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In a reversal from previous years’ pollution reductions, the United States spewed 2.4% more heat-trapping gases from the burning of fossil fuels in 2025 than in the year before, researchers calculated in a study released Tuesday. The increase in greenhouse gas emissions is attributable to a combination of a cool winter, the explosive growth of data centers and cryptocurrency mining, and higher natural gas prices, according to the Rhodium Group, an independent research firm. Environmental policy rollbacks by President Donald The President’s administration were not significant factors in the increase because they were only put in place this year, the study authors said.…

The BBC plans to ask a court to throw out U.S. President Donald The President’s $10 billion lawsuit against the British broadcaster, court papers show. The President filed a lawsuit in December over the way the BBC edited a speech he gave on Jan. 6, 2021. The claim, filed in a Florida federal court, seeks $5 billion in damages for defamation and $5 billion for unfair trade practices. The speech took place before some of The President’s supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol as Congress was poised to certify President-elect Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election that The President falsely alleged was stolen from him. The BBC had broadcast the documentary — titled “The Pr…

If you’re crypto-rich and cash-poor, you might still have a shot at securing a home loan without having to sell off your assets. Starting next month, mortgage lender Newrez will let applicants count their cryptocurrency when applying for a home loan. Historically, a borrower’s crypto holdings wouldn’t be considered in the loan application process. For anyone holding a large amount of digital currency, liquidating some – and incurring that tax bill – might be necessary to qualify for a loan in instances where traditional investments or cash are scarce. “Today, an increasing number of consumers include crypto in their investment portfolios, while major financial in…

The first Big Tech layoffs of 2026 have happened. This week, Facebook owner Meta Platforms reportedly informed employees that up to 1,500 positions in its Reality Labs division would be eliminated. Here’s what you need to know about the job cuts. What’s happened? Meta this week notified employees in its Reality Labs division that up to 10% of jobs could be lost, according to a Bloomberg report. A day earlier, the New York Times reported that the layoffs were expected. Reality Labs is a division of the social media giant primarily responsible for developing the company’s augmented and virtual reality products. The division was responsible for spearheading Meta’…

New AI tools from Docusign aim to make contracts easier to understand and quicker to prepare. For people signing documents like leases or purchases agreements, a new AI feature will make it possible to request an overall summary of the contract and its key terms. Users will also be able to ask questions about the document, which for consumer agreements could include requesting details about cancellation procedures, fees that may apply, relevant timelines, or terms of a warranty. “The whole purpose of this is to allow and provide a level of trust to the signer so that they understand what is it that they’re signing,” says Mangesh Bhandarkar, GVP of product manage…

President Donald The President will travel to Michigan on Tuesday to promote his efforts to boost U.S. manufacturing, trying to counter fears about a weakening job market and worries that still-rising prices are taking a toll on Americans’ pocketbooks. The day trip will include a tour of a Ford factory in Dearborn that makes F-150 pickups, the bestselling domestic vehicle in the U.S. The Republican president is also set to address the Detroit Economic Club at the MotorCity Casino. November’s off-year elections in Virginia, New Jersey and elsewhere showed a shift away from Republicans as public concerns about kitchen table issues persist. In their wake, the White House s…

In the summer of 2024, Squarespace’s chief marketing officer, Kinjil Mathur, attracted criticism when she told Gen Z job seekers that they, like her, should be “willing to do anything” to land their first job. “I was willing to work for free, I was willing to work any hours they needed—even on evenings and weekends,” Kinjil told Fortune. “You really have to just be willing to do anything, any hours, any pay, any type of job.” The online backlash to Kinjil’s statement was immediate and brutal, forcing her to walk those comments back. “I shared my own college internship experiences, and my words were misrepresented as career advice for a whole generation,” Kinjil later …

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Monday that Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence chatbot Grok will join Google’s generative AI engine in operating inside the Pentagon network, as part of a broader push to feed as much of the military’s data as possible into the developing technology. “Very soon we will have the world’s leading AI models on every unclassified and classified network throughout our department,” Hegseth said in a speech at Musk’s space flight company, SpaceX, in South Texas. The announcement comes just days after Grok — which is embedded into X, the social media network owned by Musk — drew global outcry and scrutiny for generating highly sexualized deep…

2025 saw several successful public offerings, especially from companies operating in the AI, cryptocurrency, and fintech spaces. What many on Wall Street are anxious to know is whether the IPO market—and its returns—will accelerate in 2026, or if investors will take a more cautious approach to newly public companies as inflationary pressures, the potential for a weakening economy, and a possible AI bubble weigh heavily on people’s minds. The first real test of investor IPO appetite may come later this month, when cryptocurrency custody firm BitGo Holdings, Inc. is expected to go public. Here’s what you need to know about BitGo’s IPO. What is BitGo? BitGo Holdin…

Thousands of New York City nurses were set to return to the picket lines Tuesday as their strike targeting some of the city’s leading hospital systems entered its second day. The walkout, which comes during a severe flu season, involved roughly 15,000 nurses spread out across multiple private hospitals, including NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia, Montefiore Medical Center and Mount Sinai hospital. The affected hospitals have hired droves of temporary nurses to try to fill the labor gap. Both nurses and hospital administrators have urged patients not to avoid getting care during the strike. The labor action comes three years after a similar strike forced medical facilities…

By now, the headlines almost write themselves: humanoid robots everywhere, AI in everything. Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2026 didn’t disrupt that narrative—it confirmed it. What changed was the subtext. This was the year AI stopped feeling experimental and started feeling infrastructural. Intelligence has shifted from novelty to baseline, forcing harder questions about consequence, control, and agency—not just what technology can do, but how it reshapes systems once opting out is no longer realistic. For years, progress at CES has been measured in speed, scale, and spectacle. In 2026, a different metric quietly surfaced: judgment. The most advanced products we…

Central bankers from around the world said Tuesday they “stand in full solidarity” with U.S. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, after President Donald The President dramatically escalated his confrontation with the Fed with the Justice Department investigating and threatening criminal charges. Powell “has served with integrity, focused on his mandate and an unwavering commitment to the public interest,” read the statement signed by nine national central bank heads including European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde and Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey. They added that “the independence of central banks is a cornerstone of price, financial and economic st…

Prediction markets are all the rage right now. Weekly trading volume on prediction platforms just surpassed $2 billion, and apps like Polymarket are being treated as the “next big thing” in consumer finance and entertainment. These platforms are designed to gamify uncertainty by exploiting the same cognitive biases as gambling and day-trading, quietly pushing users toward overspending, emotional volatility, and compulsive checking. It’s easy to see why people are drawn to them. Prediction markets feel smarter than reckless betting, more dynamic than typical investing, and more objective than punditry. For example, users are able to watch the odds move in real time, ma…

Inflation likely remained elevated last month as the cost of electricity, groceries, and clothing may have jumped and continued to pressure consumers’ wallets. The Labor Department is expected to report that consumer prices rose 2.6% in December compared with a year earlier, according to economists’ estimates compiled by data provider FactSet. The yearly rate would be down from 2.7% in November. Monthly prices, however, are expected to rise 0.3% in December, faster than is consistent with the Federal Reserve’s 2% inflation goal. The figures are harder to predict this month, however, because the six-week government shutdown last fall suspended the collection of price dat…

The convergence of brand work and entertainment is set to be making significant leaps and bounds this year as a result in a flurry of activity in 2025. Large brands of consequence have made serious investment in in-house entertainment studios over the past few years—LVMH, AB InBev, Nike, and Dick’s Sporting Goods, among them. Now, sports retail and gaming giant Fanatics is partnering with OBB Media to launch Fanatics Studios. The new division will be led by Michael D. Ratner, founder and CEO of OBB Media, and will operate as another pillar of Fanatics’ overall business, alongside retail, collectibles, and gaming. The goal is to independently create, finance, produce,…

If you’re a Slack user, you’re probably familiar with Slackbot as a good-natured—if annoying—assistant that delivers notifications, reminders, and keyword-based automatic responses within the workplace chat app. But for organizations with paid Slack plans that have AI features enabled, Slackbot is receiving a bit of a brain transplant. The company has rebuilt the humble bot as an AI agent that can help bring you up to speed on workplace discussions and priorities, pull in data from other software your organization has integrated with Slack, help draft reports and Slack canvas documents, and even help schedule meetings with your colleagues. It’s part of a push by Sales…

During President Donald The President’s first administration, he left hundreds of government designers, across half a dozen or more agencies, to do their jobs. But that changed the second time around, in January 2025, when a reelected The President wasted no time turning the official White House website into his personal blog, deleting resources for topics ranging from reproductive rights to the contributions of Navajo code talkers in World War II. Then in February, The President took a sledgehammer to the digital infrastructure of the U.S. when he enlisted Elon Musk to lead the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). In a vast cost-cutting initiative, DOGE d…

At first glance, the most striking part of the SunRise, a recently redeveloped residential tower in Edmonton, Alberta, is the boldly colored facade, with strips of primary color and a lively mural. Called The Land We Share, the vibrant landscape sketch has sparkled on the skyline since its unveiling this past summer. But the mural is far more than a pretty picture. Covered on all sides in a kind of colored solar panel called BIPV made by Canadian firm Mitrex, the mural and the rest of the structure generate roughly 267 kilowatt hours, enough to cut the building’s carbon emissions in half. Typically, high-rises generate solar power primarily via their rooftops. Bu…

A cozy, neutral sameness defines our era of interior design. Velvet sofas. Bouclé armchairs. All-white living rooms. Beds layered with fluffy faux-fur blankets. Calming sage green kitchen cabinets. You see it in furniture catalogs, social media feeds, perhaps even your own home. And we’ve got algorithms to thank. A decade ago, social platforms shifted from chronological feeds to algorithmic ones, optimized to show users what they were most likely to engage with. As many cultural critics have pointed out, those systems reward what is broadly appealing and shareable. In interiors, that has meant rooms that are soothing and inoffensive—but largely devoid of personality. …

About a year ago, an advertisement caught the attention of Ashleigh Ruane, a PhD student in physics at the University of Cambridge. The ad was simple but unusual: Teach AI about physics. Curious, she clicked. She learned that experts across fields—from physics and finance to healthcare and law—were now being paid to help train AI models to think, reason, and problem-solve like domain specialists. She applied, was accepted, and now logs about 50 hours a week providing data for Mercor, a platform that connects AI labs with domain experts. Ruane is part of a fast-growing cohort of professionals who are shaping how AI models learn. According to Freelancer, thousands o…

Sitting on a coffee table in his Chelsea office in New York City and surrounded by framed wedding invitations on the walls, Justin McLeod is worrying about AI. Specifically, the cofounder and CEO of dating app Hinge is concerned that his users—many of whom have asked him to their weddings over the years—might fall in love with it instead of one another. McLeod has spent the greater part of the past 15 years studying the dynamics of human relationships, including what makes one person fall for another, and he sees that chatbots offer exactly what many people crave. “Why would I invest in these hard human relationships with people that are not always available …

It’s a little-known fact that Columbia University, in Manhattan, was home to the first mining school in America—the School of Mines—founded in 1864. For the past three decades, the university’s program has been mothballed. Parts of its curriculum were subsumed into the more fashionable subjects of earth and environmental engineering. But next fall, Columbia University will offer a bachelor of science degree in mining engineering once again. Other schools are barreling down, as well. The University of Texas at El Paso is also relaunching its mining engineering degree, starting in the fall of 2027, after a 60-year hiatus. The University of Texas system is prov…

As utilities struggle to keep up with surging energy demand, they’re starting to turn to an unexpected tool: windows that insulate like walls. “Think of it like a thermos bottle in your walls,” says LuxWall CEO and founder Scott Thomsen, who worked in the semiconductor and flat-panel display glass industry before taking on the challenge of windows. Energy-efficient windows aren’t new. But a radical design from LuxWall, a Michigan-based startup, goes further. Rather than relying on double or triple panes, it uses a vacuum to block heat transfer, the same way your Yeti tumbler can keep a drink ice-cold or steaming hot while the outside stays close to room temperatur…

I had to submit my résumé for a role. Then I went through three interviews, with nearly identical questions each time. The problem? The role was for a freelance writing position. Not to become a company employee. I got all the way to the third interview only to learn that the role paid a fraction of my usual rate, even though I’d provided my rate up front. I’m experienced enough as a solopreneur to know that going through three interviews was a bad sign. The potential client wasn’t communicating internally (as confirmed by the fact that my rate had been overlooked). Multiple interviews are incredibly uncommon in my line of work, and indicated to me that the comp…

Americans go to great lengths to ensure they are financially set for their later years. But if you’re asking Elon Musk, you really needn’t bother. According to the world’s richest man, whose net worth is estimated at well over $700 billion, saving for retirement will soon be obsolete. Musk aired this view on a recent episode of the Moonshots With Peter Diamandis podcast. Musk let listeners in on his vision of our financial future, a world where technology, specifically artificial intelligence, creates such an abundance of resources that anyone can buy anything they want. The entrepreneur said that within just a few years, we will live in a world marked by a great…