2025-12-30 22:00:27
There were a lot of horrifying things in the news this year—a lot. But some of it was horrifying in a good way.
Extraordinary medical cases—even the grisly and disturbing ones—offer a reprieve from the onslaught of current events and the stresses of our daily lives. With those remarkable reports, we can marvel at the workings, foibles, and resilience of the human body. They can remind us of the shared indignities from our existence in these mortal meatsacks. We can clear our minds of worry by learning about something we never even knew we should worry about—or by counting our blessings for avoiding so far. And sometimes, the reports are just grotesquely fascinating.
Every year, there's a new lineup of such curious clinical conditions. There are always some unfortunate souls to mark medical firsts or present ultra-rare cases. There is also an endless stream of humans making poor life choices—and arriving at an emergency department with the results. This year was no different.
2025-12-30 21:30:40
2025 has been a tumultuous year for the car world. After years of EV optimism, revanchists are pushing back against things like clean energy and fuel economy. Automakers have responded, postponing or canceling new electric vehicles in favor of gasoline-burning ones. It hasn't been all bad, though. Despite the changing winds, EV infrastructure continues to be built out and, anecdotally at least, feels far more reliable. We got to witness a pretty epic Formula 1 season right to the wire, in addition to some great sports car and Formula E racing. And we drove a whole bunch of cars, some of which stood out from the pack.
Here are the 10 best things we sat behind the wheel of in 2025.
A Lotus Emira doesn't need to be painted this bright color to remind you that driving can be a pleasure.
Credit:
Peter Nelson
Let's be frank: The supposed resurgence of Lotus hasn't exactly gone to plan. When Geely bought the British Automaker in 2017, many of us hoped that the Chinese company would do for Lotus what it did for Volvo, only in Hethel instead of Gothenburg. Even before tariffs and other protectionist measures undermined the wisdom of building new Lotuses in China, the fact that most of these new cars were big, heavy EVs had already made them a hard sell. But a more traditional Lotus exists and is still built in Norfolk, England: the Lotus Emira.
2025-12-30 05:30:29
Imran Ahmed's biggest thorn in his side used to be Elon Musk, who made the hate speech researcher one of his earliest legal foes during his Twitter takeover.
Now, it's the Trump administration, which planned to deport Ahmed, a legal permanent resident, just before Christmas. It would then ban him from returning to the United States, where he lives with his wife and young child, both US citizens.
After suing US officials to block any attempted arrest or deportation, Ahmed was quickly granted a temporary restraining order on Christmas Day. Ahmed had successfully argued that he risked irreparable harm without the order, alleging that Trump officials continue "to abuse the immigration system to punish and punitively detain noncitizens for protected speech and silence viewpoints with which it disagrees" and confirming that his speech had been chilled.
2025-12-30 03:30:47
Yakisugi is a Japanese architectural technique for charring the surface of wood. It has become quite popular in bioarchitecture because the carbonized layer protects the wood from water, fire, insects, and fungi, thereby prolonging the lifespan of the wood. Yakisugi techniques were first codified in written form in the 17th and 18th centuries. But it seems Italian Renaissance polymath Leonardo da Vinci wrote about the protective benefits of charring wood surfaces more than 100 years earlier, according to a paper published in Zenodo, an open repository for EU funded research.
As previously reported, Leonardo produced more than 13,000 pages in his notebooks (later gathered into codices), less than a third of which have survived. The notebooks contain all manner of inventions that foreshadow future technologies: flying machines, bicycles, cranes, missiles, machine guns, an “unsinkable” double-hulled ship, dredges for clearing harbors and canals, and floating footwear akin to snowshoes to enable a person to walk on water. Leonardo foresaw the possibility of constructing a telescope in his Codex Atlanticus (1490)—he wrote of “making glasses to see the moon enlarged” a century before the instrument’s invention.
In 2003, Alessandro Vezzosi, director of Italy’s Museo Ideale, came across some recipes for mysterious mixtures while flipping through Leonardo’s notes. Vezzosi experimented with the recipes, resulting in a mixture that would harden into a material eerily akin to Bakelite, a synthetic plastic widely used in the early 1900s. So Leonardo may well have invented the first manmade plastic.
2025-12-30 03:00:42
The nervous system does an astonishing job of tracking sensory information, and does so using signals that would drive many computer scientists insane: a noisy stream of activity spikes that may be transmitted to hundreds of additional neurons, where they are integrated with similar spike trains coming from still other neurons.
Now, researchers have used spiking circuitry to build an artificial robotic skin, adopting some of the principles of how signals from our sensory neurons are transmitted and integrated. While the system relies on a few decidedly not-neural features, it has the advantage that we have chips that can run neural networks using spiking signals, which would allow this system to integrate smoothly with some energy-efficient hardware to run AI-based control software.
The nervous system in our skin is remarkably complex. It has specialized sensors for different sensations: heat, cold, pressure, pain, and more. In most areas of the body, these feed into the spinal column, where some preliminary processing takes place, allowing reflex reactions to be triggered without even involving the brain. But signals do make their way along specialized neurons into the brain, allowing further processing and (potentially) conscious awareness.
2025-12-30 00:30:45
China drafted landmark rules to stop AI chatbots from emotionally manipulating users, including what could become the strictest policy worldwide intended to prevent AI-supported suicides, self-harm, and violence.
China's Cyberspace Administration proposed the rules on Saturday. If finalized, they would apply to any AI products or services publicly available in China that use text, images, audio, video, or "other means" to simulate engaging human conversation. Winston Ma, adjunct professor at NYU School of Law, told CNBC that the "planned rules would mark the world’s first attempt to regulate AI with human or anthropomorphic characteristics" at a time when companion bot usage is rising globally.
In 2025, researchers flagged major harms of AI companions, including promotion of self-harm, violence, and terrorism. Beyond that, chatbots shared harmful misinformation, made unwanted sexual advances, encouraged substance abuse, and verbally abused users. Some psychiatrists are increasingly ready to link psychosis to chatbot use, the Wall Street Journal reported this weekend, while the most popular chatbot in the world, ChatGPT, has triggered lawsuits over outputs linked to child suicide and murder-suicide.
