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In 2018, happiness among young adults in America fell to a record low. The share of adults ages 18 to 34 reporting that they were“very happy” in life fell to 25 percent—the lowest level that the General Social Survey, a key barometer of American social life, has ever recorded for that population.

Happiness fell most among young men—with only 22 percent of young men (and 28 percent of young women) reporting that they were “very happy” in 2018.

We wondered whether this trend was rooted in distinct shifts in young adults’ social ties—including what The Atlantic has called “the sex recession,” that is, a marked decline in sexual activity for this group in recent years.

According to the National Association of Theatre Owners, US movie attendance peaked in 2002 and has been steadily declining ever since. To compensate, theatres have rolled out new technologies such as 3D, Imax and premium large-format cinemas, raising their ticket prices and thus keeping the box office at record-breaking levels

The majority of us are increasingly staying home.

At Cannes this year, the studio with the most films in competition

The financial magazine has published its first ever list of top earners on the video platform, with the irrepressible Felix Kjellberg (better known as PewDiePie) heading the charts with pretax earnings of $12 million,

most of these individuals’ income comes from advertising such as sponsored videos and previews, although four of those on the list also have book deals, while a few even offer their own product lines.

“When the zeitgeist is moving, art usually goes hand-in-hand with it,” says Rossin, describing a world in which we’re constantly glued to our iPhones, Androids, laptops, and tablets as much if not more than we are to the faces of fellow humans. Mediums have historically risen from the predominant technology and social relations of the time in which they exist

“Because of the level of sensory overload we experience on a day-to-day basis, we need to have this fully arresting experience in virtual reality in order to get a total sense of vertigo from a work of art,”

Enveloping, consciousness-bending experiences aren’t “just to escape life,” says Rafman. “But to create a total experience that will create a feeling that is qualitatively new. That is ultimately the most radical thing.”

Netherlands first to establish nationwide Internet of Things network

Three initial projects give a sense of the scope and types of application that will make up the Internet of Things. At the port of Rotterdam, depth sounders have already been outfitted with sensors and network connections. An experiment at Utrecht will connect all railway switches so they can be monitored centrally. And at the Schiphol airport in Amsterdam, a major European hub busier than JFK and Miami International combined, tests with baggage handling are already underway. If you think of the number of pieces of luggage moving through the worlds sixth-busiest international airport you begin to get a sense of the scale of applications for IoT. If each piece of luggage has an IoT tag, nothing should be unaccounted for.

We increasingly live in a world where we don’t have to leave our homes, and when we do, we travel in isolation

It is in public space that we encounter a wide variety of people different from ourselves. Public spaces are important because they provide room to negotiate how we will live together in a highly populated environment. Encountering people of different races, classes, ages and abilities on a daily basis has the potential to cultivate a citizenry that is more tolerant of diversit

Streets are declining as a form of public space because street life often is perceived – and sometime is – unsafe: thus we frequently retreat indoors, making the streets even less safe

NEW EDUCATION MODELS

education will become an "on-demand service" where people "pull down a module of learning" when they need it.

"School kids will learn from short bite-sized modules, and gamification practices will be incorporated in schools

Today, Facebook Messenger has 800 million monthly active users – more than 100 times the number of iPhone owners when Apple launched the App Store. Messenger’s current active user base exceeds even the total number of iPhones ever sold. Messaging apps now have more active users than social networks.

If and when Facebook announces a Bot Store, it will mark the “end of the beginning” of a new era: messaging as a platform. Conversational user interfaces are about to change the way billions of users interact with the world around them.

Pavel Durov announced the expansion of the Telegram Bot Store and Ted Livingston staked out Kik’s claim to be the WeChat of the West. By the end of the year, Slack had announced the Slack App Directory, supported by an $80 million fund to fuel the growth of the ecosystem, and Google was rumored to be developing its own chatbots.

. Autonomous cars will be commonplace by 2025 and have a near monopoly by 2030

They will cause unprecedented job loss and a fundamental restructuring of our economy, solve large portions of our environmental problems, prevent tens of thousands of deaths per year, save millions of hours with increased productivity, and create entire new industries that we cannot even imagine from our current vantage point.

Morgan Stanley’s research shows that cars are driven just 4% of the time,5 which is an astonishing waste considering that the average cost of car ownership is nearly $9,000 per year.6

With huge-flat screen TVs becoming more affordable — and more original TV content being produced — cinemas have to step up their game to keep pace in the arms race with home theaters. That’s why theater chains are coming out with better food, reclining chairs, and more supersized screens like Imax to take full advantage of the special effects in many tentpole blockbusters.

The theater, which opens to the public Friday night, now has a lobby that’s part of the show (and soon, a camera-based audience data gathering tool to go with it), and a cinema equipped with the showpiece Barco Escape, which combines three screens in a U-shaped pattern that gives the viewer almost a cockpit-type perspective of the action.

“The Maze Runner” and its sequel, “Maze Runner: Scorch Trials,” were the first — and only — two films with scenes optimized for Barco Escape, but with dozens of Imax films coming out every year, there needs to be a much broader pipeline of content to compete with other large format

“Wait,” I asked, “so it’s supposed to delete my personal files from my internal hard drive without asking my permission?” “Yes,” she replied.

through the Apple Music subscription, which I had, Apple now deletes files from its users’ computers. When I signed up for Apple Music, iTunes evaluated my massive collection of Mp3s and WAV files, scanned Apple’s database for what it considered matches, then removed the original files from my internal hard drive. REMOVED them. Deleted. If Apple Music saw a file it didn’t recognize—which came up often, since I’m a freelance composer and have many music files that I created myself—it would then download it to Apple’s database, delete it from my hard drive, and serve it back to me when I wanted to listen, just like it would with my other music files it had deleted.

What Apple considers a “match” often isn’t. That rare, early version of Fountains of Wayne’s “I’ll Do The Driving,” labeled as such? Still had its same label, but was instead replaced by the later-released, more widely available version of the song. The piano demo of “Sister Jack” that I downloaded directly from Spoon’s website ten years ago? Replaced with the alternate, more common demo version of the song. What this means, then, is that Apple is engineering a future in which rare, or varying, mixes and versions of songs won’t exist unless Apple decides they do.

From staff-free ticket offices to students who can learn online, it seems there is no corner of economic life in which people are not being replaced by machines.

One of the reasons Google is investing so much is that whoever owns the communications system for driverless cars will own the 21st century's equivalent of the telephone network or money clearing system: this will be a licence to print money.

The only new jobs will be in the design and marketing of the cars, and in writing the computer software that will allow them to navigate their journeys, along with the apps for our mobile phones that will help us to use them better

Women are advancing in entrepreneurship as well. An American Express OPEN State of Women-Owned Businesses report found that between 1997 and 2011, the number of businesses in the U.S. increased by 34%, but the number of women-owned firms increased by 50%. That compares to a growth rate of just 25% for male-owned firms and has allowed businesses owned by females to reach 49% of U.S. firms — near parity with their male counterparts.

The Digital Age and Childcare Entrepreneurship in the digital age lends itself to childcare, a consideration that affects any discussion of women in the workforce. Young, single, urban woman are outearning their male counterparts; however, this trend reverses as workers age and start families. And even though many companies are replacing “maternity leave” with more gender-neutral “flex time,” it’s clear that working women will always be seeking that balance of career and family.

The digital age offers a wealth of low-risk opportunities. Ventures like blogging, web-based services, ecommerce and software development require smaller upstart costs than manufacturing-based, brick and mortar type businesses. Cloud-based tools and virtual workforces further lower the cost of entry, making the idea of starting a business more feasible and/or palatable for risk-averse entrepreneurs.

"Unlike Monopoly, the goal of Commonopoly is not the exhaustion, through monopolization, of a virtual stock of goods, but rather the expansion and preservation of a self-propelling sustainable system of recycling, production and distribution," the creators write.

Commonopoly, which has recently resurfaced in a couple of places online, demands that players brainstorm alternative economic systems through activities placed around the board.

Commonopoly also triggers another recent memory. In 2012, a team of psychologists from the University of California, Berkeley, designed several experiments to measure how wealth impacted unethical behavior.

Though characters like Woody and Buzz Lightyear are wonderfully realistic and lovable, the relationship that kids have with them is largely one-sided. Kids can hear these characters talk—not only through movies, but games, toys, and other movie merchandise—but they can’t engage them.

It was this idea that inspired Jacob to team up with his former Pixar colleague, Martin Reddy, and launch a new company, ToyTalk. The San Francisco-based outfit develops mobile games that let kids have conversations with animated characters—dialogues that can last for hours

Known as PullString, it’s equal parts speech recognition engine and script writing tool, and it’s quite a departure from other speech rec tools developed by the likes of Microsoft, Google, and Apple. It’s tailored specifically to kids, whose sentence structure, pitch, and vocal tone have posed challenges for traditional tools.

it will certainly transform our daily routines: imagine driving hands-free while having the luxury of reading a book, taking a nap, or guiltlessly texting on the road. At the same time, something far more interesting - and still unexplored - is the potential transformation of our cities themselves

blurring the distinction between private and public modes of transportation. "Your" car could give you a lift to work in the morning and then, rather than sitting idle in a parking lot, give a lift to someone else in your family - or, for that matter, to anyone else in your neighbourhood, social media circles, or city.

This implies a city in which everyone can travel on demand with just one-fifth of the number of cars in use today

Google is testing solar-powered drones at Spaceport America in New Mexico to explore ways to deliver high-speed internet from the air

Project SkyBender is using drones to experiment with millimetre-wave radio transmissions, one of the technologies that could underpin next generation 5G wireless internet access

High frequency millimetre waves can theoretically transmit gigabits of data every second, up to 40 times more than today’s 4G LTE systems. Google ultimately envisages thousands of high altitude “self-flying aircraft” delivering internet access around the world.

It’s part of an experiment to see if technology can help with the daunting and seemingly Sisyphean tasks of a first time parent, to find out why a growing number of people are turning to gadgets to help with one of life's toughest jobs.

Attempting to simplify parenthood with gizmos and apps has perversely made it a lot more complicated. And as for peace of mind, forget it.

The concept of the “quantified baby” has been around for some time now, and there’s a large and growing market for smart infant products from anxious or diligent or curious new parents.

Humanoid robots are now being introduced into nursing homes, and as therapists, for example. The new Hello Barbie toy will be a "friend" to children, holding conversations with young boys and girls. Robots are even getting married in Japan.

A perfect example of the backlash against human-like machines happened last Friday, when Adrian David Cheok and David Levy were forced to cancel their second annual Congress on Love and Sex with Robots, set to be held in Malaysia next month.

The case of the cancelled conference is just the beginning of the kind of obstacles intellectuals and researchers may encounter in the pursuit of academic study of humanoid robotics—an increasingly controversial field as the line between fantasy and reality gets blurred

Founded in California four years ago, Coursera has become one of the world's biggest providers of "massive, open, online courses" - known as Moocs. The online platform has 20 million students following courses from about 145 prestigious universities and institutions around the world.But most of the online courses have been short units that give students a certificate, rather than a full degree or credits towards a degree.

Coursera has announced a partnership with the US State Department to help refugees to access online courses to improve their job chances, such as English language lessons or computer coding.It would remove any costs from studying, such as fees for certificates showing the completion of courses.

EdX is offering a range of online courses from Arizona State University - and if a student passes eight of these, costing $200 (£150) each, it counts as the equivalent of a first year at university.