What's on Your Mind?

Deals promoted as some of the best of the holiday season are expected to keep people across the United States glued to their computers and smartphones as the post-Thanksgiving shopping marathon wraps up on Cyber Monday. It’s no secret that buying things online is now a staple of many people’s everyday routines. And year after year, those purchases mount during the gift-giving holiday rush. Experts expect consumers to drive record Cyber Monday spending this year, even amid wider economic uncertainty. Adobe Analytics has estimated that U.S. shoppers will spend $14.2 billion online Monday, or 6.3% more than in 2024. They already spent $11.8 billion online for Black Friday …

When someone takes a shower at a new apartment complex in Washington, D.C., the water is heated in part by a brewery downstairs. The mixed-use development—part of a larger new neighborhood called the Bridge District—is designed to be as sustainable as possible. That includes using waste heat from commercial tenants like the brewery to save energy in the apartments. Atlas Brew Works, a solar-powered brewery that serves craft beers, moved into the building in November. At most breweries, the heat that’s generated from the brewing process would be vented outside. But in the new building, any hot water that the brewery doesn’t reuse is sent into a heat exchanger, …

A young DARPA-backed startup with a fresh spin on a low-power computer chip has raised over $100 million in a Series B funding round, a sign of the wild appetite for more energy-efficient ways to build bigger and better AI. The company, EnCharge AI, aims to move AI’s heaviest workloads from big, power-hungry data centers to devices at the edge, including laptops and mobile devices, where energy, size, and cost constraints are tighter. Its approach, known as analog in-memory computing, comes from research that CEO Naveen Verma spun out of his lab at Princeton University, where he’s still a professor of electrical and computer engineering. Verma wouldn’t say who i…

Around 70,000 Discord users may have had images of their government IDs stolen, according to an update from the company. Last week, the popular chat platform notified users that the third-party vendor the platform uses for customer service was hacked, affecting Discord users who had interacted with the app’s customer support or trust and safety teams. Discord initially announced last week that an unauthorized group gained access to a “small number” of government ID images. That includes images of sensitive documents like driver’s licenses, passports and potentially even selfies of people holding those documents – a common way to verify identity for online accounts. …

The internet posts and side projects of Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) worker Jordan Wick could give some clues for how Musk’s efficiency group might attempt to use AI to downsize and retool the government. During the last half of February, Wick, who has a DOGE email account associated with the Executive Office of the President and now is embedded in the General Services Administration (GSA), posted to his GitHub page the code for several tools that appeared to be related to DOGE’s work. The page was discovered by political reporter Roger Sollenberger at the end of last month. Wick posted the code for a tool that automatically downloads DMs from Twitt…

This drone is so small that it can sneak anywhere. Flying with the stability and agility of a normal quadcopter, its design is unlike anything you’ve seen before. The tiny aircraft, which could fly comfortably through a Pringles can, also has a built-in camera. Imagine the Death Star’s trench-run-like possibilities. “I wanted to build the world’s smallest FPV drone,” declares its creator in his how-to video. While there are other commercial drones that are almost as small, I couldn’t find a true first-person-view drone—a remote-controlled aircraft you can maneuver with VR glasses on—that could approach the diminutive size of this thingamajig. To create the dro…

In 2021, Eugene Kashuk was looking for a new venture. The Ukrainian entrepreneur realized in the wake of the pandemic that there was a large gap in education. Students were lagging behind, particularly in math. Kashuk started Brighterly, a platform that connects math teachers from all across the globe with students in the United States for private tutoring. Brighterly offers private lessons for $20 per 45-minute lesson—much cheaper than the average rate of about $40 per hour in the United States. In part, Brighterly is able to keep costs down because it uses AI to generate lessons so teachers are able to use their time to focus on their student instead of coming…

Matchmaking is an ancient dating process that stretches back thousands of years. But as online dating fatigue has begun to dominate the modern-day discourse around finding love, one company is betting that matchmaking will see a revival, and they’ve spent years developing a tool to make it happen: an AI matchmaker named Tai. One might argue that all modern dating apps aim to serve as a kind of matchmaker; an intermediary whose purpose is to connect two singles with each other. But Adam Cohen-Aslatai, CEO of the matchmaking company Three Day Rule, says dating apps still put the onus on users to choose the right partners based on what the algorithm serves. In contrast, …

If every afternoon, like clockwork, you find yourself at the vending machine punching in the code for your daily Diet Coke, you may want to rethink your selection. According to a newly released study, the popular drink may be doing damage to one of your body’s most important organs. The study, which was recently presented at the 2025 United European Gastroenterology Week conference in Berlin, involved tracking the beverage consumption habits of 123,788 participants. It found that just nine ounces of sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs), such as soda, can increase the risk of liver disease known as metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease (MASLD) by about …

Tesla sales continue to plunge. But a former Tesla employee’s startup now has a long waiting list for a very different type of product: an electric motorcycle aimed at customers in Africa and South Asia. The startup, called Zeno, officially launched its first product today, a sport utility electric motorcycle called the Emara. Ranging from $1,000 to $1,500 depending on the market, it’s designed to be cheaper than gas alternatives—and do a better job of carrying heavy loads or multiple passengers on rough roads. The battery, which is sold separately, can either be charged or instantly switched out at swapping stations. After a soft launch with several dozen customers i…

A 220-pound, fully functional, solid-gold toilet—once offered to President Donald The President as a satirical gift—just sold at a Sotheby’s auction for $12.1 million. The commode is a work of art called America created by Maurizio Cattelan in 2016. Cattelan is most well-known for his surreal, conversation-starting, and often controversial art concepts, like the 1999 piece La Nona Ora, which depicts a life-size Pope John Paul II getting struck by a meteorite, or the infamous 2019 piece Comedian, which is, put simply, a banana taped to a wall (which sold at auction for $6.2 million). After America debuted at the Guggenheim Museum in September 2016, it became an ins…

It looks like nothing more than a bedside fan. To program it, you hit the “on” button once. But what happens next could improve your memory by 226%. This is Memory Air, a new product born from decades of science charting the relationship between our nose and our brain. Each night, Memory Air cycles through 40 different, undisclosed scents, twice. As you sleep—even though you don’t consciously smell these scents—research suggests that it can measurably improve your memory within weeks. How is that possible? As the company’s founder—UC Davis professor emeritus Michael Leon—explains, “We are functionally odor deprived.” Whereas humans evolved in a scent-…

Camping. Why anyone would put themselves through an odyssey of gross insects and pooping in holes is beyond me, but you do you, Steve. I’ll do me. However, if I were forced to go sleep in the woods, I would like to use this new camping mattress by Chinese sleep startup Mazzu created in collaboration with London-based design studio Layer. It looks like the closest thing to a Four Seasons bed this side of the Rio Grande. Or any río (just don’t get me close to a river). The Mazzu Camping Mattress isn’t your typical inflatable pad that promises comfort on-the-go but delivers back pain for a week. It’s built around 72 precision-engineered elastic spring units—pre-c…

Have you ever wondered how the letter “A” got its shape? Or why some fonts instantly look “psychedelic”? Or where the word “text” even came from in the first place? Kelli Anderson, a graphic artist, author, and master of all things paper, has asked all of those questions—and she’s answering them with a massive new pop-up book called Alphabet in Motion. The book takes readers through an interactive journey about the history of typography from A to Z, starting in ancient Egypt and moving all the way into the digital age. But it’s no ordinary history tome. Anderson hand-designed 17 different pop-ups, including light projections to colorful sliders and mind-bending i…

Influencers, how many late payments are you waiting on? Odds are, more than one. Influencer marketing is a booming $10 billion industry, but for creators, inconsistent cash flow remains a major pain point. Brand budgets shift, campaign timelines change, and payments can take months to land. For many influencers who rely on brand deals as their main source of income, financial instability is the norm. According to the Wall Street Journal, fewer than 13% of online influencers earned more than $100,000 last year—while nearly half made $15,000 or less. A fintech startup called Alchemy wants to change that. Founded by Isaac Wagschal, the company has launched a $100 mil…

Sunbridge appears to be a quintessential example of 21st century sprawl. A 27,000-acre residential mega-development taking shape outside of Orlando, Florida, it’s set to include more than 30,000 new homes in total when complete—a few neighborhoods, miles of trails, and a K–8 school have already been completed. It’s riding a growth boom in Central Florida; this fast-growing section of the Sun Belt has added more than 1,000 people every week in recent years. But within the different subdivisions being constructed at Sunbridge over the next 30 years, a landscape will emerge with each new home and green space that’s much more wild, native, and sustainable than the stereot…

On weekdays, you could easily walk right past Knockdown Center, housed on an industrial stretch of road in Maspeth, Queens. The only thing that sets it apart from the neighboring auto body shops and wholesale warehouses is a rust-colored fence and a beat-up marquee that looks like it’s announcing a church rummage sale. But when Knockdown Center opens its gates at night and on summer weekends when its outdoor stage is set, the crowds of clubgoers streaming through its gate and pouring out of taxis, rideshares, and city buses is impossible to miss. The three-acre venue can accommodate up to 3,200 people inside and another 1,200 in its outdoor space, called the Ruins. …

It’s spring, and nature is pulling me away from my computer as I write this. The sun is shining, the world is warming up, and the birds are chirping away. And that got me thinking: What if a smartphone app could translate all those chirps for us? No, I’m not talking about an app that will translate bird sounds to human speech (although that would be neat). Rather, the app we’re about to go over tells you what specific species is making any bird sound around you—kind of like Shazam, only for nature. All you have to do is hold up your phone and press one button. It’s an app I’ve personally used a bunch over the years and happily rediscovered this year. It’s espe…