McLaren’s New, More Powerful P1 Supercar Will Cost a Cool $3.4M


McLaren is building a track-focused version of its P1 supercar.

McLaren is building a track-focused version of its P1 supercar. McLaren



McLaren supercar owners have let the money-scented canned oxygen they breathe go to their heads. They’re demanding an even more powerful version of the P1.


That’s McLaren’s justification for building the P1 GTR, a track-dedicated spinoff of the supercar that may be the best vehicle on the road today. With a top speed electronically limited to 217 mph, the P1 ran one of the fastest laps ever on Germany’s daunting Nurburgring Nordschleiffe circuit. It goes from 0 to 60 mph in under three seconds, and to 186 mph in 17 seconds. The McLaren F1, once the world’s fastest production car, did that in 22 seconds.


Once McLaren has finished with the 375 P1s that it plans to deliver, it will start building the car’s demonic brother. The automaker has history on its side here. The powered-up GTR version of its famed F1 won the 24 Hours of Le Mans in 1995.


We don’t have details on how McLaren is squeezing more power out of the P1′s twin-turbocharged 3.8-liter V6 and electric motor, but we know it wants to upgrade from 903 to 986 brake horsepower with a “more extreme” powertrain. The GTR will be styled for the track, with a wider stance and tires made for racing. It won’t be street-legal, so McLaren can ignore book-loads of regulations that would otherwise hold it back.


Naturally, the price is going up. The P1 sells for $1.15 million. The GTR will cost £1.98 million. That’s $3.36 million. McLaren hasn’t decided how many cars it will build, but says production will be “strictly limited.” For the few customers who get one, the price tag includes time with Design Director Frank Stephenson and access to McLaren’s racing simulators, plus the chance to take part in at least six drive events at Formula 1 circuits. Simply having the cash on hand doesn’t qualify you for a GTR. McLaren will only consider selling to 375 guys and gals who have already bought the road-going P1.


The rest of us will have to settle for high-res photos and video of the P1 GTR.


The McLaren f1 GTR won the 24 Hours of Le Mans in 1995.

The McLaren f1 GTR won the 24 Hours of Le Mans in 1995. McLaren




Science Stunts: Can Creating a Spectacle Pay Off?


Juliana Pinto is assisted onto the field in an exoskeleton to kick off the Opening Ceremony of the 2014 FIFA World Cup Brazil. Photo: Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images

Juliana Pinto is assisted onto the field in an exoskeleton to kick off the Opening Ceremony of the 2014 FIFA World Cup Brazil. Photo: Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images



It’s been a wacky week in science. First there was that computer that supposedly passed the Turing test, a 50-year old benchmark in artificial intelligence research. Then, yesterday, a 29-year-old paralyzed man in a robotic exoskeleton took the opening kick in the World Cup in Brazil.



In both cases, the researchers behind the demonstrations have made grand claims about their importance as scientific breakthroughs. And in both cases critics have complained that they’re little more than publicity stunts. The Turing test chatbot didn’t look so great under closer scrutiny, and the long-awaited exoskeleton demo turned out to be a lot less dramatic than what was initially promised, at least judging by what was shown on TV.


All of which raises the question: Are spectacles like this bad for science? Or can taking science out of the lab and into the limelight serve a greater purpose?


For some thoughts on this we turned to Hank Greely, a law professor at Stanford who specializes in bioethics. Greely himself has been a supporter (with caveats) of another highly publicized and controversial scientific endeavor: the Revive and Restore project, which aims to use genetic engineering and synthetic biology to bring the passenger pigeon and other species back from extinction.


WIRED: What did you think of the World Cup demo?


Hank Greely: If you’re going to have a spectacle it really should be spectacular. If you’re going to build it up, you don’t want to fall flat, both for your own purposes and the good of science. In this case, I could see some people saying, that’s it? I could see others saying, it’s not much but it’s an exciting start.


WIRED: So, overall, do you think it was good or bad for science?


Greely: I don’t think it was a big deal either way.


WIRED: Are there times when spectacles are good for science?


Greely: I think they can be. When they attract public attention in a positive way, they can help build support for science in two ways. They can build political support among the masses, and they might spark some people to learn more or even go into science. The space program made me want to be a scientist… then the third quarter of calculus made me decide to be a lawyer.


WIRED: Can you think of another positive example?


Greely: My personal favorite is the rovers on Mars. They’re so cute and we’re getting such good pictures from them and of them. They could do a lot of the science without the pictures, but if they did I bet NASA’s budget would be lower. I think the sweet spot is good science for which there can be a spectacular demonstration.


In general I wish scientists paid more intention to communicating with the rest of world. Some of that is talking to journalists or serving as expert witnesses, and some of it is thinking up ways to publicize and dramatize the cool stuff you’re working on. Science needs to toot its own horn because it’s under threat. Our country seems to be splitting more and more into pro-science people and really substantially anti-science people. Spectacles are just one tool for attracting positive attention, and it’s not always appropriate, but when it is I’d like to see it used.


WIRED: What are the downsides?


Greely: The first is, it could flop and make people think scientists don’t know what they’re doing. Second, it gives people the wrong idea of how science works and what’s important in science. It’s not the Frankenstein moment when the doctor flips the switch and says “It’s alive! It’s alive!” It’s all the work that goes up to that, and that’s not very dramatic and not very spectacular most of the time.


There’s also a sort of justice issue. Some fields are going to appeal more to public imagination than others. Some of the most exciting science going on today doesn’t lend itself to spectacles. Take the protein folding problem. The folded shapes of proteins are crucial to their function. If someone came up with a good general algorithm to predict how proteins would fold based on the DNA sequence, that could be really, really important. But it’s hard to imagine building a spectacle around it.


WIRED: Let’s talk about Revive and Restore. Some conservation biologists have argued that bringing back extinct species isn’t a good use of resources, but you’ve been fairly positive about it—why?


Greely: Part of it does come back to what we’ve been talking about. I think it has the potential to instill a sense of wonder or awe in people. Seeing an actual living woolly mammoth or a woolly mammoth 2.0 would have a strong positive effect on a lot of people. But I wouldn’t support federal spending on this stuff. It should be done with new money so it doesn’t reduce the amount of money spent on classic conservation. It could be the woolly mammoth brought to you by CitiBank. Or Larry Ellison. In the long run, if it works, it should increase the excitement, support, and funding for conservation biology, as well as creating and perfecting tools that can be used to protect existing endangered species.



Inside the Strange Battle for Control Over Denver’s Comic Con Scene


Photo: UCFFool/Flickr

Photo: UCFFool/Flickr



It’s two days until the launch of Denver Comic Con, and the event’s fearless leaders look frazzled.


Sitting in their office a few blocks from the Colorado Convention Center, which will host the 500,000-square-foot event from Friday through Sunday, convention director Christina Angel and programming director Bruce MacIntosh repeatedly check for pressing e-mails on their laptops, which are emblazoned with Iron Man and Pokémon decals. In a conference room nearby, organizers are scrutinizing a blow-up of the convention center floor like a battle map, coordinating the 75,000 fans and 860 volunteers expected to attend.


“We wanted to create the convention that we always wanted to go to,” says MacIntosh. “The great irony is that we did, and now we’re too busy to experience hardly any of it.”


By any measure the non-profit Denver Comic Con has been a success. Since its launch in 2012, Denver Comic Con has ballooned into Denver’s biggest consumer convention and one of the largest pop-culture conventions in the country. At the same time, the event’s organizers are learning that with great power comes great responsibility.


Like other local comic cons across the country, Denver’s started thanks to the work of a lot of dedicated comics fans. But also like other cons, Denver’s has dealt with its fair share of internal shake-ups and pressures from outside forces—like larger national convention outfits coming into town. And now Denver Comic Con finds itself at a crossroads: Will they be able to keep their loyal attendees and continue to grow or will outside interlopers pull them away one by one?


Last year, Charlie La Greca, one of the convention’s founders, was ousted from the organization and responded on a website called Save Denver Comic Con, where he voiced concerns over what he considered to be mismanagement on the part of his former colleagues. La Greca and Comic Con’s management recently concluded legal mediation and while the results of that mediation weren’t made public the resolution appears somewhat tenuous. La Greca seems mostly pleased with the outcome, but he is also behind two Rock Comic Con concerts on Friday and Saturday night, where bands like Daenerys and the Targaryens will be in direct competition with “The Nerd Rock Experience” and other official after-hours Comic Con events.


“After a year of intense life changes, I’m getting back in the Quinjet and strapping in for blastoff,” La Greca says when asked about the ordeal. “My mind is constantly bustling with ideas and I’m ready and prepped to take that next step. We’ve been developing Rock Comic Con since 2010 and I’ll be expanding that concept and its market reach in 2015.”


There may also be a new foe on the horizon. Denver Comic Con organizers say they’ve heard that Wizard World, a major pop-culture convention chain that doubled its offerings to 16 cons this year, is aiming to hit Denver in 2015. Wizard World CEO John Macaluso will neither confirm nor deny the rumor, noting only “we have a more expanded calendar for next year, and there is probably not a city in the country we are not looking at.” Wizard World might not be the only operation eying Denver; convention companies like ReedPop and Informa are also expanding their comic-themed lineup and could try to get in on the geeky action.


Just as superheroes and sci-fi have come to dominate Hollywood and the videogame industry, comic book events have morphed from niche festivals to behemoth pop culture celebrations.


Just as superheroes and sci-fi have come to dominate Hollywood and the videogame industry, comic book events have morphed from niche festivals to behemoth pop culture celebrations. The leading U.S. convention, Comic-Con International in San Diego, is projected to generate nearly half a billion dollars in economic impact between 2013 and 2015. “San Diego Comic-Con has become one of the world’s biggest media events,” says Heidi MacDonald, editor of the comics news site The Beat. “Who wouldn’t want to be part of that? A lot of local shows are trading on that reputation.” These days, MacDonald estimates there’s between 600 and 700 pop-culture conventions doing so around the world each year.


Photo: UCFFool/Flickr

Photo: UCFFool/Flickr



And where there’s that sort of money and attention involved, there’s conflict. Hence, the so-called “con wars” have erupted over control of various convention markets: One-time event co-organizers in Cincinnati that now go head-to-head with competing events. A lawsuit over who gets to use the term “comic con” in Toronto. And Wizard World’s tendency to enter a new city by scheduling their event right before a preexisting con. “They have a predatory model,” says Steve Menzie, general manager of Fan Expo Canada in Toronto. “They find somewhere that has good show in a strong market and try to take it over.”


Wizard World’s Macaluso, however, denies that’s the case. “It has never been my strategy,” he says. “We try to put a show in city that does not conflict with other events. We are simply at the mercy of the schedules of the event centers.” But in practice, such conflicts have repeatedly arisen. Last year, for example, Wizard World Portland debuted just a month before the longtime Emerald City Comicon in nearby Seattle. And last month, Wizard World held its first convention in Minneapolis two weeks before SpringCon, which has been held in the city for 26 years.


“San Diego Comic-Con has become one of the world’s biggest media events. Who wouldn’t want to be part of that? A lot of local shows are trading on that reputation.”

— Heidi MacDonald, editor of The Beat



“They’re branching out like the Borg,” says Joe Parrington, Emerald City’s former PR director. Since Wizard World set up shop in Portland, Parrington says for the first time, several celebrities booked at Emerald City haven’t made enough selling autographs to meet their event guarantees, meaning the convention has had to pay them the difference.


So what’s the best way for independent conventions like Denver Comic Con to stay afloat in the increasingly cutthroat industry? One option is to turn professional. “A lot of these conventions have fanboys and girls running their shows,” says Parrington. “They are not business people. And so when Wizard comes to your town, they may not kill your show, but they will make your show work around them.”


Attendees Chris Holm, Chris Walenter, and Kelsey Kraft take a break during the Denver Comic Con in 2013. Photo: Seth McConnell/The Denver Post via Getty

Attendees Chris Holm, Chris Walenter, and Kelsey Kraft take a break during the Denver Comic Con in 2013. Photo: Seth McConnell/The Denver Post via Getty



But some longtime convention organizers say there’s another option: Get back to basics. According to lead organizer Nick Postiglione, attendance at this year’s SpringCon in Minneapolis was up 25 percent despite Wizard World Minneapolis occurring two weeks earlier, plus SpringCon didn’t have trouble meeting celebrity autograph guarantees—since it doesn’t book celebrities. “We are a comic con. We don’t do media guests,” he explains. “We are kind of purebred in that way. We are here to provide the comics industry opportunities to interface with the public. There is kind of a fight going on for the heart and soul of the whole thing. A lot of conventions have forgotten the girl who brought them to the dance, so to speak, which is the comic geek.”


Denver Comic Con, for its part, is taking a middle-of-the-road approach: “We aim to do a lot of everything,” says MacIntosh. Yes, Denver Comic Con attendees this year can spend $150 for the best seats at a partial cast reunion of Star Trek: The Next Generation, but they can also visit with the 300-plus comic artists who will be in attendance, 80 percent of which are based locally. Yes, attendees can shell out $50 for a photo op with Chandler Riggs, the kid who plays Carl Grimes on The Walking Dead, but they can also attend workshops with titles like “The Margins of the Panel: Marginalized Identities in Comics.” Or attendees can try out new shoot-em-ups in the convention’s “Hall of Games,” but the revenues from their convention ticket purchase will be go to support Comic Book Classroom, a local comic literacy organization for underserved students.


“We want to appeal to new people and get them in the door, so then they can figure out what we already know,” says Angel. “We can get a whole bunch of new people on the bandwagon for comic books.”



Lost and Found


20140610_TILE_EDIT_01

Josh Valcarcel/WIRED



Everyone alive has misplaced their keys, phone, or wallet. If you’re lucky, a few minutes of modern archaeological digging between couch cushions or underneath the car seat will turn up your lost artifact. If you’re less fortunate, your misplaced item may require some traveling.


Tile, which began its life last summer as a very successful Kickstarter campaign, will help in both cases. This small, square-ish device can be placed in, or affixed to, any item you want to keep tabs on. It will attach to a keyring, sit in a wallet, or stick to just about anything—from a laptop to luggage. Using a Bluetooth LE signal and a companion app on your iPhone or iPad, you’re then able to track your item’s whereabouts.


Set-up is simple. Download the free app, press a hidden button on the Tile unit, and place it on top of your iPhone screen. The app recognizes and IDs your Tile. You can assign it to a specific object in the app. All told, you can do this with up to eight Tiles, giving each a name (like “Wallet”) and photo in the app. Once it’s secured to its corresponding object—I chose my wallet— you can visit the app to check where it’s located on a map. Simple.


If the Tile-equipped thing is somewhere in your house, and you can’t find it, you can tap “Find” in the app, and it will emit a melody until you’ve successfully located it. The app also shows you visually if you’re closer or further from the Tile when you’re in range.


In range? Normally, you only have a 50 to 150 foot radius for locating your stuff, since the device operates over Bluetooth LE. So if you leave it on the bus, you’re SOL. Well, kind of. If another Tile user happens to be near your Tile, the system can borrow their Bluetooth connection to update your item’s location for you. In fact, part of the promise of Tile is that as more people adopt it, everyone will get more ubiquitous location tracking. Even if there aren’t other Tile users near your item, the app automatically records where your Tile was when it was last in range.


Tiles won’t last forever though. The battery is designed to last about a year, according to the company, and you’ll get a reminder to order a new one around a year after you activate your new Tile.


If you’re prone to losing things at home or in the office, a device like Tile will certainly make life easier. I tossed it in my wallet, and then basically forgot about it unless I couldn’t remember which room I’d left it in last. Depending on the item(s) you tend to lose, the Tile’s form factor may still be a bit big (it’s far too big to discreetly stick to a pair of sunglasses, for example). Still, $20 is a small price to pay for the peace of mind that comes with being able to track down your misplaced gear. Just don’t lose your iPhone or iPad.



A Country’s Out-of-Control Sprawl, Drawn by a Robot in Sand




The State of Israel was created in 1948, with a population of around 800,000. Today, 8 million people live there—a tenfold increase that happened over the course of just a few decades. That kind of growth sparks a ravenous demand for land and housing, and in Israel has led to a housing sprawl that a group of designers, architects, and artists have coined the Urburb: neighborhoods that aren’t quite urban (they’re outside metropolitan areas) but not quite suburban (they lack the pockets of commercial businesses that define most suburbs).


To convey the notion of the Urburb, this group—comprised of architect Ori Scialom, artist Keren Yeala-Golan, designer Edith Kofsky, and professor Roy Brand—created an installation at the Israeli Pavilion for this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale. Inside the sunlit space, guests will find four large patches of sand. Atop each is a sand printer, a machine built by the group specifically to trace blueprints, Etch-a-Sketch-style, of Israeli neighborhoods into the sand. After the sand printer has drawn one plan, it wipes the sand clean and draws another. The four printers trace city plans of Jerusalem, Holon, Hadera and Yahud, and in succession, they show how Israel’s neighborhoods became what they are today.


“The show is about the reality of Israel today, in 2014. We’re showing how Israel looks today by looking back 100 years, to see how the architecture manifested itself,” says Yeala-Golan, one of the curators. “The neighborhoods are very generic. They look the same, and they are not interesting in terms of architecture.”


An Urban Plan Gone Awry


This wasn’t by design. In 1951, when the nation was still in its infancy, a Bauhaus-trained architect named Arieh Sharon created a housing plan for Israel that advocated a dispersed approach to development. Unfortunately for Sharon, people gravitated towards the coast, Israel saw an influx of immigrants, and the plan didn’t take. Units went up quickly to accommodate a booming population, without much regard to architectural integrity. (Yeala-Golan describes the residences as “cookie-cutter houses.”)


Lousy aesthetics aside, the sprawl has also created a commuter culture that’s bad for the environment: Residents have to drive into the nearest city for practically everything—groceries, schools, entertainment, and so on—since commercial properties weren’t built into the neighborhoods.


The Urburb installation is laden with symbolism, starting with the sand itself: The team imported pounds of it from the desert by the Dead Sea. In Hebrew, Yeala-Golan explains, the word sand means “secular,” or not holy, or not sacred—which is how they view the sundry of identical houses dotting the coastline. And, because sandcastles get swept up and erased by the tide (or razed), they stand for a perpetual clean slate.


“We would like the planners to see those neighborhoods and understand that they could do a better job, in terms of the environment and the people,” Yealla-Golan says. “They could make them more green, more ecological, in terms of bike lanes. There’s no commercial area, no entertainment. They could give them an opportunity to work there, or just to have coffee in their neighborhoods.”


The Biennale has ended, but the exhibit will remain up until November 23, 2014. The group’s research and work will also be published in a book, The Urburb .



Lift Your June Gloom With This Weekend’s Playlist


Image: Transgressive Records

Image: Transgressive Records





When June arrives in San Francisco, it brings with it a very particular brand of gray morning (and sometimes afternoon). While that grayness generally dissipates when the sun breaks through, it gives most mornings an otherworldly feel. Fitting, then, that so much of this week’s best new music mirrors that Yay Area summertime progression from gloom to bliss. Start out chill with new tracks from Real Lies and Sinkane, then turn up the tempo until the Ting Tings go disco and legend Giorgio Morodor brings it home with a high-energy tour de force.

As usual, we’ve added the tracks to our ongoing Spotify playlist of great new music, and created a standalone YouTube playlist for this week. Keep the recommendations coming.


The tracks:

Real Lies, “North Circular”

The Antlers, “Hotel”

Chet Faker, “Talk is Cheap (Ta-ku Remix)”

Sinkane, “Hold Tight”

SBTRKT feat. Sampha, “Temporary View”

Jo Mersa, “Rock and Swing”

Santigold, “Kicking Down Doors”

The Ting Tings, “Wrong Club”

Lana del Rey, “West Coast (ZHU Remix)”

Giorgio Moroder, “Giorgio’s Theme”


YouTube



Take a Trip Through the Strange Worlds Within Gemstones



For all the infinite vastness of the universe we’ve seen through telescopes, the world seen under a microscope also reveals some pretty alien-looking vistas. Like the tiny cosmos hidden inside gemstones, a realm that photomicrographer Danny Sanchez captures in striking photographs.

“When I first started looking through the microscope at gemstones, it was all space to me,” says Sanchez, who’s spent the last eight years learning to examine and photograph gemological interiors. “It was all the limitless imagination of outer space.”


Sanchez’s images reflect an awe for the cosmos, and the aesthetic influence of science fiction. Shattered remnants of a doomed planet emerge from microscopic rubite embedded in sapphire; the pyramidal pyrite shell of some ancient being drifts in geological time; a mountainous horizon hidden in a nugget of quartz looks absolutely extraterrestrial. The photos recall sci-fi visionary John Berkey.


At the center of most of Sanchez’s pictures are the random bits of minerals stuck in a larger gem–what are called intrusions. To collectors, they’re imperfections that reduce the value of the stone–to Sanchez, they are things of beauty.


He digs through bin upon bin of gemstones at trade shows, searching for the subject of his next image. He examines the stones and intrusions with a 10x microscope loop and fiber optic light he carries with him, gathering a sense for their inner worlds.


“I’ve got to hit all the gem shows and all the local events,” he says. “I like the ones that are flawed. They’ve got the stuff inside them. I’m actually lucky in that regard because people don’t want them, so I get to pay less for them.”


Depth of a Field


Sanchez’s images fall under the category of photomicrography–pictures of very, very small things taken through a microscope. It’s a broad field in which his images are at least partially unique.


The bulk of photomicrographic imagery comes out of academic research. Insects, microbes, circulatory systems, the vast majority focus on organic subject matter. Gemological intrusions are generally a less common subject, and certainly not the object of most photomicrographers’ fascination.


“They’re interested in documenting, ‘Oh this material is found in conjunction with this material, how interesting–we should document that,’” he says. “There’s only so much conversation that someone like that can have with me before we just totally diverge on our technique.”


To Sanchez, the most relevant distinction is the effort to create images at the standard of a fine art. He’s working more to convey a sense of sublimity he feels rather than to categorize or document what he photographs in a scientific way.


“It’s really tricky, and I wish I had someone I could just call up and ask why is this not working? How do I get this better, how do I get it cleaner? But there’s not, so I’m just sort of feeling around.”


What’s He Building in There


Without an institutional budget to throw at gear, Sanchez had to build his shooting rig piecemeal. It took almost ten years of scouring eBay before he could produce images at the level of quality he wanted. For shooting at the microscopic level, gear always comes first.


“There were so many obstacles … if you don’t have the right equipment you can’t overcome them,” he says. “There’s only so good an image you can make.”


Sanchez lights the gems with fiber optic tubes and a main light. He adjusts the light and controls shadow with teensy reflector cards and black foil. The image is captured by a specially adapted Wild Heerbrugg m450 microscope, with a light path streamlined so that it travels almost directly into a Canon 5D. A host of custom optical and stabilizing segments hold the rig together, and it’s all mounted to a vibration resistant platform.


An integral part of this process is called “stacking,” which means shooting the same subject at varying depths of field and then recombining the layers into a single sharp image. An ever present risk is over-stacking (often Sanchez will layer dozens of shots in a single image), which can force in too much color and depth information to produce the subtler sense of space he’s aiming for.


Stacking a crazy precise process that requires a step motor that can move the focus by microns at a time, allowing for super fast exposures at different points along the inclusions.


All the equipment and precision allows Sanchez to chart a course through gemological innerspace. When he comes upon a striking scene, he can drop anchor and start shooting. The experience can be pretty otherworldly, even though the whole rig resides in a small room in his house.


“I have to turn the lights off in this room, and then turn the fiber optic lights on, so it’s very much this laboratory vibe because it’s so dark and mysterious. And I’m staring into a window, seeing something totally different than the reality around me.”


The Big Picture


Sanchez is not just an admirer, he’s also an expert on the gems themselves. By looking at the stones he can tell you if they’re natural or synthetic, if they’ve been exposed to extreme heat, where in the world they might have come from. He’s as interested in making photographs as in the phenomenology of what he’s observing.


“I really try hard not to do anything false, like use false colors. I comp my images, sure, but it’s just as you see it through the microscope. It’s mostly Lightroom, and a little bit of Photoshop dodging and that’s it. That’s not to say I don’t spend a tremendous amount of time staring at it in Lightroom day after day to make sure it’s right.”


The ultimate goal is to present an exhibition of the photos, printed large next to the stones they came from so that the vast scale suggested in the images can be experienced right next to the tiny reality of them.


That’s part of the reason Sanchez keeps the stones he photographs. In any case there’s certainly not much of a financial incentive for keeping them–their “flawed” nature makes them unfit for most collectors. For him the true excitement comes from the singular instant when a photo emerges from the development process to reveal something never seen before.


“It’s that moment when you look at it and gasp,” he says. “You can’t believe that it looks like that.”


All photos by Danny Sanchez