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In London, an Ultra Low Emission Zone requires vehicles to meet strict emissions standards or else pay a daily fee for driving through that area. 

It’s an initiative that has reduced toxic air pollution levels and spurred drivers to adopt cleaner vehicles.

And now it’s even been linked to improved lung growth in the city’s children.

Before the Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ), London children had stunted lung growth, a 2018 study found. 

When exposed to air pollution, like the emissions from traffic, their lungs were smaller than they should have been—putting them at risk of asthma attacks, lung diseases, and even early death as they become adults.

But now, after five years of the ULEZ, those children’s lungs have improved, according to a major five-year study recently published in the Lancet Public Health journal. 

It’s a result that Chris Griffiths, a professor at Queen Mary University of London and University of Oxford as well as lead investigator on the study, calls “astonishing.”

Read more on Fast Company.

For some, One Direction is merely a British boy band that sang “What Makes You Beautiful” and introduced the world to Harry Styles. But for fanfic lovers in the mid-2010s, the band and its members were also their lovers, adoptive parents, and sometimes even their kidnappers.

These fantasies often unfolded on Wattpad, an online platform where writers can publish their work directly for readers looking for niche original stories that for decades has captivated a cult-like following for users looking to read steamy content that is otherwise unavailable in mainstream bookstores.

To put into context, Wattpad is a space where eyes are described as “blue orbs,” messy-bun wearing hipsters can be spotted at a crowded concert by the lead singer of a band, and young female readers can insert their own names into any world of their choosing—from Harry Potter, One direction, or even original worlds.

But a recent online rumor has put fans at odds with the platform, with users spotting popular fanfiction genres taken down on the platforms at the same time language in the platform’s guidelines shifted, claiming Wattpad banned explicit content or “smut.”

But while the rumor spread like wildfire online, in reality, guidelines didn’t actually change.

“We recently updated some of the language in our Content Guidelines to make our policies clearer and easier to understand, adding more specificity about what has always been allowed and not allowed on our platform,” Wattpad Spokesperson told Fast Company. “Our policies, content categories, and how we moderate have not changed.”

In a sense, stories taken down following the language change would have been in violation of guidelines before the change happened as well, with the timing being merely coincidental.

Still, the rumor reached enough users that the company had to clarify the situation via a blog post, saying “Wattpad has always been a place to tell stories that are steamy, complicated, romantic, weird, emotional, and everything in between. This isn’t changing.”

Read more on Fast Company.

The White House last week made some drastic changes to federal hacking policy, issuing a presidential memorandum that allows vetted private companies to initiate cyberattacks against hacker groups. The announcement reversed previous government policy, which prohibited companies from doing so without a court’s approval.

“American businesses’ innovative capabilities have historically been underutilized in efforts to identify and disrupt criminal networks operating in cyberspace,” the memorandum reads. “Thus, it is the policy of the United States to use all instruments of national power, including the innovative capabilities of the private sector, to combat cybercrime.”

Over the next two months, the government will fill in some of the blanks about the requirements companies will have to meet. But there are larger questions that aren’t likely to be addressed, including what legal protections these companies will receive. For instance, what happens if someone is arrested by a foreign government in connection with a cyberattack?

Read more on Fast Company.

Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is freezing her eggs. The New York congresswoman made the announcement recently in a series of posts to her Instagram Stories about what is driving the decision.

But while it’s becoming more common for women who aren’t ready to have children and who want to preserve the option for later in life, it’s definitely uncommon for a sitting congresswoman to open up about that choice.

Now the reveal has ignited a national conversation about fertility.

Ocasio-Cortez, known as AOC, began her series of posts by explaining why it’s important to her to be transparent about her journey. 

“I want to share this because I was weighing it for a very long time, and I was saving for it for a very long time . . . and it can feel very daunting,” she explained.

AOC added that women, whether young or old, often “aren’t taught” about their bodies, and therefore don’t know what to expect when changes come. 

Given women’s bodies are drastically understudied when compared to men’s, the argument makes a lot of sense. Doctors and scientists simply know a lot less about women’s bodies.

AOC, who is 36, may be attempting to do her part to change that.

Not only did she let the world know that she will be freezing her eggs, she’s actually documenting the entire thing on social media, from giving herself hormone injections while prepping for an on-air interview at ABC to getting her first ultrasound. 

Read more on Fast Company.

In early May, Emma Mannino received a direct message on Etsy from someone she didn’t know. The woman, who said she worked for the platform, explained that Mannino had an opportunity through Etsy’s creator codesign program to work with an unspecified “talent” on some designs. The offer was so vague that Mannino, an artist and entrepreneur, thought to herself, “Oh, this is spam.”

Mannino needed a gut check, so she called her mom, who is also an artist on Etsy. Mannino asked her, “Did you get this message from Etsy? Is this something everybody’s getting?”

When her mom said she didn’t, Mannino realized it might be a real opportunity. A few days later during a Zoom call, Mannino learned the talent in question was Olivia Rodrigo. The 23-year-old pop star—who was about to release her highly anticipated third album, you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love—wanted Mannino’s temporary tattoo brand, Saint Tattoos, to create a series of daisy-inspired designs. Immediately, Mannino knew this was “a huge deal” for her Fort Collins, Colorado-based business.

“It’s a sort of a niche market,” Mannino says of her hand-drawn temporary tattoos, which she started selling in 2021 and has since expanded into about 700 retail stores. “It’s still mind blowing that my shop was picked, out of the how many shops exist on Etsy?”

Rodrigo tapped 10 female founders with Etsy shops, including Mannino, to create a line of handmade merchandise in honor of her inaugural Daisy Chains Music Festival. The one-day event, which Rodrigo announced in June, will feature an all-female lineup, including Chappell Roan, Doechii, Katseye, and Rodrigo herself, performing in Irvine, California, this August. All proceeds are going to charities that Rodrigo says are “dedicated to advancing and advocating for women and girls.”

The festival is the spiritual heir to Lilith Fair, the all-female music festival founded by Sarah McLachlan, which toured between 1997 and 1999 before being revived in 2010. The connection is not lost on Rodrigo, who appeared in the 2025 documentary, Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery, which chronicles the festival’s history and impact.

Read more on Fast Company.

The amount of income needed to afford a typical American home is down slightly from last year—but it’s still well above what many households earn.

To purchase the median-priced U.S. home on the market in June, Americans would need an annual income of $109,796, down slightly from last year’s record high of $110,382, according to a new report from Redfin. The Seattle-based real estate site deems a home affordable if a buyer taking out a mortgage will spend 30% or less of their income on their monthly housing costs. 

The income required to afford a home is essentially unchanged from a year ago because monthly housing costs and incomes are increasing at a similar rate. But even though the income needed to afford a home has consistently dropped since October 2025, that doesn’t mean homes are affordable to the average American, notes Yingqi Xu, a senior economist with Redfin. 

“There’s still a double-digit gap between what the typical household earns and what they need to comfortably buy a home, leaving many prospective first-time buyers stalled on the sidelines,” Xu said in a statement. 

Read more on Fast Company.

When private equity bought the struggling hospital where Marilyn Anthony works, she says things quickly took a turn for the worse. One of the first things to go were the daily changes of patients’ bed linens, important for hygiene and cleanliness.

“They put big signs on the linen carts [saying] that we were to only change the linen every third day unless they were obviously soiled. How disgusting is that?” says Anthony, who has been a nurse at the hospital for nearly 25 years.

The formerly nonprofit Waterbury Hospital, which was acquired by a private equity-backed company in 2016, started cutting out specialist jobs, like nurses who focused on open-heart surgeries or nurses’ aids in the maternity ward. The on-site IT department was also eliminated.

“They started gutting us,” Anthony says. “We’d have nine nurses [on a shift], but only seven working computers.” At times, the hospital had only one functional elevator.

Along with resource cuts, Anthony says, hospital management abruptly shifted its focus. The staff was told to stop calling the people they cared for “patients”—“we were to call them ‘customers’ or ‘clients’ because they were ‘consumers’ of healthcare,” she says. “We were not in the business of healthcare any longer. We were definitely in the business of making money.”

The hospital’s owner, Prospect Medical Holdings, eventually drove Waterbury and two other hospitals in the Hartford area into bankruptcy—but not before the company and its majority owner, Los Angeles-based private equity firm Leonard Green & Partners, sold the real estate out from under the institutions and saddled the hospital chain with more than a billion dollars of debt.

Prospect and Leonard Green used the proceeds to pay themselves and other investors more than $600 million in dividends and fees, leaving the hospitals to try to pay back the loans on their own. (Prospect, which remains in bankruptcy proceedings, and Leonard Green, which sold its stake in the company in 2021, did not respond to requests for comment.)

Anthony thought her hospital’s experience with private equity was unique. But then she went to a legislative hearing in Hartford this spring and heard how widespread the problem is. Not just hospitals, but Hartford’s newspaper, special education schools, mobile home parks, nursing homes, and more have been bought by private equity firms, often resulting in fewer resources, worse service, and higher costs as the firms boost their returns by piling debt onto their acquired companies and stripping their purchases for parts.

Read more on Fast Company.

When private equity bought the struggling hospital where Marilyn Anthony works, she says things quickly took a turn for the worse. One of the first things to go were the daily changes of patients’ bed linens, important for hygiene and cleanliness.

“They put big signs on the linen carts [saying] that we were to only change the linen every third day unless they were obviously soiled. How disgusting is that?” says Anthony, who has been a nurse at the hospital for nearly 25 years.

The formerly nonprofit Waterbury Hospital, which was acquired by a private equity-backed company in 2016, started cutting out specialist jobs, like nurses who focused on open-heart surgeries or nurses’ aids in the maternity ward. The on-site IT department was also eliminated.

“They started gutting us,” Anthony says. “We’d have nine nurses [on a shift], but only seven working computers.” At times, the hospital had only one functional elevator.

Along with resource cuts, Anthony says, hospital management abruptly shifted its focus. The staff was told to stop calling the people they cared for “patients”—“we were to call them ‘customers’ or ‘clients’ because they were ‘consumers’ of healthcare,” she says. “We were not in the business of healthcare any longer. We were definitely in the business of making money.”

The hospital’s owner, Prospect Medical Holdings, eventually drove Waterbury and two other hospitals in the Hartford area into bankruptcy—but not before the company and its majority owner, Los Angeles-based private equity firm Leonard Green & Partners, sold the real estate out from under the institutions and saddled the hospital chain with more than a billion dollars of debt.

Prospect and Leonard Green used the proceeds to pay themselves and other investors more than $600 million in dividends and fees, leaving the hospitals to try to pay back the loans on their own. (Prospect, which remains in bankruptcy proceedings, and Leonard Green, which sold its stake in the company in 2021, did not respond to requests for comment.)

Anthony thought her hospital’s experience with private equity was unique. But then she went to a legislative hearing in Hartford this spring and heard how widespread the problem is. Not just hospitals, but Hartford’s newspaper, special education schools, mobile home parks, nursing homes, and more have been bought by private equity firms, often resulting in fewer resources, worse service, and higher costs as the firms boost their returns by piling debt onto their acquired companies and stripping their purchases for parts.

Read more on Fast Company.

Kyle Miller, the VP of product at Ancestry—the online genealogy company that also operates Newspapers.com and Find A Grave, among other sub-brands—has worked for the company for more than a decade. But it was just recently that AI tools were able to surface a mind-blowing connection to his past.

Miller and his wife were married in Provo, Utah, in a building that, when he was young, had burned down and since been replaced. He had seen the fire himself and, with his father, even watched the building burn. But what he didn’t know is that the original building was built by his great-grandfather—a fact that was surfaced by Ancestry’s AI insights and tools, which connected various family records and newspaper articles.

“Generative AI has been buzzy the last few years,” says Miller. “We’ve been doing things with AI for more than a decade. Our main focus is, how do we infuse AI into certain aspects of the platform? We focus on how we bring everything together and help deliver stories that people are seeking.”

In his case, it worked like a charm. “AI insights really brought it to life,” he says.

Ancestry’s adoption and incorporation of AI, over the course of many years, has found a way to pair its specialized human talent and capital with AI and modern tools. That’s a balance that some companies have struggled to strike, with many finding AI adoption and proliferation less clear cut than anticipated. For example, both Ford and Meta have rehired or reassigned hundreds of people to fix AI-related problems.

But for Ancestry, AI has proven exceptionally helpful as the company has found a combination of human-AI expertise that’s proved particularly potent—particularly in terms of digitizing old records, and finding overlooked connections among those records. And according to the company, it all begins with fostering a genuine human connection.

Read more on Fast Company.

When you think ChatGPT, do you think of lush forests, relaxing retreats, and community bonding? Probably not—but with its first-ever brand trip, OpenAI seemingly aimed to change that perception.

It didn’t work.

The trip saw a group of influencers stay in luxury cabins at Wildflower Farms, a resort in New York’s Hudson Valley. On OpenAI’s dime, the creators enjoyed fine dining and exciting excursions, and played around with the company’s newest tools, posting to their followers all the while.

“Officially letting my AI assistant do the work so I can enjoy more of all this goodness,” one attendee, business influencer Nat Lucy, captioned her post about the trip. 

Another creator, Sreya Halder, gushed about “the dreamiest weekend upstate” in a video showing off custom pajamas, a private patio, and a care package from OpenAI. In another, she highlighted some of the activities she and other attendees participated in, including creative AI-based challenges, panels on AI use, and—breaking from the AI theme—beekeeping. 

But what was a dream for the creators on the trip inspired a nightmare in their comments sections, as social media users called out the apparent hypocrisy of celebrating AI on a nature retreat.

Read more on Fast Company.

LinkedIn knows it has a slop problem. It has a button for that. 

The button, which debuted the week of July 27, allows users to flag content on LinkedIn that they believe may be “AI slop.” The option appears in a three-dot menu in the top right of any post, and shows a diamond with an exclamation point, followed by the phrase, “Seems like AI slop.” 

In a post to the platform on July 30, Hari Srinivasan, LinkedIn’s chief product officer, explained that the button will help LinkedIn “tune our models and make better feeds.” It’s just one part of the brand’s overall strategy to reduce AI slop or “generally low-quality content.” Essentially, LinkedIn is using an AI-versus-AI approach by training its own detection models to distinguish between content that contains original thinking and content that’s just regurgitating existing thinking. 

As AI-written content begins to take over social media, platforms like LinkedIn are faced with the challenge of bringing human ideas back to the surface. For several sites, that means baking AI detection and mediation features directly into the UX, allowing individual users to have some say in how AI content is handled.