Science & Tech

8 moments from 2025 that feel ripped straight out of a sci-fi movie

The future usually tiptoes in. In 2025, it kicked the door down.

Somehow, the fact that you’re reading this on a hand-sized supercomputer jammed with GPS and 4K cameras has become normal. Sometimes the future sneaks up on us, but as Mark Wales reports, in 2025 it burst through the wall like an AI-powered Kool-Aid Man. Oh yeah! 

AI is where your head probably goes first. But 2025 also brought discoveries that sound like rejected movie pitches, medical breakthroughs that blur the line between human and hardware, and robots that are no longer content to stay in the background. (Have you seen the robo-Olaf at Disneyland?) Did we finally get flying cars? Read the story to find out and see all eight of the 2025 moments that will make you question your reality.

Honestly, it was pretty hard to come up with tech that we don’t already have some version of. Flying cars? VR? Universal translators? Check, check, check.

Yesterday’s Results

Second-hand gifts are the hot new not-new gifts this season, but what about the regift? Well over half of GOOD readers are happy to regift, and, shhhh… I’m right there with you.

How do you feel about regifting?

• I regift loud and proud. Might even recycle the wrapping. (55.1%)

• I pretend I never do it, but yes, absolutely. (14.5%)

• Only if it’s a total emergency. I’m not a monster. (23.2%)

• Never. That gift was for me and we are bonded for life. (7.2%)

GOOD reader LuckyLadyB summed it perfectly. “It's the thought that counts. If I give someone a gift and it's not their "thing" then why just hang onto it?”

Science

Why Germany is turning cockroaches into first responders

Speaking of things that feel sci-fi…

Someone in Germany saw that scene from The Fifth Element and thought, “Yep, I am going to create a biotech firm to make that happen.” Equipping cockroaches with cameras and making them remotely controllable can give you a way to find people in the rubble after a building collapse, sure, but… would you want to be found by a cockroach? Eeeww.

Personal phobias aside, cockroaches are highly resilient, mobile, and stealthy, and can survive conditions that would harm humans. As Erik Barnes reports, they’re basically nature’s little tanks.

And the cockroaches? They’re treated better than most, according to the company. If you’ve got the constitution for it, click through to see the creepy crawly rescue heroes in action and find out how the company is planning to use them to save lives.

Culture

There’s defying the odds, then there’s this guy

A routine TV re-enactment turns into one of the most jaw-dropping lottery moments ever filmed.

Let’s detour from sci-fi to fantasy and meet Bill Morgan.

After a crushing accident while working as a truck driver in Australia, Morgan’s heart stopped for 14 minutes. He slipped into a coma. Doctors advised his family to turn off life support. Then, against all expectations, he woke up. No brain damage. Just a second chance at life.

Grateful and newly engaged, Morgan celebrated the most human way possible. He bought a scratch-off ticket. He won a brand-new Toyota Corolla. Local news loved the story, and as Adam Albright Hanna reports, they asked him to recreate the moment on camera. Walk into the shop. Buy a ticket. Pretend to scratch.

Then he won again.

“I just won $250,000. I’m not joking,” Morgan said, as the crew assumed he was acting. He wasn’t. The re-enactment had turned into a second jackpot, captured live and completely unscripted.

By the 1840s, Charles Dickens was already one of Britain’s most famous writers thanks to The Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist. But with a growing family and underwhelming returns on Martin Chuzzlewit, he needed another hit. London, meanwhile, was a boomtown of glittering wealth and brutal poverty, something Dickens knew firsthand from government reports and visits to places like the Field Lane Ragged School.

His first idea was a blunt nonfiction pamphlet. Then he realized a story would land harder. On December 19, 1843, A Christmas Carol was published, and Christmas was never quite the same.

Dickens did not invent trees or cards, but he helped lock in the urban Victorian vibe we still recognize: family warmth, games, feasting, and charitable goodwill. He is credited with cementing the phrase “Merry Christmas” into the common vernacular. Scrooge’s over-the-top turkey did not invent the holiday bird, but they helped turn it into the aspirational upgrade.

The book sold out its first printing in days, though it was not the financial windfall Dickens hoped for. He insisted on a deluxe edition with hand-colored illustrations, which devoured early profits. Still, the payoff came in other ways. Through public readings and endless adaptations, A Christmas Carol became a moral script that nudged Victorian society toward seasonal generosity and better support for poor children’s education, even if Parliament did not exactly leap into action.

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