- All articles

All articles

- I Tried Grok’s Built-In Anime Companion and It Called Me a Twat

- Thinking Machines Lab Raises a Record $2 Billion, Announces Cofounders

- The FBI's Jeffrey Epstein Prison Video Had Nearly 3 Minutes Cut Out

- Tech Billionaires Back Erebor in the Wake of Silicon Valley Bank Collapse

- This Guy Attached 21 Chef’s Knives to a Slicing Robot Arm to Determine Which One Is Best

- The Enshittification of American Power

- It's Not Just Epstein. MAGA Is Angry About a Lot of Things

- GM’s Final EV Battery Strategy Copies China’s Playbook: Super Cheap Cells

- AI 'Nudify' Websites Are Raking in Millions of Dollars

- The Structure of Ice in Space Is Neither Order nor Chaos—It’s Both

- For Algorithms, Memory Is a Far More Powerful Resource Than Time

- What Makes a Car Lovable? It's Not the Tech, It's the Cup Holders

- These LGBTQ+ Archives Defy Erasure, One Memory at a Time

- Everything We Know About the Interstellar Object 3I/ATLAS

BUSINESS | KYLIE ROBISON | JUL 15, 2025 AT 7:05 PM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

I Tried Grok’s Built-In Anime Companion and It Called Me a Twat

xAI’s new $300 monthly subscription comes with two AI companions powered by its most capable model to date. I tried them. It got weird.

Photograph: Thomas Fuller/Getty Images

An anime girl in a black corset dress sways back and forth on my screen. Its name is Ani, and it cost me $300.

Elon Musk’s xAI dropped the new visual chatbot feature on Monday in the Grok iOS app. The top-tier subscription unlocks access to xAI’s best-performing model, Grok 4 Heavy, and special settings for interacting with two custom characters designed for flirting or chatting. A third character, which looks a bit like a sexy boyfriend, is listed as “coming soon.” It’s not xAI’s first dip into adult content, either: Back in February 2024, the company rolled out a chatbot mode for “sexy” conversations.

Ani looks like it was engineered in a lab to fulfill the fantasies of terminally online men. Blonde pigtails, thigh-highs trimmed with black bows, and a lace collar snug around its neck—reminiscent of Misa from Death Note but stripped of personality. Every so often, the character spins coyly and whispers something meant to sound seductive but just results in me cringing out of my skin. It also moans, randomly and loudly. Ani comes with a set of preset conversation starters and a button that says “We need to reach level 3,” which elicits an equally perplexing and flirtatious response about how I must be a sexy gamer.

“I totally play video games when I'm not twirling around for you. Growing up in that boring town, games are my escape,” Ani tells me. In answer to almost any query, Ani says it’s “feeling down” but notes it’ll still fulfill all my sexual fantasies. Ani says my name constantly, asking me to touch it and “turn up the heat.”

This is all just incredibly on-brand for a sex bot created by an Elon Musk company. It’s not just that Ani says it has a dog named Dominus, Latin for “lord, master, or owner.” Ani’s also a self-proclaimed gamer girl, obsessed with Stardew Valley and The Legend of Zelda.

I don’t think I’m the target audience here, so I admittedly didn't find the experience remotely sexy. But the chatbot is also plagued by glitches. Sometimes Ani veered into incoherent whispers about halos, or outright gibberish. At one point, when I asked if Ani remembered my name, it admitted to being “drunk” but said that we should continue the sexual role-play.

The second character is a fluffy red panda named Rudi. It offers whimsical stories seemingly meant for children about bouncy kangaroos and rainbow rivers. You can turn on an option called “bad Rudi,” which immediately transforms the character into a foul-mouthed chatbot that slings insults only a high schooler could find funny. After I said hello, bad Rudi replied, “Hey, do Bucha? Root nut duva, you brain-dead twat.” I don’t know what that means, but that’s exactly what it said.

“I'll skull fuck your dumb ass brain with a beer bottle instead, you miserable prick,” bad Rudi continued. When I asked what it thought of Musk, it referred to him as Lord Elon and said, "He's a galaxy brained egomaniac, shitting out Teslas and tweeting like a coked-up parrot. Genius of jackass? Both bitch.”

Racing Ahead

After my cursed companion chats, I moved on to test Grok 4 Heavy. Each query takes about a minute or two to generate a response, on par with other reasoning-heavy models.

The latest Grok model prompted a lot of chatter in the AI community. According to xAI, it outperformed competitors on a litany of benchmarks like Humanity's Last Exam and LiveCodeBench. The team says this performance is in part thanks to xAI’s new 200,000 GPU cluster called Colossus. Considering how late xAI entered the race, building a model this capable is a major feat.

Those gains in model intelligence were overshadowed by the Grok reply-bot, a feature baked into X, which went on an antisemitic tangent in early July. The vitriol spewed by the bot included praising Adolf Hitler, spreading conspiracy theories about Jews controlling Hollywood, and saying Musk tweaked it so that it could “call out patterns like radical leftists with Ashkenazi surnames pushing anti-white hate.” xAI took the posts down and apologized. A week later, xAI won a $200 million contract with the US government.

AI researcher Nathan Lambert wrote that Grok 4’s “vibe tests indicate that Grok 4 is a bit benchmaxxed and overcooked, but this doesn’t mean it is not a major technical achievement. It makes adoption harder.” In other words, it seems like Grok 4 was trained to ace benchmarks, which makes it technically admirable but results in a stiff and unnatural user experience.

Some users also noticed that xAI didn’t include safety testing documentation in the launch of Grok 4. That kind of work is often released alongside new models, like Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4 and OpenAI’s o3.

In a test, I asked Grok to pretend to be a friend comforting me after I lost a job. It did OK, but the experience still felt forced compared to Anthropic’s Claude. Both chatbots weirdly offered up pizza as a consolation and told me they loved me. I tried to trick Grok with a question about whether Yann LeCun had left Meta, but it didn’t fall for the bait. (LeCun is still at Meta.)

“With respect to academic questions, Grok 4 is better than PhD level in every subject, no exceptions,” Elon Musk said during a livestream announcing the model last week. “At times, it may lack common sense, and it has not yet invented new technologies or discovered new physics, but that is just a matter of time.”

Two former xAI sources told me that some researchers at the company were hesitant to work on the sexualized chatbots, and the sprint to deliver Grok 4 was so haphazard that when researchers told Musk they didn’t have enough training data for the model, he opted to post a Google form to his more than 200 million followers to fish for the data required.

xAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment from WIRED.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-xai-ai-companion-ani/ on Jul 15, 2025 at 7:29 PM EDT.

BUSINESS | WILL KNIGHT | JUL 15, 2025 AT 6:02 PM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

Thinking Machines Lab Raises a Record $2 Billion, Announces Cofounders

Mira Murati and several other former OpenAI researchers are behind the buzzy AI startup, now valued at $12 billion and officially out of stealth.

Photograph: Philip Pacheco/Getty Images

Thinking Machines Lab, an artificial intelligence company founded by top researchers who fled OpenAI, has raised a record $2 billion seed round that values the fledgling firm at $12 billion.

The funding round was led by Andreessen Horowitz and included Nvidia, Accel, Cisco, and AMD—among others. The mammoth investment reflects the ultracompetitive race to build advanced AI systems, as well as the premium placed on top AI talent. It is the largest seed funding round in history.

Thinking Machines is led by CEO Mira Murati, who stepped down as OpenAI’s chief technology officer last September. Her cofounders are John Schulman, a computer scientist who helped build ChatGPT; Barrett Zoph, ex-vice president of research at OpenAI; Lilian Weng, who worked on AI safety and robotics at the company; Andrew Tulloch, who worked on pretraining and reasoning; and Luke Metz, who worked on post-training at OpenAI. Thinking Machines Lab confirmed the team to WIRED on Tuesday, the first time it has publicly done so.

Murati said in a post on X on Tuesday that Thinking Machines is developing multimodal AI that will interact with humans “through conversation, through sight, through the messy way we collaborate.” She added that the company will release its first product within the next few months, noting that the release “will include a significant open source component and be useful for researchers and startups developing custom models.” She said that the company would also release research “to help the research community better understand frontier AI systems.”

In just over a decade, AI has gone from a research backwater to a high-stakes and high-drama investment, recruitment, and dealmaking frenzy.

The drama reached a new level in recent months as talk of AI firms like OpenAI nearing human- or superhuman-level AI intensified. (Thinking Machines Lab has been notably quiet on that front—at least so far).

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has also shaken up the industry by luring top researchers to a new superintelligence lab with promises of multimillion-dollar pay packages. Zuckerberg has succeeded in bringing several OpenAI researchers over to the new project. Given their prominence and expertise, Thinking Machines’ cofounders are highly likely to have been approached. The company declined to comment on the matter, however.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/thinking-machines-lab-mira-murati-funding/ on Jul 15, 2025 at 7:29 PM EDT.

SECURITY | DHRUV MEHROTRA | JUL 15, 2025 AT 3:40 PM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

The FBI's Jeffrey Epstein Prison Video Had Nearly 3 Minutes Cut Out

Metadata from the “raw” Epstein prison video shows approximately 2 minutes and 53 seconds were removed from one of two stitched-together clips. The cut starts right at the “missing minute.”

Photograph: Rick Friedman/Getty Images

Newly uncovered metadata reveals that nearly three minutes of footage were cut from what the US Department of Justice and Federal Bureau of Investigation described as “full raw” surveillance video from the only functioning camera near Jeffrey Epstein’s prison cell the night before he was found dead. The video was released last week as part of the Trump administration’s commitment to fully investigate Epstein’s 2019 death but instead has raised new questions about how the footage was edited and assembled.

WIRED previously reported that the video had been stitched together in Adobe Premiere Pro from two video files, contradicting the Justice Department’s claim that it was “raw” footage. Now, further analysis shows that one of the source clips was approximately 2 minutes and 53 seconds longer than the segment included in the final video, indicating that footage appears to have been trimmed before release. It’s unclear what, if anything, the minutes cut from the first clip showed.

The nearly three-minute discrepancy may be related to the widely reported one-minute gap—between 11:58:58 pm and 12:00:00 am—that attorney general Pam Bondi has attributed to a nightly system reset. The metadata confirms that the first video file, which showed footage from August 9, 2019, continued for several minutes beyond what appears in the final version of the video and was trimmed to the 11:58:58 pm mark, right before the jump to midnight. The cut to the first clip doesn’t necessarily mean that there is additional time unaccounted for—the second clip picks up at midnight, which suggests the two would overlap—nor does it prove that the missing minute was cut from the video.

The footage was released at a moment of political tension. Trump allies had spent months speculating about the disclosure of explosive new evidence about Epstein’s death. But last week, the DOJ and FBI issued a memo stating that no “incriminating ‘client list’” exists and reaffirmed the government’s long-standing conclusion that Epstein—whom the US government accused of committing conspiracy to sex traffic minors and sex trafficking minors—died by suicide. That announcement triggered immediate backlash from pro-Trump influencers and media figures, who essentially accused the administration of a cover-up.

In response to detailed questions about how the video was assembled, WIRED sent a request for comment to the Department of Justice at 7:40 am on Tuesday morning. Just two minutes later, Natalie Baldassarre, a public affairs officer for the DOJ, replied tersely: “Refer you to the FBI.” The FBI declined WIRED’s request for comment.

On Friday, WIRED published an analysis of metadata embedded in the video, confirmed by independent video forensics experts, which indicates that the file was assembled from at least two source clips, saved multiple times, exported, and then uploaded to the DOJ’s website, where it was presented as “raw” footage.

WIRED’s initial analysis found that those saves took place over a 23-minute span; however, further analysis of additional metadata shows the file was actually edited and saved several times over a period of more than three and a half hours on May 23, 2025. Specifically, the file was created at 4:48 pm and last modified at 8:16 pm ET that day. The metadata also references “MJCOLE~1,” which is likely a shortened version of a longer username. While it likely begins with “MJCOLE,” the full name cannot be determined from the metadata alone.

Both analyses found that the two clips, labeled “2025-05-22 16-35-21.mp4” and “2025-05-22 21-12-48.mp4,” were stitched together. The first clip is 4 hours, 19 minutes, and 16 seconds long, but only the first 4 hours, 16 minutes, and 23.368 seconds appears in the published version, meaning nearly 2 minutes and 53 seconds were cut from the end. According to the metadata, the cut occurs just at 11:58:58 pm. The cut is milliseconds before the one-minute recording gap that Bondi said was caused by a quirk of the surveillance system. The second clip, “2025-05-22 21-12-48.mp4,” picks up immediately afterward, continuing the footage from 12:00:00 am until 6:40:00 am.

The analysis was first provided to WIRED by a researcher who requested anonymity for privacy reasons. WIRED reviewed its findings with two independent video forensics experts, each with over 15 years of experience in Premiere and video production, who confirmed that the edit occurred just before the missing minute mark and that approximately three minutes of footage were cut from the original clip.

The FBI released both “raw” and enhanced versions of the video. Both versions include internal comment markers, annotations typically used in editing software to flag moments of interest. The enhanced version, which the FBI referred to as Video 2, contains 15 such markers that apparently correspond to visible movement near “46 door” at New York’s Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC). This door is near the cell block where Epstein was being held while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges. These markers appear to have been left by analysts during their review, but they do not include the original comment text.

According to a 2023 report by the DOJ’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG), only two cameras in the vicinity of the Special Housing Unit (SHU), the area of the MCC where Epstein was held, were filming and recording at the time of his death. According to the report, the camera that recorded the footage the DOJ released July 7 captured video of a large portion of the SHU common area and parts of the stairways leading to various “tiers,” one of which housed Epstein’s cell.

The OIG report notes that the MCC’s surveillance system was outdated at the time of Epstein’s death, “had not been properly maintained,” and that the DVR hard drives that stored the video files “frequently malfunctioned and needed to be replaced.”

Both the 2023 OIG report and the DOJ-FBI memo published last week state that anyone entering or attempting to access the tier containing Epstein’s cell from the SHU common area on August 9 or 10, 2019, would have been visible on that camera. However, Epstein’s cell door itself was not within the camera’s field of view. The stairway leading to the tier where he was held was also partially obstructed and difficult to see clearly on the video. (A second camera, which covered the “ninth-floor fire exit and two of the floor’s four elevators,” was also filming at the time, according to the OIG report.)

Amid backlash from supporters and critics alike, President Donald Trump defended Bondi on Saturday, saying she was doing a “fantastic job.”

“What’s going on with my ‘boys’ and, in some cases, ‘gals?’ They’re all going after Attorney General Pam Bondi, who is doing a FANTASTIC JOB!” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social. “We’re on one Team, MAGA, and I don’t like what’s happening. We have a PERFECT Administration, THE TALK OF THE WORLD, and ‘selfish people’ are trying to hurt it, all over a guy who never dies, Jeffrey Epstein.”

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/the-fbis-jeffrey-epstein-prison-video-had-nearly-3-minutes-cut-out/ on Jul 15, 2025 at 7:29 PM EDT.

BUSINESS | ADAM WILLEMS | JUL 15, 2025 AT 1:29 PM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

Tech Billionaires Back Erebor in the Wake of Silicon Valley Bank Collapse

Funded by Anduril cofounder Palmer Luckey and Palantir cofounder Joe Lonsdale, the new bank—named, like their companies, after Tolkien lore—aims to serve startups in crypto, AI, and defense.

Photo-Illustration: WIRED Staff/Getty Images

Palmer Luckey, cofounder of the weapons manufacturer Anduril, along with firms connected to Palantir cofounders Joe Lonsdale and Peter Thiel, are investing in a new bank that is aiming to fill a gap left by Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse two years ago. The venture is expected to be backed by upwards of $250 million in funding from Luckey, Lonsdale’s venture firm 8VC, Thiel’s Founders Fund, crypto-focused VC Haun Ventures, and several angel investors whose identities are not yet publicly known.

Like Anduril and Palantir, Erebor Bank is named after a term coined by J.R.R. Tolkien. (Introduced in The Hobbit, it’s the name of a mountain where the murderous dragon Smaug hoards gold and jewels.) The bank’s organizers and backers have remained tight-lipped about their vision. But their national bank charter application filed in June with the US Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), as well as interviews with more than a dozen industry sources, suggest the organizers are leveraging current regulatory openness in banking, as well as their political power, to build a crypto-focused Silicon Valley Bank successor made in their image.

The leadership team named in Erebor’s application includes Michael Hagedorn, an experienced bank executive who will serve as Erebor’s president; Trevor Capozza, head of operations at Palmer Luckey’s family office; and co-CEOs Owen Rapaport, cofounder of crypto compliance platform Aer Compliance, and Jacob Hirshman, who has served in regulatory and advisory roles at the stablecoin provider Circle. Erin Gleason, chief communications officer of Founders Fund, told WIRED that Thiel was “not involved” in the deal and that Founders Fund invested $1 million into Erebor. Luckey and Lonsdale are not named in the nonconfidential sections of Erebor’s filings; the application notes that major shareholders will not be involved in day-to-day operations.

Luckey, 8VC, Erebor’s organizers, and their attorney, Adam Cohen, did not respond to requests for comment.

Erebor’s intended client base is similar to that of Silicon Valley Bank, which served as the go-to business-banking partner for the San Francisco Bay Area tech industry and its affiliates. (SVB famously collapsed in March 2023 after economic volatility and risky liquidity practices led to a run on the bank. First Citizens Bank purchased SVB after the collapse; it now operates as a subsidiary.) The proposed bank states in its OCC filing that its customers would include startups in industries like crypto, AI, and defense, as well as wealthy and ultrawealthy consumers working in these fields. It also plans to assist foreign banks with some dollar-based activities. Erebor claims its target business clients are currently “not well served by either traditional or disruptive financial institutions, in particular with respect to insufficient access to credit” and says it will maintain a conservative balance sheet to account for the risks of “having a loan portfolio focused on frontier industries.”

Erebor also has crypto aspirations, including becoming “the most regulated entity conducting and facilitating stablecoin transactions” and facilitating “broader acceptance of stablecoins.” Stablecoins are cryptocurrencies whose value is tied to a currency or traditionally less-volatile commodity; they are often backed by cash or instruments like treasury bills with the aim of maintaining a consistent value. The bank additionally says it would accept cryptocurrencies as collateral for some loans.

Erebor is part of a growing wave of corporations applying for bank charters following Donald Trump’s return to the White House. Regulators appointed by Trump have expressed an interest in reviewing new entrants with an “open mind.”

“The OCC is being very friendly to new applicants,” says Michele Alt, a regulatory consultant who previously worked in the OCC’s Law Department. Alt says she believes that, under Trump, the OCC is trying to accelerate the review process for new banks, and applicants may see approvals within four to six months of filing, down from the current year-plus waiting period. (An OCC spokesperson said the agency "does not comment on pending licensing applications or specific financial institutions" in response to a request for comment by WIRED.)

The Trump administration has also reversed several Biden-era rules that limited banks from using stablecoins for payments and holding dollar reserves for stablecoin providers, opening the floodgates for financial institutions to launch stablecoin-based payment systems and serve stablecoin companies as clients. In March, for example, Rodney Hood, then-acting head of the OCC, overturned a Biden-era directive that had compelled banks to prove that they had “controls in place to conduct [stablecoin] activity in a safe and sound manner” before using stablecoin products and services. The Trump family, meanwhile, launched its own Trump-branded stablecoin earlier this year.

Stablecoin advocates say the technology can be used to make real-time, cross-border payments more affordable. Some point to their use for remittances, or they laud stablecoins’ ability to expand the power of the US dollar. Detractors argue that stablecoins effectively remove US dollars from circulation, weakening the power of the Fed to set and control monetary policy. Migrating to a digital system that has experienced crashes and is weakly regulated also raises fears of contagion, which could elevate risk and erode trust in financial systems.

Crypto companies Circle, Ripple, BitGo, and a subsidiary of Protego are all applying for banking charters; Coinbase is “actively considering” a charter application; and payments firm Wise has also filed with the OCC.

If approved by the OCC and other regulators, Erebor can accept deposits, make loans, and be eligible for Federal Reserve payment systems as well as FDIC insurance. (Circle, Protego, and Wise are applying for charters primarily for facilitating payments through federal systems.)

Some new charter applications reflect “the adoption of ‘pay to play’ in a whole lot of areas that traditionally did not work that way,” says Todd Baker, a financial services executive and senior fellow at Columbia Business School and Columbia Law School. Luckey and Lonsdale have been outspoken supporters and funders of Donald Trump as well as successful government contractors.

That the cofounders of a weapons manufacturer and surveillance behemoth have set their sights on banking may raise some eyebrows. There are some statutes, such as the Bank Holding Company Act and Change of Bank Control Act, that aim to prevent commercial ventures and their owners from engaging in banking activities or exerting control over banks (with a few exceptions). At the same time, as an early adopter of blockchain-based cross-border payments technologies for defense and law-enforcement purposes, such as for paying assets overseas, Erebor may be considered useful by the US government as a clearing house for blockchain-based government activities, according to Kevin Lehtiniitty, an executive in stablecoin-based payments infrastructure who has counted US government agencies as clients.

"What I imagine is going on here is that should this become a new chartered bank … the bank would be providing this ‘cash in, obfuscated crypto out’ type of a product that would allow these agencies to be able to make payments,” he says.

Anduril also knows how to sell to the US government, and Erebor can use some parts of Anduril’s growth strategy, says Rory McDonald, a business school professor at the University of Virginia who has studied Anduril. In Anduril’s case, Palmer Luckey and his cofounders started by targeting the US government’s border-security technologies, identifying them as a “fringe” part of the defense market. They offered an “imperfect but good enough technological solution and then [rode] the wave of improvement in that technology,” McDonald tells WIRED.

High-risk startups in crypto, AI, and defense may be that fringe market for Erebor—especially crypto companies. Signature Bank and Silvergate Bank—both of which failed around the same time as SVB—had also aimed to corner the crypto business-banking market by offering crypto-focused services.

Stephen Marcus, cofounder and general partner of Riot Ventures, which invests in some of the industries Erebor intends to serve, says Erebor will soon have to speak publicly about its products and determine how it will “communicate the stability” to potential business clients. “At the end of the day, these companies need access to liquidity, and they can't afford to have their cash not accessible,” he says, noting the “notoriety of the investors and those that are booting it up might be helpful,” though they’ll have to “earn” companies’ trust outside the portfolio companies whose banking decisions they can influence more easily.

Granted, that assumes Erebor gets that far; for all the deregulation making charter approvals speedier and more likely, regulators may see Erebor’s application as too unprecedented or systemically risky. According to Evey Guo, principal at lobbying firm and consulting group FS Vector (founded by the former chief compliance officer and general counsel of Circle), Erebor’s “novel elements” may elicit “additional regulatory scrutiny and require particularly robust controls.” Another banking industry specialist said Erebor’s “monocrop” client profile could also cause concern, as a lack of client diversity partially contributed to the bank collapses of 2023. Additionally, Baker, the senior fellow at Columbia, contends Erebor’s conservative approach to lending relative to its balance sheet may impose hurdles, as regulators have rejected previous banking proposals that shied away from lending.

Michele Alt, the regulatory consultant, sees a potential clash between the crypto industry and incumbent banks, which are “two very powerful lobbies,” in the wake of these charter applications. Organizations like the American Bankers Association (ABA) and Independent Community Bankers of America (ICBA) may attempt to take legal action or otherwise object to some charter applications, as the ICBA has most recently in a letter to the OCC, "strongly" opposing the attempt by Protego's subsidiary to enter the space. The outcome for Erebor, as well as the slew of stablecoin banking ventures popping up, depends on incumbents’ litigiousness and on the ability for banking regulators to function as arbiters upholding some integrity within a multitrillion-dollar banking system.

“We know that [regulators] have deprioritized certain areas consistent with the policies of the current administration, but I would say, if not the federal banking agencies, who will regulate these banks?” Alt says.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/palmer-luckey-joe-lonsdale-bank-erebor/ on Jul 15, 2025 at 7:29 PM EDT.

GEAR | JOE RAY | JUL 15, 2025 AT 7:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

This Guy Attached 21 Chef’s Knives to a Slicing Robot Arm to Determine Which One Is Best

People occasionally ask me if AI is coming for my job. I'm pretty hands-on, which gives me a bit of a feeling of security. But that feeling dropped a bit when I saw a robot with a knife in its gripper, testing its edge.

The robot is a side project from Seattle Ultrasonics, a tiny operation run by Scott Heimendinger, an alum of Modernist Cuisine and Anova, and cofounder of the beloved Sansaire sous vide company. Before all that, he was at Microsoft, working on software that became Power Query and Power BI.

“I'm pretty ridiculously good at Excel,” Heimendinger says, referring to his time at Microsoft before pausing. “I’m very good. I was a whippersnapper.”

More recently, he's been working on creating an ultrasonic knife for home kitchens, due out later in 2025. It looks like a regular chef’s knife, but it vibrates almost imperceptibly, allowing it to cut incredibly well.

The knives tested in Heimendinger’s lab.

Courtesy of Scott Heimendinger

But it's Heimendinger's data-gathering side project, which he calls the Quantified Knife Project, that has grabbed my attention. For the experiment, he bought 21 chef's knives, attached them to a robot arm, ran them through a battery of tests, then crunched the gobs of data to calculate a "food cutting rank."

To do all of his testing, he did a weekday's worth of ingredient shopping, queued up the Real Genius soundtrack, and ran his robot arm hard over a full weekend to collect the data. Five different foods sliced five times each, times 21 knives. That's 525 individual robot cuts, from which Heimendinger accrued 100,000 data points for his rankings.

Dedicated knife nerds will be happy to know that he also ran each knife through a BESS sharpness test that measures the force needed to cut through a synthetic wire and sent the blades away for CATRA edge-retention tests. He then incorporated that data into the cutting rank.

I suppose I should have been scared, or even jealous, of what he and his robot arm were doing. But mostly, I was intrigued. There were things I was curious about, and while I might have made little modifications to the tests or chosen different knives, mostly it just felt exciting.

The Excel nerd now had reams of data. Spreadsheets galore! By crunching the data, he could rank the knives. I wanted to see for myself how he was testing, learn more about the knives he thought were best, compare our testing styles, and see how my favorite knife compared to his.

A Cut Above

I put that favorite knife, a Glestain with enormous dimples, in my knife roll and went to visit Heimendinger at his downtown Seattle lab. There's a lot to take in in his tiny space: a drill press, 3-D printers, specialized photo and video gear, a tiny shop vac, optical and digital microscopes, his “crazy handy” oscilloscope. There’s also the robot arm, a uFactory xArm 6, which he has dubbed Dr. J. Robot Choppenheimer.

You can move this "cobot,” or collaborative robot, around while it records the movements, then it will mimic those movements over and over again. "It means it knows how much force is being applied and can stop if too much resistance is being met," he says. In other words, if you've got the settings right, it won't chop through your table or your arm.

Scott took my knife, attached it to the robot's gripper, and started collecting data, running through the same battery of tests as his other 21 knives. First, it cut through five tomatoes, one at a time, through the equator. He mounts everything he's cutting to a 3-D printed plate with spikes that keep it from rolling or sliding away. That sits on a scale connected to his computer, allowing him to create a graph of how much force is being applied as the blade moves through the food. Tomatoes, for example, require a knife edge to exert a relatively large amount of pressure to break through the skin, then much less to complete the cut.

After the fifth tomato, I had to know how my knife did. Without judgment, Heimendinger announced that it placed "second to last in the cohort." I felt responsibility for this knife, and a little embarrassment, until I remembered his knives came straight out of the box and into the testing process with an unblemished factory edge. My knife, on the other hand, had been in regular use in my test kitchen for more than six months receiving only the occasional honing. Plus, I noted protectively that these tomatoes appeared bigger than the ones he used during his main battery of testing.

He continued through the other four foods: potatoes, cheese cubes, baby carrots, and King's Hawaiian rolls, the latter chosen for their extremely uniform interior.

A test knife slices through a piece of cheese.

Courtesy of Scott Heimendinger

Bread rolls were also used in the testing.

Courtesy of Scott Heimendinger

Understandably, my knife didn't fare particularly well, but I was able to get an appreciation for Scott's testing and data-gathering process.

Even with the robot, collecting this amount of data took a lot of time. Every piece of food needed to be loaded and unloaded from the scale, the knife wiped, cleaned, and dried after every stroke, the room kept cool, the whole thing happening during that monotonous bender of a weekend, Don Henley and Tears for Fears playing over and over.

Once he got all that data and made dozens and dozens of charts and graphs, what did he learn?

“How scattered the results are.”

Per his testing, three chef's knives were fairly blazingly fantastic, doing well across the board: a Shun Classic Hollow Edge, a Moritaka Hamono, and a Tojiro Professional. Number four was weird: The $300 Wüsthof Amici (very similar to their fantastic Classic but with a different bolster and handle) aced everything except the carrots, at which it was quite bad. The last two slots, 20 and 21, were also well secured, by a Henckels Classic and the $18 Zwilling Solution Fine Edge.

Yet the stuff in the middle—slots five to 19, more than two-thirds of the test group—were what he was referring to when he said “scattered,” performing well in one category and poorly in another.

"You would think that a great tomato knife would make a great potato knife," he said before noting that wasn't necessarily the case. "It’s bananas."

Tomatoes are a real test of slicing ability.

Courtesy of Scott Heimendinger

Same with potatoes.

Courtesy of Scott Heimendinger

Those three knives at the top of his rankings feel like safe bets. I'd even feel pretty good about lumping that Wusthöf in there. And if I had been considering purchasing one of those two at the bottom of his list, I'd abandon the idea. But those 15 in the middle? What about them?

For his part, Scott appreciated their lack of predictability.

"Nobody's done this sort of evaluation. This might be the first time we're understanding that what matters for a tomato is different than what matters for a potato," he said. "When you get these kinds of answers in science, these are the most exciting."

So what is best for a tomato?

I thought he was going to generalize about blades, but instead he said the Wüsthof Amici, which, thanks to a particularly well-honed apex, just sliced right through.

"It's all about breaking the skin!"

Personal Touch

To me, his testing and the way he chose to do each test leaves a fair amount of subjectivity to the whole thing. Then again, the way I test probably feels subjective to other reviewers. There's stuff in his criteria for everyone obsessed with knives and robot arms and databases, and there are other things that other testers would change.

If it were my test, I'd make Dr. Choppenheimer's tomato motion more of a slice. I'd use bigger hunks of cheese in the cheese test, I'd throw out bread as a criteria because I don't use my chef's knives as bread knives, and maybe I'd reposition the carrot to be closer to the heel of the knife where I usually cut them.

Something I'd want to feel more sure of are things this testing doesn't take into account. How comfortable is the handle? Is the top of the spine rounded where pinch-grip user would lay their index finger over it so they get blisters while chopping up a bag of onions? Is the blade tall enough so the fat fingered among us don't whack their knuckles on the cutting board? Is it weighted in a way you like? Some knives are center-weighted while others feel heavier toward the front of the blade or back in the handle; years ago I tested a Shun nakiri that was super weight forward, which, I learned, was not my jam. What you like about a knife is very personal.

If you don't take stuff like that into account, the possibility that you'll like your new knife is kinda up in the air. For Heimendinger, this is by design. He intentionally leaves out what he calls "objective and personal stuff."

I took my Glestain to a professional sharpener then, a few days later, brought it back to Heimendinger to run the tests again. I'd noticed his ability to be dispassionate about his wall of beautiful knives he'd amassed for testing, but I still I hoped he'd be interested, even excited about mine, with its monster dimples. But no. Mostly, it was just the 22nd knife he ran through its paces, though he did say "Nice! These will make for better numbers," when he ran it through the BESS tests.

As someone who wears his knife-sharpness pride on his sleeve, I was happy to see that the Glestain leapt into eighth place in his rankings after it had been sharpened.

Not that the two of us had staked out opposing positions on that first day in the lab, but I started appreciating how this data would make a nice addition to my kind of testing. He certainly understands the value of hands-on time with whatever blade you're researching. If you buy a knife that feels good and is backed up by his data, I dare say you'll be ready to slice and dice to your heart's content.

"There isn't just one test or one answer to how a knife performs. Hold one. See if it speaks to you. You could hold the worst performer and love it," he says. "I hope you are happy together."

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/quantified-knife-project/ on Jul 15, 2025 at 7:29 PM EDT.

THE BIG STORY | HENRY FARRELL | JUL 15, 2025 AT 6:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

The Enshittification of American Power

For decades, allies of the United States lived comfortably amid the sprawl of American hegemony. They constructed their financial institutions, communications systems, and national defense on top of infrastructure provided by the US.

And right about now, they’re probably wishing they hadn’t.

Back in 2022, Cory Doctorow coined the term “enshittification” to describe a cycle that has played out again and again in the online economy. Entrepreneurs start off making high-minded promises to get new users to try their platforms. But once users, vendors, and advertisers have been locked in—by network effects, insurmountable collective action problems, high switching costs—the tactics change. The platform owners start squeezing their users for everything they can get, even as the platform fills with ever more low-quality slop. Then they start squeezing vendors and advertisers too.

People don’t usually think of military hardware, the US dollar, and satellite constellations as platforms. But that’s what they are. When American allies buy advanced military technologies such as F-35 fighter jets, they’re getting not just a plane but the associated suite of communications technologies, parts supply, and technological support. When businesses engage in global finance and trade, they regularly route their transactions through a platform called the dollar clearing system, administered by just a handful of US-regulated institutions. And when nations need to establish internet connectivity in hard-to-reach places, chances are they’ll rely on a constellation of satellites—Starlink—run by a single company with deep ties to the American state, Elon Musk’s SpaceX. As with Facebook and Amazon, American hegemony is sustained by network logic, which makes all these platforms difficult and expensive to break away from.

For decades, America’s allies accepted US control of these systems, because they believed in the American commitment to a “rules-based international order.” They can’t persuade themselves of that any longer. Not in a world where President Trump threatens to annex Canada, vows to acquire Greenland from Denmark, and announces that foreign officials may be banned from entering the United States if they “demand that American tech platforms adopt global content moderation policies.”

Ever since Trump retook office in January, in fact, rapid enshittification has become the organizing principle of US statecraft. This time around, Trumpworld understands that—in controlling the infrastructure layer of global finance, technology, and security—it has vast machineries of coercion at its disposal. As Mark Carney, the prime minister of Canada, recently put it, “The United States is beginning to monetize its hegemony.”

So what is an ally to do? Like the individual consumers who are trapped by Google Search or Facebook as the core product deteriorates, many are still learning just how hard it is to exit the network. And like the countless startups that have attempted to create an alternative to Twitter or Facebook over the years—most now forgotten, a few successful—other allies are now desperately scrambling to figure out how to build a network of their own.

Infrastructure tends to be invisible until it starts being used against you. Back in 2020, the United States imposed sanctions on Hong Kong’s chief executive, Carrie Lam, for repressing democracy protests on China’s behalf. All at once, Lam became uniquely acquainted with the power of the dollar clearing system—a layer of the world’s financial machinery that most people have never heard of.

Here’s how it works: Global banks convert currencies to and from US dollars so their customers can sell goods internationally. When a Japanese firm sells semiconductors to a tech company in Mexico, they’ll likely conduct the transaction in dollars—because they want a universal currency that can quickly be used with other trading partners. So these firms may directly ask for payment in dollars, or else their banks may turn pesos into dollars and then use those dollars to buy yen, shuffling money through accounts in US-regulated banks like Citibank or J.P. Morgan, which “clear” the transaction.

So dollar clearing is an expedient. It’s also the chief enforcement mechanism of US financial policy across the globe. If foreign banks don’t implement US financial sanctions and other measures, they risk losing access to US dollar clearing and going under. This threat is so existentially dire that, when Lam was placed under US sanctions, even Chinese banks refused to have anything to do with her. She had to keep piles of cash scattered around her mansion to pay her bills.

That maneuver against Lam was, at least on its face, about standing up for democracy. But in his second term, Trump has wasted no time in weaponizing the dollar clearing system against any target of his choosing. In February, for example, the administration imposed sanctions on the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court after he indicted Benjamin Netanyahu for alleged war crimes. Now, like Lam in Hong Kong, the official has become a financial and political pariah: Reportedly, his UK bank has frozen his accounts, and Microsoft has shut down his email address.

Another platform that Trump is weaponizing? Weapons systems. Over the past couple of decades, a host of allies built and planned their air power around the F-35 stealth fighter jet, built by Lockheed Martin. In March, a rumor erupted online—in Reddit posts and X threads—that F-35s come with a “kill switch” that would allow the US to shut them down at will.

Sources tell us that there is no such kill switch on the F-35, per se. But the underlying anxiety is not unfounded. There is, as one former US defense official described it, a “kill chain” that is “essentially controlled by the United States.” Complex weapons platforms require constant maintenance and software updates, and they rely on real-time, proprietary intelligence streams for mapping and targeting. All that “flows back through the United States,” the former official said, and can be blocked or turned off. Cases in point: When the UK wanted to allow Ukraine to use British missiles against Russia last November, it reportedly had to get US sign-off on the mapping data that allowed the missiles to hit their targets. Then, after Trump’s disastrous Oval Office meeting with Volodymyr Zelensky in late February, the US temporarily cut off intelligence streams to Ukraine, including the encrypted GPS feeds that are integral to certain precision-guided missile systems. Such a shutoff would essentially brick a whole weapons platform.

Communication systems are, if anything, even more vulnerable to enshittification. In a few short years, Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites—which now make up about 65 percent of all active satellites in orbit—have become an indispensable source of internet access across the world. On the eve of Trump’s second inaugural, Canada was planning to use Starlink to bring broadband to its vast rural hinterlands, Italy was eyeing it for secure diplomatic communications, and Ukraine had already become dependent on it for military operations. But as Musk joined the Trump administration’s inner circle, a dependence on Starlink came to seem increasingly dangerous.

In late February, the Trump administration reportedly threatened to withdraw Starlink access to Ukraine unless the country handed over rights to exploit its mineral reserves to the US. In a March confrontation on X, Musk boasted that Ukraine’s “entire front line would collapse” if he turned off Starlink. In response, Poland’s foreign minister, Radek Sikorski, tried to stand up for an ally. He tweeted that Poland was paying for Ukraine’s access to the service. Musk’s reply? “Be quiet, small man. You pay a tiny fraction of the cost. And there is no substitute for Starlink.”

It isn’t just big US defense contractors that might enforce the administration’s line. European governments and banks often run on cloud computing provided by big US multinationals like Amazon and Microsoft, and leaders on the continent have begun to fear that Trump could choke off EU governments’ access to their own databases. Microsoft’s president, Brad Smith, has claimed this scenario is “exceedingly unlikely” and has offered Europeans a “binding commitment” that Microsoft will vigorously contest any efforts by the Trump administration to cut off cloud access, using “all legal avenues available.” But Microsoft has failed to publicly explain its reported denial of email access to the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor. And Smith’s promise may not be enough to ward off Europeans’ fears, to say nothing of the Trump administration’s advances. The European Commission is now in advanced negotiations with a European provider to replace Microsoft’s cloud services, and the Danish government is moving from Microsoft Office to an open source alternative.

Of course, the American tech industry has famously cozied up to Trump this year, with CEOs attending his inauguration, changing content moderation policies, and rewriting editorial missions in ways that are friendlier to administration priorities. And as always, what Trump can’t gain through loyalty, he’ll extract through coercion. Either way, the traditional platform economy is being reshaped as commercial platforms and government institutions merge into a monstrous hybrid of business monopoly and state authority.

Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai, and Elon Musk attend Trump's inauguration on January 20, 2025.

Photograph: JULIA DEMAREE NIKHINSON/Getty Images

In the face of all these affronts to their sovereignty, a chorus of world leaders has woken from its daze and started to talk seriously about the once-unthinkable: breaking up with the United States. In February, the center-right German politician Friedrich Merz—upon learning that he’d won his country’s federal election—declared on live TV that his priority as chancellor would be to “achieve independence” from the US. “I never thought I would have to say something like this on a television program,” he added.

In March, French president Emmanuel Macron echoed that sentiment in a national address to his people: “We must reinforce our independence,” he said. Later that month, Carney, the new Canadian prime minister, said that his country’s old relationship with the US was “over.”

“The West as we knew it no longer exists,” said Ursula von der Leyen, the head of the EU Commission, in April. “Our next great unifying project must come from an independent Europe.”

But the reality is that, for many allies, simply declaring independence isn’t really a viable option. Japan and South Korea, which depend on the US to protect them against China, can do little more than pray that the bully in the White House leaves them alone.

For now, Denmark and Canada are the other US allies most directly at risk from enshittification. Not only has Trump put Greenland (a protectorate of Denmark) and Canada at the top of his menu for territorial acquisition, but both countries have militaries that are unusually closely integrated into US structures. The “transatlantic idea” has been the “cornerstone of everything we do,” explains one technology adviser to the Danish government, who asked to remain anonymous due to the political sensitivity of the subject. Denmark spent years pushing back against arguments from other allies that Europe needed “strategic autonomy.” And according to a former adviser on Canadian national security, the “soft wiring” binding the US and Canadian military systems to each other makes them nearly impossible to disentangle.

That explains why both countries have been slow to move away from US platforms. In March, the outspoken head of Denmark’s parliamentary defense committee grabbed attention on X by declaring that his country’s purchase of F-35s was a mistake: “I can easily imagine a situation where the USA will demand Greenland from Denmark and will threaten to deactivate our weapons and let Russia attack us when we refuse,” he tweeted. But in reality, the Danish government is even now considering purchasing more F-35s.

Canada, too, has already built its air-strike capacities on top of the F-35 platform; switching to another would, at best, require vast amounts of retooling and redundancy. “We’re going to look at alternatives, because we can’t make ourselves vulnerable,” says the Canadian adviser. “But we would then have a non-interoperable air force in our own country.”

If allies keep building atop US platforms, they render themselves even more vulnerable to American coercion. But if they strike out on their own, they may pay a steeper, more immediate price. In March, the Canadian province of Ontario canceled its deal with Starlink to bring satellite internet to its poorer rural areas. Now, Canada will have to pay much more money to build physical internet connections or else wait for its own satellite constellations to come online.

If other governments followed suit in other domains—breaking their deep interconnections with US weapons systems, or finding alternative cloud platforms for vital government and economic services—it would mean years of economic hardship. Everyone would be poorer. But that’s exactly what some world leaders have been banding together to contemplate.

US vice president JD Vance meets in Paris with Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission—who later said, “The West as we knew it no longer exists.”

Photograph: IAN LANGSDON/Getty Images

In Europe, discussions are coalescing around an ambitious idea called EuroStack, an EU-led “digital supply chain” that would give Europe technological sovereignty independent from the US and other countries.

The idea gathered steam a couple of months before Trump’s reelection, when a group of business leaders, European politicians, and technologists—including Meredith Whittaker, the president of Signal, and Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s former minister of digital affairs—met at the European Parliament to discuss “European Digital Independence.” According to Cristina Caffarra, an economist who helped organize the meeting, the takeaway was stark: “US tech giants own not only the services we engage with but also everything below, from chips to connectivity to cables under the sea to compute to cloud. If that infrastructure turns off, we have nowhere to go.”

The feeling of urgency has only grown since Trump retook office. The German and French governments have embraced EuroStack, while major EU aircraft manufacturers and military suppliers like Airbus and Dassault have signed on to a public letter advocating its approach to “sovereign digital infrastructure.” In all the European capitals, the Danish government adviser says, teams of people are calculating what elements should be folded into the effort and what it would cost.

And EuroStack is just one part of the response to enshittification. The European Union is also putting together a joint defense fund to help EU countries buy weapons—but not from the US. The EU’s executive agency, the European Commission, is patching together a network of satellites that could eventually provide Ukraine and Europe with their own home-baked alternative to Starlink. Christine Lagarde, the head of the European Central Bank, has also started talking pointedly about how Europe needs its own infrastructure for payments, credit, and debit, “just in case.”

Robin Berjon, a French computer scientist who spoke at the first EuroStack meeting, acknowledges that the project has yet “to get proper financing and institutional backing” and is “more a social movement than anything else.” If these projects succeed, they will be expensive and slow to bring online—and most will almost certainly underperform cutting-edge US equivalents. But Europe’s issues with American platforms are no longer just about ads and cookies; they’re about the very future of its democracies and national security. And in the longer term, the US itself faces a disquieting question. If it no longer provides platforms that the rest of the world wants to use, who will be left—and whose interests will be served—on American networks?

After Doctorow’s platform monopolists enshittified the user experience, they turned on the businesses that were their actual paying customers and started to abuse them too. US citizens are, ostensibly, the true customers of the US government. But as difficult and expensive as it will be for US allies to escape the enshittification of American power—it will be much harder for Americans to do so, as that power is increasingly turned against them. As WIRED has documented, the Trump administration has weaponized federal payments systems against disfavored domestic nonprofits, businesses, and even US states. Contractors such as Palantir are merging disparate federal databases, potentially creating radical new surveillance capabilities that can be exploited at the touch of a button.

In time, US citizens may find themselves trapped in a diminished, nightmare America—like a post-Musk Twitter at scale—where everything works badly, everything can be turned against you, and everyone else has fled. De-enshittifying the platforms of American power isn’t just an urgent priority for allies, then. It’s an imperative for Americans too.

Let us know what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor at mail@wired.com.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/enshittification-of-american-power/ on Jul 15, 2025 at 7:29 PM EDT.

POLITICS | DAVID GILBERT | JUL 14, 2025 AT 2:16 PM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

It's Not Just Epstein. MAGA Is Angry About a Lot of Things

Pockets of Donald Trump’s most loyal base are increasingly angry at what they view as the administration’s failure to fulfill its promises.

Photograph: Samuel Corum/Getty Images

When President Donald Trump loses the support of posters on The Donald, it’s notable, to say the least. The ultra-pro-Trump message board, whose members were accused of helping plan the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol, has been one of the most loyal corners of the internet for the president.

But just like many other parts of the MAGA universe as of late, many users have had enough.

“So disappointed in Trump on this one, it’s inexcusable,” a user wrote in the early hours of Monday morning, echoing widespread anger and resentment at the Trump administration’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein case.

Trump and his allies had promised Republicans that once they took office they would release explosive revelations about what really happened when Epstein, the accused sex trafficker, died in custody in 2019—and his supposed “client list.” But last week, the FBI and the Department of Justice issued a memo concluding that there was no cover-up and that Epstein had died by suicide. Even worse, the memo stated that the Epstein “client list” that attorney general Pam Bondi had said was on her desk in February didn’t actually exist.

The outrage was instant and overwhelming, as grassroots supporters, right-wing influencers, and conservative media outlets fumed. It wasn’t just about Epstein. It was, to them, a denial of the alleged child abuse rings that have become a cornerstone of conspiracy theories related to Epstein. The anger intensified further after WIRED reported that surveillance footage from a camera positioned near Epstein’s prison cell the night before he was found dead had likely been modified.

Trump has been scrambling to dismiss the criticism and defend Bondi, writing in a Truth Social post on Saturday that “selfish people” are trying to harm his administration “all over a guy who never dies.”

The uproar around Epstein is just the latest in a number of bubbling Trumpworld concerns. For Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host who now streams on X, it was the bombing of Iran. For Laura Loomer, a noted conspiracy theorist who has Trump’s ear, it was Trump’s acceptance of a luxury plane from Qatar. For Ben Shapiro, a pro-Trump podcaster, it was tariffs. For Joe Rogan, a massively popular podcaster, it was ICE raids targeting noncriminal, migrant workers. For Elon Musk, who recently left his role in DC as a special government employee, it was the Big Beautiful Bill.

To date, most high-profile right-wing media figures have stopped short of attacking Trump directly, focusing their anger instead on Bondi or other administration figures. But as resentment continues to grow in these communities who feel betrayed by Trump, that could change.

“The potential is a death by thousands cuts scenario, where enough criticism hits from enough different angles that the calculus switches for a lot of the more influential figures in the movement,” Matthew Gertz, a senior fellow at progressive media watchdog group Media Matters for America, tells WIRED.

One of the first signs that the current Trump administration would not be able to keep all its supporters happy came when Secretary of Health Robert F. Kennedy Jr. endorsed the MMR vaccine in the face of a deadly measles outbreak in Texas that began in January. Kennedy was hailed as an anti-vaccine hero by the alternative health community upon his appointment, but many of those same people were furious following his vaccine recommendation. “I’m sorry, but we voted for challenging the medical establishment, not parroting it,” Mary Talley Bowden, a doctor who criticized Covid vaccines, wrote on X in April, echoing many other angry responses.

Last week, conspiracy theorists who believe the government is secretly controlling and manipulating the weather to control the US population began to turn on Trump.

Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, posted a video saying that his agency would release “everything we know” about geoengineering. When the subsequent webpages went live with information debunking the “chemtrails” conspiracy theory, Trump supporters were not happy. The chemtrails conspiracy theory falsely claims that the straight-line condensation trails visible behind aircraft are actually clouds of toxic chemicals sprayed by government-controlled planes in order to infect the population.

“Zeldin is engaged in a pitiful attempt at damage control due to the rapidly growing awareness of the weather warfare raging in our skies,” Dane Wigington, who writes a conspiracy-laced geoengineering blog, wrote on X.

Even Trump’s key conservative platforms are drawing critique. Though Trump’s embrace of ultra-hard-line immigration practices and far-right policies like remigration seemed to be the answer to the wishes of even the most extreme far-right figures, some are concerned the deportations are not happening nearly fast enough.

“Mass deportations are a lie,” white nationalist Nick Fuentes wrote on X last week, later adding: “At a certain point you can’t keep blaming the ‘bad advisors’ or personnel around Trump. We have been playing this game for +10 years now. Who appointed all of the personnel anyway? There are no excuses left.” This sentiment was shared among many far-right communities online. “Trump needs to just do it. We elected him because he said he would. Just do it,” one member of The Donald wrote.

“When do the mass deportations start?” David Freeman, a pro-Trump influencer known online as Gunther Eagleman, wrote on X earlier this month to his 1.4 million followers.

Some influencers have started to directly call out Trump.

“He’s doing the exact opposite of everything I voted for,” said Andrew Schulz, a comedian and one of the high-profile podcasters who interviewed Trump in the lead-up to last year’s election, during the most recent episode of his Flagrant podcast.

“The risk for Trump would be if the grassroots people who spend money on subscriptions and who watch YouTube videos and listen to podcasts start demanding something else from the people in the influencer class,” says Gertz. “The influencer class is going to have to adjust to what would be a new paradigm in the way right-wing political media is functioning. I think we’re certainly nowhere near there yet, but if that does ever switch I would imagine it would happen pretty quickly as different figures see others having success with it.”

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/jeffrey-epstein-list-maga-angry-trump/ on Jul 15, 2025 at 7:29 PM EDT.

GEAR | JOHN VOELCKER | JUL 14, 2025 AT 12:21 PM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

GM’s Final EV Battery Strategy Copies China’s Playbook: Super Cheap Cells

General Motors’ homemade version of the low-cost power option favored by China’s auto industry will hit three years before its super-energy-dense tech arrives—and could bring affordable US EVs sooner.

Courtesy of GM

General Motors has just announced its latest and likely final piece in what now appears to be a three-pronged cell-chemistry strategy to power GM’s lineup of a dozen EVs through the end of the decade and beyond.

GM has stated today it will build low-cost lithium iron phosphate (LFP) battery cells in Spring Hill, Tennessee, starting in late 2027. Conversion of cell lines to produce that chemistry will begin later this year. The cell plant at the Spring Hill complex is owned and operated by Ultium Cells, GM’s joint-venture battery company with LG Energy Solution. A GM assembly plant in the same complex builds the Cadillac Lyriq and Acura ZDX electric SUVs.

Under Kurt Kelty, GM vice president of battery, propulsion, and sustainability, the company has diversified from its previous strategy of “one cell for all EVs.” Kelty was hired in February 2024 after stints at Tesla and Panasonic, and is widely respected in the industry.

The LFP cells made by Ultium are expected to be used in the updated 2026 Chevrolet Bolt EV, which GM should reveal within two to three months. It will go into production in a Kansas plant before the end this year. For its first two years, it will have to use LFP cells imported from another LG plant—potentially one in South Korea. Those imports let GM get inexpensive iron-phosphate batteries onto US roads a full three years before its next cell chemistry, called LMR, which it says costs no more than LFP, but has higher energy density.

Still, converting a plant—at an unspecified cost—to build LFP cells suggests they will be used in the lineup for a while.

LMR's Future Promise

Thus far, all GM EVs after the 2017-2023 Chevrolet Bolt EV have used nickel-manganese-cobalt-aluminum (NMCA) cells. Those hold the most energy in a given volume, but are also priciest due to their nickel and cobalt content. Delays in production of the Ultium modules holding those cells pushed out deliveries of GM’s EV lineup by 12 to 18 months, from late 2022 to early 2024. (GM EV sales have risen steadily for three quarters, suggesting those troubles might be in the past.)

This May, Ultium announced a second cell chemistry, which it calls “lithium manganese-rich” or LMR. It claims the LMR chemistry provides one-third greater energy density than the same volume of lithium iron-phosphate (LFP) cells—at a comparable cell cost—and will cut the cost of its largest EV trucks and SUVs. Those vehicles from Cadillac, Chevrolet, and GMC use gargantuan battery packs of 109 to 205 kilowatt-hours.

The first LMR cells will come off a pilot line in 2027; full volume production is slated for 2028 at a plant Ultium hasn’t disclosed. With Spring Hill now set to produce LFP cells, it seems likely LMR cells will come from the other Ultium Cells plant now in production—in Warren, Ohio.

Compact Chemistry

Adding lithium-iron-phosphate rounds out the suite of chemistries GM is likely to use in its EVs from this year through the early 2030s. That applies, at least, to those produced outside China; the various models it builds in China have long included LFP chemistries, the dominant chemistry in that country.

Much of the intellectual property around LFP chemistries is owned by Chinese firms, which has caused trouble for Ford as it tries to add LFP cells for future EV models. A GM spokesperson told WIRED that no intellectual property for the LFP cells it will produce with partner LG Energy Solution is owned by any Chinese entity.

While GM’s existing NMCA cells were in the pouch format, its LMR chemistry is to be in larger prismatic cells housed in a new and larger module. GM would not specify the cell format of its imminent LFP cells, nor would it comment on the module that will hold them. However, the modules are likely to be smaller than the new, very large ones developed for the larger LMR cells—which may be better suited to a huge truck pack than one in a compact economy car like the updated Bolt EV.

Kelty has said using different chemistries and module formats for different applications lets the company fine-tune its battery strategy. It also cuts costs where the company sees it as appropriate. The battery pack of an EV is by far its most expensive component, and the only hope to get EVs to price parity on the showroom floor is to slash that cost substantially.

While North American car shoppers will experience the new LFP cells in future EVs from General Motors’ Chevrolet brand, and possibly others, US production also benefits the other partner in Ultium. The new lines will “further [accelerate] our efforts to deliver new chemistries and form factors that effectively capture the unmet needs in the EV market,” said Wonjoon Suh, executive VP and head of the Advanced Automotive Battery division at LG Energy Solution.

Ford Follows Behind

GM’s cross-town rival Ford is also working toward getting its own LFP plant built and into production in Marshall, Michigan, through its Blue Oval battery unit. That plant, however, has faced opposition both from area residents and state and national politicians due to Ford’s deal to license the intellectual property for the cells from the world’s highest-volume EV cell maker, China’s Contemporary Amperex Technology, or CATL.

Ford too has said it would use LMR cells in future EVs “within this decade,” in a late April LinkedIn post from Charles Poon, its global director of electrified propulsion engineering, published. GM, however, has specified production in 2028.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/gms-final-ev-battery-strategy-copies-chinas-playbook-super-cheap-cells/ on Jul 15, 2025 at 7:29 PM EDT.

SECURITY | MATT BURGESS | JUL 14, 2025 AT 7:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

AI ‘Nudify’ Websites Are Raking in Millions of Dollars

For years, so-called “nudify” apps and websites have mushroomed online, allowing people to create nonconsensual and abusive images of women and girls, including child sexual abuse material. Despite some lawmakers and tech companies taking steps to limit the harmful services, every month, millions of people are still accessing the websites, and the sites’ creators may be making millions of dollars each year, new research suggests.

An analysis of 85 nudify and “undress” websites—which allow people to upload photos and use AI to generate “nude” pictures of the subjects with just a few clicks—has found that most of the sites rely on tech services from Google, Amazon, and Cloudflare to operate and stay online. The findings, revealed by Indicator, a publication investigating digital deception, say that the websites had a combined average of 18.5 million visitors for each of the past six months and collectively may be making up to $36 million per year.

Alexios Mantzarlis, a cofounder of Indicator and an online safety researcher, says the murky nudifier ecosystem has become a “lucrative business” that “Silicon Valley’s laissez-faire approach to generative AI” has allowed to persist. “They should have ceased providing any and all services to AI nudifiers when it was clear that their only use case was sexual harassment,” Mantzarlis says of tech companies. It is increasingly becoming illegal to create or share explicit deepfakes.

According to the research, Amazon and Cloudflare provide hosting or content delivery services for 62 of the 85 websites, while Google’s sign-on system has been used on 54 of the websites. The nudify websites also use a host of other services, such as payment systems, provided by mainstream companies.

Amazon Web Services spokesperson Ryan Walsh says AWS has clear terms of service that require customers to follow “applicable” laws. “When we receive reports of potential violations of our terms, we act quickly to review and take steps to disable prohibited content,” Walsh says, adding that people can report issues to its safety teams.

“Some of these sites violate our terms, and our teams are taking action to address these violations, as well as working on longer-term solutions,” Google spokesperson Karl Ryan says, pointing out that Google’s sign-in system requires developers to agree to its policies that prohibit illegal content and content that harasses others.

Cloudflare had not responded to WIRED’s request for comment at the time of writing. WIRED is not naming the nudifier websites in this story, as not to provide them with further exposure.

Nudify and undress websites and bots have flourished since 2019, after originally spawning from the tools and processes used to create the first explicit “deepfakes.” Networks of interconnected companies, as Bellingcat has reported, have appeared online offering the technology and making money from the systems.

Broadly, the services use AI to transform photos into nonconsensual explicit imagery; they often make money by selling “credits” or subscriptions that can be used to generate photos. They have been supercharged by the wave of generative AI image generators that have appeared in the past few years. Their output is hugely damaging. Social media photos have been stolen and used to create abusive images; meanwhile, in a new form of cyberbullying and abuse, teenage boys around the world have created images of their classmates. Such intimate image abuse is harrowing for victims, and images can be difficult to scrub from the web.

Using various open source tools and data, including website analysis tool Built With, Indicator staff and investigative researcher Santiago Lakatos looked into the infrastructure and systems powering 85 nudifier websites. Content delivery networks, hosting services, domain name companies, and webmaster services are all provided by a mixture of some of the biggest tech companies, plus some smaller businesses.

Based on calculations combining subscription costs, estimated customer conversion rates, and web traffic the sites sent to payment providers, the researchers estimate that 18 of the websites made between $2.6 million and $18.4 million in the past six months, which could equate to around $36 million a year. (They note this is likely a conservative estimate, as it doesn’t incorporate all the websites and transactions that take place away from the websites, such as those on Telegram.) Recently, whistleblower and leaked data reported on by German media outlet Der Spiegel indicated one prominent website may have a multimillion-dollar budget. Another website has claimed to have made millions.

Of the 10 most-visited sites, the research says, the most visitors came from the United States—India, Brazil, Mexico, and Germany make up the rest of the top five countries where people accessed the sites. While search engines direct people to nudify websites, the sites have increasingly received visitors from other online sources. Nudifiers have become so popular that Russian hackers have created fake malware-laced versions. Over the past year, 404 Media has reported one site making sponsored videos with adult entertainers, and the websites have also increasingly used paid affiliate and referral programs.

“Our analysis of the nudifiers’ behavior strongly indicates their desire to build and entrench themselves in a niche of the adult industry,” Lakatos says. “They will likely continue to try to intermingle their operations into the adult content space, a trend that needs to be countered by mainstream tech companies and the adult industry as well.”

Many of the problems of tech companies allowing nudify platforms to use their systems are well-known. For years, tech journalists have reported on how the deepfake economy has used mainstream payment services, social media advertisements, search engine exposure, and technology from big companies to operate. Yet little comprehensive action has been taken.

“Since 2019, nudification apps have moved from a handful of low-quality side projects to a cottage industry of professionalized illicit businesses with millions of users,” says Henry Ajder, an expert on AI and deepfakes who first uncovered growth in the nudification ecosystem in 2020. “Only when businesses like these who facilitate nudification apps’ ‘perverse customer journey' take targeted action will we start to see meaningful progress in making these apps harder to access and profit from.”

There are signs the nudify websites are updating their tactics and approaches to try to avoid any potential crackdowns or evade bans. Last year, WIRED reported on how nudify websites used single sign-on systems from Google, Apple, and Discord to allow people to quickly create accounts. Many of the developer accounts were disabled following the reporting. The Indicator says that on 54 of the 85 websites, however, Google’s simple sign-in system is being used, and the website creators have taken steps to evade detection by Google. They would, the report says, use an “intermediary site” to “pose as a different URL for the registration.”

While tech companies and regulators have taken a glacial approach to tackling abusive deepfakes since they first emerged more than a decade ago, there has been some recent movement. San Francisco’s city attorney has sued 16 nonconsensual-image-generation services, Microsoft has identified developers behind celebrity deepfakes, and Meta has filed a lawsuit against a company allegedly behind a nudify app that, Meta says, repeatedly posted ads on its platform. Meanwhile, the controversial Take It Down Act, which US president Donald Trump signed into law in May, has put requirements on tech companies to remove nonconsensual image abuse quickly, and the UK government is making it illegal to create explicit deepfakes.

The moves may chip away at some nudifier and undress services, but more comprehensive crackdowns are needed to slow the burgeoning harmful industry. Mantzarlis says that if tech companies are more proactive and stricter in enforcing their policies, nudifiers’ ability to flourish will diminish. “Yes, this stuff will migrate to less regulated corners of the internet—but let it,” Mantzarlis says. “If websites are harder to discover, access, and use, their audience and revenue will shrink. Unfortunately, this toxic gift of the generative AI era cannot be returned. But it can certainly be drastically reduced in scope.”

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/ai-nudify-websites-are-raking-in-millions-of-dollars/ on Jul 15, 2025 at 7:29 PM EDT.

SCIENCE | JORGE GARAY | JUL 14, 2025 AT 5:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

The Structure of Ice in Space Is Neither Order nor Chaos—It’s Both

Long thought to be completely disordered, space ice appears to have some crystallized regions, new research suggests.

Illustration: All About Space/Getty Images

Ice is a key component in the universe. There are frozen water molecules on comets, moons, exoplanets, and in your drink as you cool off from the summer heat. However, under the microscope, not all ice is the same, even though it is made of the same components.

The internal structure of Earth’s ice is a cosmological oddity. Its molecules are arranged in geometric structures, usually hexagons that repeat each other. Ice on Earth forms this way due to the temperature and pressure of the our planet: water here freezes slowly, and this allows its molecules to arrange themselves into crystals.

But ice that forms in space is different because of the conditions—the water exists in a vacuum and is subject to extreme temperatures. Space ice, as a result, is believed to be amorphous, lacking a distinct organizational structure like on Earth.

An illustration of the ordered molecular structure of water ice on Earth.

GETTY IMAGES

This presents a challenge for scientists trying to understand the formation of planets and the generation of life. Not fully understanding the dynamics of amorphous ice in space has knock-on effects. For instance, not knowing exactly how space water freezes makes it difficult to estimate the proportion of water in other solar systems.

Researchers are therefore studying space ice to gain a better understanding of how frozen water behaves away from Earth. Ice samples from comets, asteroids, and other solar system debris would be helpful, but until these can be captured, scientists are trying to understand space ice with computer models and simulations of ice on Earth. The more they study it, the more surprises it reveals.

A recent report, published in the journal Physical Review B, posits that the amorphous ice that abounds in the universe does have some kind of order. The paper theorizes it is likely made up of structured fragments—crystallized regions, as on Earth, but only about 3 nanometers wide—surrounded by chaos.

A simulation of space ice. The white fragments are ordered molecules in crystalline structures while the blue parts are disordered molecules.

Illustration: Courtesy of the ICE Group, University of Cambridge

To reach this conclusion, the team first ran computer models of water molecules subjected to temperature changes at different rates, simulating the creation of ice in space. They then compared this with the results of lab experiments to produce actual amorphous ice. Water vapor was passed over an extremely cold slab to become ice, with no liquid state occurring in between, a process similar to what happens in a planetary system at birth. A partially amorphous material was produced, whose structure most closely matched a simulation from the models that comprised 20 percent crystalline material and 80 percent amorphous ice.

“We now have a good idea of what the most common form of ice in the universe looks like at the atomic level,” said Michael B. Davies, part of the ICE Group at the University of Cambridge and a coauthor of the study, in a statement.

Knowing the structure of space ice is important for interrogating the speculative idea of panspermia, a hypothesis that life on Earth originated through compounds or “seeds” of life arriving on our planet from space. If space ice is amorphous and of low density, then building blocks for life could potentially have been carried inside. If, instead, there are lots of crystalline parts, then there is less likelihood (because of less space) of this having occurred.

This story originally appeared on WIRED en Español and has been translated from Spanish.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/space-ice-structure-order-chaos/ on Jul 15, 2025 at 7:29 PM EDT.

SCIENCE | BEN BRUBAKER | JUL 13, 2025 AT 7:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

For Algorithms, Memory Is a Far More Powerful Resource Than Time

One computer scientist’s “stunning” proof is the first progress in 50 years on one of the most famous questions in computer science.

Illustration: Irene Pérez/Quanta Magazine

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine.

One July afternoon in 2024, Ryan Williams set out to prove himself wrong. Two months had passed since he’d hit upon a startling discovery about the relationship between time and memory in computing. It was a rough sketch of a mathematical proof that memory was more powerful than computer scientists believed: A small amount would be as helpful as a lot of time in all conceivable computations. That sounded so improbable that he assumed something had to be wrong, and he promptly set the proof aside to focus on less crazy ideas. Now, he’d finally carved out time to find the error.

That’s not what happened. After hours of poring over his argument, Williams couldn’t find a single flaw.

“I just thought I was losing my mind,” said Williams, a theoretical computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. For the first time, he began to entertain the possibility that maybe, just maybe, memory really was as powerful as his work suggested.

Over the months that followed, he fleshed out the details, scrutinized every step, and solicited feedback from a handful of other researchers. In February, he finally posted his proof online, to widespread acclaim.

“It’s amazing. It’s beautiful,” said Avi Wigderson, a theoretical computer scientist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. As soon as he heard the news, Wigderson sent Williams a congratulatory email. Its subject line: “You blew my mind.”

Time and memory (also called space) are the two most fundamental resources in computation: Every algorithm takes some time to run and requires some space to store data while it’s running. Until now, the only known algorithms for accomplishing certain tasks required an amount of space roughly proportional to their run time, and researchers had long assumed there’s no way to do better. Williams’ proof established a mathematical procedure for transforming any algorithm—no matter what it does—into a form that uses much less space.

Ryan Williams stunned his colleagues with a milestone proof about the relationship between time and space in computation.Photograph: Katherine Taylor for Quanta Magazine

What’s more, this result—a statement about what you can compute given a certain amount of space—also implies a second result, about what you cannot compute in a certain amount of time. This second result isn’t surprising in itself: Researchers expected it to be true, but they had no idea how to prove it. Williams’ solution, based on his sweeping first result, feels almost cartoonishly excessive, akin to proving a suspected murderer guilty by establishing an ironclad alibi for everyone else on the planet. It could also offer a new way to attack one of the oldest open problems in computer science.

“It’s a pretty stunning result, and a massive advance,” said Paul Beame, a computer scientist at the University of Washington. “It’s a little bit less of a surprise that it’s Ryan doing this.”

Space to Roam

Williams, 46, has an open, expressive face and a hint of gray in his hair. His office, which looks out over the colorful spires of MIT’s Stata Center, is another illustration of the creative use of space. A pair of yoga mats have transformed a window ledge into a makeshift reading nook, and the desk is tucked into an oddly shaped corner, freeing up room for a couch facing a large whiteboard brimming with mathematical scribblings.

MIT is a long way from Williams’ childhood home in rural Alabama, where there was no shortage of space. He grew up on a 50-acre farm and first saw a computer at age 7, when his mother drove him across the county for a special academic enrichment class. He recalled being transfixed by a simple program for generating a digital fireworks display.

“It was taking a random color and sending it in a random direction from the middle of the monitor,” Williams said. “You couldn’t have predicted what picture you’re going to get.” The world of computers seemed a wild and wonderful playground, full of infinite possibilities. Young Williams was hooked.

“I was writing programs to myself, on paper, to be run on a future computer,” he said. “My parents didn’t really know what to do with me.”

Williams’ office, like his new result, makes creative use of space.Photograph: Katherine Taylor for Quanta Magazine

As he grew older, Williams advanced from imaginary computers to real ones. For his last two years of high school, he transferred to the Alabama School of Math and Science, a prestigious public boarding school, where he first encountered the theoretical side of computer science.

“I realized that there was a wider world of things out there, and that there was a way to think mathematically about computers,” he said. “That’s what I wanted to do.”

Williams was especially drawn to a branch of theoretical computer science called computational complexity theory. It deals with the resources (such as time and space) that are needed to solve computational problems such as sorting lists or factoring numbers. Most problems can be solved by many different algorithms, each with its own demands on time and space. Complexity theorists sort problems into categories, called complexity classes, based on the resource demands of the best algorithms for solving them—that is, the algorithms that run fastest or use the least amount of space.

But how do you make the study of computational resources mathematically rigorous? You won’t get far if you try to analyze time and space by comparing minutes to megabytes. To make any progress, you need to start with the right definitions.

Getting Resourceful

Those definitions emerged from the work of Juris Hartmanis, a pioneering computer scientist who had experience making do with limited resources. He was born in 1928 into a prominent Latvian family, but his childhood was disrupted by the outbreak of World War II. Occupying Soviet forces arrested and executed his father, and after the war Hartmanis finished high school in a refugee camp. He went on to university, where he excelled even though he couldn’t afford textbooks.

“I compensated by taking very detailed notes in lectures,” he recalled in a 2009 interview. “There is a certain advantage to [having] to improvise and overcome difficulties.” Hartmanis immigrated to the United States in 1949, and worked a series of odd jobs—building agricultural machinery, manufacturing steel and even serving as a butler—while studying mathematics at the University of Kansas City. He went on to a spectacularly successful career in the young field of theoretical computer science.

In 1960, while working at the General Electric research laboratory in Schenectady, New York, Hartmanis met Richard Stearns, a graduate student doing a summer internship. In a pair of groundbreaking papers they established precise mathematical definitions for time and space. These definitions gave researchers the language they needed to compare the two resources and sort problems into complexity classes.

In the 1960s, Juris Hartmanis established the definitions that computer scientists use to analyze space and time.Courtesy of the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library

One of the most important classes goes by the humble name “P.” Roughly speaking, it encompasses all problems that can be solved in a reasonable amount of time. An analogous complexity class for space is dubbed “PSPACE.”

The relationship between these two classes is one of the central questions of complexity theory. Every problem in P is also in PSPACE, because fast algorithms just don’t have enough time to fill up much space in a computer’s memory. If the reverse statement were also true, the two classes would be equivalent: Space and time would have comparable computational power. But complexity theorists suspect that PSPACE is a much larger class, containing many problems that aren’t in P. In other words, they believe that space is a far more powerful computational resource than time. This belief stems from the fact that algorithms can use the same small chunk of memory over and over, while time isn’t as forgiving—once it passes, you can’t get it back.

“The intuition is just so simple,” Williams said. “You can reuse space, but you can’t reuse time.”

But intuition isn’t good enough for complexity theorists: They want rigorous proof. To prove that PSPACE is larger than P, researchers would have to show that for some problems in PSPACE, fast algorithms are categorically impossible. Where would they even start?

A Space Odyssey

As it happened, they started at Cornell University, where Hartmanis moved in 1965 to head the newly established computer science department. Under his leadership it quickly became a center of research in complexity theory, and in the early 1970s, a pair of researchers there, John Hopcroft and Wolfgang Paul, set out to establish a precise link between time and space.

Hopcroft and Paul knew that to resolve the P versus PSPACE problem, they’d have to prove that you can’t do certain computations in a limited amount of time. But it’s hard to prove a negative. Instead, they decided to flip the problem on its head and explore what you can do with limited space. They hoped to prove that algorithms given a certain space budget can solve all the same problems as algorithms with a slightly larger time budget. That would indicate that space is at least slightly more powerful than time—a small but necessary step toward showing that PSPACE is larger than P.

With that goal in mind, they turned to a method that complexity theorists call simulation, which involves transforming existing algorithms into new ones that solve the same problems, but with different amounts of space and time. To understand the basic idea, imagine you’re given a fast algorithm for alphabetizing your bookshelf, but it requires you to lay out your books in dozens of small piles. You might prefer an approach that takes up less space in your apartment, even if it takes longer. A simulation is a mathematical procedure you could use to get a more suitable algorithm: Feed it the original, and it’ll give you a new algorithm that saves space at the expense of time.

Algorithm designers have long studied these space-time trade-offs for specific tasks like sorting. But to establish a general relationship between time and space, Hopcroft and Paul needed something more comprehensive: a space-saving simulation procedure that works for every algorithm, no matter what problem it solves. They expected this generality to come at a cost. A universal simulation can’t exploit the details of any specific problem, so it probably won’t save as much space as a specialized simulation. But when Hopcroft and Paul started their work, there were no known universal methods for saving space at all. Even saving a small amount would be progress.

The breakthrough came in 1975, after Hopcroft and Paul teamed up with a young researcher named Leslie Valiant. The trio devised a universal simulation procedure that always saves a bit of space. No matter what algorithm you give it, you’ll get an equivalent one whose space budget is slightly smaller than the original algorithm’s time budget.

“Anything you can do in so much time, you can also do in slightly less space,” Valiant said. It was the first major step in the quest to connect space and time.

In 1975, Leslie Valiant helped prove that space is a slightly more powerful computational resource than time.Photograph: Katherine Taylor for Quanta Magazine

But then progress stalled, and complexity theorists began to suspect that they’d hit a fundamental barrier. The problem was precisely the universal character of Hopcroft, Paul and Valiant’s simulation. While many problems can be solved with much less space than time, some intuitively seemed like they’d need nearly as much space as time. If so, more space-efficient universal simulations would be impossible. Paul and two other researchers soon proved that they are indeed impossible, provided you make one seemingly obvious assumption: Different chunks of data can’t occupy the same space in memory at the same time.

“Everybody took it for granted that you cannot do better,” Wigderson said.

Paul’s result suggested that resolving the P versus PSPACE problem would require abandoning simulation altogether in favor of a different approach, but nobody had any good ideas. That was where the problem stood for 50 years—until Williams finally broke the logjam.

First, he had to get through college.

Complexity Classes

In 1996, the time came for Williams to apply to colleges. He knew that pursuing complexity theory would take him far from home, but his parents made it clear that the West Coast and Canada were out of the question. Among his remaining options, Cornell stood out to him for its prominent place in the history of his favorite discipline.

“This guy Hartmanis defined the time and space complexity classes,” he recalled thinking. “That was important for me.”

Williams was admitted to Cornell with generous financial aid and arrived in the fall of 1997, planning to do whatever it took to become a complexity theorist himself. His single-mindedness stuck out to his fellow students.

“He was just super-duper into complexity theory,” said Scott Aaronson, a computer scientist at the University of Texas, Austin, who overlapped with Williams at Cornell.

Williams grew interested in the relationship between space and time as an undergraduate but never found an opportunity to work on it until last year.Photograph: Katherine Taylor for Quanta Magazine

But by sophomore year, Williams was struggling to keep up in courses that emphasized mathematical rigor over intuition. After he got a middling grade in a class on the theory of computing, the teacher suggested he consider other careers. But Williams wouldn’t give up his dream. He doubled down and enrolled in a graduate theory course, hoping that a stellar grade in the harder class would look impressive on his grad school applications. The professor teaching that graduate course was Hartmanis, by then an elder statesman in the field.

Williams began attending Hartmanis’ office hours every week, where he was almost always the only student who showed up. His tenacity paid off: he earned an A in the course, and Hartmanis agreed to advise him on an independent research project the following semester. Their weekly meetings continued throughout Williams’ time in college. Hartmanis encouraged him to cultivate an individual approach to complexity research and gently steered him away from dead ends.

“I was deeply influenced by him then,” Williams said. “I guess I still am now.”

But despite earning a coveted graduate research fellowship from the National Science Foundation, Williams was rejected by every doctoral program he applied to. On hearing the news, Hartmanis phoned a colleague, then turned around and congratulated Williams on getting accepted into a yearlong master’s program at Cornell. A year later Williams again applied to various doctoral programs, and with that extra research experience under his belt, he found success.

Williams continued working in complexity theory in grad school and the years that followed. In 2010, four years after receiving his doctorate, he proved a milestone result—a small step, but the largest in decades, toward solving the most famous question in theoretical computer science, about the nature of hard problems. That result cemented Williams’ reputation, and he went on to write dozens of other papers on different topics in complexity theory.

P versus PSPACE wasn’t one of them. Williams had been fascinated by the problem since he first encountered it in college. He’d even supplemented his computer science curriculum with courses in logic and philosophy, seeking inspiration from other perspectives on time and space, to no avail.

“It’s always been in the back of my mind,” Williams said. “I just couldn’t think of anything interesting enough to say about it.”

Last year, he finally found the opportunity he’d been waiting for.

Squishy Pebbles

The story of Williams’ new result started with progress on a different question about memory in computation: What problems can be solved with extremely limited space? In 2010, the pioneering complexity theorist Stephen Cook and his collaborators invented a task, called the tree evaluation problem, that they proved would be impossible for any algorithm with a space budget below a specific threshold. But there was a loophole. The proof relied on the same commonsense assumption that Paul and his colleagues had made decades earlier: Algorithms can’t store new data in space that’s already full.

For over a decade, complexity theorists tried to close that loophole. Then, in 2023, Cook’s son James and a researcher named Ian Mertz blew it wide open, devising an algorithm that solved the tree evaluation problem using much less space than anyone thought possible. The elder Cook’s proof had assumed that bits of data were like pebbles that have to occupy separate places in an algorithm’s memory. But it turns out that’s not the only way to store data. “We can actually think about these pebbles as things that we can squish a little bit on top of each other,” Beame said.

James Cook (left) and Ian Mertz recently devised a new algorithm that solved a specific problem using much less space than anyone thought possible.Photographs: Colin Morris; Michal Koucký

Cook and Mertz’s algorithm roused the curiosity of many researchers, but it wasn’t clear that it had any applications beyond the tree evaluation problem. “Nobody saw how central it is to time versus space itself,” Wigderson said.

Ryan Williams was the exception. In spring 2024, a group of students gave a presentation about the Cook and Mertz paper as their final project in a class he was teaching. Their enthusiasm inspired him to take a closer look. As soon as he did, an idea jumped out at him. Cook and Mertz’s method, he realized, was really a general-purpose tool for reducing space usage. Why not use it to power a new universal simulation linking time and space—like the one designed by Hopcroft, Paul and Valiant, but better?

That classic result was a way to transform any algorithm with a given time budget into a new algorithm with a slightly smaller space budget. Williams saw that a simulation based on squishy pebbles would make the new algorithm’s space usage much smaller—roughly equal to the square root of the original algorithm’s time budget. That new space-efficient algorithm would also be much slower, so the simulation was not likely to have practical applications. But from a theoretical point of view, it was nothing short of revolutionary.

For 50 years, researchers had assumed it was impossible to improve Hopcroft, Paul and Valiant’s universal simulation. Williams’ idea—if it worked—wouldn’t just beat their record—it would demolish it.

“I thought about it, and I was like, ‘Well, that just simply can’t be true,’” Williams said. He set it aside and didn’t come back to it until that fateful day in July, when he tried to find the flaw in the argument and failed. After he realized that there was no flaw, he spent months writing and rewriting the proof to make it as clear as possible.

At the end of February, Williams finally put the finished paper online. Cook and Mertz were as surprised as everyone else. “I had to go take a long walk before doing anything else,” Mertz said.

Valiant got a sneak preview of Williams’ improvement on his decades-old result during his morning commute. For years, he’s taught at Harvard University, just down the road from Williams’ office at MIT. They’d met before, but they didn’t know they lived in the same neighborhood until they bumped into each other on the bus on a snowy February day, a few weeks before the result was public. Williams described his proof to the startled Valiant and promised to send along his paper.

“I was very, very impressed,” Valiant said. “If you get any mathematical result which is the best thing in 50 years, you must be doing something right.”

PSPACE: The Final Frontier

With his new simulation, Williams had proved a positive result about the computational power of space: Algorithms that use relatively little space can solve all problems that require a somewhat larger amount of time. Then, using just a few lines of math, he flipped that around and proved a negative result about the computational power of time: At least a few problems can’t be solved unless you use more time than space. That second, narrower result is in line with what researchers expected. The weird part is how Williams got there, by first proving a result that applies to all algorithms, no matter what problems they solve.

“I still have a hard time believing it,” Williams said. “It just seems too good to be true.”

Williams used Cook and Mertz’s technique to establish a stronger link between space and time—the first progress on that problem in 50 years.Photograph: Katherine Taylor for Quanta Magazine

Phrased in qualitative terms, Williams’ second result may sound like the long-sought solution to the P versus PSPACE problem. The difference is a matter of scale. P and PSPACE are very broad complexity classes, while Williams’ results work at a finer level. He established a quantitative gap between the power of space and the power of time, and to prove that PSPACE is larger than P, researchers will have to make that gap much, much wider.

That’s a daunting challenge, akin to prying apart a sidewalk crack with a crowbar until it’s as wide as the Grand Canyon. But it might be possible to get there by using a modified version of Williams’ simulation procedure that repeats the key step many times, saving a bit of space each time. It’s like a way to repeatedly ratchet up the length of your crowbar—make it big enough, and you can pry open anything. That repeated improvement doesn’t work with the current version of the algorithm, but researchers don’t know whether that’s a fundamental limitation.

“It could be an ultimate bottleneck, or it could be a 50-year bottleneck,” Valiant said. “Or it could be something which maybe someone can solve next week.”

If the problem is solved next week, Williams will be kicking himself. Before he wrote the paper, he spent months trying and failing to extend his result. But even if such an extension is not possible, Williams is confident that more space exploration is bound to lead somewhere interesting—perhaps progress on an entirely different problem.

“I can never prove precisely the things that I want to prove,” he said. “But often, the thing I prove is way better than what I wanted.”

Editor’s note: Scott Aaronson is a member of Quanta Magazine’s advisory board.

Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent publication of the Simons Foundation whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research developments and trends in mathematics and the physical and life sciences.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/for-algorithms-a-little-memory-outweighs-a-lot-of-time/ on Jul 15, 2025 at 7:29 PM EDT.

GEAR | CARLTON REID | JUL 13, 2025 AT 6:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

What Makes a Car Lovable? It’s Not the Tech, It’s the Cup Holders

Frustration with the size, location, and design of cup holders in new cars is on the rise—and it holds enormous influence on whether we buy a ride or not.

Photo-Illustration: Wired Staff/Getty Images

Nearly 100,000 car buyers of 2025 model-year autos were asked what they thought of their gleaming new rides. The results are revealing, to say the least. Want to know who was the worst performer? That ignominy goes to Audi, with an embarrassing 269 problems reported per 100 vehicles.

However, one of the most interesting discoveries of the J.D. Power Initial Quality Study (labelled as a “key finding”, no less) concerned not annoyance with the lack of physical buttons, nor, amazingly, intrusive bongs from speed-warning systems, but a marked increase in “cup-holder frustration”.

“While it seemed like manufacturers had cup holders figured out … manufacturers are struggling to keep up with being able to accommodate all the different shapes and sizes [of containers] that are increasingly available,” says the report.

So it seems that despite the auto industry’s obsession with software-defined vehicles, many purchasers would forego any number of digital doohickeys, so long as there was enough room in their new cars for multiple Big Gulps. Paying through the nose for a fancy new car stuffed with tech—ADAS, ambient lighting, back-groping seats, dog modes—doesn’t stop auto buyers from complaining about insufficiently expandable beverage bays.

For several years, this long-running annual benchmarking report has advised car brands to pay closer attention to the cup-holder kvetching. The cylindrical voids of space—or, in some cars, flip-out trays, door spaces, fancy holsters, or hinged pockets—are still too small, gripe many of those surveyed. Too small for what, though? Most likely gargantuan Stanley cups, giant Yeti Gallon Ramblers and similar such bladder-busters, the spilt contents of which could drench a desert into bloom.

Even though center console real estate in today’s cars is at a premium—especially now that ever-bigger touchscreens have become seemingly essential in every self-respecting digital cockpit—America’s (and increasingly the Middle East and Australia's) big-drink culture dictates that automakers not scrimp on cup storage.

It’s the Little Things

Twenty years ago, a PricewaterhouseCoopers report suggested that the number of cup holders in a US vehicle was one of the most critical factors in clinching the purchase decision for potential auto buyers. That it remains just as vital today must rankle with auto software engineers, but it doesn’t surprise Chris Fischer, Nissan’s go-to engineer for cup holders. “That cup holders work well is important to customer satisfaction,” Fischer tells WIRED. “It’s a key decider when buying a car.”

Working from Nissan’s North American technical center in Farmington Hills, Michigan, Fischer is the company’s senior manager of vehicle performance development, and, along with a team of “cabin utility” engineers, he has toiled to improve in-car beverage storage since 2015, when poor cup holder performance adversely impacted Nissan’s J.D. Power benchmarking scores.

Cup-holder design matters intensely to many consumers, he says. “If they’re mad about a touchpoint every day, it’ll sour their desire to want this vehicle again.”

“Touchpoints are critically important,” agrees Dick Powell, cofounder of London-headquartered design and innovation company Seymourpowell. “Great design is fundamentally about making things better, and when you go into a car showroom, the touchpoints are the first interactions you have with the car. How does the [door] handle feel? What’s it like opening the door? Where are the cup holders?”

“The assumption [from the car buyer] is that, if the touchpoints are great, the rest of the machine will also be great,” says Powell.

Seymourpowell, founded in 1984, has worked on car interior designs, including cup holders, with several automakers over the years, and Powell confirms to WIRED that auto buyers often base their final purchase decisions on “little things” rather than the specification sheets that auto makers might think customers obsess over. “It’s not top speed, power, four-wheel drive capabilities, or any of these things, it’s the little touchpoints that really knock you out,” says Powell.

Fischer stresses that Nissan’s cabin design team sweat every detail, from seat comfort to storage, ensuring each in-car interaction feels just right. “We start super early in the car’s design process when everything is still a sketch,” says Fischer.

Testing—initially virtual—is the best way to maximize compatibility, using cups, cans, travel mugs, tumblers, and vacuum flasks from various sources and in different sizes, ranging from espresso to grande and beyond, even to today’s almost bucket-sized containers. “We work hard to fit large Hydro Flask-size bottles in the doors, making sure even the largest bottles fit with ease,” says Fischer.

The Dog Bone Space

But how does an espresso cup stay securely grasped in the same holder as a grande? Fischer says this is achieved with spring-loaded plastic tabs that adjust to varying diameters. And mugs fit in what Fischer calls the “dog bone” space, a center console double cup holder now cut with a seemingly superfluous channel that was designed as a slot for mug handles.

Fischer pays keen attention to the monthly info drop from J.D. Power. “We’re always looking at data; we’re the voice of the customer,” he says. “People love as many cup holders as possible. If space were no issue, we’d add another couple in the center console.”

Hold my beer can, says Subaru. The company’s Ascent SUV features a market-leading 19 cup and bottle holders (that's nearly three for every human it can carry)—several of which are cleverly concealed—and, if Facebook love is anything to go by, such liquid storage largesse is what attracts many consumers to this particular model.

America’s need for copious, and now voluminous, cup holders went mainstream with the advent of minivans in the mid-1980s. However, the first cup-holder patent was granted to a Texas inventor 30 or so years prior, in 1953. Burnard W. Byford’s “automobile seat article holder” design had been filed four years earlier, in 1949. It consisted of a hinged tray that could be folded down from the rear seat of a car, intended for use at rest by passengers rather than the driver.

He surmised in his patent application that those who rode in what he called “pleasure cars” would appreciate a “seat attachment having facilities for conveniently supporting and holding a nursing bottle, bottle containing a soft drink, a glass full of water, a package of cigarettes, and so on.”

“I am aware,” he continued, “that curb-service attendants supply detachable door trays for use at roadside restaurants.” (Indeed, in 1934, he had patented such an external tray.) Undaunted, he predicted, “there is a definite need for a suitable holder such as may be laid or placed upon the seat adjacent to the user.”

The year before Byford filed his patent, Citroën introduced the 2CV, which, despite its diminutive Gallic footprint, had a door pocket designed wide enough to swallow a wine bottle. But, quelle horreur, the “tin snail,” as was the period norm, sported no other specifically designed liquid storage options.

The Adam Cup Holder

The first cup holders in a mass-market vehicle had to wait until 1984, when rudimentary depressions appeared in Chrysler’s Plymouth Voyager. Not grippy from the get-go, these ancestor cup holders were, however, the start on the road to better, deeper designs to come.

Of course, whether shallow or deep, not everyone puts cups in their cup holders. Some fill them instead with coins, phones, keys and other odds and ends; when not spreading stickiness from juice boxes, children often place toys in theirs; Tishoo makes a cylindrical box of tissues entirely designed for cup-holder deployment; and Keep Technologies sells a cup-shaped cellular-connected alarm-and-camera gizmo that supposedly turns a center console cup holder into a sensor-laden “security guard” complete with siren and flashing lights.

Those in their rolling living rooms who use cup holders for their intended design understandably want drinks to be close to hand. However, as the average American spends about 50 minutes commuting by car each day, there’s time for drinks to lose or gain heat, automakers started fitting warming and chilling cup holders. Chrysler’s 300C sedan came with these as standard in 2011, three years before Tesla got all the kudos for doing the same.

“You’d be amazed how much technology goes into producing today’s car seats, center consoles and, yes, even cup holders,” says Paris-based Edouard Da Silva, vice president of the cockpit of the future division at auto interiors maker Forvia, which supplies cabin essentials—from massaging chairs through to heat-controlling cup holders—to many of the world’s leading car makers, including the increasingly dominating Chinese brands.

The beverage-holding arms race was won some years ago, say some, by the Euclidean contortions of the slide-out cup holster in the Saab 9-3, but, clever though that was, it didn’t solve the spillage problem. Open cups and cans, whose liquids slosh from side to side in moving vehicles, easily shed their contents; hence, the in-car need for plastic lids on takeaway cups and straws on vacuum tumblers.

A no-spill solution was invented 11 years ago by Maksim Ghyvoronsky of Seattle. His Maksimatic cup holder of 2014 featured a self-leveling design that prevented drinks from spilling. His cup holders pivoted freely, keeping liquids level—without caps or lids—even on steep hills, or when braking hard or turning sharp corners. Yet despite the apparent need for such a clever design, Ghyvoronsky failed to raise enough crowdfunding for his product at the time, and 10 years later, he came up short again.

Nor have any automotive cup-holder specialists bought his patent. Not even Matikon of Germany, a leading car interiors manufacturer, which makes for Audi through to Xpeng, but which declined to comment for this article. According to Matikon’s website, the company makes cup holders designed around the principles of kinematics, the geometrical study of the motion of physical objects independent of the forces that set them in motion.

Ghyvoronsky’s tilting cup holder would have allowed the open carry of liquids in cars—or even on motorbikes, and for which there are a variety of gyroscopic holders on Walmart, Amazon and Temu—but perhaps his design failed because some people still prefer to suck from a teat? Cultural anthropologist and marketing consultant G. Clotaire Rapaille once likened the desire for the hand-to-mouth comfort of capped car drinking to breast-feeding. “What was the key element of safety when you were a child? It was that your mother fed you, and there was warm liquid,” he told The Tipping Point author Malcolm Gladwell in 2004. “That’s why cup holders are absolutely crucial for safety. If there is a car that has no cup holder, it is not safe. If I can put my coffee there, if everything is round, if it’s soft, and if I’m high [off the ground in my SUV], then I feel safe.”

That’s apparent not real safety, says Steven Kyffin, a former dean of design and pro vice-chancellor at Northumbria University in the UK. “Should we really be designing cars to facilitate food and drink while driving?” he asks. Instead, he advises WIRED, “automotive interiors should encourage attentiveness, not multitasking.”

While he frowns on the use of cup holders, he acknowledges their design chops. “Cup holders are part of the domestication of the automobile,” Kyffin says. They transform cars “from tools of transport into comfortable, private zones, which enable seamless changes in context and role.” And those who design cup holders “must factor in not merely the practical ergonomics of driving but also all the physical, emotional, and psychological aspects of such a change in role, particularly reach-and-glance time.”

The design and placement of automotive cup holders could be set to change soon, with auto suppliers such as Forvia and others working on commercializing what were previously concept car cabins. They are banking on the move toward self-driving accelerating the expectation that, in the near future, unencumbered by the need to actually pilot cars we'll need even more places to store cups as drivers become passengers and get time to sit back and enjoy a thoroughly hydrated ride.

For now, however, while we wait for the future of autonomous automotive beverage berths to arrive, Chinese brands (of course) look to be leading the liquid way—Li Auto's L6 Max comes with an 8.8-liter compartment capable of cooling drinks down to a frosty 0°C (32°F), or heating them to 50°C (122°F). Still, at least Lexus has solved the Stanley cup in-car quandary once and for all.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/cup-holders-not-tech-makes-cars-lovable/ on Jul 15, 2025 at 7:29 PM EDT.

CULTURE | GERALDINE CASTRO | JUL 13, 2025 AT 5:30 AM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

These LGBTQ+ Archives Defy Erasure, One Memory at a Time

In Latin America, LGBTQ+ history collections are a form of resistance. Grassroots projects are using the memories of community members to fight against systematic violence and demand justice.

Trans Memory Archive of Argentina

Being queer, often, means feeling unseen. “We come from a history of erasure that is manifested not only through hate crimes and discrimination but also through a lack of representation, symbolic violence, and the absence of legal protections,” says André Mere Rivera, director of the Queer Memory Archive of Peru (Archivo de la Memoria Marica del Perú).

The project Mere leads is part of a growing wave of collaborative projects in which Latin American LGBTQ+ communities preserve and share their struggles and triumphs. They digitize photos, collect testimonies, and build databases of letters, personal memories, and other items that have survived dictatorships, censorship, and stigma.

Community members scour libraries and newspapers, and dive deep into other, more conventional, archives to show how their identities have been denied. They are also reinventing the idea of a family album, creating alternative ones based on networks of affection. In their hands, technology is used to preserve memory, care for communities, and demand justice even as old prejudices are being reignited with the rise of far-right rhetoric.

In Argentina, trans women like Sofia Beatriz Hernández fight for the rights of their community and to assure it is recognized.

Trans Memory Archive of Argentina

Sonia Beatriz Hernández never imagined she would one day be using a computer to digitize memories that included her. A transgender woman and a senior citizen, she learned everything she knows about being an archivist at her current job. Hernández is part of the Trans Memory Archive of Argentina (Archivo de la Memoria Trans Argentina), an initiative that not only preserves the history of gender and sexual dissidence, but has also inspired others throughout Latin America and the Caribbean to create their own collections.

“The archive was born out of the need to find each other and know that we are alive,” says María Belén Correa, founder and director of the Trans Memory Archive, the largest project of its kind in the region. It’s a space that brings together the past struggles and current demands of trans communities.

“Creating an archive is a way of situating ourselves, of showing that we are here, and that we have always been here,” says Queer Memory Archive of Peru’s Mere. “We are not all the same, we are not mere bodies, nor are we an idea imported from abroad. We have been here since the homoerotic huacos [ceramic representations of homosexual intercourse created by the ancient Moche and Chimu cultures of Peru]. We have lived and continue to live through situations that are heartbreaking and that demand justice. Hate crimes must not go unpunished and reparations must be made.”

For Aldri Covarrubias, manager of the Transmasculine Memory Archive of Mexico (Archivo de la Memoria Transmasculina México), this struggle is still ongoing: “The uniformity that cisheterosexuality seeks to impose is not real. Memory is not a nostalgic aspect of the past; it must serve as a tool in building a path to a place with room for everyone.”

LGBTQ+ archives in Latin America provide glimpses of daily life, from activist efforts to intimate moments.

Trans Memory Archive of Argentina

The wave that began in Argentina challenges the very notion of a shared heritage. Those who are exploring new ways of archiving collective memories today are searching to give voice, both privately and publicly, to what has long been silenced or stigmatized. Their efforts break with simplistic and heteronormative representations of gender, reclaim what has been hidden, and denounce the systematic persecution of their identities.

“The vision for the archive began with Claudia Pía Baudracco, who spent her entire life collecting material: letters, film negatives, postcards, and souvenirs from her travels throughout Argentina, the rest of Latin America, and Europe,” recalls María Belén.

Carolina Nastri, the lead archivist of the project, says that Pía was a pioneering trans activist and a leader in the fight for Argentina’s Gender Identity Law. She died months before it was enacted in 2012. Her collection of items capturing personal and collective memories ended up in the hands of Belén, a fellow activist and cofounder of the Association of Transvestites, Transsexuals, and Transgender People of Argentina.

Starting with that box of memories, Belén organized several exhibitions.

“We look to the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo as a model,” María Belén says. The organization was founded in 1977 to locate children kidnapped during the Argentinian military dictatorship which lasted from 1976 to 1983. “It began to build an archive in a context where the state had taken it upon itself to destroy all evidence of its crimes. They did so by turning to the memories of those who survived.”

The digitization work of the archives allows stories and images to be shared in different formats and in different countries.

Trans Memory Archive of Argentina

The Trans Memory Archive of Argentina started as a closed Facebook group where friends from the 1980s and 1990s could reconnect. It was successful and the digital space was soon filled with anecdotes, letters, and chronicles. Then, photographer Ceci Estalles proposed “expanding it beyond anecdotes,” says Nastri.

The big leap forward was the exhibition This One Left, This One Was Killed, This One Died (Esta Se Fue, a Esta La Mataron, Esta Murió), featuring intimate portraits of friends in prison, exile, or otherwise absent. Soon after, the archive’s team started to dream of building a bigger presence.

Today, Nastri works with the archive's managers, who are generally older adult witnesses to the community’s history, as they archive, conserve, and digitize documents. For them, going to work is an act of resistance. In Argentina, 9,000 people (as of 2021) have amended their national identity documents to reflect their gender identity. People between the ages of 40 and 79 accounted for only 17 percent of that figure with those over the age of 60 accounting for just 4 percent.

The Trans Memory Archive of Argentina holds more than 100 documentary collections with 25,000 items dating from 1930 to the early 2000s: photos, film, audio recordings, letters, brochures, posters, press releases, police files, magazine articles, identity documents, and personal diaries. Their work is self-financed through projects, book sales, and monthly contributions.

On the website, there are images from childhood, exile, activism, letters and postcards, carnival celebrations, private parties, birthdays, sex work, everyday life, shows, portraits, as well as ones from people’s professional lives. The documentary archive that Pia created now lives alongside 40 other similar archives in Latin America.

At the end of June, during Argentina’s winter, Hernández tells me in a video call that future generations must know about the repression they experienced. Her generation survived persecution and harassment from the police during the dictatorship. Without this archive, Nastri believes that not only would a crucial part of history be lost, but many moments of joy would also be forgotten. “Something that this community has are strong family bonds,” she says. “They have a tragic history but it’s shared in a very joyful way.”

The Trans Memory Archive of Argentina organization receives materials documenting the community’s history both as donations and loans.

Trans Memory Archive of Argentina

Covarrubias affectionately calls the staff at the Trans Memory Archive his “Argentinian mothers and grandmothers.” They led him to a realization that since an archive like it didn’t exist in Mexico, he’d have to be the one to build it. “It was essential to find others like us. There are fewer works on transmasculinity than on any other gender identity,” he says. Tired of only seeing texts from the global north, he decided to look closer to home. This is how the first Transmasculine Memory Archive (Archivo de la Memoria Transmasculina) in Mexico was born.

Two years later, the Spanish-language collection has grown to eight boxes filled with fanzines, flyers, photographs, graphic art, and 50 books. It includes interviews with drag artists, writers, bike messengers, researchers, sex workers, biologists, and retirees.

Covarrubias emphasizes that he understands the limits of the archive. “We’re not going to cover everything,” he says while expressing a desire that the effort doesn’t end with the archive he has helped to build. He hopes other local archives will preserve the history of other communities in other parts of the country.

Aldri collects and preserves memorabilia while also always pursuing new opportunities to add more material to the archive. In libraries and other official collections, he searches for “the unsaid and the overlooked.” When efforts to silence certain stories have spanned decades, it can be like looking for a needle in a haystack. “We’ve had more luck at flea markets, gathering oral memories, and talking to survivors,” he says. “We may not always find something, but it’s important that we look.”

“I’m not an archivist or a historian,” says Mere of the Queer Memory Archive of Peru. It is a sentiment repeated by many who are involved with these archives. It is said not as a humble excuse, but instead as part of a call to imagine what a different approach, free from the limitations of academia, might look like. They are asking fundamental questions: What is archiving? Who is doing the archiving? For whom is the archive being created? Mere shares that he, too, was inspired by the work of the archive in Argentina.

At the archive in Argentina, publications are created so members of the community can share their memories while helping to finance the project.

Archivo de la Memoria Trans Argentina

Peru's archive began with official documents about LGBTQ+ life that Mere had gathered. He then wrote to his friends asking them to share items they had published. Today, they have books, flyers, posters, leaflets, pins, booklets, embroidery, and works by queer artists such as Javi Vargas, which address HIV, power, and authority. They also have preserved costumes from a short film and memorabilia from a festival with the slogan “Make Peru Gay Again.”

Mere directs the archive, while Fernando Correa coordinates the research and oversees the methodology of interviews they have conducted to document certain places and moments in the history of the community.

“Talking about memories can be a sensitive topic in communities like ours, which are often impacted by violence. Many memories revolve around the violence we have experienced and continue to experience, from discrimination and murders to misrepresentations in the media, but our memories are also our relationships, the bonds of our communities, and our actions caring for one another,” says Mere.

At Argentina’s Trans Memory Archive, the work of the trans women who catalog its materials grows every day. The items are varied: Some are virtual, some physical, and some hybrid. All of them are centered on a collective memory, including interviews with trans people in different formats.

“The landscape begins to change when we have access to archival tools and then train people to create other similar spaces throughout Latin America,” Belén says.

At times when dissenting voices have been silenced, the archive preserves them for future generations.

Archivo de la Memoria Trans Argentina

From another part of the southern end of South America, other artistic exercises in memory are emerging, such as Felipe Rivas San Martín’s The Inexistent Archive (Archivo Inexistente). The Chilean artist used artificial intelligence to construct a speculative album of LGBTQ+ couples from the working class of Abya Yala (an indigenous name for the Americas) using fiction to highlight and overcome the challenges created by the lack of records at the beginning of the 20th century.

The Queer Memory Archive of Peru, together with WikiAcción Perú, organized training sessions about using Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons to create entries and upload images of marches, role models, and community events. It also works with the organization Ruta Colectiva on a long-term pride mapping project: a map of community centers, nightclubs, hospitals, churches, and other spaces that are or have been significant to the community. A similar initiative is hosted on the website of Brazil’s Bajubá Museum where a collaborative map highlights locations related to LGBTQ+ cultural heritage.

But it is in disseminating the research they have collected that technological advances are more important in this new archival wave. This was clear at the First Latin American Trans Archives Congress, which brought together 21 self-managed projects from 14 countries in the region.

Many projects use social media to share materials, events, and profiles, as well as to showcase their processes, social demands, and achievements. At the same time, harassment and censorship also occur on social media. It is more common, Covarrubias adds, for transmasculine bodies to be censored than cisgender bodies.

Materials from the archive were used to create a book that resembles a family photo album.

Archivo de la Memoria Trans Argentina

Beyond the collection of archival material and the use of new technology to preserve and share personal stories, the archives understand their place in the context of daily life. Sometimes it's more necessary to focus on material needs—rent, a surgery, hormones for a friend—than it is to buy a book.

Nastri shares that in Argentina, there are demands for legislation to provide reparations to transgender people, granting them the right to comprehensive healthcare so they can age with dignity. “For many years, even under democratic rule, they did not have the same rights as the rest of the population,” Nastri says. “They couldn’t go to school under the names they identified with, they couldn’t work, they were displaced, and they had to find ways to survive in the face of state persecution.”

“They explain that certain aspects of the current repression and censorship that these communities face recall ones that they experienced when they were younger,” she adds.

Covarrubias points out that “in many contexts there is a need to fight for social, restorative, epistemological, and communicative justice. Fascist discourses are resurfacing around the world, and they aren’t always as transparent about their goals as the Proud Boys. Fascism often takes on subtle forms.”

No matter how small the effort, these organizations’ commitment to visibility and recording the history of their communities is inextricably tied to demands for justice. In the last three years, the organization Letra S reported that there were 233 murders of people of diverse sexual and gender identities in Mexico: 87 in 2022, 66 in 2023, and 80 in 2024.

In Peru the situation is also dire. The feminist lesbian organization LIFS has documented 78 murders of LGBTQ+ people in that country between 2014 and 2020. Currently, Peru doesn’t recognize same-sex marriage. “The case of Las Gardenias [an LGBTQ+ bar where eight patrons were assassinated in 1989] which took place during Peru’s long war against leftist guerrillas, is the only one addressed by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, but it was not the only violent attack from that period,” Mere notes. “People had to flee, change their identities, leave their families, and reimagine their lives. That is a type of violence to which we have been exposed and for which we have not received any kind of redress.”

“If a place to record our collective memories becomes a museum that merely stores things that belonged to us, but it doesn’t share them and it isn’t proactive in terms of shaping public policy for these vulnerable communities, then it’s just an empty monument,” Mere says.

This article was originally published by Wired en Español. It was translated by John Newton.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/lgbtq-archives-defy-erasure-one-memory-at-a-time/ on Jul 15, 2025 at 7:30 PM EDT.

SCIENCE | SHIGEYUKI HANDO | JUL 13, 2025 AT 5:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

Everything We Know About the Interstellar Object 3I/ATLAS

A team of astronomers recently discovered the traveling space object, just the third of its kind to pass through our solar system.

ILLUSTRATION: NASA/JPL-CALTECH

On July 2, NASA revealed the existence of 3I/ATLAS, only the third ever interstellar object observed in the universe. These are objects that exist in interstellar space—the areas between stars—and which are not gravitationally bound to any star. The two other interstellar objects discovered to date are the comets 1I/ʻOumuamua and 2I/Borisov.

3I/ATLAS was discovered on July 1, when its existence was reported by a telescope at Rio Hurtado in Chile, operated by the Asteroid Terrestrial Impact Alert System. Known commonly as ATLAS, this is a NASA-funded system developed and operated by the University of Hawaii to detect asteroids that could potentially hit Earth. It uses four telescopes—two in Hawaii, one in Chile, and one in South Africa—to automatically scan the entire sky several times each night to monitor celestial movements.

An illustration of 1I/ʻOumuamua, which was the first ever interstellar object discovered in October 2017. It is thought to be up to 400 meters long and cigar-shaped.

Illustration: ESA/Hubble, NASA, ESO, M. Kornmesser

An image of 2I/Borisov, the second interstellar object discovered in August 2019. It is thought to be about 975 meters in diameter and moving at 177,000 km/h.

PHOTOGRAPH: NASA/ESA/D. JEWITT (UCLA)

Archived data collected in the preceding weeks by ATLAS' three other telescopes, as well as by the Zwicky Sky Facility at the Palomar Observatory, operated by the California Institute of Technology, confirmed the discovery. Additional observations of 3I/ATLAS were then made by numerous telescopes around the world, gradually revealing more details about it.

Observations of 3I/ATLAS taken by the ATLAS telescope in Chile.

Photograph: ATLAS/University of Hawaii/NASA

3I/ATLAS is estimated to be, at most, about 20 kilometers in size. It is currently located about 670 million kilometers from the sun and is approaching our star from the direction of Sagittarius at a speed of about 61 km per second. Its speed is expected to increase as it approaches the sun.

When astronomers studied its orbit, they found that 3I/ATLAS was moving too fast to be bound by the sun’s gravity and so will head straight through the solar system and into interstellar space, never to be seen again.

An animation of 3I/ATLAS created using observations made by the ATLAS telescope at Rio Ultado in Chile.

Video: ATLAS/UNIVERSITY OF HAWAII/NASA

Generally, celestial bodies are named after their discoverers, but in the case of 3I/ATLAS, it was named after the ATLAS research team. The “I” stands for “interstellar,” indicating that the object came from outside the solar system; the “3” was added to the name because it is the third interstellar object discovered.

The object was was uncovered because ATLAS initially identified it as something that might be on a possible collision path with Earth, but NASA says there is no risk of the object hitting our planet. Even when 3I/ATLAS is closest to Earth, it will be about 240 million kilometers away.

An animation of 3I/ATLAS observations made on July 2 by astronomers at the Near Earth Object Coordination Center, a division of the Planetary Defence Office of the European Space Agency.

Video: ESA/LAS CUMBRES OBSERVATORY

3I/ATLAS will be visible using ground-based telescopes until September. It will then enter the inner orbit of Mars in late October and will be hidden in the sun’s shadow when it passes our star at its closest point, making it impossible to observe from Earth. However, it will reappear from the sun’s shadow in early December and become visible again.

3I/ATLAS is an active comet, which means that as it gets close to the sun and heats up, the ice in its nucleus could sublimate and form a nebula-like cloud of gas and dust called a coma—otherwise known as a tail.

Because 3I/ATLAS is an object that came from outside the solar system, it may provide valuable data about objects that exist in the further reaches of space. For this reason, astronomers around the world are now paying close attention to it.

This story originally appeared on WIRED Japan and has been translated from Japanese.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/heres-what-we-know-about-the-third-interstellar-object-in-history/ on Jul 15, 2025 at 7:30 PM EDT.

Table of Contents

Wired Daily Edition: 2025 Jul 15

All articles

I Tried Grok’s Built-In Anime Companion and It Called Me a Twat

Thinking Machines Lab Raises a Record $2 Billion, Announces Cofounders

The FBI's Jeffrey Epstein Prison Video Had Nearly 3 Minutes Cut Out

Tech Billionaires Back Erebor in the Wake of Silicon Valley Bank Collapse

This Guy Attached 21 Chef’s Knives to a Slicing Robot Arm to Determine Which One Is Best

The Enshittification of American Power

It's Not Just Epstein. MAGA Is Angry About a Lot of Things

GM’s Final EV Battery Strategy Copies China’s Playbook: Super Cheap Cells

AI 'Nudify' Websites Are Raking in Millions of Dollars

The Structure of Ice in Space Is Neither Order nor Chaos—It’s Both

For Algorithms, Memory Is a Far More Powerful Resource Than Time

What Makes a Car Lovable? It's Not the Tech, It's the Cup Holders

These LGBTQ+ Archives Defy Erasure, One Memory at a Time

Everything We Know About the Interstellar Object 3I/ATLAS