Hundreds of teens joined Boxing Day stampede after founder encouraged them to ‘rob’ his store

Toasted skin syndrome has gone viral on social media, as heating pad users reveal their discolored skin. Dermatologists discussed the cause and consequences of the condition.

Here's all you need to start a new fitness routine in 2025.

Over the past year, the writers on The Atlantic’s Science, Technology, and Health desk have investigated academic fraud, tracked infectious-disease outbreaks, studied the evolution of artificial intelligence, and chronicled extreme weather events. We’ve reported on the quirks of animal behavior and the latest in psychedelics research. Along the way, we stumbled across facts that surprised, sobered, and humbled us, and we wanted to share them with you. We hope they blow your mind too. Onions were used to treat wounds during the French and Indian War. The energy required to show a new Instagram post from Cristiano Ronaldo to each of his followers could power a house for several years. A group of butterflies flew across the Atlantic Ocean without stopping. It took them only about eight days. Children with cystic fibrosis are no longer automatically eligible for the Make-A-Wish Foundation because a new drug works so well that these kids are now expected to have an essentially normal lifespan. Your body carries literal pieces of your mom—and maybe your grandmother, siblings, aunts, and uncles. The generative-AI boom is on pace to cost more than the Apollo space missions. Early space capsules lacked handholds and footholds on the outside, and some spacewalking astronauts really struggled to make it back on board. Around the world, more than 10,000 barcodes are scanned every second. McDonald’s cooked its french fries in beef tallow until 1990. The fast-food giant also grills its beef patties for exactly 42 seconds. California grizzly bears are mostly vegan, but over time, humans have made them more carnivorous. A tick bite can make you allergic to mammalian meat—so much so that some ranchers are becoming allergic to their own cattle. When some people took a drug originally approved to treat asthma, their food allergies also started disappearing. Brains have a consistency not unlike tapioca pudding. The weight of giant pumpkins increased 20-fold in half a century. Kids don’t really need to eat vegetables. You can give rice a nutty flavor by growing cow cells inside the grains. Mushroom genes can make petunias glow. In the Middle Ages, people took their pet squirrels for walks and decked them out in flashy accessories. You can buy a fitness tracker for your pet. Humankind has basically reached the limit of airplane-overhead-bin space. Study-abroad accents might be real. Each clan of sperm whales uses its own set of clicking sounds to communicate. Some of these sounds may be older than Sanskrit. Subtitles from more than 53,000 movies and 85,000 TV-show episodes have been used to train generative AI. In 1998, Aaron Sorkin insisted to ABC executives that if he were forced to add a laugh track to his first-ever TV show, Sports Night, he’d “feel as if I’d put on an Armani tuxedo, tied my tie, snapped on my cufflinks, and the last thing I do before I leave the house is spray Cheez Whiz all over myself.” Sports Night still debuted with a laugh track. Comic Sans was originally designed for a program in which an animated dog taught people how to use their first personal computer. AI image generators have a penchant for rendering hot people. The total employees of the government’s free tax-preparation software, Direct File, are outnumbered by the lobbyists working for Intuit. Electric cars, with powerful acceleration and no fuel costs, might make the best police vehicles. Minivan sales in America have fallen about 80 percent from their all-time high in 2000. One breadfruit tree can feed a family of four for at least 50 years. Proteins can make pretty good sugar substitutes. Sylvester Graham, the inventor of the graham cracker, thought his crackers would curtail masturbation. In July, a cybersecurity company accidentally introduced a single software bug that canceled or delayed tens of thousands of flights and trains, halted surgeries, and blacked out television broadcasts around the world. Americans threw out four times as many small appliances in 2018 as they did in 1990. Luddites actually didn’t hate technology. When our writer ran his own dissertation through the plagiarism-detection software that was likely used to help bring down Harvard President Claudine Gay, it initially claimed that his work was 74 percent copied. The correct number was zero. Classical composers used dice to randomly compose songs. Male birth control could soon be as simple as rubbing a gel on the shoulders and upper arms daily. Humans could find alien life by detecting fluorescent corals on other planets. In April, a red Tesla Model S became the first electric car to travel 2 million kilometers. The car could have traveled from the Earth to the moon and back, twice, then circled the equator 11 times. Blocking the sun can lower how hot a person feels by 36 to 72 degrees Fahrenheit. Termites bury fellow colony members that have been dead for a while. Fresh corpses, they devour. In the 20th century, each day on Earth got longer by between 0.3 and 1.0 millisecond. That rate has been increasing since 2000, and could nearly double by 2100. The winds of a Category 5 hurricane are faster than the world’s fastest rollercoaster. In 1993, scientists dumped nearly 1,000 pounds of iron crystals into the Pacific Ocean to draw carbon dioxide out of the air. And in 2008, China used cloud seeding to clear the skies over Beijing ahead of the Olympics. In Goodyear, Arizona, a data center used for generative AI may guzzle as many as 56 million gallons of drinking water each year. Forty-two percent of MIT students now major in computer science. Air conditioners’ money-saver mode is a lie. By 2040, as few as 10 countries will have enough snow to host the Winter Olympics. Dogs may be entering a new wave of domestication. And the domestication they’ve already undergone may have led them to bark more. Elephants and parrots use namelike calls that identify them as individuals. Whales and bats might too. Sigmund Freud said he put his patients on the couch because he could not deal “with being stared at by other people for eight hours a day.” Our brains release dopamine in response to even the most rudimentary animations. A model of a human embryo made from stem cells secreted hormones that turned a pregnancy test positive. American men married to women are five times more likely to fully adopt their wife’s surname than to append it to their own with a hyphen. Bedbugs’ mating rituals may have supercharged their immune system. Lions on the East African savannas struggled to hunt zebras because of a single ant species. Wanting is different from liking. A “Christian conservative” mobile-phone-service provider has been operating in the U.S. for more than a decade. It pays T-Mobile for access to its cellular network. Before Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race, his campaign team maintained an account on Donald Trump’s Truth Social site. They used it to try to goad the Trump campaign into selecting a more extreme vice-presidential candidate. A slim majority of Republican voters now favor legalizing recreational marijuana. The hottest new psychedelic drugs might not cause any trip at all. Some scientists believe that multicellular life may have arisen thanks to enormous mountain ranges. BRCA mutations, famously linked to breast cancer, can also lead to cancer in the pancreas and prostate. A dentist found a hominin jawbone in a floor tile of his parents’ newly renovated house. Chewing gum became a baseball standby in part because Philip Wrigley, the heir to the Wrigley Company, gave it to players in the Chicago Cubs clubhouse after he took over ownership of the team in 1932. Sociologists have conducted several ethnographies on long-running pickup-basketball games. The 10,000-steps-a-day goal doesn’t originate from clinical science. Instead, it comes from a 1965 marketing campaign by a Japanese company that was selling pedometers. As the world warms, some dog mushers are running their teams at night so the animals don’t overheat. Extreme heat led schools to move recess indoors for millions of students in August and September. Higher amounts of naturally occurring lithium in tap water are associated with lower suicide rates in some countries. You can buy a $99 quantum water bottle “charged” with special healing frequencies. Humans have 10 times as many sweat glands as chimpanzees do. If you want to tame all that sweat, you should put your antiperspirant on at night.

This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.New Year’s might as well be called the Day of the Goal. In the coming weeks, conversations and social-media feeds will drift en masse to “What do you want to achieve in 2025?” But perhaps a better question is: “How are you spending your time now, and how do you want to be spending your time next year?”In 2019, my colleague Julie Beck spoke with Goodreads users who were imposing reading goals on themselves, often ones that proved hard to meet. She came into the conversations with a healthy dose of cynicism: “Why set yourself an unattainable goal? Why quantify your leisure reading at all?” I’m skeptical of these kinds of personal goals myself; can’t we simply trust ourselves to spend time on the things we care about? Of course, that’s easier said than done. Having a to-read list can encourage people to spend more time thinking about how much they’re reading and how much they want to be reading. Julie found in her reporting that reading goals are most useful if the person cares less about reaching a specific number and more about the increased reading they end up doing in the process. Ultimately, the point is to align your time, to the extent that you can, with the things that you find important.On GoalsIn Praise of Pointless GoalsBy Gloria LiuThese achievements aren’t about productive self-improvement. They’re designed to make the pursuit of joy a deliberate practice.Read the article.Are You Dreaming Too Big?By Arthur C. BrooksLifelong, hard-to-achieve goals might not make you happier. Small steps will.Read the article.The Adults Who Treat Reading Like HomeworkBy Julie BeckNo one’s making them try to read 100 books a year.Read the article.Still Curious? Overwhelmed? Just say “no.” The science of how to stop saying yes to everything—and be happier. Why success can feel so bitter: Achieving a goal and achieving happiness are two entirely different things, Arthur C. Brooks writes. Other Diversions Why Americans suddenly stopped hanging out The carry-on-baggage bubble is about to pop. Postpone your pleasures. P.S. Courtesy of Tish L. I recently asked readers to share a photo of something that sparks their sense of awe in the world. “A solitary soul on a beach in Portugal captures the frailty and wonder of life, and our humble place in it,” Tish L., 75, from Summerland, California, writes.I’ll continue to feature your responses in the coming weeks. If you’d like to share, reply to this email with a photo and a short description so we can share your wonder with fellow readers in a future edition of this newsletter or on our website. Please include your name (initials are okay), age, and location. By doing so, you agree that The Atlantic has permission to publish your photo and publicly attribute the response to you, including your first name and last initial, age, and/or location that you share with your submission.— Isabel

The Israeli military said it discovered and destroyed an underground tunnel system used by Hezbollah to hide weapons used to attack Israel in southern Lebanon.

Editor’s Note: Washington Week With The Atlantic is a partnership between NewsHour Productions, WETA, and The Atlantic airing every Friday on PBS stations nationwide. Check your local listings or watch full episodes here. Democrats have veered into identity politics and away from the interests of the working class. On Washington Week With The Atlantic, George Packer joins Jeffrey Goldberg to discuss his recent reporting on the Democratic Party’s illusions and the future of American politics.Donald Trump’s reelection should put an end to two progressive illusions, Packer explained last night: The first of these illusions is the notion that identity is political destiny; the second is the theory that the Democratic Party has been kept out of power by a white Republican minority thwarting the popular will through means such as voter suppression or gerrymandering.[George Packer: The End of Democratic Delusions]“The Democratic Party has become the party of establishment, of status quo, of the institutions,” Packer said. The party has come to organize itself under a framework that the “most basic identity of a citizen is group identity based on race, gender, sexuality.” But in doing so, they’ve “lost a large number of ordinary Americans who don’t see themselves primarily in those terms, who are mostly working-class … and who used to be the backbone of the Democratic Party.” Meanwhile, as with the drift of the working class away from Democrats and towards Republicans, the country’s increasingly isolationist global stance has also been building. “We are not the unipolar power that we were after the end of the Cold War,” Packer said. “We stood for a certain order, a certain set of values, a certain liberal view of the world, and I think that could collapse very quickly under Trump because he doesn’t believe in it—in fact, he wants to destroy it, and so do the people he’s putting into key positions.”Packer discusses this, as well as his reporting on conspiracism and hyper-partisanship in Phoenix, Arizona, the nation’s fastest-growing city, with the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg.Watch the full episode here.

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia told the Azerbaijani leader, Ilham Aliyev, in a phone call, “that the tragic incident took place in Russian airspace.”

The NYPD’s hot-headed Deputy Commissioner of Public Information Tarik Sheppard was demoted this week, police sources said.

Friday was one of the busiest travel days of the holiday season, the Transportation Security Administration says. The agency is preparing for a busy Monday, but the weather is complicating the travel crush for millions of flyers.

The Israel Defense Forces raided and burned a hospital in northern Gaza that the military says served as a Hamas terrorist stronghold. In Jerusalem, the IDF said it intercepted a missile that Houthi rebels had launched from Yemen after deadly strikes from Israel. The Houthis have vowed to escalate their attacks until Israel agrees to a ceasefire in Gaza.

Hanukah began on Christmas this year. A reflection on celebrating both holidays in a multi-faith family.

Each worker accumulated at least 1,851 hours in extra pay.

USC coach Lincoln Riley praised his players' resilience during a dramatic Las Vegas Bowl win, but it doesn't erase the Trojans' major issues.

Readers of the Los Angeles Times Sports section share their thoughts and opinions on Walker Buehler, the Lakers, Chip Kelly and the College Football Playoff.

A photo gallery of the stars lost in 2024.

The end of the year is a natural time to look back on the previous 12 months, and 2024 was one for the political record books.

A virtual private network (VPN) allows computer and smartphone users to mask an IP and create a secure, encrypted connection between a device and the internet.

Robbie Basho was a visionary guitarist who failed to find wide acclaim. A new set of lost recordings frames his music’s beauty as the result of tireless toil.

A new book details the life and rise of Chinese dissident Jimmy Lai.

For “Nickel Boys,” RaMell Ross asks his audience to inhabit the perspective of two Black teenagers at an abusive reform school — and share in the horrors they endure.

It's the end of December, and we're looking at the final mad dash to the end of the regular season.

When the Yankees are away, the Cornhuskers and Golden Eagles will play.

Survivors of the Azerbaijan Airlines plane that crashed in Kazakhstan on Christmas Day say they heard at least one loud bang before the aircraft crashed.

Olivia Hussey won a Golden Globe for best new actress for her part as Juliet in Franco Zeffirelli's 1968 adaptation of William Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet."

Across the front door, the goons scribbled the three words now synonymous with Mangione's name.

Leveraging their big-market status, the Dodgers continue to show their willingness to spend, taking on $45 million in new financial commitments for 2025.

Valerie Bertinelli is looking forward to starting fresh in the new year.

Just when you thought the road to the championship would be an easy one, the fantasy gods are here to pull the rug right out from under you.

"That’s all I’m legally allowed to say," he concluded.

Olivia Rodrigo nabs a furry prize at London’s Hyde Park Winter Wonderland carnival and more holiday cheer.

Ukraine said it had struck the site in Oryol Oblast where Shahed attack drones were being maintained and repaired.

In 2016, Bill Whitaker sat down with Denzel Washington to discuss his role as both director and lead actor in the film adaptation of August Wilson's "Fences," a performance which earned him an Oscar nomination.

Steve Hartman takes us on the road to meet a man who remains anonymous while bringing gifts and joy to people in need around the holidays. Plus, we go to a small South Dakota – with a population of two – where David Begnaud introduces us to a man who transforms the town into a Christmas destination each year. And, more heartwarming news stories.

A Florida woman described "hating" her $30,000 wedding as she felt "stressed" and "anxious." In contrast, she and her husband recently renewed their vows on a "beautiful day."

Ohio State's defense has been formidable all season and is eager to avenge its performance during a one-point loss to Oregon earlier this season.

Blame is simplistic. Might I suggest that there is another way to understand what happened with the president? A more humane way?

The aviation industry should get serious about direct air capture so that its emissions never reach the atmosphere.

Lauren Wood is a dive master and skydiver, unafraid of being outside her comfort zone, but even she was "panicking" that day.

Hollywood came relatively late to the culture wars. It wasn’t until 2016 — when all 20 Oscars acting nominations went to white performers for the second year in a row — that the Academy Awards began to take diversity seriously. By the following year, black actors received nods in every major acting category, a result...

The Huskies look to continue their winning ways over the slumping Tar Heels.

With this year coming to a close, here are six bold predictions for women’s college basketball that may or may not happen in 2025.

Choose between Taylor Swift's Eras Tour, Blockbuster hit Deadpool & Wolverine, or Sabrina Carpenter’s Short n’ Sweet Tour.

The request came as TikTok and the Biden Administration filed opposing briefs to the court.

Columnist David Marcus writes that Vivek Ramaswamy's criticism of the American worker, echoed by DOGE partner Elon Musk, started an internecine civil war in the GOP all for nothing.

While a Senate report has brought renewed attention to Havana Syndrome, many questions remain unanswered.

Only a small percentage of Republicans care about famous people sharing their opinions about politics, while the rest either don't care or disapprove, an AP/NORC poll showed.

If all the injuries weren’t bad enough, we have unintentionally cursed the rise of Jauan Jennings multiple times this year.

NY Post readers discuss President-elect Donald Trump’s interest in acquiring Greenland as US territory.