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For totally logical reasons, this year’s Winter Olympics in Italy is bucking the trend of a single host city and splitting its sporting events between two main locations, Milan and Cortina. Milan, the second most populous city in Italy, is the urban setting for indoor events like ice hockey and ice skating. Cortina, a ski resort town 250 miles away, provides most of the snow—and hill-based venues for quintessential Winter Olympic sports like alpine skiing and the bobsled. But the two separate locations posed a problem for one of the key parts of the Olympics: the opening ceremony. How could there be one grand show when the sporting action was split in half and separat…

Forget Donald The President. A new analysis suggests the U.S. public’s sharp lurch into polarization began in 2008, years before his first presidential campaign. Researchers at the University of Cambridge’s Political Psychology Lab tracked shifts in Americans’ views across nearly four decades and found that divisions were broadly stable through the 1990s and early 2000s, before rising steadily from 2008 onward. Using more than 35,000 responses from the American National Election Studies between 1988 and 2024, they estimate that issue polarization has increased 64% since the late 1980s, with almost all of that change occurring after 2008. The research uses a machin…

It looks like a standard shipping container. But a metal box at a London factory is aimed at solving one of the shipping industry’s biggest challenges: how to cut CO2 emissions on cargo ships. The tech, from a startup called Seabound, can capture as much as 95% of the CO2 emissions from the exhaust on ship. The company is now preparing to install a set of the containers on a cargo ship in its first commercial deployment after years of development and pilot tests. “The shipping industry is one of the last hard-to-abate sectors,” says 30-year-old CEO Alisha Fredriksson, who cofounded the company in 2021 after working as a consultant and seeing the need for a new…

The price of Bitcoin has declined dramatically in recent weeks, and cryptocurrency investors are more fearful than ever. In the past 24 hours, the crypto king dipped to the $60,000 range—a low it has not seen since October 2024. While Bitcoin has now recovered slightly to around $66,000, many analysts and investors still think the token may not have bottomed out yet. Here’s what you need to know about Bitcoin’s continued fall, and how low things might go. Why is Bitcoin falling? Like most cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin (BTC) has been steadily falling almost since the year began. As Fast Company previously reported, there were two main drivers for this fall. The…

This Sunday will see the Seattle Seahawks face off against the New England Patriots in Super Bowl LX. The game will also mark the conclusion of the tenth football season featuring Next Gen Stats, the analytics system that delivers detailed data about every game to coaches and broadcasters through a partnership with Amazon Web Services. Next Gen Stats began in 2015, when the National Football League deployed RFID chips in player shoulder pads and even in the football itself, enabling the league to capture location data multiple times per second through sensors installed throughout stadiums. It has since become a mainstay of football broadcasts and training sessions…

Hello, and welcome back to Fast Company’s Plugged In. “Programming, as it turns out, is just typing.” Talking at Cisco’s AI Summit in San Francisco on February 3, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang made that pithy observation to sum up the phenomenon of people using AI coding tools to simply describe in plain language software they want to exist, with an algorithm doing the heavy lifting. The comment came during a wild, wide-ranging riff on how AI is changing the world, and Huang kept joking that his chatter might have been influenced by several glasses of wine. (Hey, he was the after-dinner speaker.) But even if alcohol-fueled poetic license was involved, the sentiment capt…

Organizational leaders are witnessing a steep and unprecedented rise in employee healthcare costs that is eroding bottom-line profitability. According to data from the Business Group on Health, these costs are projected to rise by 9% this year, representing a 62% increase since 2017. To put it in perspective, this represents an incremental hit of nearly $1 million to the bottom line for a midsize organization of 500 people. What CFOs are now confronting is a tipping point where the average total cost to insure an employee is nearing $20,000 annually. Notably, it is specifically mental health claims that are driving the spike. PwC’s 2026 Medical Trend report shows that…

It’s time to become an armchair expert on sports that you only think about every four years. In other words, the 2026 Winter Olympics have arrived. This year’s competition takes place in two Italian cities, Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo, and the surrounding regions. It is not Cortina’s first rodeo, as the city hosted previously in 1956, while the country of Italy has hosted the games three times prior. The action kicked off on Wednesday, February 4, when the world’s best alpine skiers and curlers strutted their stuff. Despite the curling, the official Olympic Opening Ceremony takes place today (Friday, February 6). Here’s everything you need to know so you can …

Friday is the opening ceremony for the 2026 Winter Olympics. But, if you’ve spent any time on TikTok over the past week, you might have already got a sneak peek at some behind-the-scenes content courtesy of the athletes themselves. In 2024, the International Olympic Committee loosened its rules governing what athletes can capture and share on social media. The shift helped spark viral moments during the Paris Games, when Team USA rugby star Ilona Maher and Norway’s swimmer Henrik Christiansen, whose chocolate muffin reviews became an unlikely hit, took over TikTok feeds. This year, Olympians have already been posting vlogs of their journeys to the Olympic Village…

Amazon sales surged 14% during the fourth quarter, helped by strong holiday spending and a better-than-expected growth in its prominent cloud computing unit. But shares fell 11% in after hours trading on Thursday as investors appeared to be spooked by the Seattle-based tech company’s plans to increase capital spending by nearly 60% to $200 billion from last year’s $128 billion as it sees opportunities in artificial intelligence, robots, semiconductors and satellites. The company’s fourth-quarter profits also were slightly below analysts’ projections. Wall Street analysts were expecting capital spending to rise to around $147 billion this year, according to FactSet. Ama…

Design culture loves the fantasy of “blue sky” thinking. No constraints. No limits. Pure imagination. It sounds liberating, but it often produces design that only works in ideal conditions for an ideal user who does not exist. Blue sky leads to paper design—“great” ideas that never come to market. The truth is simple: Constraints fuel creativity. The most valuable constraint is the human one. When designers embrace real limits like limited dexterity, low lighting, fatigue, mobility restrictions, sensory sensitivities, small living spaces, and tight budgets, they stop designing for abstraction. They start designing for reality. That is where innovation becomes inev…

Over the years, I’ve written and spoken extensively about my belief that design has the power to change the world. I find daily inspiration in the many individuals and organizations leaning away from design as pure aesthetics and embracing design as a powerful tool for promoting the wellbeing of both people and the planet. I refer to wellbeing as holistic health. It includes holistic health of the people: end users—those using the products, and makers—suppliers, producers, and manufacturers. Also, of the planet, because no design is isolated; it is always dependent on and embedded in systems. Our choices have far-reaching impact. Upstream decisions about a design’s ma…

Noah Winter brags he’s been to way more Super Bowls than Tom Brady. Brady competed in 10 — more than any other player. But Winter will be part of the Super Bowl spectacle for his 30th straight year this year, not in uniform but as the guy in charge of the celebratory confetti after the game ends. Winter’s company, Artistry in Motion, also makes confetti for rock concerts, movies, political conventions and the Olympics. But the annual blizzard of color falling onto the field at the end of each Super Bowl is probably what he’s best known for. It certainly is what he’s most likely to get asked about at dinner parties. “It’s become an iconic moment,” Winter marvels, sitting…

The logic behind electric vehicles benefiting public health has long been solid: More EVs means fewer internal combustion engines on the road, and a reduction in harmful tailpipe emissions. But now researchers have confirmed, to the greatest extent yet, that this is indeed what’s actually happening on the ground. What’s more, they found that even relatively small upticks in EV adoption can have a measurably positive impact on a community. Whereas previous work has largely been based on modeling, a study published this month in the journal Lancet Planetary Health used satellites to measure actual emissions. The study, conducted between 2019 and 2023, focused on Califo…

The European Union on Friday accused TikTok of breaching the bloc’s digital rules with “addictive design” features that lead to compulsive use by children, in preliminary charges that strike at the heart of the popular video sharing app’s operating model. EU regulators said their two-year investigation found that TikTok hasn’t done enough to assess how features such as autoplay and infinite scroll could harm the physical and mental health of users, including minors and “vulnerable adults.” The European Commission said it believes TikTok should change the “basic design” of its service. The commission is the EU’s executive arm and enforcer of the 27-nation bloc’s Digital …

On a sidewalk, an unassuming junction box sits strapped to a fence. Inside, dozens of keychains, stickers, mini figurines, and other novelties wait to be discovered by eagle-eyed passersby or trinket traders who have traveled across the city to exchange their treasure. Trinket trading has taken off on social media in recent weeks. The trend first originated in Philadelphia, where Philly’s Trinket Trove began documenting the contents of a repurposed junction box on TikTok in September of last year. It has since spread nationwide, with communities from New York to San Francisco setting up their own boxes of assorted knick-knacks for anyone to stop by and tra…

The 2026 Milan Cortina Olympics are giving people at home a first-of-its-kind, first-person view of the Winter Games, all thanks to a fleet of custom-built drones. The small, agile drones can be spotted—not to mention heard—buzzing across Olympic venues, and they’re giving what broadcasters call a “third dimension” to the viewing experience. Instead of capturing the action only from fixed or semifixed cameras on cables and cranes, operators of these drones give viewers an athlete’s perspective as they race down slopes and around tracks. “This is the closest you can get to feeling a jump,” ski-jumper-turned-drone-operator Jonas Sandell said in a statement. …

Ever feel like your solo business is running you into the ground? Solopreneurs don’t have the luxury of handing off tasks to a team. Everything lands on your plate, and there’s never enough time. AI won’t run your business for you (despite what some of the big AI companies would have you believe). But it can give you back hours every week. Some tools are AI-first, meaning their primary job is to perform an AI-driven task. You can also look at adding AI features inside tools you’re already using. I rely heavily on AI in my solo business. I can get more done in less time, without sacrificing quality in any of my work. Here are a few AI tools that can make a hu…

Below, Maya Shankar shares five key insights from her new book, The Other Side of Change: Who We Become When Life Makes Other Plans. Shankar is a cognitive scientist and host of the podcast A Slight Change of Plans. She served as a senior policy adviser in the Obama White House, where she founded and chaired the Social and Behavioral Sciences Team. She was also appointed as the first behavioral science advisor to the United Nations. What’s the big idea? What if the life upheavals that shake you most could also be your greatest opportunities? Change can feel like loss, but it can also be the start of a stronger, reimagined self. Listen to the audio version o…

The Super Bowl LX ad blitz was a big budget highwire act—from Anthropic’s shot at OpenAI to Lady Gaga’s homage to Mr. Rogers and Dunkin’s nostalgia-fueled celeb fest. Autodesk CMO Dara Treseder breaks down what worked, what didn’t, and what the ads reveal about where marketing is headed next. Treseder also unpacks the business impact of Bad Bunny’s halftime show, and what it signals for the NFL and Apple. 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 navigati…