Gadgets on Mars

Gadgets on Mars

Hey, did you know that the new Mars rover is really cool? Its eyes see crazy different colors! It shoots out a helicopter drone! It can vaporize rocks with a laser! Plus, Perseverance traveled more than 292 million miles through space, so that makes it just about the best gadget ever.

This week on Gadget Lab, WIRED senior correspondent Adam Rogers joins us to talk about all the wild tech built into Perseverance and what the big deal about Mars is anyway. Then a very special guest crashes the show to talk about cheese.

Show Notes:

Read Adam’s story about the cameras on the Perseverance rover. Watch the video of the landing and read about it here. Read more about the LA musician who helped design the microphones on the rover here. Read Gilad Edelman on the health benefits of cheese. Preorder Adam’s book, Full Spectrum: How the Science of Color Made Us Modern, here.

Recommendations:

Adam recommends granite tile drill bits for drilling through metal. Lauren recommends Vigorous Innovations massage gun. Mike recommends the tech news website Rest of World. Gilad Edelman recommends cheese, of course.

Adam Rogers can be found on Twitter @jetjocko. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is @snackfight. Gilad Edelman is @GiladEdelman. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). Our theme music is by Solar Keys.

If you have feedback about the show, or just want to enter to win a $50 gift card, take our brief listener survey here.

WIRED Brand Lab is a creative studio from the publisher of WIRED. The WIRED newsroom is not involved in the creation of Brand Lab content.

Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Jaksot(426)

How to Quit Your Tech Job

How to Quit Your Tech Job

Jessica Powell was the top communications executive at Google when she found herself Googling, in no uncertain search terms, how to quit her job at Google. She tried approximately 837 different tactic...

8 Maalis 201953min

Alex Kipman’s Holographic Tendencies

Alex Kipman’s Holographic Tendencies

Microsoft just unveiled a brand new product, but it really doesn’t want to hype it. That’s according to Alex Kipman, technical fellow at Microsoft who is credited with inventing Kinect and HoloLens. K...

1 Maalis 201952min

You’ve Got to Know When to Fold ‘Em

You’ve Got to Know When to Fold ‘Em

At its flagship phone event this week in San Francisco, Samsung announced not one but four different versions of the new Galaxy S10: A phone with a 6.1-inch display, a plus-sized model, a “less expens...

23 Helmi 201942min

The Treacherous Allure of OG Usernames

The Treacherous Allure of OG Usernames

Product designer and internet native Chris Messina was lucky enough to snag the username @chris on Instagram back when Instagram was known as Burbn, and, like all of his early usernames, it became a p...

15 Helmi 201959min

The App Smackdown

The App Smackdown

Move fast and break app store rules: That very well may have been Facebook’s motto for awhile now, only, we’re just learning about it this week. After TechCrunch reported that Facebook was sidesteppin...

1 Helmi 201949min

Amazon Delivery Bots Are Here

Amazon Delivery Bots Are Here

Kids are particularly terrible for robots. At least, that’s what researchers in Japan discovered when they let a robot roam around a shopping center in Osaka in 2015. A group of kids antagonized the r...

25 Tammi 201942min

Nike’s Truly Smart Sneakers

Nike’s Truly Smart Sneakers

Self-lacing sneakers have been the dream since Marty McFly first rocked Nike MAGs in 1989, but most attempts at turning shoe leather into smart sneakers have been expensive, produced in small batches,...

19 Tammi 201946min

The Best of CES

The Best of CES

We came. We saw. We touched a lot of gadgets. This week was the annual CES, one of the world’s largest consumer electronics show, and WIRED’s team was on the ground covering all of the top tech trends...

12 Tammi 201952min