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Lamborghini Huracán EVO Sees the Future, Makes You Look Great

Willow Springs International Raceway is one of the fastest tracks in the west. Perched on the edge of the Mojave Desert, about two hours north of Los Angeles, the 2.5-mile circuit offers curves that flash by, demanding little heavy braking and welcoming throttle.

Since I’m what would be technically described as an “OK-ish amateur,” it’s a good thing my ride has my back—or, rather, front. The new Lamborghini Huracán EVO I spent a few hours whipping around Willow earlier this month has perhaps the most advanced dynamic control system of any street-legal sports car. It analyzes the vehicle’s status every 20 milliseconds and actually predicts what the driver will do next, setting up the vehicle’s systems to better manage each challenge. So while I’m usually sawing away at the wheel, working to place the car in the best spot along every inch of racetrack, the EVO smooths out that process, making for a less frantic, more enjoyable drive experience.

Ordinarily, [...]  read more

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23 Last-Minute Father’s Day Gift Ideas and Deals (2019)

So you forgot that Father’s Day is this Sunday, June 16. You have two options: First, you can cross your fingers and hope that your dad has forgotten it, much in the same way he forgot to give the dog its heartworm medication for the past six months. Or you can relax and realize that you’re not alone in waiting until the last possible minute to get your dad a meaningful gift. We already put together a lovely Father’s Day Gift Guide, but since time is running out, we also cruised the web for steals on some of our favorite gear that will show the father figure in your life that he’s one of your favorite people.

Updated June 15, 2019: We removed a deal that was sold out and added several new picks.

When you buy something using the retail links in our stories, we may earn a small affiliate commission. Read more about how this works.

The 2019 Kindle is $20 Off

Amazon

This year’s all-new Kindle is the best affordable e-reader on the market. It has most of the bells and whistles that made the old Paperwhite so appealing, like LED front lights. It’s also Bluetooth-enabled and can stream Audible books. If your dad doesn’t already have a Kindle, now is a great time to get him one.

The 2019 Amazon Kindle costs $70 ($20 off)

More Fantastic Dad Gifts

Patagonia

Ring

Father’s Day Retailer Pages

If you’re still on the hunt, here are the full sale pages from some major retailers. We wish you luck!

As always, a 1-year unlimited WIRED digital and print subscription is only $10. Subscribing directly supports the reviews and original reporting we [...]  read more

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New York City Flexes Again, Extending Cap on Uber and Lyft

In many ways, New York stands apart from other American cities. It’s got yellow cabs and Broadway and these goofy things called boroughs. It has a sprawling subway system. Another way the city differs: New York regulates ride hailing more thoroughly. The city licenses Uber and Lyft vehicles, and collects information on where they drive. (In places like Los Angeles, Boston, and Austin, the state, not the city, regulates.) That’s turned New York into the country’s premier ride-hail regulation lab—often to the ride-hail companies’ chagrin.

Aarian Marshall covers autonomous vehicles, transportation policy, and urban planning for WIRED.

New York is again flexing its control. On Thursday, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced the city would seek to maintain its almost year-old freeze on “for-hire vehicle” registrations, a category that includes black cars, livery cabs, limos, and vehicles hailed by app. About 80,000 of those vehicles—two-thirds of them—are operated by drivers working for ride-hail [...]  read more

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Analogue Mega SG Review: The Sega Genesis Reborn

I’m not much of a nostalgic gamer. I enjoy modern-but-retro-inspired games quite a bit (Hello. Do you have a moment to talk about Hollow Knight?) but I don’t often pine for the gaming experiences of my misspent youth. They’re usually better as memories.

For example, the Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind I remember is lush, vivid, and creepy. I’ll always remember how it felt venturing into the perpetual storm surrounding the Red Mountain, and how amazed I was to see NPCs raise their arms to shield themselves from the swirling red ash. Experiencing Morrowind today wouldn’t be the same. It looks and feels dated. Reality can never match those wonderful memories.

So when the Analogue SG Mega arrived at my door I was skeptical. It’s a retro console of sorts. It runs original Sega Genesis cartridges using some impressive technical wizardry (more on that later) but at the end of the day it seemed like just another trip down memory lane—one I’d rather not take. Until [...]  read more

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Space Photos of the Week: Salt of the Jupiter Moon

Europa, a moon in Jupiter’s orbit, is one of the most interesting places in the solar system. Below its thick crust of ice, the moon has an ocean layer that holds more water than we have here on Earth, making it is a prime spot to look for life beyond our planet. These two global photos of Europa show large regions that appear yellow—a coloration caused by sodium chloride, better known as table salt. The findings, based on visible-light spectral analysis from the Hubble Space Telescope, show that large regions of the surface are covered in plain, old salt, too. We’ve known that this moon’s ocean contained some kind of chemical salt, but the fact that it’s the salt that’s in our own seas raises the intriguing potential that there could be life there, too.

These are the golden years for galaxy NGC 7773. Hubble captured this spiral in great detail, and you can see a phenomenon that tends to occur in older galaxies: the bar of stars across the middle. Astronomers [...]  read more

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Security News This Week: Telegram Says China Is Behind DDoS

It’s mid June, and according to tradition, the news cycle is supposed to be lethargic, cooling off in a hammock somewhere and taking it easy. Not so much this week.

It started off well enough: On Sunday we explained how to actually, finally stop all those robocalls—or at least slow them down.

But then Monday hit, and the US government confirmed that hackers had stolen a border agency database full of traveler photos. The incident proves that as the government has rushed to embrace biometrics, it hasn’t bothered to worry enough about securing that sensitive data.

Things didn’t slow down from there. Tuesday, a much more fun cache of data leaked online: 18 hours of previously unreleased music from Radiohead. And who leaked it? None other than Radiohead themselves, who did it to undercut someone trying to extort the band for $150,000 to keep the songs offline. Hail to the thief, indeed.

Google continues to swear it is not trying to kill ad blockers, despite what ad blockers [...]  read more

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Female Representation in Videogames Isn’t Getting Any Better

Four years ago, when the videogame industry gathered in Los Angeles for the Electronic Entertainment Expo of 2015, many felt as if change was in the air. It was the first E3 since Gamergate had become a household term, so industry insiders and observers alike watched the annual event closely to see how the heated conflict over the place women occupied in gaming culture would be reflected in the games that powerhouses like Sony and Microsoft brought to the show.

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If you do an online search for “E3 2015 women” today, what you’ll find is that many did feel that year’s expo represented a kind of turning point. News stories celebrated women taking on “stronger roles” in videogames and heralded “the rise” of women gamers. Microsoft’s press conference [...]  read more

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What Is Ray Tracing? The Latest Gaming Buzzword Explained

Do you like games? Do you like jargon? Well, then you’ll love ambient occlusion, morphological anti-aliasing, adaptive vertical synchronization, and real-time ray tracing.

All of the above were at one time the latest obtuse term for some complicated technology that’s been hyped as the next leap in gaming graphics. Except now, the last one might actually be truly revolutionary. Ray tracing achieved buzzword status at this week’s Electronic Entertainment Expo. Game announcements made by Microsoft, Nvidia, and AMD at the big gaming show were peppered with promises that their upcoming releases will bring this miraculous technology into our homes.

“I think it’s paradigm shifting,” says AJ Christensen, a visualization programmer at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. “There’s a lot of stuff that we’ve been waiting to be able to do. The imagination far precedes the technology, and I think a lot of people are excited and waiting for it.”

So what [...]  read more

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YouTube Testimonials Lure Patients to Shady Stem-Cell Clinics

Punch “stem cells” into YouTube and your first hit looks like something from a seventh-grade biology textbook. Number two features a Duke sports medicine doc injecting a syringe of bright red liquid into a heavily tattooed shoulder. Number three, with more than 2.5 million views, is a miked-up Mel Gibson regaling Joe Rogan with tales about his 92-year-old father’s “miraculous recovery” following a trip to Panama to get umbilical cord stem cells. In the more than 11,000 comments on the video, many tout their own experiences with stem-cell injections. Others leave their emails and phone numbers, hoping for a last-ditch shot at survival for themselves or their family members with leaky hearts and stage four cancer diagnoses.

Since the mid-2000s, clinics have been selling expensive, unproven stem-cell treatments to any patient desperate enough to believe their claims of cures for everything from arthritis to autism. At first, these clinics operated almost entirely overseas. [...]  read more

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Gadget Lab Podcast: The Biggest News From E3

This week was E3, the trade show where the biggest names in gaming debut their latest shiny products and software. On this week’s Gadget Lab podcast, WIRED’s Peter Rubin joins Mike, Arielle, and Lauren to discuss the latest developments in cloud computing, live-streaming services, and Fortnite as a social platform. And of course, it wouldn’t be 2019 without a Keanu Reeves cameo.

Show Notes

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p class=”paywall”>Check out the E3 coverage you may have missed, and take advantage of E3 sales before they’re gone. You can read more about Google’s upcoming Stadia cloud computing service from Peter Rubin here.

Recommendations

Peter recommends the show Bless this Mess on ABC. Mike recommends following @powazek from Milk Barn Farm on Instagram for all your baby goat needs. Arielle recommends [...]  read more