WIRED Ghost Stories
Five hauntings from the other side of technology.
You Probably Aren’t Going to Get the Plague
The death of a lab worker in Russia has authorities looking at whether plague played a role. Even if it did, though, the odds of it spreading are very low.
Emily Mullin
Pour One Out for the Leap Second
The metric might not mean much to laypeople, but leap seconds have been a source of contention in the timekeeping community for years. Now, they’re dead.
Brian Kahn
Wikipedians Believed AI Would Come and Go. They Were Wrong
In a world of AI Overviews, Wikipedia usage declines. But the real loss may be far more existential than website traffic.
Richard Cooke
Please Let the Internet Die
Online spaces are captured by oligarchs and saturated with slop—and they’re exacerbating humanity’s worst impulses. It’s time to start over.
Miles Klee
Digger Is a Box Office Flop. It Might Be the Most Relevant Film of the Year
Sold by its trailer as a gag reel, Tom Cruise’s strangest movie may be the most unsettling portrait of our tech and climate moment yet.
Carla Sertin
Oil Spills Wreak Havoc on the Bottom of the Ocean, Even a Decade Later
While oil is known to float, new research finds that over time it can permeate even extremely deep marine habitats, with animal populations declining by as much as 80 percent.
Bob Berwyn
The 9 Best Movies to Stream This Month
Barbarian, The Fly, and Altered States are among the films deserving of your eyeballs this month.
Matt Kamen
Humans Watched This Supernova Explode Nearly a Millennium Ago. Now You Can See It in High Definition
The new image isn’t just stunning—it may also provide clues about how this star survived its own explosion.
Jorge Garay
The PHP Meltdown Shows How AI Makes Bugs More Exploitable
Security researchers used AI tools to help uncover years-old vulnerabilities in the PHP web scripting language. Then the AI-assisted attacks began.
Lily Hay Newman
Mistral Says Its AI Model ‘Le Chonk’ Has Leapfrogged China in the Open-Weight Race
The French AI lab claims its latest release matches or outperforms even the best models from DeepSeek and Z.ai in coding and cybersecurity.
Joel Khalili
The Anthropic S-1 Filing Is Also an AI Doomsday Primer
Anthropic thinks “closing the loop” is the best path to AI triumph—and a recipe for “existential” threats to humanity.
Brian Barrett