Mashable

If you haven't heard of the Magdalene Laundries, you need to watch The Woman in the Wall.

Led by Ruth Wilson and Daryl McCormack, the BBC's psychological horror/crime caper series was written by Calm with Horses' Joe Murtagh, with director Harry Wootliff at the helm. After critical praise in the UK, it's finally soon coming to streaming in the U.S. on Showtime.

Blending genres to move beyond historical drama, the series is set in a small town in West Ireland, where present day crimes connect with the dark secrets of the country's recent past — and especially the experiences of the survivors of the Magdalene (pronounced as "maudlin") institutions, including the Church's mother and baby homes (you can read more about them on Mashable.)

How to watch: The Woman in The Wall is now streaming on BBC iPlayer in the UK and will be streaming on Showtime in the U.S. from Jan. 19.

By the time 2024 dawned, looking at headlines had become a grimly emotive experience. War and conquest, death and famine: the four horsemen are all back and stalking Ukraine and the Holy Land like they never left. It's the apocalyptic reunion tour the planet never asked for, with a fifth horseman — disinformation — billed as the warm-up act.

But apart from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how do you like the play? Our entire human drama still has plenty of inspired, uplifting patches of light in it. Too much focus on daily headlines can obscure that. For example, you may not have heard anything good in the news on climate change lately: the COP28 summit was criticized as being "grossly insufficient" for the scale of this global crisis.

SEE ALSO: So, how hot will Earth get?

Ironically, though, focusing on one conference is like looking at the weather … not the climate. In 2024, cause for hope that we will limit the rate of our warming planet has never been more realistic. Here we present the reasons, plus many more positive trends kicking in as the year ticks over. Hopefully, they're all harbingers.

Four horsemen, meet the 24 horsemen.

1. Solar power is smashing all records.

It's official: the human race is hooked on clean, green, solar energy. The capacity of new installations in 2023 hit 413 GW by year's end, according to a preliminary Bloomberg analysis. To give you some idea of how big that is, last year's version of this story trumpeted the installation of 295 GW in 2022 — itself a 45 percent increase on 2021's total — and projected 319 GW for 2023.

Turns out we overshot. Installations grew by 58 percent, meaning that even the most optimistic industry analysts are scrambling to update their models. If this exponential growth of installed panels keeps going, we could double the entire solar capacity of the planet in 2024 alone. 

Featured Video For You Why aesthetics are the secret weapon we need to popularise solar energy

This is happening because the cost of solar power installation is plummeting. Polysilicon, the raw material that makes panels, is cheaper by 70 percent now than it was a year ago. In the U.S., a generous federal tax credit is slicing 30 percent off installation costs. Globally, some analysts are predicting the cost of new installations will drop to 10 cents for every watt of capacity this year — something that wasn't supposed to happen until 2030. 

2. China's carbon emissions should go into decline this year.

A good chunk of all that renewable power was being built where it can do the most good — in China, the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases. China built 300 GW of solar and wind power in 2023, far more than any other country; it committed to installing 1,200 GW by 2030 and looks set to hit the target by 2025 or earlier.

It had better, because the country also has more coal plants (and more plans to build coal plants) than any other. The breakneck rise of solar and wind is starting to make those plants look obsolete, however, and that could bring the country to a tipping point. The international Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) says current economic conditions "all but guarantee" a decline in carbon emissions in 2024 — and that if that happens, fossil fuel power in China will go into "structural decline" from which it will never recover. 

Again, that wasn't supposed to happen until 2030. Seeing a trend here? Despite the doom and gloom on climate change, we're about six years ahead of schedule on arresting one of its leading causes. 

3. Other big polluters are kicking the carbon habit too.

Overall, the planet is on course to see its first emissions drop, outside of the pandemic, in 2024. Whom else other than China should we thank? First, let's hear it for Australia, one of the world's top five exporters of coal, where rooftop solar is now providing more of the country's power than that nasty little fossil fuel. With luck, a little structural decline will set in over the whole industry: keep it in the ground, down under.

SEE ALSO: What if windows could generate solar power?

The EU was largely dependent on oil and gas from Russia until 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine. In 2023, Europe fought back against the fossil fuel-rich rogue state with massive investments in renewables and heat pumps. Now it's reaping the rewards: a decline in CO2 emissions of roughly 2 percent a year, soon to be accelerated by a steep reduction in the carbon credits available to EU polluters in 2024. 

4. Yes, Virginia, the U.S. is going green too.

The U.S. did a little better than Europe last year, in that carbon emissions dropped by three percent (again, driven by a drop in coal consumption). That's not where the U.S. government needs to be to meet its Paris climate agreement goals; we need more like six-percent-per-year drops to keep temperatures from climbing even further. But it is a decline that happened alongside economic growth — something we weren't sure could happen. And it too is accelerating (the drop was 2.5 percent in the first three quarters of the year). 

This is the year we should see the infrastructure funded by the Inflation Reduction Act, America's largest ever piece of climate legislation, start to make a dent in emissions numbers for the first time. Meanwhile, 12 states have now passed laws that require a transition to 100 percent clean electricity. In California, one of the worst emitters, two thirds of energy sold across the state in 2024 is set to be carbon-free. 

5. The U.S. oil industry just agreed to stop emitting its most harmful gas.

The general lack of progress at the COP28 climate summit in December may have eclipsed this news, but don't sleep on the fact that the Biden Administration just started cracking down on the most damaging greenhouse gas molecule, methane. The major players of the oil and natural gas industries have agreed to tough standards designed to slash emissions by 80 percent or 90 percent in the next six years, with annual international assessments beginning in ... 2024. 

6. EVs are taking off ...   

OK, so power generation is getting way cleaner in 2024. What about transportation, the second leading cause of CO2 emissions? Good news here too. Forget any misleading articles you might have read about electric vehicle sales slowing down; overall, globally, the number of EVs sold rose by 36 percent in 2023. 

Again, the U.S. is catching up nicely, with an EV sales bump of 50 percent last year. And in 2024, when more than 40 kinds of EV will be available in American dealerships for the first time, many of them qualifying for a generous federal tax credit, that growth shows no signs of stopping. 

China, meanwhile, looks likely to reach a tipping point this year where half of all cars sold will be electric (again, years ahead of schedule). That is in large part thanks to the success of BYD, a low-cost EV maker that is now outpacing Tesla. BYD's Seagull EV costs just $12,000, and the company is churning out so many — a record 200,000 in one year — that BYD is spreading its seagull gospel to the vast new car markets of India and Brazil sometime this year. 

7. … as are electric planes.  The Volocopter air taxi, seen here in Singapore, is ready for its grand Olympic debut. Credit: Ore Huiying/Getty Images

The global transition away from fossil fuels is happening in the heavens as well as on Earth. The Paris Olympics this July will showcase Volocopter, the world's first fully functioning electric air taxi service. Five "Vertiports" are under construction for the drone-like two-seater vehicles. It's not just an Olympic summer trend; some 1,900 flights are expected by years' end. Meanwhile, another European electric plane maker, Lilium, plans to challenge Volocopter's rotor-based system with a battery-powered jet design. 

8. Batteries are about to get exponentially better.

Two things that would supercharge both the EV and the electric plane markets: a major expansion in battery capacity, and a massive reduction in charging time. Luckily, one technology that marries both is on the way. 

Expect 2024 to be the year of the solid-state EV battery, a quantum leap ahead of regular old lithium-ion. Solid state boasts 40 percent more energy density, not to mention, ahem, a much reduced chance of catching fire. 

The race is on to deliver the first one to the EV market. Toyota is working on a solid-state battery with a range of 900 miles, almost double the current record, which would be enough to get you from New York to Chicago without stopping. Better yet, the company says, you can charge it up in just 10 minutes. One expert calls the Toyota prototype "the holy grail of battery vehicles."

Toyota's tentative release date is 2025, but that may be accelerated by news that Schaeffer, one of its suppliers, is showing off a solid-state battery of its own at CES 2024. Volkswagen and Mercedes are racing to release their own solid states. And as ever, there's a Silicon Valley upstart in the mix: QuantumScape, which just demonstrated a solid-state battery that can go from zero to 80 percent capacity in 15 minutes. 

Tesla isn't officially in this race yet – but as of 2024, Tesla's 15,000 supercharger stations are opening up to non-Tesla vehicles (in some cases via an adapter). That means Elon Musk's company will start inadvertently assisting its bigger-battery rivals. 

9. We've got all the raw materials we need for the clean energy transition. 

OK, but what about all the supposedly rare earth metals we need for all these EVs and batteries? We've got that figured out too. The prices of nickel, cobalt and lithium are plummeting as new extraction methods come online. We've got more than we need for current EV growth, and new reports say we can get to net zero without exhausting more than a third of the world's supply of these metals. So stop feeling guilty about that EV, and start thinking about what else the world can create with its coming surplus of solar electricity.

10. The U.S. economy is bouncing back.

Hey, remember that recession that almost every economic expert predicted would start before 2024? It's now viewed as unlikely, if not impossible. Stronger than expected holiday sales are raising estimates for the new year. Bloomberg now predicts GDP growth, not decline, of 2.8 percent in 2024. In our age of war and instability, when the global economy in general is feeling creaky, that's no mean feat.   

11. Inflation is actually under control, for now. 

The U.S. Federal Reserve has set a target of two percent inflation by the end of 2024. Most economists now agree we'll hit or even come in below that target. The Fed is so optimistic that it's signaling it will cut interest rates up to three times in 2024: good news for those of us with loans and mortgages. And, given the positive reaction of the stock market so far, good news for retirement plans too.

12. Salaries are rising in real terms.  

Good news also for those of us with wage packets: 2024 is set to be the first year since 2021 in which wages grow faster than inflation. In the middle of last year, economists thought it might take until the fourth quarter of 2024 for this tipping point to be reached; in fact, we arrived there when the economists were making their doom and gloom predictions. 

What did happen in January 2024, though, is that the minimum wage was raised in 20 states. A majority of the U.S. now offers a minimum wage higher than the $7.25 federal minimum wage (unchanged since 2009), while eight states will guarantee more than double the U.S. minimum. It isn't anywhere close to the social safety net we need, but again, here's proof we have more than enough cash sloshing around the system to reward its poorest workers while still growing the economy. 

13. The world's largest, longest Basic Income experiment is yielding results. Grace, seen here age 65, uses her Basic Income payment to buy food and medicine to treat her swollen leg. Credit: YASUYOSHI CHIBA/AFP via Getty Images

Speaking of social safety nets, remember Universal Basic Income? The idea of the government just giving a living wage to everyone, no matter what their means, instead of complex bureaucratic welfare payments? It was all the rage during the pandemic, and hey, it's not like automation became less of a threat to jobs in the past few years. Proponents point to small-scale experiments, which seem to show people spend their handouts wisely. 

SEE ALSO: Here's what you need to know about Universal Basic Income

But there's no experiment as large as the one run by GiveDirectly, a nonprofit that has been giving around $20 a month to 6,000 people in one Kenyan village since 2016, and will continue to do so until 2028. Researchers just released their first tentative results — and it turns out if you give people the money as a lump sum, rather than monthly, they don't waste it. They spend more money on starting small businesses, or educating themselves. Now can we start seeing UBI as an investment in people rather than a handout? 

14. We may be turning the tide on the obesity epidemic. 

Effective weight loss injections, as Ozempic and Wegovy appear to be, aren't just a matter of TikTok trends. For the two in five Americans who are clinically obese — a condition linked to a greater chance of dying from diabetes and cardiovascular disease among other things — a treatment that curbs your hunger could add many years to your life. Not to mention helping to unburden our overworked healthcare system.

In 2024, the weight loss treatment boom will ramp up significantly. Get ready for a third injection that sounds like a superhero/villain: Zepbound, from Eli Lily. We need to do a better job of improving access; making sure all insurance companies cover them is a good start. And we certainly need to be cautious about the side effects. But obesity is the second largest cause of preventable deaths in the world, after smoking. It kills nearly 3 million humans a year. If injections like these work, you can't put a price tag on saving that many lives. 

15. We've got a bunch of other diseases on the run. 

Three cheers for the malaria vaccine, our best shot in the war against a disease that kills more than 500,000 children every year. The World Health Organization started distributing one in Africa last year, and just approved another, cheaper version that is rolling out as you read this. 

And that's just one of dozens of public health success stories breaking out around the planet. Polio (yes, it's still a thing) is one step closer to total eradication now that even the Taliban has joined the fight against it in Afghanistan. Tuberculosis, still the planet's deadliest infection, is on borrowed time thanks to a new vaccine and a new cheap generic drug. AIDS infections have fallen to levels not seen since the 1980s. 

And then there's CRISPR, the gene editing tool that is currently in its first year of treating sickle cell disease, but setting its sights much higher. Its inventor now hopes to cure asthma via subtle changes to bacteria in your gut.  

16. Extreme poverty is on the way out again.

As we noted in 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic put an end to decades of progress on extreme poverty (which the World Bank now defines as living on less than $2.15 a day). We're still not on track to meet the U.N.'s sustainable development goal, that of eradicating extreme poverty by 2030. But the economy did start trending in the right direction again in 2023, with India and most countries in southeast Asia pulling their poorest out of the tailspin. 

If you want a shot of hope in 2024, go look at the World Poverty Clock website. At time of writing this visualization tool a net 7,000 stick figures running away from the $2.15 line every day — and gives the total number of extreme poor people in the world at under 630 million, or more than 80 million less than at the most depressing moment of 2020. 

17. Two words: Fewer. Plastics.

Good news for those of us who groan at the thought of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch: it, along with all the collections of debris in our ocean, is smaller than we thought. A major study last year estimated that half a million metric tons of plastic ends up in our seas every year – which isn't great, but it's also 7.5 million tons below the previous estimate. 

More importantly, the war on plastic waste is gearing up. A hundred countries now ban plastics in some form. The EU just banned export of plastic waste, forcing its members to deal with the problem themselves instead of farming it out to poorer countries. 

SEE ALSO: Why are we sending a plastic-eating enzyme to space?

By June 2024, the EU is also required to finish what's known as the Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation. Despite a name only a bureaucrat could love, this is the world's biggest attempt yet to crack down on microplastics leaking into the environment, and it's shaping up to be a doozy. Some kinds of packaging will just be outright banned. All packaging must contain recycled material by 2030, and be recycled "at scale" by 2035. Your move, U.S. and China.

18. The Amazon rainforest is less threatened.

The world's lungs started 2024 ... well, not quite breathing easier, but close. Under Brazil's new eco-minded president Lula, deforestation in the Amazon is at the lowest level it's been in five years; under his predecessor, it was at its highest level in 15 years. Lula just announced a $204 million reforestation fund, and aims to end all illegal burns by 2030. We'll get a better look at the situation on the ground across the Amazon this summer, when Brazil's space agency releases a full report based on satellite data. 

18. More lands and waters are being preserved and restored ... The Maya Biosphere Reserve in Guatemala, where local communities are fighting off ranchers Credit: JOHAN ORDONEZ/AFP via Getty Images

It isn't just the Amazon. We're preserving forests all over the world (like Alaska's newly protected Tongass National Forest) and creating new ones – as in Africa, where reforestation efforts have created a stunning 400,000 square kilometers of new growth; just this year, Mali is aiming to fill 40,000 square kilometers more. 

Same goes for our waterways. Some 44 countries just joined in a massive effort called the Freshwater Challenge, which aims to restore 300,000 square km of rivers by 2030 along with 350 million hectares of wetlands. 

And in February 2024, the EU (yeah, them again) will finally rubber-stamp a historic, ambitious Nature Restoration Law, after two years of wrangling. Member states agreed to restore 30 percent of listed habitats to "good condition" (defined by neutral inspections) by 2030, then 60 percent by 2040, and 90 percent by 2050. Better get cracking. 

19. … as are more species. 

Though over 1,500 endangered or threatened species remain on the Fish and Wildlife Service's list, it's worth perusing the formerly endangered species that have recently joined the recovery list thanks to painstaking conservation efforts. Try to think of a more iconic bunch. There's the African lion and elephant, the American bison and Bald eagle, the blue whale and the humpback whale, the monarch butterfly, the mountain gorilla, the grey wolf, the sea otter, the snow leopard. No word yet on whether the conservationists and their ever-improving tech can actually get a species of phoenix to rise from flames, but no doubt they'll give it a go once they've saved all the others. 

20. Crime keeps coming down … as more prisoners go free.

The U.S. started its new year safer than it has been this century, even if it didn't feel that way. Murder was down by roughly 13 percent in 2023, according to preliminary figures, which will if confirmed be one of the largest one-year drops ever. Violent crime and property crime are both down to 1960s levels. 

Oh, and look what else is happening: the prison population is in a long slow decline since 2011. It's almost like the prison-industrial complex wasn't keeping us safe in the first place! The prisons may empty a little more once thousands of people convicted for using cannabis on federal lands apply for their pardons, as the Biden Administration announced in December. 

21. AI is actually being useful.

If 2023 was all about AI hype and AI-generated content of varying usefulness and controversy, then 2024 may be the year the unseen algorithms settle down and start finding new useful – if slightly more pedestrian – things to do. 

SEE ALSO: 5 ways AI changed the internet in 2023

One great example is Google's Project Green Light, unveiled in Jan. 2024. The company is working with cities around the world, using its AI to … time traffic lights for more effective traffic flow. According to Google, that could reduce overall levels of stop-and-go traffic by 30 percent — which should be one small step for the environment, and one giant chill pill for road rage.

22. Abortion rights are winning everywhere.

You probably noticed the political ground shift after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. Reproductive rights are winning election after election, and abortion is officially now protected or expanded in 17 states. Petitions for further ballot measures are now out there in 11 states, so the 2024 election situation is wide open. Campaigners can be buoyed by the recent victory in Mexico, where a more enlightened Supreme Court recently declared – unanimously! – that penalizing any woman, pregnant person, or health worker over abortion is unconstitutional. 

23. LGBTQ rights are winning (mostly) everywhere.

It can be easy to miss the ongoing patchwork success of expanding legalized marriage. But if you wanted to book a same-sex wedding in Bulgaria, Estonia, Peru, Hong Kong, Romania or Thailand, well, 2024 is the first full calendar year in which you can. Look for the ground to shift further and wider this year, now that Pope Francis has given his blessing to priests blessing same-sex couples — a godsend for marriage rights activists in many Catholic countries. 

Meanwhile, transgender rights legislation has recently succeeded in Germany, Spain and Finland. And even if 2023 was also a banner year for anti-trans legislation in the U.S., there are several pro-trans initiatives on the ballot in several states in 2024. 

24. The largest experiment in democracy is about to begin.

Thanks to the collision of several electoral calendars, the sheer number of human beings heading to the polls in 2024 will very likely make it the most democratic (if not necessarily Democratic) year in history. It's not just the U.S., it's also the UK, the European Union, India, South Africa, Mexico, and Taiwan. (Let's not insult anyone's intelligence by including the Russian presidential elections, though millions will be heading to the Putin polls there too.) 

It's also shaping up to be the most consequential year of ballots in history. The result in Taiwan, where pro- and anti-China parties are squaring off, could hasten a long-feared invasion that might lead to a U.S.-China war. Modi may consolidate his Hindu nationalist grip on India, and then go head to head with a new Pakistani president. The UK's Conservative party may be annihilated for a generation, if the last year of polls are to be believed.

And apparently the U.S. election might end democracy in America, or save it for another generation, or something like that? 

All of which might not be the lightest note to end on, but here's what we need to remember: none of these elections are foregone conclusions. This is absolutely all in the balance. No outcome is set in stone. Everything depends … well, on you, dear readers with votes. We hope you are more encouraged to use them now. Because if there's one thing 2024 and this list has proved so far, it's that there is most definitely a chance in hell. 

The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) filed a complaint against SpaceX on Wednesday, accusing it of unfair labour practices and unlawful dismissal. Now, SpaceX has responded — by filing a lawsuit claiming that NLRB's entire structure violates the Constitution. 

The Elon Musk-owned company sued the NLRB in a Texas federal court on Thursday, arguing that the government agency is unconstitutional because the U.S. President does not have a "constitutionally required degree of control" over its administrative law judges (ALJs). 

SEE ALSO: SpaceX charged with unlawfully firing employees critical of Elon Musk

Specifically, SpaceX claims that the President should be able to remove the NLRB's judges without cause because the Constitution requires that the President use executive power to "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed." In SpaceX's apparent view, this responsibility should include more complete control over who is executing said laws.

"[T]he ALJs are removable only for cause, by officials who themselves are removable only for cause," read SpaceX's complaint. 

SpaceX also argues that the NLRB violates the separation of powers by serving simultaneously as prosecutor and adjudicator, exercising legislative, executive, and judicial powers in its administrative proceedings. Further, the company claims that adjudication by the NLRB's administrative law judges violates its Seventh Amendment right to a trial by jury.

"Even after acting as prosecutor by charging SpaceX with violations of federal labor law before an Article III tribunal, the same NLRB Members would then issue the agency's ultimate order on whether SpaceX has violated federal labor law," the complaint read.

SEE ALSO: Lawsuit against major social media companies moves forward

If the unlawful dismissal case against SpaceX goes ahead, it would first be heard by a NLRB administrative judge, then a five-member board appointed by the President. This decision wouldn't necessarily be final though, with the respondent still able to appeal in federal court. 

Even so, SpaceX is clearly disinterested in letting it get that far. The company has requested that the court stop the NLRB from proceeding with the charges, as well as declare NLRB's structure unconstitutional and permanently prevent it from bringing unfair labour practice charges against SpaceX until this is rectified.

Mashable has reached out to SpaceX for comment. The NLRB declined to comment. 

Notably, SpaceX did not provide any further response to NLRB's specific allegations that the company violated the National Labor Relations Act. SpaceX has been accused of unlawfully firing employees who criticised CEO Musk, as well as interrogating, intimidating, coercing, and implicitly threatening others. 

One would think that directly addressing such allegations would be easier than attempting to undermine an 88-year-old government agency. However, considering that the NLRB didn't find SpaceX's defence compelling enough to dissuade it from filing charges, the company may not have much faith in its ability to win with more conventional arguments.

As the saying goes, you can’t improve what you don’t measure. In the decade that I’ve been working out, trying new diets, tweaking macros, and experimenting with new weight lifting plans I’ve come to learn that tracking progress is key to moving forward in your fitness journey. That’s where a fitness tracker comes in. Ideally, a fitness tracker is a set it and forget it situation: You slap it on your wrist, and it quietly records helpful biometric data in order to translate it into easy to read information when you’re ready. 

That’s where the Fitbit Inspire 3 comes in. It sits easily on the wrist, and compared to other wearables it’s relatively small. The watch counts steps, tracks heart rate, and measures calories burned, among other metrics, and, in combination with Fitbit app, converts all that information into data you can use to inform your workouts. 

SEE ALSO: 10 of the best fitness trackers for monitoring heart rate

The Fitbit Inspire 3 fit seamlessly into my existing workout routine, and seeing some analytics even pushed me to work harder in some cases. Some features, like hourly reminders to get up and get some steps in, felt a bit extra — particularly on days I knew I’d be going to the gym in just a few hours — but could certainly be helpful for someone hoping to more regularly include low impact activities, or for someone hoping to make fitness more of a routine. 

What features are included?

As a fitness band, the Fitbit Inspire 3 offers a surprisingly large amount of features and apps. First and foremost, it’s a pedometer; it counts your steps, and logs the miles you’ve walked or run. It also has a heart rate monitor which keeps track of your pulse, and in turn the calories you’ve burned in a day. It also tracks your sleep cycles, as you shift between light, deep, and REM sleep throughout the night. 

The Fitbit Inspire 3 has a slim profile but is packed full of features. Credit: Sam Stone / Mashable

It can automatically categorize your activity — it senses when you’re on a bike ride versus when you’re on a run for instance — and records your blood oxygen level, too. There are options to log stress levels, complete mindfulness sessions or guided workouts, and log menstrual cycles. It tracks your breathing rate, skin temperature, and heart rate variability. You can log the foods you’ve eaten to track calories, and log your weight in. It vibrates on your wrist when your phone receives texts or calls, and to top it all off the thing is waterproof up to 50 meters. 

After a few days of calibration, it really feels like the Fitbit Inspire 3 tracks nearly every major metric of your fitness — and that’s a good thing. I found that these functions were genuinely helpful in feeling better, and getting more out of my workouts. Sleep analysis can help you figure out which factors are preventing you from waking up refreshed (for me it was phone time before bed), and features like the Readiness Score, available with the app’s premium subscription for $10 per month, can help you know when to focus on recovery or get in a hard workout. 

Most functions work perfectly

From the moment I put it on my wrist, the Fitbit Inspire 3 seamlessly became a part of my fitness routine. I especially appreciate that it automatically recognized the activity I was doing, and after a particularly hard workout it was kind of vindicating to check out how high my heart rate had been.

I found the watch’s left/right swiping and up/down scrolling incredibly intuitive, and, although the app has a lot of different menus and screens to display the myriad data the Fitbit has collected, I’d mastered it by the third time I opened it. 

Almost every feature worked flawlessly. That being said, during my testing, as I went from long runs, to hard cross training, to leisurely bike rides I found a few small flaws that are worth mentioning. Most notably, the heart rate monitor becomes inaccurate, recording a lower heart rate, during intensely sweaty workouts. Sweaty wrists mean that the sensor can’t work correctly, and records the wrong heart rate. I noticed this only once or twice during particularly long and hard workouts, and I wouldn’t call it major flaw.

I also found that the Smart Wake feature, which purports to wake you up with vibration when you’re at the lightest phase in your sleep, didn’t work as advertised. I’d hoped to wake up feeling refreshed and ready for the day, but I woke up groggy every time. Sleep metrics from any fitness tracker may not be exactly accurate, though, and I didn’t mind skipping over this feature. 

SEE ALSO: Tempur-Pedic’s smart bed frame taught me I’m bad at sleeping There are some small downsides

There are, however, a few issues that are worth knowing about before buying. Namely: notifications. There are a lot of them. For the most part, they’re customizable, but I found it annoying to find the right screen in order to switch them off again and again. I didn’t love getting a buzz on my wrist urging me to get up and take 250 steps every hour while I was focusing on work. I was not crazy about getting a buzz on my wrist in the midst of a workout to tell me that I was logging Active Minutes — Fitbit's metric for minutes with an elevated heart rate. I straight up didn’t care to know that I’d met my daily calorie goal. 

The battery life, too, was a bit less than advertised. The tracker is supposed to have 10 days of battery life (dependent on use, as the Fitbit website reads), but I found it to be closer to six or seven days, instead. Since it’s charging time is just less than two hours, I definitely did not mind throwing it on the charger for a while every week. And it sure beats the Apple Watch's battery life.

Is the Fitbit Inspire 3 worth the price?

This fitness tracker has an impressive amount of features, apps, and customizations available. Sure, there are one or two kinks that could be worked out, but overall it’s an incredible device that is super helpful for someone hoping to get into a fitness routine, or push themselves that much further at the gym. This Fitbit model is priced just under a hundred dollars, and with the monthly $10 charge for premium features, still feels like an absolute steal. For anyone new to fitness or any dedicated gym rat, the Fitbit Inspire 3 gets you more than you pay for.

The iPhone 15 Pro was missing something major from its Pro Max counterpart. It sounds like the iPhone 16 Pro won't have the same problem.

According to a new report from reliable Apple tipster Ming-Chi Kuo, the iPhone 16 Pro might get two fairly major camera upgrades when it launches this fall that could make the iPhone 15 Pro's camera look worse by comparison. First up is a tetraprism lens, which the iPhone 15 Pro Max used to produce excellent optical zoom photos that the iPhone 15 Pro couldn't match. The second is a 48MP ultra-wide lens, a big boost from the 12MP ultra-wide lens on the iPhone 15 Pro.

SEE ALSO: 3 Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra leaked features that beat iPhone 15 Pro Max

Kuo's reporting on the tetraprism lens matches previous reporting from the likes of MacRumors. The iPhone 15 Pro couldn't have a tetraprism lens due to size constraints, so Apple is reportedly bumping up the display size on the iPhone 16 Pro from 6.1-inches to 6.3-inches. The bigger size should allow for better camera tech inside the iPhone 16 Pro, but as always, we'll have to wait until the fall to find out.

As for the new 48MP ultra-wide lens, Kuo noted that the camera will still shoot photos in a 12MP format. However, photos taken with that lens should look better than they did on the iPhone 15 Pro.

Only eight more months until we find out whether all of this is real.

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Garth Davis' dystopian sci-fi, Foe, has been getting some lukewarm reviews. But there's one surefire element of the film, based on Iain Reid's 2018 novel, that actually deserves its moment in the burning, burning sun — and it's not necessarily the beautiful people feeling all the feelings within it. 

It's the way the world as we've known it is actually ending, often incrementally but surely. And you'd better believe it's all thanks to climate change.

How is the world ending in Foe?

Set in the year 2065, Foe is a work of speculative fiction that presents an Earth that has become almost but not entirely inhospitable, when fresh water and inhabitable land are scarce. They're not human rights but instead the most important capital a human being can own. It's Mad Max without the steampunk or gang violence.

Reid's novel keeps specifics of the apocalypse off the page, but the film, which Reid and Davis co-wrote, gives details at the top. In this version of America, the government's Federal Climate Alert System has become useless. Human displacement sits at the centre of the global climate crisis, with nations uprooted by extreme weather events. Air quality has declined and respiratory conditions have risen. People are encouraged to stay indoors to avoid the extreme heat. Folks live off-grid if they can, using solar panels and reusing their waste water, but it's all a little too late. At the core of the narrative, humanoid AI robot substitutes have replaced human labour in many industries.

SEE ALSO: 'Foe' review: Saoirse Ronan and Paul Mescal can't save this empty sci-fi mess

Quietly surviving on a barren, isolated Midwest property is married couple Hen and Junior, played by Saoirse Ronan and Paul Mescal. In this future, inhabitable land is mainly owned by companies or governments and used for farming; as for the rest, inheritance rules, as Junior's property is fifth generation-owned. Above the dusty, cracked earth of the property, extreme weather events from intense dust storms to extreme heat are an everyday occurrence. Only one tree survives on the land, kept alive by the couple's waste water. In fact, water is such a precious commodity that we regularly see Junior and Hen drinking cans of beer instead of water first thing in the morning — perhaps beyond mild hydration, beer doesn't hurt for dealing with the end of the world, either. Though for someone trying to conserve water, Hen sure has some lengthy shower cries.

Credit: Amazon Studios

Foe shows the end of the world in an isolated, domestic silence for two people, but it's also not quite ended. At every turn, it seems people are still working hard to keep surviving the harsh conditions. However, Junior and Hen's quiet, rural life changes with the arrival of a man called Terrance (Aaron Pierre), who works for a government-backed company called OuterMore, wielding a plan to evacuate the planet — but notably slowly.

Plans to move people off-planet to a colossal space station near Earth are well underway, moving away from a "climate migration strategy" to simply getting the hell out of here. Terrance mentions that the moon, Mars, and other planets were possibilities built for the "first wave of temporary settlement", but due to their distance from Earth and the time it will take to go back and forth to build a new colony there, OuterMore has instead built an enormous planet of its own near Earth and readies humans for permanent relocation to space through years of training.

Credit: Amazon Studios

People are chosen randomly through a lottery to participate in the first phase of the space program, known as The Installation, a two-year placement on the station to test its readiness for a whole planet to live on — but Terrance notes Junior's physical strength as a positive attribute for it. Notably, the program isn't optional for those chosen, instead functioning as a form of "fortunate conscription". Through discussions of this station around Junior and Hen's dining room table, Foe lightly takes aim at the billionaire space race and billion-dollar plans to terraform other planets like Mars. "Why should you be spending money up there when you should be fixing things down here?" Hen asks.

Hollywood disaster films love to cut to the chase.

By no means is Foe the only film to predict the end of the world through climate change and eventual human relocation to space — even in recent years, we've seen the likes of 2016 sci-fi Passengers sharing similar scenarios. But it's something films have only started to really hammer home within the last few decades, with a notable rise in the 2000s. Though scientists had been warning of the coming threat for frustrating decades, and weather disaster films had long rampaged through cinemas, filmmakers finally seemed to harness these legitimate fears in the 2000s and 2010s, punishing earthlings' blatant disregard for the planet with brutal, extreme weather-driven consequences in films like The Day After Tomorrow, Geostorm, 2012, and the Keanu Reeves remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still. 

Not simply allowing viruses and sentient machines to destroy the world as we know it, rising sea levels caused by a warming planet finally got their moment in the 2000s, notably with Steven Spielberg’s 2001 film A.I. Artificial Intelligence — also aligned with Foe in terms of AI human replacements and self-aware robots in the coming apocalypse. In the film, set in the 22nd century, melting Arctic ice causes catastrophic flooding in coastal cities, meaning widespread human displacement, starvation, and death. New York is underwater. The global population plummets and humanoid robots step in for both human labour and companionship because they're "never hungry and ... did not consume resources beyond those of their first manufacture." 

In the book Hollywood Wants to Kill You, Rick Edwards and Dr. Michael Brooks write of Hollywood's tendency to speed things up when it comes to planetary death by climate change, to get to the dramatically perilous stuff overnight instead of showing how it happens and how we could have stopped it gradually. The authors particularly skewer the films Geostorm and The Day After Tomorrow, which predict an overnight climate overhaul, a catastrophic tipping point that sees the planet plunged into every kind of extreme weather Hollywood can conjure at once.

"It turns out that governments, both Hollywood-imagined and real-life, aren't really interested in long-term gains that involve short-term pain," Edwards and Brooks write. The film 2012 also does this, cutting straight to the chase, but at least the movie consistently reiterates that scientists and world leaders have known what's coming for years.

But one of the most realistic parts of the potential end of the world in Foe is not that we'll all inevitably shack up with a smokin' partner with an endless supply of PBRs. It's that some things will happen slowly, the decline of the planet's habitable spaces slowly increasing as CO2 levels skyrocket, climate science misinformation continues, and government inaction prevails. (Some impacts, like amplified Western U.S. wildfires and increased flooding, are happening rapidly.)

Foe isn't a perfect representation of a future Earth, notably being the experience of two sad yet socioeconomically advantaged white people, citizens who by no means are on the frontline of the climate crisis. And notably, climate doomism itself gets us nowhere — we're not completely up the bone dry creek yet. Despite how things appear, we haven't passed a point of no return, and earthlings still have the power to either exacerbate the planet's problems or seal them in stone.

Instead, Foe is a cautionary tale, a hypothetical endgame. One that's slow but sure, and without action on climate change, could very well be what the end of the Earth looks like.

How to watch: Foe is now streaming on Prime Video.

By all appearances, Foe is a beautiful movie. Beautiful people — Saoirse Ronan, Paul Mescal, and Aaron Pierre — explore beautiful landscapes, talking about beautiful human emotions like love and loss.

Yet all these aesthetic pleasures can't cover up the vapid emptiness at Foe's core. There is indeed some attempt at substance here, but it's buried under layers of nonsensical storytelling and clumsy dialogue. Not even its prestigious stars can sell it.

SEE ALSO: 'The Creator' review: A stunning reminder we need more original sci-fi What's Foe about? Saoirse Ronan in "Foe." Credit: Amazon Studios

Ronan and Mescal play Hen and Junior, a married couple living through the climate crisis. The year is 2065, and water and habitable land are scarce. Humans have begun moving to space stations to preserve the species, but Hen and Junior remain on Earth, living in Junior's family's old farmhouse in the Midwest.

Director Garth Davis, who co-wrote Foe's screenplay with the original novel's author Iain Reid, finds beauty in the apocalyptic. Gorgeous desert landscapes and pink salt flats make up Hen and Junior's isolated world, while billowing clouds of smoke in the distance suggest encroaching danger. These quiet vistas are about as subtle as Foe gets — emphasis on quiet, because it's when the movie really gets talking that it starts to lose you.

That talking begins in earnest with the arrival of mysterious stranger Terrance (Pierre) on Hen and Junior's farmstead. Terrance reveals that Junior has been chosen to live on a space station for a few years. However, Hen will have to stay behind while he's gone.

SEE ALSO: The best part of 'Foe' is how the world is ending

To make sure that Hen isn't totally alone while Junior is in space, Terrance's company OuterMore will provide her with an AI human substitute of Junior — essentially a clone. In order to get this substitute completely right, Terrance will live at home with Hen and Junior, observing every aspect of their marriage and conducting interviews about their personal lives. If this all seems like a lot of trouble to go to to send one man into space, you'd be right! Why not set up correspondence between the space station and Earth? Or why not send Junior's replacement into space, if he'll basically be the same person?

These are all questions Foe simply avoids in order to get to the meat of the film: Terrance's time with Junior and Hen. Unfortunately, this meat has all the flavor and value of a scrap of gristle.

Foe is a run-of-the-mill marriage drama with uninspired sci-fi elements. Saoirse Ronan and Paul Mescal in "Foe." Credit: Amazon Studios

Despite being the focus of the film, the actual discussions of Hen and Junior's marriage are not particularly revelatory. Junior is possessive of Hen and (not so shockingly) grows jealous of Terrance's talks with her. Meanwhile, Hen feels that the marriage is stifling. As time goes on, she confides in Terrance that their marriage has become predictable, complete with a sense of losing her identity. "It's like he's replaced me with someone else," she tells Terrance.

The sublimation of self to keep a dying marriage going is not necessarily a new idea, although here, Foe complicates it somewhat with the addition of AI replacements. When Junior leaves for space, he'll have given up everything of himself in order to create a copy that can stay behind. But instead of reckoning with that further, or with the fact that he will be going to space, we mostly see Junior mope about how his wife will be spending time with another man — even though it will look and act exactly like him. Who needs nuance when we could watch the archetypes of the jealous husband and the cowed wife instead?

For their parts, Ronan, Mescal, and Pierre do their best with the material they're given. Mescal channels frustrated male aggression — culminating in a wall-punching scene, no less! — but he tries to soften it with bewilderment as Terrance's lines of questioning become more and more bizarre. Pierre is softly menacing as an authority figure who has the clear power over Hen and Junior. Foe mostly relegates Ronan to the role of subdued wife, which is a travesty given her skill. (It's also, ironically, what Junior does to Hen.) Despite her character being a mostly unknowable mystery, Ronan delivers a layered performance that ages better as Foe arrives at its climax. Still, even she can't make lines like "It would mean nothing and everything at the same time" feel human.

With the set-up of three great actors mostly confined to a house in the middle of nowhere, you may expect Foe to be an artful pressure cooker. Yet Foe is almost entirely devoid of tension, playing more like a series of overwrought vignettes that neither build on each other nor reach meaningful conclusions. The conclusion the film does reach is as self-satisfied as it is predictable, with all the subtlety of a slap to the face.

The casting of Academy Award nominees Ronan and Mescal suggests that Foe is aiming for prestige, but in reality, it calls to mind another sci-fi disappointment: 2016's Passengers. While Passengers is more of a blockbuster and Foe is more contained, both films highlight their leading pair of beloved stars — Ronan and Mescal in Foe's case, Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt in Passengers'. Both also fail to deliver on their stories of romantic relationships tested by humans' attempts to leave a dying Earth.

It's hard to tell if Foe is a case of wasted potential, or if its concept — with its uninspiring ideas and groan-worthy twists — was doomed to fail from the start. Ultimately, its visual beauty is the best thing about it. And that is certainly not enough to make up for hollow filmmaking.

How to watch: Foe is now streaming on Prime Video.

UPDATE: Oct. 5, 2023, 2:07 p.m. EDT Foe was reviewed out of the 2023 New York Film Festival. This review has been rerun for its streaming release.

Sexual desire can be a twisted thing, and Emerald Fennell isn't afraid to showcase the dark side of lust and longing. In fact, she relishes it with the kind of blood-smeared smile you might expect from the mind behind the darkly comic revenge-thriller Promising Young Woman. (Her feature-length directorial debut snagged her an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay and a nom for Best Director — not too shabby.) With her sophomore outing, Saltburn, the English writer/director points her razor-sharp wit at the British upper class, the kind of vaguely aristocratic, disorderly decadent, and woefully snobby folks who boast appalling wealth and privilege along with an estate so big it has its own name: Saltburn.

SEE ALSO: 'Saltburn' seduces us with '00s nostalgia. Why does it affect us so much?

In Fennell's much-anticipated follow-up to Promising Young Woman, she once more presents audiences with an anti-hero who uses sex and stereotypes as tools to achieve their darkest desires. While some critics have crudely denounced Saltburn as "The Talented Mr. Ripoff," this comparison to Anthony Minghella's 1999 movie adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's novel is as thin as that comparing Anna Kendricks's Woman of the Hour to Fennell's provocative previous feature. Perhaps the problem is that, in a cinema landscape overrun with superhero movies and other kid-friendly films, cinema for grown-ups is so rare that it shocks us into clumsy comparison. 

While Saltburn does have some familiar framework to classic tales of obsession and deception, Fennell's love of bad fashion, banger songs, and the messy area where attraction meets repulsion offers audiences a thrill ride that is uniquely harrowing, hilarious, and exhilarating. Plus, Saltburn is a thriller that edges confidently into self-aware queer comedy. 

SEE ALSO: 25 best movies of 2023, and where to watch them What's Saltburn about?  Credit: MGM/Amazon Studios

The Banshees of Inisherin Oscar nominee Barry Keoghan stars as Oliver Quick, a "scholarship case" attending Oxford University in 2006 alongside fleets of the UK's upper-crustiest youth. While relentless hard work got him there, their spots were secured by legacy, family names, and heaps of donations. While he looks achingly dweeby in glasses and a blazer, they look effortlessly cool in Juicy Couture sweatpants and eyebrow rings. 

Gen Z can bring back '00s fashion without irony, but Fennell reminds us how impossibly uncool even the hippest of fits from this era was. Visual jokes range from the reveal of achingly regrettable fashion choices to Oliver facing a comically large manor door, unsure of how to even address such an antiquated symbol of affluence and gatekeeping. But even as the cool kids might make us laugh in retrospect, Oliver pines to be with them. Or more specifically, he deeply desires to be with their king, the hot but dopey Felix Catton (Euphoria's Jacob Elordi). Class conflicts aside, "Ollie" and Felix become fast friends, and as summer approaches, the latter invites his poor friend to join him at the family's ludicrous estate. 

Credit: MGM/Amazon Studios

The film's gothic framework involves a grown and glowering Oliver looking back on this summer, warning his audience that people misunderstood his feelings for Felix. Throughout the film, this ominous voiceover will arise, giving some added color — or shadow — while reminding us that all of this is coming from the unreliable narration of a character as enigmatic as he is mesmerizing. Oliver becomes a figurative shapeshifter at the Catton home, bending his persona to best appease whoever is his audience: the project, the crush, the student, the co-conspirator. But to what end? 

SEE ALSO: 'Triangle of Sadness' review: The "eat the rich" comedy goes gross-out, and it's great Saltburn's supporting cast – from Rosamund Pike to Carey Mulligan — is stupendous.  Credit: MGM/Amazon Studios

While the first act on the Oxford campus is ripe with cringe comedy of the social embarrassment variety, the second act at Saltburn itself is absolutely on fire with its scorching satire of the so-called elite. Rosamund Pike, who deserved an Oscar for Gone Girl, gives her funniest performance yet as mother Elspeth, who chatters away with her concern about others — in between some of the most cutting barbs ever committed to film. (Her withering delivery of "She'll do anything for attention" may be the best punchline of the year.) With a wide smile and breezy tone, Pike welcomes audiences into Saltburn, then swiftly stings with a series of increasingly outrageous confessions, to which Oliver — and us — are eager audience. She is electrifying in her blithe cruelty, delivering the kind of lines that drag queens would call "reads" but with the British brightness that makes their sharp edge all the more jolting. 

SEE ALSO: 'Saltburn' gives 'Murder On The Dancefloor' new life 20 years after its release

Carey Mulligan, Promising Young Woman's Oscar-nominated leading lady, reunites with Fennell to play a quirky friend of the Catton family. And while her appearance is brief, it is rife with comically flighty comments and ruthlessly funny reaction shots. Academy Award nominee Richard E. Grant (Can You Ever Forgive Me?) adds further panache as the family's oblivious but occasionally spunky patriarch. Alison Oliver (Conversations with Friends) sizzles as Felix's trouble-making little sister, while Elordi slyly plays Felix as nothing too special beyond being hot, young, and rich. It's not that he plays the role half-heartedly; rather, his shrug of a portrayal is a damnation of such poor little rich boys who cruise not so much on charm but on privilege. 

Archie Madekwe, as one of the Catton cousins always rankled over rankings, is exciting in his bullying of Oliver, thinking himself a cat in the game when he's just another jewel-encrusted mouse. And shout-out to Lolly Adefope, the English comedian who has awed in Ghosts and Miracle Workers; she has a small but biting role as a lady who is over all this posh nonsense — especially her fool of a wealthy husband. 

Barry Keoghan is a revelation in Saltburn.  Credit: MGM/Amazon Studios

The Irish actor has garnered wild praise from critics since his haunting performance in Yorgos Lanthimos's cerebral 2017 thriller The Killing of a Sacred Deer. From there, he's been lauded in challenging films like Christopher Nolan's war drama Dunkirk, Bart Layton's true crime docu-drama American Animals, and David Lowery's surreal fantasy The Green Knight. His cheeky performance in Chloé Zhao's MCU entry Eternals spurred countless crushes online, while his heartbreaking turn in The Banshees of Inisherin made the Academy take notice. And now, with the world watching, Keoghan commits full-bodied to a role that dares you to look away. 

While Oliver is Saltburn's narrator and protagonist, he is nonetheless a slippery figure. Keoghan's penetrating gaze focuses on Felix, and it's hard to gauge if what Oliver is feeling is love, lust, jealousy, hatred, or a heady mix of all this and more. The role of Oliver is made up of masks, and Keoghan wears each one so convincingly that it's an enthralling game to guess which is real. Does he mean his chipper assessment of the house's priceless artworks? The growling huff of pillow talk during a late-night tryst? The sweet invitation to friendship? The hushed rush of gossip over cocktails? 

Oliver talks a good game no matter who he's talking to, but Keoghan and Fennell know the truth of him lies in his actions. Sex is not some lofty allusion in Saltburn. Love scenes — or lust scenes, anyway — play out with a visceral relish. Fennell refuses glossy displays of perfect flesh, instead reveling in sweat, spit, semen, and menstrual blood, sticky and viscous. Some in the audience at my screening gasped in surprise or cried out in dismay over these graphic depictions of sex, which range from kinky to taboo to groundbreakingly shocking. Yet Fennell's film doesn't project judgment onto any of the above, as it is tied deeply to Oliver's POV, and he is definitely unashamed. Keoghan expresses that in the confidence of his physicality in these sex scenes and beyond, to a climax that is kinetic, deliciously devilish, and over-the-top. (Dare I predict John Waters will love it?) 

In the end, Saltburn is unabashedly a movie for grown-ups, and thank god. 

Fennell unleashes a torrid eat-the-rich satire that confronts the 99%'s conflicted feelings over the 1%. In Oliver, we are given the vicarious thrill of being ushered into these precious, pompous spaces, taken on a tour of obscene consumerism that dates back centuries, and led into the labyrinth of jealousy, awe, and wrath. We are made complicit by following Oliver through his elaborate and merciless scheme, and we are invited to join him in a victory lap that is as jarring as it is jubilant. 

Simply put, Saltburn is dynamite, bursting with lust, lies, and laughs — the kind edged with a dark snarl. If loving a movie this willfully seedy, boldly savage, smoking hot, and unnervingly sensational is wrong, then being right is boring. 

Saltburn is now on Prime Video.

UPDATE: Jan. 4, 2024, 11:46 a.m. EST Saltburn was reviewed out of Fantastic Fest. The review has been republished for the film's debut on Prime Video