The simultaneous release of “Wonder Woman 1984" in movie theaters and on HBO Max on December 25, after many delays, managed to break U.S. box office records and become the pandemic’s biggest box office success, raking in $16.7 million during the Christmas holiday weekend, exceeding industry expectations.

The film has also proved extremely popular on the download pages: the next day, it had garnered an unprecedented 10% of the torrents and streams downloaded on peer-to-peer sites. …

The municipal authorities of Cambridge, the Massachusetts city that is home to such prestigious universities as Harvard or MIT, have decided to place bright yellow stickers on gas station pumps warning drivers that “the burning of gasoline, diesel and ethanol has major consequences on human health and the environment including contributing to climate change.”

The label, also used in Sweden, mirrors the warnings on tobacco products and that have the same purpose: to remind us that a gesture as normal as filling up the tank of our vehicle is actually very harmful. Nobody believes that these labels will save the world or prevent people from filling up their cars, but they make some of us stop and think about the climate emergency, and consider more sustainable mobility to help tackle it. These types of label has been on cigarette packages for many years now, and probably haven’t persuaded many people to give up smoking, but they have changed society’s attitude towards tobacco, which is no longer considered attractive and cool, and is instead synonymous with disease, irresponsibility and anti-social behavior. …

As a dreadful 2020 winds to an end and we prepare to usher in 2021, I find myself thinking what a year like this, the biggest experiment in remote working in human history, has taught us, and how it will affect us in the short term, during the next 12 months.

What will the work be like next year? I guess that depends on who you work for. The pandemic has forced many companies to modernize and to realize that there are other ways to work, but that won’t necessarily translate into lasting change. …

Nate Storey, founder of a startup in the burgeoning agtech sector, which applies high-tech solutions to agriculture and farming, is convinced that the future of vegetable production is vertical and indoor cultivation, an approach that allows crops to be grown anywhere in the world to supply local markets. His company, Plenty, has just demonstrated that about two acres laid out vertically and growing hydroponically, produces more than a conventional farm covering some 720 acres.

The company, which makes intensive use of robots and algorithms for watering and providing nutrients for fruit and vegetables, closed a $140 million funding round in October, bringing total investment to $500 million and reflecting the growing interest in this type of technology. Other companies also in the San Francisco area, such as Iron Ox Robotic Farms, also rely on robotization throughout the process, from planting to plant feeding and harvesting, and report similar yields. …

Due partly to documentaries such as The Social Dilemma, along with mountains of negative media coverage of the Facebook brand, more and more people are thinking about reducing their dependence on the company, a complicated task given its status as the leading global social network, coupled with the network effect. Used by more than 2.5 billion people, getting out is not easy or necessarily practical; simply disconnecting can send out the message you have become asocial.

Remind me again: what’s the problem with Facebook? Simply, the total control it wants over all our data, coupled with its unethical business model, which has given rise to its current reputation. You may not want to sever all ties, but you can consider reducing its impact by removing as much data as possible. To do this, you should think about how you use Facebook: if it’s just to keep you in touch with friends and family, they already have most of your basic personal information, which Facebook uses to manage a large part of its advertising, so you could delete that and simply have a basic, incomplete profile. …

As vaccination programs are rolled out around the world, we can expect a return to normality toward the middle or end of 2021, thanks to a confluence of technology and the market economy, as befits the end of a situation that prevented the launch and use of any number of innovations, but not necessarily their development. …

Keyboards have long been our most common interface; many of us spend hours every day sitting in front of one, and there’s little indication that will change in the future: most alternatives are either unpopular or impractical.

Of course, there are voice activated writing programs, but since we don’t speak in the same way as write, the process of educating ourselves to speak in a way that allows it to become a substitute for efficient typing is one that very few people are willing to go through. …

Recent successes in creating meat in laboratories point to a not-too-distant future where any number of foodstuffs will be available without the need to farm, transport and slaughter animals.

Aside from plans I have already commented on that are now producing a type of meat from stem cells in laboratories, a process that is still difficult and expensive, it is now possible to make dairy products such as ice cream, cheese or even human milk, by creating molecular structures in bioreactors identical to those present in real milk, without the need for cows.

Perfect Day, a San Francisco-based company set up in 2014 intends to “change the process, but not the food”, by developing processes to create milk proteins, including casein and whey, by fermentation in microbiota, specifically from Trichoderma fungi in bioreactors, rather than extracting them from cows’ milk. Using these proteins, the company makes yogurts and ice creams sold directly to a mainly vegan public. …