Losing can be smart business in pro sports. “Tanking” teams in the NBA and NFL sometimes bottom out now to position themselves for a better future. Critics say that undermines the competition.

The NBA is looking at “new ways to combat tanking,” said ESPN. Multiple teams in recent years “either shut down players early or sat players for games” to give them a better shot at a higher draft pick. (Worse teams generally get higher picks and a better chance at the most talented new players.) The point of the proposals is to give middling or losing teams a “reason to continue to try to win games.” 

Sunday’s NFL game between the New York Giants and Las Vegas Raiders was labeled the “tank bowl” because the loser would have a clearer shot at the league’s No. 1 draft pick, said The Las Vegas Review-Journal. The Raiders sat out defensive end Maxx Crosby due to a supposed knee injury. But Crosby posted pictures of himself playing basketball. “Extremely conflicted” Raiders fans breathed a “sigh of relief” when their team lost. That did not sit well with players.

What did the commentators say?
“This is professional sports, and trying to win should be paramount,” said Eric Koreen at The Athletic. Instead, you see teams like the Washington Wizards and Utah Jazz “throw away seasons at a time” in the name of “long-term interests.” 

Anti-tanking rules will indeed make it more difficult for struggling teams to improve. But it seems likely that “fewer teams will be as far away from success” if they stop trying to lose now for the possibility of getting better later, said Koreen. 

One problem? American fans “want a somewhat level playing field” in their sports leagues, said Sam Quinn at CBS Sports. That’s why the major sports leagues try to achieve “parity” by assigning higher draft slots to worse teams. 

What next?
One solution is to make teams play a “one-game playoff” for the rights to their league’s No. 1 draft pick, said Jay Busbee at Yahoo Sports. The USFL football league did it in 2024 to create stakes between two teams with 1-8 records. 

This year was a mixed one in the fight against global warming. While some countries continued to make positive steps toward net zero, the return of President Donald Trump to the White House exacerbated an already fraying international climate consensus. But a series of scientific breakthroughs in 2025 holds out some hope for a greener future. 

Automated food waste upcycling 
AI-powered food waste management uses real-time data and predictive analytics to monitor, categorize and reduce food waste. Food scraps can effectively be upcycled into resources for “composting and biogas systems,” said The Sweaty Penguin environmental podcast. 

Published in the journal Frontiers, this technology can also support “nutrient cycling” by enabling food waste to be returned to soil systems, said the program. Automated waste sorting can also “separate food waste from plastic waste,” which reduces “plastics and organics going into landfills,” produces “quality compost for agriculture” and helps to “slash methane, CO2 and nitrous oxide emissions.” 

Gene variant protection of rice production
Chinese researchers led by plant geneticist Yibo Li of Huazhong Agricultural University have discovered a naturally occurring gene variant that can preserve both the yield and quality of rice from excessive heat. Rising temperatures are a “major and growing threat” to rice production, said Science. In a 2004 study, yields fell by 10% for every degree Celsius that average nighttime air temperature rose. 

The impact of this “major breakthrough” could “ultimately be even broader than rice,” said Argelia Lorence, a plant biochemist at Arkansas State University, to the journal Science. The same gene variant can be found in other cereals that are at a similar risk from heat. 

Sodium batteries for electric flight 
While still in the experimental stage, sodium batteries could eventually lead to electric-powered flight, which is more sustainable and much cheaper even than nonpetroleum aviation fuel. A new sodium-air fuel cell, designed by a team led by Yet-Ming Chiang, a professor of materials science and engineering at MIT, works by combining liquid sodium with oxygen drawn from the air in a continuous reaction. The device is “based on well-established electrochemical principles,” said The Times, but “unlike conventional batteries, which must be recharged, it’s designed to be refuelled, with its energy-rich material being replaced as it’s consumed.”

Fireworks light up the sky over Sydney Harbour Bridge as Australia welcomes 2026. Just before midnight, hundreds of thousands of people marked a minute’s silence to show solidarity with the Jewish community after the Bondi Beach terrorist attack on Dec. 14.
Saeed Khan / AFP / Getty Images

This year marked another big step forward for the gaming industry. With a slew of big releases in 2025 and the world of video games set to expand further in 2026, here are some of the most notable games released over the past 12 months.

Death Stranding 2: On the Beach
The first installment received positive reviews of its 2019 release, and six years later, the sequel garnered similar acclaim. Death Stranding 2: On the Beach (pictured above) shifts the setting from the U.S. to Australia, where players must learn to survive in a post-apocalyptic world. The game is “beautiful, horrific, nuanced and, crucially, a lot of fun,” said IGN. (PS5)

Ghost of Yotei
The free-roaming game allows players to don their katana again as a cunning warrior but also hide in the shadows for stealth gameplay. While generally considered not as good as Ghost of Tsushima, the first installment, Ghost of Yotei, “leans into its young protagonist’s thirst for bloody vengeance,” said The Guardian. (PS5)

Split Fiction
Set in a science fiction-fantasy world, Split Fiction is hardly the first multiplayer game, but it received rave reviews for how its cooperative elements blend seamlessly. Split Fiction is the “most fun I have had with a video game in years,” gaming contributor Erik Kain said at Forbes, calling it a game “bursting with creativity and endless fun that’s at once technically impressive and astonishingly clever at every turn.” (Xbox Series X, PS5, Nintendo Switch 2, Windows)