Can cloud seeding save us from water bankruptcy? We've long tried to control the weather by engineering rainfall. Now such cloud-seeding efforts are escalating, creating conflict between countries and stoking conspiracy theories. On a cold, windy night in November 2025, a quadcopter drone took off from a farm field at the foot of the Bannock mountain range north of Salt Lake City, rising 4000 metres into thick clouds. A fan with anti-icing propellers kicked into action, blowing yellow dust out of a cannister attached to the back of the drone. Cloud-seeding company Rainmaker was trying to fight dust with dust, spreading silver iodide powder to encourage precipitation and end the deadly dust storms plaguing Utah's capital.

From claims of an Israeli false flag to efforts to sell ivermectin, influencers and grifters are using lessons learned from Covid-19 to push their baseless conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theorists, wellness influencers, and grifters have already started promoting wild claims about the hantavirus outbreak that began aboard the MV, a cruise ship on the Atlantic. Some conspiracy theorists compared the outbreak to the Covid-19 pandemic, claiming it was another effort to control the global population, while others pushed a false narrative that the Covid-19 vaccine caused hantavirus. Many others promoted ivermectin as a treatment, using the incident as a way to sell emergency medical kits featuring the antiparasitic drug typically used as a horse dewormer. In more recent days, many of these same people spreading conspiracy theories have promoted the baseless and antisemitic claims that the entire incident is a false flag orchestrated by Israel.

Plus: OpenAI has ended its exclusive partnership with Microsoft. Elon Musk and Sam Altman are going to court over OpenAI's future Ahead of OpenAI's IPO, the court could rule on whether the company can exist as a for-profit enterprise. It could even oust its leadership. Musk, an OpenAI co-founder, claims he was deceived into bankrolling the firm under false pretenses. Find out how the trial could upend the global AI race . In a celebrated episode, a community of gnomes sneak out at night to steal underpants.

Everything Is Content for the'Clicktatorship' In the second Trump administration, online conspiracy theories are shaping real-world policies like never before. In President Donald Trump's second term, everything is content . Videos of immigration raids are shared widely on X by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), conspiracy theories dictate policy, and prominent right-wing podcasters and influencers have occupied high-level government roles. The second Trump administration is, to put it bluntly, very online. Trump and his supporters have long trafficked in--and benefited from-- misinformation and conspiracy theories, leveraging them to build visibility on social media platforms and set the tone of national conversations.

This year, hype around AI really exploded, and so did concerns about AI's environmental footprint. We also saw some surprising biotech developments. It's been a busy and productive year here at . We published magazine issues on power, creativity, innovation, bodies, relationships, and security . We hosted 14 exclusive virtual conversations with our editors and outside experts in our subscriber-only series, Roundtables, and held two events on MIT's campus. And we published hundreds of articles online, following new developments in computing, climate tech, robotics, and more.

The Cybertruck, sycophantic AI, and humanoid robots all made this year's list of the biggest technology failures. Welcome to our annual list of the worst, least successful, and simply dumbest technologies of the year. This year, politics was a recurring theme. Donald Trump swept back into office and used his executive pen to reshape the fortunes of entire sectors, from renewables to cryptocurrency. The wrecking-ball act began even before his inauguration, when the president-elect marketed his own memecoin, $TRUMP, in a shameless act of merchandising that, of course, we honor on this year's worst tech list. We like to think there's a lesson in every technological misadventure.

Quantum navigation could solve the military's GPS jamming problem The rise of GPS vulnerability is putting more resilient, atom-based navigational tools on the map. The Royal Navy partnered with Infleqtion to test a quantum clock on the uncrewed submarine XV Excalibur. In late September, a Spanish military plane carrying the country's defense minister to a base in Lithuania was reportedly the subject of a kind of attack --not by a rocket or anti-aircraft rounds, but by radio transmissions that jammed its GPS system. The flight landed safely, but it was one of thousands that have been affected by a far-reaching Russian campaign of GPS interference since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The growing inconvenience to air traffic and risk of a real disaster have highlighted the vulnerability of GPS and focused attention on more secure ways for planes to navigate the gauntlet of jamming and spoofing, the term for tricking a GPS receiver into thinking it's somewhere else. US military contractors are rolling out new GPS satellites that use stronger, cleverer signals, and engineers are working on providing better navigation information based on other sources, like cellular transmissions and visual data.

But they certainly wish people were still taking their warnings really seriously. It's a weird time to be an AI doomer. This small but influential community of researchers, scientists, and policy experts believes, in the simplest terms, that AI could get so good it could be bad--very, very bad--for humanity. Though many of these people would be more likely to describe themselves as advocates for AI safety than as literal doomsayers, they warn that AI poses an existential risk to humanity. They argue that absent more regulation, the industry could hurtle toward systems it can't control. They commonly expect such systems to follow the creation of artificial general intelligence (AGI), a slippery concept generally understood as technology that can do whatever humans can do, and better. Though this is far from a universally shared perspective in the AI field, the doomer crowd has had some notable success over the past several years: helping shape AI policy coming from the Biden administration, organizing prominent calls for international "red lines " to prevent AI risks, and getting a bigger (and more influential) megaphone as some of its adherents win science's most prestigious awards. But a number of developments over the past six months have put them on the back foot.

We'll keep following these developments, but this just wasn't their year. If you're a longtime reader, you probably know that our newsroom selects 10 breakthroughs every year that we think will define the future . This group exercise is mostly fun and always engrossing, but at times it can also be quite difficult. We collectively pitch dozens of ideas, and the editors meticulously review and debate the merits of each. We agonize over which ones might make the broadest impact, whether one is too similar to something we've featured in the past, and how confident we are that a recent advance will actually translate into long-term success. There is plenty of lively discussion along the way.

"Everyone thinks they're on this big now," Debbie said, refilling her glass. "I've had it with the journey. I've had it with you people." "I don't think I'm on a journey," Burt said. Life's too short to find out who we really are." It was the first time the six of them had got together for dinner in more than a year (since Maria's diagnosis), and after such a long time (and in celebration of Maria's remission) they'd expected to have more interesting things to tell one another, deeper things, but they were entering dessert territory now, a cake was on the table, and only superficial topics had been broached: Ervin's promotion, Jane and Burt's move to the suburbs, Katherine's recent purchase of a metabolism-tracking device--a pen-shaped item and the cause of Debbie's rant. "How much can you know about yourself, exactly?" she said. "The therapy, the vision quests, the birth charts--do we really need the data on metabolic flexibility, too?" Jane, in Katherine's defense, said that, the more you knew about yourself, the more useful you could be to society. Knowing whether Kat is in fat-or carb-burning mode doesn't help anyone." As a result of Katherine declining cake five minutes earlier, no one had touched it. No one, Debbie included, really wanted to. They'd all overeaten already, drunk too much, made private plans to atone for it the next day. The cake presented a challenge, it sat there taunting them, and Debbie knew this, that you couldn't serve cake to a group of fortysomethings without causing ripples, but what else could she have done? She got it, no one wanted to put on weight, but this was a gorgeous princess cake, just gorgeous, she'd had to drive all the way to Andersonville to get it from that Swedish bakery everyone talked about. Staring at it now, though, she wondered if the cake didn't look a little bit like a tit, the smooth half sphere, the small pink marzipan flower nippling the top of it--and, oh, God, did think it looked like a tit?