WIRED UK

AN AUTHENTIC ICON Roberto Frankenberg photographed French eco-activist Léna Lazare, and found it an exciting—and delicate—experience: “I was thrilled to work with someone young, committed, and well-versed in environmental issues. Her reserved nature added a layer of authenticity to the shoot, as I had to work with the introspective and contemplative side of her personality. The challenge lay in balancing my wish to capture Lena’s beauty and mystery with the need to maintain an authentic representation of her values.” SNAP HAPPY Christopher L. Proctor shoots medtech innovator Roeland Decorte for the Start section this issue: “Often, you arrive on set hoping you’ll keep your sitter happy throughout, and it’s not too often you get an ‘I’m absolutely loving this!’ minutes into the session. We had a few visual options to chase down and…

Satellites go through a lot. As they hurtle around our planet at up to 17,000 miles an hour they must cope with the extreme vacuum of space and vast temperature swings, all while trying to precisely train their antennas back to Earth. And that’s after launch, during which they’ll be shaken like a can of paint and blasted with deafening noise. To get them ready for this ordeal, all satellites are painstakingly tested before dispatch, ensuring every loose bolt is tightened and all the electrics are in exquisite working order. That used to require trips to multiple locations for different tests, but in the UK, the newly opened National Satellite Test Facility (NSTF) in Oxfordshire offers a full satellite health-check under one roof. “The industry said they needed a onestop-shop where they…

Roeland Decorte grew up in a nursing home in Belgium, where he learned to spot the subtle early signs of mental decline in small changes to how residents walked or talked. When he was 11, Decorte’s father, who owned and managed the care home, started waking up in the night with chest pains and an overwhelming sense of impending doom. He went to two doctors, who briefly listened to his heartbeat through their stethoscopes and diagnosed him with anxiety. But the symptoms persisted, and it was only after a full set of scans at a private hospital that a third doctor uncovered a tiny hole in between the left and right chambers of his heart. If left unnoticed, it would have killed him—he was 39. Disaster averted, the young Decorte was able…

Although this image wouldn’t look out of place on a gallery wall alongside other splashy works of abstract art, it represents something very real: a 1-cubic-millimeter chunk of a woman’s brain, removed during a procedure to treat her for epilepsy. Researchers at Harvard University stained the sample with heavy metals, embedded it in resin, cut it into slices approximately 34 nanometers thick, then scanned each slice with an electron microscope. Machine-learning experts at Google then used AI to turn the 2D images into a 3D interactive “cell atlas.” Even this small fraction of the 3D reconstruction is astonishing in its detail, revealing an estimated 57,000 cells and 150 million synapses. It shows cells that unexpectedly wrap around themselves, pairs of neurons that seem like mirror reflections of each other, and…

Billy Restey is a digital artist who runs a studio in Seattle. But after hours, he hunts for rare chunks of bitcoin. “It’s like collecting Magic: The Gathering or Pokémon cards,” says Restey. “It’s that excitement of, like, what if I catch something rare?” In the same way a dollar is made up of 100 cents, one bitcoin is comprised of 100 million satoshis—or sats, for short. But not all sats are made equal. Those produced in the year bitcoin was created are considered vintage, like a fine wine. Other sats were part of transactions made by bitcoin’s inventor. Some correspond with a particular transaction milestone. These and various other properties make some sats more scarce than others—and therefore more valuable. The very rarest can sell for tens of millions of…

Roman Pohorilyi was 22 when he started tracking Russian troop movements near Ukraine’s border. It was the autumn of 2021 and he and a childhood friend, Ruslan Mykula, had been sharing foreign affairs news to an audience of about 200 subscribers on a Telegram channel. It was just a hobby for them. Neither imagined that a year later their country would be in a state of absolute war with Russia, and that their hobby, which they called Deep State, would be tracking every aspect of it. Although Deep State started as a news channel, it has become most famous for its open access map that charts the shifting front line of Russia’s invasion, and which has become a crucial tool for Ukrainians to keep track of the conflict that once threatened…