W

The clearest water on Earth The Silfra fissure, Iceland

CONTENTS

PHOTOGRAPHY COVER AND THIS PAGE: CHRISTIE HEMM KLOK

P.80

Fea t u re I NSI D E S T RI P E

John and Patrick Collison, the Irish co-founders

of Stripe – a £9.2bn payments startup that

has reshaped the global digital economy

50 years of award-winning sound built into every pair

Responds naturally to you

Wireless adaptive noise cancellation

Smart power with a 22-hour battery life

bowers-wilkins.co.uk/PX

Right : designer Natsai Audrey Chieza creates textiles that are dyed by her tiny collaborators – millions of soil-dwelling bacteria

p. 0 13 S tar t FA U X G RA S Chef Alexis Gauthier serves up French cuisine with a twist – none of it uses animal produce. His masterpiece: cruelty-free foie gras

00 5

p. 0 3 8 S tar t

CONTENTS

A NE W S PA C E RA C E Iconic astrophysicist and science communicator Neil deGrasse Tyson has a new book that links war with scientific progress

p. 0 4 2 S tar t T HE CRO W D E D S K Y New runways aren’t the only way to boost flight frequency – air traffic control is using data to

PHOTOGRAPHY: TOBY COULSON

increase the number of landings

p. 0 51 G e ar sp e c i al GEAR OF THE YEAR WIRED presents its annual list of the best products of 2018 - from top toys to audiophile equipment and the best rides around

p. 066 Work Smar ter

p. 108 Fe ature

p. 1 1 8 Fea t u re

C A R E E R H A C KS

E ND A NG E R E D

WO RLD B U ILDER

Broadcaster and scientist Jim

The Cavendish banana is facing

TV and VR producer Anthony

Al-Khalili shares his productivity

extinction. Can a group of top

Geffen is launching an epic new

secrets, plus successful

scientists save the world’s most

project – Stephen Hawking’s

founders’ seven tips for scaling

popular fruit from a deadly fungus?

legacy: a tour of the universe

p. 0 9 1 Fe atu re

p. 128 Fe ature

p. 1 36 Fea t u re

THE ANTHROPOCENE

FIGHTING THE FAKES

DIV E IN T O H IS T O RY

The celebrated Canadian

In a media landscape of fake

Driven by a passion for the past,

photographer exclusively speaks

news and intentional inaccuracies,

a group of enthusiasts are

to WIRED about some of his

a new breed of volunteer fact-

locating lost artefacts using talent

incredible environmental images

checker is championing the truth

and the latest technology

Editor Greg Williams

Publishing director Nick Sargent

Group creative director Andrew Diprose

Managing editor Mike Dent

Group head of revenue Rachel Reidy

Features director João Medeiros

Executive editor Jeremy White

Account director Silvia Weindling

Digital editor James Temperton

Senior editor Victoria Turk

Partnerships art director Tanja Rusi

Senior editor Gian Volpicelli

Senior editor Matt Burgess

Partnerships designer Jeffrey Lee

Staff writer Matt Reynolds

Associate editor Katia Moskvitch

Brand partnerships manager Jessica Holden

Engagement manager Andy Vandervell

Intern Daphne Leprince-Ringuet

Brand partnerships manager Josh Moore Senior project manager Jessica Wolfe Junior project manager Sian Bourke

Art director Mary Lees

Contributing editors Dan Ariely,

Curator of WIRED Insider Avalon Ffooks

Director of photography Dalia Nassimi

David Baker,Rachel Botsman, Liat Clark,

PA to publishing director Keelan Duffy

Acting director of photography

Russell M Davies, Oliver Franklin-Wallis,

Cindy Parthonnaud

Ben Hammersley, Adam Higginbotham,

WIRED Events

Amit Katwala, Nicole Kobie, Kathryn Nave,

Head of strategy and experience Kim Vigilia

KG Orphanides, Tom Vanderbilt, Ed Yong

Sponsorship director Christopher Warren Junior delegate sales executive Lavinia De Luca For enquiries: wiredevents@condenast.co.uk wired.co.uk/events WIRED Consulting Project consultant Emma Cowdray For enquiries: consulting@wired.co.uk

Managing director Albert Read

Chief digital officer Simon Gresham Jones

Regional sales director Karen Allgood

Chairman Nicholas Coleridge

Digital commercial director Malcolm Attwells

Regional account director Heather Mitchell

Chairman and chief executive,

Digital operations director Helen Placito

Head of Paris office (France) Helena Kawalec

Condé Nast International

Marketing director Jean Faulkner

Italian/Swiss office Angelo Careddu

Jonathan Newhouse

Deputy marketing and research director Gary Read

Associate publisher (US) Shannon Tolar Tchkotoua

Associate director, digital marketing Susie Brown

Account manager (US) Keryn Howarth

Director of editorial

Senior data manager Tim Westcott

Classified director Shelagh Crofts

administration and rights

Senior marketing executive Ella Simpson

Classified advertisement manager Emma Alessi

Harriet Wilson

Group property director Fiona Forsyth

Classified senior sales

Senior editorial business manager Stephanie Chrisostomou

Communications director Emily Hallie

Human resources director

Acting publicity director Emma Kellher

Directors Nicholas Coleridge,

Hazel McIntyre

PR manager Sophie Mitchell

Shelagh Crofts, Edward Enninful,

Head of finance

Social media and publicity

Jean Faulkner, Simon Gresham Jones,

Daisy Tam

executive Sophie McKeesick

Dylan Jones, Albert Read,

Chief operating officer Sabine Vandenbroucke

Sabine Vandenbroucke Circulation director Richard Kingerlee Newstrade marketing executive Olivia Streatfield Subscriptions director Patrick Foilleret Assistant marketing and promotions manager Claudia Long Creative design manager Anthea Denning

Please contact our editorial team

Production director Sarah Jenson

WIRED, Vogue House,

via the following email addresses:

Commercial production manager Xenia Dilnot

Hanover Sq, London W1S 1JU

Reader feedback: rants@wired.co.uk

Production controller Emma Storey

General editorial enquiries and

Production and digital co-ordinator

Advertising enquiries:

requests for contributors’ guidelines:

Skye Meelboom

020 7499 9080

editorial@wired.co.uk

Commercial senior production controller Louise Lawson

Press releases to this address

Commercial, paper & display

only please: pr@wired.co.uk

production controller Martin MacMillan

WIRED LOGO: ALEX ROBBINS. LAYERED TISSUE PAPER WHICH HAS BEEN RIPPED AND CRUMPLED, AND THEN ARRANGED ON A LIGHTBOX.

executive/trainer Casey Drabble

Je re my Wh i t e WIRED’s annual Gear of the Year list hoves into view once more – bursting with all the have made members of the team leap for joy.

“It’s always a challenge to select only the most exciting things,” says White, who edits the list. “But we like to think we’re doing our readers a great service in creating this ultimate gift guide.”

C RE ATIN G WIRED

P H O T O G R A P H Y: S A M B A R K E R ; C H R I S T I E H E M M K LO K I L L U S T R AT I O N : M AT T H E W G R E E N

essential products that

008

WO R LD B U I L D E R

A b ig ail B eal l Beall speaks to iconic

Sam Barker must have felt positively old-school while taking

science communicator

flat, 2D photographs of VR documentary producer and pioneer,

Neil deGrasse Tyson

Anthony Geffen, in his multidisciplinary studio in west London:

about his new book.

“Geffen was great to shoot, a charismatic man with a wonderful

“Neil really made me

energy and a very strong sense of himself. It was an interesting

think twice about the

time to take a portrait of him, as he had just come out of a very

intrinsic link between

intense meeting and was excited about a future project he had just

astronomy research

secured. You could tell his mind was constantly exploring – at one

and war,” she says.

point he was chuckling to himself about a joke in VR he had just

“Before, I’d thought of

thought of. I wanted to capture a flavour of his intensity and the

space as a peaceful

passion he has for his craft, and to show a little of his world away

place and studying it

Adam S i mpson

from the dramatic environments he captures for us to enjoy.”

as a peaceful pursuit.”

Illustrator Adam Simpson tackles the tricky issue of fake news, and how an army of fact checkers are fighting back. “I was interested in representing the way we are currently overwhelmed by contradictory data, crooked stats and questionable soundbites,” he says.

“And why it’s important for us to find way to cut through the noise.”

EA R N I N G H I S S T R I P E S Christie Hemm Klok photographed perhaps the youngest billionaires to ever feature in WIRED – Patrick and John Collison, co-founders of Stripe: “We had just one hour – the new Stripe HQ is pretty large, so there was a lot of running up and down flights of stairs with lights. The idea was to show the confidence of the brothers and their positive working relationship, which are crucial in building a strong company.”

source software advances of the 1970s.

New technologies, whether that’s the mainframe computer or the smartphone, unlock new capabilities, meaning that products and services are built on top of new innovations. There would be no Uber without the smartphone, for instance. No Wooga without Facebook.

No Tweetdeck without Twitter.

Today, the analogue of smartphones and social platforms is blockchain and crypto networks, which are built upon distributed ledger technology. The blockchain, like any platform, is in effect, a design space that enables others to build on top of the underlying infrastructure. And the collaborative teams building on these types of networks are bringing a quality to their work that has been eroded significantly on platforms like Facebook – trust.

In the way that the developers of the 70s built on open networks with web standards and decentralised protocols that they could trust, so those working on the blockchain are working on

products and services that have that quality in-built. And this has additional benefits: consumers can rely on the products and that investors can support these companies in the knowledge that the platform has mechanisms to ensure against bad outcomes.

It’s this, rather than advertising, that’s likely to be the foundation of the emerging platforms of the next decade. Advertising has become the de facto economic driver of the internet, but adherence to a business model of proprietary algorithms that hoover up personal data to be sold to third parties could change as we see models based on tokens. At the moment, there are competing visions about what this might be, but it’s clear that the underlying infrastructure encourages collaboration and the development of networks with a broader range of incentives.

Handled in the right way, tokens need not be extractive, but add value, not just to the platform but to all its users.

We’re some years away from this, but one way of understanding a possible future is to consider the words of the investor Charlie Munger: “show me the incentive and I’ll show you the outcome”.

Greg Williams Editor

BSME Art Team of the Year 2018 • BSME Editor of the Year, Technology 2017 • PPA Designer of the Year, Consumer 2017 • BSME Art Team of the Year 2017 • BSME Print Writer of the Year 2017 • DMA Magazine of the Year 2015 • DMA Cover of the Year 2015 • DMA Technology Magazine of the Year 2015 • DMA Magazine of the Year 2014 • BSME Art Director of the Year, Consumer 2013 • PPA Media Brand of the Year, Consumer 2013 • DMA Technology Magazine of the Year 2012 • DMA Editor of the Year 2012 • BSME Editor of the Year, Special Interest 2012 • D&AD Award: Covers 2012 • DMA Editor of the Year 2011 • DMA Magazine of the Year 2011 • DMA Technology Magazine of the Year 2011 • BSME Art Director of the Year, Consumer 2011 • D&AD Award: Entire Magazine 2011 • D&AD Award: Covers 2010 • Maggies Technology Cover 2010 • PPA Designer of the Year, Consumer 2010 • BSME Launch of the Year 2009

ILLUSTRATION: RICHARD HOGG

FR O M T H E ED I T OR

Much of the recent debate around the damage that large technology companies are causing to parts of the economy, the social fabric of society and democracy comes back to the foundation on which most media organisations are built: advertising.

Services such as Google and Facebook are free because users are willing to share information about themselves, which is then sold to third parties in search of eyeballs (and, increasingly, ears – I’m talking about you, Alexa/Siri). You are the product, as the saying goes – platforms are incentivised to gain as many users as possible and to obtain as much data from them as they can. Alphabet and Facebook are the third and fifth most valuable companies in the world because they have managed to scale advertising in unsurpassed ways.

When Google started selling space in 2000, it went about it in the way that media companies had been doing for generations – human beings selling slots based on the cost per thousand people who viewed the advert. The company’s innovation was to automate the process and develop an online auction for the top of the rankings. Introduced in 2002, automated advertising, or AdWords, generated the company just over $400 million that year. In 2017, that number was over $95 billion.

Facebook’s ad revenue was close to $40 billion in the same period.

With those numbers, it’s completely understandable that tech companies like Facebook, Twitter and Google have based their businesses on models that have long existed. However, the web is pretty good at something you may have heard of called disruption, and that is what might be coming to large technology companies in a future where their incentives are more closely aligned with those of their users.

Advertising has been part of the cultural fabric for well over 100 years, but will it provide the basis for the next generation of web services?

Those experimenting with cryptocurrencies already talk in terms of it being a “movement” akin to the open

M I R R O R L E S S R E I N V E N T E D

Whether shooting stills or videos, the new full-frame Z series pushes the boundaries in imaging quality and lens capabilities, enabled by the all-new Z mount. Unleash full creative freedom with the newly designed NIKKOR Z lenses, or choose from over 90 fully AF/AE compatible NIKKOR F lenses*. Experience revolutionary optical performance in a compact form factor today. Ι Ι Ď? QUAD VGA EVF Ď? ĹŒ Ď? Ι Äž Ď? ÄŤ

Ĺ‚ Äš Ĺ„ Ĺ„ ‹ˆ‘ “„Œ•ˆ‡ šŒ—‹ —‹ˆ ’“—Œ’‘„Â? Â?’˜‘— „‡„“—ˆ• For more information visit www.nikon.co.uk

PHOTOGRAPHY: TRICIA MALLEY/ROSS GILLESPIE

EDITED BY VICTORIA TURK & GIAN VOLPICELLI

Hazardous material Housing 70 years of documents on Britain’s nuclear ambitions requires a very specialised archive

< DANGEROUS LEGACY: WHY IT ’S CRITICAL THAT WE PRESERVE THE HISTORY OF BRITAIN’S NUCLE AR INDUSTRY

Seventy years of British nuclear history lie behind these concrete, stone and aluminium walls.

Since opening in February 2017, Nucleus, the UK Nuclear Decommissioning Authority’s (NDA) Nuclear and Caithness Archive, near Wick, Scotland, has been gathering thousands of records, images and plans about the UK’s civil nuclear industry. More documents are being transferred from 17 archives across the UK, as the NDA plans to house them all in this single purpose-built location.

The archive contains documents dating back to the 1950s, and some are classified as Top Secret. Records are kept in triplicate: a copy on paper, one on microfilm and one as a PDF version, to reduce wear on the originals.

Some of the documents are in poor condition, but they will be needed for centuries to come, as they relate to the slow processes of nuclear decommissioning. That is why Nucleus was built to last. “We adopted a mass concrete approach to the archive spaces,” says Laura Kinnaird, associate at Edinburgh-based firm Reiach and Hall Architects, which designed the building

014

Faux gras (see previous page and below-left). “This made for a very fast, robust and durable construction.” The archive is designed to both withstand and harness Scotland’s inclement weather. The building’s materials and its angular shape help minimise wind damage, and rainwater is collected to flush the toilets. The design has won awards including the RIAS Award 2018 and RIBA Award for Scotland 2018.

Within the building’s sturdy walls, the archives are temperature- and humidity-controlled to preserve the papers.

To keep these conditions stable, Nucleus’s doors, windows and walls are modular: they can be quickly replaced without exposing the documents to the outside world. “We don’t have to close for periods of maintenance,” explains Thomas John Norton, the NDA’s properties project and portfolio manager.

“It really is designed to keep the doors open for the next 100 years.”

There will be plenty of traffic coming through those doors. Nucleus has 26 kilometres of shelving, and the documents on them are frequently read by professionals working in the civil nuclear industry.

“People often think of archives as dusty shelves,” says Simon Tucker, the NDA’s head of information governance. “But this is very much an active archive.” Richard Priday reiachandhall.co.uk

Diners at Gauthier Soho are served French cuisine with a cruelty-free difference

PHOTOGRAPHY: REIACH AND HALL ARCHITECTS; AARON TILLEY. FOOD STYLIST: IAIN GRAHAM. SET DESIGN: ELENA HORN

If you think French gastronomy and veganism don’t mix, you should meet Alexis Gauthier. A classically-trained chef, Gauthier, 45, transforms the expectations of diners at his London restaurant by serving them French cuisine with one crucial difference: it’s mainly devoid of animal products.

Gauthier turned vegan in 2016 and says that he was forced to be more innovative in his cooking as a result.

“It’s very easy to do something delicious with meat or fish, but a vegetable, flower or fruit, I can’t hide behind,” he says. “My creativity has to shine in order for me to please and impress.”

One of his creations offers a meat-free take on a rather unlikely subject: foie gras, the quintessentially French dish usually made from the livers of ducks or geese that have been force-fed. Gauthier wanted to recreate the deep flavour and luxuriant texture of the meaty delicacy, but without the animal cruelty involved in making it.

After several months of experimenting, he nailed his plant-based

recipe, using a mixture of ingredients including lentils, mushrooms and walnuts. “I realised that there are two things that make foie gras special: the sweetness and the Cognac,” he says.

He calls the resulting terrine “faux gras” and serves it to diners at Gauthier Soho, his vegan restaurant in London. The dish gained popularity when Gauthier made a Facebook video with vegan web platform BOSH!, which has now been viewed more than six million times.

Here, he breaks down his vegan formula for a goose-free version of the classic meaty French delicacy.

Mandy Mazliah gauthiersoho.co.uk

INGREDIENTS:

2 tsp chopped

1 shallot

rosemary

Shallots are

2 tsp chopped

sweeter than

thyme

regular onions,

2 tsp chopped

so help to create

sage

2 tbsp olive oil

that sweet

A classic selection

For unctuousness

foie gras taste

of herbs that grow together. It’s

2 cloves garlic

likely that wild

For its pungency

geese would consume these

2 tbsp Cognac

while nibbling the

Cognac provides

undergrowth

a deep richness,

S TA R T

giving delicious body and depth

400g lentils

to the flavour

Lentils bring core texture; it’s best to

Pinch of salt

pre-cook them

To taste

so they are smooth 2 tbsp soy sauce This is an essential ingredient that provides perfect umami flavour 18 button mushrooms, roughly sliced

Black pepper

Button mushrooms

To taste

have a springiness and smoothness

Knob of

that simulates the

dairy-free butter

feel of liver better

To smear on the

than the fleshy,

top instead of

grainy texture of

a layer of fat

larger mushrooms 150g toasted walnuts Walnuts add an oily texture. When broken, they become a little grainy, just like a duck’s liver 2 tbsp beetroot purée Beetroot creates the pinkish colour

A dyed-in-the-wool creative partnership Faber Futures uses micro-organisms to make sustainable and affordable colourfast textiles

Designer Natsai Audrey Chieza has an unusual collaborator: the soil-dwelling bacterium

Streptomyces coelicolor. Under the right conditions, S. coelicolor produces a pigmented compound, which Chieza uses to dye fabric and garments in patterned hues of pink, purple and blue. “It dyes

STAR T

textiles in a colourfast manner

with barely any water and no chemicals,” Chieza says. “That’s the definition of a natural dye.”

Chieza has been working with her “companion species” since 2011, and this year launched Faber Futures, a London-based biodesign lab that aims to help other researchers harness the power of living organisms to develop their own sustainable materials. “Project Coelicolor is a great way to say, ‘This is what we did with this micro-organism; let us help you figure out what to do with yours,’” she says.

Biology, Chieza argues, is the “most advanced technology”.

It can self-replicate and scale with minimal energy requirements, and can deploy molecules exactly where they need to be deployed.

“That’s something that humans have been trying to achieve for a very long time through engineering,” she adds.

Faber Futures clients include food and automotive sectors.

Chieza hopes that her work can lead the way to manufacturers moving away from petroleumbased materials, divesting from fossil fuels and reducing waste.

With this productive human/ bacterium partnership in place, who has the most control over the finished design? “It’s a push and a pull,” says Chieza, “but I would argue that Natsai Audrey Chieza views her work as collaborative: when

mostly it’s the microbes in

she dyes fabric (left), she never knows how it will turn out

charge.” VT faberfutures.com

PHOTOGRAPHY: TOBY COULSON

companies from biotech, apparel,

WIRED explains…

Climate hacking Former US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson once said that climate change is “an engineering problem, and it has engineering solutions”. Following President Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement on climate, the concept of geoengineering has been catching on among Republican politicians and climate researchers alike. In other words: what if we reversed global warming simply by redesigning the atmosphere?

Geoengineering trends focus on carbon capture (sucking CO2 from the air), and solar radiation management (SRM – reflecting sunlight to reduce heat). The Royal Society in London estimates that, for tens of billions of pounds a year, reducing solar radiation by two per cent could rebalance the heat caused by a doubling of CO2. But SRM is not a cure-all: it would not reverse ocean acidification; it would likely interfere with the global water cycle; it could deplete ozone; and, if it were stopped, warming would return.

Still, even the rosiest of scenarios suggests that purely reducing emissions will not halt the warming of the planet.

So here’s WIRED’s guide to the technologies being proposed to turn back the global-warming clock. Phoebe Braithwaite

C L O U D Marine stratus clouds cool the Earth by reflecting some sunlight. It might be possible to make these clouds brighter and more reflective by using rotor ships to spray seawater into the lower atmosphere, stimulating cloud droplet formation. Deployed widely, cloud brightening could reverse the warming caused by double atmospheric CO2.

As it relies on seawater, the technique should be

S H A D E

relatively safe – but it could

-

alter weather patterns. The

Space-based geoengineering

technology to produce this fine

aims at blocking the Sun’s

mist is still in development.

rays before they reach Earth.

One of the most detailed projects of this kind involves building a space shade. A

C A R B O N

1,000-kilometre-wide lens only

C A P T U R E

a few millimetres thick, floating

-

like a satellite between the

Despite the difficulty of

Sun and Earth, would disperse

deploying it at scale, the

sunlight before it reaches us,

capture of CO 2 for storing or

reducing solar energy by up

reuse is certain to form a part of

to one per cent. However, the

the global response to climate

Royal Society has cautioned

change. Methodologies vary:

that a space shade would not

Canadian company Carbon

be cost- or time-effective,

Engineering, for example,

requiring decades and

uses “air conductors” with an

trillions of pounds to develop.

alkaline hydroxide solution to capture CO 2 and convert it into new synthetic fuels.

Research suggests a tonne of

S A N D

CO 2 could be captured for less

-

than $200 (£154), were existing

A Silicon Valley startup called

technologies implemented

Ice911 has run experiments

on an industrial scale.

in Utqiagvik, Alaska, to investigate whether tiny grains of reflective silica sand can keep at bay the harmful

B A L L O O N

effects of global warming.

-

Should these shards be

Aerosols released during

able to stave off melting in

the 1991 eruption of Mount

Alaska’s North Meadow Lake,

Pinatubo volcano in the

the same idea could be rolled

Philippines resulted in

out to 49,000km 2 of Arctic

a local sunlight reduction of

ice – roughly the same size

ten per cent, and cooling

as Costa Rica – and mitigate

of up to 0.6 per cent. In spring

projected sea level rises. In

2019, a team at Harvard

April 2017, it successfully

University will try to imitate

tested its method over 17,500

the effects of that event by

square metres of Arctic ice.

releasing a high-altitude balloon 20 kilometres into the atmosphere, where it will drop a smattering (100g to 1kg) of calcium carbonate, followed by sulphates, into the air. They will then observe how much radiation is reflected back.

ILLUSTRATION: SHAN JIANG; ROSIE ROBERTS

T HE FIGH T FOR PA RKING S P A C E S I S F I N A L LY KICKED TO THE KERB

For Dan Hubert, the roadside is the final frontier in the race to map our cities. “The kerb is one of the world’s last truly untapped commodities,” explains the founder of parking startup AppyParking.

Hubert has already mapped all 19,000km of London’s kerbs, as well as those in Cambridge, Oxford and Brighton. Using laser and photographic scanning, AppyParking maps roads down to a resolution of 3cm, tracking doubleyellow lines and extracting the information from parking restriction signs. All this data creates a minutely detailed record of every kerbside in the city, which is updated when councils publish information about new parking restrictions.

Hubert already has plans to make the system smarter. This October, 2,157 parking spaces in Harrogate will be fitted with sensors that automatically process payment when a registered car parks there, giving cities data on parking spots use, and making ticket enforcement simpler. “You can’t argue with a sensor that tells you if there’s a car there and takes an immediate payment,” Hubert says. Matt Reynolds appyparking.com

S TA R T

A

Quantum computing explained

B

C

S TA R T

WIRED takes a superposition on the new number-crunching D

In the beginning, there were 1s or 0s.

Now there are 1s and 0s, existing in both states at once (sort of). It’s called superposition, and it’s the physics underlying quantum computers. Say it with us: WTF. As a concept, quantum computing has been bewitching – and befuddling – researchers for nearly 40 years, promising exponentially more oomph than conventional machines.

Finally, new hardware is making the possibility real. “This era feels like the late 50s as the first microprocessors were being developed,” says Jerry Chow, who leads experimental quantum computing at IBM. His company and dozens of others love playing with these chandelier-shaped marvels (like IBM’s machine pictured here), convinced they might improve everything from car batteries to drug discovery. Tom Simonite

E

F

HARDWARE BREAKDOWN A Protective coat

C Heat exchanger

E Processor

Exposed copper

The coil circulates

A tiny silicon chip

would tarnish

helium (liquid or

– studded with

and disrupt the

gas) to supercool

qubits (“quantum”

cooling system, so

the apparatus.

+ “bits”) made

36 APPROXIMATE NUMBER OF HOURS

parts are plated

D Conductive loops

circuits – operates

with gold, which is

Stainless steel

at around 15

not reactive.

coax cables carry

millikelvin, which

signals to and from

is colder than interstellar space.

IT TAKES TO CHILL

PHOTOGRAPHY: AMY LOMBARD

from aluminium

vulnerable metal

THE COMPUTER FROM

B Aluminium tape

the processor.

Being curved

ROOM TEMPERATURE

A low-tech fix

Right: the cooling and support

TO OPERATING

corrals wires

prevents breakage

F Isolators

structure for one of IBM’s

TEMPERATURE

that link the

at low temperature.

and Circulators

quantum computing chips

control system

These components

(it’s the tiny black square at

to temperature

block noise

the bottom of the photo)

sensors.

and route signals.

S TA R T

THE PHYSICS BEHIND

WILL ENCRYPTION SURVIVE?

QUBIT

QUANTUM COMPUTING

WE ASK A QUANTUM CODE-JAMMER

OPTIONS

1 Traditional computers break problems

Theoretically,

What exactly is the danger?

Aluminium circuit

into bits – 1s and 0s on your hard drive.

quantum

Algorithms have been invented that

Create quantum

More bits means more processing power.

systems could

could use quantum computing to

weirdness by

crack popular

completely break the encryption you

circulating electric

2 Quantum computers rely on qubits.

encryption

depend on for things such as online

current through

At cold enough temperatures, they can

protocols and

shopping or banking.

superconducting

take on a state called quantum super-

expose your

position, both 0 and 1 at the same time.

digital secrets.

Yikes! How long have we got?

Dustin Moody, a

A powerful enough quantum computer

3 With bits, you can only work with the

mathematician

could be built in ten to 15 years.

number you have. Qubits play with many

at the National

more combinations of their 1s and 0s.

Institute of

So are we doomed?

electromagnetic

Standards and

We’re running an international

fields to isolate

4 Algorithms eliminate incorrect

Technology in

competition to create quantum-safe

strontium atoms.

pathways through certain problems. At

Maryland, is trying

cryptosystems before large quantum

Use lasers to

the end of the calculation, the qubits

to prevent the

computers are built. Average internet

control quantum

revert to 1s and 0s to reveal the answer.

datapocalypse.

users won’t notice – that’s the goal.

behaviours.

metal on standard chips.

Levitating atoms Ion traps use

QUANTIZED

TOMORROW

leap in computing

SOON

What a quantum

Amazon

could do for us.

IonQ Computers using trapped ion qubits

Global cooling Quantum

Volkswagen Traffic optimisation

Daimler Better car batteries

Rigetti

computers

Cambridge Quantum Computing Materials science, AI, cryptocurrency

can simulate complex molecular interactions,

CIA

revealing how to mop up carbon emissions.

D-Wave Systems Sold quantum processors to Google and Lockheed Martin

Miracle cures Better chemistry

Google Built a 72qubit chip

IBM Built a 50qubit chip

Intel Built a 49qubit chip

Microsoft Building a new quibit based on an exotic subatomic particle

Zapata Computing Chemistry, materials science

simulations will also speed up drug research by

NASA

reducing lab work.

Goldman Sachs

Smarter help Quantum

JPMorgan Chase Risk modelling for investing

algorithms can do the maths behind artificial neural

QC Ware Quantum computing software

networks faster than existing computers.

QUBIT PL AYERS From Big Tech to spinoff startups: the ever-expanding universe of quantum computing

Faster delivery Everyday logistical like plotting pizza delivery routes.

SOMEDAY

puzzles solved –

Airbus

COLL ABORATION

INVESTMENT

Q-CTRL Control software for quantum computing hardware

A BITSY HISTORY: 1980 PHYSICIST PAUL BENIOFF SUGGESTS QUANTUM MECHANICS COULD BE USED FOR COMPUTATION. // 1981 RICHARD FEYNMAN COINS THE TERM QUANTUM COMPUTER . // 1994 A BELL LABS MATHEMATICIAN INVENTS A QUANTUM ALGORITHM THAT COULD BREAK WIDELY USED FORMS OF ENCRYPTION. // 2014 GOOGLE FORMS A LAB FOCUSED ON QUANTUM COMPUTING HARDWARE. // 2016 IBM PUTS A PROTOTYPE OF A FIVE-QUBIT QUANTUM COMPUTER IN THE CLOUD FOR ANYONE TO EXPERIMENT WITH.

1

2

A creator going against the grain Craftsman Love Hultén synthesises fine woodworking and hand-wired electronics into musical works of art

3

024

PHOTOGRAPHY: ERIKA SVENSSON

STAR T

As a child, Swedish product designer and builder Love Hultén obsessed over circuits. “I used to tear electronic toys apart, trying to understand their insides,” he says. Hultén attended the local design school in his native Gothenburg and, while there, discovered his true calling in the woodshop.

The cases he crafted were a perfect complement to the creative electronic projects he’d been experimenting with since his youth. Hultén went on to forge a career making expressive and tactile synthesisers, retro-inspired games consoles, and other truly funky audiovisual contraptions that combine the organic and the electronic.

WIRED visited the master craftsman in his Gothenburg workshop to find out how the one-man production line creates his whimsical electronica.

Michael Calore lovehulten.com

1

2

Family ties

Studio space

The hulking green

Located in a

band and table

Gothenburg

saws were passed

community called

down from

Konstepidemin,

his cabinetmaker

the buildings once

father. They’re

housed the sick

big and heavy, so

and dying during

Hultén put them on

mid-1800s cholera

castors. “Mobility

epidemics. “My

is mandatory,”

studio is in the

he says. “I keep

basement where

almost everything

the nurses did the

on wheels.”

laundry,” he says.

3

4

Noise maker

Lego set

The mahogany

The Brix System

case of Hultén’s

comprises a

Noistation houses

series of 6:1 scale

a programmable

Lego blocks. There

hardware synth

are a couple of

controlled by

synthesisers, an

a three-octave

effects machine,

keyboard. The

a speaker, a

faders on the face

microphone, two

adjust frequencies

simple computers

and modulate

for playing games,

the synth filters.

and a telephone.

4

www.mondaine-helvetica.com www.mondaine.com

The new Mondaine Helvetica 2nd TimeZone will accompany you on every trip with style.

For your nearest stockist please visit: mondaine.com | mondaine-helvetica.com Models featured RRP ÂŁ3

What’s the go-to typeface to make words look futuristic? For software engineer Dave Addey, it’s a no-brainer: Eurostile Bold Extended.

In 2014, Addey set up Typeset in the Future, a blog that explores typography and design in science-fiction movies. It began with Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 masterpiece of the genre, 2001: A Space Odyssey. This, he explains, was the first sci-fi film to use Eurostile Bold Extended – a crisp, sans-serif typeface – on a spacecraft user interface. Addey decided to dig in further, writing a detailed, 5,000-word blog post about the film’s typography and its implications for the immersive world Kubrick had created.

The blog took off. “To my surprise and amazement, other people found it interesting,” he says. “My server crashed and, $1,200 [£920] of internet bandwidth overage fees later, I realised I might be on to something.” Four years later, he has turned Typeset in the Future into a book, which features a typographic analysis of genre-defining classics 2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Trek , Alien, Blade Runner, Total Recall, WALL•E and Moon. Eurostile Bold Extended is a recurrent trope throughout.

Addey believes there is more to a typeface than S TA R T just looking futuristic. “Convincing, internally consistent design is essential for sci-fi movies,” he says. “You’re building a world that doesn’t exist yet, so everything has to be thought through.” For this reason, WALL•E was his favourite of the films he focused on. “Pixar movies are unique in that every single thing you see on screen is there deliberately,” he says. “Every pixel has been hand-crafted.”

And yes, it features quite a few sightings of Eurostile Bold Extended, too. Phoebe Braithwaite typesetinthefuture.com

Dave Addey’s seven steps to making a typeface scream “sci-fi”:

1 2

1. Start with

4. …but not too

signature sci-fi

smooth. Add some

font Eurostile Bold

“consummate Vs”

Extended (This is

(tapered points)

the classic, but

to sharpen a

many sans-serif

few letter-ends

fonts will do).

into blades.

2. Add a forward-

5. Some of these

5

facing slant.

letters want to

The word wants

touch. Let them.

6

to reach 2067 as

3 4

soon as possible.

TYPOGRAPHY: STEVEN WILSON

7

6. Remove an entirely arbitrary

3. Curve off

segment of

some of those

the text,

sharp edges – the

partial strike-

future is smooth.

through-style.

7. Add a steely brushed metal effect and emboss that bad boy.

Congratulations – you’re now sci-fi!

Internet providers to the dispossessed London-based startup Jā gala is bringing refugee camps around the world online with portable Wi-Fi systems

STAR T

In 2015, a 15-year-old Eritrean boy made his way to the UK by clinging to the bottom of a Eurostar train. He was taken in by a family from Tunbridge Wells. When his foster siblings, Nils and Jaz O’Hara, heard the story of his terrifying journey, they wanted to do something to help other refugees.

The seed for Jā ৄ gala was planted.

The pair visited the Calais Jungle, the French refugee camp notorious for its squalid conditions, and Jaz posted a call on Facebook for donations to help the people living there. It went viral and, £250,000 and eight storage units full of supplies later, she and Nils, now 28 and 26, left their jobs to set up charitable organisation The Worldwide Tribe.

The O’Haras soon realised that internet access was a key concern for people living and working in refugee camps.

Many refugees had smartphones, but poor signal and expensive data packages meant that few of them were able to use them to let their family members know they were safe. “Connectivity is very important in camps,” Nils says.

PHOTOGRAPHY: SEBASTIAN NEVOLS. ILLUSTRATION: BRATISLAV MILENKOVIC

They teamed up with Samson Rinaldi, a fabricator, and Richard Thanki, a PhD student, to start Jāৄgala, which makes portable Wi-Fi systems. The group operates out of a busy warehouseunit-cum-indoor-climbing-centre in Walthamstow, east London.

Jāৄgala built its first Wi-Fi connection in the Calais Jungle in December 2015.

Starting with a 4G connection that later rolled into Wi-Fi, it could support 500 connections simultaneously and up to 5,000 in total a week. Early systems were held together with gaffer tape and flowerpot lids, meaning that parts broke of easily in the rough and ready camp environment, so Jāৄgala started packaging the systems in 3D-printed boxes instead. “In Calais, when we had more traditional networks, people were charging their phones using them and

‘When it’s going well, you’re the most popular person in the camp. But when the Wi-Fi stops working, you become unpopular very quickly’ – Samson Rinaldi, Jāngala

bits would go missing and batteries would go walkabout,” Nils says. “That’s why we decided to make our systems more mobile and in a box.”

Jā ৄ gala is now on its third generation of kit, with two versions of the box available depending on the amount of data required. Its Small Box (the size of a lunchbox) is for smaller teams working in the field, while its briefcase-sized Big Box can provide Wi-Fi for between 50 and 1,000 people. “The first thing people do when they get online is make voice calls to their families to tell them they’re safe, so when it’s going well you’re the most popular person in the camp,” Rinaldi says. “But when the Wi-Fi stops working, you become very unpopular very quickly.”

The Jā ৄ gala team prides itself on stretching limited resources. Ad blocking makes data stretch twice as far, and YouTube video is capped at 240 pixels. “You shape the traffic to each user to make the most of the data you’ve got,” Thanki explains. “It is possible to provide a service to hundreds of people on a narrow capability if you manage it properly.” No sites are blocked as standard, but the software can be tailored if necessary. In a camp for vulnerable people in Greece, for example, organisers asked for adult content to be made of-limits.

Jāৄgala aims to have 100 new boxes up and running in camps in France, Greece, Bosnia and Kenya over the next 12 months. The team is also testing a Wet Box system, designed to connect emergency teams on the water without the crackle and hiss of marine VHF radio. “We want very high-definition communication so lots of people can converse at once, which you can’t do on normal radio systems,” Nils says. “We’re designing it so people who are on small dinghies or big NGO vessels can hear what’s happening on the other boats in any situation.” The Wet Box package includes body cams for lifeboat workers, so medical professionals on the main boat can ofer assistance remotely.

As for Nils and Jaz’s Eritrean foster brother, he’s settled into life in the home counties. “He rides on his little moped and has a proper Kent accent now,” Jaz says. From one connection, came thousands more. Helen Nianias janga.la.

Additional reporting by Sam Lees

Left-right: Co-founders Richard Thanki, Jaz O’Hara, Samson Rinaldi and Nils O’Hara with JāǓgala’s Small (white) and Big (purple) Boxes

HOW JĀ GAL A I N S TA L L S I T S WI-FI SYSTEMS Richard Thanki explains the four crucial elements in getting camps connected

1 CONNEC TIVIT Y You have to be able to bring an internet signal. If you’re lucky, there’ll already be 3G or 4G; if not, you’ll need external antennas or a satellite.

2 POWER Solar panels are economical, with the best option being a combination of solar and wind power. Jā gala’s Big Box uses just 15 Watts.

3 DIS TRIBU TION A mesh network spreads the signal. It consists of two or more routers that together provide greater coverage than if used separately.

4 MAINTENANCE Jā gala monitors remotely, with help from partners on the ground. Being a small operation means refugees know who to contact for help.

Julia Shaw’s AI startup allows for more accurate, impartial and detailed reporting of workplace disputes

START

AI startup Spot wants to make it easier for victims of workplace harassment to speak up. Co-founded by psychologist Julia Shaw (right) at University College London, Spot has built a chatbot-style platform that combines natural language processing with principles from memory science to help employees record better evidence of inappropriate behaviour.

As an expert in false memories, Shaw often examined the quality of people’s memory-based evidence. “I would come into courtrooms and say, ‘Here are all the things that are wrong with this memory.’”

The more time that passes after an event occurs, the more likely your memory of it will be distorted. Shaw says that lawyers can spend days arguing over when something was written down in order to support or refute its accuracy.

“I kept thinking, I wish people had a contemporaneous way to prove when they wrote this down, and to have the most complete version of events possible.”

She began thinking about applying AI to memory science when she met Phil Libin, co-founder of note-taking app Evernote. Libin brought Shaw to San Francisco, where he heads up AI startup incubator All Turtles. Here,

she met co-founders Dylan Marriott and Daniel Nicolae. So why the focus on workplace harassment? “The Uber scandal broke that weekend,” Shaw says.

The investigation into sexual harassment and discrimination at the taxi app company, and other stories exposed by the #MeToo movement, highlighted the diiculties employees face when coming forward with such allegations. Often, people do not know how to report inappropriate behaviour in the workplace or are reluctant out of fear of retaliation. “We realised that people want to speak up about this issue, but there are not enough reasonable mechanisms to do so,” Shaw says. And, if they do come forward, “often, the quality of people’s evidence frankly sucks.”

Spot aims to help make a record of harassment that is reliable, complete and contemporaneous. People are encouraged to visit the Spot website as soon as possible after an incident. The Spot chatbot asks them to write down what happened and prompts them to confirm important details.

The process is informed by a memory recall technique called the Cognitive Interview, which is used by police when interviewing victims and witnesses of crimes. The chatbot picks up keywords such as names, job titles, dates and places to ask follow-up questions. For example, it might respond to a user’s account by asking, “Tell me what else you can remember about Tuesday,” or ask, “Did

‘How do you know that you don’t have a problem with harassment?’

PHOTOGRAPHY: DAVID VINTINER

To make work harassment-free, tell a chatbot

anyone witness this event?” It also asks how the incident made the person feel: “Not because it’s therapeutic, but because it’s core to the definition for harassment,” Shaw explains.

At the end of the chat, Spot compiles a timestamped report that employees can either send to their employer (anonymously if they wish) or hold on to as potential future evidence.

For security, and to protect anonymity where requested, the company does not keep any data and cannot access the reports unless users agree to share them for research purposes such as training the chatbot’s algorithms.

The tool is not aimed only at victims of sexual harassment, but people who have experienced discrimination of any kind. Reports so far include a Jewish person complaining of anti-Semitism in the workplace and a man reporting sexual harassment by a woman. “I found it promising that people were using it for these diferent situations,” Shaw says.

Spot is free for anyone to use as a reporting tool, but employers can partner with the company in order to better manage the reports they receive and communicate with the senders. All follow-up messages go through Spot, which checks that they do not contain leading or inappropriate questions. It is then up to the organisation to decide how to address the issue, for example by resolving a specific dispute or making sure to arrange training for staf.

Spot launched its website with the chatbot in February 2018 and is currently working with its first beta partners, which include fintech companies, a medical organisation, a dating company and a temporary staffing agency. The smallest of these companies has 75 staf and the largest around 80,000.

Given Spot’s initial focus on Silicon Valley, Shaw is surprised at the lack of interest so far from the tech sector.

She says that she and her team initially pitched to tech firms but were met with the same response: that harassment was definitely a big issue in Silicon Valley and that some companies could surely benefit from a tool like Spot, but that they had a great culture. “When asked, ‘How do you know that you don’t have a problem with harassment in your 20,000-person company?’ They’d say, ‘We haven’t had any reports in three years,’” she says.

“People aren’t talking to you, is what that means.” Victoria Turk talktospot.com

Memory specialist Julia Shaw launched Spot after the Uber workplace harassment scandal broke

Facebook’s decency conundrum Social-media companies have a dilemma on their hands: how do you roll out consistent moderation policies to users representing an array of cultures?

ILLUSTRATION: TONI HALONEN

In a bright, minimally decorated seminar room in California, an infamous painting is projected on to a wall, kicking of a heady debate about art – what it is, and what its purpose in society should be. The painting is Gustave Courbet’s L’Origine du Monde, a vivid, lifelike representation of a naked woman, which has shocked and thrilled viewers since its creation in 1866.

But this time, the discussion is not taking place in a Stanford art history seminar. We are just down the road, at Facebook’s Content Policy headquarters in Menlo Park. The image is being shown to a group of academics and researchers, myself included, who have trekked to the Bay Area to learn more about the way that Facebook moderates the millions of posts, images and videos that are published every day via its service.

Content moderation is a remarkable feature of the modern online experience.

Many people who use social networks, whether to communicate with family members or to watch cat videos, will be unaware of the sprawling infrastructure and complex set of rules that underpin contemporary sites, or the significant human labour required to police them.

It’s only when things go wrong, or get political – as they tend to do – that we get a glimpse into the parallel world behind the screen: thousands of moderators, working around the clock at sites around the world, images and text

S TA R T

flashing at them constantly, with only a few seconds to decide whether what they are seeing constitutes extreme violence, pornography or hate speech; the automated systems incessantly comparing videos with databases of forbidden content in an attempt to prevent users from posting terrorist material or child-abuse imagery.

Robert Gorwa is Dahrendorf Scholar at St Antony’s College, Oxford, and a PhD student in the Department of Politics & International Relations

For years, academics, civil society organisations and activists have been providing critical analyses of moderation in practice, calling on platform companies such as Facebook to be more transparent and accountable. The rules of the road were vague and unclear (what, precisely, constitutes “nudity”?) and if one had content removed, it was not only diicult to understand why, but one also faced little recourse.

At the end of April 2018, Facebook made a major step, clarifying the rules, or “Community Standards”, that govern what people can post on their service. For the first time, Facebook has instituted a limited appeals process (or, as some have called it, a “retrial” process). It has also published far more information about what exactly it considers to be sexual content, hate speech and other things that may be removed from Facebook.

It gets even trickier, as these rules are being actively challenged by significant amounts of people around the world, who are in efect displeased with the norms that platforms have cast down from on high. New mothers, for example, long mounted concerted campaigns to fight against the constant removal of their breastfeeding photos on Facebook.

Facebook’s content policy team needs to not just set the rules, but also decide which forms of contestation are legitimate and deserve to be honoured (breastfeeding mothers), which ones are not (#freethenipple in non-breastfeeding contexts) and when these rules should be changed to keep up with the times.

Now repeat this for the whole world, for hundreds, if not thousands, of peoples and cultures which you simply cannot ever know enough about. As bright, hard-working and committed as these employees are, the question should not just be “Who is Facebook to decide what can be said around the world?” but “How could they ever hope to actually do so?”

From hate speech to terrorism, the challenge re-emerges on virtually every politicised and controversial issue.

Facebook has to define a highly disputed concept, create clear “bright line” rules,

then try to enforce them at scale, for 2.2 billion people in hundreds of languages.

It’s a Sisyphean task. The true irony, as social-media scholar Tarleton Gillespie outlines in his new book Custodians of the Internet, is that the social-media companies never wanted or fully embraced this role, which in many cases contradicts their own ideology and values. As they have expanded to become global businesses, platforms have found themselves damned if they do moderate (being called out for censorship), and damned if they don’t (see the longstanding frustration of Twitter users with what is perceived to be insufficient moderation efforts, especially around hate speech and misogyny).

The practice of moderation from on high is unsustainable. What, then, should they do? Mark Zuckerberg has suggested that automated systems will be the way out of the current predicament, but these claims should be viewed sceptically, given the complexities involved.

Platforms should start by demonstrating they have the basic decency to ensure that moderators are well paid, trained and taken care of, but even that will not be enough. It’s time to start thinking about real solutions: systems that allow for norms to emerge from the ground up, and for users to provide meaningful consent that goes beyond just ticking away the terms of service.

Facebook once claimed to “democratise”.

Now it needs genuine democracy.

ILLUSTRATION: TONI HALONEN

STAR T

These changes are a significant step in the right direction and should be applauded. But now that the transparency civil society has been working towards for years is finally here (and we can thank the mounting global “techlash” for that), we cannot forget how difficult and fundamentally problematic such moderation is.

The biggest challenge that was apparent from speaking to Facebook’s Content Policy Team in Menlo Park was what I would call its “operationalisation” problem. Why does Facebook care what art is? After all, it’s a question that has been debated for hundreds of years, and defies easy definition. Leo Tolstoy, searching for one in 1896, reached for the broadest possible brush, defining it as “one of the conditions of human life”.

People post millions of images on Facebook so, unsurprisingly, there is plenty of artistic content there. In 2011, a French art lover posted the L’Origine du Monde painting, only for it to be removed.

He sued Facebook (the case appears to be ongoing). While art is often provocative, and explicit, it is also perceived to have social value, so Facebook responded sensibly by carving out an exception to its policies that allows people to publish explicit art if they choose.

But only when I was at Menlo Park did I fully come to understand the staggering diiculties involved in implementing this kind of policy. Facebook has had to not only attempt to define what precisely “art” is, but it has sought to do so in a way that will be able to be easily “operationalised” by its many thousands of moderators, the majority of whom are contractors in developing countries operating under major time constraints, with little context about the content they are looking at, and often working in an unfamiliar language.

Given the diiculty of this task, it is not surprising that many of the definitions are unsatisfactory. The new community standards provide exemptions for images “of paintings, sculptures and other art that depicts nude figures”, operating on the rule of thumb that “art is handmade”.

Of course, there are countless other forms of art, such as photography, and the qualities that make them artistic may be diicult to pin down. Dozens of other exceptions – what Facebook terms “edge cases” – spring to mind, and with Facebook’s scale, edge cases can happen hundreds, if not thousands, of times a day.

START

036

Crangon crangon, also

shells and mixed them into

known as brown shrimp,

glazes for her final project at

is a popular snack in the

de Kooning. The pottery is fired

Netherlands, but 70 per cent

at over 1,000°C, burning away

of the 40mm-long creature

most of the shell, except for

is shell – which leaves

its calcium, which produces the

a lot of waste. When Jade

cloudy effect shown here.

Ruijzenaars, a student

wasn’t about just creating

Willem de Kooning Academy,

a plate using shrimp: “It was

heard about the 60,000kg

more that the glaze would

of shrimp remnants that

become part of the story of

accumulate every week, she

the Dutch shrimp industry,”

spotted an opportunity. Her

she says. Phoebe Braithwaite

idea? Crustacean crockery.

Ruijzenaars, 26, asked

A new book shows how people are finding smart uses from unlikely materials

For Ruijzenaars, the result

of design at Rotterdam’s

jaderuijzenaars.nl Why Materials Matter:

Dutch shrimp-processing

Responsible Design for a Better

company Telson for some

World (Prestel) is out now

Left : The plate is made using whole, crushed and ground shell

PHOTOGRAPHY: PHILIP GROBLER-PRESTEL; JADE RUIJZENAARS

The ultimate seafood platter

D

ear Dr Tyson, it began. When I was eight, I sent you a letter calling you a poo poo-head for demoting Pluto. I have since done my own research and I’ve come to agree with your decision. I apologise for making fun of you.

“It was a totally deadpan letter,” Neil deGrasse Tyson says. Apparently, hundreds of outraged children had sent him letters when the Hayden Planetarium in New York – which Tyson has directed since 1996 – was the first to group Pluto not with the rest of the planets, but with the smaller icy bodies in the Solar System. This was before Pluto was even oicially declassified as a planet in 2006. “We were first out of the box,” he says. But, it seems, only one of these kids grew up and remembered to apologise.”

The letter illustrates that astronomy can provoke amazement, awe and seemingly illogical responses – such as an emotional attachment to an icy ball floating 7.5 billion kilometres away in outer space.

Tyson, 60, has built his career on that sense of wonder. Ever since he visited the Hayden Planetarium as a nine-year-old boy and decided to learn everything he could about the universe, Tyson has been striving to learn more. He says he has never lost that feeling.

Judging from his almost 13 million followers on Twitter, 15 published books and countless TV appearances, it appears that Tyson loves science communication. Wrong. “I’d rather be at home, play with my kids, watch a movie and eat popcorn that I make with slightly too much butter on it,” he says. When he is called into the public arena, however, he sees it as his duty to engage. “I would be irresponsible if I did not.”

His latest book, Accessory to War, is part of his mission to inform people of what they may not otherwise know. It explores the link between war

PHOTOGRAPHY: SEBASTIAN NEVOLS

‘I would like to see space force add a few things. How about guarding us from killer asteroids, or cleaning up space debris?’ and astronomy, from the invention of the first telescopes to modern-day techniques to detect alien signals. Tyson and his co-author, the writer and editor Avis Lang, set out the potentially uncomfortable idea that progress in astronomy comes hand-in-hand with military developments.

For example, the multi-spectral imaging techniques used by astronomers to probe the galaxy are also employed for spotting incoming missiles.

The book comes at a time when space and the military are a hot topic, following Donald Trump’s plan to launch a military “space force”. But the timing is just a coincidence: Tyson first had the idea for the book in 2001, although it took him more than a decade to research and write. As for the space force, Tyson says he floated the very same proposal years ago.

Astronomy and the arms-race in space Neil deGrasse Tyson’s new book connects war and science

“I remember putting that idea forward in 2001, in the Commission on Aerospace, and people were not particularly enthusiastic about it,” he says. The Air Force had the US Space Command, and nobody believed there was a need to change it. “So I said: fine. I didn’t make a big deal of it.”

A space force as a concept is not especially odd or unusual, he says, certainly no more than the Air Force was an odd or unusual thought when it was spun of from the army. “I would like to see [space force] add a few things,” he says. “How about guarding us from killer asteroids? Or how about cleaning up space debris?”

Although these eforts might protect the world from dangers in and from space, Tyson thinks that a different threat will creep in once we start exploring space: ourselves. Even if there is a beautifully written space peace treaty, it is naïve to think we would not wage war of-planet. “I don’t understand why people think we will treat each other diferently in space when we can’t not kill each other here on Earth” he says.

“That’s odd to me – I don’t have that much confidence in human nature.”

Tyson feels equally despondent about his country’s present attitude to scientific research – and, one might say, to scientific facts. “The future of science in the US is bleak,” he says. However, that is not to say science will not progress in general: “The rest of the world embraces it and values it,” he says. “Science doesn’t carry a passport. It’ll move to wherever there are people to do the work.” Abigail Beall haydenplanetarium.org Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military is on sale now

Left: Neil deGrasse Tyson, astrophysicist and science communicator, photographed by WIRED

S TAR T

The summer of 2018 will go down in history – and not only for the catchiness of its summer hits. Over three months, much of Europe – and, more generally, the whole northern hemisphere – experienced a phenomenal heat wave. The sweltering climate caused droughts, crop failures, and – possibly – deaths among old and vulnerable people. Wildfires raged in every continent, exacting a disastrous toll in Greece; less catastrophically, but more worryingly, blazes occurred north of the Arctic Circle. That could have been the moment when the world woke up to the effects of climate change, for the first time manifesting itself in a palpable, destructive form. The question is: will this have an impact on the way investors and entrepreneurs think about doing business? And could the heatwave be a tipping point for sustainable investing?

Luca Tobagi, CFA Investment Strategist and Product Director, Invesco “What happened this summer, with the ice near the North Pole starting to crack and melt, might have convinced even sceptics that

WIRED PARTNERSHIP

What if... This summer’s heatwave became the tipping point for sustainable investing?

be considered a wake-up call for society. It is anyone’s guess as to whether this will impact sustainable investing more than it already has. At Invesco, we have long embraced sustainable investing – indeed, it is part of our culture. Over the last decade, including sustainability considerations in investment decisions has become increasingly popular.

Why increased awareness of environmental challenges is changing businesses for good

Sustainable business practices can positively impact a company’s performance and I truly believe that sustainable investing can stimulate positive changes in the world.”

David Stevenson

Ioannis Ioannou

Julie Hanna

Investment

Associate

Executive

commentator

Professor, LBS

Chairwoman, Kiva

-

-

-

“Would a sensible infrastructure

“The integration of ESG factors

“A perfect storm of forces are

investor deploy money on

in investment decisions is

conspiring to make us rethink

new projects that could be

inevitable. The world’s biggest

the way we do business, and the

submerged by rising sea levels?

challenges, including the

form of capitalism we practice.

Investors are waking up to

worsening environmental crisis,

The climate crisis is one of

the idea that external costs

are in urgent need of scalable

the leading factors that are

frequently result in internalised

solutions. Business is a powerful

mobilising millennials, the largest

investment losses. Investors

modern institution that could

generation ever, to invest in

can charge more for risk and

generate such solutions and

purpose-driven companies that

demand a greater yield – or

scale them up efficiently and

are solving real-world problems.

they could demand a more

profitably. Hence, recognition

The shift to sustainable investing

sustainable approach to

of ESG-related risks and

will be about backing businesses

investing. The challenge is in

growth opportunities through

that create enduring value

defining sustainability and risk.”

sustainable investing is pivotal.”

for society over the long term.”

ILLUSTRATION: ADAM NICKEL. ADDITIONAL PHOTOGRAPHY: CHRIS MICHEL

INVESCO

climate change is real. So the heatwave could

S TA R T

041

PHOTOGRAPHY: GREGOR SAILER, TAKEN FROM THE MARS SERIES

The Antenna Test Zone, European Space Agency, Noordwijk, the Netherlands

This electric-blue chamber might bear a resemblance to a crowd of punk mohawks or the Night King’s jagged skull, but this 400-square-metre room is where antennas are torture-tested before being launched into space.

Called the Hybrid European Radio Frequency and Antenna Test Zone, or HERTZ, it’s located in Noordwijk, in the Netherlands. The ten-metre-high steel walls are studded with 45-centimetretall foam pyramids that block external electromagnetic interference. Two tests are performed here: one measures radio waves from omnidirectional antennae,

like the type rovers use to communicate with orbiters; another calibrates highly directional antennae, which spacecraft use to send data to Earth. Engineers bounce radio waves between an antenna and giant carbon reflectors to simulate signals hurtling at light speed through 800 million kilometres of space.

Next up, HERTZ will test a radar antenna that’ll search for liquid oceans during the 2022 Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer mission. If everything checks out, the system will leave this bristly cocoon for a hopefully smooth ride through deep space. Laura Mallonee

Wave points: a spiky space Calibrating antennae requires a room that’s tuned in to the void

The sky isn’t overcrowded: it just needs reorganising New runways aren’t the only way to increase the frequency of flights – so air traffic control is getting tools that will squeeze extra landings into airport schedules

I

f you’ve ever flown into or out of a London airport, you know first-hand how full the UK’s airspace is. Air traic controllers handle 2.5 million flights a year, and the number is expected to rise further. By 2030, it’s estimated there’ll be 3.1 million planes flying in and out of Britain each year, plus a phalanx of unmanned aircraft and commercial drones. Without action, Britain’s already busy airspace could quickly become a mid-air ring road for planes circling aimlessly, waiting for their landing slot.

That’s the jumbo-sized challenge facing Louisa Smith, head of research and development at the National Air Traic Services (NATS), who is redesigning Britain’s airspace. Smith, 34, oversees a team of 22 people with science, engineering and maths backgrounds, who are eking out split-second time savings to free up the extra capacity needed to handle the soaring number of flights. “When you consider the

overall mission, it’s a huge undertaking,” she says. Smith is used to working in high-stakes environments: before moving to NATS in 2011, she served in the Royal Air Force as an air traic control oicer, working in the UK and the Falklands.

About 475,000 planes pass through Heathrow Airport every year – just 5,000 short of its mandated capacity, set when planning permission was granted in 2001 for the airport’s Terminal 5. A plane takes of or lands on there every 45 seconds.

When flights slip from their schedules, chaos can ensue – which

The National Air Traffic Service is working with Deloitte and McLaren Applied Technologies on computer simulations to estimate flight delays Solving tricky

“The aim of our

infrastructure

tool is to provide

issues in airports

data-powered

by partnering

insight in airspace

with a Formula 1

management,” adds

team might sound

James Springham,

unusual – but

manager at

David Harvey,

McLaren Deloitte.

general manager

The simulator uses

of operations

data from over

planning and

700 manual logs

integration at

and can reschedule

NATS, thinks that

or reroute hundreds

the collaboration

of flights per

of wings and wheels

second. This also

has brought “a

enables operations

totally different way

supervisors to

of thinking about

“replay” days with

these problems,”

lots of delays, and

he tells WIRED.

improve responses.

leads to planes looping above the airport, or standing idle. “We need to modernise our airspace and enhance the technology to make sure we can deal with any increases,” says Smith.

To do that, NATS has developed a system for ensuring a small but safe gap between flight movements, called time-based separation (TBS). The previous system calculated physical distance between aeroplanes landing, so subsequent flights didn’t get caught up in vortices created by an aircraft’s wake. TBS allows planes to bunch closer together in strong headwinds while maintaining a safe distance. That distance appears as a physical marker on air traic controllers’ displays, indicating the safest minimum time between landings, which constantly changes with the environment.

“Imagine walking up a hill,” Smith says. “You need more time and energy [than you would walking on flat ground]. TBS takes into account the headwind, making it more eicient.”

The system, introduced in 2015 after being tested via computer modelling, freed up time for an extra 0.8 landings per hour in all wind conditions – and 2.6 extra landings an hour when the headwind was greater than 20 knots. In all, planes spent nearly 2,000 fewer hours circling the skies above Heathrow after the introduction of TBS. This year, a new version of the system, enhanced time-based separation (eTBS), has been introduced at Heathrow, and will allow, on average, an extra 2.6 landings every hour (regardless of headwind) by increasing the number of variables it uses to calculate a safe gap between landings. Even with plans for a third Heathrow runway approved by MPs, Smith’s job won’t change: if anything, the number of flights to handle will increase.

Right now, Smith and her team are focused on fine-tuning eTBS, tweaking the model to diferentiate between 96 diferent classes of planes, as opposed to the current six (known as RECAT-EU), ensuring the model can be tailored more finely and reduce periods without any plane movements. That’ll allow them to squeeze in more landings in the same amount of time.

Constantly thinking about such innovations is vital, says Smith, to keep our ever-busier skies clear and airports running smoothly. “We can’t wait to react, we need to be on the front foot,” she says. After all, she only has 78 million passengers flying through Heathrow every year to answer to. Chris Stokel-Walker

G A P B E T W E E N A N A 3 8 0 A N D B 7 7 7: 6 N M AT 4 D M E ( D I S TA N C E M E A S U R I N G E Q U I P M E N T )

6NM at 4DME CURRENT

B777

A380

NEW SYSTEM

B777

A380

PHOTOGRAPHY: MIKE KELLEY

O P T I M I S E D R U N WAY D E L I V E R Y: D E L I V E R I N G E F F I C I E N T T I M E - B A S E D S E PA R AT I O N

4NM

Threshold

S TA R T

D O N â&#x20AC;&#x2122; T G O Q U I E T LY

Official fuel consumption figures in mpg (l/100km) for the new Ford Mustang range: urban 14.4 -23.3 (19.6-12.1), extra urban 31.0 - 41.5 (9.1-6.8), combined 22.1 - 31.3 (12.8-9.0). Official CO 2 emission 285 -199g/km.

The mpg figures quoted are sourced from official EU-regulated test results (EU Directive and Regulation 715/2007 and 692/2008 as last amended), are provided for comparability purposes and may not reflect your actual driving experience.

S TA R T

Damian Collins: itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s time for complacent tech giants to ďŹ ght fake news

Disinformation is threatening democracy.

Can legislators stop social networks from being weaponised?

PHOTOGRAPHY: NICK WILSON, ILLUSTRATION: NICK D BURTON

0 47

Can democracy be hacked? For almost a year, Damian Collins and the other members of the Commons committee for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport have been investigating just that question. In July, the committee’s interim report on fake news warned that online disinformation was threatening “our democracy and our values”. The final report, expected in October, will propose potential policies A N I N Q U I R Y I N Q U O T E S aimed at mitigating the threat.

Collins, the Conservative MP for Mark Zuckerberg wouldn’t speak Folkestone and Hythe who has chaired to the panel, while Leave.EU the committee since 2016, says it all co-founder Arron Banks walked out started with Donald Trump. The 2016 US presidential election had been marred by pro-Trump viral hoaxes such as “Pizzagate”, but the actual phenomenon of online hogwash was poorly understood. Hence, in 2017, the committee Arron Banks, decided to start an inquiry into the topic. Conservative MP giving evidence “We were looking at creating a very clear, Julian Knight to on Russian clean definition of ‘fake news’,” explains Facebook CTO interference Collins, 44. “Was this just teenagers in Mike Schroepfer Macedonia messing around to make money, or was it something that was more “Facebook is a “Are you the sophisticated and sinister?”

MP that got morality-free It was something more sinister. After zone destructive drunk in the hearing expert witnesses, the 12-person to a fundamental House of committee realised that social networks right of privacy.

Commons were vulnerable to being weaponised to You aren’t an and harassed spread false, propagandist or partisan innocent party a woman and content to maximum efect – through the wronged by got drunk on psychological profiling of users and the the likes of a karaoke surgical targeting of social media posts. Cambridge evening?

Then, in March 2018, Christopher Wylie Analytica: you One of the – once a researcher at political consul- are the problem. committee is. tancy Cambridge Analytica – alleged that Your company is I don’t know his former employer had harvested the the problem.” which one.” data of 87 million Facebook users to influence them on behalf of their clients, including the Trump campaign. Evidence emerged of links between Cambridge Analytica and AIQ, a firm that had worked for the official pro-Brexit campaign in the EU referendum; the same campaign came under scrutiny for exceeding spending limits. Russian fingerprints on social media and oline hinted at involvement. Christopher At the centre of it all lay Facebook. Its carelessness may have Wylie, Cambridge allowed individuals, companies and state actors to skew the Analytica’s democratic process. But the tech giant doesn’t seem to want whistleblower to talk about it. For months, the committee pestered CEO Mark Zuckerberg, requesting that he come to give evidence in London “It has a much – to no avail. Eventually, Facebook sent its chief technologist, wider impact.

Mike Schroepfer. The question was one of semantics: was I don’t think that Facebook a publisher, responsible for the content it hosts, or military-style was it a neutral, blameless platform? Facebook favoured the information latter. “It’s actually something in between,” Collins says. “Tech operations is companies provide a curated space for their content: Facebook’s conducive for feed is not chronological. And, as it curates that space, it has a any democratic responsibility.” That, in Collins’ view, would require social process.” media platforms to remove disinformation as swiftly as they pull terrorist propaganda, but also to provide more transparency to users about who is paying for the political ads.

The session with Schroepfer shed little light on what Facebook knew about the abuses taking place on its platform. Schroepfer doled out a barrage of “I don’t know”, and failed to answer 39 key questions. Zuckerberg ignored calls to appear. The hearing revealed the real challenge for the inquiry: parliamentary

Left : the MP for Folkestone and Hythe, photographed by WIRED in his Portcullis House office, August 2018

‘Was this just teenagers in Macedonia messing around to make money, or was it something more sinister?’ committees can’t force anyone to give evidence. Vote Leave’s Dominic Cummings mocked the inquiry on his blog, and Brexit donor Arron Banks – under investigation by the National Crime Agency over alleged links to Russia – walked out mid-hearing. Facebook did co-operate, though apparently unwillingly.

That spoke of the wider problem of Britain’s unpreparedness in the face of foreign malice and arrogant corporations.

The committee’s interim report pointed out how lack of resources and investigatory powers had defanged the two bodies in charge of prosecuting data breaches and campaigning infractions – the Information Commissioner’s Oice (ICO) and the Electoral Commission. The concern is that the inquiry into the possible hijacking of Britain’s most consequential vote in recent history is being conducted by MPs with limited power.

“I don’t feel powerless,” Collins says.

He is convinced that the inquiry had an impact on recent legislation that gave the ICO increased powers, and that “behind the scenes”, the government has pushed Facebook for co-operation.

But Collins himself, following the interim report’s publication, called for the government to task the security agencies with investigating some of the matters that have been uncovered by the committee. That will likely be reiterated in the final report – expected to contain substantive recommendations, and to look into the dealings of AIQ, including its usage of cryptocurrency .

Yet so far, the Prime Minister has shown no signs of heeding any of those calls. “I have never met her one-on-one,” Collins says. Gian Volpicelli parliament.uk

Gaming prepares to level up

With 2.6 billion players in a global market expected to reach $180bn annually within the next three years, gaming is anything but kids stuff.

“Over the last decade we’ve observed a huge cultural shift,” says Imre Jele, co-founder of games company Bossa Studios, of the rise of mobile gaming, games’ increased complexity, and the evolution of eSports into its own genre.

The shift from consoles and PCs towards mobile cements more than just handheld play – gamification influences the activities of sectors such as law, finance, health and education. Its influence can be felt in tech, in intelligent assistants, blockchain, and augmented and virtual reality.

“Gaming is now mainstream,” says Joost van Dreunen, CEO of Superdata Research and professor of gaming at NYU. “It’s gained the acceptance of everyday people.”

Here, we explore three key areas of innovation reshaping the landscape of the gaming industry.

THE RISE OF MOBILE GAMING With the release of PUBG and Fortnite in full on iOS and Android, and Candy Crush creators King working on a mobile Call of Duty, the era of AAA mobile games is with us.

Mobile gaming revenues now account for more than 50 per cent of the global games market – Candy Crush Saga, for example, has been downloaded over 2.7bn times.

“Mobile has been a key contributor in changing the face of gaming from the realm of die-hard fans to one for the broader populace and casual gamer,” says Christopher Wood, head of UK Technology for J.P. Morgan.

The market is big enough to foster variety: Dan Gray, creator of Monument Valley I and II, created a premium pay-up-front hit, despite the rise of free-to-play games.

“There is a huge number of people who want to buy something once, and not worry about adverts, or in-app purchases, or any other distractions,” says Gray. He’s

ILLUSTRATION: ADAM NICKEL

From mobile games to eSports, connected creation will re-imagine the world

been proved right: Monument Valley 2 earned more than $10 million in the first year of release.

Analysts anticipate that gaming will meet premium and free part-way, embracing an equivalent of Netflix or Spotify that serves up “all you can eat” titles to monthly subscribers. Gray agrees: “Many people would never take a risk on what we do because it’s $3.99 upfront, but we’ve found that every time we put Monument Valley in someone’s hands, they’ve enjoyed it,” he says.

ARE ESPORTS COMING OF AGE? At the end of July, the inaugural Overwatch League grand finals sold out New York’s 20,000seat Barclays Centre, suggesting the emergence of gaming as a bona fide spectator sport. At present, eSports commissioners are cultivating tournament participants much in the vein of more classic mass entertainment, and the Olympic Committee is reportedly considering the inclusion of eSports in future games.

Although eSports lacks a coherent business model at present, games tournaments for amateurs and pros are on track for a surprise turn up, particularly if mainstream broadcasters come to see them as a way of luring gamers back from smartphones and PCs. eSports is predicted to generate $1.5bn in revenue by 2020, with 80 per cent coming from sponsorship and advertising, much in the model of traditional sports. “eSports,” says van Dreunen, “has been around for decades, ever since the first arcades.” Now, it’s beginning to make sense on an organised, manufactured scale, with marketers generating community as a means of improving gamer acquisition and retention. As with mobile gaming, “creating a fan-centric immersive environment will be critical to keeping audiences engaged, ultimately driving significant increases in revenues across media rights, advertising sponsorship, merchandise and, of course, ticket sales to championships,” says Wood.

Take Activision, which merged with Major League Gaming in 2016 to pivot towards eSports, van Dreunen says. “Their model is basically starting a boyband: they’re manufacturing teams, a league,” making it easy for sponsors and advertisers to see that it can hold water.

‘Whether gaming reaches the one trillion mark or not in the near future, there is no doubt gaming has and will continue to play a huge role in reshaping the media and entertainment landscape’ – Chris Wood, Head of UK Technology Sector

THE VIRTUES OF CO-CREATION The recent purchase of GitHub for $7.5bn demonstrates the value, financial or otherwise, that can come from collective creation.

The games industry is also embracing the massive creativity that can come from decentralised endeavours.

Bossa Studios has made co-creation the heart of their business, and wants to create a new breed of multiplayer games based on crowdsourced content, artificial-intelligence-directed generation of content, and an ethos of open development which brings the community into the fabric of everything they do. Defining themselves in opposition to the “old guard” of entertainment, Bossa set out to harness the creativity of players everywhere.

“Bossa Studios was built around the idea that letting go of autership increases creativity,” says Creator-in-Chief Imre Jele. Seeing players as co-creators, beyond simply consumers, Jele says, affords them renewed agency – and he has been “surprised and delighted by how players enrich and subvert the games you give them.”

Their recently-released game Worlds Adrift is the first to be built from hyped company Improbable’s SpatialOS software, a cloudbased platform which enables designers to go beyond the limits of traditional server architectures via an operating system that manages thousands of machines working together.

Orchestrating far greater computational power, this has huge implications not only for the future of gaming, but for simulaJ.P. MORGAN tions of every sort, affecting city planning, PRIVATE BANK government and healthcare.

But, says Herman Narula, ImprobaWIRED ble’s founder, “what we’re doing is really PARTNERSHIP

expanding the canvas for games, to actually enable games which can support co-creation. A lot of people say that what we’re doing is wider than gaming or bigger than gaming – I would love to draw those people’s attention to what gaming really is. There are a billion more people playing games than there were when we started Improbable,” Narula says, adding that in the not-too-distant future, “this is likely a trillion dollar industry.”

“Whether gaming reaches the one trillion mark or not in the near future,” says Wood, “there is no doubt gaming has and will continue to play a huge role in reshaping the media and entertainment landscape.”

KNOWLEDGE PA R T N E R

OF

THE THE EDIT

YEAR 2018

Movie audio clips include

“Look! There’s a droid on the scanner. Dead ahead!”

RIDES Luke Skywalker’s Landspeeder Your firstborn remains clueless to the ways of the Force, but that shouldn’t stop PHOTOGRAPHY: JOHN GRIBBEN. WORDS: CHRIS HASLAM

you from indulging them with the greatest vehicle you’ll never own. Authentically twin-sun-faded and sandpocked, this mini X-34 Landspeeder has space for two under-fours (no droids!), a top speed of 8kph, and plays audio clips from the movies.

£190.99 europe.radioflyer.com

EDITED BY JEREMY WHITE

GEAR

THE THE EDIT

AUDIOPHILE 2018

GAMING Logitech G560

STEREO Lyravox Karlina

Lightsync PC Speaker

The Karlina all-in-one floor-

These RGB light-syncing

standing stereo system

speakers flash along with the

features 3,000W of power

in-game action of more than

from four high-end DSP-

300 titles for an immersive

regulated, room-adapting

experience. Meanwhile, the

Pascal amplifiers, 30mm

booming 240-Watt peak

ceramic tweeters, and high-

drivers with down-firing

resolution ceramic diamond

subwoofer will have you feeling

drivers, developed exclusively

every bullet. £199 logitech.com

by Accuton. £tbc lyravox.com

G E AR

SPEAKER Q Acoustics 3000i

GUITAR PEDAL Ibanez

Arguably the best-value

Tubescreamer with Nutube

speaker brand in the UK, Q

Nutube’s realistic-sounding

has upgraded its core line

electronic alternative to

with a suite of five speakers.

a cumbersome valve amp

The whole range benefits

has been added to Ibanez’s

from super-rigid point-to-

Tubescreamer range of

point internal cabinet bracing,

pedals, giving controlled

a thicker mount for the drivers

analogue distortion and

and new terminal sockets.

improved harmonic richness.

From £199 qacoustics.co.uk

£199 ibanez.com

SOUND Beyerdynamic

MUSIC Touché Expressive

TUNES HD Vinyl

Amiron wireless headphones

Touché is a highly sensitive

HD Vinyl uses audio digitally

Codecs including aptX HD

wooden trackpad that reacts

converted to a 3D topographic

and LDAC now mean hi-res

to the slightest pressure.

map, which is inscribed by

wireless sound is available

Linked to a synthesiser it

lasers on to the “stamper”

over Bluetooth. The Amiron

gives the operator a whole

that etches the grooves

cans make the most of these

new level of expressive

into the vinyl. HD vinyl can

advances, throwing in a

control, while Lié, its

be played on normal record

touchpad controller on the

companion software, enables

players, but takes audio

right earcup as well. £700

you to map out your sounds.

quality to a whole new level.

europe.beyerdynamic.com

€399 expressivee.com

£tbc hdvinyl.org

WORDS: CHRIS HASLAM

DJING MWM Phase Scratching without the scratches, Phase is a wireless transceiver that sits on your turntable platter and lets you scratch without needing a cartridge. The receiver tracks

TURNTABLE Shinola Runwell

alloy platter, riding on an

platter rotation and speed

Hand built in Shinola’s

inverted ball-type bearing and

information, and sends

flagship Detroit store from

finished with a Shinola leather

it direct to your DJ software.

130 parts, the Runwell

mat. Audio chops come

€299 phase-project.com

is based around the VPI

via a built-in pre-amplifier

Industries Classic turntable,

and Ortofon 2M Blue phono

a design overseen by founder

cartridge. Technophobes will

and iconic audiophile Harry

be relieved to hear that the

Weisfeld. Set on an American

whole thing is plug-and-play

oak base, the belt-drive spins

straight out the box.

a precision-milled aluminium-

£2,000 shinola.co.uk

GEAR

AERATOR Stemless Fountain

DRINK Google Campus Warsaw

Aerating Wine Glass Set

Old Style Flavoured Vodka

Those who drink in a hurry

Google’s Warsaw campus

can now skip the decanter

sits on the site of an old

and aerate their wine in the

Vodka factory, so of course

glass – a perforated chamber

they home-brewed a batch

in these stemless goblets

of algorithmic potato juice.

releases the vino’s full

Limited to a not-for-sale

flavour by aerating the liquid

run of 200 bottles, its lovely

as it flows into the bowl.

packaging is by Warsaw-

£38.99 uncommongoods.com

based Redkroft. redkroft.com

The 127cm x 43cm

DISPENSER Fizzics Waytap

DRINKWARE Ember Mug

x 163cm Tambour

Give your 330ml cans and

Ember is a ceramic mug with a

bar can also be

bottles a blast of “Fizzics

hidden rechargeable heating

produced to your

Micro-Foam” technology.

element and app control

size specifications

Using a process called

that can keep your cuppa

“sonication”, sound waves

between 49°C and 63°C – set

create a dense foam with

via its app. To avoid singeing

uniform sized bubbles that

hot-spots into your desk, its

enhance the flavour and

convection-based elements

give your brew a pub-worthy

are cleverly built into the walls

mouthfeel. $89.99 fizzics.com

of the cup. $79.95 ember.com

FURNITURE Poritz & studio

BARWARE Vacu Vin

WINE SodaStream

Tambour Bar

Cocktail Layering Tool

Sparkling Gold >>>

Handmade in Brooklyn, this

Creating a multi-level cocktail

You’ll have to navigate

solid walnut home bar has

is now simplified with Vacu

SodaStream’s German

a horizontal tambour door

Vin’s ingenious funnel. Its

website, but this 200ml

that wraps elegantly around

design slows down the fluids

bottle of “gold” will give you

its carcass. The top shelf is

as they are poured, helping

12 glasses of ten-per-cent (by

measured to hold single malts

to “stack” liquids of varying

volume) sparkling wine that

and spirits, and there’s a pop-

densities. Start practising

has been described as tasting

out board for your ingredients.

saying: “Layered, not stirred.”

like “a fruity dry Riesling”.

$17,500 poritzandstudio.com

£5.99 amazon.co.uk

€4.99 sodastream.de

THE EDIT

M I XOLOG I S T 2018

ADDITIONAL PHOTOGRAPHY: LUCKY IF SHARP. WORDS: CHRIS HASLAM

THE

FIZZER Aarke A serious challenger to SodaStream’s fizzy crown, Aarke is a premium sparkling-water maker available in polished steel or powder-coated matte black. It has a handsome stainless-steel enclosure, worktop-friendly dimensions and three safety valves.

To carbonate, just pull down the lever and the mechanism injects C0 2, then automatically releases the pressure in one simple movement. Its matching PET and steel bottle is also explosion-proof, in case of over-zealous gassing.

From £179 aarke.com

LG SIGNATURE WIRED PARTNERSHIP

The LG SIGNATURE OLED TV comes with a Dolby Audio Hub for unmatched sound

Good design is contemporary, relevant and conclusive says Stefan Diez, a German industrial designer who takes ideas and turns them into beautiful objects. “If an object or a design or a product has a strong idea, everything falls into place in a very natural way,” he says. If that object is a television, at its essence is simplicity of design, stunning colour and an experience that offers a portal to reality.

Typically the centrepiece of a room, a television must fit seamlessly within its environment while producing a cinematic theatre. An aesthetic of minimalism is key here, but not in the traditional sense; it is about using furniture to focus a space on a particular aspect of life. “A good interior describes the priorities of your life without giving everything the same importance,” says Diez. “Orientation and allocation are crucial conditions for wellbeing.”

To capture these elements, smart technology needs to be paired with innovation and an elegant aesthetic to create a television that adds to a space whether in off or on mode. All LG SIGNATURE products have this at their heart. Teaming up with leading interior designers and architects in major cities around the world, these

Meet the sleek, slimline centrepiece of your room LG SIGNATURE introduces a stunning OLED TV that’s beautiful enough to take pride of place in even the most sophisticated surrounds

products fit seamlessly within homes that are defined by intelligent function and refined design. One of these innovations is the award-winning LG SIGNATURE OLED TV that gives the impression of a floating illusion.

One way it does this is by creating colour that comes alive, where perfect black is the crucial element.

True black offers a contrast level that adds to the depth of all colours, revealing striking details and textures

Key features - Picture-on-Wall form factor - LG ThinQ AI | Google Assistant - LG a9 Intelligent Processor - 4K Cinema HDR with support for most HDR Formats, including Dolby Vision - Dolby Atmos

for a true cinematic experience. In action, the OLED technology allows for each of the eight million self-lighting pixels to control their own luminance individually. Rather than have a backlight, each pixel simply turns itself off, or can become much brighter than those around it. Imagine a scene of the spectacular northern lights, where traditionally, the backlight would make a dark scene like this difficult to see.

With OLED technology, however, the colour pops from the screen.

Specially designed to integrate into the refined living and working spaces of those who cultivate a sophisticated aesthetic, The LG SIGNATURE OLED TV is defined above all by quality. The OLED technology allows for an ultra thin picture-on-wall that sits comfortably with a variety of curated spaces, while the slim and attractive sound bar that houses the upward-firing speakers not only creates a genuine Dolby Atmos sound experience, but complements the TV design while remaining unobtrusive.

Diez for instance, has combined the elegant TV with his New Order shelf, bringing a harmony of both function and form. “The TV is sitting flush into the back of the shelf, so it becomes an integral part of the furniture when it is in an off state,” he says. “The TV in the off state totally blends with its environment – and when it is on we place it in the middle of the room and it gives a fantastic theatre atmosphere.”

The LG SIGNATURE OLED TV turns an everyday object into a piece of beautiful art. Its appeal is to those who are only satisfied with excellence and seek to be surrounded by spaces that inspire them.

“I think this OLED technology made it possible to rethink integration and to rethink furniture around this TV,” says Diez. To truly experience its essence – seeing is believing. LGSIGNATURE.com

WIRELESS SOUNDS

LUGGAGE

Twelvesouth AirFly

Away X Dwayne Wade case

Your headphones have gone

The four-piece collection

wireless, but most aeroplanes

features a tropical interior

haven’t. AirFly connects to

lining – a nod to NBA star

your Bluetooth headphones,

Wade’s Miami roots – a

then plugs directly into any

removable laundry bag,

wired 3.5mm audio jack,

compression straps, pop-out

letting you enjoy the in-flight

USB power bank and smooth

movie with your own cans.

leather-trimmed handles.

$39.99 twelvesouth.com

From $445 awaytravel.com

HEADPHONES

SUNGASSES

SUIT Hackett Journey

PACKING Pliqo Bag

Colorware AirPods Retro

Dom Vetro Primo

This cleverly crafted two-

PLIQO is a stealth suit-carrier

Colorware’s latest mod was

Crafted from thick acetate,

piece is made from natural

that, despite packing down

inspired by Apple’s 1984 IIe

with five-barrel hinges and

cloth that is not only crease-

to the hand-luggage-friendly

personal computer, complete

classic frames, Dom Vetro

resistant and water-repellent,

size of a small laptop bag,

with its classic rainbow logo,

sunglasses exude quality.

but also antibacterial, so your

won’t scrunch your attire into

hospital-beige casing and air

Whereas lenses in lesser

sartorial style should survive

a crumpled ball. It’s all thanks

vents. Retro aesthetics aside,

specs are plastic, the Primo

even the most cramped and

to a clever arrangement of

the AirPods under the paint

line uses top-end anti-

sweaty travelling conditions.

compression straps and

job retain their 21st-century

reflective UV400 crystal

£700 hackett.com

magnets. £150 pliqobag.com

tech. $399 colorware.com

glass. $295 domvetro.com

ORGANISER Plug Pack

DIVING Wildhorn Seaview

A beautiful alternative to

180° V2 Snorkel Mask

scrabbling about in the

The Seaview is the snorkelling

bottom of your bag, hunting

equivalent of a widescreen TV

for cables, the Plug Pack

– its full-face mask gives you

from This Is Ground is made

180° vision, and incorporating

using high-quality vegetable

the increased-airflow snorkel

tanned Italian leather.

means breathing feels more

Inside, five clutter-taming

natural. There’s also a GoPro

compartments await your

mount for fishy home movies.

wires. £105 thisisground.info

$89.99 wildhornoutfitters.com

JET THE EDIT

SETTER 2018

ADDITIONAL PHOTOGRAPHY: LUCKY IF SHARP. WORDS: CHRIS HASLAM

GEAR

SURFING Grain X Glenmorangie Original Surfboard Glenmorangie’s barrels are only ever used twice when making whisky – but the wood can live on, re-purposed into items such as Grain’s glossy surfboard, which uses about half a cask’s worth of timber.

£5,150 grainsurfboards.com

GEAR

BIG THE EDIT

KID 2018

DRONE Skydio R1

STUNTS Hot Wheels

The aluminium and carbon-

Zoom In GoPro Mount

fibre R1 represents a giant

Channel your ten-year-old self

leap forward in autonomous

and revel in the car’s-eye-

flying; 13 onboard cameras

view footage from the Zoom

powered by the NVIDIA

In, a GoPro-compatible Hot

Jetson AI processor means it

Wheels car that cradles a Hero

can map the world around it

Session to record stunts for

in real time, shooting crisp 4K

posterity. The car is pocket-

along a smooth, well-planned

money priced; the camera,

route. $2,499 skydio.com

less so… $1 (Car) gopro.com

LEGO produces 19 billion elements a

year, so switching to all plant-based plastic is a big plus

RETRO GAMING

Born out of a passion for

Wanle Gamers Console

classic cars and a love of mid-

Abandon your gaming apps –

century modernist American

pre-loaded with Tetris, Tank ,

art and architecture,

Formula One Racing and

Candylab cars are made from

Snake, this case for iPhones

solid Beech wood and finished

6 through X (but not SE), has

in an eye-searing shade of

an LCD display and classic

water-based paint, plus a

Gameboy buttons to take

tough urethane coat. From

nostalgia to the next level.

$24.99 candylabtoys.com

$19.95 wanlecases.com

GREEN FUN

STARGAZING Vaonis Stellina

RC CHOPPER

LEGO Plants from Plants

Portable Smart Telescope

Goblin 570 Sport

Having committed itself to

Point the Stellina skyward,

This serious RC chopper

making all its bricks from

choose a constellation via the

features an ultra-stable

sustainable materials by

app, and sit back. No bigger

F3C style landing gear,

2030, this collection of plants

than a briefcase (11.2kg, 49

robust main gear, tail-belt

is LEGO’s first step. They’re

x 39 x 13cm) this motorised

tensioning system and can be

made from polyethylene,

smart telescope takes total

pimped out with all manner of

which is a soft, durable and

control, tracking the object

upgrades, including an ultra-

flexible plastic created from

and processing the final

light 160g fibreglass canopy.

sugarcane. £tbc lego.com

image. €2,199 vaonis.com

$795 goblin-helicopter.com

ADDITIONAL PHOTOGRAPHY: LUCKY IF SHARP. WORDS: CHRIS HASLAM

MINI MOTOR Candylab Toys

SMART BATTERY Belkin

HELMET AUDIO

Boost Charge Power Bank

Domio Pro

iPhone and iPad users rejoice

Attach Domio to the outside

– Belkin’s 10,000mAh Boost

of your helmet and, by using

sensibly connects using

Vibro-Audio technology, it

Lightning, so you can use

sends tiny micro-vibration

one cable to charge it, and to

pulses into the shell of your

re-power your device. You can

lid, creating a dome of audio

even top up the battery using a

on the inside – just like bone-

Lightning dock. Outrageously

conduction headphones.

practical. $59 Belkin.com

$199 domiosports.com

WATCH Brogue X Gavin Coyle

CLOUD GAMING

SMARTPHONE Blloc

ANDEN Watch Valet

Shadow by Blade

Minimal and monochromatic,

Take care of both straps and

Rather than install physical

the octa-core ARM-powered

charging with the ANDEN

upgrades for your gaming

Blloc has been designed to

Watch Valet, an inspired

PC, the Shadow does it for

help you be more productive.

organiser for your Apple

you, via the cloud. A monthly

There’s more to it than just

Watch. WIRED’s is in Glacier

sub currently provides eight

taking the colour screen away

Corian, but it’s also available

threads on a Xeon processor,

– the clean, distraction-free,

in sustainably sourced walnut,

12GB of DDR4 RAM, and a top-

tile-based UI rolls all your

maple and cherry wood.

end 144Hz 1080p NVIDIA card.

media updates into a single

From £89 madebyanden.com

£26.95 (monthly) shadow.tech

timeline. €359 blloc.com

SPEAKER

KEYBOARD

Beoplay P6

Havit HV-KB395L

The Beoplay P6 Bluetooth

At 22mm thick, with 3mm of

speaker is another piece

travel and 45g of operating

of exceptional design from

force, this is easily the

Bang & Olufsen collaborator

slimmest mechanical

GEAR

TECH THE EDIT

HEAD 2018

Cecilie Manz. Inside, a 16-

keyboard WIRED has tickled.

hour battery (with USB-C

The traditional, well-spaced

charging), and three amp

layout and light action

channels deliver 215W from a

should eliminate accidental

dinky box. £349, beoplay.com

keystrokes. £61.91 prohavit.com

COMMUTING Motochimp WIRED can testify to the fact this mini electric bike is as fantastically fun to drive as it is ridiculous to look at.

Behind the Raleigh Chopperstyle cuboid bodywork is a 48V, 350W rear-wheel-drive electric motor that will have you pelting along at 30kph for up to 60km on a single charge. At a little over one metre long, it can just about squeeze under your desk, and given the Li-ion battery can be fully charged in just an hour, you could save yourself a fortune on travel cards, go emission-free and still live in the deepest of suburbs.

ÂŁ1,300 motochimp.com

GEAR

THE LUX SPORT Bentley

RETRO RIDE Nobe 100ev

Continental GT

Retro elegance meets EV

The GT badge brings with it

convenience in Roman

a more aggressive Bentley,

Muljar’s three-wheel, three-

combined with a ludicrously

seater cabriolet. The all-wheel

opulent interior of classic

electric drive Nobe has a

THE EDIT

RIDER 2018

wood-panelling, chrome-trims,

combined range of 220km –

deep-pile shag and leather

extendible thanks to a spare

cladding – not to mention the

battery hidden onboard

rotating dashboard console.

– and a top speed of 110kph.

£159,100 bentley.com

$tbc mynobe.com

SMART SCOOTER

OFF-ROADER

NIU U Series

AUDI Q8 SUV 2019

NIU picked apart data from

Naturally, “Quattro” comes as

150,000 riders to help build

standard when you have a Q

its smart urban scooter. The

in your name, but this Q8 also

electric powertrain has been

features a 48-volt mild-hybrid

designed to maximise power

system that allows the car

and, with GPS tracking and

to coast for short periods

app-connectivity, you’ll be

with the engine switched off

notified the second someone

– perfect for cranking up the

tries to steal it. £tbc niu.com

B&O stereo. £tbc audi.com

COMPACT CAMPER

SUPERCAR Rimac C_Two

SPEED FREAK

Nest by Airstream

With a motor on each wheel

BMC Timemachine

Forgoing its iconic aluminium

and a 120kWh lithium battery

01 ROAD ONE

trailers, Airstream presents

producing 1,915hp, Rimac

Aero is the buzzword in the

its first fibreglass dwelling.

estimates the C_Two will

peleton, and the Timemachine

At 5m it is relatively dainty,

smash 100kph in 1.8 seconds

was a stand-out bike in the

but still offers space for two

and manage a top speed of

Tour De France. The 01 features

to sleep, cook and wash up –

412kph. Performance is on a

radical details including an “aero

and at just 1,540kg, you won’t

par with the Tesla Roadster,

module”, ICS stem-and-bar

need a giant truck to pull it.

with a range of 650km. €1.7

combo and dropped seat-stays.

From $45,900 airstream.com

million rimac-automobili.com

£10,000 evanscycles.com

ADDITIONAL PHOTOGRAPHY: LUCKY IF SHARP. WORDS: CHRIS HASLAM

PETS iMacAquarium

FOOTWEAR

Hand-built from discarded

Nike React Element 87

Apple G3 iMacs, these LED-lit

First spotted in Paris at Jun

aquariums have a 13-litre

Takahashi’s Undercover

acrylic tank with a front that’s

show, the Element 87 blends

perfectly curved to match the

vintage Internationalist-style

contour of the screen bezel.

uppers with a thermoplastic

The casing lifts off to access

elastomer yarn shell, and an

the fish, while the Apple logo

extra-cushioned foam sole

on top opens for feeding time.

that balances support and

$349 jakeharms.com

comfort. From £135 nike.com

064

DRAWING TOOLS Grovemade

HOUSE Casa Montaña

AUDIOVISUAL

Measure Collection

Taking four months to prefab

IKEA FREKVENS

Grovemade has elevated the

in a factory in Madrid, but only

Swedish audio and synth

ruler, protractor and triangle

five hours to erect on site in

brand Teenage Engineering

into something considerably

Asturias in north west Spain,

and IKEA present FREKVENS,

more desirable than double

this roomy holiday home

an 80s-inspired modular

The FREKVENS

maths. Each is machined from

was designed by Baragaño

house-party kit comprising

party kit has

solid metal, while precision-

Architects. Behind the wood

Bluetooth-connected

already won a

etched marks ensure they

and slate exterior are eight

speakers and lighting units.

Red Dot Award for

are as functional as they are

neatly stacking 2.15m x 5.3m

Available July 2019 ikea.com

Product Design

beautiful. $59 grovemade.com

modules. £137,952 baragano.eu

ACCESSORIES Spiegen

LIGHTING Artemide Huara

iPhone X Classic One

This low-voltage, 19-LED,

The original iPhone was a

30cm-wide sphere is touch-

hefty hunk of engineering –

activated and was inspired by

and you now can give that

the Acatama desert in South

solidity to your iPhone X with

America. With no obvious

DE SIGN THE EDIT

GEEK 2018

this nostalgic case. Besides

base or point of orientation,

bags of retro cred, it adds

the lamp can be positioned

Air Cushion Technology to

to illuminate objects, provide

prevent your X becoming an

ambient lighting, or simply

ex-phone. £19.99 spigen.co.uk

sit pretty. £poa artemide.com

ADDITIONAL PHOTOGRAPHY: LUCKY IF SHARP. WORDS: CHRIS HASLAM

GEAR

Transforming healthcare using digital technology

PHOTOGRAPHY: CHARLIE SURBEY

Sandoz is launching its second Healthcare Access Challenge (HACk), a global competition that invites entrepreneurs to complement – or even disrupt – established approaches to healthcare access

Sandoz, a global leader in generic and biosimilar medicines, is aiming to inspire and embrace the innovative thinking of social entrepreneurs and visionaries to co-create solutions to break down healthcare access barriers.

Despite advances in medicine, universal access to healthcare is still arguably the single largest unmet medical need. Over recent decades, a multitude of demographic and economic changes, including rapid population expansion and ageing, the rise in non-communicable diseases, and the growth of anti-microbial resistance, have exacerbated healthcare access challenges in both developed and developing countries, explains Richard Francis, CEO of Sandoz.

Sandoz is passionate about playing its part in expanding access to healthcare worldwide. By leading the way in the development of biosimilars and generic antibiotics and oncology products, Sandoz plays an integral role in making medicines affordable and accessible. Francis stresses that Sandoz believes in a truly integrated approach, and while they “strive to ensure the right products are in the right market, priced appropriately”, the role of medical information and healthcare capacity also have a big part to play.

“We have to ensure we are helping both physicians and patients to understand what medicines are available”.

Whilst great strides are being made at the global level, healthcare access is often a local issue that requires tailored, agile and scalable solutions. Francis explains, “at Sandoz, we believe that breakthroughs can come from amazing, small ideas”. This is why Sandoz is launching its second Sandoz HACk; a competition that aims to co-create

Richard Francis, CEO of Sandoz

SANDOZ WIRED PARTNERSHIP

ambitious-yet-practical solutions that break down access barriers.

The inaugural Sandoz HACk was a great success, receiving around 150 ideas from over 30 countries. The three winners included GoPharma, a Ghanaian app that connects untrained staff in rural areas with trained pharmacists in the city; Blood Drive, a social platform invented in the Maldives to promote blood donations; and Sali, a mobile app designed in the Philippines, to help non-professionals administer CPR. Through seed funding and support from Sandoz, all finalists have made great progress. “We are in regular contact with all our finalists”, Francis says, and “are proud to announce that GoPharma is up and running with 16 dispensing points; Blood Drive is in ongoing discussions with government officials; and the Sali app is due to go live soon.”

“What I was fascinated to see in the inaugural competition is how technology is such a massive lever in these emerging markets,” Francis says. Recognising this potential for digital technologies to transform healthcare and revolutionise access challenges, the competition this year is broadening its remit to encompass all potential digital healthcare solutions.

Sandoz is calling innovators and creative visionaries from across the world to “Leverage Digital Technologies to Solve Healthcare Access Challenges”. Shortlisted entrants will be provided Richard Francis with support from Sandoz experts to refine their ideas before showcasing their innovations to Francis has been a panel of judges. The winner will receive seed CEO of Sandoz funding and support from Sandoz and the since 2014, and innovation community to help bring their idea to life. leads the review “At Sandoz”, Francis concludes, “we believe and judging of that small ideas can spark big change – through ideas submitted to Sandoz HACk, we aim to support these ideas to the HACk. transform promise into impact.”

Sandoz HACk is now open for entries until November 30, 2018. For further information and terms and conditions, visit sandoz.com

ENTREPRENEURIAL CULT URE

WORK S MAR T E R

Above: Jim Al-Khalili photographed in London by WIRED, July 2018

PRODUCTIVITY HACKS

ACCELER ATED LE ARNING

E D I T E D B Y K AT I A M O S K V I T C H

PRODUCTIVITY

Jim Al-Khalili, scientist

The Life Scientific host and Royal Society fellow shares his tips on constructive working

067

Between coaching PhD students at the University of Surrey through their theses, presenting BBC Radio 4’s The Life Scientific and sitting as president of the British Science Association, physicist Jim Al-Khalili crams a lot into his working day.

The son of an engineer and a librarian, the Baghdad-born scientist arrived in the UK in the late 1970s. He splits his time between writing books, giving speeches at conferences and schools, and undertaking his own research. “I’m very good at switching hats very quickly,” he says.

Al-Khalili is one of Britain’s best communicators of science, translating difficult concepts into easy-tounderstand language. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society earlier in 2018, and quizzes scientists at the pinnacle of their fields as part of his radio show The Life Scientific.

Here, Al-Khalili explains how he manages to do so much, as well as sharing some of the advice – good and bad – he’s received in his own extensive and multifaceted career.

Chris Stokel-Walker

I can do everything I want to do. My wife tells me she has to block in holiday six months in advance because I work so much and the diary just fills up. It’s just using my time efficiently and slotting in every available bit.”

piece, or talking on the radio? You should be focusing on getting this paper finished and running this computer code to get these results.’

I was very research active. I wanted to know why I couldn’t do both.”

Do what you love “On any given day, I can be meeting my PhD students in the morning, then do a TV interview, followed by writing, followed by talking to schoolkids. I never get stressed that I’m overworked; I don’t have much time for hobbies, but that’s OK. I enjoy what I’m doing.”

Take an interest in everything “You can span a wide area while still retaining credibility in your own research field. I might be interviewing people for The Life Scientific or writing a popular-science book while supervising PhD students. That’s new: being a Jack of all trades and a master of one.”

Ignore the naysayers “When I started in science communication in the early- to mid-90s, I was very active as a researcher and my colleagues warned me against doing too much communicating. They said: ‘Why are you doing that newspaper

Compartmentalise your work “If there’s a particular day I’m going to be visiting London, I make sure anything else I need to do slots in around that day, so I maximise my time. If it’s a writing day, there are a couple of days in three weeks I don’t have any meetings on, I block them out and shut myself away. The days I spend at university, I fill in with meeting my students and doing everything else I need to do. It’s a case of being very efficient with my diary.”

JIM AL-KHALILI’S WORKING DAY

PHOTOGRAPHY: NHUXUAN HUA

Be open to career change “It was never my long-term plan to be where I am and doing what I am doing now. Very early on in my career, academic life was what I wanted to do. I was going to be a lecturer and a researcher and do all the things an academic scientist would do. I gradually realised I enjoyed explaining physics as much as I did finding out about it.”

Carefully hone your diary “I reached a nice balance ten to 15 years ago when I divided my time between teaching, research, being a public scientist, writing and broadcasting. Now I couldn’t see giving up either. I just have to plan my time carefully to make sure

What time do

Do you have an

you get up in the

email hack?

morning?

My wife helps me

I’m usually up at

tremendously. My

6am, and not much

emails go to her

later at weekends.

laptop – she flags the ones I need to

When do you do

work through.

your best work?

I’m a morning

Do you have

person. Within ten

advice for public

minutes of getting

speaking?

up I am working

Don’t give a talk on

through my emails.

what you want to talk about; try and get across what the audience is expecting of you.

Pursue your passions “A colleague once told me that if you’re not sure what you should be doing with your life, consider the last thing you think of before you go to sleep at night.

Also, what’s the first thing you think of in the morning? For those starting a PhD, what you’re going to be working on for the next three years of your life is your baby. Yes, it might be very niche, and it might not give you a Nobel Prize, but it should be the last thing you think of at night and the very first thing you think of when you wake up in the morning.”

Jim Al-Khalili will be speaking at WIRED Live on November 1, at the Tate Modern in London.

Visit wired.co.uk/event/wired-live to book your tickets

WOR K WORK S MAR T E R

Seven tips for smoother scaling – by the UK’s most successful entrepreneurs

Your technology startup will fail. The cold, harsh reality is that 75 per cent of venture capital-backed new companies never return cash to their investors. And, according to one prominent VC, only about five per cent ever fall into the “truly interesting” category. So where do these new businesses typically come unstuck? The answer lies in arguably the most fraught moment on the startup rollercoaster: the aftermath of raising early-stage Series A investment. That’s when entrepreneurs must start scaling their business, from a bunch of mates in a co-working space to a team of 100-plus – often scattered around the world.

From sourcing talent to finding customers, managing company culture to assembling a board, the barrage of problems founders encounter

‘Try to be aware of your limitations’

B A L DER T ON C A P I TA L PARTNER SUR ANGA CHANDR ATILL AKE ON WHY SOME LEADERS SHOULD STEP ASIDE AS THEIR COMPANY SCALES

“Founders, along with other key people, can sometimes be a limiting factor in a company’s growth. People who are right for a certain phase may not be right for the next. It works in both directions – there have been plenty of cases where a startup has brought in a highly experienced person with a glittering CV, but they’ve failed to make an impact.

But equally, you’re also going to have leaders who were brilliant early on, but at some point just don’t scale with the needs of the company.”

can at times resemble an endless game of whack-a-mole, played while juggling the everyday stresses and strains of running a business without burning through cash. Over the past 12 months, author James Silver interviewed some of the UK’s most successful entrepreneurs and investors to learn how to scale a tech startup. Here are a few of their tips. James Silver’s Upscale (Tech Nation) is published in November

ILLUSTRATION: ØIVIND HOVL AND

S T R AT E G Y

‘Find out who makes the decisions’

‘Go for homegrown talent over experience’

LASTMINUTE.COM

SARAH WOOD,

CO-FOUNDER BRENT

CO-FOUNDER AND

HOBERMAN ON

C H A I R O F U N R U LY,

HOW TO PARTNER

ON HIRING

‘Don’t sell umbrellas to camels’

WITH – AND SELL

“One of our team says: ‘Don’t

T O – C OR P OR AT ION S

PARTNERIZE CEO

sell umbrellas to camels’. What

A S A S TA R T UP

MALCOLM COWLEY

he means is make sure you

ON WHY B2B

understand who your ideal

S TA R T UP S

customer is and focus almost

SHOULD FOCUS ON

exclusively on them. They

“Always find out who the

“When you’ve raised a lot of

decision-maker in a corporate

money, it’s easy to go

REFERENCEABLE

are far more likely to become

is. There’s no point in taking

on a hiring spree. We made

CUSTOMERS

referenceable customers, who

meeting after meeting

precisely this mistake; we

can then provide air cover for

with people who can’t say

were so excited to fill the [new]

your sales leads, [by giving your

yes. Aside from creating that

roles that we just started

company] a great reference. If

sense of fomo about your

hiring people because they

you’re an enterprise business,

product or service, find out

had experience. But before

then referenceable customers

where the sign-off will come

you decide you need someone

are huge. Over-index on

from. Then work out how

with five years’ experience from

keeping them happy. It should

to get in a room with that

a corporate or tech platform,

get markedly easier the

individual. Too many people

give your home-grown talent

more of them that you have.”

are just too nice and tread

a chance. Our best hires have

carefully. Ask up front about

been our interns. When you

a corporate’s processes, and

watch people rise up, it gives

if the person you’re meeting

everybody confidence

isn’t the decision-maker,

because they know they’re

then quickly find out who is.”

in a meritocracy.”

‘Always be ready to get your hands dirty’

‘Weed out the wrong investors’

DAVID BU T TRES S,

CHERRY FREEMAN,

CO-FOUNDER

CO-FOUNDER OF

AND E X-CEO

LOVECRAFTS,

OF JU S T E AT

ON FUNDRAISING

‘Don’t drink the Kool-Aid’ “Founders have to pull off a

“If you’ve done the operational

WENDY TAN WHITE,

near-impossible trick: they

processes yourself, it gives

out of the fundraising process

CO-FOUNDER AND

have to distort reality –

you credibility internally –

as quickly as possible.

FORMER CEO,

because they are selling a

and even if they can do it

Fundraising is like running a

“Weed the ‘wrong’ investors

M O O N F R U I T, A N D

vision of something that

better than you, your team

sales process: you need to

ADVISER TO THE

doesn’t yet exist – but not

will respect the fact that

work out who your runners and

BRITISH GROWTH

bullshit themselves. As the

you’ve had a good go at it.

riders are, and not waste time

FUND (BGF), ON THE

Americans say: ‘Don’t drink

Throughout all my time as a

on people who aren’t going to

DANGERS OF HYPE

the Kool-Aid’. As an investor, I

CEO and four years as a

get to completion. In an ideal

look for entrepreneurs who can

public CEO, there were many

world, founders want to end

describe their strategy in level-

occasions when, even though

up with no more than three or

headed terms and articulate

I was no longer doing those

four term-sheets [investment

the steps they need to take.

tasks, if someone told me

offers]. That’s three or four

I’m asking what their insight or

something about any aspect

VCs that you’d be happy

unfair advantage is that makes

of operations, I instinctively

to work with. Then you’ve got

me believe they can achieve

knew whether what they were

something you can use to get

what they say they can.”

saying was rubbish or not.”

the best deal for yourself.”

S TA R T U P C I T Y

Montreal

Affordable office space and a community feel have helped Canada’s second-largest city develop into a thriving AI hotspot

And with AI now at the centre of so much technological development, Montreal has found itself in an enviable position. “The private sector is here, the academic sector is here and so is the government,” says Damien Silès, executive director of the Quartier de l’innovation, an experimental city laboratory that operates in downtown Montreal. “We share the responsibility and that’s why it’s working; that’s why it’s a strength.”

As Quebec’s biggest city and with 59 per cent of its population fluent in both French and English, Montreal stands out among its North American rivals. “We’re speaking French with joie de vivre but we’re acting North American,” says Silès. “But it’s also the food, the Latin way of life, the Latin way to approach people – it’s totally different.”

The low cost of real estate in Montreal has also created a more close-knit community in which locals can afford to live, work and socialise downtown.

That’s good news for the city’s 2,500 startups, which occupy the same city blocks as major corporate headquarters and fellow residents. “Montreal is one of those great cities that’s large enough to be a metropolis but small enough that it’s not cut-throat,” says Philippe Telio, founder of Montreal Startupfest, a summer festival that has grown from a few hundred attendees in 2011 to more than 7,000 in July 2018. “There’s now a serious critical mass of innovators and thinkers,” he adds.

The only thing holding Montreal back, according to Telio, is a breakout success story. “Like any community we’re starting to see some great successes, but like any great ecosystem we need a couple of billion-dollar companies to showcase.” If its AI scene continues to flourish, Montreal surely won’t be waiting much longer. James Temperton

W H E R E T O E AT

W H E R E T O S TAY

W H AT T O D O

R E S TA U R A N T I L E F L O T TA N T E ,

174 -176

R U E S A I N T V I AT E U R O U E S T .

AUBERGE DU VIEUX-PORT,

97

RUE DE LA COMMUNE EST.

M O N T R O YA L TA K E A M O R N I N G C L I M B U P M O N T R E A L ’ S

ENJOY AN EXQUISITE, SEASONAL AND

TRADITIONAL FRENCH CLASS WITH

EPONYMOUS HILL AND SEE THE CITY

L O C A L LY S O U R C E D TA S T I N G M E N U

VIEWS OF THE ST LAWRENCE RIVER

FROM A DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVE

PHOTOGRAPHY: JOCELYN MICHEL. ILLUSTRATION: SODAVEKT

Montreal is one of the world’s leading centres for artificial intelligence research – and that reputation is now having a big impact on its startup community.

According to PwC Canada, the city raised more venture capital money than any other in the country in 2017, with US$800 million (£616m) invested across 63 major deals. That’s still small fry compared to rival startup cities in the US and across Europe, but Montreal is growing fast.

Attracted by its reputation for ground breaking AI research, Google, Facebook and Microsoft have invested heavily in the city’s academic and entrepreneurial communities in recent years.

The Canadian government has also pledged more than $200 million (£118m) of funding to further boost Montreal’s AI research. According to Université de Montréal professor Yoshua Bengio, widely regarded as one of the world’s leading authorities on deep learning, the city is well on its way to becoming “a mini Silicon Valley”.

DIALOGUE Telemedicine startup Dialogue works with companies to offer employees access to on-demand healthcare. The service includes video and text consultations, referrals and a booking system for in-person visits and the ability to renew prescriptions online. It works with around 150 employers and

Left-right: Dialogue

raised $12 million in a February 2018 Series A round led by White Star Capital.

co-founders Cherif

Founded 2016

Habib, Anna Chif

Investment raised $16m

and Alexis Smirnov

Founders Alexis Smirnov, Anna Chif, Cherif Habib

AU T OM AT AI startup Automat develops conversational marketing bots for brands. Its aim? To help companies communicate with customers at scale by automating conversations.

Its work for L’Oréal, called

WORK S M A R T ER

Beauty Gifter, used a Facebook Messenger chatbot to learn what products people liked and recommend them similar items within a chat interface.

Automat has also worked with Cover Girl and Sephora on similar projects. Early-stage investment has come from Slack and Comcast Ventures.

Founded 2016 Investment raised $10.9m Founder Andy Mauro

MYLO Fintech app Mylo connects to its customers’ bank accounts and rounds up their purchases to the nearest dollar so it can invest the spare change.

Similar to London’s Moneybox and California-based Acorns, Mylo is the only round-up-andsave app available in Canada, with investments handled by an asset management

WRNCH

F L U E N T. A I

ELEMENT AI

firm. The app has more than

Computer-vision startup

With voice becoming one of

This deep-learning incubator

150,000 customers and

wrnch uses deep learning

the main ways we interact with

connects Montreal’s research

raised $1.9 million in a

to convert human motion

machines, having a strong

community with companies

seed round led by Desjardins

from 2D video into detailed

accent could be a hindrance

around the world to scale new

Capital in January 2018.

3D motion data. Its custom-

when communicating with

products and services. Think of

Founded 2015

built software can pull video

AI. To address this, Fluent.

it as an AI shop: if a business

Investment raised $3.3m

from smartphone and tablet

ai has developed a range of

doesn’t have AI expertise

Founders Philip Barrar

cameras in real time, and track

systems to help companies

it can buy it in. Seed funding

up to 63 body parts. Its proof-

better understand what people

was provided by Microsoft

of-concept bodySLAM system

are saying. Its AI engine

Ventures, and it raised $102

was among the breakthrough

learns from context and

million in a Series A round led

technologies demoed at

behaviour as well as speech,

by Data Collective in June 2017.

Nvidia’s GPU Technology

rather than simply turning

Founded 2016

Conference in May 2017.

speech data into words.

Investment raised $102m

Founded 2015

Founded 2015

Founders Jean-Francois

Investment raised $1.8m

Investment raised $4m

Gagné, Yoshua Bengio,

Founder Paul Kruszewski

Founder Vikrant Tomar

Nicolas Chapados

Whether you’re launching a startup or toiling for a tech titan, work never stops. But pulling all-nighters at the expense of a good night’s sleep can be damaging for your health and the workplace

PRODUCTIVITY

WORK S MAR T E R

Apple CEO Tim Cook once said he sets the alarm clock to start his day at 3:45am. Twitter founder Jack Dorsey bragged about being ultra-efficient despite only getting four hours’ sleep a night. Tesla founder Elon Musk claims he gets no more than six hours shut-eye – and even moved his bed into the Tesla factory to better oversee production of his latest vehicles. “Car biz is hell,” he tweeted. Former Google executive Marissa Mayer once said it’s possible to work 130 hours a week – “if you’re strategic about when you sleep, when you shower, and how often you go to the bathroom”.

Late nights, early mornings and long hours spent coding in coffee shops and bedrooms – work never stops.

The message is clear: to thrive, you have to work harder than the competition. “The picture of the hard-working entrepreneur who works all night, all day and sleeps very little is sometimes a sign of status or success,” says David Brudö, co-founder and CEO of Remente, a life-coaching app.

But what impact does burning the midnight oil have on our lives? Plenty, according to experts. “You’re at 12 per cent higher risk of any cause of death if you’re a short-sleeping adult, at 15 per cent higher risk of having a stroke, and 48 per cent higher risk of coronary heart disease,” explains Michelle Miller of Warwick University’s Sleep, Health and Society research programme. “Lack of sleep has a massive effect on health outcomes.” This is in large part due to the lack of time for the body to recover when sleep is pared back. “When we sleep, we’re refreshing the mind and the body,” says Jason Ellis of Northumbria University’s Centre for Sleep Research.

The work/sleep dilemma

There’s no hard and fast rule about how much sleep the average person needs per night. “Everybody is different and needs different amounts of sleep,” says Ellis, although there is a minimum threshold below which you’re endangering your health. “If you’re sleeping for less than four hours, we know that is associated with significant lapses in attention, judgement, memory and problem solving,” he says. It’s also best to sleep at night (sorry, shift workers) to follow the body’s natural rhythms; Miller points to research with police officers that shows when officers are put on night shifts, their lack of sleep

and irascibility leads to more complaints against them being taken to court.

Aside from the serious threats to long-term health caused by a lack of sleep, there are smaller day-to-day impacts, too. That’s the case for Denys Zhadanov, vice president of marketing at Readdle, a productivity-app developer with offices in San Francisco and Odessa, Ukraine. Zhadanov splits his time between both offices and tries to bridge the ten-hour time difference to be constantly available. “I usually tend to stay up late while in Ukraine – say until two to three am – and wake up around five when in San Francisco,” he explains.

ILLUSTRATION: RANDY MORA; MATTHEW GREEN

“Having a routine is the best way for a healthy life,” he adds, but he doesn’t have one. “It’s hard to maintain because I travel a lot.” That has an impact on his work, particularly in the run-up to a new product launch, when he can be working 20-hour days and only sleeping for four. “I feel less productive when I’m sleep deprived,” he says.

Brudö also has similar problems when he doesn’t get enough sleep.

“If I haven’t had the right amount of sleep I become more irritated and find it more difficult to focus,” he explains.

“I see a correlation between my sleep and how I interpret and react to the world around me.” Despite consciously thinking about his sleeping patterns and the impact they have on him, he finds it’s easy to fall into the same tired old ways. “An entrepreneur can easily get into that situation because you have a lot of things to do – probably more than you have time for,” he says.

Even if there don’t seem to be enough hours in the day, it’s essential for entrepreneurs and employees to get a good night’s shut-eye. “It’s really not going to be great for your startup,” says Ellis. “You may think so, because it seems logical: if I need more time to meet that deadline, I’ll catch up on sleep later. But the other side of that is you’re going to be less productive and more moody and irritable.” The social impact of a poor work-life balance can also affect relationships away from the workplace.

So why do people spend all day and night working? Like many founders, Zhadanov can’t see a way of getting around longer days and shorter nights. “Maybe some other founders and companies can do it,” he says, “but with software it’s always hard to estimate times and deadlines.” A study published in February 2018 from the University of Oulu in Finland found that one third of commits (committing code to the code base) made by software developers working for companies including Mozilla and the Apache Foundation were made outside normal office working hours.

But disrupted work patterns bleeding into disrupted sleeping patterns don’t just have an impact on productivity – a lack of sleep can have serious consequences. Research has shown that a lack of sleep can have the same effect on the reaction times of drivers as drinking alcohol. “I was driving the other day and I almost turned on a red light,” Zhadanov admits. “I saw it just in time.”

Delineating the working week from the weekend can help, says Miller, but only partly. “Some of the health benefits seem to improve, but the majority of studies seem to suggest you can’t catch up all you’ve lost during the week,” she explains. But thankfully, Silicon Valley stars are beginning to wake up to the power of sleep: Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is a strong proponent

of getting the average eight hours; Mark Zuckerberg says he regularly lies in until 8am. And while they’re slumbering, their companies are still raking in money. So instead of thinking that the startup lifestyle requires you to pull all-nighters, recognise instead there are only 24 hours in the day – and you need to sleep for a good number of them to be successful. Chris Stokel-Walker

THE BIG QUESTION

What’s your number-one strategy for a good meeting?

Clare Gilmartin,

Lauren Bowker,

CEO, Trainline

creative director, THEUNSEEN

“The traditional meeting is a dated

Charlie Pool,

“Meetings where

Scott Walchek,

concept. At

CEO, Stowga

all parties are

founder and CEO,

in a completely

Trov

Trainline, small, mission-based,

unfamiliar setting

cross-functional

“Our number-one

have always turned

teams sit together

meeting strategy

out well for me. Eat

“We start each

and meet informally

is to not have a

food together in the

week with an

throughout the day.

meeting at all.

dark or speak to

impact meeting for

It means decisions

We genuinely

a stranger on the

departments to

are made and

strive to have

bus. You never

communicate what

actioned in an

no meetings

know who you’re

they’re doing.

agile way. It gives

whatsoever at

sitting next to

This isn’t a status

everyone at

Stowga – but if we

unless you ask.”

meeting; we

every level the

do have to have

encourage teams

opportunity to

one, then we have

to say nothing if

share ideas

some rules.

their work doesn’t

informally, and

Any meeting has

have immediate

nurtures creativity

to have a specific

impact. They’re

and innovation.”

goal; it can’t

20 minutes

be booked way

long, recorded

in advance; and it

and posted

must involve

for download.”

as few people

Richard Priday

as possible.”

COMIC

Revealed: the rules of successful product design James Clear is an expert on forming good behaviour patterns â&#x20AC;&#x201C; and breaking bad ones.

His new book, ATOMIC HABITS, outlines four laws for budding startups to follow

ILLUSTRATION: JORI BOLTON. WORDS: RICHARD PRIDAY. ATOMIC HABITS IS PUBLISHED

BY RANDOM HOUSE BUSINESS, AND IS AVAILABLE FROM NOVEMBER 1

WORK S MART E R

KNOWLEDGE PA R T N E R

WIRED insider

THE INSIDER EVENT EDIT WIRED Smarter King’s Place, London

wired.co.uk/event/wired-

Events, new products and promotions Compiled by Avalon Ffooks

smarter October 9, 2018 WIRED’s latest one-day event, where the inspirational come to be inspired, has been curated to touch on retail, energy and money. Join us to hear a series of keynotes from leaders in their field, including Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon; author, expert in change and creativity, and former vice-chair of GE, Beth Comstock; and Will Shu, co-founder and CEO of $2bnbusiness Deliveroo.

WIRED Live Tate Modern, London

wired.co.uk/event/wired-live November 1, 2018 WIRED’s innovation festival showcases the pillars of the publication: ideas, technology, design and business. The

WIRED INSIDER

event will feature test labs, panels and keynote speakers including Martha Lane Fox – founder of Lastminute. com and Doteveryone.org. uk; Bill Browder, champion of the Global Magnitsky Act and co-founder of Hermitage Capital Management; awardwinning physicist, author and broadcaster Jim Al-Khalil.

Nikon D850

Bang & Olufsen H9i

£3,599 nikon.co.uk

£449 bang-olufsen.com

WIRED Next Generation

-

-

Tate Modern, London

The multi award-winning D850’s fast,

B&O’s flagship H9i wireless headphones

wired.co.uk/event/wired-next-

ultra-high-res full-frame sensor has

are lightweight and crafted from luxurious

generation

45.7 megapixels of effective resolution

materials, while boasting unique features such

November 3, 2018

for bright, clear images, and also shoots

as a proximity sensor which automatically

true full-frame movies in crisp 4K.

pauses your music when you take them off.

Issey Miyake L’Eau Super Majeure

Nomos Ahoi Neomatik Siren White

educate young people aged

D’Issey

£3,240 nomos-glashuette.com

13-19, and show them how

50ml - £47.00 Available at boots.com

-

they can influence the future

WIRED Next Generation

-

Robust yet elegant, this mechanical

of tech and innovation.

A new, exhilarating blend that builds on the

timepiece has a crown guard, reinforced

Speakers and workshops

classic men’s fragrance, Super Majeure’s

sapphire crystal and water resistance of

will expand and exercise our

vigorous surge of aromatic notes includes

200m. It is handcrafted by NOMOS Glashütte

guests’ minds – and this

essence of clary sage and rosemary.

in Germany’s oldest watchmaking town.

year there will be a special session hosted by the Royal Institution, as well as a design club and a politics project.

PHOTOGRAPHY: SUN LEE

is designed to inspire and

SET: CARAVANE. PHOTOGRAPHY: NIK MIRUS. USING PLEXIGLASS, FOLIAGE, WATER AND LIGHT PROJECTIONS. THE SET IS INTENDED TO FEEL ORGANIC AND BUCOLIC, YET FUTURISTIC AND MANUFACTURED

L O N G -F O R M STORIES

“If you look at the economic infrastructure, we haven’t even started.” John Collison, co-founder of Stripe p80

Patrick and John Collison have democratised online payments â&#x20AC;&#x201C; and reshaped the digital economy in the process

The dream machine:

By Stephen Armstrong Photography: Christie Hemm Klok

how Stripe changed the face of commerce

in a lush, green Cairo garden just a stone’s throw from the Nile, 29-year-old Mostafa Amin is talking about bread.

He’s speaking with the kind of reverence usually reserved for celebrities, football teams or minor miracles like manna – the small, doughy rolls dropped from on high to help the Israelites flee the Pharaoh, according to the Bible.

“In Egyptian Arabic, we call bread ‘aish’, which translates as ‘life’,” Amin explains. “We are a culture of bread – not rice, not meat or potatoes. Most of us eat Egyptian baladi bread with all three meals across the day. Last year we were the world’s number-two consumer of flour and we produced 28 billion loaves of baladi. It’s important.”

Indeed, bread is more than just food in Egypt – it’s history, glory, anger and revolution. The first ever loaf of bread was baked in Egypt 10,000 years ago, thanks to the quern, a technological innovation that allowed nomadic people to crush grain. At the height of the Roman Empire, the Nile delta was the bread basket of the world. Across the 20th century, every drop in the bread subsidy in Egypt, a country where 45 per cent of the population earns around £1.50 per day, caused huge public protests. On 17 January 2011, a baker called Abdou Abdel Monaam set himself on fire in the port city of Alexandria over the price of bread, sparking an uprising that kick-started Egypt’s Arab Spring and led to the fall of President Hosni Mubarak’s government.

In this context, launching Breadfast, a home-delivery startup promising fresh loaves delivered to homes by 5am, was a no-brainer to Amin: a huge population; bread’s enormous popularity; and a service that could grow very quickly

into the Amazon Fresh of Egypt and on through the rest of the Middle East.

But, in north Africa, it’s not quite that easy. “Egypt has political instability, soaring inflation and high interest rates.” Amin says. “If you go to an investor right now, they’ll ask why they should put money in a startup when they can put it in the bank and get 15 per cent? There are probably ten investors in the whole country with vision beyond wanting 90 per cent of your company for $200,000 [£155,000].

Most of the rest are real-estate investors who are after a quick return.”

Amin is not used to this way of thinking. In 2014, he moved to Berlin for a couple of years to earn some cash as a coder. The startup philosophy there was, as he puts it, “focused on reaching the first million in your user base, and then seeing how to monetise it.”

But in the Middle East, we don’t work like that. From day one, investors want you to show something tangible. They don’t speak about the next generation, they want to talk about something basic that people will pay for on the spot.”

Since the 2011 revolution, Cairo has experienced a sharp increase in young entrepreneurs like Amin. Almost 30 per cent of Egyptians live below the poverty line, and millions hover just above it. After years of energy subsidy cuts, tax increases, austerity measures and currency flotation, these entrepreneurs ofer one of the best hopes for the country to achieve Harvard University’s Center for International Development’s hopeful predictions of annual growth rates reaching 6.63 per cent by 2026.

“Egypt has one of the best strategic locations in the world,” Amin says. “We have 100 million people. If you give these people a proper education, you will create lots of impact. This country is a treasure.

But we have terrible infrastructure, shortsighted investors, zero management and no vision. Those are our problems.”

These problems are prevalent across the region – and the developing world – but so are the communities of digital entrepreneurs trying to do something about it. Take, for instance, the isolated Palestinian city of Ramallah. Despite frequent electricity failures, a creaky 2G mobile network and an unstable political situation that has lasted for decades, it also hosts a tech park and co-working spaces which helped launch Yamsafer (billed as Middle East’s booking.com), wearables company Insolito and the lingerie startup Kenz Woman.

According to the World Bank’s Small and Medium Enterprise Department, there are between 365 million and 445 million micro-, small- and medium-

sized enterprises in emerging markets, contributing up to 60 per cent of employment and up to 40 per cent of national GDP. The main problem these companies face is access to finance.

So how can entrepreneurs from emerging nations join the global market and help lift the wealth of their nations?

One of the solutions comes from a village in Ireland called Dromineer, population 102. It’s the birthplace of the world’s youngest self-made billionaires, Patrick and John Collison, founders of onlinepayments company Stripe, whose clients include Amazon, Airbnb and Uber and is used by millions of people every day around the globe.

Right: Mostafa Amin’s Cairo-based startup, Breadfast, became a Silicon Valley-funded C-Corp after he partnered with Stripe

PHOTOGRAPHY: ROGER ANIS

On a hot summer’s day

DROMINEER is a picture-postcard-cute village – there are a couple of low, whitewashed pubs, a few shops, two hotels serving the tourists who come for the boating and an 11th-century castle that towers over the place. The nearest main road is almost ten kilometres away. In the summer, the marina buzzes, but in the winter all is quiet. It’s the perfect setting for a Richard Curtis romcom.

It’s also where Patrick and John Collison learned to code – and where they began to think about online payments. It’s where they began laying the foundations for Stripe, their payments company valued at $9.2 billion when it last raised money in 2016 and which handles payments for Amazon, Booking.com, Lyft, Deliveroo, Shopify, Salesforce and Facebook.

“To say Dromineer is rural is understating it,” John Collison explains. “We

went to school about 40 minutes’ drive away and there were fewer than 20 kids in each class.” The brothers found school boring. Their father, Denis, trained as an electronics engineer and mother, Lily, as a microbiologist, and the technical chat round the family table outstripped anything they learned in class. They were fascinated by maths and physics. By their early teens they had nine computers and were paying €100 (£90) a month for a satellite broadband link via Germany.

Patrick – the red-headed older brother, now 29 – used to smuggle science and history books into class to read during the more tedious lessons: “You could try to pound your head against the wall and think of original ideas… or you can cheat by reading them in books.”

At 16, Patrick won the Esat BT Young Scientist of the Year award – Ireland’s annual school students’ science competition held by the Royal Dublin Society – with his coding language Croma,

a new dialect for LISP, the secondoldest programming language still in widespread use. At the end of the ceremony, the Irish president Mary McAleese took the microphone and marvelled: “He’s a fourth-year student. A fourth-year student! Can you believe it?”

That year, Patrick studied Ireland’s two-year Senior Cycle for his high-school Leaving Certificate while at home, condensing the work into a 20-day period. He aced 30 exams, then running a marathon to celebrate. He enrolled at MIT in 2006 based on an SAT he’d taken at 13.

John, the dark-haired younger brother, now 27, wasn’t far behind. On the way to scoring eight straight A1s

Right: Patrick (right) and John Collison’s business philosophy was forged reading books about the history of computing

old and written by banks, credit-card companies and financial middlemen.

PayPal – designed to simplify payments – actually made this worse. The company infuriated startups with its restrictions – once turnover hit a certain level, it put the business on a 21- to 60-day rolling reserve, meaning that up to 30 per cent of a company’s revenue could be locked for up to two months. Developers had to choose between this and complex legacy systems built by banks.

“For us it was quite visceral: these products are not serving the needs of the customers, so let’s build something

building the sites and apps. They came up with seven simple lines of code that anyone could insert into any app or website to connect to a payments company. A process that used to take weeks was now a cut-and-paste job.

In 2010, the brothers dropped out of college and launched Stripe in San Francisco with seed funding from Y Combinator. Stripe promised its customers that developers who integrated their API wouldn’t need to touch those seven lines of code for years.

The following year, they pitched Peter Thiel and Elon Musk for funding.

better,” John Collison says. “If you’re a developer building the next Kickstarter or Lyft and you have a two-person team writing relatively complex code and solving infrastructural problems, you need a simple payments API that – once installed – doesn’t keep changing.”

In 2008, Patrick and John sold Auctomatic to Canada’s Live Current Media for $5 million – making them teenage millionaires – then went back to MIT and Harvard respectively. They began tinkering with the idea of focusing on software developers – the people actually

“It’s a little impetuous to go to PayPal founders and say payments on the internet are totally broken,” says John with a wry smile. “But look, you can WhatsApp anyone around the world and it’s free. It’s a remarkable act of coordination between the telcos and ISPs and the people who own the fibre under the sea to create this global communications network. If you look at the economic infrastructure, we haven’t even started .”

PHOTOGRAPHY: XXXXXXXXX

in his Leaving Certificate, he spent his Transition Year – an optional time out from Irish education for 15-year-olds – with Patrick in the US, where, aged 17 and 15 respectively, they launched their first startups: Auctomatic – a software-as-aservice platform for eBay PowerSellers to track inventory and traic – and an iPhone app providing an oline version of Wikipedia, pitched as “Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy on the iPhone.”

“It was amazing to us that two kids in Ireland can start a business with customers around the world,” John explains. “Our dad ran a hotel for a while, and our mum started a company that did employee training, but they were just starting a business – they weren’t ambitious entrepreneurs, so we had no-one to ask about what we were doing.

What we did discover pretty quickly was that the hardest part of starting an internet business isn’t coming up with the idea, turning the idea into code or getting people to hear about it and pay for it. The hardest part was finding a way to accept customers’ money. You could share a photo on Facebook but you couldn’t move money around in the same way. It felt like you were in the Dark Ages.”

In 2007, when the brothers were coding their APIs, online payments were supposed to have been solved.

Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and Max Levchin founded PayPal in 1998, which was bought by eBay in 2002 for $1.5 billion.

The fintech “revolution” that followed, however, wasn’t much of an uprising but more of a spot of portfolio diversifying by some banks that laid down the payment rails any eager startup had to ride on. The banks still verified identity and owned the account that cards and payments drew from.

“The problem has always been the layers of intermediation,” explains Chris Higson, a professor of accounting at London Business School. “The annual cost of financial intermediation in the US is roughly two per cent – the same as it was in the late nineteenth century.

The US finance industry has showed no eiciency gains at all over 130 years.”

For years, the growth in e-commerce outpaced the underlying payments technology: companies wanting to set up shop had to go to a bank, and set up a gateway to connect the two. This takes weeks, a lot of bureaucracy, and lots of fees.

Much of the software in place was decades

The brothers pitched a vision of greater internet commerce, driven by more connectivity and ease of use. “That had been the original vision of PayPal, but it didn’t happen. I think they got us, in a way that a lot of people didn’t,” John says.

Thiel led a $2 million Series A round with Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz. The company grew swiftly, driven largely by word-of-mouth between developers. Marketplace builders such as Shopify and sharingeconomy newcomers like Lyft and Airbnb needed to manage payments between a large number of small suppliers, home

owners, drivers and thousands of customers in the time it took to press a single on-screen button. Setting up accounting platforms to manage these incoming and outgoing payments would have taken six months to build. Stripe processed payments through its own servers, allowing payers and vendors to connect with minimum fuss.

In short order, Stripe signed deals with Ly ft, Facebook , DoorDash, Deliveroo, Seedrs, Mondo, The Guardian, Boohoo, Salesforce, Shopify, Indiegogo, Asos and TaskRabbit. The company won’t disclose its payments volume but

‘You could share a photo on Facebook but you couldn’t move money around.

It felt like you were in the Dark Ages’ – John Collison

says it processes billions of pounds a year for tens of thousands of companies.

Over the past 12 months, 40 per cent of internet users in the UK and 60 per cent of US users have bought something from a Stripe-powered business, although very few of those customers knew they were using it. Where PayPal injects itself into the checkout process, Stripe operates like a white-label merchant account, processing payments, checking for fraud and taking a small percentage: 1.4 per cent plus 20 pence for European cards and 2.9 per cent plus 20 pence for all others. The buyer sees the seller’s name on their credit-card statement and, unless the merchant chooses to deploy the Stripe logo, that’s all they’ll ever see.

“It’s not the cheapest provider but it does remove all other intermediaries so it’s the only fee you’ll pay,” Higson explains. “And if that was all they did, they’d be interesting. It’s what they did next that’s revolutionary.”

“For many years, Stripe had been trying to work out how to deal with what seemed like an obvious opportunity,” says Billy Alvarado, the company’s chief business oicer. Alvarado grew up in Honduras, where, in 1998, Hurricane Mitch took out the capital city’s three bridges. “Suddenly you had men, women and children in rubber boots with these pads on their shoulders selling piggybacks across the river to men in suits and women in work clothes,” he recalls. “If you go to any country, you see entrepreneurship everywhere. A lot of these entrepreneurs would love to launch a global internet business. They find it difficult to trade on the world market, but these are literally millions of nascent businesses.

We were just trying to work out how we can help them do that simply.”

In February 2016, the company launched Stripe Atlas, designed to enable entrepreneurs to launch a business from anywhere on the planet.

For $500, the invitation-only platform allows startups to incorporate as a US company in Delaware – a state with such business-friendly courts, tax system, laws and policies that 60 per cent of Fortune 500 companies, including the Bank of America, Google and Coca-Cola, are incorporated there.

According to Patrick in his speech at the 2016 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Stripe Atlas had an ambition: “To increase the GDP of the internet.”

Dana Khater is 24.

Born in Egypt, she grew up in Dubai and studied at an international school until she was 11. You can still hear traces of her schooling in her soft, almostAmerican accent. After her father died, she returned to Cairo and spent a “few years arguing about education” w i t h h e r m o t h e r. “ I o r i g i n a l l y wanted to go to university abroad,”

she explains with a light smile, sipping cofee in Holm Café, a Scandinavian-style coffee shop in the affluent west Cairo Zamlek district. “I got into McGill but my mum didn’t let me go – I was 16 at the time and she said I was too young to live on my own. Throughout the first year I’d keep picking out things that I found at McGill that didn’t exist at my university – and one of the things was a fashion magazine.

She was sick of me talking like this and said ‘Well, start one.’ So I did.”

The fashion-centric magazines in Egypt mostly published translations of Vogue articles. Khater wanted to focus on Middle-Eastern brands – Cairo designer Amina K. had just held her first catwalk show at London Fashion Week and the city’s fashion scene was growing. Khater and her team learned to style shoots, borrowing clothes from stores that sold copies of the magazine in return for publicity. She ran the magazine for two-and-a-half years – she never did go to McGill – until the revolution broke

out in 2011. Cairo’s restive streets filled with protesters, military vehicles, mass pray-ins, riot police and blazing armoured cars until President Mubarak resigned.

In the months that followed, the old order stepped warily around the new.

Khater took a job at Ego, a department store that had purchased all its stock before the revolution. “Post-revolution, no one knew what was going to happen, so no one was really buying luxury goods,” she explains. “We had a lot of product that had sold out on Net-a-Porter but was just sitting on our shelves.”

Khater suggested that Ego launch its own e-commerce site but it turned her down, so she decided to turn her magazine into a platform showcasing and selling emerging brands. Coterique went online in February 2013. Its first order came from New York; the second from LA. Before she knew it, she was running a global business. Coterique was selling brands from Egypt, Dubai, Lebanon, the UK, Australia, Turkey and more.

PHOTOGRAPHY: ROGER ANIS. ILLUSTRATION: MARK LONG

Then, in 2016, the government devalued the Egyptian pound to secure a $12 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund, prompting soaring inflation and rising borrowing costs. Prior to the devaluation, $1 was oicially EGP6. After devaluation, $1 soared overnight to EGP17.

“A lot of our brands and customers were outside of Egypt,” Khater explains.

“We were getting payments from customers in Egyptian pounds, but my brands in New York needed paying in dollars. No one wanted to dabble in foreign currency, so we had to withdraw the Egyptian pounds from the bank, go to the currency exchange on the black market and redeposit them, losing a lot of money every time.”

She heard about Stripe Atlas from an early-stage investor in her company.

Crucially, Atlas allowed Coterique to set up as a US-based C-Corp – a business taxed separately from its owner’s income – with a Silicon Valley Bank account that could receive payment in US dollars.

“Before we could accept dollars, we were only taking payments in Egyptian pounds,” she explains. “If you live in London and you really like a dress, you Google EGP to figure out what currency that is. You see Egypt. Everything you see on TV says that Egypt’s unstable.

You don’t know if that means that you’re actually going to receive your dress and suddenly you’re not interested. Atlas saved our business.”

For Mustafa Amin, Atlas offered a solution to his perennial problem – nobody wanted to invest in MiddleEastern companies, “ because the instability meant they doubted our legal system – to protect their money, they need to have a strong legal system.”

Since BreadFast became a US company, Amin has landed funding from Silicon Valley venture fund 500 Startups.

Twenty per cent of tech-based Delaware C-Corps started on Stripe Atlas. Alvarado oversees the partnership between Atlas and Silicon Valley Bank.

For him, building Atlas is a visceral part of his own personal story – his father grew up in poverty in Honduras and he was born into difficult circumstances.

“My grandfather was a street hustler,” he explains. “When my dad was 18, my grandfather gave him the equivalent of $2 and told him to take care of his mum and brother. He started as a janitor in a bank and slowly made his way up until he was working for someone doing credit reviews. That person got a job at Citibank, took my dad with him and he suddenly became a professional. That paid for our education in America, but everything had depended on the decision of that one person. I don’t think helping emerging markets should be a matter of chance.”

Of course, Atlas isn’t a charity.

Payments is a notoriously tight-margin business and growth is complicated in established markets. Alvarado points to forecasts saying 70 per cent of internet commerce is going to come from emerging markets, “so it’s important that we start doing it now or people will solve it for themselves and come up with a way to pay and borrow”.

Not everyone approves. “In a developing-world context, Stripe Atlas has its benefits for disruptive SMEs located in the most conducive development markets and for those companies the business case is clear,” says Nadia Millington, deputy programme director in social Left: Dana Khater founded Coterique using Stripe’s Atlas payment platform.

“Atlas saved our business,” she says

FIVE MORE ONLINE P AY M E N T S TA R T U P S :

T h e p o s t- P a y P a l o p t i o n ADYEN In February 2018, eBay replaced PayPal with the Netherlands-based Adyen, which provides back-end payments for Uber and Netflix for cheaper, faster and more international payments.

Its June 2018 IPO has the company valued at $8.3 billion (£6.5bn).

The small-business option SQUARE Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey launched Square in 2010 with a card reader that connects to a mobile device.

It has grown rapidly via cafés, florists and van-man businesses. Q2 2018 results show the company handled payments worth $21.4 billion (£16.5bn).

The omnichannel option KL ARNA Valued at $2.5 billion in 2017, this Swedish fintech newcomer is Europe’s second-largest startup – and one of the few payments companies with its own banking licence and strong bricks-and-mortar presence.

The foreign-exchange option TRANSFERWISE Skype’s Taavet Hinrikus launched his money-transfer service in 2011 after he experienced large exchange fees when working between Tallinn and London.

The company takes funds in one country, matches them with funds in the other and swaps them around for a one per cent fee.

P a y P a l ’s m o b il e o p t i o n BRAINTREE This Chicago startup has been PayPal’s front line in the mobile payments arena since it was acquired in 2015. Its Venmo subsidiary is the largest mobile peer-to-peer payments provider in the US and offers merchants the chance to interact with customers.

innovation and entrepreneurship at the London School of Economics. “However, the majority of SMEs cannot deal with the complexity associated with registering and maintaining a US C-company.”

Challenges include double taxation, onerous repatriation rules and an inability to establish control structures that are required to run multi-country businesses. “There’s a host of structural, institutional and social barriers which must be addressed in parallel,” she adds.

One solution is the platform model.

Over the past five years, Stripe’s clients have built multi-billion-dollar businesses at speed, disrupting industry after industry with a platform business model that’s open, connected and rapidly scalable, allowing them to create entire ecosystems of developers, customers and suppliers.

Platforms allow everyone to trade on largely neutral terms, connecting millions of sellers across the world.

One in four marketplaces on Stripe pay sellers outside their home country. For the brothers, this is only the beginning.

In July, Stripe entered the credit-card business, helping its business customers issue cards to employees using existing Mastercard and Visa rails. Their devotion to the founders of the internet means they’re out to rectify one big mistake made in setting the whole thing up.

WHEN you arrive at Stripe’s offices in San Francisco’s SoMa district, you take a seat in reception by a cofee table strewn with magazines and books.

There are issues of Paris Review, engineering magazines, the Twelve Tomorrows sci-fi anthology, research journals, a handful of novels and a few scattered copies of Increment, Stripe’s quarterly magazine founded

by Susan Fowler. (She was the former Uber employee whose January 2017 blog alleging a corporate culture of sexual harassment at the ridesharing company set off an internal investigation that led to Travis Kalanick stepping down as CEO. Fowler joined Stripe three months later.)

This mise en scène is a very deliberate introduction to the company’s thoughtful culture. When he was a student, the books Patrick Collison used to smuggle into lessons included biographies of computing pioneers such as Stanford Research Institute engineer Douglas Right: John and Patrick Collison pictured at Stripe’s San Francisco headquarters by WIRED, July 2018

Engelbart – who, by 1968, had invented the mouse, real-time collaboration and video conferencing; and MIT professor John McCarthy – who coined the term “artificial intelligence” in 1955 and later published coding languages that could drive AI data searches.

Patrick’s bookshelf is stuffed with everything from War and Peace to The Wealth of Nations. He lists almost 600 titles in a “recommended reading” list on his personal website. From this, he pulls out 70 “above average” titles – including a few books on China, Africa and the Middle East; technology and climate change; Betty Friedan’s feminist classic The Feminine Mystique; Spacetime and Geometry: An Introduction to General Relativity; as well as Dracula and the Count of Monte Cristo. There’s also 20 labelled “particularly great” – including books on imperialism, engineering and democracy as well as Nick Bostrom’s Anthropic Bias and Rebecca Goldstein’s philosophy novel The Mind-Body Problem.

The Collisons argue that technology has turned from an equal-access opportunity to an oligopoly controlled by five companies worth more than $3 trillion

who, during his career at MIT and the Pentagon, mentored Robert Taylor – who implemented Licklider’s ideas of a computer network as the ARPAnet that ultimately evolved into the internet – Douglas Englebart and many of those who created computing as we know it.

“One takeaway we had on reading The Dream Machine is how accidental the whole thing seemed,” John explains, sitting in a glass-fronted oice in Stripe’s headquarters. “How easily it could not have happened and how much it relied on a set of very motivated people who really believed in the long-term idea, pushing it through. That’s one important lesson: this thing that has been impactful for so many people… was it inevitable?

It’s not obvious that it was.”

When Berners-Lee and his team were building the world wide web and designing HTTP and HTMP standards, they included error codes such as “500: internal server error”, or “404: page not found”. In the early 90s, they were trying to realise Licklider’s vision and setting out the rules for how we were going to interact over this network. One error code is “402: payment required”. The original intention, the reason 402 is reserved for future use, was that it would be used to transact digital cash or micropayments.

It has never been implemented, and the Collisons argue this is the reason tech is turning from an equal-access opportunity to an oligopoly controlled by five companies now worth more than $3 trillion.

“The idea driving 402 was that it’s obvious that support for payments should be a firstclass concept on the web and it’s obvious that there should be a lot of direct commerce on the web,” says John. “In fact, what emerged is a single dominant business model which is advertising. That leads to a lot of centralisation, because you get the highest cost per clicks and with the largest platforms.”

“A big part of what we’re trying to do with Stripe is continually make it easy for new businesses to start and succeed. Having commerce and direct payment succeed on the internet is a very important component of that. It’s the final piece in the dream machine.”

One of those 20 greats is special: The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal, by M Mitchell Waldrop. This particular book shaped Stripe – it was out of print for years until Patrick bought the rights and republished it, handing out free copies to staff and to anyone who visits Stripe’s headquarters.

The book is a sprawling history Stephen Armstrong is a freelance of the ideas and individuals that got journalist. He wrote about us from punch cards to PCs, from Tait Towers in issue 01.18 Alan Turing to Tim Berners Lee. The book focuses on Licklider, a visionary polymath psychologist from Missouri

EVERYDAY CREATIVITY, PURE AND SIMPLE WITH THE 24.2 Megapixel CMOS Sensor • ~ 180˚ Tilt & Flip Touchscreen LCD • Electronic Viewfinder Bluetooth & Wi-Fi Connectivity • Slow Motion HD • 4K Video Film Simulation Modes • Compatible with over 25 lenses

FUJIFILM-XT100.COM

Words: Nicola Davison

WHEN EDWARD BURTYNSKY WAS a first-year student of photography at Ryerson Polytechnic Institute, in Toronto, he was given an assignment that would shape his working life.

Instructed to go out and photograph “evidence of man”, he initially thought of ancient ruins. What better evidence of man’s passing than something built a long time ago? But this was Canada, not Athens, and ruins were hard to find. Burtynsky recalled that in his home town of St. Catharines, there were remnants of the old shipping canals that had connected Lake Erie and Lake Ontario in the 1800s.

He began shooting images of the sections he could find: abutments and walls that had once been part of an ambitious man-made system and now served, he thought, as evidence of how human beings have irrevocably reshaped the land.

To d a y, B u r t y n s k y i s C a n a d a’s best-known photographer. His work has been acquired by 60 museums, including the MoMA and Tate Modern.

He is essentially still at work on that first-year assignment – only now he uses better cameras and crisscrosses the globe. His images are vast and uncanny landscapes of

quarries, mines, solar plants, rubbish piles, deforestation and sprawl – pictures of depletion and desecration that are testament to the collective impact of humankind. Yet Burtynsky’s photos are not depressing.

They are reverential and painterly, capturing gargantuan industrial processes in fine detail. He achieves such a quality by shooting in high resolution and by being an enthusiastic adopter of new technologies such as drones and 3D imaging. He has started to think of himself not so much as a photographer but a “lens-based visual artist”.

“Now when I’m out in the field, I’m working with still cameras, film cameras and shooting VR and for AR,” he says. “There could be five different forms. I just apply what I believe is the best lens-based experience for the subject that I’m looking at.”

Over the past decade, he has been immersed in The Anthropocene Project, a multimedia collaboration with film-makers Jennifer Baichwal and Nicholas de Pencier. It comprises photographs, a feature film, a book and simultaneous exhibitions at the Art Gallery of Ontario and National Gallery of Canada.

Burtynsky first encountered the term “Anthropocene” when he was invited to contribute to a special issue of National Geographic in 2008. At the time, a small but growing band of scientists began to conclude that humanity had altered the planet to the extent that we had entered a new geologic time scale. They believe that the evidence points to an unsettling truth: that the Holocene – which began 11,500 years ago at the end of the last ice age – is past and we are now in a new epoch, one shaped by anthropogenic forces. Burtynsky read their research, and found parallels with his own findings: “In many respects, it reflected the 30-plus years of work I’d been doing already,” he says. “The things they were talking about – urban expansion, population growth, plastics, building dams – all of those I was aware of and had been photographing.

It just felt like a word had been put to the idea I’d been in pursuit of.”

Burtynsky contacted members of the Anthropocene Working Group, the body of scientists tasked with putting forward a case for ratifying the Anthropocene epoch. At the core

of their proposal was the need to find a physical marker for this new era, one that will be perceptible to geologists in hundreds of thousands of years’ time. (The marker that signals the end of Mesozoic, for instance, is the iridium that was dispersed around the planet after a meteor hit, killing most of the dinosaurs.)

Burtynsky’s work doubles as an artistic survey of the various marker candidates. For instance, to gather evidence of anthroturbation, or human tunnelling, he travelled to the 56-kilometre-long tunnel that burrows through the Swiss Alps, and strapped a camera to the nose of a passing train. Other candidates include technofossils such as plastic, aluminium and concrete, all human-made objects that are largely resistant to decay. Terraforming – or the act of transforming the land for agriculture, industry or urbanisation – also features in Burtynsky’s photos in myriad forms, from aerial photos of open-pit mines in New Mexico to the swathes of Borneo jungle cleared for palm-oil plantations.

For Burtynsky, defining the Anthropocene is a matter of urgency. Once formalised, he believes it will act as a body of evidence that policymakers can use to promote and enact legislation that could slow or reverse climate change. He worries that we might be nearing the point of no return. “The question isn’t whether the planet will continue,” he says.

“We still have the Sun and a heated Earth’s core and some DNA that can restructure itself. Life on some level will continue with or without us.

But will there be conscious life if we are gone? We don’t know how much of it is out there in the Universe, so to me it’s important that we at least try to preserve it.”

As engaged as he is in the natural world, Burtynsky is no technophobe.

In his work, he uses specialised tripod heads, cameras with a resolution far beyond what the human eye can see, and drones that provide a new perspective on the planet.

In 2016, Burtynsky flew to the Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya, with Baichwal and de Pencier. The trio were there to document Sudan, the world’s last male northern white rhino. “We thought that if we were going to talk about extinction, how

do you get people to sit and communicate that this is really happening, and that this isn’t in the future – this is now,” Burtynsky says. They spent six days photographing Sudan’s body from almost every angle (they discovered that the legs and underbelly of an elderly, indifferent rhino are not easy to catch), while a microphone recorded his breath.

Sudan died in March 2018, leaving his daughter and grand-daughter as the last representatives of a species that once roamed Central Africa’s grasslands. This autumn, as part of Burtynsky’s gallery exhibition, viewers will be able to walk around a blinking, breathing three-dimensional scale image of Sudan, made up of hundreds of millions of data points, and “be in the presence of him”, as the photographer puts it.

Burtynsky believes that AR inspires a different level of engagement. “I’m very interested in the evolution of the medium,” he says. “With AR, all of a sudden I’m at the beginning of a whole new form.” Looking at a traditional photograph in a museum, the viewer can walk up close and retreat, but the photographer largely controls the point of view. Standing in front of Sudan, the viewer has the power to alter the composition, the focus and the perspective. Their experience of the work is to a great extent in their own hands.

For Burtynsky, this relinquishment of control raises questions of authorship. “It’s a new form that’s emerging and I don’t know where it’s going to end up and how it’s going to change things. It brings a thousand questions to my mind,” he says.

“But anybody who I’ve shown it to thinks it’s next to magic.”

BEHIND THE IMAGES

Edward Burtynsky, Nicholas de Pencier, Jennifer Baichwal and a drone operator on location at Hambach Mine in Germany.

Burtynsky in a potash mine in Russia’s Ural Mountains. Once mined, it is used in manufacturing processes or in fertilisers.

The team took around 6,000 photographs of the secondtallest Douglas fir tree in Canada for an upcoming AR installation.

Burtynsky recently exhibited his first AR installation: a pile of scrap car engines photographed at a recycling plant in Ghana.

Clearcut #1, Palm Oil Plantation, Borneo, Malaysia, 2016 _ In the past two decades, ten per cent of the world’s wilderness – defined as an area “free of human disturbance” – has been lost. Much of this was forest and jungle; each year, it is estimated that around seven million hectares of forest is cleared, often illegally. One of the main drivers of deforestation today is palm-oil production.

Catching illegal deforestation is difficult as criminals typically operate in remote areas. Emerging technologies such as drones and satellite imaging present new means of surveillance, allowing authorities to track illegal activity in real time.

Asia

Dandora Landfill #1, Nairobi, Kenya, 2016 _ In the 1950s, less than two million tonnes of plastics were manufactured globally per year.

By the early 21st century, it had risen to 300 million tonnes. The total cumulative volume of plastics up until 2015 was calculated to be five billion tonnes – enough to coat the planet in plastic wrap.

Much of this plastic waste ends up in landfill or is illegally dumped at sea.

“Good governance takes behaviour that is negative or not helpful to the greater good of society, whether it’s polluting behaviour, plastics or whatever, and taxes the behaviour…

Governments can change things very rapidly and profoundly with base economics. In concept, it’s easy to grasp; in execution, keeping a political base going and the electorate happy, is not so easy.”

Africa

Africa

Oil Bunkering #8, Niger Delta, Nigeria, 2016 _ Oil is one of Burtynskyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s long-standing interests. His book Oil, published in 2009, explores the impact of the extraction of crude oil on the planet.

In the Niger Delta, in some of the most desecrated landscapes Burtynsky has encountered, illegal distilleries reďŹ ne crude oil diverted from pipelines and dump the waste back into the ground, a method known

as bunkering.

The Nigerian Government estimates that between 200,000 and 250,000 barrels are stolen every day. To photograph the region, some of which is controlled by militia, Burtynsky hired a helicopter, mounting his camera on a specialised tripod that could stabilise the image by offsetting the aircraftâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s vibrations.

Highway #8, Santa Ana Freeway, Los Angeles, California, US, 2017 _ Cities are a part of terraforming – the act of transmogrifying the Earth’s surface to meet human ends. “To me, Los Angeles was the invention of the suburb,” says Burtynsky. “They figured it out and perfected it and created a city that was dependent on

Nor th America

the automobile. For that reason, LA was really interesting as a place to do a study on vast urbanisation. It still has one of the greatest footprints of urban sprawl.”

Chino Mine #5, Silver City, New Mexico, US, 2012 _ The Chino Mine in Santa Rita, New Mexico, is an open-pit copper mine stretching three kilometres across and has been excavated for more than 100 years.

Once the copper is extracted, waste products stream out and oxidise in the air, forming tailings in rainbow hues. An excellent conductor of electricity, copper is used in everything from wires and motors to coins. “I’d say that my pictures are the result of a collective conscious,” says Burtynsky. “They are about our aggregate response to largescale development, the things we create, the things we build, the things we remove from the landscape. I’m not focusing on the individual; I’m focusing on the collective impact of humans in the pursuit of providing the kinds of necessary products to support food, clothing, housing and transportation.”

Nor th America

Makoko #2, Lagos, Nigeria, 2016 _ After growing at a gradual pace for most of human history, Earthâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s population has more than doubled in the past 50 years.

According to a 2017 United Nations report, the world population of 7.6 billion is expected to reach 8.6 billion in 2030, 9.8 billion in 2050 and 11.2 billion in 2100. The worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s population is increasingly urban, with 54 per cent now living in cities, a proportion expected

Africa

to increase to 66 per cent by 2050.

Accommodating all these the new city-dwellers is a challenge. In Lagos, one of the worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s fastest-growing cities, residents of the Makoko neighbourhood have built makeshift houses on stilts and live without plumbing, running water or electricity.

Building Ivory Tusk Mound, April 25, Nairobi, Kenya, 2016 _ The destruction of seized ivory is a deterrence technique used by governments where poaching is rife.

In April 2016, the largest ivory burn in African history took place in Nairobi National Park.

The 11 huge pyres comprised 105 tonnes of elephant tusks and 1.35 tonnes of rhino horn, and were estimated to be worth ÂŁ78 million.

Before the pyres were burned,

Africa

Burtynsky and his collaborators took more than 2,000 images, which they used to reconstruct a three-dimensional model. Between 2007 and 2014, the number of elephants in Africa fell by 30 per cent.

Burtynsky believes that the current high rate of animal extinction is a hallmark of the Anthropocene. â&#x20AC;&#x153;There's no question that humans are at the core of these activities,â&#x20AC;? he says.

10 4

Tetrapods #1, Dongying, China, 2016 _ Between 1995 and 2015, half of the planet’s total volume of concrete was produced – humans have now made enough to coat the planet in a 2mm-thick layer. Geologists refer to concrete as a technofossil.

Resistant to decay, fossilised traces of the material will be visible in many thousands of years’ time. Rapid urbanisation and population growth have fuelled demand, not least in China, the world’s most populated country.

Burtynsky visited a tetrapod-production plant in the country’s north-east. There, these immense concrete masses are dropped into the sea, where they form a barrier protecting the oilfields on shore.

“They take a beating against intense waves,” Burtynsky says. “With the rise of the oceans this is a way in which we as humans can build protective shorelines for our cities.”

Nicola Davison is a freelance journalist.

She wrote about treating psychiatric disorders with psychedelics in issue 05.18

Asia

‘This is really happening, and this isn’t in the future – this is now’ Edward Bur tynsky

106

E N DA N G

ERED

Species

BY MA

REYNOLT T DS

THE BANANA IS FACING EXTINCTION. CAN A GROUP OF SCIENTISTS SAVE THE WORLD’S MOST POPULAR FRUIT? During the summer of 1989, Randy Ploetz was in his laboratory just south of Miami, when he received a package from Taiwan. Ploetz, who had earned his doctorate in plant pathology five years earlier, was collecting banana diseases and regularly received mysterious packages containing pathogens pulled out of the soil from far-flung plantations. But gazing down his microscope, Ploetz realised this Taiwanese pathogen was unlike any banana disease he’d encountered before, so he sent the sample for genetic testing.

It was Tropical Race 4 (TR4) – a strain of the fungus Fusarium oxysporum cubense that lives in the soil, is impervious to pesticides, and kills banana plants by choking them of water and nutrients. It was a pathogen that would go on to consume the next three decades of his professional life.

TR4 only afects a particular type of banana called the Cavendish. There are more than 1,000 banana varieties in the world, but the Cavendish, named after a British nobleman who grew the exotic fruit in his greenhouses on the edge of the Peak District, makes up almost the entire export market. The Brazilian apple banana, for example, is small and tart with firm flesh, while the stubby Pisang Awak, a staple in Malaysia, is much sweeter than the Cavendish. But no banana has become as ubiquitous as the Cavendish, which accounts for 47 per cent of all global production of the fruit. According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations, this amounts

to 50 billion tonnes of Cavendish bananas every year – 99 per cent of all global banana exports.

The UK, which imports five billion bananas every year, has become used to this seemingly endless supply of cheap and nutritious fruits shipped from plantations thousands of kilometres away across the Atlantic. But the high-volume, low-margin banana industry has been balancing on a knife edge for decades. “It looks very stable because we’re getting bananas, but the environmental and social costs that allow that to happen have been high,” says Dan Bebber, a researcher at the University of Exeter who works on a UK government-funded project aimed at securing the future of the banana. If one part of this tightly-wound supply chain snaps, the whole export industry could come tumbling down.

Despite its ubiquity, the Cavendish is something of a genetic outlier among crops: because it has three copies of each chromosome, it is sterile and can only reproduce by creating clones of itself. This makes the Cavendish an ideal crop to grow at scale – farmers know how a plantation of Cavendish bananas will respond to pesticides, how fast its fruit will ripen, how many bananas each plant will yield. “You know what’s going to happen to a Cavendish banana when you pick it,” says Bebber. “When you put it in a refrigerated container, you know exactly what’s going to come out of the other end most of the time.”

Cavendish plants are short, so they don’t blow over easily in a hurricane, are easy to spray with pesticides, and reliably produce lots of bananas. By concentrating all their eforts on the Cavendish, banana exporters have built a system that allows a tropical fruit grown thousands of kilometres away

to appear on supermarket shelves in the UK for less than £1 per kilo – undercutting fruits like apples which are grown in dozens of varieties much closer to home. “People want cheap bananas,” says Bebber. “The system is set up for a very uniform crop.” To put it bluntly – uniformity equals higher profits-per-plant for banana producers.

“They are addicted to Cavendish,” says Ploetz, today a 66-year-old professor at the University of Florida’s Tropical Research and Education Centre.

It is this genetic uniformity that lays the foundation for an $8 billion-ayear export industry.

The Cavendish hasn’t always been popular. Before the 1950s, Europe and America’s banana of choice was the Gros Michel – a creamier, sweeter banana that dominated the export market. Unlike the Cavendish, which needed to be transported in boxes to protect its fragile skin, the robust and thick-skinned Gros Michel was ideally suited to long, bumpy journeys across the Atlantic. At the time, the thin-skinned and slightly bland Cavendish was seen as a second-rate banana. However, Gros Michel had one weakness. It was susceptible to Tropical Race 1 (TR1), an earlier strain of the Fusarium fungus. TR1 was first detected in Latin America in 1890 and, in the 60 years that followed, it tore through banana plantations in Latin America, costing the industry $2.3 billion in today’s terms. Faced with no other choice, the major banana firms switched production to their backup banana: the Cavendish. In 1960, the world’s biggest banana exporter, United Fruit Company (now called Chiquita) began switching to the Cavendish, following the lead of its smaller rival, Standard Fruit Company (now called Dole) which switched in 1947. Despite all its shortcomings, the Cavendish had one huge advantage over the Gros Michel, which disappeared from US supermarket shelves forever in 1965: it was completely resistant to TR1.

However, the Cavendish has no defence against TR4. When Ploetz first encountered the new pathogen, there had been just a handful of suspected

PHOTOGRAPHY: (STILL LIFE) WILSON HENNESSY. (PORTRAITS) DAN BURN-FORTI

CHRISTINA PIGNOCCHI, SENIOR SCIENTIST AT TROPIC BIOSCIENCES, INSPECTS A CROP OF CAVENDISH BANANA PLANTS GROWING IN ITS GLASSHOUSE, SITUATED ON A RESEARCH PARK IN NORWICH

Faced with a crisis that could see the Cavendish gone forever, a handful of researchers are racing to use geneediting to create a better banana and bring the world’s first TR4resistant Cavendish to the market. To get there, they will butt up against not only the limitations of technology, but resistance from lawmakers, environmentalists and consumers wary of GM crops. But as TR4 closes in on Latin America, gene-editing may be the last chance we have to save the one banana we have chosen above all others.

PEOPLE WANT CHEAP BANANAS

In a field outside a small town called Humpty Doo in Australia’s sparselypopulated Northern Territory, one solution to the TR4 epidemic has been growing for the last six years.

“In the Northern Territory, [TR4] is in virtually all the banana growing areas,” says James Dale, a professor at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane. “Most plantations are still shut down.” But in that one field, the world’s only TR4-resistant Cavendish bananas have been thriving, while all around them, plants have succumbed.

For eight years, the key to creating TR4-resistant bananas remained locked within Dale’s laboratory. In 2004, he isolated a single gene from a wild banana called Musa acuminata malaccensis. Unlike its distant offspring, Musa acuminata malaccensis is unlikely to ever find itself as a cereal-topper.

Its small, thin fruits are filled with upwards of 60 hard seeds, each about half a centimetre in diameter. But the inedible plant has something else going for it. It is naturally resistant to TR4.

After isolating the resistance gene – RGA2 – from the wild banana, and inserting it into a Cavendish plant, Dale hit a roadblock. “We weren’t allowed to take the fungus from the Northern Territory into our glasshouses,” he says. Australia’s strict bio-quarantine

PHOTOGRAPHY: WILSON HENNESSY; JEFF DANIELS

infections reported. In 1992, Ploetz received packages containing TR4 from plantations in Indonesia and Malaysia. “At the time all we knew was that it was a new pathogen,” he says. “We didn’t know what to expect as far as its broader implications. The more samples we got from these export plantations, the more we began to realise that this was a bigger issue than we had ever anticipated,” he recalls. His prediction proved to be eerily accurate.

In 2013, TR4 was found for the first time in Mozambique. Ploetz thinks it had been carried on the boots and equipment of banana planters from southeast Asia. The pathogen has now travelled to Lebanon, Israel, India, Jordan, Oman, Pakistan and Australia. In 2018, it was found in Myanmar. “Then in southeast Asia,” Ploetz says. “It’s everywhere.”

When TR4 hits, the destruction is near-total. “It looks like somebody’s gone to the plantation with a herbicide,” Ploetz says. “There are big areas that no longer have any plants at all.” The fungus, which can live undetected in the soil for decades, enters banana plants through their roots and spreads to the water- and nutrient-conducting tissue within, eventually starving the plant of nourishment. Two to nine months after being infected, the plant – hollowed out from the inside – collapses in on itself.

The soil it grew in, now riddled with the fungus, is useless for growing bananas.

As TR4 creeps across the globe towards Latin America, the Cavendish’s genetic uniformity is starting to look like a curse. Ploetz estimates that TR4 has already killed more Cavendish bananas than Gros Michel plants killed by TR1, and, unlike the previous epidemic, there is no TR4-resistant banana ready to replace the Cavendish.

And time to find a solution is rapidly running out. “The question is, ‘when is it going to come over here?’,” Ploetz says. “Well, it may already be here.”

So far, Latin America, which grows almost all of the world’s export bananas – including those for the US and Europe – has escaped TR4. But, Ploetz says, it’s only a matter of time. “Our concern in Central America is that if somebody has an outbreak on their property, they are going to keep their mouths shut, and then it’ll have spread widely by the time people realise it’s there,” he says.

A TR4-INFECTED BANANA PLANTATION, NEAR DARWIN, AUSTRALIA. TO TRY AND PREVENT ITS SPREAD, THE REGION IS SUBJECT TO BIO-QUARANTINE

rules prevented any TR4-infected soil traveling from the blighted Northern Territory into Queensland, where most of the country’s bananas grow.

It wasn’t until he received a call from an Australian plantation owner that Dale got the chance to put his edited bananas to the test. Robert Borsato opened his banana plantation just outside Humpty Doo in 1996 – a year before TR4 was detected in Darwin, 40km away. By the late 2000s, Borsato’s farm was overrun with the disease.

Desperate, he turned to Dale for help.

“I told him, ‘we’ve got this possible solution, but we have no idea whether these plants are resistant – would you work with us?’” recalls Dale, who is 68 and wears rimless glasses and a scrufy grey beard. “And we went up there and that really was bingo,” he says, grinning.

The three-year trial finished in 2015, but it would be two more years before Dale published his results in the journal Nature Communications. By the end of the trial, between 67 and 100 per cent of the plants without the resistance gene had been killed or infected with TR4. Of the five plant lines with the added RGA2 gene, four had much lower infection rates – below 30 per cent – and one line showed no signs of the disease at all. Another set of plants edited with a TR4-resistance gene from a roundworm showed similar survival rates.

After the success of the initial field trial, Dale is launching another study in Humpty Doo, encompassing an area more than ten times larger than the original site. He hopes to see the edited Cavendish on sale by 2021 – the first genetically-modified (GM) bananas ever sold in Australia. They would be the first GM bananas sold anywhere, but another trial Dale is running, a Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation-funded plan to engineer vitamin-A enriched Cavendish bananas in Uganda, will likely pip the Australian bananas to the post.

But Dale’s TR4-resistant bananas are still to pass a vital test. He hasn’t eaten a single one – not even on the sly, he insists, as the terms of his trial license prohibit anyone from tasting the fruit.

“We actually have to squish them up and use them as mulch,” Dale says. Instead,

all of his TR4-resistant bananas – the only ones of their kind anywhere in the world – are turned into fertiliser.

The big problem is that Dale’s plants are classified as geneticallymodified organisms (GMOs). His bananas contain genetic information from two organisms – the gene from Musa acuminata malaccensis is transplanted into the Cavendish genome by using bacteria as a “shuttle”. And under the Australian Office of the Gene Technology Regulator, experimenting with GMOs is only permitted under strict conditions designed to prevent any potential harm to humans and to minimise the chance that GM plants will breed with naturally-occurring plants and introduce genetic changes.

A worry that, in the case of the sterile Cavendish, is unnecessary.

Dale recalls a field trial of GM bananas hit by a cyclone in North Queensland.

“All of the bananas were on the ground

– they were just blown down,” he says.

The next morning he received a call from the Office of the Gene Technology Regulator asking whether there was GM banana material blown all over Australia. “I suspect so,” Dale told the regulator. But because Cavendish bananas are sterile, there was zero chance that any stray GM-banana DNA would end up in another plant.

“Bananas are, probably of all the crops, the absolute safest to do both glasshouse and field trials on GM material.

There’s no chance of escape.”

If his next trial is successful, Dale plans to apply for a tasting license and then bring the bananas to market.

“During the next four to five years that it’s going to take to get these bananas through the regulation process, TR4 is going to become a really, really significant factor in the Australian industry,” Dale says. And since Australia bans the import of fresh bananas, the government may be forced to choose between accepting GM bananas or lifting its import restrictions. “My bet is they’ll have a GM Cavendish,” Dale says.

Outside of Uganda and Australia, the future for the GM banana looks bleak. In the EU, only 64 GM crops are approved for sale – all of them versions of cotton, maize, oilseed rape, soybean or sugarbeet – with the vast majority of them going into animal feed. Only one GM crop is cultivated in the EU – MON 810 – a form of maize geneticallyengineered to be resistant to a moth that bores holes into the plant. Despite being relatively common in the US, GM fruit and vegetables have never been sold in the EU, and banana companies, too, have shunned GMO fruit. “We’re a completely natural company,” an executive from Del Monte told me on the phone when I raised the question of gene-edited crops.

Dale knows that his TR4-resistant bananas are unlikely to ever leave Australia. “If the world accepted GM, then they’d be ready to go,” he says.

Although scientists have been unable to find any long-term health impacts linked to any consumption of genetically modified food – a stance endorsed by the World Health Organisation and

THE ROUTE OF THE FRUIT

Dole is the world’s largest

1. HARVEST

2. BOX

3. SHIP

4.SIZE

banana company, exporting 150

The fruit is boxed

Dole exported 18

The company

Each shipping

million boxes of bananas a year.

three hours after

billion bananas

has a banana-

vessel contains

Here’s how it moves them

harvesting and

in 2017, shipped

shipping fleet of

around 9,900

from plantation to supermarket.

loaded on to ships

in boxes of 125

15 container ships

tonnes of bananas

5. FREQUENCY

6 . DE S T IN AT ION

7. TIME

8. COOL

Ships sailing from

Dole ships to 42

Port-to-port

Temperature

Latin America to

ports around the

from Colombia

control prevents

the US make 26-

world and sells

to Europe takes

bananas ripening

52 voyages a year

into 53 countries

around 16 days

prematurely

9. R I P E N

10. SCALE

11. R AT E

12. SHOP

Once at port,

Ripeness is rated

Bananas are

From plantation

banana ripening

on scale from 1 (all

ripened to level 3

to supermarket

is triggered

green) to 7 (yellow

(green/yellow) or

can take between

with ethene gas

with some brown)

4 (yellow/green)

ten and 21 days

the American Medical Association – consumer and environmental groups have long opposed the technology.

Dozens of countries, including China, Russia, Japan, Australia, Brazil and the European Union, legally require GM food to be labelled. In the US, where many food companies place voluntary “No GMO” labels on their products, a law requiring the labelling of GM foods was signed by President Obama in July 2016, but food manufacturers have to date been slow to respond to the new regulations.

Dale suspects that – outside of a few unique cases – the world will never accept his GMO bananas. “We have lost the GM discussion,” he says.

But, in 2016, as he was poring over the results from his field trial of TR4-resistant crops, Dale spotted an announcement that reignited his hopes for a superior Cavendish. In April, the United States Department of Agricultural (USDA) approved a mushroom that had been engineered to resist browning using a new geneediting tool called CRISPR. In March 2018, the USDA clarified its position, saying that it would not regulate “a set of new techniques that are increasingly being used by plant breeders to produce new plant varieties that are indistinguishable from those developed through traditional breeding methods.”

The USDA’s logic is simple. If you’re using gene-editing to make a simple tweak – say, a single deletion in a gene that changes only one small aspect of the whole plant – then that’s just what can happen in nature anyway. Precise gene-editing, the regulator argues, is just accelerating the natural breeding process. To the USDA, a gene-edited banana is just a banana.

In July 2018, Dale published results of an experiment where he used CRISPR to

modify the Cavendish genome so plants grew up to be white and shrunken.

Although this proved that it’s possible to use CRISPR to edit banana cells, Dale’s albino bananas were technically still GMOs as they all contained a fraction of bacterial DNA inserted to make it easier to find the five to ten per cent of edited cells in a solution containing as many as a million embryogenic cells. Ultimately, the CRISPRedited bananas won’t contain DNA from any other organism: they’ll be Cavendish through and through. “I had to go way back and start again,” says Dale, shaking his head ruefully. Dale might have been the first to create a GM-version of the Cavendish that was immune to TR4, but in the race to create the first gene-edited version, he’s no longer the only competitor.

In a lab just outside of Norwich, O f i r M e i r, t h e C T O o f T r o p i c Biosciences, is holding the future of the banana in his hand: row up upon row of greyish clusters of cells arranged in a Petri dish. It will be months before these clusters grow shoots and are ready to join the neat lines of plants, each no more than a couple of centimetres tall, growing inside test tubes.

From there, a handful of specimens will make their way into the greenhouses on the other side of the research park.

Meir, 40, raises his voice to be heard over the low thrum of the growth chambers keeping the plants at 28.3°C: “One day, these shoots will become a field in South America.”

Genetically speaking, the plants in Meir’s test tubes are almost identical to every other Cavendish plant on the planet. The difference comes down to a couple of genes. Meir’s bananas have been edited using CRISPR-Cas9, a DNA-editing molecule co-discovered in 2012 by geneticists Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna.

CRISPR can, with a few molecular snips, deactivate a gene within an organism. This technique allowed the browning-resistant mushrooms to sidestep the USDA’s GMO regulations.

PHOTOGRAPHY: DAN BURN-FORTI. ILLUSTRATION: LUCY ROGERS

GILAD GERSHON, CEO OF TROPIC BIOSCIENCES, WITH A CAVENDISH PLANT. HIS INITIAL GOAL IS TO USE CASPR-CAS9 TO CREATE SLOWER RIPENING FRUIT â&#x20AC;&#x201C; AND THEN TAKE ON THE CHALLENGE OF A TR4-RESISTANT BANANA

SANDRA LAZAUSKAITE, TISSUE CULTURE SPECIALIST AT TROPIC, CHECKS CRISPR-EDITED CELLS BEING CULTIVATED IN PETRI DISHES

“CRISPR is precise, it’s relatively easy to use, and it allows a young company like us to start doing real genetic editing,” says Gilad Gershon, Tropic’s CEO. Gershon, who founded the company in July 2016, was working for the Californian agricultural investment firm Pontifax AgTech when he became convinced that CRISPR was about to blow open the agricultural industry.

“This really marks a revolution for the industry,” says Gershon, 36. For decades, the field had been dominated by a handful of agrochemical firms – Monsanto, Syngenta, Bayer and DuPont – who channelled their GMO efforts into blockbuster crops like corn, soya, cotton and rape seed. “It was just so expensive – you needed to spend $100 million on them, so you were obliged to work on corn,” he says. “Now, when the costs are a fraction of that, the field of opportunities is much bigger.”

In an industry where margins are razor–thin, a small tweak to make a better banana could have huge impli-

cations. The tiny cell clusters in Meir’s Petri dish are embryogenic banana stem cells that have been edited to grow into full-sized plants with fruit that ripens more slowly than a typical Cavendish. When bananas ripen, they release a gas called ethene, which prompts other fruit to follow suit and ripen more quickly. One rogue yellow banana aboard a container ship can cause a chain reaction that may wreck as much as 15 per cent of a shipment.

If Gershon can tweak the genomes of bananas so they ripen more slowly, it could stop millions of tonnes of bananas spoiling, and save exporters a fortune.

PHOTOGRAPHY: DAN BURN-FORTI

Yet slow-ripening bananas are just the prelude to Gershon’s plans. His firm is also using the gene-editing technique to create naturally-decafeinated cofee and stop the flesh of bananas from browning so quickly. But the real prize for Gershon? TR4-resistant bananas.

A researcher walks in carrying a crate filled with large flasks. Meir picks one out. It is filled with a yellowish liquid and inside there are thousands of white clumps, swirling within the murky solution. This is CRISPR in action.

Within that flask containing millions of banana cells, CRISPR molecules are being guided to specific parts of each cell’s DNA and cutting out genes. “You want to take one cell and deliver the machinery to that one cell,” Mier says.

“Then, the goal is to generate this cell into a full banana plant.”

But CRISPR doesn’t edit every cell it comes into contact with, so the challenge is in sifting edited cells from a solution containing millions. Conventionally, researchers insert small bits of foreign DNA to make edited cells stick out, but that’s not an option for Tropic. “Once you’re using a selection marker, it’s regarded as a GMO, you’ve introduced foreign DNA,” says Meir.

At Tropic, Meir says he is developing tools so he won’t need to trawl through hundreds of thousands of cells looking for an edited handful. And crucially, he says, this technique doesn’t involve the use of any extraneous DNA at all.

Two Israeli companies, Evogene and Rahan Meristem, are using a similar approach to tackle Black Sigatoka – a fungal banana-leaf infection that can halve the amount of fruit a plant produces. As the joint trial enters its third year of field tests, the companies are hoping the end product won’t be classified as a GMO, making it quicker and cheaper to bring to market. “Hopefully, public acceptance will be there, and the cost to develop an improvement won’t be crazy like it was [with] GMO,” says Ofer Haviv, Evogene’s CEO. But on July 25, 2018, Europe’s highest court threw the future of CRISPR-edited bananas into doubt. After being asked in 2016 by the French government to clarify how a 15-year-old directive on genetically-modified crops applied to ones created using modern gene-editing techniques, the European Court of Justice ruled that CRISPR-edited crops would not be exempt from existing regulations limiting the cultivation and sale of GM organisms. In the eyes of the EU, there was not much diference between Dale’s transgenic bananas and a CRISPR-edited banana after all.

“Disappointed,” says Johnathan Napier, a plant biotechnologist at Rothamsted Research in Hertfordshire, of the EJC ruling. “I’m disappointed for plant sciences and agriculture research in Europe. I’m disappointed for the innovators and the people trying to actually do good. I think it’s going to be really, really tough for them now to use this technology in Europe.”

The day after the ruling, I revisit Tropic. In the boardroom, Gershon is mulling over the ECJ’s decision. “I think this could have been handled better,” he says. Later, as Tropic’s researchers unwrap their lunches, the conversation circles around the idiosyncrasies of regulators’ thinking. Bombarding seeds with radiation to engineer new crop varieties falls outside of the EU’s GMO rules, they point out, but CRISPR – touted as a more precise way of inducing changes in a plant’s genome – doesn’t.

But Gershon is undeterred. Europe is only one market, he says, and the US has already proven itself much more accepting of CRISPR-edited food. By 2050, half of the world’s population are projected to live in the tropics, and it is there that people will really need help to produce more food from the same amount of land. In rural parts of Uganda, Rwanda and Cameroon, bananas can provide up to 25 per cent of people’s average daily calorie intake.

“Today there is real necessity, but it’s not spread uniformly,” he says.

Those of us outside of the tropics are walking into a culinary cul-de-sac of our own creation. “We got used to having an endless supply of this really cheap food,” Gershon says. “This economic reality will come to an end. We need to find good solutions in order to keep having people eating this fantastically healthy fruit.” Faced with choosing between giving up bananas altogether or accepting bananas that have been given an evolutionary leg-up in the lab, we might have to rethink our attitude to buying gene-edited fruit.

After more than a month with no rain, Norwich’s driest June since 1962, the grass in the research park is almost completely yellow. But dotted among the parched blades, Meir points out tiny patches of green. Plants that, because of an entirely random mutation in their genome, are able to keep growing, even when they’re starved of water.

The Cavendish is not so lucky. Thanks to its sterility, it will never pick up a useful mutation through breeding. Yet, for all its flaws, this is the one banana out of the thousands of varieties out there that we have chosen to grow at such a vast scale. And now, as scientists race to find a way to save it that will please consumers, regulators and the food industry, it is facing the fight of its life. “TR4 is happening,” Gershon says. “It’s just a question of time.”

Matt Reynolds is staff writer at WIRED

CRISPR-EDITED CELLS BECOME BANANA SEEDLINGS. THE HOPE IS THAT THEY WILL GROW INTO TR4-RESISTANT TREES

PHOTOGRAPHY: XXXXXXXXX

PRODUCER ANTHONY GEFFEN IS REALISING THE STORYTELLING POTENTIAL OF VR, TAKING VIEWERS FROM THE FAR REACHES OF THE COSMOS TO UNEXPLORED OCEAN DEPTHS

PHOTOGRAPHY:

Sam Barker

PHOTOGRAPHY: XXXXXXXXX

By Tom Ward

A dark and infinite cosmos stretches out before you, the blackness punctured here and there by the silver shimmer of distant stars. In the far distance, a swathe of milky white denotes a new and unexplored galaxy. In the foreground, hulking planets loom. At the centre of it all, a patch of pure nothing – a black hole consuming everything from light to asteroid clusters.

This is your destination.

You are not alone; accompanying you into the depths of the black hole is one of the greatest cosmologists and theoretical physicists of all time, Stephen Hawking.

VISUALISATION: ALCHEMY VR

ANTHONY GEFFEN WAS FIRST INVITED

to meet Stephen Hawking on Wednesday, May 24, 2017. A fan of Gefen’s pioneering work in virtual reality storytelling, Hawking hoped they might collaborate on a new immersive project. Hawking wanted Geffen to construct a virtual tour of the universe, with the professor himself serving as guide.

It was Geffen’s work on such BAFTA- and Emmy-winning 3D television-documentaries such as David Attenborough’s Natural History Museum Alive, that first caught Hawking’s attention. As CEO and creative director of Atlantic Productions – the pioneering company behind some of the most exciting advancements in VR, 3D, AR and AI storytelling outside of Hollywood – Gefen was the perfect candidate to help bring the expanses of Hawking’s world to the masses. “I have never met anyone with non-stop energy like Anthony, nor his ability to get things done,” says Attenborough. “He has a unique vision, a fascination with new technology and an ability to bring together the best talent around him.”

Over the following months, Hawking and Gefen communicated back and forth on plans for the project. It was essential to Hawking that the

LEFT: A DISTANT NEBULA IS JUST ONE HIGHLIGHT IN HAWKING’S VR TOUR OF THE UNIVERSE

experience took the viewer into deep space, and also that the film would still be able to hold its own in 20 years’ time. This was, after all, to be part of his legacy.

Gefen describes it as a “dream project”, explaining that he feels Hawking has given him “the torch to carry” in engaging new audiences and generations in the mysteries of the cosmos. It was Hawking’s idea, too, that the experience should be in VR. “There’s a realism to it,” says Gefen. “Hawking’s understanding was better than anybody else’s.

Especially on black holes. Not only that, he had this incredible way of visualising things. Most scientists see in numbers, but he saw images. So, to sit down with him and map out a journey to me was the perfect way to tell a story on this bigger stage.”

And, although the genesis of the virtual journey came from Hawking, both he and Gefen knew it was essential that they consult other experts in the field – it’s a decision that displayed an absence of ego about the project. Hawking, in Gefen’s words, “wanted us to have other experts involved, because he didn’t know everything about every element of space.”

Hawking was also adamant that the experience be made available to as many people as possible.

According to Gefen, he “wanted it to be in shopping malls, he wanted it to be like a blockbuster movie.” This approach syncs perfectly with Gefen’s own view of sharing immersive experiences. Gefen believes that for immersive story-telling to advance, the experiences must be made openly available. To do this, he believes in ofering VR experiences in places that normal people go to every day, such as shopping malls. One such experience – documenting the Amazon’s Munduruku tribe for Greenpeace – was launched in 2016, with free viewing pods installed in Rio De Janeiro and that year’s Glastonbury festival.

Due in late 2019, the cosmic VR journey will be available to view in specially-designed domes in strategic locations across the country, as well as a feature-length film in cinemas.

“We’re at the forefront of the newest technology,” Gefen says.

In fact, he’s still building the tools needed to finish the experience.

“The delivery mechanism keeps changing because new bits of technology – particularly new seated haptic technologies – keep coming along that allow us to make it a better experience,” he explains. Get that right, Gefen argues, and you have the ability to transport audiences to worlds they could only have dreamed of.

BORN IN LONDON IN 1961, AND RAISED IN SUSSEX AND NORFOLK, GEFFEN

got his first taste of filmmaking when he persuaded his parents to buy him a Super 16 camera at the age of eight. Each new roll of film ate up his pocket money, but Gefen didn’t care; he was hooked, shooting and editing films.

“I grew up in an interesting time; by the end of the 60s, people were going to the Moon,” he says. “That’s only possible because of new technologies. You were not only caught up in the magic of them actually going to the Moon, but also the magic of how they did it.”

The eight year-old Gefen quickly put aside his own ambitions to become an astronaut, deciding instead that he would dedicate his life to telling stories. Gefen carried this passion to the University of Oxford, and then, in 1983, to a brief spell in Hollywood. After three months in California, working for Frank Wells, the president of Warner Brothers, an ofer to join the BBC prompted Gefen to return to the UK. The next decade constituted what Gefen calls an “adventurous period” at the BBC. As a young producer, Gefen was almost blown up by an improvised roadside explosive in Lebanon in 1986; worked alongside journalist Edward Behr to become the first broadcasters to reveal the true extent of Japanese emperor Michinomiya Hirohito’s involvement in WW2 in Hirohito: Behind the Myth; and, with the late reporter Marie Colvin, spent nearly a year living with Yasser Arafat for the 1990 documentary, The Faces Of Arafat.

By age 31, Gefen had dodged death on almost every continent. Yet, even with all of this experience, he was convinced that, when it came to innovative ways to convey a narrative, he had only just scratched the surface. In 1992, he left the BBC to set up Atlantic Productions, a company committed to marrying investigative storytelling with the latest visual technologies.

“I’ve made a point of getting to grips with each new platform as they came along, so they didn’t come as a surprise,” Gefen says. “In my lifetime, [so far] we’ve advanced from black and white television, to colour, and now to HD, to 3D, to VR… I don’t think there’s been any span of time that could have been better for storytelling.”

Gefen has long been an early adopter of new technologies. In 1996, for instance, he received backing to build his first ever VR experience. By donning a headset and entering a specially-built pod, users could race

chariots around ancient Rome’s Circus Maximus.

Gefen would later dub this “edutainment”. Although rough by today’s standards, the project was worlds ahead of the 2D gaming experiences offered by mass-market platforms, including those of the original PlayStation, launched just two years earlier.

The only problem was, with the track and horses built, Gefen’s Circus Maximus software lacked the computing power to render the crowd as well. The experience, Gefen says, taught him that although VR was clearly a medium rich with potential, he would have to wait some time before the available computing power matched his ambitions.

Gefen turned his attention to the emerging VFX technologies used by film special efects companies such as Industrial Light and Magic and Pixar.

“I went over to Pixar and was fascinated. I wondered if we could utilise some skills from there,” Gefen explains. “What fascinates me is that when you base things on the real world, they become even more fascinating; you can invent Wookies for Star Wars, and they’re great, but they’re not real.”

With input from the proper experts, Gefen saw VR and animation as a way to bring true stories to

RIGHT: A SCENE FROM MUNDURUKU: THE FIGHT TO DEFEND THE HEART OF THE AMAZON. BELOW: TIM PEAKE’S VR RE-ENTRY EXPERIENCE

life, from historical epics to explorations of the future. Zoo – Atlantic Productions’ VFX and animation wing, was founded in 2002 with the aim of doing just that.

A string of successful films followed, but in 2008, Gefen achieved particular success when Atlantic Productions employed the latest 3D technology

to document the discovery of Ida, a 47-million-year-old fossil believed to be one of the missing links between humans and our primate ancestors. For the first time, Gefen’s team was able to bring a 3D model of the fossil to life on screens, resulting in a billion Google hits, which in turn led to Ida becoming one of the earliest Google Doodles. Recounting a conversation with a then-Google employee, Gefen recalls it was one of the first times Google indicated that its search engine could be used as a storytelling device.

The following year, Atlantic Productions released The Wildest Dream: Conquest of Everest, an award-winning film charting George Mallory’s attempt to be the first to climb the mountain in 1924. As well as becoming one of Atlantic Productions’ first IMAX productions, Geffen employed actors to recreate Mallory’s last days on the mountain, in temperatures of -20°C. The resulting film was the highest altitude costume drama ever recorded. Gefen’s team also had to digitally recreate the top of the Everest, as the atmosphere is too thin to allow video camera-bearing helicopters to fly.

A n o t h e r p ro j e c t s a w G e f f e n ’s technology come crashing back down to Earth. Commissioned by London’s Science Museum to create an experience around the Soyuz crew return vehicle that astronaut Tim Peake used to return to Earth from the International Space Station, Geffen created the Space Descent VR experience in 2017.

First, Gefen set about photographing the inside of the pod, then his team digitally reconstructed it to create a 5K VR experience in which audience members transition from floating in space to slowly tumbling towards Earth, before penetrating the planet’s atmosphere at 28,500kph. The VR experience took 100 computers one month to render, and is as exhilarating as it is finely detailed.

EFFEN’S

MOST SUCCESSFUL

collaboration to date saw him explore our own planet over 11 projects with the naturalist and broadcaster David Attenborough, whom Gefen first met during his tenure at the BBC. Back then, Geffen assumed that Attenborough – comfortably established with his own production team – was highly unlikely to want to move to a new home. Later, after founding Atlantic Productions, Geffen met Attenborough for lunch and expressed his regret that they had never managed to work together. To his great surprise, Attenborough agreed.

“It was the last thing I expected to hear,” says Geffen. “Attenborough said, ‘There’s one rule: we do it together, and we go on the road together.’”

Beginning in 2011, the pair travelled the world, re-defining filmmaking technology as they went. At that time, 3D cameras were cumbersome and heavy. Nor were they the most reliable pieces of kit. Documenting penguins in South Georgia, Antarctica (for Sky’s The Bachelor King), the cameras had to be reassembled on site so that they would work in freezing conditions. Filming in the Eden Project (Kingdom of Plants), Gefen had the opposite problem; the cameras kept overheating, necessitating

AT TENBOROUGH’S CREW FILMS ELEPHANT SEALS IN 3D IN SOUTH GEORGIA

the production crew to call in every single available ice cube from surrounding restaurants in order to chill the equipment and complete filming.

As their films became more and more ambitious, Geffen and Attenborough petitioned camera manufacturers for new designs that were better suited to the task at hand. “It was the storytellers going to manufacturers and saying, ‘This is useless unless we can film insects,’” Gefen says. It was partially through the work (and demands) of Gefen and Attenborough that 3D cameras went from devices the size of a modest fridge freezer to pinhead cameras able to fit inside an ant’s nest.

Their work hit its apogee with David Attenborough’s Natural History Museum Alive, broadcast by Sky in 2014. The premise was simple: Attenborough spends a night at the Natural History Museum – with the eight most fascinating extinct creatures brought back to life. Filming ran from 6pm to 8am for 11 days, and was unlike anything Attenborough had ever done. The finished product is a high point of documentary-making. In one scene, Attenborough marvels over a three-metre long ichthyosaurus, a dolphin-like mammal belonging to the late Triassic period. In another, a skeletal sabre-toothed smilodon stalks Attenborough through the museum’s hallowed corridors. Attenborough, for his part, has never looked as enthused. “[Attenborough] had done traditional documentaries with real animals. But we took him to a diferent space, which he loved,” Gefen says.

Not only did the film require Attenborough to act against a blue screen, interacting with animals that were not there (and in fact, no longer existed anywhere on Earth), it also required that he put his trust in Gefen; with some of the special efects

not completed until the day of the premiere, there were no daily rushes or early edits for Attenborough to approve, and thus, no way of knowing what the finished product would look like.

“I didn’t tell David,” Geffen says, “But when we started the project, the technology to finish it was not ready. But, my belief was that you push everything to the limit, and you make it happen.

That is the mantra.”

Attenborough need not have worried. The film was a huge success with audiences and critics alike, eventually going on to win a BAFTA for Best Specialist Factual Programme. After its release, the Natural History Museum even reported a 17 per cent rise in visitors. The biggest praise, though, was to come from Attenborough himself who, upon seeing the finished film, declared that “CGI has reached the peak of perfection in 3D.” Emboldened by this success, Geffen decided that the time was ripe for a return to VR. That same year, he set up Atlantic Productions’ VR branch, Alchemy. The plan had always been that the first VR films would be Attenborough-driven, an approach that Attenborough himself wholeheartedly endorsed. “He loves technology, he’s like a kid,” Gefen explains. “His phone is a brick with an actual built-in spirit level, but he loves technology.

He gets it. He has an incredible curiosity.”

The pair’s first live-action VR collaboration explored the Great Barrier Reef. Attenborough had dived the reef for a documentary some 60 years earlier. Now, nearing his 90s, this was no longer possible. Using a state-of-the-art submersible, equipped with cameras covering a 360-degree field of vision, Attenborough and a pilot descended 300m. Dressed in slacks and a powder blue shirt, Attenborough looks every inch the master of his environment as the submarine descends beneath the waves into another world of mystery. In addition to the three-part BBC TV series, Gefen won a further BAFTA for the resulting VR experience, and spawned an interactive

ANTHONY GEFFEN:

‘Hawking had this incredible way of visualising things.

Most scientists see in numbers, but he saw images’

website through which users could explore the Great Barrier Reef in real time each and every day.

Geffen had sought to expand the audience’s experience ever since his documentary on Ida. To do this, additional content had been spread across diferent platforms, including a

website. A programme, Gefen muses, is the main dish, and once a person acquires a hunger for a subject, they should be able to indulge it elsewhere.

With the BBC Great Barrier Reef series, this was taken one step further; Geffen had observed that home audiences were not yet ready for 3D

programmes – primarily because the supply of good content did not yet exist.

In 2016, Great Barrier Reef Dive VR with David Attenborough opened and ran for over a year. Crucially, this success proved for the first time that there was a commercially successful model for large-scale immersive experiences.

ANTHONY GEFFEN IN HIS WEST LONDON OFFICE

N M I D J U LY, G E F F E N I N V I T E D

WIRED to his west London studios to discuss a roster of confidential works in progress. The building houses Atlantic Productions, as well as Zoo – its 3D and VFX animation branch – and the VR innovation hub, Alchemy.

Inside, more than 100 staf are busily inventing the future.

Gefen’s own oice is decorated with DVDs and VHS tapes of programmes he has produced, displayed alongside a wall of Emmys, BAFTAs and other awards from a four-decade career.

Relaxed in a grey suit, Gefen, 57, describes his first immersive project with real world applications outside of “edutainment”.

Produced in collaboration with Harvard Medical School, Neuro-AI will be used to treat and diagnose patients with schizophrenia, autism and Alzheimer’s. The AI headset works by monitoring and interpreting subtle facial expressions in real time. As the area around the face and eyes is believed to display 90 per cent of everything we think and feel, the project will allow medical professionals a better understanding of patients who may otherwise struggle to express themselves.

A 3D MODEL OF THE GREAT PYRAMID, WHICH CAN BE EXPLORED IN VIRTUAL REALITY

“The disconnect between what a patient is thinking and feeling and what they’re outwardly expressing is a problem in a number of social interactions,” says Harold Bursztajn, a clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, and advisor on the project. The Neuro-AI process, is, in Bursztajn’s words, “A fundamental game-changer” and “very much at the new heart of precision medicine.”

Which is not to say Gefen’s sense of adventure has diminished. Via a TV screen in the corner of his oice, we are given a tour of the sunken wreck of the Titanic.

The ship’s flooded corridors have been captured in immaculate detail by real-life film crews. Here a grand piano, there a child’s doll – then, before our eyes, the film footage merges into VFX as water drains from portholes, paint returns to the walls, carpets unfurl over long-untrodden corridors, and the ship is brought back to life from a century of decay.

Afterwards, we continue into the past as we don a VR headset and hand-held controls to explore a 3D reconstruction of Egypt’s Great Pyramid. The

rendering is not yet complete (there are no colourful hieroglyphics adorning the walls, or scurrying scarab beetles) but even in its early stage, to wander the pyramid’s hidden vaults, where most tourists are never allowed, is awesome in the truest sense of the word. The project – which Gefen hopes to launch in 2019 – is being developed with the blessing of the Egyptian government, and in collaboration with a tech company that Gefen is not currently at liberty to name.

Collaborations with a number of media institutions are in the pipeline. Gefen must remain tight-lipped, but he is able to confirm that Atlantic Productions is in dialogue with Amazon, Netflix and Apple.

After their initial explorations of VR technology failed to take off due to a lack of enough quality content and the software necessary to share it with a large

customer base, Gefen thinks many media companies may be ready to try again.

“I think everybody charged forwards a bit,” Geffen says. “Some had huge plans [for VR], and got whole divisions together, only to scale them back.”

Now, however, with an increase in both the technological capabilities around VR, an increase in the number of good quality experiences, and growing audience demand, Geffen says that Netflix and Apple have invested heavily in the sector.

Gefen has, he says, been in “deep discussions” with both companies about VR. “At the moment [these companies] are juggernauts; they are doing incredibly well, but they are nervous about changing anything to do with their relationship with the subscriber until there are extraordinary VR oferings, like the things we are making now,” Gefen says.

G E F F E N ’ S N E X T P R O J E C T M AY

convince them. This year, entrepreneur and explorer Victor Vescovo will explore the world’s oceans by means of an innovative new submarine. His journey will include the first manned expedition to the Titanic in 13 years.

Gefen was Vescovo’s first choice when it came to capturing his new ocean explorations. Currently filming and due to air next year, the project is set to do for the mysteries of the ocean what Hawking’s black hole experience will do for space.

If the Attenborough dive to the Great Barrier Reef was a logistical nightmare, Vescovo’s mission is something else entirely, involving live underwater volcanoes and subaquatic mountains.

There was also the small matter of building a submersible capable of withstanding the extreme pressures of the deep sea. How do you ensure there is enough battery life to carry you to the depths of the ocean and back? How do you guarantee crystal clear, 360-degree video in the total absence of natural light? “[Vescovo] literally created an industry in order to build this sub,” says Gefen.

“One day, it will be the key to understanding the ocean; it has technology no one currently knows about.”

Not only does the proposed series represent a number of practical difficulties, active volcanoes, crushing pressure and freezing water aside, any one of the deep descents is a potentially fatal undertaking. One power cut, one engineering miscalculation,

one fault in hull integrity, and Vescovo will be trapped without hope of rescue.

“There’s no way out,” Gefen sighs. “In space, [if something goes wrong] you can get outside the capsule and hang on. In this new submersible, you’re safe until the moment anything goes wrong, then you’ve had it. You can’t get out, and we can’t send another vehicle down there.”

In preparation for such a scenario, Vescovo has been practicing piloting a model of the submersible at home, and in pitch darkness. Should the lights go down, he hopes muscle memory will be enough to guide him to safety.

The results of his expedition will be broadcast in three one-hour episodes next year. The final episode may be broadcast live, from one of the deepest, most inaccessible locations on the planet.

But this too presents problems. Chiefly, how to transmit the signal to the surface, an issue Gefen is working with Nasa to overcome. Usually, a cable is attached to the submarine, but in the deep ocean, the signal must be transmitted through water, a process Gefen says is far more complex even than beaming a signal through space.

On an undertaking of this scale, everything, Gefen says, is working against you. But inventing the future is never easy.

And, whether he’s pointing his lens to the stars or the ocean floor, we imagine Gefen wouldn’t have it any other way.

Tom Ward wrote about the search for extremophile bacteria in 09.18

ANTHONY GEFFEN:

‘Attenborough had done traditional documentaries, but we took him to a different space – which he loved’

IT IS WHEN THE CLARION VOICE OF House of Commons Speaker John Bercow calls “Jeremy Corbyn”, that Full Fact swings into action. It is midday on a Wednesday in late March, and in the fact-checking charity’s oice in central London, all eyeballs are on two TVs showing Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs). Since its inception in 2010, Full Fact has been parsing claims from British politicians and media, cross-referencing them with reliable data and labelling them as inaccurate or correct. Claims are picked from sources including TV programmes such as Question Time or Newsnight, newspapers, electoral materials and PMQs, which Full Fact probes before posting results in real time on Twitter.

Opposite the screens, near a window overlooking St. James’s, senior fact-checker Claire Milne, one of five in the verification team, sits at a Post-It-plastered desk, facing three monitors. A live PMQs transcript scrolls on one of them.

If Theresa May, Jeremy Corbyn or anyone else makes a claim that resembles something Full Fact has already assessed, an alert pops up, linking to the pertinent fact-check.

Sometimes the spotter works, sometimes it stumbles. Here, the system rightly serves an analysis of access to mentalhealth services when the prime minister mentions the subject, but later on it rattles off stats on crime figures when May is simply deploring hate crimes. Milne tweets the link to the mental-health fact-check channel and flags the incorrect suggestion to the tech team.

Senior fact-checker Joseph O’Leary paces the room as if it were the deck of

a boat sailing treacherous waters. On the screens, May and Corbyn trade barbs and figures. The Prime Minister says that mental-health spending has increased to “a record £11.6 billion”. The Opposition leader retorts that spending “fell by £600 million between 2010 and 2015”.

O’ Leary, a jovial man in his late twenties, shakes his head. “We don’t know if that’s a record level,” he says, as oicial data are incomplete. Milne posts as much in a thread of tweets. The debate shifts to the NHS. “Can you find something generic about spending on health?” O’Leary asks. Joël Reland, a fact-checker with black-rimmed glasses, starts searching.

Corbyn and May keep lobbing figures.

Claims will be broken down to essentials: facts, numbers, contextual information – which in turn will be dissected and compared with data from the Government, institutions such as the Oice for National Statistics, or research organisations such as the Institute for Fiscal Studies. In some cases, Full Fact will ask the opinion of independent experts. If the facts cannot be found anywhere, one of the fact-checkers will phone the person who made the claim and ask where they got the information.

The eventual outcome will be an online article providing “the whole picture” about the claim, often with the aid of graphs and always linking to the original sources. At the top of the page, there will be a banner juxtaposing the original statement with Full Fact’s conclusion.

Full Fact only checks declarations about the economy, Europe, health, crime, education, immigration and law,

Full data sets debunk the idea that objectivity is best obtained by giving a platform to each side focusing on national politics and limiting itself to claims that can be verified with publicly available information: O’Leary, for example, will not touch the Cambridge Analytica scandal, until after an inquiry.

“We take the view that if a member of the public had to check this information, could they? If they can, we’ll fact-check that,” he says. “Full Fact researchers are just full-time citizens?” I ask.

A half-smile flickers on O’Leary’s lips.

“Full-time citizens with a lot of skills.”

AT ONE TIME, A FACT-CHECKER was a person working on a newspaper or magazine, who made sure that stories reporters filed were grounded in reality: they called sources, double-checked quotes and pored over archives to verify points of fact. Such a figure can still be found in some larger publications’ oices – The New Yorker’s fact-checking unit has attained quasi-legendary fame. But, in the early noughties, “fact-checker” came to signify something else: someone whose job is not to avoid mistakes being printed, but to call out people (often politicians) who – willingly or otherwise – pollute the public debate with inaccuracies.

The first independent political fact-checking website, FactCheck.org, launched in the US in 2003 – the brainchild of a reporter and an academic who had spent years scrutinising political ads. It billed itself as a “consumer advocate for voters”, besieged and bewildered by campaign-trail whoppers and political fact-massaging. Two years later, Channel 4 launched FactCheck, the UK’s first fact-checking blog. Academics explain fact-checking partially as a reaction to the internet’s great disintermediation: the web weakened traditional media’s vice-like grip on information, allowing anyone – from citizen journalists, to cranks, to Twitterhappy politicians – to become a news source in their own right. The end of media gatekeeping resulted in a lot of noise, and fact-checkers stepped in to sort the wheat from the chaff – ironically, by launching websites.

Fact-checking is also – even if some fact-checking groups are offshoots of established news outlets – a notso-veiled piece of criticism of how traditional media operate.

“The rise of fact-checkers in the US happened because politicians were making claims that were inaccurate, and weren’t being corrected by the media,” says Michelle Amazeen, assistant professor at Boston University’s College of Communication. “The US media is driven primarily by the mantra of ‘If it bleeds, it leads’: they focus on the political horse-race – who’s ahead, who’s behind, rather than on the accuracy of the candidates’ policy statements.”

Besides sensationalism, bias and, more recently, traic-driven churnalism, American fact-checkers resented the so-called “he said, she said” fallacy: the idea that objectivity is best attained by giving a platform to each side of a debate, regardless of the accuracy of their claims.

Similar issues were also present in the UK, where a partisan press coexisted with the sometimes puzzling conceit of impartiality on television news.

turmoil has only made Dogruluk Payi more relevant, as its non-partisan, data-based articles are less amenable to governmental intervention.

“Compared with journalists, our work is allowing us to be more active,” founder Baybars Örsek says. “We are just presenting facts and comparing them with statements by political actors.”

Problems arise when official facts cannot be trusted – a rare scenario in the UK, less so in Turkey – in which case Dogruluk Payi would point out the problem in its fact-check and turn to international sources. Sometimes, Örsek says, data is simply nowhere to be found – a common occurrence with military operations in Syria, for instance.

Laura Zommer, executive director of Argentinian fact-checking venture Chequeado, also has to deal with elusive data. Argentina’s National Institute of Statistics stopped publishing crime and poverty figures between 2009 and 2015. “They just decided not to publish those figures, because they were not necessarily good news,” she says. For the occasion, the outfit coined a new label – insostenible or “unsustainable” – to designate politicians’ statements that cannot be verified with existing data.

As Argentina braces itself for a general election in October 2019, the situation is compounded by the rise of disinformation websites. Chequeado hopes new technological tools and partnerships with larger media outlets will let her reach the widest possible audience. Its goal has not changed in eight years. “We want to increase the cost of lying,” Zommer says.

“In British television, you have this concept of ‘BBC balance’: as a journalist, your job is to look at the story, give equal weight to both sides, and your job is done,” says Patrick Worrall, lead writer of Channel 4’s FactCheck. “But it’s frustrating when you watch the news and there are people on each side screaming at each other over a factual dispute. I think it’s journalists’ job to act on this recurring factual dispute.” (The BBC launched its own “Reality Check” in 2015.)

Over the last decade, fact-checking organisations have mushroomed around the world. According to Reporters’ Lab at Duke University, as of May 2018, 149 fact-checking outfits were operating globally. In September 2015, the realisation that a new phenomenon was taking place led a group of fact-checkers from various countries to launch the International Fact-Checking Network

under the aegis of The Poynter Institute, a journalism school based in Florida.

One year later, the Network issued a code laying down five core rules of fact-checking: nonpartisanship and fairness; transparency of sources; transparency of funding and organisation; transparency of methodology; and open and honest corrections. It counts 54 signatories, including Full Fact.

Some of the challenges fact-checkers grapple with are roughly similar, regardless of where they are based: online fake content and obfuscating politicians can as easily be found in France as in, say, Brazil. Other issues are more geographically specific. Take Istanbul-based fact-checking website Dogruluk Payi: since its launch in 2014, it has witnessed Turkey descend into polarisation, authoritarianism and diminished freedom of the press. Such

WILL MOY SAYS HE DECIDED TO launch Full Fact after working in the House of Lords. Moy, 34, explains how in 2007, he was working as a 23-year-old assistant for crossbencher peer Colin Low. Like all politicians, Lord Low received cartfuls of briefings, reports and evidence from lobbying organisations, think tanks, charities and pressure groups trying to influence lawmakers.

“Some was complete nonsense,” Moy says. “And some of that nonsense was being picked up by important people trying to make important decisions. And that was very frustrating – seeing how bad information can lead to bad decisions that people would have not made if they’d had good-quality information.”

Two years earlier, journalist and commentator Peter Oborne had published The Rise of Political Lying, a book in which he took aim at politicians’ and

spin doctors’ complicated relationship with accuracy, and proposed the creation of “a body to bring back integrity to the political process by monitoring the statements of politicians of all parties”– mentioning FactCheck.org as a model.

Moy was convinced that he could build such a body, and pitched the idea to parliamentarians and political journalists.

“They immediately said, ‘This sounds like an important thing to do’. You don’t get that speed of response from those kinds of people unless they mean it,” he says.

The project secured funding from Michael Samuel, a former Conservative Party donor, and from the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, a left-leaning organisation with no party ailiation. In early 2010, Full Fact set up an oice above a sex shop in Soho. Since then, it has been through three general elections and three referendums, has partnered with newspapers, radio and TV, and averages 309,000 unique visitors per month.

From the beginning, Full Fact was at pains to establish its non-partisanship: “Our work is only valuable as long as people trust us,” Moy says. For that reason, Full Fact has its strategic directions set by a board of trustees including representatives from various parties, and on both sides of the Brexit debate. And, in order not to appear beholden to anyone in particular, it takes funding from several diferent sources: from individual crowdfunders, to charitable trusts (among which are the Nuield Foundation, the Omidyar Network, and the Open Society Foundations), to corporations – Facebook and Google both donated to Full Fact in 2017 to fund specific projects; altogether their donations amounted to a quarter of Full Fact’s total income of £956,000.

Full Fact claims to equitably check statements from every party that secured over one per cent of the vote; it also monitors the media, taking editors to task if their stories contains falsehoods.

The language used in its fact-checks is finely calibrated: you will not find “Tory” (a derogatory word originating from “highwayman”, although many Conservatives have embraced it), nor “reform” (implicitly connoting a positive change). And you will never, ever read a Full Fact piece stating that somebody intentionally lied. “We check claims, not people,” O’Leary says. “You’ll never see us say that someone is lying. Because we can never prove intent.” (On this, Full Fact is at one with FactCheck.org, less so with The Washington Post, whose Fact Checker blog is personified by a culpably insincere Italian puppet named Pinocchio.)

Non-partisanship is also ensured via recruitment. Deftness at Microsoft Excel, command of current afairs and a well-

developed bullshit detector – the ability to understand, for instance, that classic politico brag ““record numbers are in employment” is less impressive once you consider that Britain’s population is also at a record high – are all key skills. But somebody who has extreme or militant views, and who can’t check them at the door, will never make it on to the team.

“When we recruit people we test if they’re able to see the other side of the argument, how visceral their reactions are to a government’s policies,” says Phoebe Arnold, Full Fact’s head of communications and impact. (Arnold left Full Fact in June 2018.) “We ask them, ‘What is austerity?’ And if they go, ‘Oh, it’s this awful Tory policy’, we’d ask them to describe it and then we’d ask, ‘Why is it necessary?’ If they can’t explain it from a conservative viewpoint we’d be worried about their ability to stay neutral and see diferent facets of an argument.”

People who do get in have to sign a declaration of personal interest revealing membership of a political party, or involvement in large companies likely to be fact-checked. As long as they work for Full Fact, they are not allowed to express any opinion on “matters of political controversies,” in public or in the oice.

The curious outcome is an organisation chock-full with political junkies with no apparent opinion on politics, unless it can be backed up with available data.

“We employ nice people and we establish the rules from day one,” says O’Leary. “We keep the culture very tight.”

FULL FACT’S DIGITAL PRODUCT manager Mevan Babakar opens her laptop and mutes her ever-pinging smartphone. “What do you know about automated fact-checking?” she asks.

A bioengineer by training, Babakar is in charge of developing digital tools that could allow Full Fact to check more claims, more quickly. Babakar and her team’s live transcription claim-spotter (which I saw in action during PMQ) is still pretty rudimentary software: all it does is match BBC subtitles against the group’s database of fact-checks.

But soon it will gain the ability to analyse claims and automatically retrieve the pertinent primary data from the Oice of National Statistics’ API. Babakar’s second tool is called “trends”. “It captures information from TV, social media, Parliamentary records, newspapers – it looks for claims we have already fact-checked and looks at who’s spreading it,” she explains. “The idea is that it will help us getting corrections.”

Corrections must be made quickly: delays allow inaccuracies to become entrenched Full Fact’s love for corrections sets it apart from many other fact-checking groups. Most organisations just publish their fact-checks, naming and shaming the person who made the claim. Full Fact takes the extra step of requesting oicial corrections. Politicians, including former Prime Minister David Cameron, have rectified their statements after Full Fact called them out. And Moy says that Full Fact’s dedication has helped change how newspapers make corrections.

“In 2010, a story on special education came out that had been wildly misunderstood by most newspapers and broadcasters: we fact-checked it and then asked them to correct the record,” he says.

“It was almost the first time some newspapers had been asked to correct a matter of accuracy by a third party.

That was an important precedent.”

Moy would later give evidence on the matter before the Leveson Inquiry on press ethics; he says that afterwards, the Daily Mail and The Sun launched their corrections columns.

In order to work, correction requests need to happen quickly – problematic, given that fact-checking a claim takes longer than making it. Moy discovered this law during the EU Referendum campaign in 2016: the notorious pledge that the UK paid the EU £350 million every week, money that could be spent on the NHS. Full Fact checked the claim and requested a correction, but it was not quick enough: the claim stuck around.

“You have to get in before people are so committed to a claim that they can’t back out,” says Moy. “By the time they’ve tied their political reputation very closely to one specific claim, it’s harder for them to correct it, even if it’s wrong.”

The third tool Babakar shows me (dubbed Robochecking), is a sort of “Shazam for facts”: software that would use speech recognition to detect when someone makes a claim, and fact-checks them on the spot. So, if somebody said that GDP is rising, the software would promptly retrieve a chart showing how GDP has been trending of late. Full Fact plans to give this and the other tools to “the wider community” – which Babakar stresses as fact-checkers (Full Fact is already collaborating with Chequeado and African organisation Africa Check), journalists, and others interviewing politicians.

“I don’t think we will apply this to any pub conversation,” she assures.

“I am not building a bot that tells anyone in the world that they are wrong.

That’s not how you make friends.”

THE DOUBLE WHAMMY OF BREXIT and Trump’s eventful presidency have persuaded many that inaccurate claims can actually harm a country’s political life. Now, many feel that the world needs fact-checkers as never before. On the other hand, much of the attention has been on so-called “fake news”, a label Full Fact finds flawed. “We are not super impressed by the term ‘fake news’,” says Arnold. “It’s obviously used by people like [Rodrigo] Duterte [president of the Philippines] or Trump to criticise legitimate media criticism. It also covers a whole range of issues in an unhelpful way.”

One of the walls of the meeting room where we are talking is half-covered in yellow, pink and blue Post-Its detailing all the fake news-related questions Full Fact has been asked so far – from “dark ads” to “political actors bypassing media” to “bots”. The group is collaborating with the Cabinet Oice and with the European Commission on strategies for countering misinformation.

There are many facets to the “fake news” story. One has to do with dark adverts: political messages posted on social media, set to be visible only to select audiences. Dominic Cummings, the director of Brexit-backing Vote Leave campaign, revealed that it had deployed “about one billion targeted digital

adverts” in the ten weeks leading up to the vote. “That’s just massive,” Moy says.

“And we don’t know what the equivalent number is for the Remain campaign at all.” One problem with targeted ads is that they cannot be easily fact-checked, as they are not visible to people who are not supposed to see them. Another issue – one that has cropped up in the Cambridge Analytica scandal – is that targeted ads bring “dog-whistling” to an entirely new level. A campaign might use dark ads to send radically diferent messages to diferent cohorts, becoming a million things to a million voters. “That’s very worrying for an election where we are all meant to be equal voters with an equal voice,” Moy says. To counter this, Full Fact is pushing for regulation: politicians should be required to always write their names and addresses on online ads – as they must do with campaign flyers and billboards.

A corollary of that rule is that parties should make all their online adverts public, allowing voters to grasp the full picture of what a campaign stands for.

Another aspect of disinformation is the diffusion of unsubstantiated, mistaken or deliberately false claims on social media. It is the “Russian propaganda” problem, but it may also be ordinary people sharing hyper-partisan memes. The emerging of this trend has forced Full Fact to think about updating their real-world-focused model.

“In the past, we mostly checked claims by politicians, the media and pressure groups,” Arnold says. “Now, we need to be thinking about what inaccurate or unsubstantiated information is on the internet that we might need to check. It’s not just about Parliament and the media anymore. It’s about what is happening on Facebook groups about immigration, or the economy, or whatever.”

During the 2017 general election campaign, Full Fact teamed up with anti-misinformation group First Draft to spot and verify viral online content.

In some cases, they rebutted inaccurate memes by creating counter-memes.

Given the number of inaccurate memes

circulating online, and the time it takes to debunk them – it took Full Fact three days to fact-check a particularly sticky meme on the state of the economy. This is not a battle fact-checkers can fight alone, Arnold says. Internet platforms, traditional media and governments will all have to play a role.

Alphabet and Facebook have publicly claimed that they would remove fake news from the web. In 2016, Alphabet’s Google Digital News Initiative awarded Full Fact funds to develop its automated fact-checking prototypes, and Facebook has repeatedly partnered with the organisation for anti-disinformation projects.

Mark Zuckerberg’s social network has been hit hard with the accusation of being a passive platform for the spread of conspiracy theories, propaganda and malicious lies. It was a problem that Facebook had begun wrestling with immediately after the US presidential election: in December 2016, it kick-started an algorithmically-driven purge of thousands of fake accounts, and inaugurated a partnership with several fact-checkers tasked with verifying news stories and posts reported as suspicious. If a story fails the fact-checkers’ test, it will be made less visible on users’ feeds, and shown alongside fact-checking articles.

According to Zuckerberg’s recent statements, one technology destined to gain more prominence in Facebook’s anti-fake armoury is AI. Facebook is using inputs from fact-checkers to train machine-learning software to recognise the hallmarks of false news stories – from geographical provenance, to poor spelling to general sentiment.

As Facebook itself acknowledged, however, AI might help speed up human fact-checkers’ work, but we are nowhere close to building an effective AI fact-checker. “Techniques analogous to spam filtering won’t go very far to eliminate the majority of more sophisticated fake news stories, where fabricated facts are presented in a seemingly credible way,” says Dean Pomerleau, a professor at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, and one of the organisers of the Fake News Challenge, a worldwide competition for projects harnessing AI to fight disinformation.

A classic and relatively innocuous example, according to Pomerleau, was the claim that the size of the crowd at Trump’s inauguration ceremony was bigger than Obama’s. “To debunk these kinds of stories requires a subtle analysis of a story’s content, plus the hard work of actual fact checking,” Pomerlau explains.

“This isn’t the kind of thing artificial intelligence is going to be able to tackle any time soon, since it requires rich

semantic understanding of how the world works, where to look for corroborating evidence, and talking with sources.”

On the other hand, AI already gets right some aspects of fact-checking. It is capable of understanding identical claims expressed diferently, which could help reduce the amount of time fact-checkers spend looking at multiple misinformation articles all pushing the same narrative. “This shows how a synergy between humans and AI can work efectively,” Pomerlau says.

It remains to be seen how falsehood-peddlers will adapt to internet platforms’ automated filters. “There’s going to be an arms race between real news and fake news, where AI is used to both generate as well as detect fake news,” says Anjana Susarla, associated professor of accounting and information systems at Michigan State University.

That is why, Arnold says, fact-checkers need to tackle the root causes of political tribalism. They have to understand how one would convince an ultra-Trumpist, or a hardcore Brexiteer, or a firebrand Corbynista, that something is true, even if it looks bad for their political faction.

Researchers at Duke University’s Reporters’ Lab, chaired by the founder of Pulitzer Prize-winning website PolitiFact, Bill Adair, are trying to solve

THE REALLY NAGGING QUESTION about the fake news conundrum is whether fact-checking makes any difference.

In the past, political fact-checking had seemed able to modify politicians’ conduct. According to Boston University’s Michelle Amazeen, this has now stopped working with Trump – with the lone exception of his backtracking from the assertion that Barack Obama was born in Kenya. But fact-immune politicians presuppose fact-indiferent audiences.

Political fabulists exist as long as they are able to cater to partisan supporters.

that puzzle. In September 2017, they launched Tech & Check, a two-year initiative bringing together technologists and journalists. Tech & Check uses algorithms to identify claims for fact-checkers to verify, or even provide real-time fact-checking during televised events. The goal, Adair says, is to whittle down the double “fact-checking gap”: the gap in time between an audience hearing a claim and reading a correction; and the gap in space, which requires people to search for a fact-check after hearing a claim on television.

Technologist Dan Shultz is creating “Truth Goggles” – a tool that factchecks websites as you read

“We are looking to get the fact-checks on to the same screens where claims are made,” he explains. “We want to get the fact-checks to viewers the moment they receive a political message.”

Tech & Check is also working on how to reach out to people who, when confronted with facts jarring with their political convictions, cling on their ideas even more strongly, in a psychological short-circuit political scientists Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler have christened “backfire effect”. Technologist Dan Schultz wants to tackle this problem with an online plug-in called Truth Goggles.

“My idea was: how do we present partisan readers with credible information in a pill they’d be able, or willing, to swallow?”

Schultz says. “The solution we have come up with, if done wrong, it’s creepy.”

Prima facie, Truth Goggles is a tool for highlighting claims and providing pop-up fact-checks tailored to accommodate individual political leanings. To glean each reader’s ideas, Schultz envisions an explicit survey-like interface asking them about a range of issues. On the basis of those answers, Truth Goggles would fine-tune its rhetoric – by avoiding, for example, calling a statement outright “false” if the reader is an overzealous fan of the politician who made it, or tweaking the wording so that it chimes with the reader’s world view. (Schultz says US gun owners prefer to call them “firearms.”)

“It should be the language of a buddy you like, but don’t always agree with,” Schultz says. He says to be aware that, in a post-Cambridge Analytica world, this kind of targeting looks suspicious, regardless of its goals. But he thinks that while targeted propaganda is designed to anger and hoodwink people, Truth Goggles would leverage empathy to help them look at facts with a clearer head.

“We called this Truth Goggles because we would provide you with ‘prescription lenses’ adapted to your personal vision issues – the biases we all have,” he says.

Full Fact is also turning to psychology, education and neuroscience to understand the role of emotions in information-processing, and refine the way it presents its fact-checks: its research and impact manager, Amy Sippitt, peruses reams of studies about how extreme partisans react to facts and verifications.

It is too early to say whether any of this will work, or if the post-truth era is the new normal. Still, it’s a fight that Full Fact thinks is worth it. “Fact-checking is about giving power to the people,” Moy says. “Facts aren’t the end of political debate – they’re the start of it.”

Gian Volpicelli (@Gmvolpi) is a senior editor at WIRED

By John Beck

Driven by a passion for archaeology, the team at RPM Nautical Foundation have set out to prove that technology and talent can save undiscovered artefacts from rogue treasure hunters

Research vessel

Amidships is the control room. It’s nearly dark, filled with the drone of the engines and an air-conditioning unit maintaining 20°C. Today, it’s unusually crowded. George Robb sits in the centre, splayed back in his chair with his chin in his left hand and old cream loafers up on the laminate desk next to a pack of Nicorette. Like everyone else, he’s fixed on the monitors showing various angles of blue 80 metres below, as well as maps, and a yellow and black, constantly refreshing sonar.

Jonathan Dryden works quietly in the corner, biting his lip as he pilots the submersible feeding video from the other end of the yellow cable. The silver hair of RPM Nautical Foundation’s chairman Jim Goold is just visible over the back of another chair to Robb’s left; surveyor Mateusz Polakowski sits in the fourth chair with his clipboard and pen. The rest – crew, archaeologists, historians and observers – switch between standing, leaning and a crude wooden stool.

Suddenly, a shape appears on the sonar – an advanced multi-beam model that looks out 30 metres from the remotely operated vehicle (ROV). Dark with a flash in the middle, it’s the kind of solid, manmade-looking electronic signature that Robb likes. The ROV moves at just around one knot, so the target forms slowly: a smudge, a shadow, then a solid shape, outlined against the sandy seabed.

“There it is,” Robb says. “Put it down here,” he tells Dryden with a New York bluntness once used on junior trading-floor employees. The ROV settles in a small cloud of sediment in front of an ancient bronze waterline ram. It’s about a metre long and it appears to weigh upwards of 180kg.

Polakowski reaches for his radio. “Back deck, crane down” and a chain ending in a hook lowers slowly into view near the ram. Finally, they must now wait for the divers.

Here, on March 10, 241 BCE, 24 kilometres west of Trapani on the Sicilian coast, around 200 Roman warships ambushed a larger Carthaginian fleet as it attempted to

PHOTOGRAPHY: JOHN BECK

Hercules rolls gently in the swell as it holds position off the Egadi Islands, engines running. Its 37-metre hull is seafoam green and its superstructure is white with a stripe below the bridge. “RPM Nautical Foundation” is painted on the side.

The August Sun shines hot, and the crew has retreated from the open back deck, where a thick yellow cable leads from the stern down beneath the surface of the water.

relieve besieged comrades at a nearby port. The Carthaginians had the wind and the numbers, but the Roman oarsmen were better trained and had stripped their craft of masts, supplies and unnecessary bodies, so were more manoeuvrable. Polybius’s Histories records that 50 Carthaginian boats were sunk and 70 were captured, along with as many as 10,000 men to the loss of 30 of their own. The Battle of the Aegates was a victory so decisive that it ended the 23-year-long First Punic War. “It is Rome’s coming out party as a dominant power”, says underwater archaeologist Peter Campbell, with a historian’s taste for the present tense.

It is also the only confirmed location of an ancient naval battle. The warm waters quickly rotted the wrecked warships’ timbers, but the pottery amphora they carried survived, as did the rams, their primary weapon. These were the peak of naval technology for hundreds of years and turned boats into waterborne projectiles. A far more efficient method than the boarding parties that had gone before, they drowned boatloads of men all at once, rather than stabbing them individually.

Images of the projectiles still persist throughout the Mediterranean, reproduced on centuries-old coins and statues. Real examples have been more elusive. Just three are known to exist outside this site from the whole of antiquity. When RPM arrived in Sicily this summer, 13 had been

George Robb (foreground) watches a live feed from the ROV in the control room of the Hercules research vessel

located in the area, but the most recent was back in 2013.

The current ram on the monitors was found on July 27, a quarter of an hour after Robb had yelled at Polakowski, Dryden and Campbell for suggesting that a quiet day be concluded early so that they could motor back to their berth among container ships and ferries in Trapani, where there would be evening sunshine and local food. The area was an “abyss”, Campbell told Robb in attempt to persuade him. There was nothing to find.

Robb is rangy and habitually hunched, with still-dark hair that he lets grow out with an indifference also applied to new clothes, regular mealtimes and manners. He enjoys being right and winding people up, so was happy with ram 15. It was a significant find – and a way to needle Campbell for at least the rest of the season.

They formed a plan to raise it with the help of local Italian divers. Goold, an enthusiastic, slightly breathless 67-year-old who also serves as RPM’s legal counsel, pushed for the day to be named “Operation Rostra” – after the Latin for naval rams. No one objected.

The grey motorboat of the Guardia Di Finanza – the Italian law enforcement agency under the authority of the Minister of Economy and Finance – approaches on roughly the same intercept course as the Romans used, then moors alongside the Hercules. Thankfully, it’s not here to arrest anyone – they’re just ferrying the team of Italian technical divers who are working with the RPM crew. Even for such skilled divers, 80 metres is deep, requiring a mix of breathing gasses, complex gear, multiple decompression stops and a backup team. If something goes wrong, a direct ascent to the surface will not be possible. The Italians expect to have 20 minutes at the bottom, then more than two hours of decompression time on the way up.

The divers lower the emergency t a n ks, t h e n g e a r u p a n d s t e p backwards into the water, reappearing on the ROV’s remote screens three minutes later, close to the ram and the dangling crane hook.

They work hard to dig the ram out and manoeuvre a sling underneath it.

The ram is quickly hidden in a cloud of sediment, from which torch beams, bubbles and flippers emerge. It’s apparent that the divers are struggling.

The divers then move out of view.

Those in the control room exhale with disappointment. Perhaps it won’t happen today. Then, instead of ascending, the divers swim back into view, loop the sling over the crane hook and give an “OK” sign to the ROV cameras.

The ram looks solid, but if it’s cracked, movement could tear it apart.

“My recommendation is recover immediately,” Robb says. “It’s time to make a call. Up?” They all nod.

PM has worked on this site nearly every summer since 2005, part of Robb and Goold’s drive to discover, map and research maritime heritage all across the Mediterranean from the Malta-based Hercules. The artefacts they occasionally recover are priceless, but RPM are no treasure hunters.

They collaborate with local authorities – which often don’t have resources to operate their own vessels – and specialist scholars on every project.

The information they provide helps each

The ROV approaches a field of Roman amphorae, which have lain in place for at least two millennia.

Visible on the ROV’s side is a utility arm which includes a blower for clearing sand and sediment

country protect its underwater cultural heritage from illegal salvage operations or accidental damage in nets and other fishing operations.

It is an ethos that has driven Goold since the 70s. He started diving when he was a teenager and began pursuing nautical archaeology soon after, working under George Bass, one of its earliest practitioners. Things were different then. Underwater archaeological sites were often curiosities to be profited from, not preserved. Opportunistic divers would loot wrecks of anything they could find, selling amphora to local cafes, coins and pieces of WW2 wrecks to beachfront stalls. Today, the Mediterranean coast is mostly stripped clean at recreational scuba depth.

Within days of getting his law license, Goold began working pro-bono with the Institute of Nautical Archeology (INA) and other non-profits to protect wrecks from the Turks and Caicos to Maine’s Lake Sebago. In the late 90s, new technology, particularly ROVs, made time and money the only barriers to stripping historic sites.

A number of countries were becoming increasingly concerned, including Spain, which contracted Goold on a series of cases involving its sunken ships. In 1999, Madrid awarded him the Knight’s Cross of the Order of Isabella Cattolica for his services.

Around that time, Robb was beginning to think of a life away from the New York Stock Exchange trading floor. The original RPM was Robb Peck McCooey Financial Services (RPMFS), a specialist firm run by George’s father and associates, and his grandfather before that. Robb started working there as a teenager and, in 1985, aged 29, managed to raise enough capital to buy out the older generation for $35 million. RPMFS

Divers looted wrecks – the Mediterranean coast is mostly stripped clean at scuba depth

grew fast, ultimately increasing in valuation many times over. Robb did things his way there. He abandoned his suit and tie and indulged a love of the sea that had begun while catching red snapper as a child. He was soon leaving the office for weeks at a time to fish marlin and sailfish from ever-larger yachts based in the Florida Keys.

But by the late 90s, sport angling was boring.

“I got tired of killing fish,” he says. “I went to catchand-release, but I thought, why am I putting these poor animals through all this, y’know?”

There were salvage and treasure-hunting operations working out of the same harbours in the Keys. Robb noticed them and thought amateur archaeology could be a new challenge.

Multibeam sonar wasn’t available then, but he coupled a side-scan model with a magnetometer and commissioned software that pulled the data

together for a comprehensive view of the bottom. He would survey sites in the afternoons, look over the findings, then dive the next day, matching the physical object with its electronic signature.

Goold, then on the INA board, heard from an associate that a financial guy from New York was busily buying up sophisticated surveying gear for archaeological use off Florida. In Robb, he saw a like-minded ally.

“I thought, if he likes doing this stuff, he’s worth getting to know,” Goold says.

He called Robb and suggested he join an INA executive meeting in New York, then, in case that sounded dull, visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where a colleague was refurbishing Panathenaic amphora. It worked, Robb still remembers the “gorgeous” pots.

They two men liked each other immediately. Goold visited the Keys, then Robb joined the INA board and began supplying boats – modified fishing yachts mostly – for projects from Morocco to Israel.

Robb sold RPMFS in 2001 for $180 million, married, and looked for his next project. Robb had seen enough not to even attempt archaeology as a business venture, but at Goold’s suggestion, founded a non-profit named for his old business and funded with an endowment from its sale.

The concept was to operate a boat purpose-built for nautical archaeology that could systematically search large, below-diver-depth areas.

They acquired the Hercules as a mud-boat hull, then built it back up with the latest sonar gear, a dynamic positioning system to keep it steady while they worked, and an ROV – 500kg, 1.7 metres long and with two manipulator arms and a suction/blower tool able to clear off artefacts.

The boat, and its crew, is key to RPM. Academics don’t have the money to run a ship, while vessels with comparably advanced survey equipment are usually operated by navies or oil firms

and cost upwards of £10,000 per day to charter. The Hercules is in the archaeological sweet spot between overheads and capability.

Their first major project was a 2004 attempt to locate the remains of sunken warships from the Battle of Trafalgar in time for its bicentennial.

It was, Goold remembers wryly now, a “learning experience”. They found promising sonar signatures but were never able to actually see them – the rivers emptying into the Bay of Cadiz washed in vast volumes of silt that rolled along the seabed and reduced visibility to nothing.

The following year, they chose the Egadis more carefully, a sandy floor without too many rocks to give false signatures and no river mouths nearby. They were already pretty sure that the Battle of the Aegates had taken place in at least the general vicinity, because Sicilian fishermen dragged up a ram in their nets in 2002.

When Robb first talked about searching it, archaeologists laughed at him – a cocky Wall Street trader trying to do something that they couldn’t. The way he tells it, that was just more motivation to prove the value of new technology to unimaginative scholars. Even with the electronics and the submersible, there were years of nothing.

Underwater surveying is shining a flashlight into the depths to reveal a tiny segment of seabed. An artefact could be five metres out of sonar range, or hidden just beneath shifting sands.

Mostly they just found what everyone in the Hercules control room knows as “bags of rocks”: rope and fishing net weighted with stones that have been discarded or lost from boats still working what’s left of the area’s now-collapsed fish stocks. There is other debris down there too, most of it useless; broken engine parts, WW2 naval mines, diving gear, bottles.

Then they found amphora, whole and in fragments, usually guarded by territorial comber fish that stare down the ROV. There were just six in a two-month season of hunting in 2006, eight the next. It took even longer to find a ram. “You gotta want it” Robb answers every time someone asks if it was frustrating. And he does. After nearly 20 years

Left: bronze naval ram 15 being hauled up by crane from water off the coast of Sicily Above: Jim Goold, RPM’s chairman, on the deck of the R/V Hercules, inspects ram 15

searching seafloors, he still gets butterflies every time the ROV hits the water.

A map in the control room spans the years since then that RPM has spent crawling the site, little black lines marking every transect and the location of each artefact. There are circles for the different types of amphora: red for Greco-Italic, white for Punic, yellow for Punic-African.

Much rarer yellow triangles mark the rams, most of which have now been raised and are on display at a museum on the island of Favignana. Campbell and historian William Murray visit them there when possible to make 3D scans and take samples.

reparation for the ram recovery is delayed by technical problems. Bosun Gerry Villanueva, who has been with RPM since shortly after its founding, is shocked by a leak in the Kevlar and rubbercoated tether carrying 500 DC volt and 660 AC volts down to the ROV. Robb decides it needs a total refit. That’s a day stuck in port, possibly two.

Dryden sets to it, along with Howard Phoenix, the son of a nuclear plant technician who grew up everywhere in the US there was a reactor, learned electronics and engineering, then taught himself to dive from a Navy manual. He also joined RPM at the start, and even got married at Robb’s mansion.

A ram discovered by the RPM team, now restored and on display at the Archaeological Museum of Favignana, sited in the former Florio tuna factory

Downtime hits every season, either through weather – the ROV cannot be safely launched or recovered in any more than a 1.5-metre swell or 20-knot wind – or because something breaks. Often it’s both and it’s always frustrating.

In an attempt to ward off bad luck, the crew have got into the habit of throwing coins and biscuits overboard as an offering to the sea gods. It began as a joke but has now become a half-serious superstition.

Robb usually kills time on the bridge drinking cups of Earl Grey tea – milk and three sugars, despite Dryden’s attempts to wean him down to two. Goold works on his laptop in the forecabin. In June, as they were waylaid in Albania with malfunctioning sonar and buffeted by days of powerful winds, he ran through PowerPoint presentations of his high profile cases on one of the big TVs. Most of the crew had already seen them, but they sat through anyway.

Polakowski and Dryden, crew members who are both in their 20s and joined RPM four years ago after begging to be taken on as unpaid interns, watch films if they can. The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou is an enduring Hercules favourite and received four screenings this season, including once for Murray – known by everyone as Bill – because it seemed wrong he had not seen his namesake’s most nautical work. The crew reference it constantly, Polakowski plays the soundtrack in the control room for Dryden’s birthday, Robb jokes about jaguar sharks and Phoenix replaces his lopped-off sunhat with a Zissou-style red beanie when it’s cold.

The morning of Operation Rostra begins with drizzle, but by 7.30am it’s already heating up. Sicilian authorities send an observer on every recovery operation – and for a ram, they send three. The excited crew is up earlier than normal to prepare, topping a wooden pallet with coiled rope and a white shower curtain for the recovered ram, and donning RPM T-shirts in the same shade as the Hercules’s hull. Goold’s is green with the old logo and Robb has added a straw hat, coming apart at the rim, to his usual ragged shirt.

Three women from the Soprintendenza del Mare come aboard the Hercules in a cloud of perfume just before 8am.

Robb welcomes them with a handshake, Goold with a kiss on each cheek.

The Guardia Di Finanza appear soon after, carrying relaxed-looking divers in shorts and Havaianas, and stressing Phoenix out by looping a rope around part of the Hercules’s railing instead of a bollard. They talk strategy with Robb, examine the ROV, then cast off to reconvene in the bay.

The Hercules stations itself 50 metres off from the ram, and Phoenix tosses a dive guide rope weighted with concrete over the side, then helps launch the ROV. Dryden pilots it down.

Visibility is bad and they don’t notice the dark shape looming out of the sediment until they’re nearly on it. It’s a different ram.

The odds of finding a ram like this are incredibly small. It had lain just beyond sonar range on their last pass of the area. “How the fuck did we miss that?” Robb asks disbelievingly. There is a helmet at its base too, and what Campbell thinks are ballast stones.

PHOTOGRAPHY: JOHN BECK

The RPM crew in the ROV control room on the Hercules research vessel.

L-R : William Murray, Mateusz Polakowski, George Robb, Peter Campbell

But they need to prepare for the divers, so Polakowski notes the co-ordinates and Dryden pulls away.

Half an hour later, ram number 15 is slung up and ready to be raised.

The ram quickly moves out of the ROV’s view and breaks the surface for the first time in two millennia; huge, dark and trailing seaweed. Phoenix helps pull it back on to the palette.

The crew take turns to pose for photos while they wait for the divers on their slow way back. It really is big – a sturdy lump covered in dead oyster shells, tubeworms and pulsating green tongue. The front is chipped, likely damaged by whatever ship it took on before going down.

The divers surface exhausted, wrestling with heavy gear and blowing snot from their noses. Villanueva and Phoenix winch in a concrete-weighted guide line that the divers were using.

It snags and Robb goes to help. As he leans over the edge of the deck, his new iPhone falls out of his pocket. He almost saves it with a quick swipe, but it goes overboard, sinking fast. He looks forlorn.

A local television crew are waiting at Trapani and clamber aboard to get shots of the ram. Goold shakes hands

and poses for the cameras, then cheerily discusses the operation.

Tourists look over and one family stops to ask about the ROV, ignoring the ram, which is still on the pallet.

The new discoveries suggest theories as to how the ancient battle unfolded. Perhaps the Carthaginians were disorganised and strung out, perhaps bunched up into lines, Murray says. When RPM began working here, no one really knew where the fighting happened. Years of work are now taking them closer to saying how.

The day after Operation Rostra, they revisit the ram they dropped in on the day before, moving in a series of transects across a grid and following up on any likely sonar signature. During the survey, they find yet another ram. “Best season ever,” Dryden says. They chat about the emails they will send to doubters, in particular, the historian who told Robb to “come back when he’d found 19 more rams”. They’re nearly there.

John Beck wrote about improvised weapons in Mosul in 10.17

874

129.3

164

319.6

854.3 1138.5

328

518.4 1699.5

surveyed by

798.6

999

RMP and the

984.3

347.1

Isola di Levanzo

1091.5

368.8

40.7 32.8

263.1

Hercules, which

196.2

357.9

944.9

328

278.9 141

is thought the

186.6

135.8

164

55.8

91.9

618.1 456

be the location Isola di Marettimo

of the Aegates

98.4

141

Isola di Favignano

385.2

200.1

164

328

44.0

262.5

246

252.6

47.2 318.2

nde

640.4

ITALY

257.2

Gra

142.4

247.4

Isola

328

45.9 49.2

82 49.2

217.8

of the Battle

Carthaginian fleet

249.5

283.5

Area being

240.8 55.8

295.3 180.4

Roman fleet

295.3

391.7 328

292.0

246 224.4

260.5 328 984.3

70.2

164 76.8 82

70.2

59 278.9

95.1 99.7

555.8

738.8

34.1 134.5

393.7 63.6

2160.1 643

32.8

CONDÉ NAST INTERNATIONAL Chairman and Chief Executive: Jonathan Newhouse President: Wolfgang Blau

PUBLISHED UNDER LICENSE OR COPYRIGHT COOPERATION: Australia: Vogue, Vogue Living, GQ Bulgaria: Glamour

THE CONDÉ NAST INTERNATIONAL GROUP OF BRANDS INCLUDES: UK Vogue, House & Garden, Brides, Tatler, The World of Interiors, GQ, Vanity Fair, Condé Nast Traveller, Glamour, Condé Nast Johansens, GQ Style, Love, Wired, Condé Nast College of Fashion & Design, Ars Technica

China: Vogue, AD, Condé Nast Traveler, GQ, GQ Style, Condé Nast Center of Fashion & Design, Vogue Me, Vogue Film Czech Republic and Slovakia: Vogue, La Cucina Italiana Germany: GQ Bar Berlin Hungary: Glamour

France Vogue, Vogue Hommes, AD, Glamour, Vogue Collections, GQ, AD Collector, Vanity Fair

Iceland: Glamour Korea: Vogue, GQ, Allure, W

Italy Vogue, Glamour, AD, Condé Nast Traveller, GQ, Vanity Fair, Wired, La Cucina Italiana, Lisa

Middle East: Vogue, Condé Nast Traveller, AD, GQ, Vogue Café Riyadh

Germany Vogue, GQ, AD, Glamour, GQ Style, Wired

Portugal: Vogue, GQ, Vogue Café Porto

Poland: Vogue, Glamour

Romania: Glamour

T HE C OLOPH ON

THE FOOD FIXER The magic of animal-free food got some extra sparkle this issue, thanks to food stylist Iain Graham. It was his task to take chef Alexis Gauthier’s ingredients list and whip up not only the finished product – vegan foie gras – but also create a pleasing composition from the raw elements: “The idea was to find the most exciting and graphic way to display the constituent parts

Spain Vogue, GQ, Vogue Novias, Vogue Niños, Condé Nast Traveler, Vogue Colecciones, Vogue Belleza, Glamour, AD, Vanity Fair Japan Vogue, GQ, Vogue Girl, Wired, Vogue Wedding Taiwan Vogue, GQ, Interculture

ing them look good. I decided to make the Faux Gras look as ‘restauranty’ and fancy as possible, just like a real foie gras torchon, so we made the

South Africa: House & Garden, GQ, Glamour, House & Garden, Gourmet, GQ Style, Glamour Hair The Netherlands: Vogue, Glamour, Vogue The Book, Vogue Man, Vogue Living Thailand: Vogue, GQ

Mexico and Latin America Vogue Mexico and Latin America, Glamour Mexico, AD Mexico, GQ Mexico and Latin America

Turkey: Vogue, GQ Ukraine: Vogue, Vogue Café Kiev

India Vogue, GQ, Condé Nast Traveller, AD

CONDÉ NAST USA President and Chief Executive Officer: Robert A. Sauerberg, Jr. Artistic Director: Anna Wintour

PUBLISHED UNDER JOINT VENTURE:

Vogue, Vanity Fair, Glamour, Brides, Self, GQ, GQ Style, The New Yorker, Condé Nast Traveler, Allure, AD, Bon Appétit, Epicurious, Wired, W, Golf Digest, Teen Vogue, Ars Technica, Pitchfork, Backchannel, Them

to prevent them looking dull – the recipe calls for surprisingly basic stuff, so I had a lot of fun mak-

Russia: Vogue Café Moscow, Tatler Club Moscow

Brazil: Vogue, Casa Vogue, GQ, Glamour Russia: Vogue, GQ, AD, Glamour, GQ Style, Tatler, Glamour Style Book

mix, ballotined it (a classic method using cling film to make a cylindrical shape), froze it, then placed it in shot and allowed it to thaw. I decided it needed a touch of striking impossibility, where you can’t help but look and go ‘how, what!?’ So, I stood all the herbs on their ends, and spherified the liquids using agar (a seaweed jelly) and round moulds. To be honest, I was blown away by Gauthier’s recipe. It’s super simple, tastes delicious and is really similar to pâté! What more do you want from a meal? The texture and taste is genius – as a vegan, I really loved it. I think there will be more and more of these types of things that are a halfway house for people who are new to veganism, or just trying to eat less meat. It’s a useful middle ground, and what’s best about this is it’s all good stuff – it’s not seitan or fake food, it really is lentils, nuts and mushrooms. So good!”

Published by The Condé Nast Publications Ltd, Vogue House, Hanover Square, London W1S 1JU (tel: 020 7499 9080; fax: 020 7493 1345). Colour origination by williamsleatag. Printed in the UK by Wyndeham Roche Ltd. WIRED is distributed by Frontline, Midgate House, Peterborough, Cambridgeshire, PE1 1TN, United Kingdom (tel: 01733 555161). A one-year (10 issues) WIRED magazine subscription is available to the UK, Europe, US and the rest of the world. Order at www.magazineboutique.co.uk/wired/W173 or call +44 (0)844 848 5202, MonFri 8am-9.30pm, Sat 8am-4pm. Enquiries, change of address and orders payable to WIRED, Subscription Department, Lathkill St, Market Harborough, Leics LE16 9EF, United Kingdom.

Change of address or other subscription queries: email wired@subscription.co.uk or call 0844 848 2851. Manage your subscription online 24 hrs a day at www.magazineboutique. co.uk/youraccount. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission is strictly prohibited. WIRED cannot be responsible for unsolicited material.

Copyright © 2018 THE CONDÉ NAST PUBLICATIONS LTD, Vogue House, Hanover Square, London W1S 1JU. The paper used for this publication is based on renewable wood fibre.

The wood these fibres are derived from is sourced from sustainably managed forests and controlled sources. The producing mills are EMAS registered and operate according to highest environmental and health and safety standards. This magazine is fully recyclable - please log on to www.recyclenow.com for your local recycling options for paper and board. WIRED is a member of the Independent Press Standards Organisation (which regulates the UK’s magazine and newspaper industry). We abide by the Editors’ Code of Practice [www.ipso.co.uk/editors-code-of-practice] and are committed to upholding the highest standards of journalism. If you think that we have not met those standards and want to make a complaint please see our Editorial Complaints Policy on the Contact Us page of our website or contact us at complaints@condenast.co.uk or by post to Complaints, Editorial Business Department, The Condé Nast Publications Ltd, Vogue House, Hanover Square, London W1S 1JU. If we are unable to resolve your complaint, or if you would like more information about IPSO or the Editors’ Code, contact IPSO on 0300 123 2220 or visit www.ipso.co.uk

recycle this magazine

144

PRETTY ECCENTRIC Pretty Eccentric Vintage Watch Movement Cufflinks. When these watches stopped who knew they would be reincarnated as really cool cufflinks. Crafted from 1920s-1950s watch movements, set with their original ruby jewels and mounted as cufflinks. Presented in a vintage style box. By Pretty Eccentric £49.

Visit prettyeccentric.co.uk

HEINRICH BARTH Heinrich Barth was one of the greatest travellers and explorers of the l9th Century.

The story of his life and his many adventures have inspired their brand. Under his name, they created their range of beauty products for your daily needs, sourcing the best ingredients from local flora around the world, to recreate the aura of a destination that lingers on as a souvenir. This is their Skin Softening Body Cleanser. Visit heinrich-barth.com

WIRED AD V ER TISIN G FEATU RE

W.I.M.U. Are you tired of your old and boring underwear?

W.I.M.U. (Where Is My Underwear) is here for you: by subscribing you will receive by mail a surprise package with a pair of underwear and socks. You can also give a WIMU box as a gift!

Easy, Funny, WIMU! Visit: wi-mu.com IG: @w.i.m.u_subscriptionbox

ELUSIVE SOCIETY Elusive Society creates modern classics like this cable knit beanie with a faux fur lining for the coldest of days. $39 from elusivesociety.com

HIMBRIMI A unique Old Tom Gin from Iceland, Himbrimi Gin is based on early 18th century gin recipes. Handcrafted from pure Icelandic water and wild flowers, this is the perfect sipping gin that also works great in a variety of cocktails. Available at The Whisky Exchange.

Follow them at @ginhimbrimi and visit himbrimi.com for more info.

AHJAYEE Ahjayee presents the Skin and Face pack, the ultimate in skin care essentials. These luxurious handmade products were created using custom oil blends, high quality butters and plant extracts. From the Murumuru and Cocoa cream to the Performance Face serum, they will leave your skin, hands and lips moisturised all day long. Visit ahjayee.com

CUTS CLOTHING Cuts Clothing’s custom PycaTM Fabric has led to unmatched style, innovative comfort, and the perfect fit. Making it the only fabric worth wearing. Through endless combinations of cuts, collars, and colours, it’s time to elevate your wardrobe. Visit cutsclothing.com and use code ‘WIRED’ at checkout for 15% off (expires 31/12/2018).

SCENTEE The next generation smart room diffuser equipped with AI technology. Replacing the old and cumbersome diffuser, “Scentee Machina” can be managed directly from your smartphone.

With embedded AI, “Scentee Machina” analyses your favourite fragrance from usage history.

From the bedroom, to a gathering with friends “Scentee Machina” matches any scene. Enjoy your favourite scent 24 hours, anytime, anywhere. Visit scentee-machina.com

BERROLIA Berrolia is a premium car mount for your phone with charging capability.

Hand-crafted from the highest quality materials (Italian full-grain leather and stainless steel). Enabling drivers to insert and operate the phone with just one hand at any time. The design ensures that the phone can start getting charged within seconds of entering a vehicle.

Visit berrolia.com

BRYKER HYDE Quick Draw Minimalist by Bryker Hyde is handcrafted out of the finest leather with detailed stitching throughout. Carry the things you need and access them easily with their patent pending “Quick Draw” pockets. Easily remove any card with a single touch of your finger or thumb. Visit brykerhyde.com or email team@brykerhyde.com for more information.

11/12.18 KITSOUND Take your music outside thanks to the KitSound Diggit Speaker. Stick it in the ground with its removable stake feature, play 360° sound via Bluetooth, and never worry about the Great British weather with its IP55 water and sand resistance rating. RRP £39.99.

Available from kitsound.co.uk and Amazon.co.uk #GODIGGIT

THE UNRULY Not just for slick ricks and scumbags. Peace Pomade, by male grooming brand The Unruly, gives you high-shine hold or laid-back lengths, whatever your steeze. That’s why it’s a classic.

Find the full range of professional styling products at theunruly.co.uk

TOUGH & TUMBLE The Barcode Custom Comb, Red Dot Design 2016 winner, is built from 0.1” thick stainless steel. It comes custom-cut, the pattern of the teeth generated from the owner’s birthday, and imparting a personal touch on your hair that no one else can have. As such, the tooth size and pattern varies heavily. Visit toughandtumble.com or via Amazon

TO JOIN US ON THESE PAGES CONTACT : 020 7499 9080 EXT 3705

STUBBLE & CO British designed high-quality men’s bags. Made with 16oz premium waterproofed canvas, natural full grain leather and ultra-reliable YKK zips. Perfect for work, the gym and weekend adventures.

Available in four colours from £135 with free UK shipping. Visit stubbleandco.com

EDEN Founded with a rebellious spirit and a bold objective: to offer a blue sparkling wine from France in a revolutionary way. Vibrant intensity of stone fruits in addition to the sweetness and fleshiness of passion fruit.

Visit sparklingeden.com

LEVER GEAR The Toolcard Pro—a better way to carry. Always be prepared with this multitool wallet that keeps 40 tools at your fingertips. Stainless steel, TSA compliant, and backed by a lifetime warranty. Learn more and order yours at levergear.com or amazon.co.uk Use code ‘WIRED10’ to save on orders placed at levergear.com (expires 31/12/2018)

VOCIER This premium German luggage manufacturer has a patented wrinkle-free design for packing suits and fine apparel. Innovation, impeccable quality, and luxurious materials have won VOCIER numerous international design awards. The carry-on shown here is available in durable nylon or fine Italian leather. Free shipping and returns, duties paid, and a 100-day return guarantee make buying easy at vocier.com and email support@vocier.com

OHMME OHMME’s casual wear line has arrived! Engineered for movement, OHMME’s new collection features chinos, jeans, shirts and other items that will encourage you to move.

Visit OHMME.com/casualwear to shop. WIRED readers get 10% off with code ‘WIRED10’ (expires 31/12/2018).

LUCA FALONI This iconic polo is crafted in Italy with the most prestigious cashmere from Cariaggi. Their knitwear polo is the ultimate luxury wardrobe piece and perfect gift inspiration. Free worldwide delivery and returns available. £260 from lucafaloni.com

INVENTERY Redefined writing instruments, like these modular pocket fountain pens from Inventery. Precision machined from solid brass stock, they come equipped with interchangeable caps and a lengthening kit. Equal parts cavalier and contraption, these fine tools are for those who seek the classics but have an eye for contemporary design.

Visit inventery.co or email support@inventery.co

WIR E D ADVE R T IS ING F E AT U R E

The number of homes that a proposed hydro pump storage plant in Loch Ness, Scotland, will be able to power.

It will run for six hours a day, with an output of 400 megawatts of energy

The amount of nominations Netflix received for the 2018 Emmy Awards. This is the first time a streaming company’s studios has received the most nods – it had four more than HBO, the most-nominated studio for the past 17 years

The number of internet users in India expected to be online

by June 2018, according to a report by the Internet and Mobile Association of India and market research company Kantar IMRB. This is an increase of 19 million since the end of 2017

T HE WIRED IN D E X

W E SOU RCE E VE R Y TH ING

The amount of reports a Facebook commentmoderating company can receive in one day, according to a Channel 4 Dispatches documentary

The proportion of home insulation in China that uses the illegal, ozonedamaging gas CFC-11 in its manufacture, despite being outlawed since 2010. It remains a cheap and effective element for insulating foam in new builds

The average daily maximum temperature, in degrees Celsius, recorded in the south east of England throughout the month of July 2018. It beat the previous record of 26.1°C set in July 2006

The time it would take to walk from one end of e-commerce retailer JD.com’s warehousing site in Jiading, China, to the other. One of the warehouses covers 100,000 square metres The proportion of diseased mosquitoes that were successfully eradicated in experimental sites in Australia.

Researchers genetically modified male mosquitoes to be sterile, then released three million of them into the wild to prevent the species from breeding as easily

The accuracy with which researchers at UCL could identify a Twitter user out of 10,000 people, based on the metadata from one tweet

The amount of Twitter followers Katy Perry lost after the company announced that locked accounts would no longer contribute towards a user’s follower total. Perry is thought to have lost the most due to the change; she is currently down to 107 million followers. The average drop was four

WORDS: RICHARD PRIDAY. ILLUSTRATION: GIACOMO GAMBINERI. SOURCES: BBC; UCL; ILI ENERGY; CNN; ICO; THE TIMES OF INDIA; EMMYS.COM; THE MET OFFICE

The amount the European Commission has fined Google over its use of Android – a new record. The EC said the firm had used its mobile operating system to illegally “cement its dominant position” in online search.

CHOOSE YOUR OFFER PRINT ONLY OR ALL ACCESS WITH DIGITAL EDITIONS

ONE YEAR OF WIRED PRINT ONLY £19 ALL ACCESS PRINT+DIGITAL ONLY £24 FREE INSTANT ACCESS TO THE DIGITAL EDITIONS. ALL YOU NEED IS YOUR SUBSCRIPTION NUMBER. *LIMITED TO UK ADDRESSES. FOR OVERSEAS ALL ACCESS ONE YEAR SUBSCRIPTION THE RATE IS £48 TO EUROPE OR US OR £58 TO REST OF WORLD. OFFER CLOSES ON 30/11/2018.

WIRED.CO.UK/SUBS/CWR17790 0844 848 5202 REF: CWR17790

Please turn the page to view Supplement

PHOTOGRAPHY: XXXXXXXXX

THE FINER THINGS IN WIREDâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S WORLD FREE WITH WIRED MAGAZINE NOV/DEC 2018

dorchestercollection.com 7KH 'RUFKHVWHU /RQGRQ _ 3DUN /DQH /RQGRQ _ &RZRUWK 3DUN $VFRW _ /H 0HXULFH 3DULV +{WHO 3OD]D $WKpQpH 3DULV _ +RWHO 3ULQFLSH GL 6DYRLD 0LODQ _ +RWHO (GHQ 5RPH 7KH %HYHUO\ +LOOV +RWHO %HYHUO\ +LOOV _ +RWHO %HO $LU /RV $QJHOHV _ 'XEDL RSHQLQJ

3HUIHFWLRQ MXVW KDSSHQV DW 'RUFKHVWHU &ROOHFWLRQ

D O N â&#x20AC;&#x2122; T G O Q U I E T LY

Official fuel consumption figures in mpg (l/100km) for the new Ford Mustang range: urban 14.4 -23.3 (19.6-12.1), extra urban 31.0 - 41.5 (9.1-6.8), combined 22.1 - 31.3 (12.8-9.0). Official CO 2 emission 285 -199g/km.

The mpg figures quoted are sourced from official EU-regulated test results (EU Directive and Regulation 715/2007 and 692/2008 as last amended), are provided for comparability purposes and may not reflect your actual driving experience.

Contents

09 21 24 30 36 40 49 56 60 65 68

FETISH: objects of desire PROFILE: Ian Rogers of LVMH HOTELS: four innovative inns FASHION: wearable tech RIDES: luxurious transport SPIRITS: inside The Macallan WATCHES: classics with a twist WATCHES: Rolex and the deep TEST: HondaJet Elite RETAIL REPORT: China GOURMET: wagyu beef

Vollebak has coated the inside of this nylon jacket with a molecule-thick layer of graphene, to create a light, hardwearing fabric that conducts heat and energy.

£725 vollebak.com This breathable top from Aeance gives yarn a new twist: wrapping a nylon filament around a merino core increases the fabric’s strength by 70 per cent.

PHOTOGRAPHY (COVER): BAKER & EVANS. (THIS PAGE): MARK SANDERS

£160 aeance.com

Published by The Condé Nast Publications Ltd, Vogue House, Hanover Square, London W1S 1JU (tel: 020 7499 9080). Colour origination by williamsleatag. Printed in the UK by Wyndeham Roche Ltd. WIRED is distributed by Frontline, Midgate House, Peterborough, Cambridgeshire, PE1 1TN, United Kingdom (tel: 01733 555161). The one-year (ten issues) full subscription rate to WIRED in the UK is £35, £48 to Europe or US, £58 to the rest of world. Order at www.magazineboutique.co.uk/wired/W173 or call +44 (0)844 848 5202, Mon-Fri 8am-9.30pm, Sat 8am-4pm. Enquiries, change of address and orders payable to WIRED, Subscription Department, Lathkill St, Market Harborough, Leics LE16 9EF, United Kingdom. Change of address or other subscription queries: email wired@subscription.co.uk or call 0844 848 2851. Manage your subscription online 24 hours a day at magazineboutique. co.uk/youraccount. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission is strictly prohibited. All prices correct at time of going to press but are subject to change. WIRED cannot be responsible for unsolicited material. Copyright © 2017 THE CONDÉ NAST PUBLICATIONS LTD, Vogue House, Hanover Square, London W1S 1JU. The paper used for this publication is based on renewable wood fibre. The wood these fibres are derived from is sourced from sustainably managed forests and controlled sources.

The producing mills are EMAS registered and operate according to highest environmental and health and safety standards.

This magazine is fully recyclable – please log on to www.recyclenow.com for your local recycling options for paper and board.

Desired

Desired

Masthead

Editor Greg Williams

Contributors

Production director Sarah Jenson

Jonathan Bell, Colin Goodwin,

Commercial production

Supplement editor Jeremy White

Chris Hall, Chris Haslam,

manager Xenia Dilnot

Group creative director Andrew Diprose

Daphne LePrince, Laura

Production controller Emma Storey

Managing editor Mike Dent

McCreddie-Doak, Tony Wong

Production and digital

Art director Mary Lees

co-ordinator Skye Meelboom

Acting director of photography

Publishing director Nick Sargent

Commercial and paper production

Cindy Parthonnaud

Group head of revenue Rachel Reidy

controller Martin MacMillan

Partnerships director James Byrne

Huge copper stills at the heart of the

Advertising enquiries 020 7499 9080

new ÂŁ140-million Macallan distillery

Supplement free with WIRED 11.18

PHOTOGRAPHY: GREG WHITE

Account director Sylvia Weindling

Fetish

F

E

BY CHRIS

PHOTOGRAPHY: BAKER & EVANS

I

S

H

PHOTOGRAP HY: H A S L A M

Audio BA NG & OLU FSE N E D GE

Designed in conjunction with

T

Desired

created a new acoustical

Italian design studio Flos and

technology called Active

Herman Miller collaborator

Bass Port. When playing

Michael Anastassiades, the

at lower volumes, the Edge

Beosound Edge is a fully

applies a closed cabinet

wireless speaker (AirPlay2,

principle for more accurate

Chromecast2, Bluetooth)

sound reproduction – but

with a 25.4cm bass driver,

as you turn up the volume,

10.4cm midrange and

the Active Bass Port opens

2cm tweeter. The circular

to kick out a bigger, beefier

design was inspired by the

bass. Mount on the wall

original £1 coin, and it’s

for a station-clock style

just as tactile, thanks to its

statement, or leave on the

pressure-sensitive controls.

floor and rock it back and

To help deliver its signature

forth to adjust the volume.

high quality sound, B&O

£2,900 bang-olufsen.com

B A K ER

&

EVANS

AND

JASON

P IETRA

Fetish

Amplifier AU DIO R ESE A RCH R EF ER ENCE 160M A M P

Featuring four KT150 valves

panel is transparent, showing

– famous for producing tight,

the glowing tubes behind it,

full and precise bass, neutral

while the power supply stage

midrange and transparent

uses a newly developed High

high-end clarity – Audio

Energy Capacity Transformer

Research’s REF160M

to provide high current on

monoblock power amp

demand for transient peaks.

boasts impeccable industrial

Hitting 150W in Ultralinear

design, alongside peerless

mode and 75W in Triode

audio quality. Thanks to

mode, it also includes single-

its ingenious dual-layer

ended RCA inputs, as well as

construction, the illuminated

ones for balanced XLR.

power meter on the front

£28,998 absolutesounds.com

PHOTOGRAPHY: BAKER & EVANS

Desired

danish design by . made by

Fetish

Speaker M C I N T O S H X R T 2 .1 K

Standing more than 2m tall and a reported 45 years in the making, McIntosh’s ZRT2.1K features 81 nanocarbonfibre drivers arranged in a four-way configuration of six 20-centimetre bass drivers, two 16.5-centimetre lowfrequency/midrange units, 28 five-centimetre uppermidrange units and the small matter of 45 19-millimetre tweeters. Why so many?

McIntosh claims this vertical line array configuration was influenced by live concert PA systems and enables sound projection at a greater distance than a traditional point source design would allow. The speaker can handle a concert-worthy 2,000 watts of power, the reinforced bass cabinet is made from brushed black aluminium, and it’s all finished in inky piano black.

£137,500 mcintoshlabs.com

PHOTOGRAPHY: JASON PIETRA

Desired

Fetish

PHOTOGRAPHY: BAKER & EVANS

Eyewear P O R S C H E D E S I G N P ’8 478 40-Y

While history will remember

sunglasses. To celebrate

bridge, nose pads and lens

him primarily as the design

the 40th anniversary of

holders. Available in two

mastermind behind the

these Aviator-style shades,

sizes, each pair comes in a

iconic Porsche 911, professor

Porsche has created a

special travel box and has five

Ferdinand Alexander Porsche

limited run of 1,978 pairs,

sets of lenses: grey gradient,

also made history by creating

all featuring a lightweight

blue gradient, blue/green

the P’8478 – the world’s

matte-black titanium frame

mirror, mercury and brown.

first interchangeable-lens

and gold accents on the

€650 porsche-design.com

Desired

Desired

Fetish

Turntable GLOBE-T RO T T ER X A NA LO GU E FOU N DAT ION

Feel like taking the party

winning producer Russell

with Shibata stylus), plus

with you everywhere you go?

Elevado and the music

a drawer full of exceptional

This one-off collaboration

group Soundwalk Collective),

headphones, including the

between James Bond’s

should fit the bill. A custom-

£2,000 ATH-ADX5000.

preferred luxury luggage

built vinyl-only “Listening

Naturally, it also comes with

brand, Globe-Trotter, and

Station”, it brings together

a library of vinyl to sample

The Analogue Foundation

a unique turntable with a

at your leisure, plus an extra

(a consortium of audio

selection of Audio-Technica

compartment housing a pair

evangelists spearheaded by

phono cartridges (such as

of cut-glass tumblers and a

Japanese sound specialists

the AT-ART9 magnetic core

bottle of single malt.

Audio-Technica, Grammy-

moving coil, and the AT33Sa

analoguefoundation.com

T H E

A R T

O F

E S S E N C E

With its ultra-thin wallpaper design, the LG SIGNATURE OLED TV is technological innovation at its greatest.

World-renowned for its superior picture quality and picture-on-wall design, the TV offers a perfect black canvas that plays host to vibrant, accurate color.

Find your LG SIGNATURE TV at www.LGSIGNATURE.com

Included TV-to-AV Box cable is required for TV operation.

016

Fetish

Footwear J I M M Y C H O O VOYAG E R B O O T

As sumptuous as the water-

with French-based startup

levels via the accompanying

resistant vachetta calf

Zhor-Tech to bring app-

smartphone app, and adjust

leather and shearling liner

controlled in-sole heating

the temperature of each sole

may be, WIRED is perhaps

to its new season winter

from 25°C to 45°C. Depending

even more excited by what’s

boots. Chargeable via a

on the outside temperature,

to be found inside the lugged

USB port discreetly hidden

each boot can keep your toes

commando sole. Jimmy

beneath a hand-tooled collar,

toasty for up to eight hours.

Choo has collaborated here

you can track your activity

£tbc jimmychoo.com

PHOTOGRAPHY: BAKER & EVANS

Desired

T H E

A R T

O F

E S S E N C E

The LG SIGNATURE refrigerator's beautiful design goes beyond its stunning exterior to a variety of advanced features.

And with innovations like InstaView™ Door-in-Door®, you can see inside with just two simple knocks.

Find your LG SIGNATURE refrigerator at www.LGSIGNATURE.com

Desired

Fetish

Audio S ON Y DM P-Z1 DIGI TA L M USIC PL AY E R

control is plated in copper

handle Native DSD files up

“portable” music player, the

and gold to ensure signal

to 11.2MHz and 384kHz PCM,

68.1mm x 138mm x 278.7mm

purity, and to get the best

while the 256GB of internal

DMP-Z1 is built to power

from the dual Asahi DACs.

storage with dual micro SD

the finest headphones

Power it either from AC mains

slots means you won’t go

(1,500mW/16Ω output), and

or via an independent, super-

short of music, however high

is compatible with virtually

stable, five-cell noiseless

the resolution – but there’s a

every high-res audio format.

battery system that manages

USB-C if you do want to hook

The gorgeously smooth

both digital and analogue

up directly to your computer.

analogue rotary volume

needs separately. It can also

£8,000 sony.co.uk

Stretching the definition of

T H E

A R T

O F

E S S E N C E

With the minimal design of LG SIGNATURE washing machines, technology is refined to its simplest, most exquisite form.

Combined with TwinWashâ&#x201E;˘ technology which allows you to wash two loads at once. It's the perfect marriage of convenience and beauty.

Find your LG SIGNATURE washing machine at www.LGSIGNATURE.com

50 years of award-winning sound built into every pair

Responds naturally to you

Wireless adaptive noise cancellation

Smart power with a 22-hour battery life

bowers-wilkins.co.uk/PX

Profile

Desired

B Y J E R E M Y

WHI TE

P HOT OGRAPHY: L A U R A

STEVENS

LUXURY’S TECH REBOOT Ian Rogers, the first ever chief digital officer of LVMH, discusses data, privacy, personalisation and the future of high-end retail with WIRED

In 2015, LVMH poached Apple’s former senior director of iTunes to be its chief digital officer.

The appointment marked digital as a new focus for the world’s largest luxury conglomerate.

Rogers’ music industry career started in 1993, when he ran the The Beastie Boys website while at university in Indiana. Then came stints running a Yahoo!-owned music service and heading Topspin Media, which connected artists to fans.

In 2013, he joined Beats Music as chief executive, then Apple in 2014, following the company’s $3 billion acquisition of Beats Music and Beats Electronics. As senior director of Apple Music, Rogers ran music streaming services and online radio station Beats 1. He left just two months after the launch of Apple Music to take on developing LVMH’s online retail presence.

Chief digital officer is a relatively new role at LVMH. What does this position mean for the group? I think this chief digital officer role is potentially hazardous. What it does is act as a change agent – which also means that its life span is limited. In the music business, I watched them go from 1994, when they had “new media”, and then in 2003, 2004, they had “digital marketing”. Today, they just have “marketing”. They’ve eradicated these digital positions. Louis Vuitton has as well. They have digitally capable communications and retail teams, and a technology organisation that reports to the CEO, as a tech startup would.

The rise of CDOs raises technological innovation to board level.

The expectation must be more than just change? I would agree, except that, long term, I would want to call it a CTO. I think that “digital” is a bit of a nonsense word. I haven’t met anybody who can explain to me, really, what it means. Scott Galloway at L2 said, “Having a chief digital officer is like having a chief electricity officer.”

I think that that’s really accurate.

What you’re doing is, you’re using this somewhat technical term to mask the fact that your customers’ behaviours have changed. You need to elevate technology inside of your organisation.

Ian Rogers, chief digital officer LVMH, photographed by WIRED in Paris, August 2018

Desired

Profile

Right : The Hublot omnichannel offering includes a remote timepiece video-showcase, live from its NYC boutique

How far along are you with the transformation for LVMH? We’re over €40 billion in revenue and covering multiple industries. You have such a broad spectrum of types of businesses, from Sephora – which is an international e-commerce business – to a small watch company. They have completely different profiles in terms of what their needs are and what this transition is. On that level, it’s difficult to go, “We’re here on the timeline”. At the same time, you can look at successes. You can plot your strategic areas of focus. What are our long-term, our three- to ten-year strategies?

What is LVMH doing with data? Our belief is that privacy and luxury are synonymous. I think that we will always be extremely conservative in the way that we use data. At the same time, our customers expect a high level of service and personalisation.

We learned in music that people love personalisation because it brings them tangible value.

The exact same thing is true in the luxury world.

The context is so important, and when you’re selling luxury, you’re not selling a product. No one is buying a Dior handbag for €3,000 because of its incredible utility. You’re buying it because the culture of Dior has meaning. In the music business, you might be selling a 99-cent Eminem download – but really, you’re selling culture, you’re selling rebellion, you’re selling what Eminem means to a 15-year-old kid. There’s tons of ways to use data to scale this fit between the creativity and the craftsmanship and the product and the people who love and appreciate that.

How can data help to identify new customers?

The internet has changed the definition of the word “local”. Local used to mean nearby. Today, local means shared interests. We’re also moving from a world where marketing was hyper efficient, to a world where quality is hyper efficient. At a certain point, you get diminishing returns spending more money on marketing. Take my 27-year-old daughter: no amount of TV or magazine spending is going to reach her. She doesn’t consume media that contains advertising, apart from Facebook and Instagram. But she watched Stranger Things. Not because of the marketing, but because [the show was] good and five friends told her, “You must watch this”. Then she told five friends. In the era of a loud consumer voice, quality is more efficient than marketing.

‘I think that “digital” is a bit of a nonsense word.

I haven’t met anyone who can explain what it means’

How do you match the online customer experience in luxury with the real-world one? For a long time, people thought that luxury and online didn’t fit, because they’re looking at commodified e-commerce experiences like Amazon and saying, “that’s not luxury”. But the convenience of Amazon Prime is a luxury. I would argue that on some level, Uber or even Warby Parker are luxury consumer experiences. In the Hublot boutique in New York, there is now a video clientele suite.

Customers [looking to try watches remotely] can Skype or Facetime with a sales associate, [which means] that person has access [through] their phone camera to a high-end video experience. This is important, because a watch might cost tens of thousands of euros, and it’s not right that [online], it sits in a grid of watches, and a Paypal checkout becomes the customer experience. We don’t really refer to e-commerce at LVMH. We talk about omnichannel commerce.

What are you working on right now?

How we communicate, how the customer is changing, how we sell.

That “omnichannel commerce” bucket.

Direct e-commerce, the way that stores interact with online. Wholesale is a big channel and our relationships with our partners are changing... All of the projects that we have fit in that matrix.

That’s a lot to take on. Do you look at the mountain or just what’s just right in front of your feet? I like the fact that it’s both strategic and specific. One of the things that we’ve built since I’ve been here is the customer service centre (for the brands). It seems boring and pedestrian to some, but I love it because it is the most basic thing in luxury, taking care of our customers one at a time. It’s also directly related to the “digital strategy”, but in a non-obvious way. From a strategic perspective, e-commerce only grows as a percentage of revenue. As e-commerce grows, some of our selling costs migrate from physical stores to the call centre. It’s not the case that luxury shopping becomes self-serve on the internet: if I buy something I expect a high level of service, even if I’m remote.

It’s strategic for us to invest in remote customer support, and it’s downstream of our internet strategy. There’s this ridiculous land of “digital transformation” where people wave their hands and talk in impractical terms.

Keep drilling until you have something practical that works and then rinse and repeat. Lose these nonsense words like “digital”, “data”, “social media”. You have to get rid of this digital umbrella because it’s just too broad. When somebody says, “We’re really behind on digital”, my response is, “You’re behind in every aspect of your business?”

Desired

Hotels

PHOTOGRAPHY: VIRGILE SIMON BERTRAND

Zaha Hadid Architectsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Morpheus Hotel in Macau

B Y

J ONATHAN

BELL

OV E R N IG H T S E N SAT ION S Hotels have long been testing grounds for innovation. WIRED checks in to four establishments showcasing standout architecture as well as accommodation

Hospitality has always been a benign arms race, a struggle to capture the hearts, minds and loyalty of the most fickle and demanding guest.

Hotels were the original test beds for architectural innovation and building technology, places where many people had their first experience of modern plumbing, electric lighting and a

slew of other innovations that we now take for granted. For example, in 1883, the City Hotel in Sunbury, Pennsylvania, was the very first building to have electric illuminations, courtesy of Thomas Edison’s original system, while the Savoy in London, which opened in 1889, was the first British hotel to have both electric lights and lifts.

Hotels

MOR PH EUS HOT EL Macau [previous page]

NOBU HOT EL Shoreditch, London [below]

One of Zaha Hadid Architects’

Ben Adams Architects’

first projects after the death

design for Nobu’s Shoreditch

of its principal in 2016, the

outpost is a striking infill

42-storey Morpheus is a

structure for a happily chaotic

beacon of design excellence

part of London. The hotel

in Macau’s City of Dreams

was originally devised by Ron

casino resort. It is a colossal

Arad Architects – Arad came

piece of mathematically

up with the fractured east

driven weaving: every facet

façade, with its oversailing

of the building’s lattice

steel beams and tumbling

structure, façade and internal

balconies. Concrete, steel,

spaces are digitally bound

bronze, timber and glass

together, allowing changes

combine to create a dark,

to any one parameter to

layered interior, with daylight

filter automatically through

coming from the courtyard.

the entire design. The

All rooms have Apple TV, all

asymmetric style continues

the way up to the Nobu Suite,

in the rooms and at the

with its twin balconies on

open-air pool on the 40th

the building’s “frayed” edge.

floor. zaha-hadid.com,

benadamsarchitects.co.uk,

cityofdreamsmacau.com

nobuhotelshoreditch.com

These days, as frequent travellers know to their cost, a surfeit of technology doesn’t always guarantee a relaxing stay. Over the course of their lifetime, regular hotel guests will probably spend two or three days working out how to turn off the lights or adjust the temperature in their room. All too often, flatscreen televisions, smartphone docks and speaker systems will be ignored and remain unused by guests.

Yet hoteliers still require a degree of drama and spectacle to attract guests and secure status and publicity, and even the most understated modern hotels relish the opportunity to indulge in some standout design. The current crop of high-tech hotels showcased on these pages combine the initial wow-factor with coherence and consistency, preferring design and technological innovation to be integral to the whole experience, rather than a last-minute afterthought. Shaped purely by innovation, they offer us a glimpse of the future of hospitality.

PHOTOGRAPHY: WILL PRYCE

Desired

|

I T T O O K S C O T T S E A R S 3 8 D AY S T O B E C O M E T H E Y O U N G E S T P E R S O N I N H I S T O R Y T O T R E K S O L O TO THE SOUTH POLE. Arriving on 25th December, heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d dragged a 125kg pulk for 790km and climbed 11,000 feet onto the Antarctic plateau. The final degree brought wind speeds of over 50 knots and temperatures down to -45Âşc. As the record books demand, the 27-year old was unsupported and unassisted throughout â&#x20AC;&#x201C; other than by his Shackleton expedition apparel.

Inspect the range of British made, expedition grade parkas, jackets, knitwear and accessories for yourself: ShackletonLondon.com Also available at therake.com and harveynichols.com

M E D I C A L C E N T R E AMUNDSEN-SCOT T BA SE Geographical South Pole 26th December 2017

Oicial Clothing Supplier

ShackletonLondon.com

F R E YCI N ET LOD GE Freycinet Peninsula, Tasmania [below]

The newest addition to

These glass-and-timber

the Bürgenstock resort in

pavilions, designed by

the Lake Lucerne region,

Tasmania-based Liminal

Waldhotel takes wellness

Studio, serve as an extension

to another level: guests can

to the existing Freycinet

partake in physical therapy,

Lodge, a nature-lover’s

surgery and alternative

destination overlooking

medicine as well as more

Great Oyster Bay. Each of the

traditional relaxing activities.

Pavilions consist of a living

Its 160 rooms and suites

and sleeping space, divided

are served by 4,000m of

into pods that encircle an

remedial facilities, with Swiss

open-air bath on the deck. The

pods that encircle an

designer Matteo Thun making

whole set-up is geared around

the most of outdoor space

the great outdoors, with

open-air bath on the deck

with a cascade of shaded

extensive use of timber inside

terraces and green roofs,

and out, including charred-

all contained within a visually

hardwood façades that

All of the Freycinet Lodge’s pavilions are divided into

PHOTOGRAPHY: DIANNA SNAPE

WA L DHOT EL Obbürgen, Switzerland [previous page]

2

unifying wooden façade.

blend into the surrounding

matteothun.com,

bush. liminalstudio.com.au,

buergenstock.ch

freycinetlodge.com.au

Desired

Fashion

M AT E R I A L

LORO PI A NA E MON JACK ET

GAINS Loro Piana’s Storm Systems line combines natural

From colour-changing technology

fibres with advanced fabric technology. Its Rain System

to nature-inspired protection and

treatment is applied to this jacket’s surface to keep it

self-moulding garments, innovation

water repellent and protect it against dust, dirt and liquid

in luxury clothing is on a roll

stains. £tbc loropiana.com

B Y

D A P H NE

LEPRI NCE- RI NG U E T

P HOT OGRAPHY: M A R K

S ANDERS

S T Y L ING: DAV ID

L AMB

Z ZEGNA TECHMERINO WASH & G O SU I T

Z Zegna uses pure merino wool that’s specially treated to ensure maximum comfort and thermo-regulation to help keep body temperature constant. What’s more, this suit can be laundered at home. Been nice knowing you, dry cleaner. £1,300 zegna.com

Desired

Fashion

BELL A BE AT LE A F U R BA N N ECK L ACE

This piece of smart jewellery can be worn as a bracelet, necklace or clip, and tracks movement, stress levels and sleep activity. Its slick design dispels the need for screens and buttons: data can be

A E A NCE T IGH TS

accessed via smartphone.

£130 johnlewis.com Aeance’s tights are a model of eco-friendly innovation: even the Elastane component of the compression fabric is composed of recycled yarns.

The material is warp-knitted, with laser-cutting used for details such as the back pocket. €180 aeance.com

ST ELL A MCC A RT N E Y ECON Y L TRENCH COAT

Econyl is a process that recycles nylon waste reclaimed from the ocean to create new fabric. The finished material can be regenerated and reshaped infinitely without losing its virgin nylon quality. £1,365

stellamccartney.com

ST ON E ISL A N D ICE JACK ET

Stone Island’s material innovation continues with the Ice Jacket: its leather molecules are encased in resin and change colour as the degrees begin to fall. That’s your winter party trick sorted.

£2,995 stoneisland.com

Desired

Fashion

A E A NCE A DA P T I V E JACK ET

A thin, protective film produced by ecorepel Bio technology ensures any rainwater will be deflected from this jacket. It also means the jacket will remain permanently odourless.

£468 aeance.com

T EN C OJ J C A R COAT

You become what you wear with Original Japanese Jersey (OJJ) – its car coat is made using a knitted microfibre which moulds itself to your body shape over time. Each item becomes the personal patina of its user. £825 18montrose.com

M I N IST RY OF SU PPLY 3D-K N I T T ED M ER I NO T OP

This 3D print-knit top is created as one continuous piece of fabric with no seams for a better fit. This method of production also allows for 40 per cent less fabric

A E A NCE T ROUSERS

waste in the cutting process.

£115 ministryofsupply.com Aeance’s ultra-light trousers are also coated with ecorepel Bio’s water-repellent film, which protects the fabric from aqueous dirt by copying the natural mechanisms found on leaves to protect plants from water. £290 aeance.com

ST ELL A MCC A RT N E Y LOOP SN E A K ERS

The Loop’s built-in socks are made from renewable fabric that can be recycled at the end of the trainer’s life. The upper and sole are combined without glue – just remove the stitching to separate the parts.

£525 stellamccartney.com

Desired

Rides

THE LEAST WIRED offers demanding travellers of distinction

PEDESTRIAN OPTIONS

an enticing study in

PHOTOGRAPHY: BAKER & EVANS

the mode of transport

Dior Homme X Bogarde BM X BI K E [left]

BY

Bogarde, the Paris-based

Triton X Aston Martin PROJ ECT N EP T U N E SU BM A R I N E

cycle atelier specialising in creating deluxe, 80s-inspired

CHRIS

HA LL

BMX bikes for nostalgic adult fans, has made the leap (bunny-hop?) into high

What do you get when one of

there appear to be no torpedo

fashion. Dior commissioned

the world’s most stylish car

tubes. Still, you’ll be exploring

100 of these glittering gilt

brands teams up with a maker

up to 500m below the waves

rides so you can ensure total

of deep-sea submersibles?

in true Aston Martin style,

co-ordination with pieces

Project Neptune: a three-

thanks to an interior trimmed

from its “Gold” A/W 2018

person sub that looks as

with carbon-fibre and hand-

capsule collection. Beneath

sleek as the superyachts

stitched leather – all of which

the bling, you’ll find triple-

from which it will no doubt be

had to be hand-assembled

butted tubes, a leather seat

deployed. Its racy bodywork

by craftsmen working inside

and matching Dior-embossed

writes a cheque that the

the single-piece iridium-

pads, and a mirror-finish

five-knot top speed doesn’t

coated acrylic canopy.

chainset. £3,500 dior.com

quite cash – and regrettably,

$4 million astonmartin.com

Desired

Rides

Land Ark DR A K E RV 5

There’s something of the

Star Wars Sandcrawler about the Land Ark RV – but inside, rusty droids. Instead, you’ll

Bugatti CH I RON SK Y V I EW

find flawless Scandinavian

[right]

there’s no scrap metal or

design with washed-pine surfaces, black metal fittings and LED lighting. There’s

If you’ve been mulling over

space to sleep six travellers,

a hypercar purchase, but

plus a fully equipped kitchen

felt let down by the sunroof

and shower room. It’s badged

options, help is now at

as an RV, but it isn’t powered

hand. The Bugatti Chiron

– you’ll have to hook the

Sky View further burnishes

10m, 9.5-tonne trailer up to

the idiosyncratic aesthetic

a top-end pickup to hit the

credentials of the base

road. $139,900 landarkrv.com

model by adding two 65cm x 44cm glass panels either side of the central fin. The four-layer laminated glass reduces wind noise, cuts UVA and UVB, reflects infrared radiation and is tinted for privacy. £tbc bugatti.com

Desired

Spirits

PIONEERING

The Macallan distillery has embarked on Scottish whiskyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s most ambitious project:

BY

P HOTOG RAP HY:

CH R IS H A SL AM

G RE G WHITE

SPIRITS

harnessing new technology to quench a global thirst for luxury single malts

Desired

Spirits

Previous page and opposite: Macallan’s huge copper stills are elevated for public display;

Right : water for cooling the wash is pumped straight from the River Spey nearby

tretching from Inverness in the west to the River Deveron in the east, Speyside may only be 120 kilometres wide, but the undulating hills and winding roads are home to an economic powerhouse. In these watercolour-worthy landscapes, whisky is big business. Exports earned £139 every second in 2017 – totalling £4.36 billion – with sales accounting for 20 per cent of all UK food and drink exports. Meanwhile, 1.7 million whisky tourists topped up the local economy to the tune of £53 million, and exports to Singapore, from where a large proportion of whisky is then shipped to Southeast Asia and China, rose 29 per cent to £291 million in 2017.

Located at the heart of the region on the 149-hectare Easter Elchies estate in Craigellachie, Moray, is the new £140 million Macallan distillery and visitor centre. Belying the traditional image of Scotch whisky-making is its “future-proof” production facility, which caters for the ever-increasing demand for single malt while providing a luxury playground for the whisky connoisseur.

Launched in 1824, The Macallan is the world’s leading international single malt by value. It’s an unashamedly luxury product, with each bottle aged for a minimum of 12 years. James Bond drinks it, Don Draper guzzles the stuff and, thanks to a Netflix tie-in, actors enjoying a tipple on the streaming platform’s Originals series will likely be

S

The Macallan’s 15-million-litre modular distillary layout and cutting-edge control system are taking whisky into the future sipping it on-screen for the foreseeable future.

In April 2018, two bottles of the rarest Macallan in existence sold for $1.2 million (£930,000).

Edrington, the owner of The Macallan, isn’t the only company investing heavily as demand for Scotch soars. Diageo has announced plans to invest £150 million to upgrade, and in some cases reopen, 12 distilleries, the centrepiece

of which will be a Johnnie Walker “immersive visitor experience” in Edinburgh. Away from the corporates, more than a dozen new small-batch distilleries are expected to open by the end of 2018, including a £5.8 million privately funded Holyrood distillery that will become the first to produce single-malt whisky in Edinburgh since 1925. And LoneWolf, a distillation subsidiary of Aberdeen-based superstar brewery BrewDog, has recently started producing its own whisky.

For The Macallan, the vital concern is how to maintain 194 years’ worth of heritage in a new state-of-the-art distillery. “Consistency is the most important thing in this whole process,” explains Nick Savage, The Macallan’s master distiller, whose team spent two years fingerprinting traditional production methods and understanding the unique variations and tolerances. “Increasing production by one third but not impacting on the final product is an enormous challenge, and no matter how impressive the building, if in 12 years’ time [when the first bottles originated in the new stills will be ready] we realise we’ve got it wrong, we’re in serious trouble.”

Tasked with averting any such hiccups was Graham Stirk of Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners, the architectural firm responsible for the design of the Leadenhall Building in London and the Pompidou Centre in Paris. The brief was far from simple; build an entirely new, super-sustainable distillery capable of producing a third more whisky than the original facility, while maintaining the quality of one of the world’s most successful single malts, all on a restricted plot considered an “area of great landscape value”.

Desired

Spirits

The Macallan distillery was designed to complement the natural beauty of the surrounding area

The result is an understated subterranean structure built by local firm Robertson Construction. It’s huge: 120 metres long, 68 metres wide and 24 metres tall at its highest point. Some 20,000m 3 of concrete and 700 tonnes of steel were used in the build, and the 14,000m 2 undulating living roof was pieced together using 380,000 individual components.

The distillery is a short stroll from Easter Elchies House, a Highland manor built in 1700 and a key piece of Macallan iconography. Its grass-covered domes and full-length glass walls draw visitors in, but the lavish nature of the development – described by Savage as “a skyscraper on its side” – isn’t fully appreciated until you step inside. In the 8,100m2 reception are two vast glass walls, one 18 metres tall and displaying more than 800 bottles of whisky, the other providing a monumental widescreen view of The Macallan’s new 15-million-litre modular distillery.

In order to achieve this aesthetic, the architects had to create the world’s largest fireproof glass wall. “The main problem was that, while the distillery and visitor centre are technically in the same building, they have very different sets of building regulations,” explains Toby Jeavons, associate partner at Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners. “In order to achieve a two-hour fire rating, we needed to implement a deluge system that washes the glass in cold water in the event of a fire. While this is a pre-existing technology, we had to prove it would work on this scale [by

setting fire to a sample in controlled conditions] while maintaining the clarity of the wall between the two spaces. From a building-regs point of view, the glass is actually considered an outside wall.”

The glass is one of many individual innovations put in place in order to get two contrasting industries – global whisky distillation and tourism – to seamlessly coincide. The Cave Privée is another – a Tony Stark-style private cellar dug out beneath the tasting bar. It contains 952 open bottles of The Macallan to house the rarest of private casks (rental starts at around £30,000 a cask) in temperature-controlled bonded warehouse conditions and showcases the money-noobject luxury appeal of the brand. It’s fabulously, needlessly lavish, and beautifully executed.

But as impressive as the glorified warehouse is, it’s the modular distillery layout and cutting-edge control system that is dragging whisky into the future. “In a traditional distillery, the fermentation vessels will be in one space and the product process will happen across several rooms, with mash tuns and stills being separated,” explains

The subterranean structure’s 14,000m 2 undulating living roof was pieced together using 380,000 individual components

The distillery’s 17-tonne, biomass-powered mash tun can produce 15 million litres of spirit a year

Spirits

Jeavons. But, being architects, they came at it from a more aesthetically pleasing perspective.

The circular pods, each capable of producing five million litres of spirit, house the distillation vessels and copper stills together. This helps to celebrate the beautiful copper stills but also works from an aesthetic point of view. “The copper stills are hotter so need to sit higher, which also means visitors can get closer to the distillation process,” explains Jeavons.

These copper stills are of huge importance to The Macallan’s legacy. Smaller than average, they “create a robust, heavy spirit that matures well over many decades, and creates the whisky’s signature mouthfeel”, explains Savage.

The original stills were made by Forsyths, a local coppersmith, so through a combination of 3D imaging and the original 1950s blueprints, they were able to hammer out 36 exact replicas.

But, while pretty, positioning the stills so close to the fermentation tanks would play havoc with the internal temperatures, which need to remain below 34ºC. So a new heat-exchange system has been implemented, which cools the wash, instead of using inefficient cooling jackets.

These three pods, combined with a 17-tonne mash tun (the vessel used to convert the starches in crushed grains into sugars for fermentation) can produce 15 million litres of

Desired

spirit per year – and 90 per cent of the power required to do this comes from a nearby biomass plant, with cooling waters pumped straight from the River Spey. And, unlike the haphazard expansion most distilleries are forced to undergo, if production needs to be increased, two more still pods and a second mash tun can be added to make 25 million litres.

Savage admits it was a bold move, but the result – and the bank of computers monitoring each step of the process – gives his craftsmen much greater control. “It’s not automated to the point where we don’t need people, but [the modern plant] allows us to do our jobs more accurately and provides a greater level of information. Previously we’d have measured density with a basic hydrometer, but the new density meter can measure returns of 0.01 per cent.

“We’ve been able to monitor every single measurement and reading from the original plant,” explains Savage, “so we’re confident that the new plant’s output will be indistinguishable from the original. And that’s just the start – we now have a state-of-the-art distillery producing The Macallan, but the next phase is how we can use the technology to secure our future. We’ve got the tools to improve performance and evolve without compromising on the whisky that’s brought us here.”

PLEASE DRINK RESPONSIBLY DRINKAWARE.CO.UK

HERBS. DON’T SMOKE THEM. DRINK THEM.

Introducing No.1 Botanicals. The UK’s only range of drinks containing pure, fresh botanical extracts beautifully blended with natural spring water and authenticated by the scientists of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Ten extraordinary herbs, carefully chosen for their delicate, aromatic flavours.

Refreshing and different, our wonderful drinks contain no sugar or additives. And we use no plastics.

You can of course find us on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

Available from www.no1botanicals.com

Watches

BY L AURA MCCREDD IE-DO AK

C L A S S ICS WITH

Desired

With their expert blend of understated innovation and design excellence, these watches will add style to any occasion

A TWIST

La Última Paloma

P HOTOG RAP HY:

(above, centre)

IRING Ó D E ME TE R

Ingredients

ST YLING :

MODEL: STUART @ HIRED HANDS. SET DESIGN: VICKY LEES. TRAY: TIIPOI. MARTINI GLASS: TOM DIXON. GOLD SUIT JACKET, BEGGARS RUN. SHIRT, ERMENEGILDO ZEGNA AT MR PORTER

L AURE N G RANT

60ml

Patrón Silver tequila

45ml

grapefruit cordial

7.5ml

fresh lime juice

4 drops

celery bitters

Method Add ingredients to a cocktail

SEI KO PRO SPE X AU T OM AT IC 1968 DI V E R’S R E-C R E AT ION

shaker. Shake, then strain into a coupe or wine glass.

Although there are nods to

depths for long periods of

the original here, such as the

time). Its movement, the

flat case, this is a beautifully

Caliber 8L55 Hi-Beat, has

designed 21st-century

also been adapted to work

reimagining of Seiko’s diver’s

efficiently and accurately

watch. The first thing to notice

at depths of up to 300 metres.

is the new monobloc case,

And if you don’t plan to use

which upgrades the piece from

it underwater, it has all the

only being serviceable for

retro cool you need to draw

shallower air divers to making

envious looks while you

it suitable for saturation

prop up a beach bar.

divers (those who work at

£5,000 seikowatches.com

Desired

Watches

M ON T B L A NC S U M M I T

Ingredients

Montblanc’s latest forary

of Bluetooth headphones.

into the competitive world

Montblanc has developed a

30ml

Ailsa Bay Single Malt Whisky

of smartwatches is this

World Time app especially

35ml

Banana bitters

stylish companion for

for this watch, as well as

30ml

Discarded Cascara Vermouth

business travellers.

baked-in voice translation,

Powered by a Qualcomm

navigation and a wallet-

Snapdragon Wear 2100

style ability to store

Method

processor and with a 1.39-

essential documents such

Add ingredients to a cocktail

inch AMOLED display

as boarding passes. The

shaker. Shake, then pour into a

screen, it can measure your

case and crown construction

tumbler and serve on the rocks.

heart rate, has an ambient

borrows from the Montblanc

light sensor and a digital

1858’s understated vintage

compass to ensure wearers

stylings, so it won’t look

never lose their bearings. You

out of place when worn with

can also stream music from

a business suit.

its 4GB memory to a pair

£795 montblanc.com

MODEL: LAUREN GRANT. TRAY: E15. JUMPER: JOSEPH. AILSA BAY BANANAVARDIER MADE BY MATT WHILEY AT SCOUT BAR LONDON

Ailsa Bay Bananavardier

Watches

Desired

Z E N I T H D E F Y C L A S S I C O P E N WO R K E D

STUART WERAS: GREEN VELVET TUX JACKET, BEGGARS RUN. SHIRT, ERMENEGILDO ZEGNA AT MR PORTER. GLASSWARE: HABITAT

Espresso Martini When the Defy collection

includes this openworked

was rebooted in 2017, it

option. This has been the

Ingredients

looked as though this

year of the skeleton watch,

40ml

Grey Goose La Vanille Vodka

was going to be the place

but rather than opt for a

30ml

Fresh espresso

for Zenith to let off some

traditional feel, this piece

20ml

Coffee liqueur

technological fireworks.

looks like a 1970s watch with

The first was a high-

obvious echoes of Swiss

beat chronograph that

designer Gérald Genta.

Method

could measure to 1/100th

With the pattern on the dial

Chill a coupe or Martini glass and pour the vodka,

of a second, while the

reminiscent of a superhero

espresso and coffee liqueur into an ice-filled

follow-up, Defy Lab, had

logo, plus the cool, greyish

shaker. Shake hard for one minute. Pour the liquid

a super-high-frequency

sheen of the titanium case,

through a strainer into the glass.

oscillator. However, it has

it’s also the type of watch

changed tack this year

Bruce Wayne might wear on

to add a Classic – read

his day off. £5,400

“pared back” – line, which

zenith-watches.com

Desired

Watches

S I N G E R T R AC K 1 H ON G KON G E D I T I ON Appleton Estate Mai Tai automotive styles. However,

renowned for its chassis-

in a reversal of logic, the

up rebuilding of some of

timing functions are front

Ingredients 50ml

Appleton Estate 12-Year-Old Rare Blend Rum

the most desirable custom

and centre (literally – there

Porsche 911s on the market

are no sub dials), while the

25ml

Fresh lime juice

– so its foray into watch

simple time-telling element

12ml

Orange Curaçao

design has been highly

is left to the periphery of

12ml

Orgeat syrup

anticipated. The Track 1

the dial. The movement

12ml

Sugar syrup

is a three-way collaboration

took ten years to develop

1 sprig

Mint

between Singer Vehicle

and features an automatic

1 wedge

Lime

Design founder Rob

column-wheel chronograph

Dickinson, watch designer

function. This Hong Kong

Marco Borraccino and

edition is a reimagining of the

Method

watch-movement maker

original, with orange accents

Combine all the ingredients in a cocktail

extraordinaire Jean-Marc

that seem to mimic the neon

shaker and shake over ice. Strain

Wiederrecht. Ostensibly, it’s

lights on the Far-Eastern

into a rocks glass filled with crushed

a chronograph in the

city’s skyline. CHF44,500

ice. Garnish with lime and mint.

vein of the vintage 1960s

singerreimagined.com

STUART WERAS: JACKET, HUGO BOSS. TRAY: MUUTO

Singer Vehicle Design is

Wild Turkey 101 Old Fashioned Ingredients 50ml

Wild Turkey 101 Bourbon

10ml

Sugar syrup

2 dashes Angostura bitters 1 strip

Orange peel garnish

Method Pour half the bourbon and all the bitters and sugar syrup into a rocks glass, then add two ice cubes and stir. Add more ice and the remaining bourbon and stir until the sugar is diluted. Snap the orange peel over the drink to release the citrus oils then drop into the glass.

STUART WERAS: CREAM JUMPER, HUGO BOSS

H ER M ÈS C A R R É H

When it originally came on to

guilloché that plays with the

the market in 2010, the idea

light, creating depth over

behind the Carré H was for it

three levels. There is also an

to be a watch for the modern

added colour pop from the

dandy. With its deceptive

second hand, which lends the

simplicity, square case

whole watch an on-trend mid-

and minimalist aesthetic,

century-modern vibe. Finally,

it proved an instant hit.

the Carré H is powered by

Fast forward to 2018, and

Hermès’s automatic H1912

the square small-seconds

caliber from subsidiary

has gone, it’s been beefed

Vaucher, with 50 hours of

up to 38mm and the centre

power reserve and running

features a cross-hatch

at 4Hz. £5,625 hermes.com

022 PPPM 019 SPPM Drinks Partner of WIRED Smarter.

WHISKY HACKED DISTILLED WITH CRAFT. REFINED BY CODE. Ailsa Bay is a registered trademark of William Grant & Sons Irish Brands Ltd.

Drink responsibly.

Watches

The Royal Sidecar Ingredients 35ml

Rémy Martin 1738 Accord Royal

30ml

Cointreau

15ml

Fresh lemon juice

Method Add ingredients to a cocktail shaker.

STYLIST: LAUREN GRANT. HAND MODEL: STUART R @ HIRED HANDS. SET DESIGN: VICKY LEES. LAUREN: SILK TOP, TODS. STU: JACKET, PAUL SMITH AT MR PORTER. SHIRT: TOM FORD AT MR PORTER

Shake, then strain into a coupe.

BU L G A R I O C T O F I N I S S I MO

LEICA L1

Bulgari’s Roman personality has

Take the brand name off the dial and

traditionally shone through in its

there is very little here to suggest

jewellery and women’s watches, but this

a photographic connection. Gone is

sandblasted rose gold version of its Octo

the shutter-inspired gimmickry of its

Finissimo is pure Bertolucci – decadent,

2014 collaboration with Valbray; this

difficult, but with an attractive swagger.

is restrained, functional watchmaking

The Octo, launched in the early 2000s –

powered by interesting mechanics. The

before Gerald Genta, as a company, was

pusher at two o’clock is for the instant

subsumed by Bulgari – was a chunky

date change, while the aperture at eight

affair: 45mm and standing high on

is a setting indicator connected to a

the wrist. Since then, it has slimmed

clever push-crown. When it’s white, the

down – so much so that it now holds

watch is running and the movement

the record for the world’s thinnest

can be wound, but push the crown and

time-only automatic wristwatch. It

it becomes red, indicating that you

puts an interesting twist on the full-gold

can now set the time. The crown also

bracelet watch, upping the sporty

operates a zero-reset mechanism, so

element but without losing any of

you can precisely set the small seconds.

the glamour. £37,700 bulgari.com

From €10,000 leicastore-mayfair.co.uk

Desired

Desired

Watches

Right : Rolex tests its dive watches in a 1.3-tonne steel tank

The Rolex dive watch is an icon of durability, its reputation founded on a gruelling series of tests

B Y C H R IS

H A LL

P HOTOGRAP HY: FRED

GRACE

UNDER

PRESSURE

MERZ

Desired

Watches

No family of watches is subject to more intense levels of fandom and debate than the dive watch.

Pro divers have been leaving their mechanical watches on dry land in favour of wrist-borne dive computers since the late 1970s, but before that, a dive watch was a life-saving tool. Buy one today and you are still connected, however loosely, to that era of exploration, adventure and endurance.

A diver’s watch must comply with ISO 6425 (a set of requirements for resistance to water pressure, shock, corrosion and magnetism), it must have a unidirectional rotating bezel to measure elapsed time, and be sufficiently legible in complete darkness. Most importantly, ISO 6425 defines a dive watch as being able to withstand at least 100m of water pressure.

Below that, any claims of water resistance should not be taken literally – a watch rated to 30m or 50m should be taken off to do the washing-up.

Rolex produces in the region of 800,000 timepieces annually, and a significant percentage of that number will be dive watches: the Submariner (water-resistant to 300m), the Sea-Dweller (1,220m) and the Deepsea (3,900m). It is also worth pointing out that absolutely every Rolex Oyster model – that is, every Rolex save for the Cellini family – is water-resistant to 100m, even the most delicately gem-set Pearlmaster or luxurious Day-Date, and it has been that way since Rolex produced the world’s first truly water-resistant watch case, the Oyster, in 1926.

In 1960, just six years after launching the Submariner, Rolex set a dive-watch record that still stands when it sent a one-off custom-made piece, the Deep Sea Special, to accompany the bathyscaphe Trieste to the bottom of the Mariana Trench. Strapped to the outside of the submarine, it was 36mm thick and resembled a glass eye affixed to a metal bracelet, and withstood 10,916m of pressure. In 2012, when filmmaker James Cameron became the first to undertake a solo expedition to the same depths, Rolex created the Deepsea Challenge, a 51.4mm monster rated to 12,000m. At this depth, it was bearing 12.35 tonnes of pressure – more than the weight of his Deepsea Challenger submersible itself.

All of which begs the questions: just how do you engineer watches to take such pressure? And more to the point, how do we know they really can?

In the first instance, the process begins with the

The dome-topped Deep Sea Special survived a trip to a depth of 10,900m

materials. Rolex uses 904L stainless steel (most watch brands use 316L) for its greater resistance to corrosion. Its dive watches have titanium casebacks for their hypoallergenic properties as well as material strength, and where the sapphire crystal over the dial has a “cyclops” date magnifier (as the Sea-Dweller now does, since 2017), it is milled from a single piece of sapphire crystal to eliminate any structural weaknesses. Fun fact: the sapphire crystal protecting the dial on the one-off Deepsea Challenge is thicker than an entire Rolex Submariner (14.3mm vs 13mm).

Then there is the design. Both the Sea-Dweller and Deepsea use a triple-sealed screw-down crown (the greatest point of weakness for a dive watch), and the Deepsea employs a patented case construction that uses nitrogen-alloy steel within the 904L steel, and a titanium outer case.

These enable it to dive three times deeper while only being one millimetre wider (44mm vs 43mm) and 2.2mm thicker (17.7mm vs 15.5mm), and roughly 20 per cent bigger overall. This year, the watch has been tweaked slightly, giving it a thicker bracelet, sturdier lugs and sides, and a correspondingly bigger clasp.

The answer to the second question lies in a 1.3 tonne stainless steel tank, cast in a single piece and sitting somewhere inside Rolex’s Les Acacias factory in Geneva. Created for Rolex to the brand’s own specifications by French maritime The Deepsea Challenge is rated engineering specialists as water resistant to 12,000m Comex, for whom Rolex made watches in the 1960s, it is the hyperbaric pressure chamber through which all Rolex dive watches must pass: a baptism not of fire, but of water.

Each watch will already have been subject to a preliminary test for air-tightness before being entered into this tank, wherein the pressure is ratcheted up to 25 per cent beyond the watch’s stated levels of endurance – a Deepsea is tested to 4,875m, for example. (The Deepsea Challenge was tested all the way to 15,000m, far deeper than it could ever be asked to go, using an even bigger custom-made hyperbaric tank).

What the tank can’t do is actually tell if there is a leak – that requires a simple but separate test.

Once out of the chamber, the watch is heated and then a cold metal rod placed on the sapphire crystal. Should any condensation that might appear within the watch not disappear after 60 seconds, it has failed the test. In that instance, it would pass to a vacuum chamber to locate any potential leaks – but it is thought that fewer than 0.1 per cent of all watches show any sign of failure.

The clearest water on Earth The Silfra fissure, Iceland

Desired

Test

BY

COLI N

GOODWI N

PHO T O GRA PHY:

D AVID

SP UR D ENS

JOINING THE HONDAJET-SET The famed car manufacturer has taken to the skies with a luxurious aircraft aimed at the ultra-discerning traveller DESIGN – WIRED steps into the pilot’s seat The first thing that strikes you about the HondaJet is its engines, the result of a joint venture between General Electric and Honda. Instead of sitting either side of the rear fuselage, like on conven- CONTROL tional business jets, they’re placed on top of the wings. The aviation and automotive worlds The HondaJet is certified for single-pilot operation, love a good acronym, so this engine mounting is which means that it needs to be uncomplicated. In called OTWEM (Over The Wing Engine Mount). The front of you in the cockpit are three large, Hondajet’s designer and chief executive of the Honda Jet-specific 14.1-inch Garmin G3000 screens.

Aircraft Company, Michimasa Fujino, was told by Virtually every function of the jet can be his professors while he was studying aeronau- controlled or checked through these screens via tical engineering at the university of Tokyo in the a pair of identical touchpads, while a Garmin G300 early 1980s to never mount anything above the avionics suite (for plotting your courses and even wing, as it spoils airflow and reduces lift. Ignoring airport runway layouts) completes the dash. his teachers, Fujino eventually discovered a Once the master switch is on, it’s a simplified configuration that reduced aerodynamic drag push-button operation: press the one labelled and, in the process, improved fuel economy.

“START” for the left-hand engine, and another The main advantage of using OTWEM rather identical one for the right-hand. The starting than rear-fuselage, is that it removes the need procedure is automatic, with the engines warming for a complex mounting structure that would themselves up and settling down to a quiet idle. take up space inside the body of the aircraft – Checks are done via a system known as FADEC eating valuable space for storage and facilities. (Full Authority Digital Engine Control). This means There is also considerably less vibration when that there are no bulky manuals or multipage they’re mounted this way, as well as less risk of lists; you call up a checklist on the screen, and the engines picking up dirt and grit and sustaining tick off items via a toggle switch. The parking what’s known as FOD or Foreign Object Damage. brake can then be released, the take-off flaps Such technical innovaset (these, the undercarriage lever and tions also benefit the craft’s HON DAJ ET throttles are about your lot as far as sleek exterior aesthetic – H A-420 levers go) and you’re ready to taxi out the HondaJet is a thing of on to the runway. Nosewheel steering beauty. A door/stairway SPECS [latest Elite version] is fly-by wire, and the HondaJet has combo enables passenger Price: $5.25m an extremely compact turning circle – and pilot access to the plane, Engines: 2x GE Honda HF120 which proves particularly useful when with a leather-rope handrail turbofans: 2,050lb manoeuvring its stubby 12-metrefor a little added luxe on of thrust each wingspan, and will be appreciated by entry. The cockpit is to the Top speed: 420kts pilots who need to park on busy aprons left, seating to the right. Range: 1,437 nautical and in smaller hangars. Releasing the Because Honda expects its miles (2,644km) parking brake automatically switches jet owners to be capable of Ceiling: 45,000ft on the taxi lights, while opening the flying their vehicles, there’s Take-off run: 1,064 metres throttles turns on the strobes and no compromise in finish on Useful load: 1,648kg landing lights, but you can opt to either side of the pilot’s door. WIRED Rating: 8/10 operate these manually if you wish.

Desired

Test

Right : the HondaJet’s design emphasises simplicity in both the main cabin interior and cockpit instrumentation

FLIGHT We’re at Hawarden, in Cheshire, home of the Airbus factory where A380 wings are made. Mike Finbow, HondaJet’s demonstration pilot in the UK is in the left-hand seat, WIRED is in the co-pilot’s seat.

The piston-engine propeller aeroplane WIRED’s reviewer usually flies is fast and climbs at over 2,000ft a minute to cruise at 160kts, but the HondaJet is something of a hot rod. At the maximum climb rate of 4,000ft per minute, the ascent takes just a fraction more than 60 seconds.

The HondaJet’s ceiling is 43,000ft – above the majority of airliners and most weather – but our test hop only takes us to 17,000ft.

Slipping into cruise, the engines are virtually silent, and there’s barely any vibration. The 420 bit of the jet’s HA-420 name refers to its top speed of 420kts, slotting it into the top performance level of light jets – though there’s almost no sensation of speed. It’s economical, too: even with four passengers and luggage, the Honda now has a range of 1,437nm (2,644km – see update).

The HondaJet has a very low-drag airframe, which means that it’s difficult to slow on approach, so there’s an airbrake that helps bring the aircraft down to a speed at which the flaps and undercarriage can be deployed. The computers have already worked out our approach speed from our passenger and fuel load. At around 110kts, the jet touches down on to Stansted’s runway. Carbonfibre brakes slow the aircraft to a steady taxiing speed within seconds, while a tap on the iPad-like controller pops up a map showing the ground layout of Stansted, and our position within it.

Remember that extra space created by using OTWEM? Well, behind the co-pilot is a toilet with a wash basin – but it’s very small and does rather push the definition of what actually qualifies as a “bathroom”. There’s a curtain that slides across, but using this particular loo could well prove to be unnervingly public for many. Still, when you’ve got a 1,437-nautical-mile range, you’ll be glad you have somewhere to go…

PI LOT I NG Sealing the deal for its ultra-rich potential buyers is the fact that When you learn to fly, the first this isn’t just a new plane, but is private pilot’s licence that also a debut for Honda – an excluyou’ll hold is called the PPL(A). sivity factor that is sure to appeal.

This allows you to fly a When we land at Stansted, the single-engine piston aircraft in daylight and clear of cloud. ground controller says: “Wow, a Once you’ve got that in your HondaJet! We haven’t had one of hand, you can start adding those in here before.” According to to it. For example, WIRED’s Finbow, this is the typical reaction reviewer has a restricted to those who see this striking jet instrument rating, which in person – so if you enjoy gasps allows flying in cloud, and also of admiration at your Bentley or a night rating, which is selfLamborghini, this will fit nicely into explanatory. To be allowed to your head-turning fleet. fly the HondaJet solo, you

CABIN

ELITE UPDATE

will need to get an unrestricted IR licence, plus a licence for

Once back up in the air, Finbow takes control, so we can explore the plane interior – as you would expect for a private jet, it’s quiet and smooth. We’re not in icing conditions, where ice can form on a plane’s wings during flight, but the HondaJet windscreens are heated electrically, and the wing leading-edges by hot air from the engines; the tail leading-edges are kept ice-free by electrically powered actuators that effectively “hammer” the skins to dislodge ice.

It’s called EMEDS – Electro Mechanical Explosion Deice System. The wings and empennage are metal, but the fuselage is composite.

Four sit in the back, two facing two, on seats that can slide sideways towards the aisle to give more headroom for taller passengers. A fifth passenger sits further forward, facing the doorway, and then the pilot plus another passenger or co-pilot.

multi-engine aircraft, as Barely a couple of years after its well as taking the type-rating launch, Honda has come up with course for the HondaJet itself. a revised version of the jet called the HondaJet Elite, which will now be the standard model. The changes to the jet are simple but significant. An auxiliary 61-litre fuel tank has been fitted into previously unused space in the rear of the fuselage that increases range by 231 nautical miles to a maximum of 1,437nm. More importantly, the elevators have been made wider, which has increased their authority (aviation speak for increasing their effectiveness), resulting in reducing take-off roll by 120m – allaying one of the HondaJet’s shortcoming of needing a longer runway compared to its direct rivals. Finally, new engine air intakes have reduced noise still further, not that they were particularly needed. 8/10

TIME

T H E I NSI DE GUI DE T O LUXU RY WAT C H E S W I R E D T I M E . F R E E W I T H W I R E D 07.19

Retail repor t

B Y T O N Y

Desired

ILLUSTR ATION: W O N G

SER GIO

M EM B R ILL AS

ALL EYES ON THE HIGH STREET

In China, facial recognition is bridging the gap between online and offline retail, for seamless, personalised experiences.

But will western consumers set aside privacy concerns and embrace the technology?

There are more than 176 million CCTV cameras in China, and the number is growing by an estimated 12 per cent a year. The country leads the world in facial recognition technology. According to data analysts CB Insights, there have been more than 900 facial recognition patents filed in China – almost ten times as many as the United States.

In the west, such intense surveillance is viewed with suspicion, but in China, it’s increasingly being used by the retail industry. For luxury brands, facial recognition has the potential to build a bridge between online and offline.

On the sprawling JD.com, one of the largest online retailers in China, you can buy anything from vitamins to an iPhone X and even a £100

million apartment in Beijing – all on the same site.

In fact, Alibaba and JD.com are in direct competition with each other for luxury brands, with companies often choosing to sell through only one of them. JD.com has invested almost $400 million in Farfetch, the luxury online fashion retail platform, while Alibaba has opened The Luxury Pavilion, an invite-only platform (where the invitations are only given to previous top-spenders on Alibaba and ultra-rich users). Alibaba is also a part-owner of Mei.com, a luxury flash-sales site.

However, even though, broadly speaking, online shopping is an emotionless and relatively monotonous experience, high-end consumers are increasingly expecting internet retail as part of a brand’s offering. Indeed, more than half of luxury Chinese shoppers have gone as far as to categorise the omnichannel shopping experience as “non-negotiable”, according to research from BCG Global Consumer Insight.

Facial recognition could be employed to create a unified shopping experience, one that combines personable real-world shopping with the convenience of targeted data for personalised treatment of customers. Jack Ma, billionaire founder of Alibaba, has called this the era of “new retail”.

Physical stores – particularly luxury brands – are setting up cameras at their entrances and are

Desired

Retail repor t

using facial recognition to identify individuals as they enter. By cross-referencing data about them collected from their browsing history, official accounts that they follow (usually collected via WeChat) and previous purchases, sales staff will be able to offer a far greater personalised service. They’ll know what to recommend and how best to cater to particular customers as soon as they set foot in the store.

In Hong Kong, entrepreneur Adrian Cheng’s museum-retail brand K11 is testing facial recognition technology through an investment in AI company AIbee. It’s hoped that this will help track a customer’s entire journey not just in one store, but across the entire retail complex, whether it’s food and beverages, fashion, art exhibitions or entertainment. Linking online data with facial recognition should enable much more accurately targeted marketing within a physical retail environment. In China, services like this will be particularly powerful because of the popularity of all-inclusive platforms such as WeChat, which has become the main way that many consumers communicate, purchase and access all kinds of services, from consuming current affairs to booking medical appointments.

Targeted advertising is a common feature of the internet, but this technology could put personalised offers and marketing messages in stores as well. In malls, billboards could change their messaging depending on who was walking past them, and show special offers directing individuals to visit particular shops. Additionally, retailers could use digital displays to change the price of items in order to entice specific shoppers, or show recommendations based on what might complement previous purchases.

Stores and brands will be able to gauge whether new products are eliciting interest – and tailor their packaging or displays accordingly

Alibaba and Guess are already trialling FashionAI, a project that integrates facial recognition into “magic mirrors” in fitting rooms. These allow customers to immediately view themselves in the clothes that they’ve picked, without actually having to put them on. Incorporating facial recognition and WeChat data allows the AI to factor in basic information about gender, age and local weather, and to swap those clothes out for other recommendations, without the need for the customer to leave the fitting room.

There are some wrinkles to be smoothed out before the technology can be more widely adopted, only demonstrating its true value when it is able to combine behavioural information from the online and offline worlds – for example, by using location technology and cameras to gauge which items a customer is most interested in at a physical store, and then targeting them later with online advertising, and vice versa.

Incidentally, WeChat data is also used to facilitate Chinese consumers’ spending while abroad.

Shopping-list apps notify users when they are in the geographical vicinity of certain outlets when overseas. Louis Vuitton’s own WeChat platform performs this function. As a result, companies are now targeting wealthy Chinese travellers before they fly, giving brands two bites at the consumer cherry: sales in China as well as retail tourism.

Eventually, as well as identifying individuals, facial recognition in stores will extend to emotions – technology is already in development by companies such as Emotient, which was acquired by Apple in 2016. Stores and brands will be able to gauge whether new products are eliciting interest or surprise, and tailor their packaging or displays accordingly in future.

China’s population is relatively open to privacy issues compared to European and American consumers. The huge population and vast network of cameras will provide a massive data-set to make facial recognition algorithms more accurate and more powerful. Developments in this technology, as well as advances in VR and location-based data, have the potential to radically change the luxury-shopping experience.

Tony Wong is head of technology for K11

Roast beef cooked, just how you like it.

With minimum effort.

SinglePoint MeatProbe Our Serie 6 oven range with MeatProbe constantly measures the temperature at the core of your roast, so you can enjoy meat just how you like it. And as soon as itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s done, it switches off automatically.

The easy way to perfect results. bosch-home.co.uk

Models shown - Single oven: HBG5785S0B Compact oven: CMA585MS0B

Gourmet

Super sarnie D ON WAGY U A 5 OZ A K I ST E A K

In an attempt to create a

first coats the steak with

luxury dining experience that

panko breadcrumbs before

doesn’t require a three-hour

frying for precisely two-

sit-down meal, this serious

and-a-half minutes. He then

sarnie is made from the

crafts the ultimate lunchtime

finest Wagyu beef sourced

snack using pain de mie

from a single farm in the

(soft white bread) coated

Miyazaki Prefecture, Japan.

in a Japanese steak sauce

Only five of Mr Muneharu

made with onions, ginger

Ozaki’s prize cattle are

and garlic, cooked down with

shipped to the US each

sake, mirin, tamari and black

month, exclusively for

vinegar. It’s served bento-

serving up in the Don Wagyu

style in a wooden box,

restaurant in NYC, just

with a generous side of

around the corner from Wall

nori-seasoned skinny fries.

Street. Chef Samuel Clonts

$180 donwagyu.net

WORDS: CHRIS HASL AM. PHOTOGRAPHY: JASON PIETRA. BADGE BY TELEYMON

Desired