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23-Year-Old Turns Free Facebook Marketplace Acrylic Base Into Viral Pill-Bottle Table, Earns $150K

Oskar Flodstrom, a 23-year-old Los Angeles artist who skipped college to pursue creative work, transformed a free acrylic base found on Facebook Marketplace into a pill-bottle-shaped side table. The design went viral on social media, leading to a partnership with the brand NO LOGO and roughly $150,000 in sales within two weeks.

Google Research Tests Traffic-Spreading Algorithm on Maps Users in 10 U.S. Cities

Google's research division ran an experiment rerouting a small subset of Google Maps drivers across 10 U.S. cities, including San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle and Chicago, spreading vehicles across more routes instead of funneling them onto the fastest-looking path. The published results, which appeared in Nature Cities, showed average speeds rose about 2% and travel times shortened by 0.7%, with highway-focused rerouting in Los Angeles boosting speeds by as much as 4.6%.

NYC and Los Angeles school systems reinstate broad restrictions on student AI use

New York City Public Schools banned student-facing AI tools for all K-8 classrooms this week, allowing only a limited set of approved programs for high schoolers, while Los Angeles Unified is enacting a similarly tighter policy for the 2026-27 school year. The move reverses the more permissive stance both districts adopted starting in 2023, after they initially banned ChatGPT outright when it launched in late 2022.

AI-Generated Fakes Undermine Trust in Online Animal Rescue Content

AI-generated images and videos depicting animals—rescues, reunions, and lost pets—are flooding social media, making it harder for viewers to trust what they see. In one case, a Los Angeles woman named Mibbby Butler was targeted by a scammer who used an AI-manipulated photo of her missing cat to extort payment for its supposed return, though she caught the deception due to garbled text in the background image.

Coco Robotics' Delivery Bots Win Shake Shack Praise After 500,000 Trips

Coco Robotics, founded in 2020 by two UCLA engineers, built small autonomous delivery vehicles to replace full-size cars for short restaurant delivery trips. The company says it now completes about 1,000 deliveries a day in Los Angeles and has surpassed 500,000 total deliveries across more than a million miles, with a Shake Shack regional manager singling out the robots as a standout courier.

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