Tech
New wave: Sea power turned into energy at Los Angeles port
Floating blue paddles dance on the waves that lap a dock in the Port of Los Angeles, silently converting the power of the sea into usable electricity.
This innovative installation may hold one of the keys to accelerating a transition away from fossil fuels that scientists say is necessary if the world is to avoid the worst effects of climate change.
“The project is very simple and easy,” Inna Braverman, co-founder of Israeli start-up Eco Wave Power, told AFP.
Looking a little like piano keys, the floaters rise and fall with each wave.
They are connected to hydraulic pistons that push a biodegradable fluid through pipes to a container filled with accumulators, which resemble large red scuba tanks.
When the pressure is released, it spins a turbine that generates electrical current.
If this pilot project convinces the California authorities, Braverman hopes to cover the entire 13-kilometer (eight-mile) breakwater protecting the port with hundreds of floaters that together would produce enough electricity to power 60,000 US homes.
Supporters of the technology say wave energy is an endlessly renewable and always reliable source of power.
Unlike solar power, which produces nothing at night, or wind power, which depends on the weather, the sea is always in motion.
And there is a lot of it.

Tough tech
The waves off the American West Coast could theoretically power 130 million homes—or supply around a third of the electricity used every year in the United States, according to the US Department of Energy.
However wave energy remains the poor relation of other, better-known renewables, and has not been successfully commercialized at a large-enough scale.
The history of the sector is full of company shipwrecks and projects sunk by the brutality of the high seas. Developing devices robust enough to withstand the fury of the waves, while transmitting electricity via underwater cables to the shore, has proven to be an impossible task so far.
“Ninety-nine percent of competitors chose to install in the middle of the ocean, where it’s super expensive, where it’s breaking down all the time, so they can’t really make projects work,” Braverman said.
With her retractable dock-mounted device, the entrepreneur believes she has found the answer.
“When the waves are too high for the system to handle, the floaters just rise to the upward position until the storm passes, so you have no damage.”
The design appeals to Krish Thiagarajan Sharman, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
“The Achilles heel of wave energy is in the costs of maintenance and inspection,” he told AFP.
“So having a device close to shore, where you can walk on a breakwater and then inspect the device, makes a lot of sense.”
Sharman, who is not affiliated with the project and whose laboratory is testing various wave energy equipment, said projects tend to be suited to smaller-scale demands, like powering remote islands.
“This eight-mile breakwater, that’s not a common thing. It’s a rare opportunity, a rare location where such a long wavefront is available for producing power,” he said.

AI power demand
Braverman’s Eco Wave Power is already thinking ahead, having identified dozens more sites in the United States that could be suitable for similar projects.
The project predates Donald Trump’s administration, but even before the political environment in Washington turned against renewables, the company was already looking beyond the US.
In Israel, up to 100 homes in the port of Jaffa have been powered by waves since December.
By 2026, 1,000 homes in Porto, Portugal should be online, with installations also planned in Taiwan and India.
Braverman dreams of 20-megawatt projects, a critical capacity needed to offer electricity at rates that can compete with wind power.
And, she said, the installations will not harm the local wildlife.
“There’s zero environmental impact. We connect to existent man-made structures, which already disturb the environment.”
Promises like this resonate in California, where the Energy Commission highlighted in a recent report the potential of wave energy to help the state achieve carbon neutrality by 2045.
“The amount of energy that we’re consuming is only increasing with the age of AI and data centers,” said Jenny Krusoe, founder of AltaSea, an organization that helped fund the project.
“So the faster we can move this technology and have it down the coastline, the better for California.”
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Tech
The 5 Big ‘Known Unknowns’ of Donald Trump’s New War With Iran
More recently, Iran has been a regular adversary in cyberspace—and while it hasn’t demonstrated quite the acuity of Russia or China, Iran is “good at finding ways to maximize the impact of their capabilities,” says Jeff Greene, the former executive assistant director of cybersecurity at CISA. Iran, in particular, famously was responsible for a series of distributed-denial-of-service attacks on Wall Street institutions that worried financial markets, and its 2012 attack on Saudi Aramco and Qatar’s Rasgas marked some of the earliest destructive infrastructure cyberattacks.
Today, surely, Iran is weighing which of these tools, networks, and operatives it might press into a response—and where, exactly, that response might come. Given its history of terror campaigns and cyberattacks, there’s no reason to think that Iran’s retaliatory options are limited to missiles alone—or even to the Middle East at all.
Which leads to the biggest known unknown of all:
5. How does this end? There’s an apocryphal story about a 1970s conversation between Henry Kissinger and a Chinese leader—it’s told variously as either Mao-Tse Tung or Zhou Enlai. Asked about the legacy of the French revolution, the Chinese leader quipped, “Too soon to tell.” The story almost surely didn’t happen, but it’s useful in speaking to a larger truth particularly in societies as old as the 2,500-year-old Persian empire: History has a long tail.
As much as Trump (and the world) might hope that democracy breaks out in Iran this spring, the CIA’s official assessment in February was that if Khamenei was killed, he would be likely replaced with hardline figures from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. And indeed, the fact that Iran’s retaliatory strikes against other targets in the Middle East continued throughout Saturday, even after the death of many senior regime officials—including, purportedly, the defense minister—belied the hope that the government was close to collapse.
The post-World War II history of Iran has surely hinged on three moments and its intersections with American foreign policy—the 1953 CIA coup, the 1979 revolution that removed the shah, and now the 2026 US attacks that have killed its supreme leader. In his recent bestselling book King of Kings, on the fall of the shah, longtime foreign correspondent Scott Anderson writes of 1979, “If one were to make a list of that small handful of revolutions that spurred change on a truly global scale in the modern era, that caused a paradigm shift in the way the world works, to the American, French, and Russian Revolutions might be added the Iranian.”
It is hard not to think today that we are living through a moment equally important in ways that we cannot yet fathom or imagine—and that we should be especially wary of any premature celebration or declarations of success given just how far-reaching Iran’s past turmoils have been.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has repeatedly bragged about how he sees the military and Trump administration’s foreign policy as sending a message to America’s adversaries: “F-A-F-O,” playing off the vulgar colloquialism. Now, though, it’s the US doing the “F-A” portion in the skies over Iran—and the long arc of Iran’s history tells us that we’re a long, long way from the “F-O” part where we understand the consequences.
Let us know what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor at mail@wired.com.
Tech
This Backyard Smoker Delivers Results Even a Pitmaster Would Approve Of
While my love of smoked meats is well-documented, my own journey into actually tending the fire started just last spring when I jumped at the opportunity to review the Traeger Woodridge Pro. When Recteq came calling with a similar offer to check out the Flagship 1600, I figured it would be a good way to stay warm all winter.
While the two smokers have a lot in common, the Recteq definitely feels like an upgrade from the Traeger I’ve been using. Not only does it have nearly twice the cooking space, but the huge pellet hopper, rounded barrel, and proper smokestack help me feel like a real pitmaster.
The trade-off is losing some of the usability features that make the Woodridge Pro a great first smoker. The setup isn’t as quite as simple, and the larger footprint and less ergonomic conditions require a little more experience or patience. With both options, excellent smoked meat is just a few button presses away, but speaking as someone with both in their backyard, I’ve been firing up the Recteq more often.
Getting Settled
Photograph: Brad Bourque
Setting up the Recteq wasn’t as time-consuming as the Woodridge, but it was more difficult to manage on my own. Some of the steps, like attaching the bull horns to the lid, or flipping the barrel onto its stand, would really benefit from a patient friend or loved one. Like most smokers, you’ll need to run a burn-in cycle at 400 degrees Fahrenheit to make sure there’s nothing left over from manufacturing or shipping. Given the amount of setup time and need to cool down the smoker after, I would recommend setting this up Friday afternoon if you want to smoke on a Saturday.
Tech
Make the Most of Chrome’s Toolbar by Customizing It to Your Liking
The main job of Google Chrome is to give you a window to the web. With so much engaging content out there on the internet, you may not have given much thought to the browser framework that serves as the container for the sites you visit.
You’d be forgiven for still using the default toolbar configuration that was in place when you first installed Chrome. But if you take a few minutes to customize it, it can make a significant difference to your browsing. You can get quicker access to the key features you need, and you may even discover features you didn’t know about.
If you’re reading this in Chrome on the desktop, you can experiment with a few customizations right now—all it takes is a few clicks. Here’s how the toolbar in Chrome is put together, and all the different changes you can make.
The Default Layout
Take a look up at the top right corner of your Chrome browser tab and you’ll see two key buttons: One reveals your browser extensions (the jigsaw piece), and the other opens up your bookmarks (the double-star icon). There should also be a button showing a downward arrow, which gives you access to recently downloaded files.
Right away, you can start customizing. If you click the jigsaw piece icon to show your browser extensions, you can also click the pin button next to any one of these extensions to make it permanently visible on the toolbar. While you don’t want your toolbar to become too cluttered, it means you can put your most-used add-ons within easy reach.
For the extension icons you choose to have on the toolbar, you can choose the way they’re arranged, too: Click and drag on any of the icons to change its position (though the extensions panel itself has to stay in the same place). To remove an extension icon (without uninstalling the extension), right-click on it and choose Unpin.
Making Changes
Click the three dots up in the top right corner of any browser window and then Settings > Appearance > Customize your toolbar to get to the main toolbar customization panel, which has recently been revamped. Straight away you’ll see toggle switches that let you show or hide certain buttons on the toolbar.
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