Mike Seymour goes behind the visual effects that earned “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” an Oscar nod. See how Industrial Light & Magic crafted complex action sequences, detailed environments, and realistic characters with the help of advanced motion-capture technology and performances from actors like Lupita Nyong’o.

The stargazer spends its entire life looking like it just walked in on something...unseemly. The fish, which ambushes prey from the sea floor, also sports venomous spines and an electric shock.

The Super Bowl is as much about the commercials as it is the football, but this year the ads weren't made for your big TV.

About what you said last night ...

Amazon Studios’ “The Man in the High Castle” take places in an alternate history, set in a post-WWII world where the Axis powers ended up victorious. To create the look of a United States run by Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany, Zoic Studios was tasked with creating difficult visual effects and environment work. Find out how they did it.

And one was nearly 7 feet tall.

There's a terrifying hunter lurking on the bottom of tropical seas. It's called the bobbit worm, and it can destroy.

Meet the tarsier, the wide-eyed staring contest champ of the animal world. Its eyes have evolved to be so enormous, it can’t even move them in its head. Which means you can say whatever you want to a tarsier and it can’t roll its eyes at you.

The shrike may look like a songbird but the only tunes it knows are METAL! The cute little bird kills its prey then impales them on spikes.

The pygmy seahorse is cute, that much is clear. It’s got amazing camo. Also clear. But the big mystery: How on Earth it changes to so perfectly match its surroundings.

The Oculus Rift is now shipping. Four years of intense work led to this moment. WIRED got to look at some of the early prototypes that would have never made it to market.

The Fennec fox is the smallest, and arguably the cutest, fox on earth. Its enormous ears make it look like a cartoon character and help it hear prey and keep cool.

WhatsApp just made the scope of the Apple-FBI encryption battle look kinda small. WIRED's senior staff writer, Cade Metz, breaks down exactly why this is a big deal.

The morning after his big win in the Wisconsin primary, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz took his campaign to New York's Bronx borough.

Fair warning. This video is about the botfly's horrific larvae, which grow and feed in human flesh. Don't say we didn't warn you.

The Werkstatt-01 from Moog Music is a synthesizer you build yourself. It's also a valuable tool for learning how these mystical analog machines work. It'll cost you around $200.

Look at the nudibranch. Beautiful, right? That's its way of saying it will mess you up. You see, the nudibranch packs a punch–in a very unusual way

The world's hottest startup isn't located in Silicon Valley–it's in suburban Florida. WIRED explores what Magic Leap's mind-bending technology tells us about the future of virtual reality.

There are thousands of strains of weed. Cracking their genetic codes may be the key to transforming pot from a budding business to a high-flying industry and a cannabis analytics lab is trying to unlock the true potential of weed. Pictures by Preston Gannaway.

Hey listen, we’re all lopsided. You’d look weird as hell if you were perfectly symmetrical. But the strawberry squid is really lopsided, with one tiny eye and one giant eye.

The silky anteater isn't high. It's just tired, because this proficient nocturnal hunter has no business being up during the day.

The hydra's got kind of a jellyfish thing going on, with tentacles it uses to snag prey. But this tiny freshwater creature regenerates itself over and over again.

The frogfish is a vicious hunter that swallows its victims whole, but it doesn’t really bite its prey. By rapidly expanding its mouth to 10 times its normal volume, the predator creates a vacuum that sucks victims in.

Screen printing is the pinnacle of DIY culture. We're going to show you how to make your own design and screen it onto whatever you'd like. You’ll need to block out a few hours, and you'll need to have a design or logo in mind to print.

Our childhood hermit crab has a rather more … sizable cousin: the 3-foot-wide, 9-pound coconut crab that can rip coconuts and sometimes, well, kittens to pieces.

Kids swallow a lot of batteries. But now MIT researchers are developing swallowable origami to fish the nasty foreign objects out.

For a bird called the kingfisher, stealth, dive-bombing and impalement is a way of life.

At the top of the list of people who know how to rule social media there are two very important groups: comedians and celebrities. The Lonely Island team—Andy Samberg, Jorma Taccone, and Akiva Schaffer—actually belong to both of those groups. So WIRED asked them for hot tips on how to rule Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat.

When the new Kings basketball stadium is completed this fall, they hope it’ll be so outrageously technologically advanced that it will even wow fans from Silicon Valley.

The binturong has a prehensile tail, crazy feet, and excretes a scent that smells like popcorn. Just call it Orville Smellenbacher.

Travis Fimmel, Paula Patton, Toby Kebbell, and Robert Kazinsky answer the web's most searched questions about themselves and World of Warcraft.

For gamers, World of Warcraft represents a massive universe in which they’ve spent many hours. But for many moviegoers, WoW’s Azeroth is a completely foreign place they know nothing about. So for his new movie, Warcraft, director Duncan Jones—a gamer himself—had to create a world that would bring in new fans and make long-time WoW players feel like they were coming home. In this interview with WIRED, he explains how he worked with Industrial Light & Magic to make that happen.

Think orcs don’t have barbers? Think again. Gaelle Morand and her team at Industrial Light & Magic spent hours perfecting the hair on all of Warcraft’s characters. Here’s how they made “Haircraft” happen.

It’s called a remora, and you’ve probably seen it before. It attaches to fish and marine mammals all the time. But get this: It doesn’t attach with its mouth. It’s got a suction cup it wears as a hat.

For a tiny arthropod called a globular springtail, life is about being generally spherical and generally pissed-looking.

The tree kangaroo may have shrunken hind legs, but hey, at least it can walk backwards unlike regular roos. Oh, also: It can plummet out of trees and not suffer the consequences.

What is creativity to you? In the world of business it's all about bravery and collaboration.

In South America, the peanut bug ambles around with a goofy-ass head. And that’s not its only clever defense against the bullies of the rainforest.

Want to know how crickets are farmed and turned into powder? Of course you do. You'll be eating the stuff soon enough.

The sea spider isn’t actually a spider, but it’s genitals are on its legs. Which is nice.

Find out how NASA’s Juno Mission will help unlock the mysteries of our planet and our solar system.

May I introduce you to the rotifer, a magical microscopic critter that uses a buzz saw to suck its victims into its face.

Say hello to the secretary bird. It’s a bird of prey, but it ain’t doing no swooping. Instead, it kicks the everloving crap out of its victims.

Meet the bizarre sea pig, a kind of sea cucumber that walks along the sea floor on little squishy feet. Oh, and it shoves dead things into its mouth with tentacles.

The agouti ain’t no sewer rat: It’s actually a pivotal part of the rainforest ecosystem. Like a weird-looking squirrel, really.

Human eyes haven’t seen the USS Independence, which fought ferocious battles in the Pacific Theater, for 65 years. But now, thanks to the wonders of remotely operated vehicles, it’s coming into view off the coast of San Francisco.

To promote the upcoming MTV Video Music Awards, a pair of helicopters cruised over the Hudson. One towed a 250-foot-wide banner, and a second flew behind it at an angle, beaming video onto the banner from a few hundred feet away.

Krige Schabort is gearing up for his ultimate paratriathlon at his sixth and final Paralympics in Rio. WIRED takes a look at the high tech bike that's going to get him over the finish line.

Meet the decorator and urchin crabs, crafty little critters that don’t just sit around waiting to get eaten. They deck themselves out with some serious outfits.

Design FX dives into the incredible special effects of BBC America's Orphan Black. Mike Seymour breaks down how the team at Intelligent Creatures and Emmy Award nominated actress Tatiana Maslany work together to create convincing clones; with a combination of visual effects, rotoscoping, and incredible acting ability.