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On Wednesday night, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders shared an altered video of a press briefing with Donald Trump, in which CNN reporter Jim Acosta's hand makes brief contact with the arm of a White House Intern. The clip is of low quality and edited to dramatize the original footage; it's presented out […]

On November 8, an unimaginably fierce firestorm broke out in Northern California. Fed by dry vegetation, and fanned by northeasterly winds pouring off the Sierra Nevada Mountains, it rapidly descended on the community of Paradise, home to nearly 30,000 people. Scott McLean, deputy chief of Cal Fire, was among the rescuers, driving through town and […]

The Parker Solar Probe just earned the title of the fastest-moving manmade object. Launched by NASA this past August, this robotic spacecraft is currently very, very near the Sun, on its way to probe the outer corona of our local star. OK, I know you have questions. Let me just jump right into it. How […]

This story originally appeared on Grist and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. When a blue-hulled cargo ship named Venta Maersk became the first container vessel to navigate a major Arctic sea route this month, it offered a glimpse of what the warming region might become: a maritime highway, with vessels lumbering between Asia […]

Way, way out at the cold, dark edges of the solar system—past the rocky inner planets, beyond the gas giants, a billion miles more remote than Pluto—drifts a tiny frozen world so mysterious, scientists still aren't entirely sure if it's one world or two. Astronomers call it Ultima Thule, an old cartography term meaning "beyond […]

This story originally appeared on Grist and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. You probably didn’t give much thought to how exactly you loaded this webpage. Maybe you clicked a link from Twitter or Facebook and presto, this article popped up on your screen. The internet seems magical and intangible sometimes. But the reality is, you rely on […]

Last week, scientists published the biggest-ever study of the genetic influence on educational attainment. By analyzing the DNA of 1.1 million people, the international team discovered more than a thousand genetic variants that accounted—in small part—for how far a person gets through school. It made a lot of people nervous, as they imagined how this […]

Front and center for this week’s jaunt into space is one of the most interesting—and possibly habitable—moons of our solar system. As the largest moon of Saturn, Titan measures about 3,200 miles in diameter, bigger than our own moon (which is a little over 2,000 miles wide). It’s covered in a thick atmosphere of clouds […]

This story was originally published by The Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Greta Thunberg cut a frail and lonely figure when she started a school strike for the climate outside the Swedish parliament building last August. Her parents tried to dissuade her. Classmates declined to join. Passersby expressed […]

WIRED ICON Sean Parker, Napster cofounder NOMINATES Alex Marson, biologist and infectious disease doctor at UC San Francisco When Sean Parker was young, he cofounded Napster and changed the way we listen to music. In his twenties, he helped jump-start Facebook and changed the way we interact with each other. Now, at age 38, he’s […]