Technological advancements in various fields of science are shattering what some scientists once deemed impossible.
In recent years, researchers have mitigated the existential threat of asteroids, unlocked the power of immunotherapy to treat cancer tumors, and achieved unprecedented control over the human vestibular system.
These scientific innovations have been fostered by new types of cross-disciplinary collaboration and the use of artificial intelligence tools.
And though theyre approaching it from vastly different perspectives, planetary science, pathology, and neuroscience researchers shared at the World Changing Ideas Summit in November how theyre really working toward a common goal: to improve the human experience in some way.
The DART mission of 2022 saw a team led by NASA intentionally crash a spacecraft into an asteroid and successfully change the asteroids path through space, marking a waterline for humanity, said Terik Daly, a planetary scientist at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, at the summit cohosted by Fast Company and Johns Hopkins University in Washington, D.C.
Researchers are better prepared, he added, for the real threat of asteroidswhich is a medium-size asteroid, roughly the size of an Olympic swimming pool or half a football field, that could easily destroy an area like the D.C. metro area or even larger.
Currently, we cannot stop earthquakes, we cannot stop volcanoes, we cannot stop hurricanes, Daly said. But with appropriate investments, we can be ready to stop an asteroid if we find one coming our way.
New mapping tools for cancer research
And finding new ways to treat cancer is getting an assist from a perhaps unlikely discipline: astronomy.
Thats the idea behind AstroPath, which uses decades-old learnings about organizing spatial data to help researchers figure out how the immune system interfaces with cancer, said Janis Taube, a pathologist and a professor of dermatology and pathology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
Cancer researchers are making advancements about how to treat tumors, including identifying which patients are a good candidate for immunotherapy, none of which would be possible were it not for learning how to map the breadth of tumors using tools from astronomy, Taube said. We never would’ve been able to separate the signal from noise.
New uses for neurotechnology
Finally, the founders of the neurotechnology startup Orbit set out to find a solution to a supposedly anatomically unsolvable problemgenerating a motion hallucination.
They not only did that, but they are now looking for ways to use the technology to optimize and heal humans, said Steven Pang, cofounder and CEO.
If you get really fine, great control over the vestibular system, you can use it to build a generation of general bodily or mental regulators that no one’s ever been able to build before,” Pang said.
Orbit is now in clinical trials for its first few devices focused on enhancing human cognition and optimizing both the onset of and effectiveness of sleep, Pang said.
There are projections of some incredibly powerful neurotechnology coming in the next 30 to 40 years that could help people be smarter, faster, sleep a lot better, and solve various health conditions that have eluded pharmaceutical interventions for decades, but Pang is optimistic that such innovations could happen even sooner.
Our take is just, if you’re clever about it, you start solving some of these problems with some distinct ways of thinking, that it might just be two or three years away, he said. So hopefully we’ll prove that out.
Imagine you are searching for a new mattress online and find something surprising. The retailer displays an ad featuring a Mattress Comfort Scale running from 1 (soft) to 10 (firm), followed by the message that if your firmness preference is at either end, this mattress is not for you. Wait . . . what? A retailer telling someone not to buy its product? No way!
Why would a company tell potential buyers that the product might not suit them? Our team of professorsKaren Anne Wallach, Jaclyn L. Tanenbaum, and Sean Blairexamines this question in a recently published article in the Journal of Consumer Research.
Marketers spend billions trying to persuade consumers that a product is right for them. But our research shows that sometimes the most effective way to market something is to say that it isnt for them. In other words, effective marketing can mean discouraging the wrong customers rather than convincing everyone to buy.
We call this dissuasive framing. Instead of saying a product is perfect for everyone, a company is up front about who it might not be for. Surprisingly, that simple shift can make a big difference.
We ran experiments comparing ads with dissuasive versus persuasive framing. For example, one coffee ad said, If you like dark roast, this is the coffee for you. Another said, If you dont like dark roast, this isnt the coffee for you. Most marketers assume the first version would work better. But for people who prefer dark roast, the second message outperformed it.
Across different products, from salsa to mattresses, and in a real Facebook campaign for a toothbrush brand, we consistently saw the same results. The dissuasive ad drove more engagement and clicks, making the brand feel more specialized and its product more appealing for the right customers.
Why? You might think its about fear of missing out, or reverse psychology, but we ruled out those explanations. Instead, we found that what really drives the effect is the perception of a stronger match between personal preference and product attributes.
When a message signals that a product may not suit everyone, consumers see it as more focused on a specific set of preferences. This sense of focus, which we call target specificity, makes the product feel like a better match for customers whose preferences align with it. For others, it feels less relevant, which helps companies reach their goal of attracting those who are most likely to buy.
Our results show a clear trend: When companies set boundaries in their messages, products appear more focused. This messaging strategy makes the intended customer feel like the product is a better match for them. People assume that if a product isnt meant for everyone, it must be more specialized. That sense of specificity makes those in the target audience feel the product was designed just for them.
Why it matters
These findings challenge one of marketings most enduring assumptions: that effective marketing comes from directly persuading customers that a product matches their needs. In todays crowded marketplace, where nearly every brand claims to be for you, dissuasive messaging offers an alternative. By clearly signaling that a product may not be right for customers with different preferences, brands can communicate focus and specialization. Consumers see this as a sign that the company understands its own product and who it will best serve.
Our work also helps explain how people make what psychologists call compensatory inferences. This means consumers often believe that when a product tries to do too many things, it ends up doing each of them less well. Think of an all-in-one tool that can cut, twist, open and filebut few would say it performs any of those tasks better than the dedicated tool.
From a practical standpoint, dissuasive framing helps marketers communicate more effectively by defining the boundaries of their products appeal. In doing so, brands can build trust, strengthen connections with the right customers, and avoid spending their marketing dollars on those unlikely to purchase.
What still isnt known
Our research focused on products with clear attributes, such as taste or comfort, and on consumers who already knew their preferences. Future work could test how this approach works when people are less certain about what they like or when choices reflect self-expression rather than product fit.
Even with these open questions, one conclusion stands out. Defining whom a product is not for can help the right customers see that it truly fits them. By focusing on preference matching rather than universal appeal, brands can make their messages more targeted, more efficient and ultimately more effective. In other words, telling the wrong customers This isnt for you can actually help the right ones feel that it is.
Jaclyn L. Tanenbaum is an associate teaching professor at Florida International University.
Karen Anne Wallach is an assistant professor of marketing at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
China and the European Union said Monday they have agreed on steps toward resolving their dispute over the blocs imports of Chinese-made electric vehicles.
A guidance document released by the EU on Monday gives instructions for Chinese EV manufacturers on making price offers for battery EVs, including minimum import prices and other details. The EU had imposed tariffs of up to 35.3% on Chinese EV imports in 2024 following an anti-subsidy investigation.
The EU said that minimum import prices must be set at a level appropriate to remove the injurious effects of the subsidization. Chinese EV manufacturers’ plans for investments within the EU will also be considered, it said.
The European market is open to electric vehicles from all around the world, provided that they have come here according to that level playing field, said European Commission spokesperson Olof Gill. If those conditions are met, then we can look at price undertakings in a serious way.
The EU said the European Commission would assess each offer in an objective and fair manner, following the principle of non-discrimination and in line with World Trade Organization rules.
This is conducive not only to ensuring the healthy development of China-EU economic and trade relations, but also to safeguarding the rules-based international trade order, a statement by Chinas Commerce Ministry said. The China Chamber of Commerce to the EU welcomed the move, which it said would bring about a soft landing in the EV standoff.
The EUs anti-subsidy probe and tariffs on Chinese EVs had strained ties between China and the bloc. In late 2024, the EU imposed countervailing tariffs of 7.8% to 35.3% on Chinese battery EV imports for a five-year period.
As low-priced Chinese EVs rapidly entered the European market, EU officials said Chinas EV makers — with massive support from the Chinese government — benefited from unfair subsidization which threatened economic injury to EU auto manufacturers.
Mondays announcement also came after the EU said last month it had opened a review into whether a price undertaking offer by Germany-based Volkswagen group’s Chinese joint venture could potentially replace the EU’s anti-subsidy tariffs applied on its China-built EVs.
The minimum prices offer Chinese brands probably some comfort to continue their exports long term … while avoiding higher import tariffs,” said Rico Luman, a senior economist at the Dutch bank ING who focuses on transport, logistics and the automotive industry. Im convinced the inroads of Chinese brands will continue.
EU manufacturers depend heavily on Chinese made batteries, rare earths materials and computer chips. That requires “a balancing act to avoid frustrating the trade relationship” with China, Luman said.
Stephen Chan, an associate director at S&P Global Ratings, said some European demand of China-built vehicles could be constrained if the approved floor price under the new guidelines significantly narrows the gap between Chinese BEVs (battery EVs) and European rivals.
Chinese car brands are expected to gain more market share in Europe over the next few years, analysts said. China-manufactured cars rose to 6% of sales in the EU in the first half of 2025, according to the European Automobile Manufacturers Association (ACEA) and S&P Global Mobility, up from 5% in the same period of 2024.
EU-based manufacturers represented 74% of total EU car sales in the first half of 2025, the ACEA said. Germany still produced about 20% of cars sold in the EU, followed by Spain, Czechia and France.
By 2030, Chinese automakers are likely to double their European market share to about 10%, according the consultancy AlixPartners.
Chan Ho-Him, AP business writer
Associated Press writer Sam McNeil contributed to this report.
A leader of the Canadian government is visiting China this week for the first time in nearly a decade, a bid to rebuild his country’s fractured relations with the world’s second-largest economy and reduce Canada’s dependence on the United States, its neighbor and until recently one of its most supportive and unswerving allies.The push by Prime Minster Mark Carney, who arrives Wednesday, is part of a major rethink as ties sour with the United States the world’s No. 1 economy and long the largest trading partner for Canada by far.Carney aims to double Canada’s non-U.S. exports in the next decade in the face of President Donald Trump’s tariffs and the American leader’s musing that Canada could become “the 51st state.”“At a time of global trade disruption, Canada is focused on building a more competitive, sustainable, and independent economy,” Carney said in a news release announcing his China visit. “We’re forging new partnerships around the world to transform our economy from one that has been reliant on a single trade partner.”He will be in China until Saturday, then visit Qatar before attending the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Switzerland next week.Trump’s tariffs have pushed both Canada and China to look for opportunities to strengthen international cooperation, said Zhu Feng, the dean of the School of International Studies at China’s Nanjing University.“Carney’s visit does reflect the new space for further development in China-Canadian relations under the current U.S. trade protectionism,” he said. But he cautioned against overestimating the importance of the visit, noting that Canada remains a U.S. ally. The two North American nations also share a deep cultural heritage and a common geography.
New leaders have pivoted toward China
Carney has been in office less than a year, succeeding Justin Trudeau, who was prime minister for nearly a decade. He is not the first new leader of a country to try to repair relations with China.Australian Premier Anthony Albanese has reset ties since his Labor Party came to power in 2022. Relations had deteriorated under the previous conservative government, leading to Chinese trade restrictions on wine, beef, coal and other Australian exports. Unwinding those restrictions took about 18 months, culminating with the lifting of a Chinese ban on Australian lobsters in late 2024.British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has sought to repair ties with China since his Labour Party ousted the Conservatives in 2024. He is reportedly planning a visit to China, though the government has not confirmed that.The two governments have differences, with Starmer raising the case of former Hong Kong media magnate Jimmy Lai, a British citizen, in talks with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in late 2024 in Brazil.Trump, who has said he will come to China in April, has indicated he wants a smooth relationship with China, though he also launched a tit-for-tat trade war, with tariffs rising to more than 100% before he backed down.
Bumpy relations, with Washington in the middle
In Canada, Trump’s threats have raised questions about the country’s longstanding relationship with its much more powerful neighbor. Those close ties have also been the source of much of Canada’s friction with China in recent years.It was Canada’s detention of a Chinese telecommunications executive at the request of the U.S. that started the deterioration of relations in late 2018. The U.S. wanted the Huawei Technologies Co. executive, Meng Wenzhou, to be extradited to face American charges.China retaliated by arresting two Canadians, Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, on spying charges. While they were imprisoned, Meng was under house arrest in Vancouver, a Canadian city home to a sizable Chinese population. All three were released under a deal reached in 2021.More recently, Canada followed the U.S. in imposing a 100% tariff on electric vehicles and a 25% tariff on steel and aluminum from China.China, which is Canada’s second-largest trading partner after the U.S., has hit back with tariffs on Canadian exports including canola, seafood and pork. It has indicated it would remove some of the tariffs if Canada were to drop the 100% charge on EVs.An editorial in China’s state-run Global Times newspaper welcomed Carney’s visit as a new starting point and called on Canada to lift “unreasonable tariff restrictions” and advance more pragmatic cooperation.Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said Monday that China looks forward to Carney’s visit as an opportunity to “consolidate the momentum of improvement in China-Canada relations.”
Canada is also repairing ties with India
Carney met Xi in late October in South Korea, where both were attending the annual Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit.He has also tried to mend ties with India, where relations deteriorated in 2024 after the Trudeau government accused India of being involved in the 2023 killing of a Sikh activist in Canada. The fallout led to tit-for-tat expulsions of senior diplomats, disruption of visa services, reduced consular staffing and a freeze on trade talks.A cautious thaw began last June. Since then, both sides have restored some consular services and resumed diplomatic contacts. In November, Canadian Foreign Minister Anita Anand said the two countries would move quickly to advance a trade deal, noting the government’s new foreign policy in response to Trump’s trade war.Carney is also expected to visit India later this year.
Associated Press journalists Sheikh Saaliq in New Delhi and Jill Lawless in London, and researcher Shihuan Chen in Beijing contributed.
Ken Moritsugu, Associated Press
If winning gold medals were the only standard, almost all Olympic athletes would be considered failures.A clinical psychologist with the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee, Emily Clark’s job when the Winter Games open in Italy on Feb. 6 is to help athletes interpret what it means to be successful.
Should gold medals be the only measure?
Part of a 15-member staff providing psychological services, Clark nurtures athletes accustomed to triumph but who invariably risk failure.The staff deals with matters termed “mental health and mental performance.” They include topics such as motivation, anger management, anxiety, eating disorders, family issues, trauma, depression, sleep, handling pressure, travel and so forth.Clark’s area includes stress management, the importance of sleep and getting high achievers to perform at their best and avoid the temptation of looking only at results.“A lot of athletes these days are aware of the mental health component of, not just sport, but of life,” Clark said in an interview with The Associated Press. “This is an area where athletes can develop skills that can extend a career, or make it more enjoyable.”
Redefining success
The United States is expected to take about 235 athletes to the Winter Olympics, and about 70 more to the Paralympics. But here’s the truth.“Most of the athletes who come through Team USA will not win a gold medal,” Clark said. “That’s the reality of elite sport.”Here are the numbers. The United States won gold medals in nine events in the last Winter Games in Beijing in 2022. According to Dr. Bill Mallon, an esteemed shoulder surgeon and Olympic historian, 70.8% of Winter and Summer Olympic athletes go to only one Olympics.Few are famous and successful like swimmer Michael Phelps, or skiers Mikaela Shiffrin or Lindsey Vonn.Clark said she often delivers the following message to Olympians and Paralympians: This is a once-in-a-lifetime chance. Focus on the process. Savor the moment.“Your job is not to win a gold medal, your job is to do the thing and the gold medal is what happens when you do your job,” she said.“Some of this might be realigning what success looks like,” she added. “And some of this is developing resilience in the face of setbacks and failure.”Clark preaches staying on task under pressure and improving through defeat.“We get stronger by pushing ourselves to a limit where we’re at our maximum capacity and then recovering,” she said. “When we get stressed, it impacts our attention. Staying on task or staying in line with what’s important is what we try to train for.”
A few testimonials
Kendall Gretsch has won four gold medals at the Summer and Winter Paralympics. She credits some of her success to the USOPC’s mental health services, and she described the value this way.“We have a sports psychologist who travels with us for most our season,” she said. “Just being able to touch base with them and getting that reminder of why are you here. What is that experience you’re looking for?”American figure skater Alysa Liu is the 2025 world champion and was sixth in the 2022 Olympics. She’s a big believer in sports psychology and should be among the favorites in Italy.“I work with a sport psychologist,” she said without giving a name. “She’s incredible like the MVP.”Of course, MVP stands not for Most Valuable Person or Most Valuable Player for “Most Valuable Psychologist.”“I mean, she’s very helpful,” Liu added.
Vonn: “I just did it myself”
American downhill skier Vonn will race in Italy in her sixth Olympics. At 41, she’s coming off nearly six years in retirement and will be racing on a knee made of titanium.Two-time Olympic champion Michaela Dorfmeister has suggested in jest that Vonn “should see a psychologist” for attempting such a thing in a very dangerous sport where downhill skiers reach speeds of 80 mph (130 kph).Vonn shrugged off the comments and joked a few months ago that she didn’t grow up using a sport psychologist. She said her counseling came from taping messages on the tips of her skis that read: “stay forward or hands up.”“I just did it myself,” she said. “I do a lot of self-talk in the starting gate.”
On sleep
“Sleep is an area where athletes tend to struggle for a number of reasons,” Clark said, listing issues such as travel schedules, late practices, injuries and life-related stress.“We have a lot of athletes who are parents, and lot of sleep is going to be disrupted in the early stages of parenting,” she said. “We approach sleep as a real part of performance. But it can be something that gets de-prioritized when days get busy.”Clark suggests the following for her athletes and the rest of us: no caffeine after 3 p.m., mitigate stress before bedtime, schedule sleep at about the same time daily, sleep in a dark room and get 7-9 hours.Dani Aravich is a two-time Paralympian she’s been in both the Summer and Winter Games will be skiing in the upcoming Paralympics. She said in a recent interview that she avails herself of many psychological services provided by the USOPC.“I’ve started tracking my sleep,” she said, naming Clark as a counselor. “Especially being an athlete who has multiple jobs, sleep is going to be your No. 1 savior at all times. It’s the thing that you know helps mental clarity.”Ditto Clark.“Sleep is the cornerstone of healthy performance,” she added.
Follow AP’s Be Well coverage, focusing on all aspects of wellness, at https://apnews.com/hub/be-well
Stephen Wade, Associated Press
Fitness brand Modern Warrior has voluntarily recalled all lots of its dietary supplement Modern Warrior Ready after testing revealed the presence of “undeclared ingredients,” one of which could be potentially life threatening.
The product was sold over a period of three years as capsule-based dietary supplements. Consumers nationwide could buy them directly online. The voluntary recall was announced on Friday, January 9, the same day that a recall notice was published on the website of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
Heres what you need to know.
What does the recalled product look like?
The recalled dietary supplement, Modern Warrior Ready, is sold in a black plastic supplement bottle with a black screw-top lid sealed with black and gold temper-evident shrink wrap. Each bottle contains 60 capsules.
The bottles front label features the Modern Warrior (MW) logo in gold at the top.
The name Body Repair Plan is centered on the front label, in gold lettering. Below that, the word Ready appears with a small sunrise icon followed by the phrase Mental Clarity.
The recalled dietary supplement was distributed and sold online to customers nationwide from April 2022 until December 8, 2025.
Some undeclared ingredients pose serious risks
Some of the ingredients found during what was described as regulatory testing have a risk of causing serious side effects, including “life-threatening events.” The FDA recall notice explains the following potential health risks:
Tianeptine: Tianeptine can cause “life-threatening events,” according to the FDA notice, including suicide ideation or behavior in children, adolescents, and adults aged 25 and younger. Additionally, overdose of this ingredient “carries serious and potentially life-threatening risks,” the FDA notice states, including confusion, seizure, drowsiness, dry mouth, and shortness of breath, which can be exacerbated by alcohol use. The notice further states that “Using tianeptine in combination with monoamine oxidase inhibitor (MAOl) antidepressants could lead to life-threatening complications including stroke and death.”
1,4-DMAA: 1,4-DMAA can cause stimulant effects. Using 1,4-DMAA can cause elevated blood pressure, which could lead to cardiovascular problems, like, heart attack, shortness of breath, and tightening of the chest.
What should I do if I have this product?
If you purchased the recalled dietary supplement, you should stop using it.
The FDA recall notice states that Modern Warrior has immediately ceased distribution of the recalled product and has removed it from sale.
A recall notice could not immediately be found on Modern Warrior’s website. The impacted product was listed as “sold out” as of Monday morning.
Fast Company has reached out to Modern Warrior for comment and will update this post if we hear back.
If you have any questions about the recall, call Modern Warrior at 314-713-1984 or email theviking@modernwarrior.life.
President Donald Trump said Sunday that he is “inclined” to keep ExxonMobil out of Venezuela after its top executive was skeptical about oil investment efforts in the country after the toppling of former President Nicolás Maduro.“I didn’t like Exxon’s response,” Trump said to reporters on Air Force One as he departed West Palm Beach, Florida. “They’re playing too cute.”During a meeting Friday with oil executives, Trump tried to assuage the concerns of the companies and said they would be dealing directly with the U.S., rather than the Venezuelan government.Some, however, weren’t convinced.“If we look at the commercial constructs and frameworks in place today in Venezuela, today it’s uninvestable,” said Darren Woods, CEO of ExxonMobil, the largest U.S. oil company.An ExxonMobil spokesperson did not immediately respond Sunday to a request for comment.Also on Friday, Trump signed an executive order that seeks to ensure that Venezuelan oil revenue remains protected from being used in judicial proceedings.The executive order, made public on Saturday, says that if the funds were to be seized for such use, it could “undermine critical U.S. efforts to ensure economic and political stability in Venezuela.” Venezuela has a history of state asset seizures, ongoing U.S. sanctions and decades of political uncertainty.Getting U.S. oil companies to invest in Venezuela and help rebuild the country’s infrastructure is a top priority of the Trump administration after Maduro’s capture.The White House is framing the effort to “run” Venezuela in economic terms, and Trump has seized tankers carrying Venezuelan oil, has said the U.S. is taking over the sales of 30 million to 50 million barrels of previously sanctioned Venezuelan crude, and plans to control sales worldwide indefinitely.
Kim reported from West Palm Beach, Florida.
Seung Min Kim and Julia Nikhinson, Associated Press
Mattel Inc. is introducing an autistic Barbie on Monday as the newest member of its line intended to celebrate diversity, joining a collection that already includes Barbies with Down syndrome, a blind Barbie, a Barbie and a Ken with vitiligo, and other models the toymaker added to make its fashion dolls more inclusive.Mattel said it developed the autistic doll over more than 18 months in partnership with the Autistic Self Advocacy Network, a nonprofit organization that advocates for the rights and better media representation of people with autism. The goal: to create a Barbie that reflected some of the ways autistic people may experience and process the world around them, according to a Mattel news release.That was a challenge because autism encompasses a broad range of behaviors and difficulties that vary widely in degree, and many of the traits associated with the disorder are not immediately visible, according to Noor Pervez, who is the Autistic Self Advocacy Network’s community engagement manager and worked closely with Mattel on the Barbie prototype.Like many disabilities, “autism doesn’t look any one way,” Pervez said. “But we can try and show some of the ways that autism expresses itself.”For example, the eyes of the new Barbie shift slightly to the side to represent how some people with autism sometimes avoid direct eye contact, he said. The doll also was given articulated elbows and wrists to acknowledge stimming, hand flapping and other gestures that some autistic people use to process sensory information or to express excitement, according to Mattel.The development team debated whether to dress the doll in a tight or a loose-fitting outfit, Pervez said. Some autistic people wear loose clothes because they are sensitive to the feel of fabric seams, while others wear figure-hugging garments to give them a sense of where their bodies are, he said.The team ended up choosing an A-line dress with short sleeves and a flowy skirt that provides less fabric-to-skin contact. The doll also wears flat shoes to promote stability and ease of movement, according to Mattel.Each doll comes with a pink finger clip fidget spinner, noise-canceling headphones and a pink tablet modeled after the devices some autistic people who struggle to speak use to communicate.The addition of the autistic doll to the Barbie Fashionistas line also became an occasion for Mattel to create a doll with facial features inspired by the company’s employees in India and mood boards reflecting a range of women with Indian backgrounds. Pervez said it was important to have the doll represent a segment of the autistic community that is generally underrepresented.Mattel introduced its first doll with Down syndrome in 2023 and brought out a Barbie representing a person with Type 1 diabetes last summer. The Fashionistas also include a Barbie and a Ken with a prosthetic leg, and a Barbie with hearing aids, but the line also encompasses tall, petite and curvy body types and numerous hair types and skin colors.“Barbie has always strived to reflect the world kids see and the possibilities they imagine, and we’re proud to introduce our first autistic Barbie as part of that ongoing work,” Jamie Cygielman, Mattel’s global head of dolls, said in a statement.The doll was expected to be available at Mattel’s online shop and at Target stores starting Monday for a suggested retail price of $11.87. Walmart stores are expected to start carrying the new Barbie in March, Mattel said.The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported last year that the estimated prevalence of autism among 8-year-old children in the U.S. was 1 in 31. The estimate from the CDC’s Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring Network said Black, Hispanic, Asian and Pacific Islander children in the U.S. were more likely than white children to have a diagnosis, and the prevalence more than three times higher among boys than girls.
Anne D’Innocenzio, AP Retail Writer
Late last year, Meta confirmed it would effectively be abandoning the metaverse, a nebulously defined project that spurred the companys 2021 rebrand and has cost it over $70 billion since. At a strategy meeting at Mark Zuckerberg’s Hawaii compound, Reality Labs, the division responsible for the metaverse, was told to cut its budget by 30%, versus only 10% across the rest of the company. Reality Labs fate was arguably a long time coming: The division has never turned a profit, with cumulative losses these past five years totalling $73 billion. Wall Street reacted positively to the news, adding $69 billion to its market capitalization.
You remember the metaverse, dont you? The next stage of the internets evolution: a virtual reality full of legless avatars, sprawling, lifeless, digital malls, and nausea-inducing headsets. Upon the inception of the metaverse, its enthusiasts looked at vast swaths of the economygaming, online retail, digital advertising, compulsory Zoom meetingsand said: Imagine we did more of this, but on virtual reality platforms, mediated by micro-transactions and facilitated by cryptocurrency-backed assets. Relabeling the digital economy as the “metaverse” was a simple, elegant moveas well as a deeply cynical effort to rebrand already existing digital markets as the next internetthat allowed forecasts to assume an air of inevitability. Until it wasnt. Perhaps more urgently now, the metaverse should also be understood as a dress rehearsal for todays AI boom: The former was to succeed the mobile internet, while the latter now promises to be more profound than electricity or fire. Perpetually inflating definitions. A single-minded focus on profit that identifies but fails to address egregious harms. Manufactured narratives about inevitability and technological progress. Burning eyewatering sums on infrastructure for a product nobody wants.
Any of this sound familiar?
Talking it into existence
At the heart of the metaverse derangement was the persistent inflation of its definition. McKinsey & Company proclaimed in June 2022 that the metaverse could generate “up to $5 trillion in impact by 2030equivalent to the size of the world’s third-largest economy today, Japan.” McKinsey also estimated that e-commerce would comprise $2 trillion to $2.6 trillion of that share. Of the 3,400 consumers and executives McKinsey surveyed, 95% of “business leaders” expected positive impact from the metaverse in five to ten years, while 61% expected moderate changes to their industry’s operations.
Incredibly, McKinseys was among the more conservative estimates. A few months before, Citigroup predicted the metaverse would become “the next iteration of the internet, or Web3.” While it would be “community-owned and governed and guarantee privacy by design, it would also have a total addressable market (TAM) between $8 trillion and $13 trillion by 2030, with some five billion users to boot, the bank estimated. And one month before that, Morgan Stanley sent an investor note anticipating that the metaverse represented an $8-trillion market opportunity in China alone.
In an essay analyzing Web3 and the metaverse, tech critic Evgeny Morozov observes that a great deal of what was going on at this time was a performance aimed at conjuring new realities into being through language that, itself, spun up visions unmoored from reality. “The advocates of Web3 are quite explicit about this, we’ve got this beautiful map on our handsall that’s missing is the territory it is supposed to refer to . . . if there’s no reality, we’ll create one by talking it into existence.”
A mass hallucination
Why was this mass hallucination indulged for so long? Part of it was because profit-driven surveillance and enclosure were core ambitions of the metaverse pivot. When it came to labor, the best-case scenario resembled employers platonic ideal: bypassing labor laws through remote work, misclassifying full-time workers due protections and benefits as contractors, paying arbitrage wages across borders, all while subjecting workers to cold, algorithmic overseers.
As for consumers, they would be enlisted into digital sharecropping. Take Axie Infinity, the “play-to-earn” game once hailed as a crown jewel of Web3 and the metaverse. “Managers” in wealthy countries bought expensive NFTs, or non-fungible tokens (remember those?), then rented them to “scholars” in the Global South, who grinded for hours and hours in the game for a few pennies an hour, all in hopes of earning enough to one day become a manager with their own scholars. Was this a new economy? The future of the internet? Or the same old bitter taste?
At the same time, a land grab for virtual real estate broke out. Speculators poured millions into Decentraland, The Sandbox, and other virtual worlds where land should, theoretically, be limitless and abundant. Yet the speculators imposed artificially limits, in hopes of inflating valuations of the digital real estate. This would allow investors to realize eyewatering returns on fundamentally worthless assets, like a slice of land in an abandoned virtual world. It would be akin to “buying property in Manhattan, but in a world where anyone could feasibly create an infinite amount of alternative Manhattans that are just as easy to get to. Which means the only reason for users to buy into this Manhattan is if it offers a better service than the others,” as Wired put it.
The humbling
Still, the emptiness did not deter Facebook, which rebranded as Meta on October 28, 2021, during Connect 2021, its annual developer conference.
During the October announcement of Facebooks pivot to the metaverse, Zuckerberg offered that “the last few years have been humbling for me and our company in a lot of ways. Thats one word for it. That year, whistleblower Frances Haugen testified that Facebook products had harmed children, torched our democracy, while reaffirming its complicity in genocide in Myanmar and in “literall fanning ethnic violence” elsewhere. On another front, Apple changed iPhone privacy settings so that users could opt out of being tracked for personalized adsMeta told investors the changes would cost it $10 billion of revenue in 2022. The impact may have been so steep that the firm is currently accused of “deliberately bypass[ing] privacy rules on Apple iPhones in a bid to boost revenues.”
Amid all this came the metaverse Hail Mary: A transparent, desperate rebrand to sell the promise of “presence” in a virtual world. The pivot was about building a “total service environment”a closed garden where consumers spend all day exclusively using one firm’s goods and services, a new world where Facebook was not seen as a parasite, but understood to be the landlordthe benevolent god watching over everything. “We should all be concerned about how Facebook could and will use the data collected within the metaverse,” warned Bree McEwan, a VR researcher.
The physical world was becoming increasingly hostile to Metas relentless profit-seeking. Before Zuckerberg preached democratization, Meta spent the past few years busy at work on patents aimed at optimizing ad delivery through eye-tracking, gait analysis (to identify users by how they walk), and haptic feedback suits monitoring heart rate and emotional arousal. Parents and children were raising concerns about its impact on mental health and social relations. European regulators and American competitors were implementing changes that thwarted data extraction.
Rise and fall
Yet within a year of the rebrand, there was already trouble in (digital) paradise. By October 2022, Meta’s flagship virtual-reality game, Horizon Worlds, proved so buggy and unpopular that it was placed on “quality lockdown.” There was a time when Horizon Worlds claimed to have 200,000 monthly users (walking back claims of 300,000) and hoped to hit 500,000 by the end of the year. But by August 2023, it wasn’t even clear if there were more than 1,000 daily active users. Other virtual worlds like Decentraland and The Sandbox appeared to fare even worse. Some may insist that we cant learn too much from the rise and fall of the metaversethat it and Meta, more generally, are rogue mutations, aberrations from normal technological development or even from capitalism itself. But Meta is, actually, a more straightforwardly boring company than some critics might have you think.
Facebook enthusiastically became Meta, and patented surveillance tools were adopted as a means to an end: making more and more of the rhythms of human life legible to markets. This is old wine in new bottles. From its earliest days, surveillance has helped minimize capitalist dysfunction by regimenting labor, stimulating consumer demand, satiating Wall Street’s hunger for reliable returns, and indulging the security states demand for total information awareness.
Meta has been on a vision quest for business ventures that might rival (or bolster) its core advertising business ($51.2 billion Q3 25, up 26% year-over-year). It tried and failed to take on the global financial system with a cryptocurrency called Libra, before stripping it down and selling what remained. It tried and failed to enter hardware with Building 8, which became Portal, which became nothing. Lacking his own currency or device, Zuckerberg made a bet that he could graft a virtual interface onto the digital and physical world (while pocketing a few more advertiser bucks along the way).
Aberration vs. symptom
If you are reading this in the year 2,025 A.D., you may have noticed there are many similarities between our former inevitable future (the metaverse) and our current inevitable future (generative artificial intelligence).
While the word “metaverse” was not uttered once on Meta’s most recent earnings call, executives gushed about generative AI and anticipated “notably larger” growth in capital expenditures in 2026 than 2025 driven primarily by the AI infrastructure overbuild. The company expects to lose $72 billion on artificial intelligence through 2025. Reality Labs is expected to reallocate some metaverse funding to Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses pitched as a new AI hardware productthat have seen huge growth in sales, even as the public galvanizes against the return of glassholes.
There is the matter of narrative. The metaverse was hailed as “the successor to the mobile internet,” whereas artificial intelligence is “the next general-purpose technology” that will revolutionize human civilization. Just as the metaverses future was so obviously entwined with surveillance and enclosure, so too is the project of remaking the digital world for AI agents regardless of whether they will ever exist, let alone work.
There is the tiny problem of the numbers. The metaverse got multi-trillion dollar TAMs by reclassifying all digital activity; artificial intelligence gets multi-trillion dollar GDP contribution estimates by assuming unprecedented productivity improvements and sidestepping questions about the $2 trillion in revenue it needs by 2030 to justify capital expenditures on AI infrastructure.
There is also the burning question of demand. In the metaverse era, startups offered crypto-tokens and complicated (Ponzi) schemes to artificially inflate demand. Today, tech firms are “investing” billions in AI startups but requiring those dollars be spent on the investor’s own cloud compute. Subsidizing your own revenue growth to impress Wall Street and create the illusion of organic demand is a tale as old as our tech sector’s origins. How will it go this time?
And then there is the question of the fate of our physical world. Intel estimated the metaverse might have required a thousandfold increase in computing capacity, powered by data centers whose energy and environmental costs would be excluded from glossy demos and deks. The metaverse also prominently featured cryptocurrency, which itself demanded substantial amounts of energy. One White House report notes that “from 2018 to 2022, annualized electricity from global crypto-assets grew rapidly, with estimates of electricity usages doubling to quadrupling” landing somewhere between 120 and 240 billion kilowatt-hours per yearon the lower end, thats more than the entirety of Argentina, but on the higher end this would rival Australias electricity usage.
Had Meta succeeded, we wouldve built out much more energy-intensive computational infrastructure with a growing ecological cost. But we also wouldve fleshed out supply chains to extract and deliver critical mineralsmeaning we would likely intensify child and slave labor that already prominent figures into these enterprises. A good thing, then, that Meta abandoned this path.
Ironically enough, Nvidia offers a bridge between the two worlds: the fusion of the dead metaverse and the living generative AI hype in the “Omniverse.” In The New Yorker‘s 2023 profile of Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang, he shows off “Diane,” a hyper-realistic avatar with blackheads on her nose and an uncanny shimmer” in her eyes. Were working on that, the specialist shares with the reporter. The goal is to speak whole universes into existence. The writer “felt dizzy” and shared that “I thought of science fiction; I thought of the Book of Genesis.” If that reaction is any guide, Nvidia may well succeed with its proselytizing where Meta failed.
It would be a mistake to simply celebrate the death of the metaverse. Instead, we should understand why such a delusional fervor took hold so that we can inoculate ourselves as the next one spreads.
I teach AI to editorial and PR teams for a living, and if there’s one thing that excites and engages them more than any other, it’s vibe coding. The highly visual and interactive projects my students create with vibe-coding tools often turn me into the person taking notes.
Vibe coding is definitely having a moment. It’s arguably the most impactful thing to come out of the field of generative AI in the past year, at least as far as applied AI goes. Broadly, vibe coding is the practice of using AI to create not just “content,” but webpages, apps, and experiencessoftware people can actually do things with. And you don’t need to know a lick of code: The AI will take your plain-language prompts and do all the programming for you, whipping up pages or even entire websites in minutes.
The thrill of the first click
The feeling you get the first time you vibe-code something is similar to what you probably felt the first time you asked ChatGPT to write an essay. You feel incredibly empowered, and maybe even a bit fooled. “It can’t be that easy,” is a common thought. And you’d be right: Vibe-coded experiences are visually and technically impressive, but they are almost always one-offs: Turning them into stable tools you can use on an ongoing basis typically requires a wider set of software and developer skills.
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Nonetheless, vibe coding has the potential to be transformative for storytelling, newsrooms, and the media at large. At last, the people crafting content are no longer constrained by the tools forced upon them by their organizations. I remember the publication I worked at in the early days of blogging didn’t even have a gallery tool for readers to quickly scroll through images. Today, even absent AI, there are many platforms and plug-and-play tools to choose from, but they rarely have all the features you want. In any case, incorporating new software is typically a lengthy process in organizations.
With vibe coding, creators can now build experiences that are tailored to the content, not the other way around. Like I mentioned at the outset, this often ignites an enthusiasm in storytellers and domain experts, which is leading to a fantastic uncorking of creativity as more journalists dabble with vibe coding, like an interactive explorer of Newarks municipal service data or a webpage that turns wildfire point data into Datawrapper-ready hexagon maps.
The challenge for media organizations is to translate that enthusiasm into deeper audience engagement, and to do it in an ongoing way. That, however, requires an approach that goes beyond simply giving reporters and editors permission to experiment. It requires new skills, specialized tools, and above all a culture shift.
Turning vibe coding into a team sport sport
The skill of vibe coding isn’t that different from “normal” AI skills, which is to say structured prompting and understanding how to collaborate with AI will get you a long way. But to get the most out of vibe coding, it helps to think first about what inputs you need (beyond your story) and find examples of other interactive experiences that are similar. Most importantly, think about what your audience wants and how you expect readers to interact with what you’re creating. Data journalists will probably have an advantage here, but it ultimately comes down to thinking a bit more like a product manager than a writer.
You can technically vibe-code in the same platforms where you’re probably already using AI, such as ChatGPT and Claude, but software tailored to vibe coding can generally get you from prompt to product much faster. That said, the services that hew most closely to the familiar chat interface, such as Lovable and Base44, will be less intimidating to non-enthusiasts.
For teams, the goal is to have a go-to platform where anyone can experiment with stories in a safe and private way. Given that the whole point of this software is to create web experiences for pushing out to audiences, that can be tricky, but most vibe-coding platforms have controls for keeping things secure by default while still enabling publishing to a public-facing site when you want to.
To really take advantage of the interest in vibe coding, however, will often require a shift in culture. Many media organizations have rigid structures around product and editorial. AI has already begun to chip away at the wall separating creators and coders, and vibe coding essentially takes a sledgehammer to it. That can be unnerving to product teams used to roadmaps, strict QA, and defined KPIs. The teams that get this right will properly balance the desire to allow their creative teams to experimentsometimes publiclywithout turning their sites and strategy into the Wild West.
Collaboration is key, and doing it successfully means various teams need to be fully aligned on the end goal: creating a pipeline from creativity to new, polished, and highly engaging experiences. As we move closer to “Google Zero” in 2026, media brands need to do more with the audiences they have, and vibe coding provides a means by which the entire team, not just product managers and engineers, can play a role in crafting that future.
The future favors the flexible
Vibe coding doesn’t need to replace existing newsroom workflows to matter. Its value comes in giving non-coder domain experts like journalists room to test ideas and think beyond the constraints of the CMS without waiting for an opening in the roadmap. Some of those ideas will remain one-offs, and that is fine. Others will point toward new formats worth formalizing. The organizations that benefit most will be the ones that encourage vibe coding as legitimate editorial exploration, support it with light structure rather than heavy oversight, and accept that the path to stronger audience relationships now runs through experimentation as much as execution.
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