Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. There are plenty of annual recap lists circulating around this time of year, but few of them involve the amount of work put in by California's Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI). Over the past year, researchers guided remotely operated vehicles more than 3,000 feet down to survey the vast biodiversity within some of the oceans' deepest and darkest regions. The data and footage collected during these trips will help experts fill in the gaps towards understanding the planet's hardest-to-reach ecosystems. To celebrate the past 12 months of discoveries, MBARI released a video highlighting some of 2025's most stunning, strange, and mysterious creature sightings.

Could the AI industry be on the verge of its first major layoffs? Will China spread propaganda to slow the US data-center building boom? Where are AI agents headed? AI-powered robots are just one of the topics likely to grab headlines in 2026. When OpenAI declared a "code red" this month to refocus its teams on competing with Google, I couldn't help but think back to December three years ago when the companies' roles were reversed.

This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Quotes displayed in real-time or delayed by at least 15 minutes. Market data provided by Factset . Powered and implemented by FactSet Digital Solutions . Mutual Fund and ETF data provided by Refinitiv Lipper .

This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Quotes displayed in real-time or delayed by at least 15 minutes. Market data provided by Factset . Powered and implemented by FactSet Digital Solutions . Mutual Fund and ETF data provided by Refinitiv Lipper .

The Avatar Game Is So Good, They Don't Need to Make the Movies Anymore See the new movie if you'd like. But if you really want to experience the big blue world of Pandora, the video game is where it's at. The Avatar video game is better than the movies. I say this as someone who has dumbly adored James Cameron's Avatar movies for a long time. The original 2009 film was my first ever midnight premiere, which I attended along with a friend who sat in the theater shirtless with his entire body painted blue.

Can You Reclaim Your Mind? To feel mentally alive, you have to do more than defeat distraction. Looking back over the columns I've written in 2025, I can see that a lot of them, broadly construed, have been about reclaiming one's mind. I wrote about living in the present, picturing the future, and exploring one's memories; about reading, learning, and making the most of one's spare time; and about whether artificial intelligence will end up expanding our thinking or limiting it . The shared subject was resistance to the forces, malevolent or inertial, that can render us mentally exhausted and scattered.

"I didn't expect this book to be analyzed like," hockey smut author Rachel Reid tells WIRED. Rachel Reid didn't intend for anyone to write a dissertation about her horny little gay hockey series. Then again, the Nova Scotia author behind the series could never have anticipated the level of fanfare that's accompanied the television adaptation of her books: . The show, commissioned by Canada's Crave and distributed by HBO Max in the US, debuted in late November and quickly became a massive hit. It's the number one Crave original series of all time, and it also climbed to number 1 on HBO Max.

Drone detection technology has led to an increase in airborne smuggling operations over U.S. prisons, putting authorities in a tough spot as federal regulations prevent drones from being brought down.

Polling shows that nearly half of Americans now believe aliens have visited this planet--and that the number who aren't sure has dropped by two-thirds. The reasons why, experts say, are complicated. Americans are becoming more open to the idea that aliens have visited Earth, according to a series of polls that show belief in alien visitation has been steadily on the rise since 2012. Almost half--47 percent--of Americans say they think aliens have definitely or probably visited Earth at some point in time, according to a new poll from YouGov conducted in November 2025 that involved 1,114 adult participants. That percentage is up from roughly a third (36 percent) of Americans polled in 2012 by Kelton Research, with the exact same sample size.

Business leaders agree AI is the future. They just wish it worked right now. Since ChatGPT exploded three years ago, companies big and small have leapt at the chance to adopt generative artificial intelligence. SAN FRANCISCO/STOCKHOLM - Last spring, CellarTracker, a wine-collection app, built an artificial intelligence-powered sommelier to make unvarnished wine recommendations based on a person's palate. The problem was the chatbot was too nice.