It’s Not Sci-Fi—NASA Is Funding These Mind-Blowing Projects

PLUS: Easily Distracted? You Need to Think Like a Medieval Monk, and more.

View this email in your browser  |  Manage newsletter preferences 01.25.23 Your weekly roundup of the best stories on health care, the climate crisis, genetic engineering, robotics, space, and more. For all our science coverage, visit WIRED Science.   It's Not Sci-Fi—NASA Is Funding These Mind-Blowing Projects GALAXY BRAIN | 5-MINUTE READ  The space agency gave money to researchers working on liquid telescope mirrors, a lunar oxygen pipeline, and Martian building blocks made of fungi. By Ramin Skibba   Easily Distracted? You Need to Think Like a Medieval Monk DOOM SCROLLING | 5-MINUTE READ  Focusing wasn't much easier in the time before electricity or on-demand TV. In fact, you probably have a lot in common with these super-distracted monks. By Matt Reynolds   Why This Universe? Maybe It's Not Special—Just Probable COSMOLOGY | 10-MINUTE READ  Two physicists find that our universe has a higher entropy—and is therefore more likely—than alternative possible universes. By Charlie Wood   The Problematic Arrival of Anti-Obesity Drugs PUBLIC HEALTH | 5-MINUTE READ  Fat activists say they're tools of coercion. Celebrities are taking them to get slim. Is this really the road people want to go down? By Grace Browne   Hey EV Owners: It'd Take a Fraction of You to Prop Up the Grid SHARING IS CARING | 5-MINUTE READ  If you agree to provide some of your car's battery power in times of high energy demand, you'll get paid, and help make the grid more stable. By Matt Simon More from WIRED Science You Can Use This Silly Game to Do Some Serious Physics Why Not Cover Ugly Parking Lots With Solar Panels? This Startup Is Using AI to Unearth New Smells The World's Farms Are Hooked on Phosphorus. It's a Problem The Battery That Never Gets Flat Trending on WIRED DIRTY BUSINESS | 7-MINUTE READ Spy Cams Reveal the Grim Reality of Slaughterhouse Gas Chambers By Andy Greenberg Animal rights activists have captured the first hidden-camera video from inside a carbon dioxide "stunning chamber" in a US meatpacking plant. GET WIRED Get WIRED for just $29.99 $5. Includes unlimited access to wired.com plus free stickers! Subscribe now. Have questions or comments? Reply to this email.   This email was sent to you by WIRED. To ensure delivery to your inbox (not bulk or junk folders), please add our email address, wired@newsletters.wired.com, to your address book.   View our Privacy Policy Unsubscribe or Manage your newsletter subscriptions   Copyright © Condé Nast 2023. One World Trade Center, New York, NY 10007. All rights reserved.