TBT: Meet the carousing Texan who won a Nobel prize for his cancer breakthrough

PLUS: The best WIRED stories from this month a year ago. View this email in your browser  10.03.19 For more than 100 years, medical researchers puzzled over why the immune system doesn't fight cancer the way it fights even the common cold. Then this hard-living, harmonica-playing Texan discovered the answer, and his research may save millions of lives. Read all about his Nobel Prize–winning cancer breakthrough, plus the best WIRED stories from this month a year ago below.   Meet the Carousing Texan Who Won a Nobel Prize Jim Allison is an iconoclastic scientist who toiled in obscurity for years. Then he helped crack a mystery that may save millions of lives: Why doesn't the immune system attack cancer? The Best Stories From This Month, Last Year I Bought Used Voting Machines on eBay for $100 Apiece. What I Found Was Alarming Opinion: The fact that voter information is left, unencrypted, on devices that are then sold on the open market is malpractice. I Ditched Google for Bing. Here's What I Found—and What I Didn't I spent the last few months using Bing instead of Google for search. It's a whole new world, but not always for the better. Humans Just Can't Stop Rear-Ending Self-Driving Cars—Let's Figure Out Why Human drivers (and one cyclist) have rear-ended self-driving cars 28 times this year in California—accounting for nearly two-thirds of robocar crashes. Jeff Bezos Wants Us All to Leave Earth—for Good At Blue Origin, Amazon's space-obsessed founder is building rockets, and he hopes to someday blast humanity into an extraterrestrial future. The Insane Physics of Airbags In a collision, a car's airbag has a tiny fraction of a second in which to inflate—which is why airbags use explosives. It's Time to Talk About Robot Gender Stereotypes How gender biases manifest in the design of voice assistants is well-worn territory. But scientists are just beginning to consider how these gender biases materialize in physical robots. GET WIRED Get 1 year of WIRED access for just $10.   When information is cheap, context is more valuable than ever.   Subscribe now     This e-mail was sent to you by WIRED. To ensure delivery to your inbox (not bulk or junk folders), please add our e-mail address, wired@newsletters.wired.com, to your address book.   View our Privacy Policy Unsubscribe or manage your newsletter subscriptions