What's on Your Mind?

Many of the office buildings emptied by the pandemic are still sitting vacant. A recent report from Moody’s Analytics found that in the second quarter of 2025 office vacancy rates were still above 20% nationwide, and cities across the country are still trying to figure out what, if anything, to do about it. One startup has an unconventional solution. It wants to fill that empty space with crops. Area 2 Farms is a three-year-old company based in Arlington, Virginia, that’s taking the concept of indoor farming to unusual spaces. Its first farm, in Arlington, grows dozens of varieties of crops in a low-slung brick building tucked between a dog day care and a car repair s…

When Stephen Smith started NOCD 11 years ago, he wanted to build an app for people like himself—one of the nearly 3 million Americans with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD)—to track their symptoms and time their therapy exercises. Since 2018, NOCD (pronounced “No-CD”) has provided virtual appointments with therapists specializing in OCD-focused exposure and response prevention (ERP) therapy. With more than 140 million people able to access NOCD through their insurance, the company currently provides at least 1 million therapy sessions annually. Now, NOCD—last valued at nearly $270 million in 2024, according to PitchBook—is making an acquisition and forming a par…

Last month in Los Angeles electric vehicle startup Slate Auto revealed its low-cost, American-made electric truck, with hopes to become the holy grail the auto industry needs to make EVs more affordable and accessible.The company expects its trucks’ sales price to be less than $20,000 with $7,500 U.S. federal tax incentives taken into consideration. While markets like Europe and China are seeing moderate to accelerated sales growth in their electric vehicle markets, the transition to EVs is slower in the United States. According to McKinsey’s latest annual survey, 12% of respondents in the U.S. said they intend their next car purchase to be a battery electric vehicl…

In 2034, Salt Lake City will join a short list of cities that have hosted a Winter Olympic Games twice, joining the likes of Turin and Innsbruck. But unlike in any Olympics of the past, skiers and bobsledders may glimpse a surreal sight overhead as they compete—flying air taxis. Though still nine years away from the Opening Ceremony, aviation company Beta Technologies sees the state of Utah as a proving ground for its electric planes. As competitors focus on major cities like New York and Los Angeles, Beta has inked a deal with Utah to start exploring transportation solutions across the very rural state. The Beehive State had a confluence of benefits for Beta, inc…

For many families with young children in the U.S., the cost of childcare is prohibitively expensive, preventing some parents, especially mothers, from returning to the workforce. That’s why one California-based company recently introduced a new childcare initiative, vowing to pay up to $3,000 a month in childcare costs for eligible employees. The cofounders of Cakes Body, 32-year-old twin sisters Casey Sarai and Taylor Capuano, say their own experiences as working mothers inspired the decision. Capuano recalls how, after having her first child, she made the difficult decision to return to work even though she had only $200 left each month after paying childcare costs.…

Influencers are not only good for skinny jean and matcha recommendations. Now, they can advise you on where to invest your money. Founded by 23-year-old Steven Wang, Dub is an influencer-driven marketplace where users can now copy the entire portfolios of the likes of Rep. Nancy Pelosi or billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman for just $9.99 a month or $89.99 a year. At the same time, retail traders accepted into Dub’s top creator program will be paid royalties for users to access their model portfolio. “I want the next five Warren Buffetts to be surfaced and famous on Dub,” Wang told CNBC last month. “If we’re really successful with the top creator program,…

This story was produced by Grist and co-published with Source NM. The first thing Andy Barrientes noticed when he showed up for his shift at RMS Foods on Valentine’s Day in 2005 was the cloud of black smoke emanating from the building. A fire had started in the factory around 4:20 p.m., not long before Barrientes was scheduled to clock in as maintenance manager at the food manufacturing plant in southeastern New Mexico. The blaze had caught his coworkers coming off the day shift by surprise; they reported smelling the smoke before seeing the flames. When Barrientes arrived, he saw the staff huddled together at the park across the street. “Everyone was holding han…

Reality is melting away before our eyes. Identity spoofing against older adults alone grew by 8x between 2020 and 2024, driven in part by convincing AI impersonations of friends and loved ones. It’s a problem costing people in the U.S. nearly half a billion dollars a year with no end in sight. Which is why a pair of design studios teamed up on a provocative solution that starts with a real-life handshake. Called Quartz, it’s a ring that adds friends to your network by literally shaking hands. And from there, it gatekeeps your online communications by proving you’re alive, proving you know the person you’re talking to, and proving provenance through encrypted chan…

Single-use soy sauce packets for sushi take-out orders are now a whole lot more sustainable, thanks to a redesign that doesn’t use any plastic. While sushi lovers in the U.S. are used to getting their to-go soy sauce in rectangular packets like they do their ketchup and mustard, soy sauce in Australia often comes in small plastic fish bottles with a screw top. This typical mini fish-shaped bottle is cute, for sure, but the user is done with it in a few minutes. Its packaging lasts much, much longer by comparison, since plastics can take as long as 500 years to break down. Does the user experience really require packaging that lasts that long? The Holy …

Handmade punch cards are currently trending on TikTok as a cute, visual way to track 2026 goals. Modeled after the punch cards that will secure you a free coffee or sandwich after showing loyalty to one cafe or another, users instead punch, stamp or check off a square every time they make progress on their goals, whether that’s staying consistent at the gym, completing a no-spend weekend or paying down debt. “Today’s New Year’s Eve, and I made these little punchcards this morning of goals I have for myself starting this new year,” TikTok user @camiunderthesea said in a video showing off her deck of cards. “The first one is to read five books. I’ve been trying to…

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…

Nili Lotan’s Tribeca flagship has been a fixture in the neighborhood for 20 years. It’s an austere space that brings her aesthetic universe to life, one that blends silk slip dresses with military-inspired jackets, and crisp button-down shirts with utilitarian pants. But now, across the street, there’s a second store devoted to just one thing: denim. No knits. No tailoring. Just jeans. Denim has always been at the heart of Lotan’s collections, but Lotan has found that the careful design of the jeans—and care that went into making them—gets lost when they are folded into seasonal collections. Now, the denim store and flagship operate as a single ecosystem. Sales …

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…

A few leftover donuts may not seem like a major problem, but for a fast-food operation with nearly 100 stores, unnecessary waste can add up to serious costs. To better predict donut demand, a Knoxville, Tennessee–based Dunkin’ franchisee, Bluemont Group, has rolled out an AI system called Do’Cast designed to cut waste while keeping popular flavors in stock. Developed in partnership with restaurant AI company PreciTaste, the system uses in-store cameras to track inventory in real time and forecast demand for each type of donut. Those predictions factor in recent sales, weather, seasonal patterns, holidays, days of the week, and major local events such as college footb…

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, …