Tabla de contenidos para Winter 2025 en WIRED UK

ASIDE FROM A MAGA hat, there is likely no object that feels more emblematic of US president Donald Trump’s return to the White House than the Tesla Cybertruck. The blunt angles and steel doors look futuristic, for sure, but only if the future looks a lot like RoboCop. To some, it’s a metallic status symbol. To others, it’s fascism on wheels. Either way, heads turn. Cybertruck owners see things differently. “To me, it’s just a vehicle that I love,” says Andrew Castillo, a stock trader from Los Angeles. “It has no political affiliations at all to me.” We’re standing in the parking lot of McCormick’s Palm Springs Classic Car Auctions. All around us, a dozen Cybertruck owners—and their cars—bake in the 100 degree heat. They’ve arrived for a meetup…

WANT A WATCH strap that’s as comfortable as fabric, as light as rubber, as strong as a metal bracelet, and as tactile as a Milanese mesh? Malaysian indie brand Ming appears to now offer the best of all worlds. The one strap to rule them all has been dubbed the Polymesh. It is 3D-printed from grade 5 titanium and comprises 1,693 interconnected pieces (including the buckle), held together without any pins or screws. The only additional parts requiring assembly are the quick-release spring bars that attach it to the watch—even the articulated pin buckle is also formed in the same 3D-printing process as the strap. Cofounder Ming Thein says the strap, made up of rows of 15 equilateral triangles meshed together and bookended by larger end pieces, “has more motion…

52.3676° N, 4.9041° E Adaptive ML Adaptive ML, founded in 2023 by Baptiste Pannier, Julien Launay, and Daniel Hesslow, is shipping a platform that demystifies preference tuning (the technique for training language models to align with human preferences). The aim is to help enterprises to launch LLM-based tools—chat, support, research—that actually learn from usage. The promise of helping to deliver more intuitive, stickier genAI to businesses has garnered $20 million in seed funding from the likes of Index Ventures, ICONIQ Capital, and Motier Ventures. adaptive-ml.com Agurotech Much of modern farming still relies on guesswork. Agurotech, founded in 2020 by Lilia Planjyan and Joëlle van den Brand, turns messy field data into clear, real-time advice—when to water, where disease might strike, what the soil actually needs. It draws from publicly available…

60.1699° N, 24.9384° E IXI IXI is developing autofocus eyewear for people with bifocals, correcting vision at both long and short distances. IXI’s frames use a low power eye tracker to calculate which direction the wearer is looking. An electric field then rotates crystals inside a liquid crystal lens to adjust focus. The processing power unit is located on the nose bridge, but the glasses are the size and weight of a typical pair. A seed round in 2021 raised $4.4m from Maki.vc, First Fellow Partners, Amazon Alexa Fund, and Firstminute Capital, followed this April by a $36.5m A round led by Plural. ixieyewear.com Solid IO Only 20 to 40 percent of cancer patients respond to immunotherapy. The drugs involved can trigger severe auto-immune reactions, so predicting a patient’s response…

48.8575° N, 2.3514° E Entalpic Leveraging tens of millions of data points drawn from lab experiments at the quantum level, Entalpic’s platform analyzes manufacturing processes down to the molecule. Computer simulations can suggest a novel electrode material for a battery cell company, or a more sustainable solvent for a chemistry conglomerate. By focusing on the microscopic, CEO Mathieu Galtier says Entalpic can help cut emissions at a macro scale. “Chemistry is nature’s most intricate puzzle—too complex for human intuition alone. Our AI squeezes more chemistry from every molecule, saving raw materials.” Since raising €8.5m in a September 2024 seed round, Entalpic, founded by Galtier, Alexandre Duval, and Victor Schmidt, has launched research with the likes of the French Institute of Petroleum and France Chimie, the national federation for the French…

Huspy More than one in four residential financing transactions in Dubai—one of the hottest real estate markets in the world—are processed through Huspy, a proptech startup founded in 2020 by CEO Jad Antoun and Khalid Ashmawy. Huspy gives mortgage brokers and real-estate agents a single platform to process and manage all aspects of home buying—from scheduling viewings to closing a purchase deal. In 2024, Huspy, which is currently available in the UAE, Spain, and soon in the KSA, registered double-digit monthly growth. huspy.com Calo “A third of the population in the GCC region has some form of obesity or diabetes.” Says Ahmed Alrawi, cofounder and CEO of healthy ready meal subscription service, Calo. Customers can sign up for monthly plans and personalize them according to specific requirements. Available in…

In 2021, a queer police officer in Morocco saw his phone confiscated by colleagues, who accessed his photos and chats. This evidence was later used to prosecute him in court for “lewd or unnatural acts”. He lost his job and his home. That same year, in Beirut, a trans Lebanese woman was stopped by the police and pressured to unlock her phone. “If you don’t open the phone, We will put you in a room on your own where you will rot,” she was warned. The police officers shared her private photos and videos among themselves and tortured her. She was also later prosecuted for “acts against nature”. These are just a couple of stories that our organization, The De|Center, has uncovered, illustrating how routine—and central—device access has become to…

52.5200° N, 13.4050° E Trawa After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, friends David Budde, Robert Quick, and Max Lüddemann saw small and mid-sized companies overwhelmed by volatile electricity costs. In 2022, they founded trawa to help businesses cut bills. Trawa audits contracts and switches clients to cheaper tariffs, and its software analyzes real-time consumption, spotting inefficiencies like idle equipment or peak-time use. Then, trawa installs on-site batteries, connects them to existing systems, and controls when to charge or discharge—reducing grid fees by avoiding high-cost hours. Backed by a total of €34m from investors like Headline and Speedinvest, trawa powers 3,000 sites in Germany and Austria. trawa.de Integral Integral envisions a future where SMEs fully outsource accounting, tax, and payroll, so they can focus on growing their businesses. Founded in late 2024…

38.7223° N, 9.1393° W DOJO AI DOJO AI, founded by Duarte Garrido and Antonio Alegria in 2024, provides companies with a team of AI agents that can do the job of a marketing team. “It is essentially a full stack marketing agency at your disposal, in the form of AI Agents cooperating together on a data engine that is a digital twin of your whole marketing operation,” Garrido says. “You can ask questions like, ‘Help me outrank my competitor in SEO in two weeks’. Dojo can do it all.” With $1m raised in a pre-seed round, DOJO AI is already used by more than 20 companies, primarily in the US and the UK. usedojo.ai NOXUS Noxus helps companies build their own AI workforce. “Many sizable organizations—especially those with established business…

59.3327° N, 18.0656° E Tandem Health When Lukas Saari worked for McKinsey’s Healthcare Analytics he was taken aback by a particular statistic. “I found it insane how clinicians on average spend 40 percent of their time on administrative tasks,” he says. “Three percent of the global GDP is spent on just admin in healthcare.” In 2023, he launched Tandem Health, an AI medical assistant for clinicians which can transcribe notes from patient doctor meetings and create a medical note draft. Tandem is currently being used in more than a thousand clinics across the Nordics, UK, Germany, France, and the Middle East and has raised a $9.5m seed round led by Northzone, alongside angel investors from OpenAI and Deepmind. “We see the AI medical scribe as the first step towards…

In 2025, we saw online extremist communities proliferate faster and more widely, targeting younger people than ever before. Last year, between 40 to 50 percent of people referred to de-radicalization services in the UK were aged between 11 and 15. Across western democracies, one in five arrests for terrorism involve adolescents under 18. Extremist movements—whether right-wing, left-wing, nationalistic, ecoterrorist, or religious—often prey on young minds searching for identity and connection. In 2025, this became more pronounced in new ways, with extremist communities starting to explicitly and exclusively target adolescents aged 15 to 18 on the platforms and channels they use. For instance, the white supremacist Youth Clubs—who often mix violent neo-Nazi rhetoric with sports training—only started gaining a presence on Telegram and TikTok in 2025. In 2026, these processes will…

In 2026, researchers will push forward an idea that once seemed fringe: that menstrual blood—long stigmatized and often discarded—could become a cornerstone of regenerative medicine. Scientists are now isolating potent mesenchymal stromal cells (MSCs) from menstrual fluid, and using them to treat everything from endometriosis to degenerative diseases. Unlike embryonic stem cells, which have been at the center of decades of political and ethical controversy, or hard-to-access cells from bone marrow, MSCs derived from period blood are easy to access and abundant. These powerful cells can modulate inflammation, stimulate tissue repair, and differentiate into fat, bone, and cartilage cells. In the coming year, researchers will be using them in research to mitigate diseases from stroke and liver disease to Alzheimer’s. One of the pioneers of this research is Caroline Gargett,…

MY LITTLE THEORY is that the concept of “imprinting” in psychology can just as easily be applied to programming: Much as a baby goose decides that the first moving life-form it encounters is its parent, embryonic programmers form ineradicable attachments to the patterns and quiddities of their first formative language. For many people, that language is Ruby. It’s often credited with making programming “click”; imprintees speak of it with a certain indebtedness and affection. I get that. I wrote my first “Hello world” in an awful thing called Java, but programming only began to feel intuitive when I learned JavaScript (I know, I know) and OCaml—both of which fundamentally shaped my tastes. I arrived somewhat late to Ruby. It wasn’t until my fourth job that I found myself on a…

Nanuk 910 10-Watch Case Designed to carry 10 watches in absolute safety, Nanuk’s IP67 waterproof and dustproof NK-7 resin watch case with patented PowerClaw latching system is ideal for securing any timepiece collection, be it bargain or big budget. The cross-linked polyethylene foam interior comes precut, and the case itself boasts a lifetime warranty. It even has two reinforced metal eyelets that accommodate TSA-compliant case locks for additional security. $175 nanuk.com 1. Hamilton Khaki Field Mechanical 38mm Hamilton has had more big-screen-time than almost any other watch brand. Look closely in 2001: A Space Odyssey, Tenet, Indiana Jones, and Men in Black, and you’ll spot one. Which brings us to this elegant 38-mm field watch with its 80-hour H-50 caliber movement, three-hand display, and luminescent numerals. And no, you’re not…

51.5072° N, 0.1276° W Yonder Cofounded by Tim Chong, Harry Jell, and Theso Jivajirajah in 2020, Yonder offers consumers what they call a “credit card for the digital native generation”. Currently, its more than 40,000 UK users can use debit and credit cards with nationwide rewards that include local premium experiences which change monthly—in May it included tickets to Beyoncé, The Great Gatsby, and dining at restaurants such as BAO, Miznon, and The Water House Project. “The breakthrough is instant redemption: pay with your Yonder card at any curated experience, then swipe the points away in-app, no coupons or QR codes,” says Chong. The startup, which has raised more than £62m, has also launched points-for-flights program Yonder Flights, and is planning to expand into Europe in 2026. “We’re betting on…

53.3498° N, 6.2603° W Tines Tines’ automation platform for IT and security teams offers a menu of eight common commands, letting users create simple automated tasks. February saw a €120m Series C round led by Goldman Sachs and Softbank, valuing the company at €1bn, and making it Dublin’s eleventh unicorn. The money funded an AI agent, launched in June. This has two roles—monitoring and patching vulnerabilities as well as, through its chatbot, handling requests and alerts from employees. Tines has 400 customers, including Reddit, GitLab, and Coinbase. tines.com VisionR VisionR offers brick- and mortar stores a plug- and play computer vision camera, called Scout, which can analyze shopping behavior. It records footfall, dwell time, activity within store, and which products they engage with. Founded by schoolfriends Mulvey and Shane O’Sullivan,…

40.4167° N, 3.7033° W Vitaance Vitaance was founded by Ana Zamora and Christian Rochas in 2021 after Zamora, who worked in health insurance, noticed that many company benefits weren’t used by employees. “Traditional benefits programs are outdated,” she explains. “They lack personalization, generate low engagement, and overwhelm HR teams with admin.” Backed by Mastercard, Vitaance offers an app which lets employees pay for tax deductible benefits, from meals to public transport and childcare. For taxable benefits, like gym membership, or physiotherapy, employees have an allowance in virtual cash called a Well-being Balance: they can pay up front then claim back through the app, which scans receipts and issues refunds. The company’s customers include WeWork, Kayak, and Bamboo Energy, and it has raised €5.6 million across angel and seed rounds.…

47.3769° N, 8.5417° E Lakera “We’re entering an era of autonomous AI agents making critical decisions in our lives and businesses”, says Lakera CEO David Haber. This brings new threats, such as prompt injection attacks, where hackers trick a company’s own chatbots or AI tools into revealing sensitive information. Lakera acts as a protective layer, detecting and blocking such threats in real time. Based in both Zurich and San Francisco, it has raised $30m, while its viral side project, Gandalf—a game where users try to trick the AI into revealing a password—has attracted over a million players. lakera.ai Saipient Saipient’s AI assistant “Isaac” can automatically summarize patient records and generate consultation reports—giving doctors more time to focus on patients. Founded in 2024 by entrepreneurs and experts in healthcare and AI,…

Welcome to an exclusive preview of what’s next, from the smartest thinkers in the WIRED network Life expectancy consistently increased across the past century—until the last five years, when we saw the first instances of decline. In the US, for instance, life expectancy dropped from 78.8 years in 2019 to 76.4 years by 2022, due to the pandemic, chronic diseases, violence, and drug overdoses. The United Kingdom saw a similar decline, with male life expectancy falling to 78.6 years in 2020–2022, down from 79.2 in 2017–2019. These numbers revealed more than the impact of Covid—they exposed deep-seated public health challenges with stagnation in years alive starting prior to 2020. These recent trends are alarming healthcare policymakers around the world. That’s why, in 2026, governments will be increasingly focused on not…

2026 will be the year when US dollar dilution—the quiet erosion of its global dominance as countries trade and pay in alternatives—starts to build momentum. America’s share of global trade has fallen from one-third in 2000 to just one-quarter today. As emerging economies trade more with each other, the dollar is less central to the flow of goods. Indian and Russian trade now settles in rupees, dirhams, and yuan. More than half of China’s trade now moves through CIPS, China’s own cross-border payment system, instead of SWIFT—the global messaging network long dominated by Western banks. Other trading partners like Brazil–Argentina, UAE–India, and Indonesia–Malaysia are also piloting local currency settlements. Central banks around the world are starting to accumulate currencies other than the dollar as reserves. The dollar made up 72…