The companies, products and trends that fared the best over the last 12 months. Every December, the Engadget staff compiles a list of the year's biggest winners . We scour over articles from the previous 12 months to determine the people, companies, products and trends that made the most impact over the course of the year. Not all of that influence is positive, however, and some selections may also appear on our list of biggest losers. Still, sit back and enjoy our picks for the biggest winners of 2025.

Here's how Google is laying the foundation for our mixed reality future At The Android Show: XR Edition, the company showed off some major updates headed to what could be its next big OS. Here are two of Google's reference model smart glasses. The one in the front features dual RGB waveguide displays while the one in the back relies on a single monocular screen. Today, during the XR edition of The Android Show, Google showed off a bunch of updates and new features headed to its mixed reality OS. And while most of the news was aimed at developers, I got a chance to demo some of the platform's expanded capabilities on a range of hardware including Samsung's Galaxy XR headset, two different reference designs and an early version of Xreal's Project Aura smart glasses and I came away rather impressed.

What is in the 28-point US plan for Ukraine? 'Ukraine is running out of men, money and time' Can the US get all sides to end the war? Why is Europe opposing Trump's peace plan? Firefighters evacuated residents and their pets from a nine-storey apartment building in Ukraine's Sumy region after a Russian drone strike. The strikes come as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy met with leaders of the UK, France and Germany in London to discuss the US peace plan.

New images of two novae are'like going from a grainy black-and-white photo to high-definition video.' Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. The recent deaths of two white dwarf stars are challenging our understanding of both novae and the powerful physics underlying star death. According to astronomer John Monnier, the initial analysis of these often dramatic novae offers an "extraordinary leap forward" for the field. "The fact that we can now watch stars explode and immediately see the structure of the material being blasted into space is remarkable," said the University of Michigan astronomer and a co-author of a study published on December 5 in the journal .

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. Don't want AI Actions in File Explorer? Microsoft seems to have heard the criticism against AI Actions in File Explorer and will let users turn them off if desired. Across the recent fall months, Microsoft added a number of AI features to Windows File Explorer, which not all users appreciated. We're talking features like AI-powered file search, various AI Actions in the Context Menu, and even AI integrations with third-party apps .

Senior AI editor Will Douglas Heaven talks with Tim Bradshaw, FT global tech correspondent, about what our world will look like in the next five years. Welcome back to The State of AI, a new collaboration between the and . You can read the rest of the series here. This is a subscriber-only event and you can sign up here .) Every time I'm asked what's coming next, I get a Luke Haines song stuck in my head: "Please don't ask me about the future / I am not a fortune teller." What will things be like in 2030?

The space-inspired wastewater treatment uses the nutrients and loses the odor. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. When most people need to go number one, they find the nearest bathroom and don't give half a thought to what happens to their pee once it disappears down the toilet or urinal . It turns out that the nitrogen in human urine can be used in fertilizer. However, humanity's use of nitrogen is everything but efficient, according to a pair of siblings who founded the Swiss start-up company, VunaNexus.

With artificial intelligence putting productivity on hyperspeed, the painstaking but often slow nature of dealing with other countries, as well as policymaking, is also forced to speed up. But a panel at the forefront of these changes at the BRIDGE Summit in Abu Dhabi--which convenes creators, policymakers, investors, technologists, media institutions, and cultural leaders around the world to discuss the future of media--said that breaking things fast is not without consequences. "Decision makers are being asked to make decisions very quickly on the basis of information that may not be verified or verifiable," Elizabeth Churchill, a professor of Human-Computer Interaction from the Mohamed Bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, told moderator Nikhil Kumar, an executive editor at TIME, which is a media partner of the BRIDGE Summit. Churchill, who held senior roles in firms like Google and Yahoo, said she returned to academia to explore transparent and "interrogable" AI tools and content that is effectively watermarked--so that decision-makers know at a glance if information is trustworthy. She said current shortfalls in information quality are "very much a design problem that sits at the surface of all of the tools that we use and in diplomacy conversations many different people are using."

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. The December update for Windows 11 will be huge. On Tuesday the 9th, Microsoft will release December's monthly patch for Windows 11. The last Patch Tuesday in 2025 will be huge, because according to Windows Central, there will be no fewer than new features included in the update (though given the nature of Windows 11 previews, none of these are guaranteed until they appear on home PCs). These include various design changes to important elements such as the Start menu, specific improvements to existing functions and completely new features.

Two armed men have stolen eight engravings by French artist Matisse and at least another five by Brazilian painter Cândido Portinari from a library in São Paulo. Brazilian officials say the thieves held up a security guard and an elderly couple who were visiting the library before making off with the artworks on foot. They reportedly entered the library by the main entrance at 10:00 (13:00 GMT) on Sunday, and left by the same route, heading towards the nearest metro station. The heist comes less than two months after the art world was rocked by a brazen break-in at the Louvre museum in Paris, where thieves made off with priceless jewels. The engravings stolen from Biblioteca Mário de Andrade on Sunday formed part of a joint exhibition with the São Paulo Museum of Modern Art.