redefine the role of local data protection...