Patrick Mahomes' Mom Randi Asks For Fans To Pray For Her Father

"Should I say my last words?" the passenger texted their relative after reporting a bird had struck the plane.

Mochi, a doughy cake made from steamed sweet rice, is more than just a nostalgic taste of Japan; the very act of making mochi – a "mochitsuki" – takes on special significance on New Year's Day. Correspondent Conor Knighton reports.

North Korea's Kim Jong Un vowed to implement the "toughest" anti-U.S. policy, less than a month before Donald Trump takes office as U.S. president.

"Sunday Morning" checks out Spotify's top streaming hits of the past year.

The "Bad Blood" singer and the Kansas City Chiefs star walked hand-in-hand as they headed to a restaurant in the Meatpacking District of the Big Apple.

The $150 test usually gives people results in less than two weeks but experts warn that the information might be “harmful” to some.

A variety metapuzzle to close out 2024 in style.

The Korean star calls the moment an "inflection point" for Player 333.

One change offers a few kinds of security protections.

Few would argue that New York City is mired in a housing crisis — as defined by high prices and low vacancies. There’s good evidence for that conclusion. The most recent federal New York City Housing and Vacancy Survey reported a vacancy rate of just 1.4%, “a stark contrast to the 4.54 rate in 2021”.  Over the same period,...

Best bets for Week 17's Colts-Giants and Raiders-Saints matchups.

Aaron Rodgers and Gang Green are looking to spoil Buffalo's sparkling season.

Dora Moono Nyambe passed away on Christmas after spending the last 5 years helping kids in Africa.

At least two people were killed and six more injured as several tornadoes touched down in Texas and Mississippi on Saturday.

North Korean Dictator Kim Jong Un's regime vowed to adopt its "toughest" policies against the U.S. during its annual meeting last week.

The Guardian Angels will start patrolling New York City subway cars once again in response to the the horrifying murder of a sleeping passenger, who was burned to death on the F train last week, the group announced. Ever since the horrifying incident, “hundreds of citizens” have requested the Guardian Angels return to patrol the...

Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev also accused Russia of trying to "hush up" the issue for several days.

Gracie Abrams, Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan are some of the biggest breakout stars of the year, gaining popularity with mainstream audiences.

Videos showed the plane skidding across a runway at Halifax Stanfield International Airport in Nova Scotia.

Did you miss it? We have all the details here.

The following is the full transcript of an interview with David Rubenstein, philanthropist and author, on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" that aired on Dec. 29, 2024.

Survivors from the crash told ABC News that they heard and felt explosions outside the aircraft during the flight, after which the plane appeared to lose control.

Lamar Jackson has entered the chat. 

An inside look at Sunday's Giants-Colts Week 17 matchup at MetLife Stadium:  

It's ineffective at shaping behavior, and it primarily benefits the wealthy while needlessly adding to the deficit. EVs aren't even good at curbing climate change, and the credit could be stifling better alternatives.

Smokey Robinson and Ronald White wrote and produced the classic Motown melody "My Girl. It went on to become the first No.1 single for The Temptations.

A new study says outdoor security camera apps are among the biggest collectors of user data, including phone numbers, payment details and precise location.

Ending the $7,500 bipartisan tax credit, as President-elect Donald Trump has promised to do, would be counterproductive and costly for consumers.

High-profile figures ranging from billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk to rapper and model Amber Rose threw their support behind President-elect Donald Trump and the MAGA agenda this year.

A lot of the drama from 2024 can be traced to some of its annoying people and there are too many to list here. We get to make fun of the worst of them.

The American Culture Quiz is a weekly test of our unique national traits, trends, history and people. This time, test your knowledge of New Year’s novelties, highway history and musical milestones.

The friends smashed around 50 plates in the restaurant, without realizing they had to cover the cost.

Naruto is massively popular, and these iconic characters are the best in the series.

I should've done this sooner.

This is my third time honoring what I see as the year’s most important scientific and technological advances.In 2022, my theme was the principle of “twin ideas,” when similar inventions emerge around the same time. Just as Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray both arguably conceived of the modern telephone in 1876 (and, by some accounts, on the same day!), the U.S. saw a cluster of achievements in generative AI, cancer treatment, and vaccinology.In 2023, my theme was the long road of progress. My top breakthrough was Casgevy, a gene-editing therapy for patients with sickle-cell anemia. The therapy built on decades of research on CRISPR, an immune defense system borrowed from the world of bacteria.[View: 2024 in photos: Wrapping up the year]This year, my theme is the subtler power of incremental improvement, which has also been a motif of technological progress. Although nothing invented in 2024 rivals the gosh-wow debut of ChatGPT or the discovery of GLP-1 drugs, such as Ozempic, this year witnessed several advancements across medicine, space technology, and AI that extend our knowledge in consequential ways.An Ingenious Defense Against HIVAround the world, 40 million people live with HIV, and an estimated 630,000 people die of AIDS-related illness every year. The disease has no cure. But whereas patients in rich developed countries have access to medicine that keeps the virus at bay, many people in poor countries, where the disease is more widespread, do not.This year, scientists at the pharmaceutical company Gilead announced that a new injectable drug seems to provide exceptional protection from HIV for six months. In one clinical trial of South African and Ugandan girls and young women, the shot, which is called lenacapavir, reduced HIV infections by 100 percent in the intervention group. Another trial of people across several continents reported an efficacy rate of 96 percent. Clinical-trial results don’t get much more successful than that.This fall, Gilead agreed to let other companies sell cheap generic versions of the shot in poor countries. More controversially, the deal left out middle-income countries, such as Brazil and Mexico, which will have to pay more for access to the therapy.Lenacapavir works by targeting key “capsid proteins” that act as both sword and shield for HIV’s genetic material—protecting the virus’s RNA and allowing it to invade our cells. Lenacapavir stuns the proteins and disarms their sword-and-shield functions, which makes the HIV viral particles harmless. In naming lenacapavir its breakthrough of the year, the journal Science reported that the same technique could disrupt the proteins that protect countless other deadly viruses, including those that cause common colds or even once-in-a-generation pandemics. The ability to break down the structure and function of these viruses by targeting capsid proteins could help us cure even more diseases in the long run.The U.S. Enters the Age of Rocket-CatchingFor six decades, the U.S. has been pretty good at using propulsion technology to toss heavy objects into space. But catching them when they fall back to Earth? Not so much.Until this October, when a SpaceX booster plummeted from the sky at 22 times the speed of sound, hit the brakes, slowed down over the same tower that had launched it, and settled into its two giant mechanical arms for a high-tech hug. Sixty-six years after America blasted into the age of rocket-launching, it has finally entered the age of rocket-catching.[Read: The most powerful rocket in history had a good morning]So what is this rocket-pincer technology—nicknamed “chopsticks”—actually good for? SpaceX, founded and run by Elon Musk, has already cut the price of getting stuff into space by an order of magnitude. Making rockets fully reusable could cut that price “by another order of magnitude,” writes Eric Hand, a journalist with Science. Just about every aspect of a space-bound economy—running scientific experiments in our solar system, mining asteroids, manufacturing fiber optics and pharmaceuticals in microgravity conditions—runs up against the same basic economic bottleneck: Ejecting things out of our atmosphere is still very expensive. But cheap, large, and reusable rockets are the prerequisite for building any kind of world outside our own, whether it’s a small fleet of automated factories humming in low-orbit or, well, a multiplanetary civilization.A Quantum BreakthroughIn December, Google announced that its new quantum computer, based on a chip called Willow, solved a math problem in five minutes that would take one of the fastest supercomputers roughly “10 septillion years” to crack. For context, 10 septillion years is the entire history of the universe—about 14 billion years—repeated several trillion times over. The achievement was so audacious that some people speculated that Google’s computer worked by borrowing computing power from parallel universes.If that paragraph caused a nauseous combination of wonder and bafflement, that feels about right. Quantum computers don’t make sense to most people, in part because they’ve been hyped up as the ultimate supercomputer. But as the science journalist Cleo Abram has explained, that’s a misnomer. You shouldn’t think of quantum computers as being bigger, faster, or smarter than the computers that run our day-to-day life. You should think of them as being fundamentally different.Traditional computers, such as your smartphone and laptop, process information as a parade of binary switches that flip between 1 and 0. Quantum computers use qubits, which harness quantum mechanics, the weird physics that governs particles smaller than atoms. A qubit can represent both a 1 and a 0 simultaneously, thanks to a property called superposition. As you add more qubits, the computational power grows exponentially, which theoretically allows quantum computers to solve problems of dizzying complexity.Qubits are finicky and prone to error. That’s one reason quantum computers are held in special containers refrigerated to almost 0 kelvin, a temperature colder than deep space. But Google’s chip, which connects 105 qubits, is among the first to show that the number of errors can decline as more qubits are added—a discovery that future quantum-computing teams can surely build on.Optimistically, quantum computers could help us understand the rules of subatomic activity, which undergird all physical reality. That could mean designing better electric batteries by allowing researchers to simulate the behavior of electrons in metals, or revolutionizing drug discovery by predicting interactions between our immune system and viruses at the tiniest level.But the possibilities aren’t all pretty. The U.S., China, and other countries are locked in a multibillion-dollar race toward quantum supremacy, in part because it’s broadly understood that a fully functioning quantum computer could also solve the sort of complex mathematical problems that form the basis of public-key cryptography. In other words, a working quantum computer could render null and void most internet encryption. Here again, the technological power to do more good tends to rise commensurately with the power to cause more chaos.Another Year of Generative-AI WizardryThis might just be the era when any plausible list of the year’s most important technological advances ends with the sentence Oh, and also, artificial-intelligence researchers did a bunch of crazy stuff.In just the past three months, a small study found that ChatGPT outperformed human physicians at solving medical case histories; several AI companies released a torrent of impressive video generators, including Google DeepMind’s Veo 2 and OpenAI’s Sora; Google announced an AI agent whose weather forecasts outperformed the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts—the “world leader in atmospheric prediction,” according to The New York Times; and OpenAI released a new “reasoning” system that blew away industry standards in coding and complex math problems. [Read: The generative-AI revolution may be a bubble]I continue to be interested in how the transformer technology behind large language models handles the most complex logic systems. With ChatGPT, researchers showed that an AI could master the grammar of language well enough to produce plausible sentences, code, and poetry. But the cosmos is filled with other languages—that is, other logical systems that obey a finite number of rules to produce predictable results. One example is DNA. After all, what is DNA if not a language? With a vocabulary based on just four letters, or nucleotides, our genetic code spells out how our proteins, cells, organs, and bodies should function, replicate, and evolve. If one LLM can master the logic of English and computer programming, perhaps another could master the grammar of DNA—allowing scientists to synthesize biology in laboratories the same way you or I could produce synthetic paragraphs on our personal computers.To that end, this year researchers at the Arc Institute, Stanford University, and UC Berkeley created Evo, a new AI model trained on 2.7 million genomes from microbes and viruses. Evo acts as a master linguist, learning the rules of DNA across billions of years of evolution to predict functions, analyze mutations, and even design new genetic sequences.What could scientists do with generative AI for biology? Think about CRISPR technology. Scientists use a special protein to cut a cell’s DNA, like a pair of molecular scissors, allowing researchers to make basic edits to the snipped genome. This year, Evo scientists designed a wholly original protein, unknown in nature, that could perform a similar gene-editing task. As Patrick Hsu, the core investigator at Arc Institute and an assistant professor of bioengineering at UC Berkeley, said, just as tools like ChatGPT have “revolutionized how we work with text, audio, and video, these same creative capabilities can now be applied to life’s fundamental codes.”

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.This was the year of Dune: Part Two, of the highest-grossing stadium tour of all time, of Wicked and Deadpool & Wolverine, of Beyoncé’s country-music album, of new works of fiction and nonfiction that proved genuinely surprising, of standout television (even amid an overload of mediocre reboots). Below, our writers and editors offer their picks for the best culture of the year.Best of the Year Illustration by Joanne Joo The Atlantic 10: The Books That Made Us Think the Most This YearBy Ann Hulbert, Boris Kachka, and Jane Yong Kim Each of our 10 [picks] is a triumph of alchemy, deriving insight from fresh combinations of dismay and delight, tragedy and comedy, mourning and hope … The feature that distinguishes all of these titles—or any book worth cherishing—is the surprising experience of reading them. Illustration by Joanne Joo The 10 Best Movies of 2024By David Sims Hollywood seems to be shifting away from the superhero industry, following decades of reliable box-office domination, but the next trend has not yet emerged. I’m heartened, though, by the broad swath of genres and storytelling approaches of my favorite movies this year, made by a mix of rising filmmakers and established figures. Illustration by Joanne Joo The 13 Best TV Shows of 2024By Sophie Gilbert, Hannah Giorgis, and Shirley Li Whether they transported us to another century or dropped us in the middle of a high-stakes work environment, these are the series that kept our hope for TV’s creative future alive. Illustration by Joanne Joo The 10 Best Albums of 2024By Spencer Kornhaber Pop stars and punks alike are … saying exactly what they feel, exactly how they want to say it. Although my top picks span a variety of genres, many of them have a similar spewing quality. They play like glorious run-on sentences, full of oversharing and id. Joanne Joo The 20 Best Podcasts of 2024By Marnie Shure This list represents the 20 best podcasts I heard this year, with a lean toward either new shows, or shows that have a renewed focus. Virtually all of them, even the most entertaining and quirky ones, suggested an underlying preoccupation with the power of narrative to shape our sense of reality. Here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic: 77 facts that blew our minds in 2024 The most memorable advice of the year Radio Atlantic: The joy of reading books in high school Essay Illustration by Allie Sullberg No One Has to Settle for Bad Pizza AnymoreBy Saahil Desai In pizza heaven, it is always 950 degrees. The temperature required to make an authentic Neapolitan pizza is stupidly, unbelievably hot—more blast furnace than broiler. My backyard pizza oven can get all the way there in just 15 minutes. Crank it to the max, and the Ooni Koda will gurgle up blue flames that bounce off the top of the dome. In 60 seconds, raw dough inflates into pillowy crust, cheese dissolves into the sauce, and a few simple ingredients become a full-fledged pizza. Violinists have the Stradivarius. Sneakerheads have the Air Jordan 1. Pizza degenerates like me have the Ooni. I got my first one three years ago and have since been on a singular, pointless quest to make the best pie possible. Read the full article.More in Culture Two different ways of understanding fatherhood Six books to read by the fire The Atlantic’s favorite images of the year The 20 best podcasts of 2024 The darkest movie of the year Bob Dylan broke rules. A Complete Unknown follows them. Trapped—and lavishly rewarded—for playing a part The agony of indulging in Squid Game again When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Amy Stokes was just 20 years old.

Two men searching for Sasquatch, also known as Bigfoot, over Christmas week were found dead in the forest in the state of Washington after not coming home.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will undergo prostate removal surgery on Sunday amid multiple conflicts across the Middle East.

He also praised the grocery store chain as a “wonderful place to work.”

North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida are under warnings, with much of the east of the country facing severe storms.

Jalen Brunson scored 55 Saturday, but Precious Achiuwa was responsible for the most exciting play of the 136-132 overtime victory.

The Post’s Erich Richter makes his picks and predictions for Week 17 of the NFL season.

Choose between President Joe Biden dropping out of the 2024 race for the White House, Vice President Kamala Harris on Special Report with Bret Baier, and Donald Trump surprising McDonald’s customers at a drive-through.

New laws taking effect in the new year will affect Hollywood actors, social media stars, chatty motorists and more.

Jill and Marcy Clements have the perfect balance of independence and togetherness in their cohousing community.