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Roblox is stepping up its age verification system for users who want to privately message other players and implementing age-based chats so kids, teens, and adults will only be able to message people around their own age. The moves come as the popular gaming platform continues to face criticism and lawsuits over child safety and a growing number of states and countries are implementing age verification laws. The company had previously announced the age estimation tool, which is provided by a company called Persona, in July. It requires players to take a video selfie that will be used to estimate their age. Roblox says the videos are deleted after the age check is …

Like clockwork, 5 p.m. on a Sunday, flashes of unread emails and notifications for tomorrow’s upcoming meetings start. Your shoulders tense, your stomach knots. You have a case of the Sunday scaries. This unsettling feeling is a form of anticipatory anxiety that creeps in as the weekend draws to a close and Monday looms with the responsibilities of the week ahead. If you can relate, you’re not alone: New data suggests the vast majority of workers experience this anxiety, and it also suggests some workers feel it worse than others. Adobe Acrobat surveyed over 1,000 full-time employees and found 82% experience this sense of anxiety before the workweek even begins. …

For those of us who earn a living publishing content on the open internet, Amazon’s lawsuit against AI startup Perplexity can seem darkly amusing. Perplexity is among the many AI companies that has spent years extracting value from the internet in exchange for little. Its crawlers have synthesized endless amounts of content from publishers, even working around publishers’ attempts to block this behavior, all so Perplexity can summarize content without having to send traffic to the websites themselves. Now Perplexity and its rivals are going a step further, with a new wave of AI browsers that can navigate pages automatically. Perplexity has Comet, OpenAI has ChatGP…

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-…

Country music fans have something extra to be thankful for each November beyond turkey. Traditionally, the Country Music Association Awards—aka the CMA Awards—take place during the second-to-last month of the year. Wednesday, November 19, is the big day in 2025 for the 59th annual event. Let’s get you up to speed on everything you need to know about “country music’s biggest night” so you can confidently two-step your way through the evening. What’s the venue for the 2025 CMA Awards? The 59th CMA Awards will be held at the Bridgestone Arena in Nashville. Who’s hosting the 2025 CMA Awards? Lainey Wilson is back to emcee the awards. Last year, sh…

Business leaders are scrambling to understand the fast-moving world of artificial intelligence. But if companies are struggling to keep up, can today’s business schools really prepare students for a new landscape that’s unfolding in real time out in the real world? Stanford University thinks it might have the answer. At its Graduate School of Business, a new student-led initiative aims to arm students for a future where AI is upending in ways that are still unfolding. The program, called AI@GSB, includes hands-on workshops with new AI tools and a speaker series with industry experts. The school also introduced new courses around AI—including one called “AI for Hum…

Most personal branding advice assumes you’re one thing. But what if you’re not? What if you’re a strategist and an artist, a CEO and a musician, a parent and a community builder? For leaders who live at these intersections, the advice to “pick a lane” can feel suffocating. I know this tension firsthand. My own path has spanned finance, strategy, leadership development, writing, and creating art. Initially, I worried that showcasing this diversity would appear disjointed. Over time, I realized that my multidimensionality isn’t a liability; it’s part of my brand. The question isn’t “How do I simplify myself?” It’s “How do I integrate my many identities into a cohe…

When it comes to podcasting, it’s Joe Rogan’s world. The Joe Rogan Experience was the most popular podcast of 2025, according to Apple’s just-released rankings. This is the first year Rogan has topped the Apple charts. Last year, he took the bronze medal, behind The Daily and Crime Junkie (both of which still made the Top 10 this year). Two years ago, he didn’t make the list (thanks to an exclusivity agreement with Spotify, signed in 2020—where he also currently holds the No. 1 spot). Rogan’s podcast certainly had head-turning guests this year, including a much-listened-to interview with Elon Musk. The Daily, from The New York Times, was Apple’s second-most popula…

Here’s the thing about Wellington boots: They’re great when it’s raining, because they keep your toes dry and toasty. But when the rain stops, you feel a little silly stomping around in heavy rubber boots. But what if your rain boots looked like any other fashion-forward boot you’d be comfortable wearing rain or shine? What if they looked like, say, a classic pair of Dr. Martens? I have good news. Dr. Martens has designed a rain boot that mimics one of its most iconic designs, the 1460 eight-hole lace-up boot, which first came to market in 1960. It has a lot of the hallmarks of a Dr. Martens boot, like the heel tab for easy pull-on, the grooved sole, and even the…

For its 2026 postage stamps, the U.S. Postal Service is going colorful and graphic. USPS gave a first look at some of the stamps set to be released next year, including the latest edition of its Love stamp, stamps commemorating the 250th anniversary of the U.S., and stamps depicting figures including a boxer, a martial artist and actor, and a pair of published poets. The stamps will be released on a rolling basis beginning in January and available at Post Office locations and online. “This early preview of our 2026 stamp program underscores the Postal Service’s commitment to celebrating the artistry and storytelling that make stamps so special,” Stamp Services dir…

In a world where AI can churn out chart-toppers in seconds and ticketing algorithms treat fans like data points, we risk losing the soul of live music. But a quiet countermovement is making a comeback right in people’s living rooms, backyards and basements. Once the gritty domain of garage bands and DIY punks, house shows are becoming a structured, sustainable model for music communities embraced by a myriad of musical genres and accessible to all ages. House shows aren’t just an indie throwback. They serve as a blueprint for re-humanizing music and sustainable artist development, and cities should treat them as civic infrastructure. Today, fans crave authentic…

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. Back in May, ResiClub teamed up with Stessa, an asset management and accounting software for real estate investors, to survey real estate investors about how they were navigating the rental market. Over the past month, we teamed up with Stessa again to survey real estate investors about their market conditions, portfolio plans, and property management strategy. Investors who own at least one single-family investment property were eligible to respond to the Stessa-ResiClub Real Estate Investor Survey—Q4 2025, fielded between October 24 and Novembe…

If the football games, boxing matches, and comedy specials weren’t indication enough that Netflix is making a bold move for the live television market, here’s another: Beginning in 2026, it will air live baseball for the first time. Major League Baseball announced a new three-year media rights agreement on Wednesday with NBC, ESPN, and Netflix that could see baseball fans channel surfing to find their games. The shakeups in the agreement mostly see NBC and its parent company, NBCUniversal, commanding a larger share of baseball coverage, picking up several key games and events previously aired by ESPN, including “Sunday Night Baseball.” And, for the first time in …

For consumers heavy on savings and light on credit history, a new partnership in the world of credit scores could help you lock down a loan. FICO, the company basically synonymous with the credit score, is teaming up with Plaid to bring real-time data showing how much cash you have on hand to lenders. Plaid, a fintech company that links bank accounts with financial apps, has a lot of visibility into how its customers move cash between bank accounts, payments apps, investment platforms, and just about everything else. Plaid’s technology runs under the hood across a huge network of 12,000 financial institutions that partner with the fintech startup, which has grown into…

As startups race to keep up with advances in artificial intelligence, some of them seem to be borrowing from China’s exacting work culture—which normalized a 72-hour workweek, or a “996” schedule of working six days a week from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. While the 996 parlance and laser focus on AI may be new, hustle culture has always been embedded in Silicon Valley to some degree. Some business leaders, perhaps most famously Elon Musk, have long demanded those hours from their employees: “There are way easier places to work, but nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week,” he once said of the “hardcore” work ethic promoted at his companies. Now that culture seems …

Instead of teens simply putting down their phones to take a break, TikTok wants them to use the app’s new breathing exercises and affirmation journal to improve their well-being. Over the past couple of years, a growing number of legislators have been proposing or enacting laws to restrict or limit minors’ access to social media apps in order to protect children’s and teens’ mental health. TikTok has other ideas on how to boost well-being—without ever leaving the app. This week, it launched a Time and Well-Being space within users’ account settings, replacing the existing screen-time management page. New features in the space include an affirmation journal …

Google has 44 data centers in operation or in development around the world, but as demand for AI and the need for compute capacity grows, the company is already getting started on three more. This latest batch is destined for Texas, where Google already has a pair of data centers in operation just south of Dallas. One of the new centers will be located outside of Amarillo in Armstrong County, with the other two headed to Haskell County, about three and a half hours west of Dallas. The $40 billion investment in the Lone Star State will help the company build additional infrastructure for its cloud and AI units. The company expects the centers to be operational by t…

With little more than a coat of paint, buildings could soon make the air around them cooler and harvest gallons of water directly from the atmosphere. Researchers at the University of Sydney in Australia have created a nanoengineered polymer coating that passively cools building surfaces while enabling them to collect water like dew-coated leaves. It’s a material solution that could help combat rising heat and water insecurity in places all over the world. The white coating, a porous paint-like material, reflects up to 97% of sunlight and radiates heat, making surfaces up to 10 degrees cooler than the surrounding air, even under direct sun. This cooler condition a…

When entrepreneurs list their principal reasons for launching a company, small business owners often cite being their own boss, flexibility in setting their working hours, and turning a commercial concept into reality as their main motivations. Now, new data identifies another incentive that may convince future entrepreneurs to take the plunge. According to a recent analysis by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, the average self-employed person earns significantly more income during their career than people who work for someone else. However, the report’s findings also note the widely varying levels of income among small business owners, and the length of time u…

In his new book Ding Dong: How Ring Went from Shark Tank Reject to Everyone’s Front Door, Ring founder Jamie Siminoff pulls back the curtain on the chaotic, often absurd reality of building one of the most recognizable consumer tech brands of the last decade. The following excerpt captures one of the book’s most pivotal moments: the high-stakes, borderline-reckless gamble to secure the name “Ring.com,” a decision that nearly emptied the company’s bank account, tested the patience of his investors, and set the stage for a brand that would soon reshape home security. eBay.com. Half.com. Cars.com. Shop.com. Toys.com. And yes, Nest.com. So many great four-letter domain na…

After entrepreneur Brynn Putnam sold her smart fitness company, Mirror, to Lululemon for $500 million in 2020, she was looking for her next big idea. It was the middle of the pandemic, and Putnam was living with five kids ranging in age from 2 to 21. She says she often found herself dreaming of an activity that would get her whole family to sit down and connect with each other. Brynn Putnam “When we played games, we were either playing board games like Candyland, so that the littlest ones could participate, or we would try to play video games, but the teenagers who’ve logged a lot of hours on sort of modern controllers would always smoke us,” Putnam says. “There wa…

Shares in Alphabet Inc (Nasdaq: GOOG), the company better known as Google, are rising again in premarket trading today. The stock is currently up by more than 4% following yesterday’s rise of 6.2%. If those gains hold, Google could be set to become the world’s next company with a $4 trillion market cap today. Here’s what you need to know. Why are GOOG shares rising? Shares in Alphabet have had a stellar run as of late. Yesterday, they rose more than 6.2%. Over the past five days, they have been up more than 11.5%. Over the past month, they have jumped more than 22%. And over the past six months, they have been up more than 87%. And that’s before…