Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. For years, needing reading glasses to correct farsightedness seemed like an inevitable part of aging. This year, the visual accessories might officially be a thing of the past. The newly approved drops are powerful enough to improve vision by three or more lines on an eye chart within only 30 minutes. That wide-ranging impact is why chose the drops as the 2025 Health category winner.

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.

Multimodal deep learning foundation models can learn the relationship between images and text. In the context of medical imaging, mapping images to language concepts reflects the clinical task of diagnostic image interpretation, however current general-purpose foundation models do not perform well in this context because their training corpus have limited medical text and images. To address this challenge and account for the range of cardiac physiology, we leverage 1,032,975 cardiac ultrasound videos and corresponding expert interpretations to develop EchoCLIP, a multimodal foundation model for echocardiography. EchoCLIP displays strong zero-shot (not explicitly trained) performance in cardiac function assessment (external validation left ventricular ejection fraction mean absolute error (MAE) of 7.1%) and identification of implanted intracardiac devices (areas under the curve (AUC) between 0.84 and 0.98 for pacemakers and artificial heart valves). We also developed a long-context variant (EchoCLIP-R) with a custom echocardiography report text tokenizer which can accurately identify unique patients across multiple videos (AUC of 0.86), identify clinical changes such as orthotopic heart transplants (AUC of 0.79) or cardiac surgery (AUC 0.77), and enable robust image-to-text search (mean cross-modal retrieval rank in the top 1% of candidate text reports). These emergent capabilities can be used for preliminary assessment and summarization of echocardiographic findings.

Researchers have demonstrated that artificial intelligence can lead to better predictions of the onset and course of cardiovascular diseases, allowing physicians to prevent, treat or foresee serious heart problems even before the patient becomes aware of any underlying conditions. Although the focus of the study was for cardiovascular diseases, according to the researchers, the findings could pave the way for a new era of personalised, preventive medicine, allowing doctors to proactively alert patients on potential ailments and suggest treatments to alleviate the problems, before the onset of serious conditions. Martin Tristani-Firouzi, corresponding author of the study says, "We can turn to AI to help refine the risk for virtually every medical diagnosis. The risk of cancer, the risk of thyroid surgery, the risk of diabetes -- any medical term you can imagine." The current approaches for calculating the combined effects of various risk factors, including demographics and medical history on cardiovascular diseases are imperfect and subjective, with the methods failing to identify certain interactions that can have a profound effect on the health of the heart and the blood vessels.

The country singer invited Wyatt McKee, an avid fan, to sing a duet with him during his concert last month as he continues to wait for a new heart. A 6-year-old awaiting a heart transplant had his dreams fulfilled last month when Blake Shelton invited him on stage to sing a duet during his concert. The avid fan and Shelton's miniature duet partner, Wyatt McKee, and his mother Harley McKee, joined "Fox & Friends Weekend" to recount the emotional rendition of one of Shelton's top hits, "God's Country." "I can't even explain how it made me feel," Harley explained Sunday. "I don't think he quite grasped how big it was. He just had a blast, and that's what he wanted to do. He always tells us he wants Blake Shelton's phone number, so he would ask Siri all the time."

For the first time, University of Utah Health scientists have shown that artificial intelligence could lead to better ways to predict the onset and course of cardiovascular disease. The researchers, working in conjunction with physicians from Intermountain Primary Children's Hospital, developed unique computational tools to precisely measure the synergistic effects of existing medical conditions on the heart and blood vessels. The researchers say this comprehensive approach could help physicians foresee, prevent, or treat serious heart problems, perhaps even before a patient is aware of the underlying condition. Although the study only focused on cardiovascular disease, the researchers believe it could have far broader implications. In fact, they suggest that these findings could eventually lead to a new era of personalized, preventive medicine.

When Avi Yagil, Ph.D., Distinguished Professor of Physics at University of California San Diego flew home from Europe in 2012, he thought he had caught a cold from his travels. When a "collection of pills" did not improve his symptoms, his wife encouraged him to see a doctor. Further tests revealed something far more life-threatening to Yagil than the common cold. "A chest X-Ray showed my lungs were flooded with fluid, and a subsequent echocardiogram found I had damage to my heart." Yagil was diagnosed with heart failure.

Organ transplants can improve the life expectancy and quality of life for the recipient but carry the risk of serious post-operative complications, such as septic shock and organ rejection. The probability of a successful transplant depends in a very subtle fashion on compatibility between the donor and the recipient - but current medical practice is short of domain knowledge regarding the complex nature of recipient-donor compatibility. Hence a data-driven approach for learning compatibility has the potential for significant improvements in match quality. This paper proposes a novel system (ConfidentMatch) that is trained using data from electronic health records. ConfidentMatch predicts the success of an organ transplant (in terms of the 3-year survival rates) on the basis of clinical and demographic traits of the donor and recipient. ConfidentMatch captures the heterogeneity of the donor and recipient traits by optimally dividing the feature space into clusters and constructing different optimal predictive models to each cluster. The system controls the complexity of the learned predictive model in a way that allows for assuring more granular and accurate predictions for a larger number of potential recipient-donor pairs, thereby ensuring that predictions are "personalized" and tailored to individual characteristics to the finest possible granularity. Experiments conducted on the UNOS heart transplant dataset show the superiority of the prognostic value of ConfidentMatch to other competing benchmarks; ConfidentMatch can provide predictions of success with 95% accuracy for 5,489 patients of a total population of 9,620 patients, which corresponds to 410 more patients than the most competitive benchmark algorithm (DeepBoost).

WASHINGTON – Scientists are developing a robotic sleeve that can encase a flabby diseased heart and gently squeeze to keep it pumping. So far it has been tested only in animals, improving blood flow in pigs. But this "soft robotic" device mimics the natural movements of a beating heart, a strategy for next-generation treatments of deadly heart failure. The key: A team from Harvard University and Boston Children's Hospital wound artificial muscles into the thin silicone sleeve, so that it alternately compresses, twists and relaxes in synchrony with the heart tissue underneath. It's a dramatically different approach than today's therapies and, if it eventually is proven in people, it might offer a new alternative to heart transplants or maybe even aid in recovery.