We may earn revenue from the products available on this page and participate in affiliate programs. At, we've published our prestigious Best of What's New list since 1988. For 153 years, we've celebrated the science and technology that shapes our everyday lives and launches humanity forward. Innovation doesn't follow a straight path, and the detours, stumbles, and dead ends force great minds to pioneer change. Looking back at the early days of our Best of What's New lists, we see technologies that now seem quaint or have been completely forgotten, but we also see the roots of future greatness. Our list this year is the culmination of countless hours of debate, hands-on testing, and expert conversations. This is the Best of What's New 2025. From the most detailed movie of the night sky ever made to the first commercial soft landing on the moon, this year has been an inflection point for exploring and understanding the vast expanse above our heads. We also saw breakthroughs in small changes to commercial airliners that improve efficiency, as well as a new type of rocket engine that might be the future of extremely high speed air travel, plus the closest view of Mercury we've ever seen! Vera C. Rubin Observatory by U.S. National Science Foundation & Department of Energy: World's largest digital camera to conduct 10-year survey of the night sky Prepare to see space like never before. The Vera C. Rubin Observatory is a groundbreaking US-funded project that will capture the most detailed, dynamic map of the night sky ever made. Using the world's largest digital camera, it will capture a time-lapse of the entire sky every few nights to reveal billions of objects and catch fast-changing events like supernovae and near-Earth asteroids. Its massive dataset will help scientists better understand dark matter, dark energy, and the structure of the universe while also improving planetary defense. The 3,200-megapixel Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) camera is the size of a small car and twice as heavy, tipping the scales at 6,000 pounds. The sensor's huge number of megapixels is equivalent to 260 modern cell phone sensors. The camera is so powerful, it could snap a clear image of a golf ball from 15 miles away. By making its data widely available, the observatory will also open new doors for discovery for researchers, students, and citizen scientists around the world. Deployed on Boeing 787-9 aircraft starting in January, the coating uses tiny, sharkskin-like grooves called riblets to guide airflow smoothly along the aircraft's surface.

'It Was Nuts': The Extreme Tests that Show Why Hail Is a Multibillion-Dollar Problem The costs of a hail damage have ballooned over the past two decades, prompting researchers to resort to extreme measures to understand how these storms destroy buildings. The scars left on houses look like shotgun blasts, sometimes. In the aftermath of major storms, Andrew Shick, owner and chief executive of Illinois-based firm Roofing USA, has driven through suburbs blasted by hail and been left stunned by the damage. Earlier this year, he visited a farm complex in western Illinois where roofs, even sturdy metal ones, were left pockmarked and perforated after 3-inch balls of ice fell from the sky. "It was nuts," he recalls.

Scientists Thought Parkinson's Was in Our Genes. New ideas about chronic illness could revolutionize treatment, if we take the research seriously. Amy Lindberg spent 26 years in the Navy and she still walked like it--with intention, like her chin had someplace to be. But around 2017, her right foot stopped following orders. Lindberg and her husband Brad were five years into their retirement. After moving 10 times for Uncle Sam, they'd bought their dream house near the North Carolina coast. They had a backyard that spilled out onto wetlands. From the kitchen, you could see cranes hunting. They kept bees and played pickleball and watched their children grow. But now Lindberg's right foot was out of rhythm. She worked hard to ignore it, but she couldn't disregard the tremors.

Ghislaine Maxwell's ultimate humiliation: Epstein's sex trafficker girlfriend poses in outrageous outfits and exposes herself in dozens of photos released from the billionaire paedophile's files Silent Trump flees growing storm over Epstein'cover-up' as he jets off for holidays without ANY comment How you can ease the agony of carpal tunnel syndrome. The'change of pace' sex move that sends ANY woman wild. Here's the precise moment to deploy it and what to do with your eyes. Corey Feldman walks back claim that Corey Haim'molested' him after late star's mother slammed his comments Emily in Paris cast left'aghast' and'walking on eggshells' as off-camera drama becomes overwhelming... and whispers swirl about a CURSE Truth about THIS photo of Karoline Leavitt's face... and why if she was non-binary and disabled, Vanity Fair would never have done this: KENNEDY After 27 years as a TV anchor I was suddenly pulled off screens. My boss's explanation was a brutal lesson in loyalty I was dead for 105 minutes and learned exactly how you get into heaven... then Jesus spoke six words into my mind and sent me back Jake Paul's jaw is broken in Anthony Joshua battering: YouTuber-turned-boxer rushes to hospital I was falsely accused of being the Brown University shooter... America's great divide laid bare as Wall Street splurges record bonuses on outrageously lavish homes while the rest of the country struggles Andrew's fury at anyone who doesn't bow and scrape.

And why many scientists are freaked out about the first serious for-profit company moving into the solar geoengineering field. Stardust Solutions believes that it can solve climate change--for a price. The Israel-based geoengineering startup has said it expects nations will soon pay it more than a billion dollars a year to launch specially equipped aircraft into the stratosphere. Once they've reached the necessary altitude, those planes will disperse particles engineered to reflect away enough sunlight to cool down the planet, purportedly without causing environmental side effects. The proprietary (and still secret) particles could counteract all the greenhouse gases the world has emitted over the last 150 years, the company stated in a 2023 pitch deck it presented to venture capital firms. In fact, it's the "only technologically feasible solution" to climate change, the company said. The company disclosed it raised $60 million in funding in October, marking by far the largest known funding round to date for a startup working on solar geoengineering.

A member of the Ukrainian State Emergency Service attends a transfer ceremony of special vehicles from Japan to Ukraine in Kyiv in November 2023. With Russia making incremental territorial gains in Ukraine, Kyiv is urging Tokyo to boost its support in areas such as cybersecurity, demining and counterdrone systems, transforming what started as ad hoc, nonlethal assistance into a long-term security partnership. "Ukraine has identified several priority areas," Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Serhiy Boev told The Japan Times in an exclusive interview. These include counterdrone systems that can be integrated with the country's air-defense network, logistics and maintenance support for nonlethal equipment, as well as surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities to enhance maritime domain awareness, particularly in the Black Sea. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever.

Unlike conventional keyword-based search tools, the AI service for searching through disclosure materials allows for prompts such as companies whose dividend predictions rose at least 20%. Japan Exchange Group, the operator of the Tokyo Stock Exchange (TSE), on Tuesday launched a service enabling users to search corporate disclosure materials using artificial intelligence. The J-Lens service, whose prototype version was released by JPX Market Innovation & Research, a unit of Japan Exchange, or JPX, is aimed at improving investor convenience by enhancing search functions for the massive volume of disclosure documents. Around 150,000 such documents are filed each year. Unlike conventional keyword-based search tools, J-Lens allows for prompts such as companies whose dividend predictions rose at least 20%.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang speaks alongside U.S. President Donald Trump at the White House in Washington on April 30. U.S. President Donald Trump decided to let Nvidia sell its H200 artificial intelligence chips to China after concluding the move carried a lower security risk because the company's Chinese archrival, Huawei Technologies, already offers AI systems with comparable performance, according to a person familiar with the deliberations. Administration officials who weighed whether to clear Nvidia's H200 had considered multiple possible scenarios, factoring in the views of national security hawks in Washington, said the person. Options ranged from exporting zero AI chips to China to allowing exports of everything to flood the Chinese market and overwhelm Huawei. Ultimately the policy backed by Trump called for clearing H200s to China while holding back the latest Nvidia chips for American customers, the person said.

The emergence of large language models (LLMs) has sparked much interest in creating LLM-based digital populations that can be applied to many applications such as social simulation, crowdsourcing, marketing, and recommendation systems. A digital population can reduce the cost of recruiting human participants and alleviate many concerns related to human subject study. However, research has found that most of the existing works rely solely on LLMs and could not sufficiently capture the accuracy and diversity of a real human population. To address this limitation, we propose CrowdLLM that integrates pretrained LLMs and generative models to enhance the diversity and fidelity of the digital population. We conduct theoretical analysis of CrowdLLM regarding its great potential in creating cost-effective, sufficiently representative, scalable digital populations that can match the quality of a real crowd. Comprehensive experiments are also conducted across multiple domains (e.g., crowdsourcing, voting, user rating) and simulation studies which demonstrate that CrowdLLM achieves promising performance in both accuracy and distributional fidelity to human data.

Abstract--We present a Fourier-enhanced recurrent neural network (RNN) for downscaling electrical loads. The model combines (i) a recurrent backbone driven by low-resolution inputs, (ii) explicit Fourier seasonal embeddings fused in latent space, and (iii) a self-attention layer that captures dependencies among high-resolution components within each period. Energy policy and infrastructure investment decisions require an integrated system-wide perspective that captures the interdependencies of supply, conversion, and end-use sectors, as well as feedback from macroeconomic, technology-cost, and policy drivers. Many such energy modeling systems exist [1], of which the National Energy Modeling System (NEMS), developed by the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) [2], is widely used by policymakers and stakeholders for this very reason. However, as noted in the study of energy plant pollution studies provided by NEMS [3], using temporally and spatially averaged data may significantly miss essential features and pricing signals.