What's on Your Mind?

If it weren’t for the white lines on the grass, you would be forgiven to think this building is a perfectly quiet hotel surrounded by a field of grass in the middle of the Norwegian forest. After all, most soccer training grounds are ugly structures whose sole purpose is to provide infrastructure for people to kick a ball around. But this isn’t just a place to kick a ball. These facilities, designed by the internationally renowned architecture firm Snøhetta, aim to redefine the very concept of a training ground, transforming it into a vibrant hub for the entire football community. “Our approach to sustainability is deeply rooted in a holistic perspective that consider…

The Mojave Micro Mill just broke ground in the Mojave Desert about 85 miles from downtown Los Angeles. It’ll be the first steel mill to open in California in more than half a century when it begins production in two years. More notable, it’ll do so using local sun and wind power, making it the first self-powered, net-zero steel mill in the country. Mojave Micro will make rebar—the thin rods of steel used to reinforce concrete walls and floors—out of recycled scrap steel using a net-zero manufacturing process. Eric Benson, CEO of Pacific Steel Group, which will operate the plant, said the company had started to strategize about a new facility a few years ago. Sinc…

Greenland’s coastline is huge: a sprawling 27,394-mile labyrinth of fjords, glaciers, and ice-choked waters, longer than Earth’s circumference. Its length and topography makes it one of the planet’s longest and most logistically hostile to patrol in peacetime. Now, with countries like Russia and the United States’s neo-imperialist plans to grab as many Arctic natural resources as possible, it is one of Europe’s frontlines. Which is why people like Jens Martin Skibsted—global partner and VP of foresight and mobility at design studio Manyone—are thinking about how to better protect a wonderland that is key for the future Denmark and the European Union. For decades, Denmark …

The newest plaza in Valencia, Spain, has everything one might expect from a public space in a temperate seaside Spanish city. Its five acres contain green space, a playground, ball courts, and walking paths, and the plaza connects to a new market hall, with restaurants and bars serving a wide range of local specialties. Next to all this—and the real reason for any of it existing at all—is Roig Arena, the new multipurpose stadium built for the men’s and women’s professional basketball teams of the Valencia Basket Club. The basketball arena is hardly the second thought here, but it’s much more a piece of this broader civic space than the typical pro sports facility.…

The Brannock device—that sliding metal gadget used in shoe stores to measure the dimensions of your feet—was invented 100 years ago this year. But footwear fitting hasn’t really gotten more advanced since, says Dan Cataldi, founder and CEO of custom insole maker Groov. For most people, it still comes down to finding shoes by style and size, taking a few steps in them, and hoping for the best. And when it comes to insoles, the part of the shoe that you actually walk on, people with medical issues and professional athletes might get custom orthotic inserts fitted by a doctor, while most people make do with what comes in their shoes or, in a pinch, a cushioning insert from …

Americans are likely to have spent a record $1 trillion-plus this holiday shopping season alone, and about $5.5 trillion in retail sales in all of 2025, according to estimates by the National Retail Federation. That includes many unhappy returns for retailers: And when it comes back to them, a lot of the $850 billion in returned merchandise is often cheaper to discard than to inspect, sort, and resell—adding millions of tons to landfills every year. “This is a massive ecological problem, as well as a financial problem for these companies,” says Ryan Ryker, CEO of rScan. Based in South Bend, Indiana, the startup has developed software and logistics services to help tra…

When Quentin Farmer was getting his startup Portola off the ground, one of the first hires he made was a sci-fi novelist. The co-founders began building the AI companion company in late 2023 with only a seed of an idea: Their companions would be decidedly non-human. Aliens, in fact, from outer space. But when they asked a large language model to generate a backstory, they got nothing but slop. The model simply couldn’t tell a good story. But Eliot Peper can tell a good story. He’s a writer of speculative fiction who’s published twelve novels about semiconductors, quantum computing, hackers, and assassins. Lucky for the Portola team, he likes solving weird tech pro…

As data centers strain the power grid, utilities are scrambling to build new power plants. But a startup in California is one of a handful focusing on the problem from a different angle: building a network of batteries and solar panels at homes to relieve pressure on the grid more quickly. In some cases, thanks to state funding, low-income homeowners can get the systems installed at no cost, and then start saving on their electric bills and have access to backup power if the grid goes down. Others pay a subscription that’s lower than their previous electric bill. Then the startup, called Haven, manages the flow of power back to the grid. Why utilities see Haven’s …

Caralynn Nowinski Collens, Ramille Shah, and Adam Jakus spent years developing an innovative technology to regenerate injured bone. The results, they thought, were . . . okay. The company they founded, Dimension Bio, received clearance from the Food and Drug Administration for its approach: providing a 3D-printed lattice or “scaffold” for new bone to grow in. However, it didn’t form new bone fast enough to compete with established treatment methods, such as transplanting a patient’s own bone tissue. But Collens, Dimension’s CEO, sees the experience as a net positive, validating the company’s technology and processes with the FDA. That could help the Chicago-based star…

A new startup is leaning on the power of recommendations to spread the word about indie films. Olyn offers a direct-to-consumer platform for film and video distribution, enabling filmmakers to retain up to 90% of their revenue. Billed as “Shopify for filmmakers,” Olyn removes the platform as a middleman, eliminating ads and algorithm-driven recommendations. This allows movies to shine based on their own merits and be monetized directly through viewership. Ana Maria Jipa, cofounder and CEO of Olyn, told TechCrunch that the filmmakers are responsible for the movie’s promotion, while Olyn handles the rest. “We provide all the tech that implies: from DRM, 4K streaming…

Daniel George, the founder and CEO of AI company TwinMind, has quite the resume. He was a part of a Nobel Prize-winning team that worked on using artificial intelligence (AI) to detect gravitational waves and black holes. He also worked on AI projects at companies like Wolfram and Google X. Perhaps most notably, he created an AI tool that automated his own job as a VP at JPMorgan, allowing him to spend a few years traveling the globe. And now, George counts himself as a startup founder, and he’s bringing his latest project to the masses: TwinMind, an AI platform that “listens to everything you do, say, and browse, and it’s all stored locally and encrypted,” he sa…

Anthropic, Menlo Ventures, and other AI industry players are betting $50 million on a company called Goodfire, which aims to understand how AI models think and steer them toward better, safer answers. Even as AI becomes more embedded in business systems and personal lives, researchers still lack a clear understanding of how AI models generate their output. So far, the go-to method for improving AI behavior has focused on shaping training data and refining prompting methods, rather than addressing the models’ internal “thought” processes. Goodfire is tackling the latter—and showing real promise. The company boasts a kind of dream team of mechanistic interpretabilit…

Tiny fragments of microplastics—from clothes, car tires, plastics, and other sources—slip through most water filters. But at a water treatment plant on the coast in Atlantic City, New Jersey, where plastic-filled wastewater would normally flow into the ocean, new technology has captured hundreds of millions of microplastic particles over the past year. The technology, from a startup called PolyGone, can also clean microplastic out of lakes and rivers or treat wastewater at factories. The startup spun out of research at Princeton, where the founders drew inspiration from aquatic plants that can naturally attract microplastic. The plants have fibrous roots coated in…

One of the world’s most distinctive new buildings is now poking out of the center of a small village in the Swiss Alps. The structure, a cylinder of bone-white columns topped by a dome, wasn’t built in the traditional sense. It was 3D-printed. It’s now the tallest 3D-printed tower in the world, and it could offer a technique for other 3D-printed buildings to rise even higher. Standing on the base of an existing building, the tower rises to a height of 98 feet, with four floors connected by a central staircase. The tower itself is all structure, with 32 tree-inspired concrete columns forming a cage-like shell that’s open to the air. Gradually widening as it rises, the …

Starchitecture is heading to the moon. A lunar design from the international architecture and design firm Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) is part of a just-launched rocket mission that expects to land on the moon in early March. Not architecture per se, the design encases a shoebox-size data storage center that’s attempting to prove the concept of off-world disaster recovery services. Commissioned by Florida startup Lonestar Data Holdings, the solar-powered 8-terabyte data storage device is tacked onto the side of the lunar lander now making its way to the moon. A thin, 3D-printed object with sleek curves and a matte-black finish, BIG’s design sets a higher bar than the wire-ju…

On a quiet residential street lined with unassuming homes and white picket fences in Gliwice, Poland, one building is not like the rest. It’s a hulking, bright silver structure that’s covered entirely in pipes. This eye-catching building is the new headquarters for Gambit, a Polish pipe distribution company specializing in underground water systems. Designed by the architecture firm KWK Promes, the headquarters takes Gambit’s building materials aboveground, transforming pipes from a utilitarian necessity into an aesthetic material that encases the building’s entire exterior. The result is a visually striking structure that cleverly merges architecture with product ad…

Almost seamlessly, the two sides of a scenic forest in Alberta, Canada, have been woven back together. Located between Calgary and Banff National Park, this stretch of the Canadian Rockies is sliced in two by the Trans-Canada Highway, one of the busiest roadways in the province. That’s had deadly consequences for the area’s abundant wildlife, as well as the tens of thousands of people who drive through it every day. But now, after years of mounting wildlife-vehicle collisions, the danger to animals and humans is being addressed with a stunning new wildlife overpass. The Bow Valley Gap wildlife overpass is a roughly 200-foot-wide cap over a four-lane highway, toppe…

If someone driving a new version of a Subaru Forester crashes into a cyclist, an airbag will immediately inflate on the hood to help protect the person on the bike. The SUV, which offers the feature only on vehicles sold in Japan, isn’t the first Subaru to include an external airbag. The company started including pedestrian protection airbags on its Japanese cars nearly a decade ago. But the brand says the new design is the first in the world intended to also protect cyclists. It’s a basic, commonsense idea. “Airbags have been proven to be effective to protect the occupants in a vehicle,” says Ben Crowther, policy director for America Walks, a nonprofit focused on…

Aerospace company Starfighters Space, which operates the world’s only commercial supersonic aircraft fleet out of NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, is down double digits after major gains following completion of its initial public offering (IPO) last week. Starfighters Space’s stock price has had a volatile ride in the days since, and Tuesday was no exception. On Tuesday, shares of the stock, which are trading under the ticker symbol FJET, were down 55%, just one day after Monday’s record gains, when it soared a whopping 371%. The Florida-based company completed its IPO last Wednesday, with shares beginning to trade on the NYSE American the next day. The company ra…

There is a new calculator that shows how President Donald The President’s “big, beautiful” law will affect your 2026 tax bill, and how much additional take-home pay you’ll be getting. The calculator, from the Tax Foundation—an independent, tax policy research organization—looks at the new exemptions and tax write-offs in the massive 940-page One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), which was signed into law in July. The savings are the result of the OBBBA extending the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, making many of the changes permanent, while adding some new short- and long-term tax rules, including the “No Tax on Tips” provision (which allows eligible tipped workers to d…

Ellie Ghassali was on a plane back to the U.S. from Sydney when he spilled red sauce on his new phone. The phone still had its screen protector on, so he just peeled it off, and the red sauce was gone. At this very moment, an idea popped into his head: What if you could “peel off” your dinner plate in a similar way? Ghassali, who lives in New Jersey, is now the founder and CEO of Peelware, a company that makes disposable, “peelable” dinnerware that is biodegradable and compostable. Plates come in stacks of 15, meaning that you eat on the top layer, peel it off and compost it when you’re done, then eat anew on the next layer (the 14th). And then the next layer (the 13th), …

Rejection stings. If you’re on the job hunt right now, it’s likely something you’ve grown accustomed to, if not entirely numb to. Considering more than one in four workers without jobs has been unemployed for at least half a year, chances are that comes with a tidal wave of rejection emails. The entry-level job market is also the toughest it’s been in years, with only 30% of 2025 graduates finding jobs in their fields. One TikTok creator, however, has made it her personal mission to collect rejections like gold stars, documenting her challenge to receive 1,000 instances of being told “no” in one year. Just 71 “nos” into her journey, she’s already seen how embraci…

For the first time in history, five generations are sharing the workplace. But grouping different generations under one roof doesn’t have to cause friction. Sometimes it means unlikely friendships blossom. “Me & someone’s dad 8 hours a day,” TikTok creator @witchofwallstreet posted last week. In the video, the young financial planner and her older colleague are lip-synching to a remix of Nicki Minaj’s “Beez in the Trap” (featuring 2 Chainz) and 4 Non Blondes’ 1993 hit “What’s Up?” The video currently has over 13 million views. This lip-synch trend featuring these songs has been circulating online in recent weeks, but has now been taken up by coworkers to sh…

When you describe it in words, the Indianapolis 500 might seem like a boring watch: Cars go round and round an oval track 200 times, totaling 500 miles over the course of a few hours. But if you were a driver, you’d be having a hell of a different experience. Think screaming speeds of 230 miles per hour, pulling 4 Gs on corners, with one’s reflexes and split-second decisions drawing a thin line between victory and tragedy . . . over the course of a few hours. It’s a level of intensity that TV networks have been trying to bring viewers into for years with in-car cameras and things like driver radio communiques. It has been working. Last year, NBC—which covered the spec…