Earlier this week, I attended a screening of, the buzzy new documentary about the disgraced former biotech CEO Elizabeth Holmes. I went in not really knowing what to expect. I'd avoided spoilers (and won't be giving anything away here, either!). I was wondering what new information this film could reveal, given how familiar many of us are with the Theranos story thanks to years of media coverage, the best-selling book, and the Hulu series, starring Amanda Seyfried. Like many others who have seen the film, I came away feeling unsettled.

WIRED was the first magazine to cover Theranos and its enticing billionaire founder. There were warning signs even then. Elizabeth Holmes, the disgraced founder of the fraud-ridden blood-test company Theranos, made her national press debut in The Wall Street Journal in 2013. It ran in the Opinion section, by a writer on the Journal's editorial board named Joseph Rago, winner of a Pulitzer Prize for critiques of the Affordable Care Act. He wrote that he was impressed by the prospect of individuals having more direct control of their health care; no less an eminence than former secretary of state George Shultz, a Theranos board member, had told Rago that Holmes was the next Steve Jobs or Bill Gates. By 2014, Holmes was the youngest woman billionaire ever, and the mid-2010s were electric with tech-industry success stories--the iPhone, Tesla, Airbnb, Twitter.

Back to School Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Mashable Selects Say More Look Up Trending Now Good Connection: Uplifting stories for a digital age Creator Playbook Switch Off Mashable Voices Safety Net Versus All Series Nathan Fielder and Theranos' Elizabeth Holmes have intense exchange in'You Can See Everything' doc trailer Why would I deceive you? Amanda Yeo is an Assistant Editor at Mashable, covering entertainment, culture, tech, science, and social good. Based in Australia, she writes about everything from video games and K-pop to movies and gadgets. Netflix's'Raygun' doc trailer looks to breakdance through the viral storm LAIKA's'Wildwood' trailer is the most stunning thing you'll see today Channing Tatum and Gemma Chan lead chilling trailer for Sundance hit'Josephine' A24 has released an intense teaser trailer for, an upcoming documentary about Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes. While it only shows a single exchange between Holmes and Nathan Fielder, the brief conversation/staring contest already speaks volumes.

The new artificial intelligence features Google announced just weeks ago are finally breaking through to the mainstream--albeit not in the manner Google might prefer. As you may have gleaned from recent coverage and chatter (or even experienced yourself), the autogenerated A.I. Overviews now sitting atop so many Google search results are giving answers that … well, to call them incorrect is true but doesn't quite nail it. Try surreal and ridiculous and potentially dangerous instead. Since their rollout, A.I. Overviews have told users to smoke cigarettes while pregnant, add glue to their home-baked pizza, sprinkle used antifreeze on their lawns, and boil mint in order to cure their appendicitis. To address the erroneous answers to both straightforward and jokey queries, Google appears to be addressing each incident one by one and tweaking the relevant Overviews accordingly. Still, the broken top-of-Google answers may even be spilling over into the search engine's other features, like its automatic calculator: One U.S.–based user found, posting a screenshot to X, that Google's tech couldn't even scan that the unit cm stands for centimeter, reading the measure as a whole meter.

I am behind the wheel of a Nissan Leaf, circling a parking lot, trying not to let the day's nagging worries and checklists distract me to the point of imperiling pedestrians. Like all drivers, I am unwittingly communicating my stress to this vehicle in countless subtle ways: the strength of my grip on the steering wheel, the slight expansion of my back against the seat as I breathe, the things I mutter to myself as I pilot around cars and distracted pedestrians checking their phones in the parking lot. "Hello, Corinne," a calm voice says from the audio system. The conversation that ensues offers a window into the ways in which artificial intelligence could transform our experience behind the wheel: not by driving the car for us, but by taking better care of us as we drive. Before coronavirus drastically altered our routines, three-quarters of U.S. workers--some 118 million people--commuted to the office alone in a car.

Late last year, I picked up John Carreyrou's "Bad Blood," which chronicles the long con pulled by Elizabeth Holmes, an entrepreneur who dropped out of Stanford at nineteen to found Theranos, a company that she claimed would reinvent the biomedical industry. I was instantly engrossed--"Bad Blood" unfolds like a thriller, offering a breathless barrage of details exposing how Holmes deceived her investors and colleagues at nearly every turn. Holmes wanted to disrupt the blood test: she boasted that her company was developing a method for running hundreds of lab tests from a single drop of blood, employing a machine called "The Edison" that used nanotechnology and robotics to analyze the sample. In just a few short years, thanks to Carreyrou's investigations and leaks from whistle-blowers, Holmes went from Silicon Valley's golden girl--named the youngest self-made female billionaire by Forbes--to a disgraced fraudster whose company was under investigation by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. "Bad Blood" does a formidable job charting the Theranos ordeal, but it doesn't get into Holmes's head.

This year brought no shortage of great science-themed books. Spurred by rapid advances in biotech, the writer Carl Zimmer spun a personal tale around the emerging science of heredity. Investigative reporter John Carreyrou exposed the rotten business at the heart of Theranos, the blood-testing startup built on air. Our past also proved bountiful, with books on that time we made teenage girls glow until their bones rotted (The Radium Girls), and when competing visionaries dueled over how to steward our one and only world (The Wizard and the Profit). If that all seems a bit much, we've got an escape hatch: psychedelics. Lots of them, as recounted by Michael Pollan. But those are just a few of the superb tomes to emerge in 2018.

Silicon Valley has a term for startups that reach the $1 billion valuation mark: unicorns. It suggests not only that hugely successful startups are rare, but also that there's something unreal about them. Founded by a 19-year-old Stanford dropout, Elizabeth Holmes, who went on to become the world's youngest self-made female billionaire, it raised nearly a billion dollars from investors and was valued at $10 billion at its peak. It claimed to have developed technology that dramatically increased the affordability, convenience, and speed of blood testing. It partnered with Safeway and Walgreens, which together spent hundreds of millions of dollars building in-store clinics that were to offer Theranos tests. Tens of thousands of Americans had their blood tested by its proprietary technology. The problem was that Theranos' technology was never close to ready. In a series of devastating articles published in the Wall Street Journal starting in 2015, reporter John Carreyrou reminded us that unicorns are usually found only in fairy tales.

Much of the attention has focused on Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes. But another character played a central role behind the scenes in the alleged fraud: Ms. Holmes's boyfriend, Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani, according to more than three dozen former Theranos employees who interacted with Mr. Balwani extensively over a number of years. Mr. Balwani, who met Ms. Holmes when she was a teenager, jointly ran the company with her for seven years as president and chief operating officer and enforced a corporate culture of secrecy and fear until his departure in the spring of 2016, the former employees say. Unlike Ms. Holmes and Theranos, who reached a settlement with the SEC to resolve the agency's civil charges in March without admitting or denying wrongdoing, Mr. Balwani has denied separate charges the SEC filed against him in a parallel action and is fighting them in a California federal court. A spokeswoman for Mr. Balwani provided a statement from his lawyer, Jeffrey B. Coopersmith, saying Mr. Balwani accurately represented Theranos to investors to the best of his ability, worked hard to maximize shareholder value and took on significant risk investing in the company while never benefiting financially from his work.

Last week, Business Insider reported that employees of the troubled startup Theranos had created a Space Invaders-style video game featuring the Wall Street Journal's John Carreyrou as a target. Carreyrou began reporting on the company in 2015 and revealed that Theranos was misleading investors about its technology. Theranos and CEO Elizabeth Holmes said the company could test just a small drop of blood for a number of diseases -- claims the company was never able to back up and eventually led to massive financial troubles, employee layoffs and fraud charges from the SEC. Today, Business Insider shared a video of employees playing the video game at the company. A number of people at the startup are said to blame Carreyrou for Theranos' growing problems and Vanity Fair reported in 2016 that staff erupted in a chant of, "Fuck you, Carreyrou," during a meeting.