What's on Your Mind?

When you think of dangerous jobs, an office job that requires you to sit for hours probably doesn’t come to mind. And while many jobs are objectively riskier, a sedentary job can pose a serious risk to your health. The average office worker spends 70% of their workday sitting down, according to data by workplace supplies firm Banner. Yet, research shows that sitting for prolonged periods without any physical activity significantly increases the risk of ill effects such as high blood pressure, numerous musculoskeletal issues, and potentially heart disease. All in all, a desk job increases your risk of mortality by 16%, according to a study published by JAMA. Our ma…

While Silicon Valley argues over bubbles, benchmarks, and who has the smartest model, Anthropic has been focused on solving problems that rarely generate hype but ultimately determine adoption: whether AI can be trusted to operate inside the world’s most sensitive systems. Known for its safety-first posture and the Claude family of large language models (LLMs), Anthropic is placing its biggest strategic bets where AI optimism tends to collapse fastest, i.e., regulated industries. Rather than framing Claude as a consumer product, the company has positioned its models as core enterprise infrastructure—software expected to run for hours, sometimes days, inside healthcare…

At the Consumer Electronics Show in early January, Razer made waves by unveiling a small jar containing a holographic anime bot designed to accompany gamers not just during gameplay, but in daily life. The lava-lamp-turned-girlfriend is undeniably bizarre—but Razer’s vision of constant, sometimes sexualized companionship is hardly an outlier in the AI market. Mustafa Suleyman, Microsoft’s AI CEO, who has long emphasized the distinction between AI with personality and AI with personhood, now suggests that AI companions will “live life alongside you—an ever-present friend helping you navigate life’s biggest challenges.” Others have gone further. Last year, a leaked…

Generative AI was trained on centuries of art and writing produced by humans. But scientists and critics have wondered what would happen once AI became widely adopted and started training on its outputs. A new study points to some answers. In January 2026, artificial intelligence researchers Arend Hintze, Frida Proschinger Åström, and Jory Schossau published a study showing what happens when generative AI systems are allowed to run autonomously—generating and interpreting their own outputs without human intervention. The researchers linked a text-to-image system with an image-to-text system and let them iterate—image, caption, image, caption—over and over …

The Grammy Awards return February 1 at a pivotal moment for the music industry, one shaped by trending Latin artists, resurgent rock legends, and even charting AI acts. To unpack what will make this year’s broadcast distinctive, the Recording Academy CEO Harvey Mason Jr. shares how Grammy winners are chosen, and how music both reflects and influences the broader business marketplace. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by former Fast Company editor-in-chief Robert Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with today’s top business leaders navigating real-time challenge…

January arrives with a familiar hangover. Too much food. Too much drink. Too much screen time. And suddenly social media is full of green juices, charcoal supplements, foot patches, and seven-day “liver resets,” all promising to purge the body of mysterious toxins and return it to a purer state. In the first episode of Strange Health, a new visualized podcast from The Conversation, hosts Katie Edwards and Dr. Dan Baumgardt put detox culture under the microscope and ask a simple question: Do we actually need to detox at all? Strange Health explores the weird, surprising, and sometimes alarming things our bodies do. Each episode takes a popular health or welln…

Many people spend an incredible amount of time worrying about how to be more successful in life. But what if that’s the wrong question? What if the real struggle for lots of us isn’t how to be successful, but how to actually feel successful? That’s the issue lots of strivers truly face, according to ex-Googler turned neuroscientist and author Anne-Laure Le Cunff. In her book Tiny Experiments, she explores how to get off the treadmill of constantly chasing the next milestone, and instead find joy in the process of growth and uncertainty. “You’re probably doing better than you give yourself credit for,” she explained on LinkedIn recently, before offering 10 telltal…

It’s 7:45 a.m. in the office. Someone bounces in, already back from the gym, already through their emails. Cheerfully asks if everyone’s “okay” because it’s so quiet and people seem a bit tired. Around the office, people clutch coffee like a life raft, waiting for their brains to come online and cursing the 8 a.m. meeting. And the cheerful colleague. But at least they got in early enough to find parking and grab coffee before it ran out—this time. Now: which person are you? The early riser, or the one watching them, wondering why you can never feel that awake at this hour no matter how hard you try? Those clutching their strong brews are probably not just tire…

We have been taught to segment people into neat design personas: young versus old, able-bodied versus disabled, patient versus caregiver. Those categories may help on a spreadsheet, but they rarely reflect real life. Ability is not a fixed identity. It is a state that shifts across hours, seasons, and decades. Most people are not “disabled” or “able bodied.” They are navigating a continuum. A parent carrying a toddler, a traveler pulling luggage, a cook with wet hands, someone recovering from surgery, a person with arthritis on a cold morning, an older adult managing fatigue at the end of the day. These are not edge cases. They are the mainstream experience of modern …

Ads already follow you wherever you go. They’re on your TV, your phone, your train car—even on your airline tray table and escalator. Now, they’ll soon be in your chatbot, too. OpenAI announced last week that it will begin selling ads in ChatGPT. The move opens up a potentially massive revenue source for OpenAI—and is a huge threat to Google’s world-dominating ad empire. Here’s why. ChatGPT, Sell Me a Toaster For years, OpenAI has resisted the siren song of advertising and has kept its chatbot largely open to the world. That’s gone well for the company. Offering a massively valuable product for free has been, unsurprisingly, popular. ChatGPT n…

The European Union opened a formal investigation into Elon Musk’s social media platform X on Monday after his artificial intelligence chatbot Grok spewed nonconsensual sexualized deepfake images on the platform. European regulators also widened a separate, ongoing investigation into X’s recommendation systems after the platform said it would switch to Grok’s AI system to choose which posts users see. The scrutiny from Brussels comes after Grok sparked a global backlash by allowing users through its AI image generation and editing capabilities to undress people, putting females in transparent bikinis or revealing clothing. Researchers said some images appeared to include…

The brothers operated in the glitz and glamour of the Hamptons and South Beach. Two were high-end real estate brokers dubbed “The A Team.” The third went to law school and ran their family’s private security firm, which caters to heads of state and the rich and famous. They frequented nightclubs, cruised on yachts and flew on private jets. One lived alongside celebrities and corporate titans on Manhattan’s Billionaires’ Row. The others had multimillion-dollar waterfront mansions in Miami. But behind their posh, peripatetic facade, prosecutors say, Tal, Oren and Alon Alexander — known collectively as the Alexander Brothers — were predators who sexually assaulted, traffic…

Your watch says you had three hours of deep sleep. Should you believe it? Millions of people rely on phone apps and wearable devices like rings, smartwatches and sensors to monitor how well they’re sleeping, but these trackers don’t necessarily measure sleep directly. Instead, they infer states of slumber from signals like heart rate and movement, raising questions about how reliable the information is and how seriously it should be taken. The U.S. sleep-tracking devices market generated about $5 billion in 2023 and is expected to double in revenue by 2030, according to market research firm Grand View Research. As the devices continue to gain popularity, experts say it …

So many things went wrong last Jan. 29 to contribute to the deadliest plane crash on American soil since 2001 that the National Transportation Safety Board isn’t likely to identify a single cause of the collision between an airliner and an Army helicopter near Washington, D.C., that killed 67 people at its hearing Tuesday. Instead, their investigators will detail what they found that played a role in the crash, and the board will recommend changes to help prevent a similar tragedy. Last week, the Federal Aviation Administration already took the temporary restrictions it imposed after the crash and made them permanent to ensure planes and helicopters won’t share the sa…

CoreWeave and Nvidia announced Monday that the AI chipmaker has invested another $2 billion as part of a plan to accelerate the buildout of more than five gigawatts of artificial-intelligence (AI) factories by 2030. That’s on top of its previous $3.3 billion investment. CoreWeave is a cloud computing platform focused on artificial intelligence. According to a release from Nvidia, the chipmaker bought CoreWeave Class A common stock at $87.20 a share, which “reflects it’s confidence in CoreWeave’s business, team and growth strategy as a cloud platform built on NVIDIA infrastructure.” The news sent shares of CoreWeave, Inc. (Nasdaq: CRWV) up 12% in Monday mornin…

The Wienermobiles are coming back for a bite at the Brickyard in May, giving them another chance to relish the spotlight of racing’s biggest weekend. Oscar Mayer announced Sunday all six of its famed street-ready vehicles will compete for the second straight year on Indianapolis Motor Speedway’s historic 2.5-mile oval. The Wienie 500 is scheduled for May 22 during the track’s annual Carburation Day festivities. Last year’s race was such a hit, organizers wanted to give fans a second round to savor the flavor of a light-hearted competition just two days before IndyCar’s marquis race — the Indianapolis 500. The presentation will have a familiar look for fans who…

Below, Kati Morton shares five key insights from her new book, Why Do I Keep Doing This?: Unlearn the Habits Keeping You Stuck and Unhappy. Kati is a licensed therapist, author, and content creator. For over 14 years, she has been helping people better understand their mental health through therapy and YouTube videos. What’s the big idea? Why do we fall into the same patterns—whether that’s people-pleasing, perfectionism, or emotional numbing—even when we know they’re not good for us? These strategies help us feel safe, but replacing that armor with inner strength lets us move with freedom instead of fear. Listen to the audio version of this Book Bite—read …

Back in October, Google ended software support for the original and second-generation Nest Learning Thermostats. On the surface, that doesn’t seem totally unreasonable, considering those original devices are roughly 14 years old at this point. If you have one, you can still use it as a thermostat, but it will no longer connect to the internet. As a result, you can’t connect to it using the Nest or Google Home apps. That may not seem like a big deal, except that the single greatest thing about using a Nest Thermostat wasn’t the fact that it would learn your habits and create routines, or that it would detect when you’re not home and adjust accordingly. No, the best thi…

Every month, around two billion people see AI Overviews, Google’s AI-powered search feature that generates summaries to users’ queries. Now, a new study is revealing a concerning pattern among some of these responses: When asked health-related questions, AI Overviews appears to turn to YouTube significantly more often than trusted medical sites. Since its inception, AI Overviews has faced its fair share of controversies, from early reports of the product spewing nonsensical answers to a series of lawsuits from businesses and publisher groups alleging that the feature is damaging to organic traffic patterns. The most recent concern with AI Overviews emerged via an inve…