Things have not been looking good for Spirit Airlines for years now. The budget airline known for its bare-bones approach to the sky filed for bankruptcy in 2024 and then again in 2025. And yet, its demise on Saturday felt sudden and shocking: Spirit said it would go out of business, canceling flights, shuttering its customer service lines, and laying off workers without warning. What does it mean for flyers, and for the busy summer travel season? WIRED spoke to experts to find out.

The recent surge in fuel prices due to the war in Iran has spurred demand for electric vehicles around the world, and Chinese car makers are making the most of the opportunity. China is the world's top producer of EVs, and while its manufacturers remain largely shut out of the major car market of the United States, they are benefiting from an uptick in interest and orders via dealerships across Asia and elsewhere. BYD, which overtook Tesla as the world's largest seller of electric vehicles last year and is expanding aggressively overseas, is at the centre of this shift in focus. We survive and are successful without the US market today, BYD executive vice president Stella Li told the BBC at the Beijing Auto Show. Instead of aiming for US customers, the company says its challenge is meeting increased demand in other regions, including Brazil, the UK and Europe.

McDonald's boss on abuse claims: 'I don't want to talk about the past' The boss of McDonald's UK and Ireland has said she doesn't want to talk about the past when asked about allegations of abuse at the fast-food chain. Lauren Schultz told the BBC what had happened in recent years was unacceptable but said we have drawn a line under it. A BBC investigation in 2023 heard from more than 100 McDonald's workers in the UK claiming they faced a toxic culture of sexual assault, harassment, racism, and bullying. Last year, staff said they still faced sexual abuse and harassment. The UK equality watchdog agreed tougher measures with the company to protect staff in November, including new sexual harassment training.

Electricity prices in liberalized markets are determined by the supply and demand for electric power, which are in turn driven by various external influences that vary strongly in time. In perfect competition, the merit order principle describes that dispatchable power plants enter the market in the order of their marginal costs to meet the residual load, i.e. the difference of load and renewable generation. Many market models implement this principle to predict electricity prices but typically require certain assumptions and simplifications. In this article, we present an explainable machine learning model for the prices on the German day-ahead market, which substantially outperforms a benchmark model based on the merit order principle. Our model is designed for the ex-post analysis of prices and thus builds on various external features. Using Shapley Additive exPlanation (SHAP) values, we can disentangle the role of the different features and quantify their importance from empiric data. Load, wind and solar generation are most important, as expected, but wind power appears to affect prices stronger than solar power does. Fuel prices also rank highly and show nontrivial dependencies, including strong interactions with other features revealed by a SHAP interaction analysis. Large generation ramps are correlated with high prices, again with strong feature interactions, due to the limited flexibility of nuclear and lignite plants. Our results further contribute to model development by providing quantitative insights directly from data.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is no longer a flashy term thrown around without merit. Rather, industries across the board are broadening use of technology applications to improve industry standards and drive greater efficiency. Over centuries of operating supply chains, humans improved operations to the point where shipments could be completed in less than 24 hours. But with technology entering the picture only a few decades ago, and quickly advancing to the point of surpassing human intelligence, it's time to investigate specific areas across the industry where technology can further enhance operations, simplify and automate tasks, boost safety measures and, ultimately, improve bottom lines. AI enables machines to mimic human processes, all while doing it better.

Artificial Intelligence is rolling out across the aviation industry to a greater and greater extent. It could even hold the key to a speedier post-pandemic recovery. Let's take a look at how its branch of machine learning is already impacting everyday aspects of travel, including how tickets are priced, point-to-point routes, fuel consumption optimization, and biometric boarding. "AI is coming and it will have no mercy for any obstacles on its way. Companies can choose to resist and maintain status quo to extend their survival period, or embrace AI and be part of the ongoing revolution," – IATA, AI in Aviation White Paper, 2018.

Armed conflict has led to an unprecedented number of internally displaced persons (IDPs) - individuals who are forced out of their homes but remain within their country. IDPs often urgently require shelter, food, and healthcare, yet prediction of when large fluxes of IDPs will cross into an area remains a major challenge for aid delivery organizations. Accurate forecasting of IDP migration would empower humanitarian aid groups to more effectively allocate resources during conflicts. We show that monthly flow of IDPs from province to province in both Syria and Yemen can be accurately forecasted one month in advance, using publicly available data. We model monthly IDP flow using data on food price, fuel price, wage, geospatial, and news data. We find that machine learning approaches can more accurately forecast migration trends than baseline persistence models. Our findings thus potentially enable proactive aid allocation for IDPs in anticipation of forecasted arrivals.