- The top 25 stories curated by editors and fellow readers!
Editor's Pick |
| Work Homeland Security Shares New Details of Mysterious Drone Flights Over New Jersey  Homeland security officials in New Jersey huddled with state and local lawmakers Wednesday to discuss the recent spate of drone sightings throughout the state. Dozens of mysterious nighttime flights started last month and have raised growing concern among residents and officials. |
| Work Firefox, one of the first "Do Not Track" supporters, no longer offers it  That moment, when every major browser had a Do Not Track option, was perhaps the height of DNT, and even then, there was a feeling that it could never work. |
| Work Moment of relief as Romania and Bulgaria join EU border-free zone  Seventeen years after Romania and Bulgaria joined the European Union, they have been given the green light to become members of its border-free Schengen travel zone. |
| Work 80 colleges could close by 2029, even as elite Ivy League schools thrive  American higher education is in crisis. This year, some two dozen colleges shut their doors and more are forecast to close in 2025, CNBC reports. |
| Work The Long, Contentious Battle to Regulate Gain-of-Function Work  In early 2012, federal officials summoned Michael Imperiale from his home in Ann Arbor, Michigan, to a large conference room in Bethesda, Maryland. There, they handed the virologist drafts of two scientific papers. |
| Work Co-packaged optics can supercharge generative AI computing  Optical fibers carry voice and data at high speeds across long distances, and IBM Research scientists are bringing this speed and capacity somewhere they haven't previously gone: inside data centers and onto circuit boards, where they will help accelerate generative AI computing. |
| Work Most Canadians would avoid buying U.S. products post-Trump tariff: Nanos survey  A majority of Canadians would be hesitant to buy U.S. goods in response to the proposed American tariff on products from Canada, according to a new survey. The findings of a recently released Nanos Research survey suggest a tariff on Canadian exports into the U.S. |
| Work U.S. share of electric and hybrid vehicle sales reached a record in the third quarter  The share of electric and hybrid vehicle sales in the United States increased again in the third quarter of 2024 (3Q24), reaching a record. Combined sales of hybrid vehicles, plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, and battery electric vehicles (BEVs) increased from 19. |
| Work Scientists Built the First Engine Powered by Entanglement--Not Coal or Oil  The word "quantum" is proliferating into nearly every facet of modern technology. There's quantum computers, of course, but also quantum hard drives, quantum internet, and yes, even quantum engines. |
| Work How Learning Tibetan Changed the Way I Think  When I was nine years old, my parents discovered Buddhism and became students of Lama Tony Karam at Casa Tibet Mexico. That same year, I watched Disney's Atlantis: The Lost Empire. |
| Work The Golden Rules of Road Tripping  Veteran road trippers (including a service station food evangelist) share their savviest tips and tricks. |
| Work Hospitals gave patients meds during childbirth, then reported them for illicit drug use  This article was published in partnership with The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization covering the U.S. criminal justice system, Reveal and Mother Jones. |
| Work NYC Wants You to Stop Taking Traffic Cam Selfies, But Here's How to Do It Anyway  When it debuted this summer, the Traffic Cam Photobooth (TCP) website offered a new twist on the surveillance state by enabling smartphone users to take selfies with traffic cams in New York, Georgia, Maryland, Minnesota, and Ireland. TCP was recently featured in an exhibit at Miami Art Week. |
| Work Google's new Project Astra could be generative AI's killer app  Top billing goes to Gemini 2.0--the latest iteration of Google DeepMind's family of multimodal large language models, now redesigned around the ability to control agents--and a new version of Project Astra, the experimental everything app that the company teased at Google I/O in May. |
| Work Russian Troops Advance to Within 3 Miles of Key Ukrainian Transit Hub  Ukraine's top general said on Thursday that his troops were facing "extremely fierce" fighting as Russian forces close in on the strategic eastern city of Pokrovsk, and that "unconventional decisions" would have to be made to bolster Ukrainian defenses. Although the commander, Gen. |
| Work AI Agents with More Autonomy Than Chatbots Are Coming. Some Safety Experts Are Worried  All day, every day, you make choices. Philosophers have long argued that this ability to act intentionally, or with agency, distinguishes human beings from simpler life-forms and machines. |
| Work Where next for Iran now that its 'Axis of Resistance' is shattered?  Amid the shattered glass and trampled flags, posters of Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei lie ripped on the floor of the Iranian embassy in Damascus. |
| Work Trump's Pick for FTC Chair is Ready to Undo the Good Things From Lina Khan  President-elect Donald Trump announced on Tuesday that he would be nominating Andrew Ferguson as head of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. Ferguson would replace Lina Khan, a regulator who fought for consumer rights and pushed back hard against monopolists. |
| Work Americans rate Trump's Cabinet picks in new poll  While a majority of American voters questioned in a new Fox News poll say they are hopeful about the re-election of President-elect Donald Trump, they are divided when it comes to the president-elect's top nominees who will likely serve in his upcoming second administration. |
| Work Ex-FBI informant Alexander Smirnov pleads guilty to lying about the Bidens  A California man who was charged with lying to the FBI about fake criminal allegations against President Biden and his son Hunter is pleading guilty, according to an agreement filed in federal court on Thursday. |
| Work Warner Bros. Discovery restructures to split up streaming and cable businesses  Warner Bros. Discovery is reorganizing its business into two separate units: one for linear networks, and the other for streaming and studios business. |
| Work In Nigeria's lithium boom, many mines are illegal and children do much of the work  NASARAWA, Nigeria (AP) -- Dressed in a faded pink dress, 6-year-old Juliet Samaniya squats under scorching skies to chip at a jagged white rock with a stone tool. Dust coats her tiny hands and her hair as she works hour after hour for less than a dollar a day. |
| Work Why did China hack the worlds phone networks  Chinese hackers have breached dozens of telecommunications companies around the world. |
| Work What Trump Said About Elon Musk in his TIME Person of the Year Interview  This article is part of The D.C. Brief, TIME's politics newsletter. Sign up here to get stories like this sent to your inbox. |
| Work When IBM Built a War Room for Executives  It seems to me that every item in the Computer History Museum's collection has a biography of sorts--a life before CHM, a tale about how it came to us, and a life within the museum. |
| Work Why is deep sleep so important to memory? It's about time.  It's no hidden health secret that sleep is really good for us. It helps our immune systems and supports almost every organ system in the body. We've also known for almost two decades that the slow, synchronous electrical waves in the brain during deep sleep supports memory formation. |
| Work Inclusive immigration policies protect America's health care  As Syrians chart a new future free from dictatorship, the U.S. has an opportunity to reaffirm its commitment to inclusive immigration policies that strengthen bonds between nations. By empowering immigrant doctors, America can continue to lead in health care innovation while supporting global stability and peace. |
| Work Better Recovery Story Buy for 2025: Super Micro Computer vs. Intel  Adria Cimino has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Advanced Micro Devices, Intel, and Nvidia. The Motley Fool recommends the following options: short February 2025 $27 calls on Intel. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy. |
| Work Apple Stock vs. Tesla Stock: Billionaires Are Buying One and Selling the Other Ahead of 2025  Suzanne Frey, an executive at Alphabet, is a member of The Motley Fool's board of directors. Bank of America is an advertising partner of Motley Fool Money. Trevor Jennewine has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Alphabet and Bank of America. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy. |
| Work Gemini AI can now summarize what's in your Google Drive folders  Gemini's integration into Google Drive is getting a little more useful. In addition to summarizing documents or answering questions about a project, the AI assistant can now generate summaries of everything inside a folder. |
| Work Meet the Newest Stock in the Nasdaq-100. It's Soared 3,250% Since Early Last Year and Is Still a Buy Heading Into 2025, According to Wall Street.  Randi Zuckerberg, a former director of market development and spokeswoman for Facebook and sister to Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg, is a member of The Motley Fool's board of directors. Danny Vena has positions in Meta Platforms. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends AppLovin and Meta Platforms. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy. |
| Work Report: Tuberculosis R&D funding is up, but still short of goals and dominated by a few players  Meanwhile, the U.S. National Institutes of Health and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation contributed 53% of all R&D funds, and the 20 top funders were responsible for 86% of total spending. Looked at another way, the public sector provided 62% of the $1.2 billion in funding, followed by philanthropies that contributed 24%. Just 9% came from the private sector, such as pharmaceutical companies. |
| Work Elon Musk says SpaceX headquarters to be in Starbase, Texas  He also transferred SpaceX’s incorporation from Delaware to Texas earlier this year. This followed the shareholder vote held by Musk to move Tesla's state of incorporation to Texas, where it has its headquarters, after a Delaware judge invalidated his $56-billion pay package. |
| Work Six Republicans in Nevada again charged for 2020 fake elector scheme  Their lawyers previously argued that Ford improperly brought the case before a grand jury in Democratic-leaning Las Vegas instead of in a northern Nevada city, where the alleged crimes occurred. |
| Work Trumpa??s FBI pick Kash Patel locks down Senate support as Wray prepares to quit  And when Robert F Kennedy Jr, Trump's choice to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, arrives on the Hill, he will almost certainly struggle to resist engaging with reporters that could create a media circus around his nomination, the Trump advisers said. |
| Work Ed Miliband pledges a??most ambitious reforms to UK energy system in generationsa??  He added: "Any money earmarked for carbon capture and storage - which is expensive, impossible to make zero carbon and fails to detach electricity prices from the volatile international gas market - would be better spent on the renewables, grid and storage infrastructure that will actually deliver clean power." |
| Work UK electric vehicle charger rollout risks regional divide, report warns  Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, the chair of the House of Commons’ public accounts committee, said issues with planning permissions and electricity grid connections were “acting as roadblocks to further progress”. |
| Work Prince Andrew a??confidanta?? loses appeal on UK ban over national security  They concluded: "In our judgment it was open to the SSHD to take a reasonably precautionary approach to the risk, and to take action rationally aimed at neutralising it so far as possible. |
| Work Royal Mail fined A?10.5m for missing delivery targets  The fine comes as the Czech billionaire Daniel KÅetÃnský's takeover bid for Royal Mail is reportedly close to being finalised. The £3.57bn takeover by Royal Mail's largest shareholder, KÅetÃnský's EP Group, was agreed by parent company IDS in May. |
| Work Christmas rail strikes suspended as union mulls new Avanti deal  Great Britain’s rail network is completely closed each year on Christmas Day, while only a limited service operates on Boxing Day. Some routes are closed for longer over the festive period, as Network Rail carries out engineering work. |
| Work UKa??s economy shrinks unexpectedly by 0.1% in October  Last month, the Bank trimmed its annual growth forecast for 2024 to 1% from 1.25% but predicted a stronger 2025 with 1.5% growth, reflecting a short-term boost to the economy from the budget. |
| Work Middle East crisis live: rebel leader urges Syrians to take to the streets to celebrate a??revolutiona??  In the US, a former Syrian military official who oversaw a prison where alleged human rights abuses took place has been charged by a federal grand jury with several counts of torture and conspiracy to commit a crime. Samir Ousman al-Sheikh, who oversaw Syria's infamous Adra Prison from 2005 to 2008 under recently ousted President Bashar Assad, was arrested in July on visa fraud charges. |
| Work Macron expected to name new French PM after days of political deadlock  In a critical looming moment, Le Pen on 31 March 2025 faces the verdict in an embezzlement trial on charges she denies. If convicted, she could lose the chance of standing in the 2027 elections and with it her best chance yet of winning the Élysée Palace. |
| Work Obscurity awaits Bashar al-Assad in Moscow after Putin offered personal escape route  “I believe Bashar will maintain a very low profile, perhaps for the rest of his life. I do not see him at all making any sort of political comeback in Syria or anywhere else,” said Lesch. |
| Work Russia launches huge missile attack on Ukrainea??s energy infrastructure  On 21 November, Russia used an intermediate range hypersonic missile, which Putin has dubbed the Oreshnik, for the first time, striking an industrial plant in the city of Dnipro. Putin has used the missile, which has nuclear capabilities, as a way of raising the stakes and threatening the West, and has said it could be used again, including against "decision-making centres" in the country. |
| Work Man who allegedly raped 90-year-old charged with her manslaughter and murder  The man was arrested at a home near Lake Macquarie and charged with aggravated breaking and entering, inflicting actual bodily harm with the intent to have sexual intercourse, aggravated sexual assault (break and enter) and aggravated sexual assault (inflict actual bodily harm on victim). |
| Work Peter Dutton says nuclear a??will make electricity cheapera?? but critics say Coalition costings a a??fantasya??  Clare Savage, the chair of the Australian Energy Regulator, has said ageing coal plants are increasingly leading to outages. She has warned they cannot be relied on until theoretical nuclear plants came online, putting the grid at risk if the renewable energy rollout slows. |
| Work The Coalition claims its nuclear policy is a??visionarya?? a?? but it needs to stand up to scrutiny  There will be much scrutiny of these costings because, thus far, it's about the only pre-election policy detail available from the opposition. There should be a lot more. Just like all that Labor does and promises to do, every Coalition policy needs to be able to withstand rigorous interrogation. |
| Work British music producera??s Byron Bay scuba diving death a??could have been avoideda??, father tells court  Under questioning from the barrister representing Sundive and its directors, Patrick Barry, the court heard Rings had performed the same maintenance work she had done on the equipment that would later be used by Bareham an estimated 20 times. |
| Work Japan chooses a??golda?? as kanji of the year in nod to Olympics glory a?? and slush fund politics  In acknowledgment of the quake's impact, the second most popular choice was sai, meaning disaster, while third place went to sho - soar or fly - which forms part of the name of the Japanese Major League Baseball star Shohei Ohtani. |
| Work Friday briefing: After a week of chaos, will South Korea impeach its president?  Littman’s granddaughter, Sarah Sicherman said: “They both love each other’s humour and intellect. They keep each other young.” But the couple have different ideas. Littman attributed his longevity to reading and keeping himself current. For her part, Fiterman credited buttermilk. |
| Work a??The water wara??: how drought threatens survival of Sicilya??s towns  Troina, the site of a historic battleground during the second world war that resulted in extensive damage to the city during the intense six-day conflict, is among hundreds of Sicilian towns risking extinction in the coming decades. In 2021, in an attempt to resuscitate the community, Troina adopted a strategy that has become fashionable in the south: sell, or practically give away, abandoned homes to anyone willing to move in - the symbolic price of a house: â¬1. |
| Work Thick as Thieves is a multiplayer stealth-action game from legends Warren Spector and Paul Neurath  Here's how Spector describes it: “Thick As Thieves captures the vision of immersive gameplay that OtherSide was founded on. With this game, we’re empowering players to create their own stories in a world that values observation, craftiness, and creative problem-solving.” |
| Work The next game from the Sifu team is... a 5v5 arcade soccer title?  Don't expect to see the likes of Liverpool or Real Madrid in Rematch, at least not right away. The game is set in the future, so there isn't much in the way of licensing, but Sloclap isn't ruling out such agreements down the line. |
| Work Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is coming to PC on January 23  Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is coming to PC!Just announced at #TheGameAwards, the second entry in the Final Fantasy VII remake project launches on Steam and Epic Games Store on January 23rd.Save up to 30% when pre-orders become available later today. #FF7R pic.twitter.com/S5YkQgy7Ei |
| Work The first Witcher 4 trailer sees Ciri kicking butt  CD Projekt did not share a release date for The Witcher 4, nor did the studio say what platforms the game would arrive on. However, it has previously said it was making the game in Unreal Engine 5, and if you look hard enough, a footnote at the bottom says the trailer was pre-rendered in UE5 on an unannounced "NVIDIA GeForce RTX GPU." |
| Work It Takes Two studio returns with dueling sci-fi and fantasy worlds in Split Fiction  Like Hazelight's previous games, Split Fiction is being published by EA under its indie-focused EA Originals label. Split Fiction is due to hit PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S on March 6, 2025, and it'll cost $50. On PC, it's coming to Steam, the Epic Games Store and the EA app. Crucially for the co-op aspect, it supports cross-platform play among PS5, Xbox and Steam. |
| Work Ontario to restrict electricity exports to US and bar American-made alcohol if Trump tariffs applied  TORONTO (AP) -- Canada's most populous province may bar American-made alcohol in addition to restricting electricity exports to Michigan, New York State and Minnesota if U.S. President-elect Donald Trump imposes sweeping tariffs on all Canadian products, a senior official said Thursday. |
| Work Fumito Ueda's follow-up to The Last Guardian is an untitled dark sci-fi game  Influential game director Fumito Ueda is back with a brief look at his first new game since 2016. |
| Work Elden Ring Nightreign is a co-op spinoff coming in 2025  Multiplayer isn't a new concept for FromSoftware. Demon Souls, multiple Dark Souls entries, and Elden Ring all allow for some kind of co-op multiplayer if you need to summon a friend in for a particularly difficult boss fight. Playing a game were you get to run around the open world with friends, seemingly with a much greater ability to jump and run around based on the trailer, would feel very different.Elden Ring Nightreign is coming to PlayStation 4 and 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC in 2025. |
| Work Ragebound is a new Ninja Gaiden game from the team behind Blasphemous  Right away, you can see the influence of The Game Kitchen. The studio's signature pixel art style looks gorgeous in the back half of the reveal trailer, and it looks like the game will reward tight, coordinated play from players. As for the story, it's set during the events of the NES version of Ninja Gaiden and stars a new protagonist, Kenji Mozu. It's up to him to save Hayabusa Village while Ryu is away in America. |