From specialized motors to the use of machine-learning algorithms, Turkey's billion-dollar hair-transplant industry is the result of a constant process of innovation. The astounding growth of the hair-transplant industry in Turkey is not just a medical tourism success story; it's also a tale of "hacked" medical equipment and algorithmic craftsmanship. From a biological and evolutionary perspective, human hair is often viewed as an unremarkable mass of keratin that still plays some important functions--protecting our scalps from the sun's harmful ultraviolet rays and regulating our body temperatures--but, for the most part, is no longer essential to our survival. Yet, since ancient times, our subconscious perceptions of whether another person is healthy, young, or fertile have been based on visual cues such as skin radiance, the integrity of teeth, and hair density. Deep within our perceptions, hair has become one of the most powerful representations of our identity and self-confidence. Today, the global hair-transplant and restoration industry, which has evolved around this deep psychological and evolutionary need, has grown into a massive, multibillion-dollar industry. Various research firms have estimated the total size of the global hair-transplant market as sitting somewhere between $7.33 billion and $11.61 billion in 2024. And those figures don't include the underground economy.

Amazon Is Making an AI-Animated TV Show. The company licensed the character for a new Amazon series--made with AI--without her consent. Author and illustrator Loryn Brantz never imagined that a popular cartoon character she created almost a decade ago would one day be the subject of an intellectual property dispute involving BuzzFeed, Amazon's video streaming service, and generative artificial intelligence. But that's exactly the situation she finds herself in today. "Nothing said in good faith by managers and executives was followed through with," Brantz says of BuzzFeed, her former employer.

Soon-to-be-laid-off Meta contractors say they're being treated differently than Mark Zuckerberg's full-time employees, who stand to receive more generous severance packages. Now we're being left behind," chanted a horde of contract workers who gathered outside Meta's offices in Dublin, Ireland, on Friday afternoon. Waving flags, brandishing signs, and armed with whistles and vuvuzelas, they were out to protest a round of planned layoffs. The workers are employed by Dublin-based company Covalen, which handles content moderation and data labeling services that help Meta to fine-tune its AI products. In April, Covalen told 700 employees that their jobs were at risk, citing "reduced demand," WIRED reported . A large swath of the affected workers won't receive any severance because they've been employed for less than two years. The rest are being offered the minimum payout required under local labor laws--two weeks' pay for every year of employment--according to the Communications Workers' Union (CWU), whose members include Covalen employees. "We're just getting the crumbs here," Aadel Obaid, a team manager at Covalen who is part of the planned layoffs, tells WIRED. "Give us a little bit of the pie." To try to compel Covalen into revising the severance package, workers voted to strike outside the company's corporate office, before marching to Meta's nearby European headquarters. According to John Bohan, an organizer at the CWU, Meta could use its leverage as an anchor client to pressure Covalen into offering its employees an enhanced severance package. The workers are asking for double what's currently being offered--and at least some form of payment for workers who don't meet the two-year threshold. The company could also release Covalen workers from a "cooldown period" preventing them from working on another Meta account for six months after being laid off, Bohan says. At 1 pm local time on Friday, the striking workers began to gather outside Covalen's corporate headquarters, a red-brick office building on an otherwise largely residential street in the heart of Dublin. The protests began with a wall of sound: the workers beat drums, booed, whistled, shouted, and catcalled. Then came a volley of call-and-response chants led by a worker with a megaphone. The building's security guard watched, bemused, from inside the lobby, hands on his hips. Two hours later, the group--now more than 150 people--began to march down the center of the mile-long stretch of road to Meta's campus, slowing the trailing traffic to a crawl. Dubliners enjoying the early onset of summer stopped to gawp; some applauded. When the protesters arrived at Meta's complex, two security guards stood with crossed arms, blocking the way. The group set up at the gates and began another round of chants: "We scrub the feed.

We Asked the Author to Explain How He Used AI. A book about how AI shapes perceptions of reality came under fire for using AI-generated quotes. Its problems go beyond that. Earlier this month, WIRED published an excerpt from Steve Rosenbaum's buzzy new book,, which looks at how artificial intelligence warps people's sense of reality. Shortly thereafter, The New York Times reported that the book contained over a half-dozen made-up or misattributed quotes.

Pope Leo XIV may not be able to disarm AI, but he's got the attention of the industry. For one thing, Olah is an atheist who at 15 rejected his evangelical Christian upbringing. As a Thiel fellow, he accepted a grant from the guy who thinks that anyone who slows down AI progress is a legionnaire of the antichrist . Olah is also a cofounder of Anthropic, a leading AI company reportedly about to go public with a nearly trillion-dollar valuation. Olah commented on the oddness in his remarks at the Vatican.

Sex workers appear on the livestreams of famous manosphere influencers to boost their followings--but often end up being degraded. Adult film star Willow Ryder didn't immediately recognize the man who entered the Miami party she was at earlier this month, but she knew he wasn't part of the sex work industry . He had an entourage and what appeared to be a hulking bodyguard. Her friends told her it was Clavicular, aka Braden Peters, a popular Kick livestreamer known for " looksmaxxing," or resorting to extreme measures to improve his appearance. Ryder says she didn't know exactly who Clavicular was or what he talked about on his stream, but she knew that he had a massive following.

The GOP's Attacks on James Talarico Are Straight Out of the Incel Handbook Claims about low testosterone and false accusations of veganism might play well to the online far right, but will they win an election? Democratic US Senate candidate James Talarico speaks in Houston, Texas. On Tuesday, with Donald Trump's endorsement and the backing of the MAGA faithful, scandal-ridden Texas attorney general Ken Paxton defeated incumbent US senator John Cornyn in a runoff primary to claim the Republican nomination for that seat. He then quickly set about painting his general-election opponent, Democratic Texas state representative James Talarico, as insufficiently masculine. "My opponent is the most extreme radical that Democrats have ever nominated," Paxton said in his victory speech.

LinkerBot makes dexterous robotic hands for as little as $600. It wants to become the standard for humanoids and automated factories--and eventually replace human labor altogether. If you could buy a humanoid robot for less than a smartphone, would you? Would you buy several robots to handle cooking, cleaning, babysitting, and even your job? This is the pitch being made by Zhou Yong, the 40-year-old founder and chief technology officer of LinkerBot, one of China's leading manufacturers of dexterous humanoid hands.

New mothers working in software development are staring down an AI-pilled workplace they barely recognize. As Danielle settled into the rhythms of new motherhood, her profession underwent a drastic reinvention. Danielle, who asked to use her first name to avoid damaging her job prospects, worked as a software developer at a car company in Portland, Oregon. Before she left the workforce in mid-2024, barely anybody used AI to write code; by the time she was ready to return, a year later, it had become the expectation. Once upon a time, she had been drawn to coding for the job security it offered, but AI was threatening to upend that.

The Centers for Research in Emerging Infectious Diseases were launched during the Covid-19 pandemic. The group lost its funding under Trump in part due to conspiracy theories. As the world struggles to contain the rapidly growing Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo's Ituri province, a vital network of research centers has been unable to help on the ground. The reason: The Trump administration slashed its funding last year, in part due to conspiracy theories about the origins of Covid-19. Established in 2020 by the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Research in Emerging Infectious Diseases (CREID) Network was conducting research into viruses that emerge from wildlife and spill over to people, including the family of viruses that Ebola belongs to.