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 S48S61Get Ready for a 'Tsunami' of AI at CES   If you're waiting for the hubbub over generative AI to die down, maybe pull up a chair. The buzz around artificial intelligence shows no signs of quietingâa fact that will become all too obvious at this year's CES.CES, the consumer electronics industry's largest annual gathering in the US, is returning to Las Vegas on January 9. It is a massive, four-day-long bustling bazaar of tech, with expo halls filled to the brim with new gadgets, hopeful startups, and prototypes that reach for the stars. CES is a trade show where sales and distribution deals are inked, where concept cars roll through crowded streets, and where tech journalists and showgoers alike wander the floors looking for the standout new products. And this year, many of the products debuting are going to be garnished with heaping globs of AI.
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S30Why the Noise of L.A. Helicopters Never Stops  The Jay Stephen Hooper Memorial Heliport sits on top of a brutalist brick-and-concrete building, the C. Erwin Piper Technical Center, across from Union Station in downtown Los Angeles. It’s an area where trains, buses, and highways all converge, and where the sounds of helicopters coming and going are barely noticeable above the din of engines and the smell of exhaust. From the ground, the heliport is barely visible. The best view of it is nearby, from the Cesar Chavez Bridge, over the Los Angeles River, which, in this part of the city, is just a low stream of water in a giant concrete aqueduct. From there, looking over a rail yard, one can see the helicopters parked at an angle on the roof, and the blinking of video monitors inside of an observation tower. On a recent evening, just before sunset, a police helicopter alighted, paused for a few minutes with its propeller spinning, then took off again.The C. Erwin Piper Technical Center is the headquarters of the Air Support Division of the Los Angeles Police Department, which, according to the L.A.P.D., is the largest local airborne law-enforcement unit in the world. The division has seventeen helicopters in its fleet and more than ninety employees, and keeps at least two helicopters airborne for twenty hours a day or more, if deemed necessary. The aircraft are a constant part of the L.A. backdrop, like palm trees and traffic. A cluster of them hovering might indicate a crime or an accident, but one would have to be motivated to find out for sure. In addition to the L.A.P.D. patrols, there are also many news helicopters in L.A., plus the choppers of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department’s Aero Bureau and of the Fire Department, and private helos ferrying the very wealthy. These other helicopters are identifiable on radar apps you can download onto your phone, but L.A.P.D. helicopters aren’t always labelled on these apps, which can make them difficult to track. They are often black with a white stripe down the middle, somewhat orca-like in appearance. At night, they blink with green and red lights, or beam blinding Nightsun spotlights toward the ground. The division’s mascot is a cartoon buzzard, in apparent honor of their tendency to circle. Rare is the day in central L.A. when you go without seeing one. They have made their way into movies—“Blue Thunder,” “Boyz n the Hood”—and into the city’s psyche.
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S33The Most Replayable Music Game Just Got a Huge Discount on Nintendo Switch  Heartbreak is about as universal as human experiences get, but while it’s inspired countless works in other media, comparatively few games have tackled the topic. If you want to ring in the new year with a little lovesickness, though, you can grab the best breakup game ever on sale for under $10 on PC, PS4, and Switch.Simogo’s Sayonara Wild Hearts follows its unnamed heroine through a surreal post-breakup journey in the form of a spectacular music game. It’s not a rhythm game per se, since acting on the beat is rarely required, but music is still central to Sayonara Wild Hearts — so much so that its developer has described it as a “pop album video game.”
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S32Could They Be Ghosts?  By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.© 2023 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights. The New Yorker may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast. Ad Choices
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S3535 Years Ago, an Underestimated Platformer Changed the Course of Video Game History  To celebrate 35 years of Mega Man 2, Inverse caught up with the duo behind the game’s entrancing 8-bit score.Takashi Tateishi is a genre bender, a melodist who poetizes anomalous grooves. The Japanese composer is best known for writing and recording the music for 1988’s Mega Man 2 – an original 8-bit soundtrack that turned the Nintendo Entertainment System’s limitations into a synth-heavy odyssey that drifts through pockets of Mezzoforte, lo-fi dream pop, and 70s-tinted jazz fusion. It’s noteworthy for the way it flowed an era of piano-orientated compositions into guitar motifs, but as the Blue Bomber sequel celebrates its 35th anniversary this December, it is also a reminder of a transition in experimentation for Tateishi and Capcom at large.
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S67TV Technica 2023: These were our favorite shows and binges of the year  Everything was coming up mystery in 2023, judging by our picks for Ars Technica's annual list of the best TV shows of the year. There's just something about the basic framework that seems to lend itself to television. Showrunners and studios have clearly concluded that genre mashups with a mystery at the center is a reliable winning formula, whether it's combined with science fiction (Silo, Bodies, Pluto), horror (Fall of the House of Usher), or comedy (Only Murders in the Building, The Afterparty). And there's clearly still plenty of room in the market for the classic police procedural (Dark Winds, Poker Face, Justified: City Primeval). Even many shows we loved that were not overt nods to the genre still had some kind of mystery at their core (Yellowjackets, Mrs. Davis), so one could argue it's almost a universal narrative framework.
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S60The Foods the World Will Lose to Climate Change  There’s no denying it: Farming had a rough year. Extreme weather spun up storms and floods, unseasonal freezes and baking heat waves, and prolonged parching droughts. In parts of the world in 2023, tomato plants didn’t flower, the peach crop never came in, and the price of olive oil soared.To be a farmer right now—or an agronomist or an agricultural economist—is to recognize how closely those weird weather events are linked to climate change. In fact, when the United Nations Climate Change Summit, known as COP28, ran in Dubai earlier this month, it featured a 134-country pact to integrate planning for sustainable agriculture into countries’ climate road maps.
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S4S37This Quest 3 App Turns Your Local Tennis Court Into a Mixed Reality Arcade  Mixed reality does a great job of transforming banal spaces into something spectacular. Take, for example, this app that turns your living room into a spaceship, or this one that makes it look like your house is flying, Up-style.But it’s not all spaceships and shooting games — XR can also transform practical spaces into something a lot more. Exhibit A: this mixed reality tennis app that turns a regular court into a portal for playing anyone in the world.
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S43S68Here are the 10 best cars we drove in 2023  The mince pies have been eaten, the crackers have been cracked, and the days are starting to get longer. That means it's time to look back on the best vehicles we tested in 2023. It has been a good year for electric vehicles, which accounted for almost one in ten new vehicles sold in the US this year. We've also driven some rather good hybrids, as well as a pair of sports cars that reminded us that there's still room for enthusiast cars. Read on to find out which cars made the cut.
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S26S53How AI shook the world in 2023  2023 was the year that generative AI truly went global. Tools like Midjourney and Dall-E became part of the mainstream, getting more accurate with increased use. OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which launched in late 2022, fueled the imagination of tech enthusiasts who used the tool for various new purposes: from a legal ruling in Colombia to a TikTok business created on the platform. Although visits to the ChatGPT site peaked in May and plateaued afterward, the page had been seen a staggering 1.7 billion times by the end of November, according to Similarweb data.Everyone seemed to find a different use case for AI in 2023. Politicians in India used it as an excuse to deny inconvenient truths, claiming a controversial leaked audio was fabricated using the technology. Advertisers, meanwhile, ran wild with the technology: ad agency Ogilvy created different versions of an ad featuring Shah Rukh Khan, a Bollywood star, for small shops to personalize with AI and have him become their brand ambassador. Photographers, getting ahead of the risk of losing their livelihood to AI, used it to create award-winning images. All year, Rest of World cut through the noise and looked at the wider implication of AI. From women left heartbroken by their AI companion to artists being pushed aside by their own AI copycats, here are some of the most unexpected ways AI was used around the world in 2023.
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S49S69Saving the African penguin from climate change and overfishing  CAPE TOWN, South Africa—A weathered, green building stands at the edge of the cozy suburban Table View neighborhood in Cape Town, just a few blocks down from a Burger King and a community library. Upon stepping inside, visitors’ feet squelch on a mat submerged in antibacterial liquid—one of the first signs this isn’t just another shop on the street.
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S3465 Years Ago, a Legendary Director Made an All-Time Classic Samurai Movie -- And Inspired Star Wars  Imagine this: there’s an old warrior who has long been rumored dead, but he’s part of a covert group on a mission to get the princess of a conquered kingdom to safety. Standing in the way is a scarred villain with a direct connection both to the evil empire as well as the old warrior. The warrior belongs to an ancient tradition.Now imagine that it’s not Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. While George Lucas wore a lot of influences on his sleeves when he put together the first Star Wars trilogy, including Flash Gordon, obscure French comics, and more, Akira Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress proved one of the biggest influences on that galaxy far, far away.
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S31The Crisis at the Border  A record number of migrants crossed the southern border of the U.S. this year, and accounts have emerged throughout the year of cities struggling to provide services to an influx of immigrants. Republicans have tied foreign aid for Ukraine and Israel to call for stricter policies regarding asylum seekers, while Democrats have been stymied in search of a more humane approach to a crisis with no easy solutions in sight. There’s a reason the last major overhaul of the immigration system in the United States was in 1986. Changing conditions and a political impasse have created a state of chaos that the Biden Administration can no longer deny. In June, the New Yorker staff writer Dexter Filkins spoke with David Remnick about what he learned from reporting at the southern border. Plus, a visit with the poet John Lee Clark, whose writing on the DeafBlind experience is full of humor and life.The last major overhaul of the immigration system was in 1986. Changing conditions and a political impasse have created a state of chaos that the Biden Administration can no longer deny.
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S51Your Favorite HBR Articles of 2023  As we close out 2023, we asked our readers: Did an HBR article make a meaningful impact on the way you think, work, or lead this year? And how specifically did it change the way you operate? We heard from readers in a variety of different industries, writing in from various corners of the world. They called out articles ranging from a 2001 classic article about managing your energy as a worker to a recent magazine piece on storytelling for leaders.
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S66Stunning video reveals how our fingers form in the womb  For the first time, scientists have mapped the process of limb development in human embryos down to the individual cell — and the stunning result could help prevent a common type of birth defect in the future.The challenge: At four weeks old, the parts of a human embryo that will eventually be arms and legs are essentially buds of undifferentiated cells. By week 8, though, the limbs are well-defined, with visible fingers and toes, and we’ve never really understood how we get from point A to B.
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S16The Best Fitbits for Every Type of Activity  If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more. Please also consider subscribing to WIREDThere was a time not too long ago when Fitbit was essentially the only wearable in town, the most popular way to brag about step counts and the rest. While its status has waned in the face of ever-growing competition, Fitbit is still making easy-to-use fitness trackers and watches.
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S63The 15 Best Movies on Amazon Prime Right Now  Over the past year or so, Netflix and Apple TV+ have been duking it out to have the most prestigious film offerings (congrats, CODA!), but some of the best movies are on Amazon Prime Video. The streamer was one of the first to go around picking up film festival darlings and other lovable favorites, and they’re all still there in the library, so if they flew under your radar the first time, now is the perfect time to catch up.Our picks for the 10 best films on Amazon Prime are below. All the films in our guide are included in your Prime subscription—no renting here. Once you’ve watched your fill, check out our lists for the best shows on Netflix and best movies on Disney+ if you’re looking for something else to watch. We also have a guide to the best shows on Amazon if that's what you're in the mood for.
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S45S575 Ways Ozempic and Other New Weight-Loss Drugs Have Changed Health  Ozempic and similar drugs are ushering in a new era of weight management and obesity treatments, and researchers are racing to understand their impactOur culture’s obsession with weight has always felt unshakeable. But over the past year, new classes of drugs seem to be changing the way we think and talk about weight, dieting and obesity—for better and for worse. Popular pound-shedding medications including Wegovy, Ozempic, Mounjaro and Zepbound have been all over social media and mainstream headlines in the past few years, and the frenzied interest around these drugs has fueled a research boom that produced impressive results in 2023. These drugs, typically taken as regular injections, are attractive for multiple reasons: they offer not only a seemingly fast and easy way to lose weight but unexpected cardiac benefits as well. But even though the latest research shows immense promise, high costs and poor accessibility of the life-long treatment pose thorny challenges.
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S29Why Russia and China have been added to Republicans' new 'axis of evil'  Former US president George W Bush’s concept of an “axis of evil”, introduced in his 2002 State of the Union address, came to define the flawed foreign policy decisions of his years in power.He used it to legitimise both the invasion of Iraq and the ensuing “war on terror”. Bush’s axis of evil included Iraq, Iran and North Korea. They were bound together as long-standing US adversaries, rendered as actively seeking weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and who, he argued, collectively posed a “grave and growing danger” as antagonist regimes capable of attacking the US and its allies.
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S46S54Behold--the Best Space Images of 2023  This year’s most interesting space images include infrared views of galactic “bones,” an asteroid’s double moon, Jupiter’s giant polar vortex, and moreThe year 2023, like every other one before it—and, no doubt, every year to come—has had its crests of good news and its troughs of bad tidings. But one constant, reliable source of awe and beauty is the sky over our head. After journeys of mere seconds to billions of years, the light from astronomical objects in the cosmos rains down on all of us, and scientists have patiently photographed some of it to better understand the universe in which we live.
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S11Did Australia's boomerangs pave the way for flight?  The aircraft is one of the most significant developments of modern society, enabling people, goods and ideas to fly around the world far more efficiently than ever before. The first successful piloted flight took off in 1903 in North Carolina, but a 10,000-year-old hunting tool likely developed by Aboriginal Australians may have held the key to its lift-off. As early aviators discovered, the secret to flight is balancing the flow of air. Therefore, an aircraft's wings, tail or propeller blades are often shaped in a specially designed, curved manner called an aerofoil that lifts the plane up and allows it to drag or turn to the side as it moves through the air.
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S42To Prove Your Company Isn't Greenwashing, Endorse Smart Regulation  Whether you call it propaganda or greenwashing, companies have long used marketing to tout the good they do for the environment while obfuscating any negative externalities of their businesses. However, thanks to the rise of the internet and social media and the proliferation of data on ESG performance, consumers (and employees) are now acutely aware of whether organizations are actually practicing what they preach. Conversations with advocates, regulators, consumers, and executives suggest that the most powerful way for businesses to prove they do so is to support meaningful regulations to ensure that their entire sector or industry will do the right thing. This includes exiting lobby groups that fight against such measures, communicating more regularly with regulators, and endorsing and advocating for more science-backed regulation.
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S27Fondue Chinoise: Switzerland's Asian-inspired hot pot  While Italian-Americans may celebrate the holiday season with the feast of the seven fishes and the Swedes spread the festive table with seafood to make their julebord (Christmas Smorgasbord), the Swiss gather around a fondue pot in an activity of unity and friendship. However, it's not the cheese fondue you might expect – instead, they celebrate the end of the year by preparing fondue Chinoise (Chinese fondue), an Asian-inspired hot pot made with a fragrant, salty broth in lieu of cheese, and tender, melt-in-your-mouth ribeye steak for dipping, instead of bread. Dating to the 17th Century, the history of cheese fondue, unlike fondue Chinoise, has been well-documented. It originated in western Switzerland, where farmers made hard cheese from a surplus of milk during the winter and it was ultimately eaten in the most delicious way possible: melted in a pot.
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S18Can near-death experiences prove the afterlife?  There’s nothing so beloved by filmmakers as the near-death experience scene. You know the one: It happens when the hero is bleeding out, drowning, or staggering through a heat-warped desert. Suddenly, the screen turns a pure, calming white, and there’s a saccharine scene between the hero and their dead loved ones, or perhaps a wise old person with a kind face. After some heart-warming back and forth, it ends with something like, “It’s not your time,” or, “You don’t belong here.” Then, the hero jerks awake and goes on to defeat anything and everything.As it turns out, these near-death experiences (NDEs) are not just a box office trope. They’re unusually common in the general public. Roughly 9 million Americans claim to have had an NDE. It’s thought that roughly five percent of the general population, and 15-20 percent of critical patients (that is, those in critical care) have had an out-of-body experience. It’s likely that someone in your life has had one. Perhaps you have?
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S56Watch the Best Scientific American TikToks of 2023  This year, on our 178th anniversary, Scientific American tried something new: we started a TikTok account. It’s the same high-quality science coverage you know and love, just in a shorter (and perhaps sillier) form.You can get more bite-sized science by following us on TikTok. But if TikTok isn’t your cup of tea, head to our Instagram or YouTube for the same great videos.
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S64What was it like when supermassive black holes arose?  One of the biggest challenges for modern astrophysics is to describe how the Universe went from a uniform place without planets, stars, or galaxies to the rich, structured, diverse cosmos we see today. Not just with a general story, mind you, but in gory detail, going not only as far back as we can see, but even farther: to what must have existed at an epoch where even our most distant observations are insufficient to take us there. Going back to the limits of what’s observable, to when the Universe was just a few hundred million years old, we find a slew of fascinating objects.It’s the old chicken-and-egg problem made new: if there’s a maximum rate at which black holes can grow, and the Universe wasn’t born with them, how did we make the ones that we see? In other words, how did the Universe make such ultra-massive black holes in such short periods of time? After decades of conflicting stories, scientists finally think we know what happened.
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S19S55How Autonomous Vehicles Could Help People with Disabilities  Self-driving cars could give people who live outside big cities and are unable to drive more mobility, but the technology must still overcome some hurdlesGRAND RAPIDS, Minn. ― Myrna Peterson predicts self-driving vehicles will be a ticket out of isolation and loneliness for people like her, who live outside big cities and have disabilities that prevent them from driving.
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S50S416 Criminally Overlooked 2023 Games You Need to Play  It feels like 2023 has seen a nonstop torrent of fantastic video games with each step of the year bringing massive hits like Resident Evil 4, Baldur’s Gate 3, and Alan Wake 2. Fans of every genre have been inundated with things to play, but with a steady stream of releases, a few things will inevitably fall through the cracks. This year has also provided dozens of smaller titles with unique vibrant styles and unique ideas, from both the indie and AAA sides of the industry. With that in mind, we’ve compiled a list of six hidden gems from 2023 that you absolutely shouldn’t miss. Paranormasight: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo is a fourth-wall-breaking horror visual novel from Square Enix and possibly the most criminally overlooked game of the entire year. Set in 1980s Tokyo, Paranormasight follows multiple protagonists through a twisty tale about curses that have infested the city. All of the curses in the game are based on real-life urban legends from Sumida, Tokyo.
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S44S25A Better Way to Make New Year's Resolutions  This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.Early in 2023, my colleague Caroline Mimbs Nyce chatted with the writer Oliver Burkeman about New Year’s resolutions. Burkeman is an expert on productivity, but he’s arguably also an expert on getting real about the time human beings have on Earth. Burkeman is the author of Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mere Mortals (4,000 weeks is approximately the length of an average American’s life span). In it, he writes: “The average human lifespan is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short.”
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S36We Are About to Enter the Golden Age of Gene Therapy  Gene therapy has experienced a complete renaissance — where will it go in 2024 and beyond? Eleven years ago, gene therapy — where defective genes are snipped out of DNA and replaced with healthy ones — became a household name. A landmark paper proved that scientists could precisely manipulate DNA in ways previously thought unimaginable using CRISPR-Cas9, an editing tool adapted from the immune system found in some bacteria. Almost overnight, the idea of designer babies, kill-switch mosquitoes, and cancer-off buttons stormed into mainstream imagination.
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