CES is a show that’s all about the future. Usually, that future is within the next year or two. Companies show off products to kick off marketing campaigns and begin building consumer demand. Sometimes, though, they offer a peek a good bit further down the road.
Several prototypes at this year’s CES offered clues about how companies expect the consumer electronics world to evolve. Many, of course, will fall by the wayside. Almost all of them will experience changes before getting anywhere close to market. Despite that, though, they offer a look into a consumer electronics crystal ball.
Here are some trends they’re prophesizing for the years to come.
Smart watches will get a lot more useful and easier to repair
Smart watches already do a lot. They free up users’ hands, letting them check messages, see who is calling them without fumbling for their phone, track health data, and can act as a lifeline if you’re stranded. They’re good for opening hotel room doors, but they’re generally not seen as being secure enough for something like a banking or access system.
Cambridge Consultants, however, showcased a prototype luxury watch that also doubles as a digital passkey. The rotary bezel (the rotating ring with markings most often seen on dive watches) utilizes extreme miniaturization to boost security components.
At that same demo: a prototype smart watch designed to let consumers repair the device itself without sacrificing the aesthetics.
Augmented reality will ditch the cameras
Eye tracking, at present, requires a camera. But another prototype being shown by Cambridge Consultants did away with the lens, using a photonics and sensor fusion instead. That could be the push AR needs to gain wider acceptance, as it could make headsets significantly smaller and more comfortable.
TVs are about to be a lot brighter
This upcoming trend is a lot closer than some of the others. Both Samsung and TCL were showcasing TV sets that blast out the colors, utilizing next-generation backlighting called RGB LED, the latest in the alphabet soup mishmash of backlighting names (which also includes QLED, OLED, LED, Mini LED, and more).
The colors pop like never before, but the screens are also significantly brighter to the extent that if you’re too close, you might find yourself squinting. The Samsung prototype reached a brightness of 4,500-nits. That’s about twice the level of current high end TVs.
Position sensing could be the next battleground
As the robotics industry continues to grow and nudge its way into homes and businesses, it’s going to be crucial for positioning software to be as precise as possible. (It’s fun to watch a robot dance, but a lot less fun when it hits you full force while showcasing its moves.)
This year’s CES showed off a number of new position sensing technologies, from Lego’s smart bricks, which incorporate position sensing into play, to a prototype architecture that shrinks the footprint of unidirectional position sensing. That could open the door to adding position sensing to devices where it currently can’t be used — while also ensuring your housebot doesn’t accidentally pop you with a right hook as it takes care of your laundry.
A new insult for artificial intelligence just dropped thanks to Microsofts CEO.
If you use Microsoft products, its near impossible to avoid AI now. The company is pushing AI agents deep into Windows, with every app, service, and product Microsoft has on the market now including some kind of AI integration, without the option to opt out.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella recently shared a blog post to LinkedIn titled “Looking Ahead to 2026” offering an insight into the company’s focus for the new year. Spoiler alert: its AI.
Nadella wrote that he wants users to stop thinking of AI as slop and start thinking of it as bicycles for the mind. Many took the post as a pushback against the popular insult slop often leveled at anything AI-generated, recently crowned Merriam-Webster’s word of the year for 2025.
The internet saw Nadellas critique and raised him a new insult for anything AI, now dubbed Microslop.
I will hereby be referring to Microsoft as MicroSlop for the rest of 2026, one X user posted in response to Nadellas words. The post currently has almost 200,000 views.
The term subsequently trended across Instagram, Reddit, X and beyond. On X, @MrEwanMorrison wrote, A great example of the Streisand Effect in which telling people not to call AI slop is already backfiring and resulting in millions of people hearing the word for the first time and spreading it virally. A huge own goal from Microslop.
Year of the Linux desktop, another X user posted. but not because of Linux.
In a separate clip uploaded over the weekend, programmer Ryan Fleury demonstrates Microslop in action. At the start of the video, the settings page AI-powered search bar for Windows 11 recommends searching My mouse pointer is too small.
Yet, when Fleury searches My mouse pointer is too small, word for word, nothing turns up. He waits around for a moment or two, but nothing loads. But when he looks up test afterwards, three results pop up. This is not a real company, Fleury wrote.
He then added: AI writes 90% of our code!!!!, referring to claims made by Nadella that as much as 30% of the companys code is now written by artificial intelligence.
Dont worry, we can tell.
Over the course of 2025, deepfakes improved dramatically. AI-generated faces, voices, and full-body performances that mimic real people increased in quality far beyond what even many experts expected would be the case just a few years ago. They were also increasingly used to deceive people.
For many everyday scenariosespecially low-resolution video calls and media shared on social media platformstheir realism is now high enough to reliably fool nonexpert viewers. In practical terms, synthetic media have become indistinguishable from authentic recordings for ordinary people and, in some cases, even for institutions.
And this surge is not limited to quality. The volume of deepfakes has grown explosively: Cybersecurity firm DeepStrike estimates an increase from roughly 500,000 online deepfakes in 2023 to about 8 million in 2025, with annual growth nearing 900%.
Im a computer scientist who researches deepfakes and other synthetic media. From my vantage point, I see that the situation is likely to get worse in 2026 as deepfakes become synthetic performers capable of reacting to people in real time.
Just about anyone can now make a deepfake video.
Dramatic improvements
Several technical shifts underlie this dramatic escalation. First, video realism made a significant leap, thanks to video generation models designed specifically to maintain temporal consistency. These models produce videos that have coherent motion, consistent identities of the people portrayed, and content that makes sense from one frame to the next. The models disentangle the information related to representing a persons identity from the information about motion so that the same motion can be mapped to different identities, or the same identity can have multiple types of motions.
These models produce stable, coherent faces without the flicker, warping, or structural distortions around the eyes and jawline that once served as reliable forensic evidence of deepfakes.
Second, voice cloning has crossed what I would call the indistinguishable threshold. A few seconds of audio now suffice to generate a convincing clonecomplete with natural intonation, rhythm, emphasis, emotion, pauses, and breathing noise. This capability is already fueling large-scale fraud. Some major retailers report receiving over 1,000 AI-generated scam calls per day. The perceptual tells that once gave away synthetic voices have largely disappeared.
Third, consumer tools have pushed the technical barrier almost to zero. Upgrades from OpenAIs Sora 2 and Googles Veo 3 and a wave of startups mean that anyone can describe an idea, let a large language model such as OpenAIs ChatGPT or Googles Gemini draft a script, and generate polished audio-visual media in minutes. AI agents can automate the entire process. The capacity to generate coherent, storyline-driven deepfakes at a large scale has effectively been democratized.
This combination of surging quantity and personas that are nearly indistinguishable from real humans creates serious challenges for detecting deepfakes, especially in a media environment where peoples attention is fragmented and content moves faster than it can be verified. There has already been real-world harmfrom misinformation to targeted harassment and financial scamsenabled by deepfakes that spread before people have a chance to realize whats happening.
AI researcher Hany Farid explains how deepfakes work and how good theyre getting.
The future is real time
Looking forward, the trajectory for next year is clear: Deepfakes are moving toward real-time synthesis that can produce videos that closely resemble the nuances of a humans appearance, making it easier for them to evade detection systems. The frontier is shifting from static visual realism to temporal and behavioral coherence: models that generate live or near-live content rather than pre-rendered clips.
Identity modeling is converging into unified systems that capture not just how a person looks, but how they move, sound, and speak across contexts. The result goes beyond this resembles person X, to this behaves like person X over time. I expect entire video-call participants to be synthesized in real time; interactive AI-driven actors whose faces, voices, and mannerisms adapt instantly to a prompt; and scammers deploying responsive avatars rather than fixed videos.
As these capabilities mature, the perceptual gap between synthetic and authentic human media will continue to narrow. The meaningful line of defense will shift away from human judgment. Instead, it will depend on infrastructure-level protections. These include secure provenance, such as media signed cryptographically, and AI content tools that use the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity specifications. It will also depend on multimodal forensic tools such as my labs Deepfake-o-Meter.
Simply looking harder at pixels will no longer be adequate.
Siwei Lyu is a professor of computer science and engineering and diector of the UB Media Forensic Lab at the University at Buffalo.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Strategic planning is a big business. Companies spend millions of dollars working with consulting firms to chart a path forward. Not only does a lot of money change hands as part of this process, but the amount of time that employees invest in working on the plan likely doubles the cost of the entire process.
In the end, leadership gets a shiny report they can send to employees, shareholders, external stakeholders, and others. Often, though, much less money and time is invested in implementing that plan than was spent creating it. As a result, there is a lot of cynicism around engaging in strategic plans.
In many ways, this feels a lot like New Year’s resolutions. With great fervor, people will identify a change they want to make in the new year. Now is the time to get physically fit, develop deeper relationships, or get an education. Yet, most people have abandoned their resolutions in a few weeks.
The central problem with strategic plans is in the name itself. Every organization needs to be concerned both with strategy and tactics. Strategy defines the north star for the organization. What are the big-picture elements youre trying to accomplish? Tactics is the method for getting there. What specific steps are team members going to take on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis that will lead to the desired outcome. Ultimately, a strategy is unlikely to meet with success without a tactical plan to get there.
There are several things leaders can do to increase the chances of success for a strategic plan. In many ways, these mirror the steps people need to take to be better at achieving their New Years resolutions.
Focus on resources
A big part of the problem with the strategic planning process is that the focus is almost entirely on strategy instead of the resources needed to execute on it. Organizations take their plan and then develop other teams tasked with turning that plan into a reality.
This creates two central problems. There are inevitable tradeoffs that must be made to start to implement a plan, which dampens enthusiasm for the golden future the strategy promised. In addition, the resource (human, financial, and material) needed to implement the plan is rarely identified ahead of time, which leads to significant battles during implementation.
A planning process should put most of the effort into the tactical planning rather than the strategic planning. Responsibility for particular elements of the plan should be given to specific groups. Money needed to move the plan forward should be identified early. The new work to be done should not just be dumped on top of the existing load carried by employees. Instead, responsibilities must be shifted so that people in the organization have the time to make progress on the new work. Otherwise, the plan will fail.
Identify concrete steps
If an organization is going to do things differently in the future than it does in the present, people are going to have to engage in different actions than they were before. That means you need to know what people are doing now. How do the actions people take now move the organizations mission forward? How can the elements of that mission that cannot be lost be integrated with tasks that will promote the new direction?
Much of the success of this planning process also requires thinking through the reward structure for employees. In any organization, there is what you say, what you do, and what you reward, and people listen to those in reverse order. What you reward is what drives a lot of daily behavior. So, if you want people to do something different tomorrow than they were doing today, youre going to have to shift what people are rewarded for doing so that more of the actions related to the new goals is incorporated into the work day.
This kind of specific exploration of the work day is not nearly as much fun as envisioning a bright future, which is why strategic planning processes often kick that can down the road. But, this kind of detailed work is directly related to the likelihood of success of the plan.
Try, then adapt
As Mike Tyson said, Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth. The other reason that the planning process is fun (albeit unproductive) is that it is blissfully unsullied by reality. It is impossible to envision the issues that will inevitably arise as you implement a plan.
Success at reaching a strategic goal is done in successive approximations. You try something, measure the outcomes, and then assess what is working and what is not. Keep what works, and fix what doesnt. Ultimately, your plans are more like software than hardware. Hardware is as good as it will ever be when it comes out of the box. Software gets better by patching the bugs and adding new features. When you commit to continuous improvement of your tactical plans, you greatly improve the likelihood of reaching strategic aims.
Starting today, Google is weaving its massive investment in AI into one product nearly everyone already usesand for many people, the change wont feel optional.
Google announced Thursday that a suite of new features powered by Gemini 3 will begin appearing in Gmail, introducing automation designed to reduce inbox overload. The most consequential update is a new Gmail view called AI Inbox, which reshapes email around summaries, topics, and to-dos, rather than individual messages.
What changes the moment this turns on
For users, the shift isnt about learning new toolsits about no longer having to manage email the same way. Instead of opening Gmail to a chronological list of messages, AI Inbox presents a briefing-style overview that surfaces conversations, tasks, and updates it thinks matter most.
With email volume at an all-time high, managing your inbox and the flow of information has become as important as the emails themselves, Gmail VP of product Blake Barnes wrote in a blog post announcing the changes. Googles goal, he added, is to turn Gmail into a personal, proactive inbox assistant.
The new AI Inbox wont roll out right away. Google says its currently testing the feature with a small subset of users, with a broader rollout planned for the coming months.
Less searching, more trusting
In general, the addition of AI is meant to make finding things easier. Google says Gmails new AI Inbox will offer a personalized briefing that prioritizes conversations based on how you use email, filtering out what it considers clutter so you can focus on whats important. In practice, that means relying less on Gmails search barand more on AI judgments about relevance.
Thats a notable shift for a product used by roughly 3 billion people worldwide. Next to search, Gmail is Googles most ubiquitous service, functioning as the default archive for receipts, contracts, travel plans, conversations, and work history. Yet even as inboxes have grown more crowded, Gmails core experience has changed little.
Google acknowledged that gap directly. Your inbox is full of important information, but accessing it has required you to become a power searcher, Barnes wrote. And even when you find the right emails, you are often left staring at a list of messages, forced to dig through the text to piece together the answer.
The new approach aims to remove that burden entirely by summarizing, prioritizing, and contextualizing information before users ask for it.
Your inbox as memory, not messages
Every online interaction youve ever had likely lives somewhere in your inbox, but finding the right detail at the right moment has long required manual effort. With AI Inbox, Google wants to change that by treating Gmail less like a communication tool and more like an external memory systemone that can recall information, surface context, and suggest next steps.
That idea aligns with how people increasingly use AI tools like ChatGPT, but applying the same concept to email raises higher stakes. Gmail doesnt just hold drafts and threads; it holds personal history. How well users trust AI-generated summariesand whether they stop opening original messages altogethermay ultimately determine whether the new interface sticks.
Trust, not accuracy, is the real test
The real test for Gmails AI makeover wont be whether its summaries are technically accurate, but whether users come to trust them enough to stop opening original messages at all.
As AI-generated overviews begin to replace scrolling and searching, the act of verifying informationbe it reading an entire thread, checking dates, or scanning for nuancemay quietly fade. Over time, Gmail could train users to rely on interpretation rather than inspection, shifting email from a record people consult to a system they simply accept.
Which features everyone getsand which they wont
Many of the new AI-powered Gmail features will roll out to all users, but some of the most powerful tools will be reserved for paying subscribers.
One widely available update, called AI Overview, summarizes long email threads and highlights key points, reducing the need to reread entire conversations. That feature is rolling out broadly.
However, a more advanced capabilityasking Gmail questions like Who was the plumber that gave me a quote last year? and receiving an AI-generated answerwill only be available to subscribers on Google One AI Pro or Ultra plans, priced at $20 and $250 per month, respectively.
For free users, Gmail becomes more readable. For paid users, it begins acting more like a searchable personal archive.
Writing emails with less effort
Google is also expanding AI tools designed to reduce the friction of replying and composing emails. A tool called Help Me Write, previously just an option for paid subscribers, will now be available to all Gmail users, along with “Suggested Replies,” a refresh of a tool previously called “Smart Replies.” Help Me Write will help users draft emails from scratch using prompts, while Suggested Replies generates a tailored one-click response based on the context of your conversation.
Paid subscribers will also get access to “Proofread,” which offers more advanced grammar, tone, and style suggestions while composing messages.
What youll need to opt out of
Many of these features will be enabled by default, meaning users who prefer a more traditional Gmail experience will need to actively disable Gemini-powered tools in Gmails Smart Features settings.
For those eager to hand off more inbox management to AI, the transition may feel overdue. For others, it may feel like Gmail has quietly crossed a linefrom organizing information to deciding what matters.
Either way, once Gmail stops asking you to search your inbox and starts telling you what you need to know, email may never feel quite the same.
While headlines about AI replacing workers dominated 2025, behavioral health is charting a different path. The industry thrives on human connection, measuring success in trust, healing, and human relationships, not throughput. That’s not to say AI isn’t rapidly reshaping the industryit is. Its role here fundamentally differs because it supports clinicians rather than sidelines them.
Over the next year, I predict we’ll see a paradox play out: Behavioral health will become increasingly AI-enabled, and simultaneously, more human than it’s been in decades. The reason is simple. Burnout and administrative burdens have been increasingly limiting what clinicians can do. Providers must spend hours on documentation, prior authorizations, and data entry instead of with patients. AI built to reduce that friction can return clinicians to the work that drew them here in the first place: showing up fully for the people they serve.
Here are the five ways I believe well see AI reshape behavioral health in 2026:
Therapy will get more personalized
Rather than relying solely on memory or paper charts, therapists can now see recurring themes, emotional patterns, or missed follow-ups, often in real time. Over time, this will help providers offer more personalized, insight-rich carewithout having to sift through pages of notes. This saves time, but crucially it deepens therapeutic continuity.
Less admin, more care
Scheduling, billing, and documentation are necessary but time-consuming tasks that pull clinicians away from patients. AI will get more efficient at many of these routine workflows.
Nationally, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Servicess push to Kill the Clipboard is accelerating this shift by setting the expectation that patient histories should flow digitally into Electronic Health Records rather than being re-collected on paper, so AI can automate the busywork and return that time to care. What used to require hours of after-hours work or weekend catch-up is now being done in minutes with AI. For clinicians, this means more time for reflection, team collaboration, or rest.
AI trust will become part of the care experience
For AI to truly support behavioral healthcare, its essential that patients and clinicians feel confident that it’s being used responsibly. In 2026, well see transparency and governance become integral to how care is delivered, not just how its built. When platforms make it clear how AI tools work, how data is protected, and who remains in control, it strengthens the therapeutic relationship rather than undermining it. Trust, in this context, is care.
Staff well-being will increasingly get the attention it deserves
The same technology that helps clinicians support patients can also help organizations support their staff. AI can give clinics real-time visibility into overwork, flagging unbalanced caseloads, surfacing signs of burnout, or routing time-saving tools to the right team member at the right moment. Workforce data can even help leaders proactively intervene before someone hits a breaking point.
As an anecdote, Ive heard from neurodivergent clinicians who had long struggled with documentation requirements but are now able to keep up without added stress because of AI support. Thats a big win for inclusion, well-being, and workforce retention. When staff feel supported, patients feel it too.
Proving outcomes will unlock new resources
As behavioral health shifts toward value-based care, clinics and centers will be under increasing pressure to demonstrate measurable outcomes. AI can help care teams track progress across sessions, identify gaps in treatment plans, and present results in a way that supports reimbursement, accreditation, and compliance.
For example, instead of checking a box to indicate that an appointment occurred, healthcare professionals can use AI to validate that they have met clinical goals, transforming anecdotal stories into structured documentation. These capabilities can also help organizations secure grants, expand services, and reach more people without overburdening already stretched teams. In that way, AI becomes a tool not just for care delivery, but for access and sustainability.
FINAL THOUGHTS
The shifts ahead won’t redefine what good behavioral health care looks likeclinicians already know what that looks like. But they will determine whether more people can access it, and whether the providers delivering it can sustain their work.
AI that reduces administrative burden creates room for the kind of attention that changes outcomes. That’s not a moonshot. It’s already happening in clinics that have adopted these tools, where documentation that once took hours now takes minutes. A recent multicenter study in JAMA Network Open found that physicians using ambient AI scribes saw their burnout rates drop from 51.9% to 38.8% after just 30 daysa 74% reduction in the odds of experiencing burnout. While that research focused on medicine broadly, the implications for behavioral health are clear: When clinicians spend less time on screens and more time present with patients, both care quality and workforce sustainability improve.
As these technologies become standard practice in 2026, the question shifts from whether AI belongs in behavioral health to how we deploy it. The organizations that treat it as critical infrastructure will be the ones that can scale quality care without burning out their teams. In a field where healing depends on human presence, technology that protects that presence isn’t optional anymore.
Josh Schoeller is the CEO of Qualifacts.
The average rate on a 30-year U.S. mortgage edged higher this week to just above its 2025 low.
The average long-term mortgage rate rose to 6.16%, mortgage buyer Freddie Mac said Thursday. Thats up slightly from 6.15% last week, when the average rate dropped to its lowest level since October 3, 2024. One year ago, the rate averaged 6.93%.
Borrowing costs on 15-year fixed-rate mortgages, popular with homeowners refinancing their home loans, rose this week to 5.46% from 5.44% the previous week. A year ago, it averaged 6.14%, Freddie Mac said.
Mortgage rates are influenced by several factors, from the Federal Reserves interest rate policy decisions to bond market investors expectations for the economy and inflation. They generally follow the trajectory of the 10-year Treasury yield, which lenders use as a guide to pricing home loans.
The 10-year yield was at 4.17% at midday Thursday.
The average rate on a 30-year mortgage has been mostly holding steady in recent weeks since Oct. 30 when it dropped to 6.17%, which at the time was its lowest level in more than a year. Mortgage rates began easing in July in anticipation of a series of Fed rate cuts, which began in September and continued last month.
The Fed doesnt set mortgage rates, but when it cuts its short-term rate that can signal lower inflation or slower economic growth ahead, which can drive investors to buy U.S. government bonds. That can help lower yields on long-term U.S. Treasurys, which can result in lower mortgage rates.
All told, the average rate on a 30-year mortgage ended last year nearly a percentage point lower than at the start of 2025, helping boost home shoppers purchasing power toward the end of the year. Sales of previously occupied U.S. homes rose on a monthly basis in September, October and November.
Still, even with long-term mortgage rates holding near their 2025 low point, sales in November slowed compared with a year earlier for the first time since May and ended the month on pace to finish the year down from 2024. December existing home sales data are due out next week.
The recent pullback in mortgage rates has been helpful for home shoppers who can afford to buy at current rates. The median U.S. monthly housing payment fell to $2,365 in the four weeks ending January 4, according to Redfin. That’s a 4.7% drop from the same period a year earlier.
While lower mortgage rates can help boost how much homebuyers can afford, the housing market remains out of reach for many aspiring homeowners, after years of soaring home prices and lackluster wage growth. First-time buyers have had it particularly tough, because they dont have equity from an existing home to put toward a new home purchase.
Uncertainty over the economy and job market are also keeping many would-be buyers on the sidelines.
Economists generally forecast that the average rate on a 30-year mortgage will remain slightly above 6% this year.
Alex Veiga, AP business writer
Jan. 26 marks the official start date of the 2026 tax filing season, when the IRS will begin accepting and processing 2025 tax returns. April 15 is the filing deadline.
Tax experts, including the IRS independent watchdog, have warned that this year’s filing season could be hampered by the loss of tens of thousands of tax collection workers who left the agency through planned layoffs and buyouts spurred by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.
The IRS will also be responsible for implementing major provisions of Republicans’ tax and spending package signed into law last summer. Several provisions in the law retroactively affect the 2025 tax year, likely leading to more questions from taxpayers and requiring the IRS to update tax forms.
President Trump is committed to the taxpayers of this country and improving upon the successful tax filing season in 2025, said acting IRS Commissioner Scott Bessent in a news release. I am confident in our ability to deliver results and drive growth for businesses and consumers alike.
The IRS expects to receive roughly 164 million individual income tax returns this year, which is on par with what it received last year.
The latest National Taxpayer Advocate report to Congress published in June states that the IRS workforce has fallen from 102,113 workers at the end of the Biden administration to 75,702. The IRS website does not include the latest employment numbers on the agencys workforce.
IRS employees involved in last year’s tax season were not allowed to accept a buyout offer from the Trump administration until after the taxpayer filing deadline of April 15, 2025.
The June National Taxpayer Advocate report to Congress warned that the 2026 season could be rocky.
With the IRS workforce reduced by 26% and significant tax law changes on the horizon, there are risks to next years filing season, said Erin M. Collins, who leads the organization assigned to protect taxpayers rights.
Fatima Hussein, Associated Press
The crisp crinkle of fallen leaves beneath your feet. The swish and trickle of water moving through a stream. A breath of crisp, fresh air.
Spending time in nature can be invigorating or produce feelings of peace and calm. But many professions allow little time or access to the outdoors during the workday.
After a youth spent climbing trees and playing soccer, Anna Rose Smith found it difficult when her first job as a psychotherapist in Utah required working in a windowless office.
So she spent her lunch breaks outside, walking to nearby fountains or gardens. She picked up flower petals or leaves from the ground and brought them back to her desk, where she would listen to recorded bird songs, sometimes incorporating the soothing chirps into sessions with clients.
It helps to just have that reminder that these things are going on outside, Smith said. I can remember, no matter what happens in this room or with my job today, theres still going to be birds singing.
Getting to trees or shorelines can be challenging during work hours, especially in cold weather and urban environments. But there are ways to enjoy the outdoors and to bring the natural world into your place of work, even if it’s a windowless cubicle.
Al fresco meetings
Scheduled meetings don’t have to take place indoors. An in-person appointment can happen on a park bench. Smith sometimes suggests a walk and talk meeting at a nearby greenway.
Mobile devices mean virtual get-togethers also aren’t limited to conventional work spaces. You can also attend Zoom meetings while walking a woody path.
Smith will ask if she can participate in an online meeting with her smartphone and headphones, allowing her to still be able to get sunlight on my face or see water and plants and birds, she said.
I do definitely feel more calm, Smith, who grew up in South Dakota but now lives in a more moderate climate in North Carolina, said. I think it helps with focus as well. Im just feeling more peaceful and optimistic.
Atlantic Packaging, a sustainable packaging manufacturer headquartered in Wilmington, North Carolina, encourages employees to hold meetings in the courtyards of its facilities or while taking a walk, said Becca Schusler, the company’s wellness director.
The company added fig trees and native plants to its Charlotte location. It launched a nature challenge in 2024 in which employees tracked the time they spent outdoors while dog walking, eating meals, attending meetings, or watching a sunset. Participants uploaded photos into a group chat from their workstations around the U.S.
It was just so wonderful because we got sunrises in the mornings, sunsets at night from all different areas, from the beach to the mountains in Nevada,” Schusler said.
Some employees reported they felt like they handled stress better as a result of spending more time outside, she said.
Just walk
Separate from meetings, a group of Atlantic Packaging employees get together for Walk it out Wednesdays, a weekly time to take strolls together. It helps provide a quick break in the day where they can reset and refocus,” Schusler said.
The Ford Motor Company also has encouraged employees to move outdoors. When it redesigned its Dearborn, Michigan, headquarters in 2025, the automaker included native plants, walking paths, and outdoor pavilions, and suggested people use the grounds for meetings. The parking lot was put further away from the main building by design so people would walk for a few minutes by tall grasses, rocky outcroppings, bridges, and flowers.
We are very careful about how we are engineering space so that our brains and our bodies react positively, said Jennifer Kolstad, Ford’s global and brand design director. Designing for human health is our priority, our responsibility.
Find the light
When temperatures dip and more time is spent indoors, windows can provide a connection with nature.
The designers who laid out Ford’s new headquarters placed offices in the center of floors so exterior walls with tall windows could be enjoyed by everyone in collaborative spaces, Kolstad said.
During Smith’s windowless office days, she kept a pothos plant in the room. The greenery didn’t need much light and survived with the dose it got when Smith moved it to spend weekends in a colleague’s office that had a window.
If its really ugly weather, extreme, then I think thats where windows are truly a godsend, she said.
To catch some sunshine and feel the wind on your face during a commute, consider biking all or part of the way. Many cities and towns have bicycle sharing programs. A warm coat and mittens can keep you from getting too cold while pedaling. Layer up with a neck gaiter, balaclava or hat under your helmet.
Erin Mantz, who works in Washington, D.C., as vice president of marketing for public relations firm Zeno Group, walks to a Pilates class before work four times a week, often before the sun rises. On the days she works from home, she takes breaks to walk her dog on the meandering paths in her neighborhood.
Mantz said that as a child living in Chicago, she often played at the park with neighborhood friends while bundled up in winter gear. She found it difficult to maintain her connection with nature when she had prior jobs that called for working in an office full-time.
Growing up Gen X, we were always running around outside, and you have that great feeling of freedom and fresh air, she said.
Now that she has a hybrid work schedule, she’s realized that spending time outdoors helps her feel relaxed and destressed.
It’s so good for me, Mantz said. The fresh air reminds me of that youthfulness of being outside, and I think its physical and mental, honestly. I feel reinvigorated.
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Share your stories and questions about workplace wellness at cbussewitz@ap.org. Follow APs Be Well coverage, focusing on wellness, fitness, diet and mental health at https://apnews.com/hub/be-well
Cathy Bussewitz, Wellness Writer
In the age of rampant AI slop, seeing isnt always believing. Theres more than one way, though, to make people doubt their own eyes.
Many have long predicted and warned that AI deepfakes could profoundly distort public opinion. For example, although swiftly debunked, a fake video of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy urging his troops to surrender in early 2022 seemed to be a harbinger of horrors to comewhen AI would become indistinguishable from reality.
But as events this week in Minneapolis and the White House demonstrate, no visual manipulation is necessary for forging reality from whole cloth. All it takes is a federal government united around its leaders preferred narrative.
On Tuesday afternoon, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent fatally shot a woman driving an SUV in a Minneapolis suburb. Amid a crowd protesting the agencys recent incursion into the Twin Cities, legal observer Renee Nicole Good was stopped in the middle of the street when federal vehicles zoomed toward her, sirens wailing.
Agents then hopped out of the vehicles and aggressively approached Goods car on foot. As captured on video from multiple angles, she tried to evade the agents, prompting one of them to fire several shots through Goods windshield, one of which hit her face. She died of her injuries on the scene.
Even before many of the above details were known or confirmed, the official government narrative had already begun to coalesce.
Today, ICE officers in Minneapolis were conducting targeted operations when rioters began blocking ICE officers and one of these violent rioters weaponized her vehicle, attempting to run over our law enforcement officers in an attempt to kill theman act of domestic terrorism.— Homeland Security (@DHSgov) January 7, 2026
Who are you going to believe?
Journalism may be the first rough draft of history, but the Trump administration, famously hostile toward journalists, prefers to write the first rough draft of reality themselves, in real timeoccasionally with a Sharpie pen.
As videos of the incident in Minneapolis proliferated online, a tweet from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) declared that a nameless violent rioter had committed an act of domestic terrorism by attempting to run over our law enforcement officers in an attempt to kill them.
DHS Secretary Kristi Noem soon held a press conference, reiterating this version of events. She claimed that the still-nameless woman had been stalking officers and suggested that shed used her vehicle as a weapon. Both accounts claimed that officers involved had been hurt but expected to make a full recovery.
Of course, no narrative from the Trump administration is complete until the president himself weighs in, which he did soon enough on Truth Social. Apparently, it wasnt enough for Trump to just reiterate the skewed DHS version of events; instead, he added some flourishes of his own.
In Trumps telling, the driver hadnt merely attempted to run over an ICE agent; shed viciously ran over himto the point where it is hard to believe he is still alive.
Before Goods name had even been confirmed by The Minnesota Star Tribune and released to the public, the administration had turned her into an attempted murderer (the rare type of attempted murderer, no less, who drives around with a glove box full of stuffed animals for her young child).
Stranger than fiction
Much remains unknown about the events that led to Goods killing, since video has yet to emerge showing what happened before her vehicle stopped in the middle of the road.
Whether her attempt to flee the scene was illegal or ill-advised may be up for debate. What is absolutely certain, though, is that this was the ninth ICE shooting since just last September, which suggests that Good had more reason to be scared of the agents than they were of her.
Either way, to describe what is depicted in the videos as a ramming attack is so staggeringly detached from reality, its an attack on the very idea that one should believe their own eyes.
Unfortunately, in this administration, such brazen fabrications are par for the course.
One day before Goods shooting death, the White House crystallized Trumps paradoxical reframing of the Capitol riots with an official new government web page. On the fifth anniversary of the attack, the administration touted a timeline that grossly misrepresented what happened on January 6, 2021, despite countless freely available video clips taken by the rioters themselves.
In this fanciful retelling, the pro-Trump marchers were orderly and spirited, while the Capitol police escalated tensions by firing tear gas and flash-bangs for no reason. And somehow its all then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosis fault.
Perhaps more egregious, the site presents this revisionist history as a corrective to the purportedly revisionist history spun by the Biden administration. Its not that Trump and his defenders are being dishonest; theyre just the only ones courageous enough to tell the truth!
The Democrats masterfully reversed reality after January 6, the site reads, branding peaceful patriotic protesters as insurrectionists and framing the event as a violent coup attempt orchestrated by Trumpdespite no evidence of armed rebellion or intent to overthrow the government.
In truth, roughly 174 of the 608 defendants charged with assaulting, resisting, or interfering with law enforcement that day were charged for using a deadly or dangerous weapon or otherwise causing serious injury to an officer.
Footage that shows it happening is out there for all to see. But for the second Trump administration, it doesnt matte if hard video evidence disproves their narrative. What matters is their unwavering insistence that their narrative is the way it is.
Seeing is still believing
Although Trumps reelection in 2024 has essentially rendered moot the truth about January 6, the story of what happened in Minneapolis on Wednesday is still developing. Local politicians are not mincing words as they attempt to wrest control of the narrative out of Trumps handsand back into the realm of evidential reality.
“They are already trying to spin this as an action of self-defense, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey said during a press conference on Wednesday. Having seen the video myself, I want to tell everybody directly: that is bullshit.”
Shortly afterward, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz tweeted that hed also seen the video, and urged people to not believe this propaganda machine. (Walz was on the business end of Trumps propaganda machine last Saturday, when the president reposted a video falsely suggesting that Walz was behind the murder of Minnesota state senator Melissa Hortman last summera video Hortmans children have asked Trump to take down, so far to no avail.)
Walz’s and Freys statements reiterate that seeing is believing, an idea that Trump himself apparently shares.
Asked by visiting New York Times reporters on Wednesday about his version of eventsin which Renee Nicole Good viciously ran over an ICE agentthe president ordered an assistant to play video footage that he seemed to think proved him correct.
While watching the video, the reporters claim they told Trump that the angle did not appear to show an ICE officer had been run over.
Well, Trump responds, I the way I look at it He then apparently trails off, without ever admitting that the footage shows something different than what he previously claimed it does.
The report describes this remarkable exchange as a glimpse into Mr. Trumps reflexive defense of what has become a sometimes violent federal crackdown on immigration.
But this characterization doesnt tell the full story. Its more of a glimpse into how the president routinely invents whatever version of reality best serves him, regardless of whether it clashes with realitys version of reality.
On Thursday morning, the Times released a forensic analysis of Goods killing from three different angles, definitively contradicting Trumps account.
And yet even conclusive video evidence is bound to have little impact, not as long as the presidents supporters in and out of Congress insist on only viewing the world the way Trump looks at it.
