What's on Your Mind?

A new browser from the Norwegian company Opera just launched today, and it wants you to stop stressing out so much. The free browser, called Opera Air, is billed as the first-ever “mindful browser.” While existing mindfulness apps like Calm and Headspace can help you take a break to reduce feelings of stress, Opera Air proposes a product that integrates mindfulness directly into working online. The browser comes with a sleek, minimal UI and built-in mindfulness tools—like breathing exercises and binaural beats—so users can code, type, or browse the web and get a brain boost simultaneously. Nikita Walia is a brand strategist at U.N.N.A.M.E.D, the creative partners …

Water scarcity is often viewed as an issue for the arid American West, but the U.S. Northeast’s experience in 2024 shows how severe droughts can occur in just about any part of the country. Cities in the Northeast experienced record-breaking drought conditions in the second half of 2024 after a hot, dry summer in many areas. Wildfires broke out in several states that rarely see them. By December, much of the region was experiencing moderate to severe drought. Residents in New York City and Boston were asked to reduce their water use, while Philadelphia faced risk to its water supply due to saltwater coming up the Delaware River. Before the drought, many people…

My mom used to always say, “If you want something done, give it to a busy person.” She was a very busy person who seemed to have endless energy and a knack for outperforming others in her real estate firm. While the origin of the quote isn’t clear, the idea is that someone who juggles several projects effectively probably has systems in place for prioritization and efficiency. This makes sense. But there is a point when said “busy person” hits overload. Tossing them one more ball could cause the person to drop all of them. About two-thirds of workers feel empowered to decline extra work, according to a recent report from résumé builder Resume Now, yet 59% feel fr…

Search today sure ain’t what it used to be. On the one hand, you’ve got the escalating sense that Google’s once-reliable results are stuck in a downward spiral. It’s a perception we’ve been seeing take shape for some time now, even before Google Search started pushing accuracy-challenged AI answers into its search engine and steering people away from first-party sources. On the other hand, you’ve got AI-powered info engines ranging from ChatGPT and Perplexity to Google’s own Gemini chatbot now browsing the web for you and offering up immediate (if occasionally also inaccurate) answers. For the first time, that’s raising pressing questions about the long-term fate …

Botox can be expensive. You know what isn’t? Bananas. A new beauty hack making the rounds online involves rubbing the inside of a banana peel all over your face for a few minutes to brighten and tighten skin. You’ve heard of chemical peels for your skin? Now it’s all about the banana peel. “This actually made my face feel so much tighter,” one TikToker said after giving the hack a go. “Me, after seeing a banana peel can help with hydration, brightening, hyperpigmentation & be preventative Botox,” wrote another over a video of them rubbing the peel on their skin. “POV: When you’re 37 years old & do banana peel scrubs instead of Botox,” a third creator pos…

A strong supply chain ensures the right goods are available at the right time, in the right place, and in the right quantities. An effective supply chain strengthens everything from customer loyalty and company reputation to market resilience and consumer safety. But supply chains are notoriously vulnerable to costly disruption, tampering, and theft. In today’s world of rapidly shifting consumer demands, ensuring supply chain integrity is critical to maintaining a healthy supply chain, which can mean the difference between keeping pace with and falling behind the competition. Impinj surveyed 1,000 US supply chain professionals across a variety of industries for its Su…

Imagine this: A team meeting is scheduled for 4 p.m. in California. For software developers in Mumbai, it’s 5:30 a.m. the next day—prime sleeping hours or, at best, the tail end of an exhausting night shift. In Poland, where other team members are based, it’s already 1 a.m., and the developers are long offline. Awkward timing for a call, to say the least. How do these time zone differences impact overall efficiency? As more projects rely on globally distributed teams with members from every corner of the world, this question is becoming increasingly urgent. This is underscored by a study conducted by Harvard Business School professor Prithwiraj Choudhury. It found th…

Multiple earthquakes are rattling Santorini, a volcanic island in Greece, prompting authorities to dispatch rescuers with tents, a sniffer dog and drones, and to shut schools on four islands. Residents have been warned to avoid indoor gatherings, check escape routes, stay away from cliffs and to drain swimming pools to reduce potential structural damage to buildings in the event of a large earthquake. Greece lies in a highly seismically active part of the world, and earthquakes are frequent. The vast majority cause no injuries and little or no damage, but the country has also seen deadly quakes. Earthquakes can’t be predicted, but authorities are taking measures a…

January was a long month, but we finally have some good news in 2025: Bookseller Barnes & Noble plans to open at least 60 new stores this year, topping last year’s record of 57 stores and marking a steady revival of its brick-and-mortar bookstores across the country. “[Barnes & Noble] is experiencing strong sales in its existing stores and has been opening many new stores after more than 15 years of declining store numbers,” the company told Fast Company. “In 2024, Barnes & Noble opened more new bookstores in a single year than it had in the whole decade from 2009 to 2019 . . . [The company] is enjoying a period of tremendous growth as the strategy to hand…

OpenAI is further proving that 2025 is the year of agentic AI. The artificial intelligence giant revealed another new feature from ChatGPT this week, called Deep Research, which it claims can gather research from across the web and summarize it in easy-to-read reports. “Deep research is OpenAI’s next agent that can do work for you independently—you give it a prompt, and ChatGPT will find, analyze, and synthesize hundreds of online sources to create a comprehensive report at the level of a research analyst,” the company wrote in a Sunday blog post. Every output shows clear citations and a summary of the agent’s thinking. The tool is powered by its upcoming Ope…

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg hinted at a “return to OG Facebook” during last week’s Q4 earnings call, listing it as a key goal for 2025. But what exactly does that mean? So far, Meta hasn’t offered any clear details. Could Zuckerberg mean the millennial meme-filled Facebook of the 2010s or the “masculine energy” of its controversial origins as Facemash (a site that ranked Harvard classmates by attractiveness without consent)? Asked about his plans for the “OG Facebook,” Zuckerberg replied, “I think some of this will kind of get back to how Facebook was originally used back in the day,”, while tight-lipped on any other details. “I think there are a lot of opportunities…

Nine months ahead of this year’s annual U.N. climate summit, known as COP30, lodging prices in the Brazilian host city of Belem are turning heads—and may soon turn off would-be attendees from the first such meeting in the Amazon rainforest. With a shortage of housing and high interest, property owners and rental companies are feeling emboldened to charge five-digit rates, even for cramped rooms with shared bathrooms. On Booking.com, one of the last available hotel rooms listed, a flat apartment, is going $15,266 for one person, up from $158 for the same category currently—a 9,562% increase. A 15-day stay during the conference in November would total $228,992, enou…

Immigration Judge Ana Partida sat before a mostly empty courtroom on an afternoon in October, her body angled toward a television on one of the side walls. None of the people scheduled to appear before Partida, who hears cases inside San Diego’s Otay Mesa Detention Center, were present in person. That’s because Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had transferred all of them to other locations around the country, even though their cases were already underway in San Diego. One by one, an ICE attorney asked Partida to move the detainees’ cases to courts closer to their new locations. All of the people who were transferred had attorneys in San Diego, including …

Former President Jimmy Carter has won a posthumous Grammy award. Carter, the peanut farmer who won the presidency in the wake of the Watergate scandal and Vietnam War, died in December at age 100. Prior to his passing, Carter was nominated in the audio book, narration, and storytelling recording category at the 2025 Grammys for “Last Sundays in Plains: A Centennial Celebration,” recordings from his final Sunday School lessons delivered at Maranatha Baptist Church in Georgia. Musicians Darius Rucker, Lee Ann Rimes and Jon Batiste are featured on the record. It’s Carter’s fourth Grammy. His posthumous Grammy joins his three previous ones for spoken word album. If the for…