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AI-powered visual search tools, like Google Lens and Bing Visual Search, promise a new way to search the world—but most people still type into a search box rather than point their camera at something. We've gotten used to manually searching for things over the past 25 years or so that search engines have been at our fingertips. Also, not all objects are directly in front of us at the time we’re searching for information about them. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The Polity series by English science fiction author Neal Asher is a limitless thrill-ride of grotesque aliens, badass hardware, rogue AIs, and deadly secret agents. It’s got everything a science fiction fan could want from an action-adventure story, and that’s definitely by design. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

While I gave birth to my first child in 2015, my brother sat across the street from the hospital in a bar, live tweeting his experience of waiting to meet his nephew. As the hours of my long labor wore on, my brother got drunker and his jokes more off the wall. When my son was finally born and I went to send an email birth announcement, I found that everyone already knew. Emails had flooded my inbox already congratulating me. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Earlier this year, my home was infested with smart speakers—I've used a lot of them at this point. But I’ve never used an Alexa device as dedicated to the cause as the Polk Command Bar, a soundbar that wants to be an Amazon Echo so badly that it’s practically in cosplay. It’s designed to look like engineers smushed an Amazon Echo Dot right into the center of it. In many ways, that's precisely what Polk did. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

I was walking through a Hasidic neighborhood in Brooklyn with another parent I’d just met at a child’s birthday party. “I like it here,” he observed. “But the people smell bad.” Hgst. Someone has commented on the odor of an entire people. A bad moon rose. Then another. All around us were men in tzitzit, fedoras. I stabbed at the map on my phone. “I don’t smell anything,” I lied; the air was thick with the hot scent of political anguish. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Everybody is searching for something. Paul Ashby’s search began with an unexpected phone call on July 8, 2017. It was a Saturday night in Townsend, Tennessee, a small town just outside Great Smoky Mountains National Park. An affable Army vet with gray hair, a goatee, and wire-frame glasses, Paul worked as a concierge at a rustic event space called the Barn. He was dressed in his usual top hat and coattails that night, greeting guests who were attending a wedding. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Susan Gerbic spent her career photographing babies at a department store in Salinas, California, just 100 miles south of San Francisco. Today, the retired 55-year-old has dedicated her life to something entirely different: Wikipedia. As a member of the skeptical movement, Gerbic is committed to promoting critical thinking, scientific inquiry, and empirical evidence—particularly when it comes to fringe ideas. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Lamar Smith has liked the idea of flying cars since he was a kid growing up in Texas. So when the Republican representative from San Antonio was walking along the National Mall a few months ago, he became fascinated with a remote-controlled flying car operated by 10 year-old boy and his mom. “The advantage of this one is that it flies so slowly you can stay out of trouble,” Smith told the hearing room at the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill, as he embraced his inner Oprah. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The lava fields of Hawaii. The peaks of the Himalayas. The crowds of a Justin Bieber concert. These are among the most perilous of environments on planet Earth, places where few humans dare tread. They ain’t got nothin’, though, on waters of our planet’s polar regions, where frigid temperatures and considerable pressures would snuff a puny human like you in a heartbeat. Robots, though? This is the stuff their tough-as-hell bodies were made for. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Lately, in considering the erosion of America, the image that first comes to mind is Mariah Carey's now-iconic "I don’t know her" GIF. The gleeful shake of Carey's head. The subtle mischief of her utterance. The animation frames our current moment with dead-on precision. In fairness, from its earliest days, America has never looked like we knew it could. Which is to say, America—a country of sharp contradictions and tangible evils—has never lived up to what it could be. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Electric pressure cookers hit it big in American home kitchens a few years back because, along with the perceived lower risk of dinner on the ceiling, they cook food fast. Something like beef stew, which takes all day in a slow cooker, needs as little as 25 minutes under pressure. With an extra hit of power, Instant Pot's new six-quart Max promises to take that speed and turn it up to 11, getting dinner to the table even faster. Could it? I wondered. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Emily Calandrelli, host of Xploration Outer Space and correspondent on Bill Nye Saves the World, thinks there aren’t enough female science geeks in fiction. She wants to help change that with her Ada Lace series of children’s books. “What I wanted to do was create a character that was female who had these types of adventures and did these types of science experiments,” Calandrelli says in Episode 318 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The new movie Hereditary, a supernatural thriller about family secrets, is one of the scariest films in years. But the movie was more than just frightening, says horror author Paul Tremblay. “From the opening frames of the film there was just this wonderful atmosphere of dread,” Tremblay says in Episode 317 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

A fun game if you ever find yourself at a comics convention: Try to spot as many gender-swapped cosplayers as you can. Throughout years of going to Comic-Cons and other fan gatherings, I’ve spotted women in drag as Loki, Harry Potter, and—before Paul Feig's reboot—various Ghostbusters. (However, this tends to be a one-way phenomenon; rarely, if ever, have I seen men dressed as Catwoman or Stranger Things' Eleven, at least in a way that wasn't going for laughs. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Here's the truth: Comic book publishing—yes, just the business of selling printed comics—is a billion-dollar industry. This month, 1,194 new comic books and 391 new graphic novels and collections will hit shelves. That's a lot of titles for a single month, and those aren't uncommon numbers. Comics are everywhere; even your grandma knows who Thanos is. If anything, comics are a bigger deal now than they've ever been. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

It is a parent’s job to think her children are exceptional. Up to this point, I had spent many hours crafting a tale for myself that Leo’s fascination with fans was, in fact, proof of his genius. Now I was imagining a roomful of Leos, all in tiny white lab coats, all saving the world one vactrain at a time. Their origin stories were the same: “It all started,” they would say, “with the Lasko Wind Machine. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

André Prager turns away from me for a moment, rummaging through a pile of stuff on the cart he has pulled into the small conference room. There are lots of cut-up pieces of cardboard, with a few bags of colorful plastic odds and ends mixed in. “I think the most valuable things in this building are cardboard and tape,” he says. He shows me a rectangle of foam-core with a straw, a broken pen, and a few thumb tacks stuck to it. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Amazon is one of the largest and most formidable companies in the world. It’s run with brutal efficiency, a keen focus on keeping its customers happy, and a deep thirst for innovation. Its $50 billion of revenue per quarter makes the company worth more than $850 billion, which is enough to buy Walmart three times over and still have more than $100 billion in change. (It’s also enough to make founder Jeff Bezos the richest man in modern history. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Democrats just gained a Republican ally in the battle to save net neutrality. Today, Representative Mike Coffman (R-Colorado) became the first House Republican to sign a petition to force the House to vote on legislation that would reverse the Federal Communications Commission's decision to jettison rules banning broadband providers from blocking or discriminating against lawful content. The proposal already passed the Senate, where three Republicans crossed party lines to support it. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

It's that time of year yet again—time for Amazon's blockbuster sales event. We've combed the spreadsheets and chased every link to find the best deals in a variety of categories. From home entertainment, to PC components, and even some awesome high-tech kitchen necessities, this is the list of the best Amazon Prime Day deals you'll want to peruse first. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The Wompoo Pigeon, also called the Wompoo Fruit Dove, forages for fruit in the forests of Australia and New Guinea. The Nicobar Pigeon has long, blue-gray neck feathers that resemble a mane. A white patch marks the eyes and throat of the White-breasted Ground Dove. It lives in New Guinea. The Topknot Pigeon of eastern Australia wears a crest of gray, brown, and black feathers on its head. The Kereru Wood Pigeon can grow nearly two feet in length. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Juniper was over Tinder. A recent college grad living in rural Connecticut, they’d been subject to the swipe-and-ghost thing a few too many times. Then, this spring, Juniper submitted an ad to @_personals_, an Instagram for lesbian, queer, transgender, and non-binary people looking for love (and other stuff). The post, titled "TenderQueer Butch4Butch," took Juniper two weeks to craft, but the care paid off: the ad ultimately garnered well over 1,000 likes—and more than 200 messages. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Surfing the web used to feel a lot more like actual surfing. Grab your (key)board, paddle out, and spend some time bobbing in the calm waters of the worldwide web. Now? It's a bit like trying to surf a tsunami. Our devices buzz and bleep for our attention all day long. Our brains are permanently frenzied. Sitting through an entire video or reading an entire article online now seems impossible without opening another tab or reaching for another device. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Around 6 pm Tuesday at Tham Luang in Thailand, the last of the 13 survivors who had spent 18 days trapped in a cave emerged to safety. A rescue team had spent the past three days getting the boys out after five days of desperate planning and calculations since their discovery. As the boys’ oxygen supply dwindled, doubts in the rescuers’ ability to save them mounted. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Last year, we eviscerated the BlackBerry Keyone. Physical “keyboards are bad,” we argued, and they were never better than on-screen keyboards. You could make all the same angry arguments against the new BlackBerry Key2, but after using this unique, productivity-focused device for a few weeks, I don’t get the hate. It’s true that the BlackBerry of old did not keep up with trends, became uncool, and died a slow and painful death. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Once a year, the bucolic grounds of Goodwood House in West Sussex, England, are consumed by the smell of exhaust fumes, the sound of engines revving, and an excited crowd of 100,000 people, all wanting a look at the special cars on show. They gather here because Charles Gordon-Lennox, the 11th Duke of Richmond, likes to occasionally open his home to host the Goodwood Festival of Speed, a celebration of all the history, the heritage, and the future of motor racing. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

It's hard to know, at first, what problem the Brava smart oven is supposed to solve. Its value proposition—to use the Silicon Valley parlance—is a bit diluted. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Two years ago today, a studio called Niantic released a game with a novel proposition: Go outside. Point your smartphone at the real world. Catch some monsters. Within a day, Pokémon Go was at the top of every app store chart. Within 200 days, players had spent a billion dollars on in-game upgrades—the shortest time to reach that milestone by a wide margin. In the summer of 2016, you couldn’t walk two blocks without running into, sometimes literally, a person in hot Pidgey pursuit. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Mark Zuckerberg’s knockoff site was a hit on campus, and so he and a few school chums decided to move to Silicon Valley after finals and spend the summer there rolling Facebook out to other colleges, nationwide. The Valley was where the internet action was. Or so they thought. In Silicon Valley during the mid-aughts the conventional wisdom was that the internet gold rush was largely over. The land had been grabbed. The frontier had been settled. The web had been won. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Chris Cox has long been the Chief Product Officer for Facebook. He has also recently been promoted to run product at WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram, which means he is effectively in charge of product for four of the six largest social media platforms in the world. He recently sat down with Wired Editor-in-Chief Nicholas Thompson at the Aspen Ideas Festival to talk about the responsibilities and plans of the platforms he helps run. Nicholas Thompson: I'm going to start with a broad question. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Here's some choice equipment for cooking like a pro in the wild. Toss the packets of dehydrated soup and make a real meal at the campsite instead. This Dutch oven is, in fact, made in the Netherlands. Combekk’s 4-liter pot is crafted from recycled iron—railroad track, mostly—and has a thermometer built into its sidewall. Set the whole thing in the campfire coals; the 6-mm-thick bottom keeps heat distributed evenly. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Don't let limited storage stop you from taking another Instagram-worthy photo or downloading another album to listen to on the go. It's easy to free up space on your iPhone. Follow our best tips and tricks and you'll lighten the load on your iPhone within an hour. Before you do anything, it’s helpful to understand what’s taking up your storage space. Go to Settings > General > iPhone Storage. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Just a few weeks into the 2018 fire season, any hopes that an ongoing drought and a winter of weak snowfall wouldn’t wreak havoc are already toast. Fires are already popping up across Colorado, New Mexico, and west into Oregon and California. This year’s season got off to a roaring start more than a month ago in Durango, Colorado, where the 416 Fire has burned more than 50,000 acres in the San Juan National Forest. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Victorien Erussard, an experienced ocean racer from the city of Saint-Malo in the north of France, was halfway through a dash across the Atlantic when he lost all power. Sails kept the boat moving, but Erussard relied on an engine and generator to keep the electronics running. He temporarily lost his autopilot and his navigation systems, jeopardizing his chances of winning the 2013 Transat Jaques Vabre race. Never again, he thought. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The Fourth of July is a holiday consecrated in meat smoke. On this day, lovers, neighbors, children, and friends gather around a BBQ, cold beers sweating in hand, to stare into piles of pork belly, strip steak, burger patties, and row after row of red hot dogs. We watch the embers char the flesh as we discuss the tragedies and triumphs of our United States. It is my favorite holiday. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

We’re halfway across the Bay Bridge when John asks the question he probably should have thought of before he buckled his seatbelt. Maybe he spotted the sticker that reads “This vehicle does not conform to the requirements of the dynamic or static tests set out in CMVSS 208.” Maybe he knows that’s the bit of the regulatory code that lays out crash protection standards. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In the DC Comics universe, Metropolis is the fictional mega-city where Clark Kent works as a reporter for The Daily Planet and, in his spare time, fights crime as Superman. In the real world, Metropolis is a small town of about 6,500 people in southern Illinois, just across the Ohio River from Kentucky. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In the first few hours of a newborn’s life, doctors administer a vitamin K shot. This is because infants are born without enough of the vitamin, and the baby needs a boost to prevent any potential bleeding. This is a routine practice—ask your pediatrician, your obstetrician, or the CDC. “Babies are born with very low stores of vitamin K, and without the Vitamin K shot ... they do not have enough Vitamin K in their blood to form a clot,” the CDC says on its website. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Alas, we knew this day would come. Amazon's fourth annual Prime Day Sale is about to crash from the virtual sky like a meteor in Fortnite, and as of April, there are 100 million Amazon Prime members set to scoop up all the deals that land. Prime Day started innocently enough back in 2015. It was a day-long sale celebrating Amazon's 20th anniversary, and a fun gift to the millions of Prime subscribers. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

As directors like Steven Soderbergh and Sean Baker have shown, you can conjure movie magic with an iPhone. The dual rear cameras on the X are nearly as capable as professional shooters. You get 4K video at 60 frames per second, excellent slo-mo, optical image stabilization, continuous focus—and did we mention it fits in your pocket? Bonus: The crisp OLED screen doubles as a mini movie theater for playback. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In this moment, there is only one thing I wish to know, and those are the words coming out of Sylvester Stallone’s mouth—if indeed they are words. I’m watching Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2. Incomprehensibly, Stallone has a small part in it, speaking, as he often does, incomprehensibly. But, gosh, he looks very important. Therefore he must be saying something important. Probably the whole of this film depends on it. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

This may seem obvious given my profession, but I think technology is...fine? Even for kids? It’s hard to believe that it’s safe for your kid to get anywhere near a Wi-Fi-enabled device when you read stories about tech addiction, hacked toys and horrible YouTube videos. It’s also possible that my opinion might change as my kids get older. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The next shipment headed to the International Space Station packs nearly three tons of research and resupply materials. You know, the typical stuff: sediment studies, a plant thermometer, a replacement hand for the giant robotic Canadarm. Oh, and also a floating robot designed as a helpmeet for astronauts—scientifically, logistically, and emotionally. The bot’s full name is Crew Interactive Mobile Companion: Cimon. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

There's a point when I make sauerkraut where it feels like the whole thing is going off the rails. Mine has the traditional cabbage and caraway seeds, but I like to throw an onion in there and something about the latter steers the whole thing into off-putting deep-funk territory at about the six-day mark: it smells vaguely of stinky shoe and has a taste that's equally prohibitive. Amazingly, these are not bad signs. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Back in 1999, when the mobile internet first flickered to life on Japan’s i-mode, email was confined to a snug 250 characters. Email! So when designer Shigetaka Kurita centered pixels on his potter’s wheel and spun them into sunshine and rain, he was both supplying a jolt of atmospherics to the early smog-screened smartphone and frugally conserving space. Kurita’s horizontal rain and naval-ensign sun were among the first 176 emoji. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Tesla is in a pinch. It’s supposed to be producing lots of cars. Model 3 sedans, specifically. At least 5,000 a week, and, ideally, making money while doing it. But nearly a year after starting production of the car, it has yet to meet that goal, which CEO Elon Musk originally said Tesla would hit before the end of 2017. Now, the second quarter of 2018 is winding down and investors are asking questions: The need to crank out more cars has gotten even more dire. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

What do games do for us—and what do we owe them for that? It's an odd question, but it seems to come up, in one form or another, whenever a gaming controversy hits the news. Gaming is no longer a young medium, but it's still somewhat opaque from the outside, which makes games an easy target for crusades from those wont to crusade: most recently, with local-news insistences that Fortnite is rotting your children's brains. It's not. (Probably. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Shopping for a 4K TV is like trying to find a single wave in the ocean. Most TVs are indistinguishable from each other at a glance—unless your eyes happen to lock onto an OLED. When you look at an OLED TV, you tend to keep looking. You may not even know why at first, but it looks better. Even next to the best LCD TVs, an OLED, with its vivid colors and inky blacks will entrance you. It's simple actually: OLED TVs don't need a backlight. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Beauty, to borrow a cliché, is in the eye of the beholder. But what if your beholder’s eyes could be hacked? What if yours could? In Reality+, they can be. The short film—from Revenge writer-director Coralie Fargeat—imagines a future where people can buy an implant that allows them to live in an alternative reality where they can be seen as they want to be seen. Reality+, which you can watch in full above, is set in Paris in the future. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In the past, other WIRED writers have loved real wireless buds, but I’ve been skeptical. In fact, I viscerally dislike them. They hit a specific Uncanny Valley of technology that threatens to cross the line between implant and implement. I'm not the only one. While testing the Bose SoundSport Free, my toddler daughter repeatedly asked me to take them out. And I can’t blame her. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices