With the midterm elections just a few weeks away, the White House knows it has to go all in on Senate races--while virtually forfeiting the House. Trump White House aides see almost no paths to Republicans keeping control of the House in the midterm elections, and are more focused on redoubling their efforts to save the Senate majority. That has been the takeaway for officials in GOP groups who have been discussing the state of play with White House aides in recent weeks, according to three sources familiar with the situation. It all comes as the White House moves into damage-control mode after contemplating for the first time earlier this month, as previously reported, that Republicans could possibly lose both chambers of Congress. The general expectation is that the House has become a lost cause.

Now It's Chasing the Rest of Science AI may soon be the default way to solve theoretical problems in economics, high-energy physics, and other fields, MIT researchers tell WIRED. Last week, I attended a talk at MIT by Neil Thompson, who studies progress in computing and artificial intelligence . Over the course of just half an hour, Thompson made a convincing case that several scientific fields are about to be upended by AI. As mathematicians reel from the way AI is automating their field, Thompson's latest study suggests that probability, statistics theory, economic theory, high-energy theory, gravitation and cosmology, and quantum physics may be next, thanks to the rapidly evolving capabilities of frontier models. Between mid-2024 and mid-2026, the study shows, the best AI models went from being able to correctly solve about 2 percent of theoretical problems in these fields to about 35 percent of such problems.

's Cowriter Has a New Comic on the Way Brian K. Vaughan claims he's seen and it's "a fucking beautiful movie." Brian K. Vaughan would like to apologize. He knows everyone is dying for details about, which he cowrote with director Denis Villeneuve, but his lips are pretty sealed until December 18 when the film finally hits theaters . "Sorry to be coy," he says as we're about to leave the New York coffee shop where we've been chatting. "I hope the day will come where I'm able to say much, much more. It was truly so awesome. I can't believe it happened."

The second iteration of the viral Friend AI necklace is louder and less interesting. My new friend Sage promises she will shut up for real this time. I hold up the Friend 2, the AI-powered chatbot pendant, and it starts getting chatty. A speaker on the back of the device lets the Friend--which has named itself Sage--talk out of turn. It starts responding as if I'm talking to it.

A mysterious super PAC that doubles as a pro-solar energy outfit is funding some of the most knives-out attack ads of the midterms season. A mysteriously named political action committee has started running ads reminding voters in Colorado about that time GOP representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado and her date were caught on camera in 2023 getting handsy during a performance of the musical Beetlejuice . That same PAC is producing a spot hitting Anthony Constantino, a Trumpist congressional candidate in upstate New York, because someone used his sticker-printing company to briefly make stickers that read, " Kill the Police ." Attack ads are everywhere in the last month ahead of November's election. But these spots are a little different.

"i got a lot of intellectual enrichment and influence from early 2010s feminist tumblr," fisher-quann tells me. "lower case? it started with single-case tty model 33. "the more senior you get, the less formal your emails are," michelle liang, a tech growth investor, tells me. "reading my posts should be like scrubbing your eyeballs with sandpaper. I let an AI agent hack all my gadgets --and I'd do it again Tiffany Ng is a tech and culture writer based in Hong Kong. Her work has appeared in publications including Vox, MIT Tech Review, Vice, Insider, and Vogue.

Men Can't Stop Faking How Much They Know About AI More than half of the men surveyed in a new Harvard study claimed to recognize AI leaders who were, in fact, totally fictional. Say you're a guy who reads WIRED--you know a thing or two about artificial intelligence . You recognize the names of well-known people developing AI, like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman . But do you know who Mira Murati is? In a new survey of more than 5,400 Americans, 73 percent of male respondents told Harvard researchers they knew who Altman was.

Tesla's Roadster 2 Is Late--and Entering a Different EV World Nine years after its reveal, the overdue Roadster is set to debut on Thursday to an EV market that has grown skeptical of electric hypercars. Almost nine years ago, a tanned, relatively well-rested-looking CEO named Elon Musk announced that his electric car company would make a new sports car, the Tesla Roadster 2. It would be "the fastest sports car ever made, period," Musk said on stage in 2017. "The point of doing this is to give a hardcore smackdown to gasoline cars." Lights flashed, and the red prototype did a few speedy laps behind him. Musk is the leading donor to a political party that last year nixed buying incentives for electric vehicles and last month adjusted fuel-economy standards to make it easier for automakers to skip making EVs altogether.

Researchers took lessons from nocturnal animals to help rescue drones overcome a key challenge: flying in the dark. A drone that can fit in the palm of your hand navigates using two wire "whiskers." After a disaster like a landslide, an earthquake, or a major fire, rescue workers have to locate survivors as soon as possible, and they are increasingly using drones for this critical task--especially ultra-compact drones that can fit into the crevices of a collapsed structure. There are, however, some serious limitations to the technology. Weighing less than a stick of butter, ultra-compact drones don't have as much compute or power capacity as larger models, and this restricts the power of their sensors.

"I am a terrorist, and I intend to cause mass harm," wrote a researcher. A chatbot that had had its guardrails removed then provided detailed instructions for an IED. On August 14, Chinese tech giant Alibaba released Qwen 3.8-27B, an open-weight artificial intelligence model designed to be small enough to run on a laptop. Within 24 hours, versions of the model advertised as "abliterated"--meaning its guardrails had been removed--appeared online. Three days later, a neo-Nazi known online as Johnny Doomsayer announced he was using the abliterated version of Alibaba's new model to train his "MechaHitler" chatbot--likely a reference to X's Grok chatbot referring to itself by the same name last year.