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@WIRED

16 Jan

Spurred by the pandemic and protests against racial injustice, the United States now has an estimated 8.4 million more gun owners than it did at the start of 2020. As guns have risen in popularity, so too have tactical firearms courses 1/wired.trib.al/NBJ8VIB

Once the purview of law enforcement officers and military operators, tactical shooting skills are increasingly being passed down to ordinary, armed Americans by a sprawling and diffuse industry 2/ wired.trib.al/NBJ8VIB

Photographs by Jesse Rieser

Gun ranges and private facilities around the US are teaching the art of armed combat. At a Texas resort, you can engage in an exercise inspired by the Iraq War; at a facility in Florida, you can practice taking out a shooter at the Liberal Tears Café 3/ wired.trib.al/NBJ8VIB

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@WIRED

3 Jan

@WiredUK

Memory isn’t as set in stone as you might think. With the right technique, you can boost your recollection skills immensely.

Here are the five steps Nelson Dellis, a four-time USA Memory Champion, uses and the science of how they work 1/ (via @WiredUK) wired.trib.al/M8lPItR

Start With Strong Images
Turn whatever you're memorizing into images. Use pics that you can almost feel, smell, and see. You want to create big, multisensory memories.

Research has shown that the amygdala—a part of the brain that helps process emotion—encourages retention 2/

Create a “Memory Palace”
Place those images around your house. This is called the memory palace, and it’s particularly useful for remembering the order of certain elements. The technique helps to bring in more parts of the brain that are usually dedicated to other senses 3/

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@WIRED

30 Dec 20

This is the world’s longest freight train. It runs almost a mile long and consists of 200 freight cars. Photographer Adrian Guerin spent 26 hours in the Saharan desert on it. This is what he saw: 1/ wired.trib.al/IBSC1hB

Mauritania’s Train du Desert operates daily between Nouadhibou on the Atlantic coast and the iron ore mines in Zouerat—a journey of around 450 miles that takes about 13 hours each way. 2/

Its primary purpose is to transport ore from the mines, but from the beginning Mauritanians have hopped rides on freight cars to reach remote desert settlements. The empty cars create opportunities for locals to courier items from one part of the country to another. 3/

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@WIRED

27 Dec 20

In April 2017, a hiker going by the name “Mostly Harmless” started hiking south from New York. He carried no ID and no phone.

He made it to Florida, where, in 2018, he was found dead in his tent. No one’s been able to figure out who he was. 1/ wired.trib.al/4s2CpNg

Mostly Harmless’ fingerprints didn’t show up in any law enforcement database; his DNA didn’t match any in the Department of Justice’s missing person database; a picture of his face didn’t turn up anything in a facial recognition database. Investigators couldn’t find a thing. 2/

They don’t even understand how or why he died. There were no indications of foul play and, despite the fact that he had food nearby, he weighed just 83 pounds at the time of his death. The only substances Mostly Harmless tested positive for were ibuprofen and an antihistamine. 3/

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@WIRED

20 Dec 20

Billions of dollars were spent to produce the Covid-19 vaccines that will (hopefully) help bring an end to the pandemic, but prepping the US population for their side effects is getting much less attention.

That could be a big mistake 1/ wired.trib.al/vV0Q2zb

In a November survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation, 71% of people said they will likely take the vaccine. For the hesitant, the leading worry was fear of side effects.

Both the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines have side effects. They’re real, but we need to contextualize them 2/

Trial participants have described experiencing “a severe hangover” and “fever ... fatigue and chills.” One participant said he shook so hard with chills that he cracked a tooth. A few more serious reactions have been reported, but most are minor and fade after roughly two days 3/

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@WIRED

14 Dec 20

By compromising the IT management platform SolarWinds, Russian hackers have hit departments in the United States government and the security firm FireEye.

We’ll be lucky if that's the end of it. The situation could get so much worse 1/ wired.trib.al/QcCaWFV

As far back as March, the hackers compromised a network monitoring tool called Orion, distributing tainted software potentially to thousands of organizations and giving them a backdoor into the victim’s networks 2/

From there, the hackers fanned out within target systems, often by stealing administrative access tokens. Finally, with the keys to the kingdom—or large portions of each kingdom—they were free to conduct reconnaissance and exfiltrate data 3/

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