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The average rate on a 30-year U.S. mortgage fell to its lowest level of 2025 this week, an encouraging sign for prospective home buyers. The average long-term mortgage rate dipped to 6.15% from 6.18% last week, mortgage buyer Freddie Mac said Wednesday. That’s the lowest average long-term rate since October 3, 2024, when it dipped to 6.12% before shooting back up. One year ago, the rate averaged 6.91%. Borrowing costs on 15-year fixed-rate mortgages, popular with homeowners refinancing their home loans, fell this week to 5.44% from 5.50% the previous week. A year ago, it averaged 6.13%, Freddie Mac said. Mortgage rates are influenced by several factors, from t…

Nvidia’s Jensen Huang is one of the tech industry’s longest-serving chief executives, leading the chipmaker since cofounding it in 1993. Now he’s the recipient of a long-standing technology award: the IEEE Medal of Honor, established by a predecessor of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 1917. Huang was named the recipient of the medal (and an accompanying $2 million prize) at the Consumer Electronics Show on January 6 in recognition of his lifetime of work in accelerating computing—the technique of using specialized chips like Nvidia’s graphics processing units to speed specialized operations such as rendering images for video games, crunching …

On the edge of Boulder, Colorado, a remarkable convergence of mutually beneficial collaboration is underway, and it could reshape how housing gets built, who builds it, and who is able to afford it. This is all happening inside BoulderMOD, a new modular housing factory built by the city of Boulder for use by the local Habitat for Humanity affiliate and powered by the labor of apprentice modular home builders from area public high schools. The students come to the factory several hours a day for hands-on education in advanced home building, working on actual modular homes that are now being installed in a section of Boulder devastated by flooding. At full capacity…

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. In today’s article, we’re sharing the full results from the Q4 2025 Zoodealio-ResiClub Real Estate Agent Survey. To conduct our real estate agent survey, ResiClub partnered with Zoodealio, a cash-offer platform, and iBuyer-management software designed for real estate agents. Among the 204 agents who took the survey, half (51%) have been real estate agents for 15 years or longer. The survey was fielded from November 17 to December 29, 2025. Respondents included real estate agents spanning all regions of the U.S., giving us a ground-level view of b…

Octopuses are brilliant, emotional, and mysterious. Can they ever be farmed humanely? And if they can, should they be? Fast Company contributor Clint Rainey is the first journalist in the world to be let inside a cutting-edge effort to build the first commercial octopus farm. Exclusive documentary. Coming in 2026. Check out the full article: https://www.fastcompany.com/91448602/octopus-could-be-the-next-commercially-farmed-seafood-should-it-be View the full article

OpenAI has launched ChatGPT Health, a product that allows users to connect their medical records and wellness apps to the AI chatbot and get personalized health guidance. The feature, unveiled on Wednesday, creates a separate space within ChatGPT for health questions and discussions, where users can collect data from their connected health apps such as fitness apps and store their health files. Users can also connect to their electronic medical records through a partnership with b.well, OpenAI says. ChatGPT, then, does not have a direct integration with the MyChart patient records app from Epic, for example, but lets individual users make requests for their patie…

A small Finnish startup says it has done what the world’s biggest automakers are still struggling to do: put a solid-state battery into a production vehicle, starting with a motorcycle that can charge to more than 100 miles of range in as little as five minutes. “For the last 15 years, the entire battery industry in automotive has been talking about solid-state batteries—that they’re the future,” says Marko Lehtimäki, CEO of Donut Lab, the startup that makes the new battery. “But up until today, despite all the talk, there’s never been a single production vehicle that uses solid-state batteries. They’ve only been used at lab level.” Verge Motorcycles, an elect…

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 …

New York Attorney General Letitia James is demanding more information about Instacart’s recent, and highly controversial, price tests, and suggesting that the scheme—which saw customers charged notably different prices for the same products, when offered at the same stores—might have violated a new state law. Late last year, Consumer Reports and the Groundwork Collaborative released an investigation that found that a single item posted on Instacart could have as many as five different prices, and that costs for a single item could range from just seven cents to $2.56. The investigation found that while some prices changed, and some differed only marginally, for some …

While headlines about AI replacing workers dominated 2025, behavioral health is charting a different path. The industry thrives on human connection, measuring success in trust, healing, and human relationships, not throughput. That’s not to say AI isn’t rapidly reshaping the industry—it is. Its role here fundamentally differs because it supports clinicians rather than sidelines them. Over the next year, I predict we’ll see a paradox play out: Behavioral health will become increasingly AI-enabled, and simultaneously, more human than it’s been in decades. The reason is simple. Burnout and administrative burdens have been increasingly limiting what clinicians can do. Pro…

The average rate on a 30-year U.S. mortgage edged higher this week to just above its 2025 low. The average long-term mortgage rate rose to 6.16%, mortgage buyer Freddie Mac said Thursday. That’s up slightly from 6.15% last week, when the average rate dropped to its lowest level since October 3, 2024. One year ago, the rate averaged 6.93%. Borrowing costs on 15-year fixed-rate mortgages, popular with homeowners refinancing their home loans, rose this week to 5.46% from 5.44% the previous week. A year ago, it averaged 6.14%, Freddie Mac said. Mortgage rates are influenced by several factors, from the Federal Reserve’s interest rate policy decisions to bond marke…

Run a small business and you probably feel like you make dozens of decisions every day. Whether to cut a quality corner, or miss a ship date. Whether to respond to a customer complaint, or hope the problem goes away. Whether to address an employee’s behavior, or kick that can down the road. Then there are all the personal decisions. Whether to get up and going, or hit the snooze button. Whether to ditch the food you packed, or go out for lunch instead. Whether to keep grinding, or work out. None of those are actually decisions, though, since you already know you should do so. Nearly everything you “decide” already has an answer. Quality problem? Fix it. Custom…

U.S. stocks are rising toward records Friday following a mixed report on the U.S. job market, one that may delay another cut to interest rates by the Federal Reserve but does not slam the door on it. The S&P 500 climbed 0.5% in midday trading and was on track to top its all-time high set earlier in the week. The Dow Jones Industrial Average added 237 points, or 0.5% and was also heading toward a record. The Nasdaq composite was 0.7% higher, as of 11:45 a.m. Eastern time. The gains came after the U.S. Labor Department said employers hired fewer workers in total during December than economists expected, though the unemployment rate improved and was better than e…

Rumors have been circulating online that Microsoft is preparing to cut tens of thousands of jobs. TipRanks reported that the company is “considering massive layoffs” this month, potentially eliminating between 11,000 and 22,000 roles across the Azure Cloud, Xbox, and global sales teams. According to The Seattle Times, the claims appear to have originated on anonymous online forums like Reddit and Blind before rapidly spreading across Bluesky and X, drawing widespread attention and, in turn, swift denials from Microsoft executives. Microsoft’s chief communications officer, Frank X. Shaw, took to X to refute the rumors, calling them “100 percent made up/speculative…

Imagine you are searching for a new mattress online and find something surprising. The retailer displays an ad featuring a “Mattress Comfort Scale” running from 1 (soft) to 10 (firm), followed by the message that if your firmness preference is at either end, this mattress is not for you. Wait . . . what? A retailer telling someone not to buy its product? No way! Why would a company tell potential buyers that the product might not suit them? Our team of professors—Karen Anne Wallach, Jaclyn L. Tanenbaum, and Sean Blair—examines this question in a recently published article in the Journal of Consumer Research. Marketers spend billions trying to persuade consumers th…

There’s a quote from Charles Bukowski framed on my office wall: “What matters most is how well you walk through the fire.” We’re in that fire right now. For 25 years, our company has moved people to show up for entertainment. Then the world changed. Entertainment changed. Technology changed. Almost overnight, we had to throw the old playbook out the window. So, we paused. We looked inward and asked the hard question: Do we rebuild what we had or transform into what we need to be for the future? Companies need to choose the second. For us that meant becoming culture-led, not as a slogan or a rebrand, but as the infrastructure for how we operate. Becoming cultur…

Chris Cuomo is returning to SiriusXM, putting him on the air with morning and evening talk shows. He will host a two-hour weekday show centered on listener calls on the satellite radio company’s P.O.T.U.S. channel, starting Jan. 20 at 7 a.m. Eastern. Guests on his first few shows include Democratic Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, Republican Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, sportscaster Bob Costas, and political consultant James Carville, the company said Tuesday. Cuomo previously hosted a show at the network but quit in 2021, shortly after he was fired from CNN when it was revealed that he assisted his brother, former Democratic New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, in fighting accusation…

“Get ready with me as an absolute piece of shit ICE agent,” one such video begins, posted by comedian Adam Macias. These videos are comedic skits, rather than from the social media accounts of actual ICE agents, but have quickly racked up hundreds of thousands of views as the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency faces intense backlash after the shooting of Renee Good in Minneapolis. “I wake up screaming and shooting. Not because I’m scared but because my sleep paralysis demon looks like someone’s tía,” the skit begins (tia is Spanish for aunt). “I start the day off with a shower but no matter how hard I try I just can’t seem to get clean,” it continues. …

When the FIFA World Cup 2026 arrives in the United States this June, it will signal more than soccer’s return to its fastest-growing commercial market. The tournament will span three countries—the United States, Mexico, and Canada—for the first time, becoming the largest World Cup ever staged. The scale, however, is also forcing a technological reset. As modern global sporting events grow in scale, expectations have evolved alongside them. Audiences now look for more immersive broadcasts and real-time data, broadcasters face rising reliability demands, and governing bodies continue to push for greater transparency and precision. Together, these pressures are starting …

I was born an only child, but now I have a twin. He’s an exact duplicate of me—down to my clothing, my home, my facial expressions, and even my voice. I built him with AI, and I can make him say whatever I want. He’s so convincing that he could fool my own mother. Here’s how I built him—and what AI digital twins mean for the future of people. Deepfake yourself From the moment generative AI was born, criminals started using it to trick people. Deepfakes were one of the first widespread uses of the tech. Today, they’re a scourge to celebrities and even everyday teenagers, and a massive problem for anyone interested in the truth. As criminals were …