What's on Your Mind?

When Anirudh Rao was 4 years old and living in Nashville, his friend’s house was destroyed by a tornado. A year later—yes, as a kindergartner—Rao started sketching a potential solution for better tornado warnings. Now 12 years old and living in Colorado, Rao is pursuing a more advanced version of his concept: a network of drones that could theoretically sense infrasound, a wave phenomenon emitted before and during tornadoes with frequencies below the threshold of human hearing. “On the outskirts of the city, there’ll be a base station and a network of autonomous drones that fly in all directions,” says Rao. He envisions sensors detecting infrasound along with temp…

We’ve been expecting the tsunami of AI-generated videos ever since we first got a taste of AI’s image-making abilities several years ago. The results until recently were underwhelming. But now our social feeds are awash in increasingly realistic AI-created video. OpenAI, Meta, and Google have entered the game. At the end of September, Meta introduced Vibes, an AI-only video feed, in the newest version of its Meta AI app. It allows users to share videos created by the company’s generative tools in the Meta app, as well as on Facebook and Instagram. Five days later, OpenAI unveiled its Sora app, which, beyond creating videos from a prompt, is focused on allowing users t…

For two decades, I’ve mentored professionals at every career stage: first as a high school teacher and administrator, and presently as a university professor and corporate consultant. One pattern emerges across every career pathway—the people who find strong fits for their talents aren’t the ones with the most impressive single credential. They’re the ones who understand how three things work together: Skills. Credentials. Network. The car mechanic who realized his hands-on skills weren’t enough as cars went digital. So he went to night school and earned his associate’s, bachelor’s, and MBA in four years. During the journey, he took advantage of every professional net…

Need a train station shelter in a hurry? You can now print that. In Arida, Japan, a Japanese architectural firm and 3D-printed house manufacturer partnered with JR-West, a railway network, to build what they claim is the world’s first 3D-printed train station. Assembled in less than six hours between the station’s last train of the night and first train of the following morning, it’s a promising first look at how infrastructure improvements might be done faster and cheaper. The station is the work of the 3D-printed house manufacturer Serendix and the architecture studio Neuob. It’s made from four 3D-printed mortar pieces that were printed offsite and filled with concrete …

Most chatbots want to appear human. But their efforts to sound just like us only widen their uncanny valley feeling. Many are Elon Musk-level awkward. And most are annoyingly verbose. There’s only one AI persona that offers a completely different user experience: Tolan. This AI-powered being—which you can teleport into your iPhone—doesn’t pretend to be like us. Quite the opposite. Tolan embraces being very much unlike us. But in doing so, it feels more human and relatable than any other AIs I’ve come across. Tolan is an alien. The whimsical, colorful creature is made of friendly curved shapes that are designed to reflect, converse, and grow with its user. These AI-drive…

Gap just released an animated ad to promote its collection with designer Sandy Liang, and we need it to become its own TV show ASAP. Created by animator Annie Choi, who has a history of illustrating campaigns for luxury fashion labels, the ad stars a young girl modeled after Liang herself. While dreaming up new clothing designs inside her childhood bedroom, the girl discovers that her closet has been imbued with magical powers—and when she opens its doors, she’s transformed, Sailor Moon–style, into a new version of herself dressed head-to-toe in Gap x Sandy Liang. The Gap x Sandy Liang ad, titled “Sandy’s Dream Closet,” is part of the roll-out for Liang’s bigges…

At this fall’s prestigious New York World Spirits Competition, a wheated bourbon that’s widely available for about $30 claimed the title of Best Overall Bourbon. The blind-tasting competition drew a crowded field of bourbons that included bottles that are typically impossible to find—or exorbitantly marked up on shelves. Among more than 100 contenders, including bourbon heavyweights like Blanton’s Gold Edition and W.L. Weller Full Proof, the reasonably priced Green River Wheated Bourbon landed the top title. Green River Wheated is an approachable 90 proof (45 percent ABV) and a blend of four- to six-year-old barrels. The judging panel described it as “a richly t…

The latest generation of artificial intelligence models is sharper and smoother, producing polished text with fewer errors and hallucinations. As a philosophy professor, I have a growing fear: When a polished essay no longer shows that a student did the thinking, the grade above it becomes hollow—and so does the diploma. The problem doesn’t stop in the classroom. In fields such as law, medicine, and journalism, trust depends on knowing that human judgment guided the work. A patient, for instance, expects a doctor’s prescription to reflect an expert’s thought and training. AI products can now be used to support people’s decisions. But even when AI’s role in doing t…

Early drivers steered cars by pushing a lever left and right. That was fine at slow speeds, but disastrous when you accelerated. It took years before the steering wheel arrived. Granola CEO Chris Pedregal says AI interfaces are still in the lever era. Pedregal, who in 2019 sold the edtech startup Socratic to Google, says we’re just beginning to figure out how humans should interact with AI. Three years after the launch of ChatGPT, people still associate AI with typing into a chat box. Granola is betting on a new approach to AI-enhanced note-taking. The London-based startup doesn’t record audio or video or send bots into your meetings. Instead, its tool sits on y…

You’ve heard the gospel: AI is going to change everything. Good, great, grand. But when you’re staring down a deadline and 80 unread emails, you don’t need philosophy, you need a cheat sheet. The fastest way to master AI isn’t by watching lectures, it’s by finding a way to replace an hour of your grind with a 10-second prompt. Here are five specific, repeatable ways to automate your most time-consuming professional tasks. Grab your chatbot of choice (Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot—whatever floats your boat) and let’s get to work. Writing Staring at a blank page. Tedious, formulaic first drafts. Enough. You are a professional. You shouldn’t be spen…

A computer science student is behind a new AI tool designed to track down Redditors showing signs of radicalization and deploy bots to “deradicalize” them through conversation. First reported by 404 Media, PrismX was built by Sairaj Balaji, a computer science student at SRMIST in Chennai, India. The tool works by analyzing posts for specific keywords and patterns associated with extreme views, giving those users a “radical score.” High scorers are then targeted by AI bots programmed to attempt deradicalization through engaging the user in conversation. According to the federal government, the primary terror threat to the U.S. now is individuals radicalized to vi…

A new extension for Chrome stops AI slop from invading your life. Called Slop Evader, it is a temporal firewall that modifies your Google search queries to exclude any results indexed after November 30, 2022. That is the day the ChatGPT asteroid hit the open web, upending culture and reality as we know it. Installing Slop Evader is easy: just add it to Chrome, toggle it on, and suddenly, the scroll of generative garbage vanishes. You are back in the “old” internet knowing that every article you read is not the product of simulated intelligence. It’s an enticing idea, especially given that the latest estimation is that more than 50% of all new articles on the int…

In the fall of 2024, six college students joined forces to start an AI company together. Five of them had met while studying computer science, computer engineering, and electrical engineering at Georgia Tech in Atlanta. The sixth, its CEO, was pursuing a degree in childhood and adolescent development at Sacramento State, with an eye on becoming a grade-school teacher. That wasn’t the only thing that made him an outlier. He also happened to have been in the tech industry for well over thirty years—longer than his fellow founders had been alive. The Georgia Tech students are Ian Boraks, Jacob Justice, Drake Kelly, Ella McCheney, and Abhinav Vemulapalli, all of whom happ…

A startup called Adapt is betting that it can be an AI hub connecting other software tools to help answer questions and get things done. When users pose questions or ask for help with a business task, Adapt can answer based on information from the web and business data to which it’s been given access, similar to other AI tools. But it can also automatically launch a virtual machine, essentially a computer in the cloud from which it can connect to a wide range of internet-based software, pull information from databases, and craft custom code to analyze data and create charts and visualizations. It’s an approach that cofounder and CEO Jim Benton says lets users w…

A new technology can pinpoint victims of intimate partner violence four years earlier than other detection systems and with 80% accuracy. The Automated Intimate Partner Violence Risk Support System (AIRS) utilizes clinical history and radiologic data to pinpoint patients seen in the emergency room who may be at a risk for intimate partner violence (IPV). Developed over the past five years, AIRS has been rolled out to the Brigham and Women’s Hospital’s Emergency Rooms in Boston as well as surrounding primary care sites. Currently, the tool has been validated at the University of California-San Francisco Medical Center and is being evaluated by the Alameda Health Syste…

Ever wondered what it would be like to wake up in Pompei on eruption day? How about how it would have felt to be a passenger on the Titanic? Now you don’t need to. A new TikTok trend lets you travel back in time via artificial intelligence and experience the POV of someone living though that time period. From waking up as a caveman in 40 B.C. to being the last person on earth in 2087, many of the most viral videos have been posted by creator @timetravellerpov. “The inspiration behind my videos is the desire to bring history to life in a way that feels immersive,” @timetravellerpov tells Fast Company over email. “Each one is designed to transport viewers into differen…

Picture a memory from childhood, one that feels real and nostalgic, but somehow just out of grasp: perhaps a family trip to the beach, or a moment mid-swing on the playset, or an afternoon spent hunting for four-leaf clovers. Now, imagine that you could bottle that golden moment into a fragrance. One scientist at MIT, Cyrus Clarke, is working to do just that. Alongside a team of fellow researchers, Clarke has developed a physical machine called the Anemoia Device, which uses a generative AI model to analyze an archival photograph, describe it in a short sentence, and, following the user’s own inputs, convert that description into a unique fragrance. The word “an…

What many applicants may not realize is that, nowadays, the first hurdle in applying for a job is dealing with AI. Candidates now often must clear an artificial intelligence system that screens their résumés that quietly determines who advances, and whose application is filed away in a drawer or spam folder, never to see the light of day. Now, a new lawsuit filed on Tuesday is the first in the U.S. to accuse an AI hiring company of violating the Fair Credit Reporting Act. Eightfold AI, a venture capital-backed artificial intelligence hiring platform, is being sued by two workers in California for allegedly compiling reports used to screen job applicants without their…

“Insane project idea: all of wikipedia on a single, scrollable page,” Patina Systems founder Tyler Angert posted on X earlier this month. “Even better, an infinitely scrolling Wikipedia page based on whatever you are interested in next?” replied Bloomberg Beta VC James Cham. “WikiTok,” added Angert. insane project idea: all of wikipedia on a single, scrollable page — Tyler Angert (@tylerangert) February 3, 2025 New York-based app developer Isaac Gemal stumbled across the discussion the following evening. Within two hours, WikiTok was live. If you’re the type to instinctively pull up Wikipedia to fact-check anything and everything, this app is made for you. W…

Nowadays, when you hear someone talk about faxing, there’s a decent chance it’s the punchline to a groan-inducing dad joke. (Not that I would ever be guilty of such silliness, of course. I stick strictly to the fax.) And yet, here in the futuristic-feeling time of 2025, we all find ourselves facing the very occasional and impossibly baffling need to send something somewhere specifically by fax. Try as you might, sometimes, you just can’t avoid it. (One might even say those are just the fax of life!) Faxing is antiquated technology through and through, but for whatever reason, we as a society don’t quite seem ready to shed it entirely—despite the fact that we’ve go…

Spring is just around the corner, ushering in new growth, brighter days, and the heady anticipation of summer. For those of us with sizable screen time, spring’s arrival also means that the dreary weather is no longer an excuse for spending hours doomscrolling TikTok and Instagram Reels until our eyes glaze over. And now there’s an app that can help you feel like it’s spring year-round. Rhys Kentish is a senior software engineer at the London-based app design firm Brightec. He’s spent the past four months building an app that makes users literally touch grass before they can open social media. “I was sick and tired of my reflex in the morning being to reach for my…