As surrogacy remains illegal in China, demand is growing for overseas-born babies.

An “industry of agencies, consultancies and fertility clinics” has sprung up to help Chinese people connect with potential surrogate mothers overseas, said the Financial Times. Many are attracted by the US’s “advanced medical facilities, strong legal protections for the parents and the prospect of an American passport for their child”.

The motherhood penalty

Between 2014 and 2020, nearly a third of surrogate babies in the US were intended for international parents, a survey published in 2024 suggests. More than 40% of those were from China.

There’s a “growing interest” from women who aren’t struggling with infertility, but who fear the impact of pregnancy on their bodies and careers, said the Financial Times. That fear is “well founded”, said Lu Pin, a Chinese women’s rights activist. The so-called “motherhood penalty” is “a product of how the environment works against women” in China.

“If I remain unmarried, I will have to bear all the costs of pregnancy and post-partum recovery myself,” a 25-year-old entrepreneur told the paper. That “really isn’t very different from the cost of having a child through surrogacy”.

Last year, China registered its lowest number of births since records began: the fourth consecutive year of population decline. There has been a “very clear increase among patients who are fearful of getting pregnant and giving birth”, said a Chinese medicine doctor and fertility specialist. “Chinese women worry about how it will impact their appearance and whether they can return to their normal weight and womb health.”

Extreme surrogacy?

But there is a darker side: “a little-known trend in the largely unregulated US surrogacy industry”, said The Wall Street Journal. Chinese elites and billionaires are paying to “quietly have large numbers of US-born babies”.Some, “inspired by Elon Musk’s 14 known children”, shell out millions to hire women in America to “help them build families of jaw-dropping size”.

In the US, there is a “thriving mini-industry” of surrogacy agencies, law firms and clinics, even services to collect newborns from hospitals. Chinese people can “ship their genetic material abroad and get a baby delivered back”, for up to $200,000. The market is now “so sophisticated” that some Chinese elites have had US-born children – who automatically become US citizens under the 14th Amendment – “without stepping foot in the country”.

One billionaire, Xu Bo, an “online megaposter” and “vocal critic of feminism”, calls himself “China’s first father”. The maker of fantasy video games claims to have 100 children. He told a US court in 2023 that he hoped to have 20 US-born children through surrogacy, preferably boys, to one day take over his business. Another wealthy Chinese executive, Wang Huiwu, hired US models as egg donors to have 10 girls, allegedly “with the aim of one day marrying them off to powerful men”.

He ultimately plans to father 100 “high net-worth babies”, according to The Times. And although the practice is “arousing concern” in both the US and China, there is no US law stopping multiple surrogacy births for the same family. This “extreme surrogacy” is “a perfect mix of liberal Californian attitudes and Chinese productivity”.

A phoenix planet, created from the remnants of a dying star, has been found around a white dwarf star for the first time. The second-generation planet could be an indicator of the future of our solar system.

Cosmic death

The unnamed exoplanet was discovered circling the white dwarf HS 0209+0832, according to a study published in the journal Nature Astronomy. White dwarfs are created when stars “exhaust the hydrogen in their cores needed to fuel nuclear fusion and create helium,” said Space.com (a sister site of The Week). HS 0209+0832’s atmosphere had an “unusual chemical signature” with “oddly heavy elements including zinc, copper and most notably, niobium,” which are “created during the death of a star,” said a news release about the study.

This signature is likely the white dwarf “feeding off a newly formed, second-generation giant planet” that “condensed out of a new disc of material formed during the star’s death,” said the release. Scientists also suspect that the atmosphere of the phoenix planet is “being stripped by the white dwarf’s stellar winds, causing the rare elements to fall back onto the zombie star,” said Live Science (also a sister site of The Week).

Rebirth

Many more phoenix planets around white dwarfs may exist. “Over 95% of stars in the Milky Way will evolve to become a white dwarf,” including our sun, said lead study author Jamie Williams to Reuters. In the future, our own solar system could “host a second-generation planet formed from the ashes of our sun,” said the release.

While this phoenix planet is a gas planet, others could be rocky or even hold life. “White dwarfs cool predictably over time ⁠and as they get cooler, their cooling slows,” Williams said. “If a second-generation rocky planet formed close enough to the white dwarf then it could remain in the habitable zone for billions of years.”

Gambling is putting people in the hospital, according to a new study. The increase in online sports betting has worsened mental health problems in younger men, leading to more hospital visits as a result.

Mind games

Online gambling is “associated with a doubling of the rates of severe cases of gambling disorders, with increases occurring only in young men,” said a study published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. More young men are showing up at emergency rooms with “major depression and suicidality,” as well as “other mental health or substance abuse diagnoses” exacerbated by gambling, said Time.

The uptick in these health issues is “particularly concerning given the rapid growth and promotion of online sports betting, which targets this demographic,” said study author Ryan Forrest, a doctoral student at the University of Toronto, in a news release. And the “consequences of rising gambling involve not just harm to people who are gambling but wider effects on families and communities.”

Underscored

While the study centered on Ontario, Canada, the U.S. has a similar spike in gambling. Since 2018, several states have legalized online sports betting.

“It’s just not a regulated environment out there,” said Cynthia Grant, the vice president of clinical for Birches Health, the largest U.S. provider specializing in treating gambling disorders, to Time. “People’s lives are being ruined, their relationships are being destroyed,” and “their retirement accounts are gone.”

This data “likely represents only a small fraction of the overall harms associated with gambling in the population,” said the study. Unfortunately, “most people experiencing gambling problems will never seek care,” said senior study author Daniel Myran in the release. But increased ER visits may be “revealing much larger increases in gambling-related harm.”

The killing of a woman in Okinawa has sparked an outcry across Japan and inflamed long-simmering tensions over the US military presence on the island.

US Marine Devin Ballard was arrested on Sunday on suspicion of strangling Anna Yagi, 39, whose body was found at a hotel in Naha, the largest city on Okinawa. The 20-year-old lance corporal has denied the allegations.

‘Brutal’ crime

Security footage shows a man resembling Ballard entering the hotel with Yagi, and later leaving alone with her belongings, according to public broadcaster NHK. Yagi’s body was found in her hotel room.

Ballard, who was arrested in a civilian district while off duty, will remain in the custody of the Japanese authorities. If convicted, he could face life in prison or the death penalty.

Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi urged US authorities to “enforce stricter discipline” of their troops in light of the “brutal and heinous” killing, while Defence Minister Shinjiro Koizumi posted on social media about his “strong indignation”. Incidents involving US military personnel “cause significant anxiety to the local community and must never occur”, he said.

On Okinawa, the incident has met with protests and also a grim familiarity. “Honestly my first reaction was, ‘Not again’,” one local told the BBC.

‘Anti-US sentiment’

Crimes involving US troops stationed on Okinawa have been “a constant source of tension between Tokyo and Washington”, said The Guardian. Most of the 54,000 US troops in Japan, and 70% of their military facilities, are based on the island.

In 1995, when three American servicemen raped a 12-year-old girl, tens of thousands of people protested for months, intensifying the “anti-US sentiment” in Okinawa. A teenage girl was raped by a US serviceman in 2024, one of four sexual crimes linked to US military personnel that year, and “anger erupted again”. It’s a problem that seems to be increasing: last year, there were 101 recorded crimes involving US troops, according to prefectural police – up from 40 in 2020.

The killing of Yagi is emblematic of a decades-long issue for the people of Okinawa, gender and peace professor Kozue Akibayashi told Al Jazeera. “They have expressed countless times their opposition to, and anger at, the US military presence,” she said. But Tokyo has “chosen the US-Japan alliance over the safety and lives and voices” of its people.

With climate change making natural disasters far more frequent, some consumers are turning to smaller off-grid electric networks to generate power in the event of a catastrophe. These “microgrids” are already becoming popular in numerous vulnerable areas of the U.S.

What is a microgrid?

It is a small power network that “generates, stores and consumes electricity in one relatively confined space,” said National Geographic. They operate in a manner different from traditional power grids, in which “electricity moves from a power plant to homes and businesses via a connected, centralized grid made of substations and transmission lines.” These grids are embraced by homeowners and small businesses, and many also “connect to their local utility and draw power from that grid” if the larger ones “don’t produce enough on a given day.”

These electrical systems are appearing in stormy areas like North Carolina, where solar versions help to “prepare for disasters like Hurricane Helene, which devastated the region two years ago,” said NPR. They are also “popping up in public spaces” where people “often gather after storms.” Currently, the U.S. has more than 5,000 microgrids in operation, according to research firm Wood Mackenzie.

What next?

Legislators have made efforts to increase microgrid use. Sen. Peter Welch (D-Vt.) introduced a bill to “boost the adoption of microgrids across the country as the nation’s transmission system becomes increasingly strained by growing energy demand and extreme weather events,” said Politico’s E&E News.

The bill would provide $700 million toward microgrid development. It would also encourage regulators to “streamline the interconnection process for localized, independent grids,” said E&E, while “providing technical assistance to utilities and governments working on grid resilience projects.”

Authorities in South Africa’s capital city have set out plans to round up and remove around 60 chacma baboons, which are increasingly coming “into conflict” with the city’s human residents, said Reuters. The animals can be “intimidating” – males grow up to one metre tall and weigh around 50kg – and this urban primate population has adapted to city life, raiding bins, cars and houses for food.

But plans to move the baboons to a newly built sanctuary have “triggered a bitter dispute” over ‌whether they should be “confined, culled or allowed to coexist with residents”. Protests are ongoing, and the issue could play a major role in Cape Town’s upcoming municipal elections.

‘Divisive’ and ‘expensive’

Problems with baboons in the city stretch back decades but they have “reached boiling point” over the past two years, said The Guardian. In the early 2000s, the city authorities stopped the culling of baboon troops in response to public pressure, but that has since swollen the population by a third – to around 500. Geography is “partially to blame”, too, as the baboons are “boxed in” between the steep landscape of the Table Mountain National Park and “the sprawling urban development that stretches to the Atlantic Ocean”.

Current baboon-management measures in the city have not only been “divisive” but “expensive”. Full-time rangers monitor the groups as part of a programme that costs around R20 million (£900,000) every 18 months. Those who support the baboons being removed say the only serious alternative is culling. Officials believe the primates will be “better off if they are confined” and supported by a high standard of care in alternative locations, said CNN.

There is also a wider plan that includes “strategic fencing, better waste management and stronger by-law enforcement”, said SA People News. Authorities have already started distributing 6,000 lockable “baboon-proof bins” to some of the most affected communities. It remains to be seen how well this solves the competition between people’s need for “safe neighbourhoods” and wildlife’s needs for habitat.

Failure of leadership

“For years, baboons have been chased, paintballed, harassed and subjected to increasingly intensive forms of disruptive management,” said the Daily Maverick. What is fundamentally a failure of environmental leadership has “repeatedly been attributed to the animals themselves”. There have been few attempts to teach householders why food waste should not be mixed with other rubbish in outside bins, for example, “even though this would reduce wildlife attractants”. The baboon-proof bins are a good step, but Simon’s Town, an area where 60 baboons have been identified for removal, has been excluded from the rollout.

Cape Town is a city that “derives so much of its identity, beauty and prosperity” from the nature around it, and many believe that the decision to remove the baboons will be a stain on its environmental record. The city has municipal elections in November, and voters will be all too aware that any solutions to the baboon problem are a “measure of the kind of city Cape Town is choosing to become”.

“The best solution to resolving conflicts is to prevent them,” said US anthropology professor Shirley C. Strum on The Conversation. Preventing undesirable baboon behaviour, like raiding food, is easier than trying to tackle it once it’s become engrained. Translocation methods – like the one the city authorities plan – have been successful in the past but, nowadays, there are “very few places left where baboons can’t get into trouble”. Culling them is highly difficult due to their “wily” nature and, “even if you succeed (which I doubt)”, then “another troop will soon take its place”. It’s difficult but we must face up to the fact that “conflict between baboons and humans won’t change unless human behaviour and attitudes change”.

A new study suggests a worrying link between frequent marijuana use and care-intensive seizures in people with ‘hard-to-treat’ epilepsy. While it’s too early to prove causation, researchers believe the connection warrants further study.

‘Unsettling trend’

Adults with “hard-to-treat epilepsy” who used cannabis most days had “more than twice as many convulsive seizures” per year and “more rapidly became resistant to antiseizure medications” compared with nonusers, according to new research from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, published in the journal Epilepsia, a press release said.

The researchers reviewed the medical records of 64 adults with drug-resistant epilepsy who were admitted to an inpatient unit where “doctors monitored their seizures in real time,” said U.S. News & World Report. Twenty-two of them “reported using marijuana at least 20 days a month.” The difference between the two groups “was significant.” In total, “91% of frequent users experienced convulsive seizures compared with 57% of nonusers.”

An FDA-approved cannabis-derived epilepsy treatment exists, Epidiolex, but it is “only made from cannabidiol (CBD),” said Gizmodo. The team suspects THC, the other active compound in cannabis, “could be the primary culprit behind this unsettling trend.”

Next steps

The researchers emphasized that the “current data demonstrate an observational association rather than direct causation,” said Neuroscience News. Moving forward, the team is designing a “prospective, multisite study” incorporating blood tests rather than “self-reported usage.”

The primary takeaway is to “not ignore cannabis use in epilepsy or to assume it is beneficial,” said senior study author Aaron Struck to Gizmodo. It is worthwhile to “discuss with a treating physician” if “stopping or reducing THC may be beneficial to your care.”

A debate has broken out at the University of St Andrews after a former student accused the establishment of having a “culture of anti-Scottish classism”.

In a LinkedIn post three weeks ago, Sophie Rose Jenkins said that the culture she encountered at the elite university made working-class students like her “feel ashamed of their home life”.

Speaking to The National, she recalled a group chat where members exchanged recommendations for designer clothes, and tutorials in which fellow students “refused to include me in the conversation because apparently, they couldn’t understand my accent”. She claimed disparaging attitudes extended to staff: an adviser attempted to remove her from an elective course, telling her she was likely to fail, only for her to average more than 90%.

‘Anti-Scottish bias’

Jenkins' story has “resonated with hundreds” of other students and “touched on a growing tension at St Andrews”, said The Guardian. “My parents were worried about me coming here,” a Scottish fresher on a scholarship told the newspaper. “They didn’t want me to be left out.” Since arriving, “most of the people I have met are international students” who maybe “can be a bit ignorant to the cost of things”.

The “exclusivity of expensive, invite-only events rattled me,” said another former St Andrews student Carla Jenkins in The Times. “I too experienced anti-Scottish bias.” An American tutor “disagreed with everything that I ever said”, including marking me down for “using the word ‘Glaswegian’”, and in tutorials I was “asked to speak slower or change the words I used”.

The “debate around classism at Scottish universities is not new,” said The Guardian. In 2024, Edinburgh University offered guidance on how students should treat one another after rising claims of discrimination and classism. “Don’t be a snob!” it advised.

St Andrews vice-principal Niall Scott acknowledged in a statement that some students arrive with “immature, offensive, and classist views”, but claimed “they tend not to leave with them”. Universities have a “crucial role to play in challenging these attitudes by bringing together people from different backgrounds, cultures, and perspectives, encouraging understanding, respect, and inclusion”.

Manhattan microcosm

The feeling that Scotland’s most famous university is not a welcoming place for ordinary Scots is rooted in its unusually high international make-up. US students, many of them escaping even higher fees back home, represent around 20% of the total undergraduate body and are a particular source of friction. An article in student newspaper The Stand last year complained that “our beloved Scottish town is day by day turning into a microcosm of Manhattan’s elite world; complete with intrigue, privilege, and secrets that spread like wildfire”.

Scottish universities have a “capped number of places” each year for Scottish students, whose fees are paid by the devolved government. The issue is not as simple as Scots being “squeezed out” in favour of rich international students, said The Herald; the Scottish government has a limit on how many subsidised places it can fund. But in practice it means institutions may “continue to accept high fee-paying international students” while turning Scottish applicants away.

The international tuition fees are “significantly higher than what the government pays for a domestic student” so they’ve become “an essential, if increasingly volatile, source of income” for universities.

Dementia research has reached a major milestone: Alzheimer’s disease is no longer untreatable, according to a landmark global report. The growing range of treatment options marks a shift from seeking a cure to focusing on avoiding the disease entirely.

‘Era of unprecedented activity’

The Alzheimer’s research field is “witnessing a period of remarkable scientific momentum,” said the 2026 World Alzheimer Report, which is coauthored by Alzheimer’s Disease International and health journalist Paul Gallagher. The ADI is a global federation of dementia associations affiliated with the World Health Organization.

After years of being considered an “inevitable consequence of old age and neurodegeneration,” dementia research has entered an “era of unprecedented activity.” Experts are hopeful.

Hundreds of clinical trials are investigating “medicines, diagnostics, lifestyle interventions, digital technologies, rehabilitation programs” and new care models for the disease, said the report. The disease is now seen as a condition for which “earlier diagnosis, better understanding of disease biology, and a wider range of interventions may collectively improve outcomes.”

During the past five years alone, novel drugs such as donanemab (brand name Kisunla) and lecanemab (brand name Leqembi) have been shown to “modestly slow decline in early Alzheimer’s,” while growing evidence suggests “some dementia cases could potentially be delayed or prevented through risk reduction,” said Science Alert.

What’s next?

There are drugs that “millions of people are taking right now for other reasons” that might also be able to help with Alzheimer’s disease, said Vox. GLP-1s “in particular are the big ones.”

It’s still “sort of theoretical,” but the Alzheimer’s Association is “putting $100 million behind some research projects” to investigate this possible link, said Vox. Years from now, when “millions of people are now on these GLP-1 drugs,” we may “start to see Alzheimer’s less often.” This would be “another reason to be optimistic” that the “future for this disease is looking brighter.”

Beekeepers in Australia are “abuzz” at the news that “a series of stunning heists” caused the disappearance of 800,000 bees, said Smithsonian magazine.

The loss of the stolen insects, which are worth tens of thousands of dollars to members of the “apiary community” in and around Queensland, has also “sparked concerns” for regional food production and comes at a tricky time for the sector.

‘Completely gutted’

The thefts occurred across multiple properties and required a sophisticated operation, with the thieves taking the entire brood boxes – “the colony’s breeding system” – to avoid detection.

The culprit is thought to be from a “commercial operation” rather than a “hobby farmer”, a police detective told ABC.

Jack Laughton, a commercial beekeeper, said he was “completely gutted because the amount of work that goes in preparing beehives to a good quality, to a high standard, is quite a lot of work”. So “it’s a bit of a shock to the system” to open a hive expecting it to be full of healthy bees and “there’s just nothing”.

The apiarists don’t just lose the insects and the honey they would have produced, but the value of pollination contracts, which can be worth thousands of dollars. Many bees are used at avocado farms in Queensland to pollinate the crops, so the thefts could have a knock-on effect on other food production.

Buzzed off

Tom Bidner, an apiarist from the Atherton Tablelands, west of Cairns, said 44 colonies had been stolen from three beekeepers. The calculation of how many have been taken “isn’t over yet” because they have “so many colonies to get through” and they’re “still getting around and checking all our different sites”.

This is not the first bee theft to “rock Australia” this year, said Smithsonian. In May, around 80 hives, worth an estimated $150,000 (£80,000), were swiped from properties in New South Wales. The culprit was “definitely” a “disheartened” beekeeper, Mitch McLennan, owner of the Honey Shed in Tabulam, told The Guardian, because “what else are you going to do with them unless you’re a beekeeper”?

Police are continuing their investigation and are appealing for information that could help locate the missing colonies or identify those responsible.

Sting in the tail

To compound the “impact of lost revenue” and the “difficulty of recovering stolen populations”, a bee-killing parasite, the varroa mite, has recently been detected in the region, said Smithsonian.

In 2022, Australia was the last inhabited continent on which varroa was detected and just over a year later, the parasite had become “so widespread” that the government “abandoned its eradication efforts” after it had spent more than $100 million to try to prevent varroa’s spread. This decision has “shifted additional expenses and burdens onto apiarists”.

Menopausal women spent years unable to get relief from the potentially deadly but often preventable effects of recurrent urinary tract infections, due to the FDA’s black box warning for estrogen products. Despite growing evidence supporting safety and efficacy, and the lifting of the warning, a lingering stigma is keeping women from life-saving care.

Grave ‘misinterpretation’

Menopause increases the risk of UTIs because “declining estrogen changes the tissue and bacteria of the vagina and urinary tract,” making it “easier for harmful bacteria to grow,” said USA Today. For menopausal women, those infections are also “more likely to spread to the bloodstream,” causing “sepsis, organ failure and death.”

For years, major medical groups have recommended a low dose of vaginal estrogen to help “prevent recurrent infections” in menopausal women, said USA Today. The cream, tablet or ring can “cost as little as a few dollars a month.” Unfortunately, for nearly two decades, access was limited by the government.

A set of Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) trials, launched in 1991, suggested that some forms of hormone therapy that included estrogen and progesterone could “increase the risks of cardiovascular problems, breast cancer, endometrial cancer and possibly dementia,” said Harvard Medical School. A “misinterpretation” in 2002 of that landmark research study prompted the FDA to “slap its strongest warning” on all estrogen products, including “low-dose vaginal estrogen” that was never studied in the associated trial, said USA Today. Shortly after, the FDA implemented a black-box warning, its “strongest available measure short of removing a drug from the market,” on all menopause treatments containing estrogen.

The stringent label “scared doctors” from prescribing medications their “patients desperately needed,” pushed women off treatment and “contributed to decades of missed opportunities” to prevent “serious menopause-related health problems for two generations of women,” said USA Today. Even when groups like the Menopause Society suggested in 2004 that “hormone replacement therapy, including vaginal estrogen, could be used for serious menopause symptoms,” the FDA black-box warning “kept most women from using it.” Many years later, researchers would say the study “overstated the risk of cancer for younger menopausal women,” leading to the FDA removing the black box warning in November 2025.

Deadly UTI’s still plague menopausal women

Nearly a year has passed since the warning was removed from vaginal estrogen and other estrogen products. But the treatment’s “use still isn’t widespread,” likely due to ongoing stigma, said USA Today.

The first Baby Boomers “turned 54 in 2000,” and estrogen use plummeted from “27% of menopausal women in 1999 to 5% in 2020,” according to the National Institutes of Health, said USA Today. During a similar period, between 1999 and 2023, women’s deaths from “sepsis stemming from UTIs” nearly tripled for women 45 to 64, according to a USA Today analysis of CDC data included in the June 2026 edition of the International Journal of Gynecology and Obstetrics.

This was more than “women simply suffering from hot flashes because they weren’t prescribed estrogen,” said Rachel Rubin, a urologist and menopause specialist, to USA Today. “They were dying.”

Vaginal estrogen has been shown to be an effective treatment for menopausal women with frequent UTIs. In a recent study published in the Urology Journal of nearly 2 million women with recurrent UTIs, “women 55 and older who were prescribed vaginal estrogen were about half as likely to be hospitalized with a UTI as those who were not,” said USA Today. Their recorded rates of sepsis and death were “roughly one-fifth as high.”

Despite that evidence, “only about 1 in 10 menopausal women covered by Medicare use vaginal estrogen,” according to records reviewed by USA Today. Unlike menopause hormone therapy, which is “widely prescribed,” vaginal estrogen suffers from a “public relations problem,” said The Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, with “few women knowing what it is.”

A war is being waged over the future of Argentina’s Andean glaciers, as environmentalists warn of the dangers posed by heavy resource mining and the construction of vast new data centres.

These might be a boon for the country’s fragile economy, but geologists fear they could lead to severe water shortages and devastating flash-flooding similar to the one that killed more than a thousand people in Nepal and Tibet last month.

Copper, energy and data

President Javier Milei has looked to attract major oil ⁠and mining investments to Argentina through tax breaks and regulatory reforms, including changes to the 2010 Glacier Law banning damaging commercial activity on the country’s nearly 17,000 documented glaciers.

Changes to the law passed by MPs in April this year transferred responsibility of defining protected glacier areas to provincial governments, something Milei said would “empower” them to permit exploitation in glacial zones where they judged there was “nothing to protect”, reported BBC.

Bosses from mining giants Glencore, Lundin and BHP Group have all visited Milei in the last year, reported Bloomberg, and, along with others, are “keen to invest about $40 billion in Argentina’s untapped copper belt”.

Milei’s efforts to court Big Tech also appear to be paying off. Investors have been eyeing up potential sites in Patagonia for new data centres, enticed by “cool temperatures, renewable energy, shale gas and empty stretches of land”, as well as a lack of organised opposition, said Reuters. Last October, OpenAI announced plans to partner with a local company to build a data centre powered by clean energy costing up to $25 billion.

But while Patagonia “has energy resources and a favorable climate, infrastructure and connectivity remain hurdles”. There is also anxiety among investors ahead of the 2027 presidential election and the potential victory of a left-wing candidate. “They would feel more comfortable if Milei was re-elected,” said Luis Schilling, Latin America co-chair for iMasons, a US digital infrastructure non-profit.

‘Daughter of water’

Argentina’s glaciers provide water to 36 river basins across 12 provinces, which are home to more than seven million people. “In years with especially low rain and snowfall” water from melted glaciers “helps to minimise the impact of droughts” which have become “increasingly common” in recent years, said BBC business reporter Rachel Flynn.

“The Andes mountains, with their winter snow and glaciers, feed the rivers and streams that flow into the valley to irrigate our crops,” Virginia de Valle, whose family runs a vineyard in the Mendoza region, told the broadcaster. “This is also the water we consume in our homes. That is why people say ‘Mendoza is the daughter of water’.”

A study using MapBiomas data reported that 42% of all Andean glaciers have already disappeared, and according to data from Argentine Institute of Snow Science, Glaciology and Environmental Sciences, the amount of ice lost annually by Argentine glaciers could supply all Argentinians for a year and a half.

Changes to the Glacier Law have sparked widespread public protest in areas reliant on them for water. Scientists and geologists have warned that glacial development will further accelerate the retreat of Andean ice sheets, creating unstable conditions that expose Argentina – as well as neighbouring Chile and Peru – to the risk of catastrophic floods and mudslides.

In November 2005, the collapse of the Laguna de los Erizos reservoir in San Juan province unleashed a 1.1 billion cubic-feet mudslide that stretched for 155 miles, although its remote location prevented any deaths. “What happened in Nepal has already happened in Argentina,” Juan Pablo Milana, a researcher with Argentina’s National Scientific and Technical Research Council, told Argentinian news site Infobae.

Mosquito excrement could provide valuable insight on potential pathogens. Scientists have created a “toilet” to collect the insect waste, which can then be analyzed. The results showed a variety of viruses, including some never seen before.

Valuable waste

Mosquito excreta (or waste matter) has “recently emerged as a promising alternative substrate for pathogen detection,” said a study published in the journal Microbiology Spectrum. This detection in mosquito populations “can provide a critical warning before human cases begin, allowing health officials to act quickly.”

Analyzing mosquito waste showed the presence of viruses along with other parasites. To collect the mosquito excretions, scientists built a “mosquito toilet,” which is a “3D-printed funnel coated with a superhydrophobic (water-repelling) material that causes liquid to bead up and slide into a collection tube,” said a release about the study.

Researchers then sequenced the genetic material and “recovered a complete West Nile virus genome, found the first known evidence of a Hedwig-like virus in the Americas and detected several viruses that may be new to science,” said the release. (The Hedwig virus was first “identified in Europe in snowy owl tissue, prompting scientists to name it after Harry Potter’s famous white owl.”) Some of the infected birds also had West Nile virus. Scientists “don’t know whether Hedwig-like viruses make birds sick, facilitate West Nile infections or simply coexist with other viruses.”

Along with West Nile and the Hedwig-like virus, the mosquito waste also contained trypanosomatids, which are “single-celled parasites associated with insects and other hosts,” said Earth.com. One parasite “produced tens of thousands of genetic matches in the samples.”

Traditional mosquito surveillance “requires collecting large numbers of insects, sorting them by species, grinding them into pools and testing for specific pathogens,” said Lab Compare. This slow process can “delay information during an outbreak and only detects what researchers already know to look for.” If “you don’t look for it, you won’t find it,” Dana Price, an entomologist and associate professor at Rutgers University who led the research, said in the release. “But what if you don’t know what to look for?”

Time and place

While the presence of the viruses and microbes is alarming, experts say there is no need to panic. “A virus found for the first time in a region may have recently arrived or may have gone unnoticed for years,” said the release. Only a “few broad mosquito-virus studies have been conducted in North America,” so “organisms that seem geographically restricted may prove widespread.”

The “more data we generate, the more we start to wonder if everything is everywhere,” Price said in the release. “Although we don’t yet know how much of everything is everywhere, it may be a lot more than we realize.” Also, just because a pathogen is found in mosquitoes does not mean it will pass to humans.

This study only involved 100 mosquitoes collected from one location in New Jersey, so the “results cannot show how common these viruses are across New Jersey or elsewhere in North America,” said Earth.com. The mosquitoes were also “moved into the collection device in a laboratory” rather than tested at the collection point.

Researchers are now “working toward a field-ready trap that would collect mosquitoes and their waste,” said the release. Eventually there may be a “system that could prepare samples, sequence genetic material, analyze the results remotely and alert scientists to a possible threat in real time.”

“If a left-wing candidate can win in New York, then there’s no reason it can’t happen in Berlin.” A year on from her comments after Zohran Mamdani’s victory, Elif Eralp looks likely to be elected as the mayor of Berlin. She would be the first Turkish-origin person in the role, and the first candidate from left-wing party Die Linke to become mayor since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Victory for Die Linke does not guarantee Eralp will become mayor, said The Berliner. The new parliament has to elect the governing mayor and, with 47 seats out of 158 in the state parliament, Die Linke will need to form a coalition. The centre-right CDU refuses to engage with them, but a joint government with the Greens and the Social Democratic Party would be a “realistic” outcome.

‘Generational shift’

Eralp has become the “new face of radical left-wing parties asserting themselves in major cities around the world”, said Le Monde. Her “historic win” is all the more impressive considering she inherited a party “marred by internal divisions”. Now, it is “one of the most dynamic forces in German politics.

Die Linke, which emerged from the communist Socialist Unity Party that ruled East Germany until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, has undergone a “striking generational shift” in the last three years, said the Financial Times. A recent overhaul has seen the party “draw a tidal wave of new supporters, doubling its membership in the space of a year, reaching 123,000 at the end of 2025”.

A younger, predominantly female cohort has emerged at the top of the party leadership, who have not been afraid to take on AfD and have become “social media stars on the German left”. Eralp and others have “cultivated a recognisable style: sharp fringes, tattoos, hoop earrings and red lipstick”, which she is often seen sporting alongside “jeans and trainers with a bomber jacket”. She also regularly wears a gold necklace which displays the word “Mietendeckel” (“rent cap”).

On ‘borrowed time’

Berlin’s housing crisis was “at the heart of Eralp's campaign” said Euro News. She called for rent caps, an increase in social housing, and has floated the idea of expropriating properties from large housing portfolios to come under government control. And this fits the issues facing Berliners, said Novara Media. In Berlin, 84% of the population rent, and “more than half from private landlords”, while “10% of Berliners live in housing poverty”. A 2021 referendum saw Berliners support the city government’s seizing of privately-owned flats from large corporate landlords.

Pressure had already been “mounting” on Chancellor Friedrich Merz following the success of the AfD in regional elections, and his “struggles to push through promised economic and social welfare reforms”, said Al Jazeera. Less than 18 months into power, his approval ratings have tanked to around 14%, “raising doubts among fellow party members about whether he can continue to lead”.

The “cumulative effect” of the losses to both the right and the left “can hardly be exaggerated”, said The Guardian. Merz cancelled a planned trip to speak to the UN in New York, “already anticipating he would need to be in Berlin to grapple” with the aftermath of the state election. For now, he has vowed to remain in post, but for many, the German leader is “on borrowed time”.

To be loved is to be smelled, at least according to the manosphere. In the newest internet trend, young men are “pheromonemaxxing,” opting to forgo hygiene rituals to emphasize natural body odor and attract mates. The science behind human pheromones, however, is wishy-washy at best, and maximizing odor may also be putting your love life in a funk.

Pheromones are not all the same

Similar to the looksmaxxing trend, pheromonemaxxing is based on the idea that “natural body odor may contain chemicals that influence attraction” and that a person’s scent could make them “more appealing to a potential mate,” said NBC News. Partaking in the trend involves “ditching deodorant, skipping showers” and in a gross escalation for the most committed, “drinking their own urine to ‘sweat out toxins,’” said Vice. The goal is “amplifying a ‘natural musk’ that allegedly contains pheromones that make you biologically irresistible.”

A pheromone is a “chemical messenger made inside the body of one member of a species” that is “secreted or excreted and reliably produces a response in another member of that same species,” said Samuel Cornell, a research fellow in public health at the University of Queensland, and Rob Brooks, a professor of evolution at the University of New South Wales, at The Conversation. But while some pheromones are for the purpose of attracting mates, many are not sexual. For example, “alarm pheromones might warn others about danger, and food trail pheromones might inform colleagues about where food is located,” said Forbes.

Sex pheromones in some animals do attract mates, but pheromonemaxxing relies on the belief that humans are “like ants, moths, mice and other animals known to secrete pheromones,” said Forbes. Unfortunately, human mating is far more complex.

Some research has found that people are “unconsciously drawn to partners whose immune profile differs from their own,” but it is not a guarantee, as research has also found that hormonal birth control “appears to completely reverse” the preference, said Vice. The studies with these conclusions have not held up over time and may be victims of publication bias.

To have or not to have pheromones

Scientists have yet to find conclusive evidence about whether humans have or are able to detect pheromones. The chemicals require a biological method to be received. In many animals, “that job falls to the vomeronasal organ, a small structure in the nasal cavity wired to a dedicated processing station in the brain called the accessory olfactory bulb,” said Cornell and Brooks.

While “some humans have a vomeronasal pit,” from birth there are “no nerve cells in it connecting to the brain and no accessory olfactory bulb for a signal to report to,” said Cornell and Brooks. There has also never been a chemical in humans that “meets the criteria to be labeled a pheromone.”

However, just because we haven’t found any doesn’t mean we don’t have pheromones. Because other mammals can have pheromones, it is “highly likely that humans do too,” said Tristram Wyatt, a senior research fellow in biology at the University of Oxford, to IFL Science. One of the clues is the “smells we give off as we grow up and go through puberty.”

Even if humans do have pheromones, thumbing your nose at showering does not mean you can “select for what remains on your body and what doesn’t,” said Forbes. It is “hard to selectively remain dirty,” as “everything that your body has accumulated throughout the day and night” stays there, which could include “alarm pheromones and food trail pheromones if they do exist on humans.”

It is ultimately important not to “confuse sensing and liking different smells with detecting and being affected by pheromones,” said Forbes. Sweat is “just a mix of 99% water, electrolytes (salts) and then tiny amounts of urea, ammonia and other compounds.” The mixture, said Cornell and Brooks, can become a “cozy breeding ground for bacteria, and that will start to cause a stench.”

Humans have been getting high for longer than you might assume. Researchers have found evidence that ancient humans chewed on betel nuts, a stimulant still widely used today. The seed may have been employed as a painkiller or as a social and cultural practice still influencing its modern use.

A dated drug

Researchers analyzed the teeth of early human foragers from the Indonesian island of Sulawesi and found “dental pathology” most likely attributed to the “habitual sucking of whole betel nuts,” said a study published in the journal Science Advances. The earliest human remains studied were dated to 25,000 to 16,000 years ago, and the other was dated 7,600 to 6,300 years ago. Written accounts of betel nut chewing go back approximately 2,000 years, while previous archaeological evidence goes back about 3,500 years. The new findings extend the potential betel nut use by tens of thousands of years.

The two skeletal remains, while dated over 10,000 years apart, “shared a common trait: deep, rounded grooves in some of their teeth,” the authors of the study said at The Conversation. The grooves were “unlike any previously documented form of prehistoric dental wear” and “pointed to an unusual activity, performed repeatedly over a long period.” The researchers compared the dental wear to “‘clay pipe facets’ seen in people from the colonial period.” The facets were “rounded notches worn into the teeth of habitual smokers who regularly clenched the abrasive stems of clay tobacco pipes.”

This similarity led the researchers to the betel nut, as the “rounded seeds of the Areca catechu palm generally match the size and shape of the grooves,” said the authors at The Conversation. While not well known in the U.S., the betel nut is “one of the world’s most popular intoxicants,” especially in Southeast Asia, said Popular Science. The seeds are generally “prepared by grinding and processing the plant seeds with slaked lime (calcium hydroxide),” then “often combined with additional ingredients such as flavoring spices or tobacco.” Chewing the drug produces a euphoric effect because of a psychoactive ingredient called arecoline, and millions of people are still betel users today.

A time-honored tradition

Prehistoric humans likely used betel nuts as painkillers, but in chewing on them, they “wore their teeth down to the pulp, which would have been excruciating,” said The New York Times. Because of the pain from tooth damage, they may have upped their betel nut consumption, ultimately worsening the addiction. “It’s strong evidence that this was an early form of drug use,” and it “appears to be what then gave rise to this modern, very widespread tradition throughout the Asia-Pacific region, Adam Brumm, a professor of archaeology in the Australian Research Center for Human Evolution at Griffith University and the lead author of the study, said to the Times.

It is “fascinating to see the negative effects that drug addiction, if you want to call it that, had on ancient people before the development of alcohol, nicotine and caffeine,” Brumm told the Times. The seed may also hold significant social and cultural importance, making it more than just a drug today. “Modern betel-nut chewing is definitely a very social thing,” Brumm said. “It has very deep symbolism in lots of cultures.”

The British glass industry could become “No. 10 North’s first major test”, said the Financial Times. A new government green levy introduced last year has put thousands of jobs at risk in the “heavily northern-based sector”, creating a headache for Prime Minister Andy Burnham.

‘Polluter pays’

The Extended Producer Responsibility scheme is based on “the ’polluter pays’ principle to help local councils with the cost of recycling”, said The Times. It makes businesses responsible for the collection and recycling costs of the goods they put on the market, including packaging. Because the fees are calculated according to weight, glass is facing disproportionate costs compared to cardboard and plastic.

The policy, drawn up by the Department for the Environment, Farming and Rural Affairs, is expected to raise around £1.6 billion a year. But it comes at an “acute time” for the glass sector, industry body British Glass told The Times.

The policy is making the British glass industry more expensive than the cheap imports from China and Turkey which are flooding the market. Five of the six main glass packaging manufacturers are based overseas, so the UK “has to be attractive to foreign owners as an economy but also from a policy point of view”, a spokesperson said.

Call to reconsider

Breweries and the pub industry have “long urged a rethink” on the levy, which they claim offers a perverse incentive for retailers to opt for less sustainable plastic packaging, said the Financial Times. There is also support for amending the scheme within Labour: the Business Secretary, Jonathan Reynolds, is among the cabinet ministers who have “privately been pushing for changes to the policy”.

“Too many take glass for granted”, wrote Brian Leishman, the Labour MP for Alloa and Grangemouth, on Politics Home, but this is a £1.3 billion industry “supporting well over 100,000 jobs”, and it’s “hugely important for the government to reconsider pressing ahead” with these worrying regulations.

Action needs to come swiftly, said Labour List. “Stand next to a glass furnace for a few minutes, feel the heat, listen to the noise and one thing becomes obvious”: this is not an industry “that can simply switch off at the end of the day” or “wait for market conditions to improve”.

Who we are and who we become may be in our genes, at least partially. A new study links a variety of gene variants to various personality traits and lifestyles. These findings displayed patterns across large demographics, though experiences and surroundings still play a pivotal role in individual development.

In your DNA

Over 1,000 gene variants are associated with personality, including more than 800 not previously linked to it, according to a study published in the journal Nature. These genetic variants also “partially predict mental and physical health, longevity, education, career paths and outcomes and even how people are perceived by close others,” said a release about the study. While scientists have known that a variety of factors, including DNA, could affect personality, the “challenge has been deciphering the specific pathways through which a genetic blueprint nudges the direction of a person’s life,” said The New York Times.

In order to analyze how genes affect personality, researchers had participants from 46 different cohorts provide DNA samples and fill out a questionnaire measuring the “Big Five” personality traits, which are “openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism,” said the release. These traits are “relatively stable and habitual differences in how people think, feel and act.” The data also included demographic and lifestyle information about the participants, allowing the researchers to “see links between personality traits, genetic variants and other parts of people’s lives as well,” said Time.

For example, the variants linked to conscientiousness “were associated with being more active during the day while variants linked to openness to experience and extraversion were linked to being more of a night owl,” said the release. Those with variants associated with neuroticism tended to spend more time at hospitals. Scientists also analyzed fraternal twins and siblings, who are raised in the same surroundings, finding that “genetic effects on personality within families were almost identical to those found between unrelated people,” said ScienceAlert.

Nature vs. nurture

Of course, experiences can also shape personality. Genetic variants linked to openness “predicted that a person would move to more cosmopolitan neighborhoods” but “living in those neighborhoods may reinforce and further shape that same trait,” said the release. Genes obviously “influence our personality predispositions,” Michel Nivard, a genetic epidemiologist at the University of Bristol and a senior author of the study, said to ScienceAlert. “But there are clearly also substantial environmental causes of personality, which collectively explain the majority of individual differences.”

Cultural differences and societal perception additionally affected the results of the study. Of the Big Five, “agreeableness proved the most difficult to analyze,” as researchers found “weaker genetic correlations across countries and evidence that the trait is less heritable than the others,” said El País. This could potentially be because “‘agreeable’ may not mean the same thing everywhere.” This study is the “first time genetics has made it possible to assess objectively whether two cultures are measuring the same thing when they use the same word.”

Ultimately, genetic differences only “account for only about 5 to 10% of personality variation among people,” said the Times. A “person’s DNA and context are constantly interacting,” and “experiences are the very tool that genetic predispositions use to mold who a person becomes.” If “we’d want to know someone’s personality at an individual level, genetics isn’t really a fruitful path,” Nivard said to ScienceAlert. Instead, “what genes do offer us is a way to link personality, in the aggregate across groups of people, to all other outcomes we have ever previously studied.”

The South Korean government has launched an app which allows victims of stalking offences to be notified if their stalker comes within range. More than 400 people are enrolled in the scheme, which has been operating since June.

Control centres in Seoul and Daejeon cover more than 5,000 people under electronic monitoring, and handle 19,000 alerts a day, said The Guardian. “Most are filtered out by staff at the centres but about 300 a day are serious enough to send out a probation officer.”

Stalking cases are “on the rise” in South Korea. In the four years since a dedicated stalking law was introduced in 2021, reports have tripled, reaching 44,687 in 2025. Many South Koreans believe the government needs to do more to address the root causes behind the epidemic.

Greater visibility

Previously, survivors received a text message warning if their stalker was nearby and giving an estimated distance, said The Guardian. The new app notifies the victim if their stalker is within a 2km radius, flagging their precise location on a real-time map.

If the offender comes closer than a kilometre, the app notifies police; probation authorities will then call the victim to establish their safety and can dispatch officers to the area.

One case in particular fast-tracked the development of the app, said The Korea Times. In March, a woman in her 20s was allegedly murdered by her ex-partner, who was the subject of multiple restraining orders and was wearing an ankle monitor to track his location. The victim had been wearing a smartwatch issued to her by police for her protection. According to lawmaker Lee Gwang-hee, a member of the ruling Democratic Party of Korea, between 2021 and August 2025, 23 murders or attempted murders involved victims who had been issued emergency alert devices, said The Korea Herald.

Tracking remains contentious. Under current laws, police must apply through the legal system to force a suspected stalker to wear an ankle tracker. In 2024 and 2025, 29,404 people were arrested in stalking cases, of which only 1,187 had court applications brought against them. Only 427 of those were granted.

‘Mixed’ reactions

Though the app is “in its early days” and on a “limited scale”, it has drawn “mixed” reactions, said The Guardian. One stalking victim who spent “two weeks moving between state-run shelters for survivors of domestic violence before being given a panic-button” told the newspaper that she would have “welcomed” the detailed real-time information provided by the app.

“Knowing a perpetrator’s whereabouts can be more helpful than not knowing,” Sujeong Kim of Korea Women’s Hotline told the paper. But victims may end up “checking wherever they go” to see whether the perpetrator has entered the radius, “adding to the psychological burden of living with the threat”. Too much information on the stalker’s location “risks shifting responsibility for their safety” onto the victim.

Non-technological measures are also planned to increase victim safety. In April 2027, the government is changing the legal process to allow stalking victims to “directly petition courts for restraining orders”, instead of relying on law enforcement agencies to file requests on their behalf, said The Straits Times. In July, a new taskforce was launched to focus on “addressing gaps in laws, systems and on-the-ground responses” around stalking offences, said Korea JoongAng Daily. The country’s justice ministry has also developed a “specialised psychological treatment programme to identify risk factors for recidivism” in stalkers.

Space travel is taking off, but landing on the moon will be no easy feat. The first-ever spaceport could join the moon’s orbit in the next 20 years, increasing space traffic. As a result, plans need to be made to deal with the logistics of several celestial vehicles taxiing and docking at the port and eventually at a permanent moon settlement.

Arrivals and departures

NASA during the next two decades is preparing to implement its Gateway, a small space station designed to be a “multipurpose outpost supporting lunar surface missions, science in lunar orbit and human exploration further into the cosmos,” said NASA. With increased cosmic traffic, there need to be systems in place to manage the flow, according to a study published in the journal Acta Astronautica. The station will become an airport for space travel but “won’t have concrete runways crowded with airplanes, flashing taxiway lights or a crackling voice over an intercom,” said a release about the study.

The Gateway “will not circle the moon the way a satellite circles Earth” and will instead “travel in a near-rectilinear halo orbit, or NRHO, an elongated path shaped by the combined gravity of Earth and the moon rather than by the moon alone,” said Earth.com. The NRHO “passes within 1,000 miles of the moon’s north pole” and then rounds its turn “about 40,000 miles past the lunar south pole,” said Popular Science. The Gateway NRHO “provides an uninterrupted line of sight for communications to Earth and requires little propellant to maintain,” Diane Davis, an associate professor of space engineering at the Texas A&M University College of Engineering and an author of the study, said in the release.

However, the catch is that any spacecraft that enters the NRHO “will be subject to a gravitational tug-of-war between Earth and the moon,” said the science publication Nautilus. Lunar and space missions are also “likely to involve multiple spacecraft arriving, orbiting and leaving at similar times.” With several crafts, traffic management in the form of loitering, or the “careful choreography of spacecraft positioning,” will be necessary, said the release.

Unlike parking at an earthly airport, vehicles in space require “continuous effort to counteract the forces of orbital physics over extended periods, such as days or weeks,” since each spacecraft is moving constantly, said Universe magazine. Scientists are “required to ascertain a distance that ensures sufficient separation for safety while remaining sufficiently proximate to their destination to optimize fuel efficiency.”

Control tower

To tackle what could be a logistical nightmare, scientists ran thousands of computer simulations to test “strategies for keeping vehicles carefully spaced around Gateway while accounting for realistic navigation errors, thruster imperfections and even small disturbances expected during future Artemis missions,” said the release. They found that “modest increases in station-keeping maneuvers allowed spacecraft to stay significantly closer to their intended positions, requiring only small changes in propellant use.”

The proposal is to “get everything moving together, rather than each spacecraft focusing exclusively on its own path around the moon,” said Nautilus. “By sharing data and continually calculating the position of the Gateway, spacecraft can follow a ‘string of pearls’ formation that keeps everybody at a safe distance.”

The concepts “remain incredibly complex to translate into multibillion-dollar missions with dozens of lives on the line,” said Popular Science. “Greater positional accuracy means mission planners can better predict where every spacecraft will be, preserving valuable fuel,” Davis said in the release. “The future of lunar exploration depends as much on the traffic management as it does on the rocket science.”

The Italian government has “moved in a unilateral and arrogant way, treating Sardinia like the Cayenne of Italy”, said Alessandra Todde, governor of Sardinia.

The official, referring to the former penal colony off the coast of French Guiana, nicknamed “Devil’s Island”, has accused the government of ignoring her objections, and not permitting her to be “involved in decisions that directly affect” Sardinia, said Il Sole 24 Ore.

Last weekend, 88 high-security prisoners arrived on the island, said The Times. They are among the “746 inmates held under Italy’s toughest solitary confinement rules”, taking Sardinia’s total to 183, a quarter of the national total.

Starting with protest flashpoints in February, Sardinians continue to oppose the prisoners’ relocation to the island, but one prison official told the newspaper: “we can’t send them to Sicily because many of them come from there in the first place”.

‘Alcatraz of Italy’

This is not the first time the island has been perceived by the central government as a favourable location for prisons, said The Times. In the 1990s, Sardinia “endured an influx of mobster prisoners” after a government crackdown on Cosa Nostra, the Sicilian mafia. Many were locked up on Asinara, a small island off the Sardinian coast, including Raffaele Cutolo, a crime boss from Naples, and Salvatore “Toto” Riina, the head of Cosa Nostra. Asinara was nicknamed the “Alcatraz of Italy”, and only one prisoner escaped during its 112 years as a prison before it closed in 1997.

Implementing this process is the “first concrete result of the government’s plan to concentrate harsh imprisonment in seven Italian facilities, three of which are located in Sardinia”, said L’Independiente. Transferring the prisoners to the island also required significant logistical planning. Transporting the 88 prisoners required two finance police aircraft plus “10 military flights, 65 vehicles, eight ground convoys, seven ambulances, two drones and 207 officers”.

The prisoners will continue to be detained under the “hardline” “41 bis” programme, which promotes near-complete isolation, said The Italian Times. Introduced in 1992 following the assassinations by the mafia of prosecutors Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, the regime is designed to “sever” contact with criminal networks outside jail.

The government has framed this “Sardinia expansion” as part of a “multi-region overhaul” of this system, concentrating the most high-risk criminals in regional posts. But the 41 bis regime has come under fire, being repeatedly challenged by the European Court of Human Rights. The initial stages of this rollout are a “test of how far Rome can concentrate its highest-security prisoners without triggering a fresh rights dispute at home and abroad.”

Movement of mafia clans

With its “silky, white beaches, turquoise bays and terracotta villages, Sardinia has worked hard” to forget its past and to “position itself as one of Europe’s most popular holiday destinations”, said The Telegraph. Asinara, which once hosted a maximum-security prison, became a national park in 1997. Now, it is “famed for its unique population of albino donkeys”. Local businesses are concerned this appealing image will be “tarnished” by the government’s plans to “dump hundreds of maximum-security prisoners in its jails”.

Locals fear that the island’s culture, once linked to “notorious mobsters and convicted terrorists” incarcerated away from the mainland, could re-emerge, said The Independent. As more high-security prisoners arrive, mafia clans could “move from mainland Italy to be near jailed relatives”. The risk would no longer be of violence, but of “white-collar crime”, with authorities concerned that the “precarious working conditions and low salaries provide an ideal environment for the clans”. There would be clear opportunities to “launder illicit money and infiltrate business, particularly in less developed areas”.

Sardinia already faces one of the country’s highest prisoner-to-inhabitant ratios, and increasing that could strain services. Like much of southern Italy, Sardinia has a “fragile healthcare system and an ageing population”. Additionally, islanders face “higher inmate healthcare costs than in other parts of the country.” If a “mobster” in prison were to require hospital treatment, they would require an escort of “dozens of prison guards”, and in order to accommodate them, and protect the public, authorities could be forced to “shut entire wards”.

A non-league footballer who “revs up teammates with F-bombs in a thick London accent” has become the “unlikely successor to the throne of a traditional kingdom in Uganda”, said The Times.

George Desmond Kamurasi, captain and goalkeeper of SE Dons in Bexleyheath, southeast London, is a first cousin of the Tooro region’s late king and a grandson of King George David Matthew Kamurasi Rukidi III, who ruled between 1928 and 1965.

Prison breakthrough

The royal succession committee of the Tooro kingdom selected Kamurasi following the death of King Oyo Nyimba Kabamba Iguru Rukidi IV, who had occupied the Tooro throne since 1995 after succeeding his father at the age of three.

Oyo’s death prompted an “outpouring of grief” across Tooro and Uganda, said UG Diplomat. The nation’s president, Yoweri Museveni, described him as a “good person and a good leader,” whose death was “a great loss to the people of Tooro and Uganda”.

In contrast to Oyo, Kamurasi has spent most of his adulthood in Britain, “building a life largely outside Uganda’s royal spotlight”, said Pulse.

He has spoken of a “difficult adolescence” – his mother died when he was 14, leaving him “vulnerable to bad influences”, and he has remembered being “angry” and making poor decisions. “I got into the wrong circle and ended up in jail.”

But then “I realised that everything I had done was my fault” and “I took responsibility”.

After serving his jail sentence, football “became his route to rebuilding his life”. Kamurasi once played in Barcelona, where he was watched by Pep Guardiola, and in England he played lower-league and grassroots football for clubs including Ashford United.

Videos from his coaching sessions “portray an intense and motivational figure” who speaks about “discipline, responsibility and the need to recover from failure”.

Strong mobiliser

The royal succession committee selected Kamurasi last week, with 15 of the 18 members present voting for him, and a formal proclamation is expected after Oyo’s burial this weekend.

He’s “said to be reluctant to swap his goalkeeping gloves for the crown”, said The Times. The Spy in Uganda quoted unnamed sources “close to the unfolding succession process” claiming that Kamurasi doesn’t wish to leave London and inherit the kingdom.

But if the succession committee’s decision is officially confirmed and he accepts the role, the “qualities” he preached on the football pitch, such as “discipline, resilience, accountability and hunger for success” will then be “tested on a much bigger stage”, said Pulse.

Opinion on social media is divided over the prospect of the 6ft 6in footballer returning as monarch. He “looks like a strong mobiliser, no nonsense, aggressive”, said Ugandan author Cynthia Natkoto on X. “For the people of Tooro, that’s a good thing.”

But another X user described the prospect as “a crazy turn of events” and some have wondered how the kingdom would take to a king who is married to a “mzungu”, in his case a white British woman.

While fog can create an eerie, lonely atmosphere, it’s teeming with life. Scientists have found vibrant microbial communities in low-hanging clouds, including bacteria that can detoxify air pollution. And these microbes could play a larger role in our air quality than previously expected.

Misty microbes

Fog water can have “bacterial concentrations similar to those in continental or marine bodies of water” and “contain microbiomes well-differentiated in composition from those in the dry aerosol microbiomes,” said a study published in the journal mBio. While scientists have known that bacteria and other microbes exist in the air, not much was known about “whether those airborne microbes are doing much,” be it “growing, feeding, dividing and changing the air around them” or “simply waiting to land somewhere better,” said ZME Science.

Fog is “basically just a cloud that’s low to the ground — water vapor that has condensed or frozen to form tiny droplets or crystals in the air,” said The Weather Channel. Researchers focused on radiation fog, which is the still kind that “occurs on clear nights as the ground cools the moist air immediately above it.”

They “collected and analyzed samples from 32 separate fog events along with aerosol particles gathered before, during and after fog formation,” said a release about the study by Susquehanna University. The findings showed that fog is “more than a vehicle for transporting microbes” and could be a “habitat where bacteria can thrive and positively influence atmospheric chemistry, air quality and even climate processes.”

While “fewer than 1% of fog droplets contain bacteria,” when “averaged together, they represent an astounding amount of life,” said a release by Arizona State University (ASU). “When you take all of the droplets together, the concentration of bacteria is the same as in the ocean,” said study co-author Ferran Garcia-Pichel, the director of the ASU Biodesign Center for Fundamental and Applied Microbiomics, in the release. Each fog event had an average of 188 unique bacterial signatures, and the “communities of microbes present were similar across all fog samples” but “differed quite a bit from those found in air without fog,” said Science News Explores.

Cloud cleaning

Scientists identified Methylobacterium as “one of the most abundant bacteria in the samples,” said the Susquehanna release. These microbes “consume single-carbon compounds such as formaldehyde,” which is a common air pollutant “resulting from the combustion of carbon fuels that contributes to ozone smog and poses health risks.”

The Methylobacteria “cleared such large amounts of formaldehyde so quickly that the researchers suspected they weren’t just eating it,” said the ASU release. At “high levels, the chemical is toxic to the bacteria, so they break it down into carbon dioxide to keep the levels low,” which is a “win-win for microbes and humans alike.”

“We observed them under the microscope to see that, yes, the bacteria are getting bigger and they are dividing, so there’s growth,” making fog a microbial habitat, said lead study author Thi Thuong Thuong Cao, a postdoctoral researcher at ASU, in the ASU release. The potential for “harvesting fog for drinking water has also been up for discussion,” said The Weather Channel. “Now, we need to consider and further study if these air-cleaning benefits are too good to pass up.”

People “think of fog as just water droplets,” said study co-author Derek Straub, an associate professor at Susquehanna University, in the Susquehanna release. But there’s a “tremendous amount happening inside those droplets that we are only beginning to understand.”

Prince Alois of Liechtenstein is expected to veto an initiative passed by the country’s parliament that would legalise abortion during the first 12 weeks of pregnancy.

Situated between Switzerland and Austria, Liechtenstein – the majority of whose roughly 42,000 citizens identify as Roman Catholic – has some of the most restrictive abortion laws in Europe. The tiny Alpine principality is also “one of the few places on earth where a royal family still reigns with real political power”, said The Australian Women’s Weekly. Unlike other European monarchies, the constitution allows the ruling prince to dismiss governments, appoint judges, call referendums and veto legislation.

‘Protection of life’

Liechtenstein last held a referendum on legalising abortion in 2011, when the proposal was rejected by 52% of voters. Under current laws, abortion is allowed only in limited circumstances, including when a woman’s life is at risk, or if pregnancy involves a girl under the age of 14 (the age of consent) and/or is the result of rape. A woman who undergoes a termination outside those exemptions can be jailed for up to a year, with abortion providers liable for up to three years in prison.

Last week Liechtenstein’s parliament, the 25-seat Landtag, narrowly backed a citizens’ initiative which would legalise abortion during the first 12 weeks of pregnancy, by 13 votes to 12. It would also lift the country’s ban on providing information about abortions and bring them under health insurance cover. MPs rejected another proposal to put the matter to a public vote, despite a public opinion survey, the Lie Barometer, showing that a majority would vote in favour of it.

The initiative is unlikely to become law, however, after Prince Alois, who serves as regent for his father Prince Hans-Adam II, indicated to the Liechtensteiner Vaterland newspaper earlier this year he would veto any legislation of this kind, citing “the central legal interest of the protection of life”.

Currently, women in Liechtenstein must travel abroad if they wish to have an abortion, although since 2015 they have been able to do so without facing a penalty.

Liechtenstein has also not had a maternity ward for several years, “meaning that women must travel abroad to give birth”, said Vatican News. Benno Elbs, the archbishop of Vaduz, stressed the importance of a support system in which “saying yes to life becomes possible”. “A society that protects life must also be a society that does not abandon people in difficulty,” he told the publication.

‘Broader consolidation of power’

The last time the abortion debate was put to a public vote, the royal family threatened to use its power of veto if the result did not go in their favour. Such a step “would have plunged our nation into a severe crisis”, said Gabriella Alvarez-Hummel, a campaigner from Liechtenstein focusing on reproductive rights, in The Guardian. More than a decade on, “speaking out in favour of legalising abortion is regarded as speaking out against the monarchy”.

In August, Prince Alois announced a change to royal succession rules to allow women to ascend the throne on equal terms with men, breaking with three centuries of dynastic tradition. “This means that in future the first-born child, regardless of sex, will become heir to the throne and later princess or prince of Liechtenstein”, the House of Liechtenstein said in a statement.

The move was “hailed as overdue progress” but it also “masked a much broader consolidation of power”, said the Financial Times. Internal documents seen by the FT show that in a closed-door session of family members over the summer “Europe’s wealthiest ruling dynasty had quietly approved an overhaul that strengthens the authority of a prince who already wields extraordinary power”, while at the same time “reducing some of the rights and checks exercised by his relatives in the Princely House of Liechtenstein”.

Checks on Prince Alois were already “quite limited”, Wouter Veenendaal, professor of kingdom affairs at Leiden University, told the newspaper. The powers he now wields “would be unthinkable in Europe’s larger constitutional monarchies”.

Everyone wants to go to space, but at what cost? Companies that have been hoping to colonize the cosmos are not addressing the potential environmental and atmospheric impacts of that expansion. This phenomenon is known as starwashing, and it is likely only going to become more common.

Taking space

Starwashing, a spin on greenwashing, is when space companies “sell space exploration narratives by appealing to a desire to expand humankind beyond Earth” while “downplaying or omitting the negative repercussions for Earth and the space environment,” Marissa E. Yingling, an associate professor of social work at the University of Louisville who first popularized the term, said at The Conversation. These companies “appeal to your sense of cosmic wonder” as well as to an “interest in learning about life’s origins, Earth’s place in the universe or the desire for humans to explore places beyond our planet.”

The problem is that starwashing “takes attention away from actually solving the problems that are here on Earth,” Gregers Andersen, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Southern Denmark, said to Grist. For example, Blue Origin’s founder, Jeff Bezos, “envisions building space habitats that could house billions as a solution to environmental catastrophes on Earth” and “outlined a vision for moving industry off Earth, most immediately to the moon,” said Yingling. SpaceX’s founder, Elon Musk, has expressed interest in creating human settlements on Mars. But “even if having a fraction of the human population live and work in space one day far in the future were possible, it would not fix pressing environmental crises such as wildfires or climate change in the near term.”

Another source of potential harm is the proliferation of data centers. AI usage has increased the need for these centers, which have very high water requirements. Bezos and Musk “both have companies that build and rely on resource-intensive data centers based on land” and have “espoused plans to construct solar-powered orbital data centers,” said Yingling. They “frame these plans as environmentally beneficial because an orbital data center wouldn’t require the same amount of water or electricity as a data center on Earth.” Yet “orbital data centers, made up of satellite clusters, would add to an already-crowded space environment.” They can also “threaten Earth-based astronomy” and “pollute Earth’s orbit with debris.”

Room for improvement

Unfortunately, putting things in space takes a substantial environmental toll. Spaceflight “leads to a globally averaged depletion of the ozone layer and contributes to global warming,” said a study published in the journal Earth’s Future. “Nearly 88% of the ozone loss comes from nitrogen oxides released by objects reentering the atmosphere.”

Aside from ozone depletion, “space expansion has other environmental effects,” said Grist. These include the “loss of dark sky as satellites reflect sunlight and damage to wildlife habitats around launch sites,” in addition to the “enormous greenhouse gas emissions involved in building and launching satellites.”

If a “rocket, satellite network or lunar mining project is supposed to benefit everyone, companies should have to provide transparent accounting for emissions, land use, debris risks and impacts on communities,” said The Cool Down. There should also be “tougher oversight before new launch facilities, satellite fleets or data-center projects move forward.”

The prevalence of starwashing does not mean that all extraterrestrial endeavors should be scorned, said The Cool Down. “Methane-detecting satellites have uncovered leaks from oil and gas operations in recent years that dramatically exceeded what had been reported,” said Grist, and “astronauts have been shocked by how fragile and delicate Earth’s atmosphere looks from space,” turning a “surprising number of them into climate advocates.”

Two seemingly unrelated incidents more than a year apart have sparked some of the biggest youth protests in Vietnam in a generation.

‘Tree of Justice’

Eighteen-year-old student Do Ngoc Phuong Thuy, known as Mina, was killed in Hanoi in May last year when the motorbike she was travelling on with her father was hit by a car. Tragic as the incident was, few expected it to lead to “an eruption of Gen Z outrage and creativity” that thrust Memorial Tree 55 on Nguyen Huy Tu Street “into the local zeitgeist”, said The New York Times.

The subsequent investigation yielded little information except that the driver had the initials N.S.C. and was born in 1961. This led to social media speculation that former National Assembly deputy Nguyen Sy Cuong was the car driver responsible. Some felt “the incident had been swept under the rug due to the influence of powerful figures”, said the BBC.

But by August 2026 the car crash and Mina’s death had “almost faded from public memory” and “may have stayed that way if hadn’t been for the heavy-handed decision of Vietnam’s minister for culture, Lam Thi Phuong Than, to all but ban a new album by rap artist ‘MCK’”, said academic Nils Mallock on The Conversation. “This censorship against the most popular rap singer among Gen Z drew scrutiny to the culture minister – and from there attention moved to her husband, Nguyen Sy Cuong.”

Within days, millions of young people voiced their outrage online and Tree 55, renamed the “Tree of Justice”, had become ground zero in a growing campaign against a perceived government cover-up.

Government reaction

“Pressurised by more than a year’s worth of growing suspicion and a rush of online attention, the issue had become too big to ignore,” said the BBC.

On the evening of 17 August, state broadcaster Vietnam Television (VTV) aired an official statement from authorities confirming Nguyen Sy Cuong’s involvement in the incident, adding that because he had “sincerely confessed and actively and fully remedied the consequences of his actions”, the victim’s family had submitted a petition to exempt him from prosecution.

In the one-party state, the official acknowledgment of responsibility was “an extraordinary concession to public pressure”, said The New York Times. Warning against “opportunists exploiting the incident on social media”, the TV report “reflected the government’s deep concerns about an unexpected youth movement pushing for accountability at a time when officials are focused on economic growth”.

The Vietnamese authorities are also mindful of the wave of Gen Z protests that “toppled leaders in Nepal, challenged authorities in Indonesia, and continue to rattle the power structure in India”.

Mina’s father Do Viet Hung, who survived the crash, appeared in the VTV broadcast, saying the “family was satisfied with the investigation’s findings”, said the BBC, and asked people “not to be drawn into the influence of reactionary elements”.

A senior police official also said in the report that some people were “leveraging the incident to stoke dissent”. The Ministry of Public Security had “uncovered highly dangerous plots and intentions by hostile forces, reactionaries and bad actors to incite unrest and cause disorder”.

The newest search and rescue recruits are cockroaches. Scientists have outfitted the insects with capabilities to locate and administer medical care to people in remote or hard-to-reach locations. Different kinds of insects could be used for varied purposes and could be a valuable asset for disaster relief in the future.

Engineering and experimentation

Paramedic cyborg cockroaches called Paraborgs can be “field-deployable medical intervention,” said a study published in the journal Advanced Science. The robotic roaches “contain cameras and miniature medical injectors” that “could deliver supervised emergency care to people trapped in collapsed buildings, caves or other places too dangerous for rescuers to reach,” said a release about the study.

“A lot of people might not like the sight of a giant cockroach scurrying toward them,” said the study co-author and Ph.D. candidate Hai Nhan Le in the release. “But if you are trapped in rubble or stuck in a cave and need help, it could make a real difference between life and death.”

To create the cyborgs, scientists fitted North Queensland giant burrowing cockroaches (Macropanesthia rhinoceros), the “heaviest cockroach species in the world that ​measure up to 3.3 inches, with backpacks containing syringe cylinders and cameras,” said Reuters. They “start with anaesthetizing the insect, immobilizing them so that we make sure that they cannot feel anything during the implementation process,” said study co-author Thang Vo-Doan, a biorobotics ‌engineer, to the outlet. “Once we implant an electrode into the insect, we can apply a small electrical signal to activate or stimulate the nerve system so that they can respond to our command.”

While promising, “one of the biggest engineering challenges was getting the cockroaches into the correct position for an injection,” said Interesting Engineering. The insect has to “navigate to the target, position itself accurately and remain stable enough to perform the injection,” said Le in the release.

The good news is that the Paraborgs had a 95% success rate at performing close-range injections in proof-of-concept experiments. “The long-term goal is targeted human-supervised intervention in places conventional medical technologies cannot access,” said Thanh Nho Do, a medical robotics associate professor at the University of New South Wales who worked on the study, in the release.

Harnessing nature

If cyborg insects can “safely enter spaces we can’t, locate casualties and ultimately help deliver emergency care, they could become another valuable tool in the future of urban search and rescue,” said Tim Hassiotis, the superintendent of Fire and Rescue New South Wales, in the release. And other insects could offer promising methods of search and rescue in the future. “Rather than building one robot to do everything, we can harness the natural strengths of different insects and equip them for different missions,” said Vo-Doan in the release.

“Ethical guidelines for invertebrate research are not yet standardized,” said the study. Still, the cockroaches were “provided with a suitable living environment” and “decent nutrition.”

This is not the first time cockroaches have been fitted for other purposes. Scientists previously created tiny diving suits for Madagascar hissing cockroaches that could be used in perilous search operations, according to a study published in the journal Nature Communications. The suit contained electronic controllers to guide the cockroach and “allowed it to survive and operate in oxygen-deprived environments such as underwater” for up to three hours, “transforming it into an amphibious cyborg robot capable of operation across land and water.”

The sweet treat of the future could be plastic. Scientists have found a way to transform plastic waste, along with other food additives and ingredients, into edible cookies. The method could combat refuse accumulation and provide sustenance in remote or disaster locations — or in space someday. However, many are understandably unsure about eating plastic, and there’s a long road ahead before the cookies can hit shelves.

From bottle to bakery

According to research that was presented at the fall 2026 meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS), scientists have “programmed yeasts to turn plastic and agricultural waste into edible proteins and flavoring molecules,” creating a treat deemed µBites (micro bites), said an ACS news release. The cookies could tackle food shortages and plastic pollution.

We were “trying to develop technologies for plastic upcycling to make more valuable products. We thought: Why not focus on making food? Because plastic is carbon, and food is carbon,” said Lahiru Jayakody, a microbiologist at Southern Illinois University Carbondale who worked on the study, in the release.

Polyethylene terephthalate, or PET, from plastic bottles and “discarded sweet corn plant stalks and leaves” were put through a process called “oxidative hydrothermal dissolution,” which “uses heat to break down the materials into components that microbes can digest,” said New Scientist. The components are “fed to yeast that has been genetically altered using CRISPR gene-editing technology,” allowing it to “convert the components into a variety of useful ingredients, including proteins, fats and acids, as well as vanilla flavoring and beta-carotene, which the body can convert into vitamin A.” Then “fiber, starch and sweetener are added, and the paste is extruded through a 3D printer into any desired shape.” Thus µBites are produced.

Bite-size solution

While the “futuristic treats received high ratings on overall aroma and the underlying science implies that µBites are safe to eat, researchers still must wait for institutional approval before beginning actual taste tests,” said Popular Science. “It has a pleasant, appealing aroma,” said graduate student Sandhya Jayasekara, who worked on the study, to New Scientist. “We have not tasted it, but it smells good, like a real cookie.”

Still, plastic cookies likely won’t be a sought-after delicacy. “We produce 400 million tons a year of plastic waste. You are not going to turn it all into cookies,” said Jason Hallett, a professor and researcher at Imperial College London, to New Scientist. It’s “not a solution to the plastic-waste crisis.”

Rather than becoming a mainstream treat, the “µBites system is a tunable and portable device that integrates all necessary components” that could be “deployed in submarines or disaster relief vehicles to produce on-demand, on-site food,” said Jayakody to ScienceAlert. The process is also “particularly suited for using carbon waste in extreme environments such as deserts, the Arctic or the Antarctic to make food” and potentially even “on Mars or the lunar surface.”

We are barreling toward a nuclear problem. Decades-old radioactive waste from discarded containers may be slowly seeping into the Atlantic Ocean and affecting the marine ecosystem. Scientists have conducted dives to collect samples and test the region to determine the extent of the pollution and whether the radioactivity has made its way into the food web.

A barrel of trouble

Between 1950 and 1990, “more than 200,000 barrels filled with radioactive waste were dumped in the depths of the North-East Atlantic,” said a release by the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). Scientists first mapped the area where the barrels were dumped on a mission in summer 2025. They recently completed a second mission where they “carried out 20 dives to depths of over 4,700 meters (15,419 feet), enabling direct observation of several barrels and their immediate surroundings” using a manned submersible called the Nautile.

The barrels “contain low- and intermediate-level radioactive material” including “process sludge, contaminated metal and laboratory equipment,” said Futura. They sit “between 10,000 and 16,000 feet down in international waters.” Using the “Nautile and other instruments deployed from the vessel, together with the samples collected,” CNRS researchers “were able to document the advanced state of deterioration of several barrels, observe that some of them had leaked their contents and identify the various materials used to encapsulate the waste,” said the release.

While the “photographs from the initial cruise revealed barrels in various stages of degradation and corrosion,” images “alone cannot determine if radionuclides have entered the marine food web,” said Futura. To fill in the gaps, the researchers collected “precise water, fauna and sediment samples directly adjacent to the corroded barrels, allowing scientists to measure exactly how far any escaping radioactive materials have migrated into the deep sea ecosystem.”

Nuclear family

Due to barrel deterioration, there were “significant signals of radionuclides specifically linked to this waste, cobalt 60 and niobium 94, in addition to cesium 137 and americium 241,” Javier Escartin and Patrick Chardon, who were both involved in the research, said at The Conversation. The difficulty now is in “separating any potential leakage from historical background radiation,” said Futura. The Atlantic Ocean in the region “already contains radiation from 20th-century atmospheric nuclear weapons testing, the 1986 Chernobyl disaster and authorized runoff from coastal nuclear power plants.”

Despite the depth and radioactive signatures at the site, it was “not devoid of life,” said The Cool Down. Researchers “saw crabs, sponges, anemones and other organisms on or near the barrels, which have effectively become hard surfaces in an otherwise soft seabed environment.” The question that remains is not simply “whether radioactive material is present” but “whether deep-sea life is absorbing it and whether it is moving through sediment and water in meaningful amounts.” Studying the collected samples will provide more information on the effect these underwater communities have on the transfer of radionuclides.

The barrels were never meant to permanently seal the radioactive waste. These containers were intended to “provide an initial period of confinement rather than act as permanent deep-sea vaults,” said Earth.com. Over time, the “radioactive contents were expected to be released gradually and dispersed in the ocean.”

“It’s too late to undo the damage inflicted on the environment by previous generations,” said Popular Mechanics. But “having a deeper understanding of how these systematic episodes of pollution impacted the world will help future generations avoid making the same mistakes.”

Produce shelves are becoming sparser and featuring fewer options. Economic, cultural and environmental factors have reduced the variety of vegetables available to consumers. Prioritizing the same produce can have negative health effects and could make crops more susceptible to climate change.

The same stock

Vegetable diversity is “declining due to market homogenization, land-use change and other threats,” and its “current conservation is insufficient,” said a study published in the journal PNAS. There have been “substantial declines in the range of traditional vegetable varieties grown over the past century, while almost one-quarter of assessed wild relatives of major vegetable crops are threatened with extinction,” said a release by the World Vegetable Center about the study.

“Vegetable biodiversity is one of the world’s greatest assets for improving diets and adapting agriculture to a changing climate,” Colin Khoury, the global conservation lead at the crop diversity preservation nonprofit Crop Trust, said in the release. “But we’re losing it at exactly the time we need it most.”

Several factors have reduced vegetable biodiversity. Initially, “humans selected only a portion of wild plants for cultivation, and then the variety narrowed even further due to the industrialization of agriculture, globalization and the spread of mass production,” said the news publication BB. As a result, traditional varieties of vegetables and “their wild relatives have fallen out of favor, leaving just a shrinking selection of tamed vegetables on supermarket shelves,” said IFL Science.

Also, agricultural practices like “monoculture, the practice of growing a single crop variety across vast areas,” are a “risky business, both economically and ecologically,” said IFL Science. If a “disease takes root in one plant, it rapidly spreads through the entire identical field like wildfire.”

Underrated options

People “consume nearly 40% fewer vegetables than recommended by the World Health Organization,” said the release. Low vegetable consumption is “among the five leading dietary risk factors contributing to the global burden of disease.” In addition, “relying on the same familiar crops,” like “standard varieties of eggplant, kale, cabbage, carrots, lettuce, onion and tomato,” may “not be enough to meet the climate challenges ahead,” said Food & Wine. The good news is that there are 1,480 known species of edible vegetables, most of which are underused.

“The solution isn’t simply to grow more vegetables,” Maarten van Zonneveld, who led the research, said in the release. “It’s also to grow more kinds of vegetables.” Many nutrient-rich vegetables, like “spider plant, slippery cabbage and other dark-green leafy vegetables, receive little breeding attention due to their lower commercial value compared to crops such as pepper and tomato,” said the study. The less-consumed vegetables also “carry traits that could help breed new varieties better able to withstand heat, drought, pests and disease,” said IFL Science.

Unfortunately, these underutilized crops “receive only a tiny fraction of the research, breeding and conservation efforts devoted to globally traded vegetables and staple grains,” said the release. The study highlights the need to “strengthen breeding capacity among both public and private organizations, combined with investment in participatory breeding with farmers,” said the study.

“Much of the vegetable biodiversity we need is still out there,” Zonneveld said in the release. The “urgency is to conserve it properly so that we can use it wisely to diversify diets amid climate change.”

“Leaked diplomatic correspondence” shows that Andy Burnham is “embroiled” in a row with Cuba over Britain’s “looming ban” on cigars, said The Telegraph.

Cuba’s former president Fidel Castro, who was often photographed puffing away, said the cigar “made our country famous” and gave “prestige” to Cuba. But now the island’s cigar industry is facing a perfect storm of existential challenges.

Unjustified barrier 

The Cuban ambassador in London has been writing to the UK government since 2024 to express concerns about plans for a “smoke-free Britain”, according to the leaked correspondence. Diplomats from Honduras and the Dominican Republic have also weighed in.

The incoming generational smoking ban brought in during Rishi Sunak’s reign will “disproportionately impact cigar-producing countries” and amounts to an “unjustified barrier to trade”, they said. Cigars “neither contribute to youth smoking initiation nor share the same public health profile as cigarettes”.

The rift is thought to have “deepened” after the UK government opened a consultation on extending the ban to premium cigars.

National pride

Cuban cigars have “held an unrivalled position at the pinnacle of the cigar world”, said Simply Cigars. They are “renowned for their heritage, craftsmanship and distinctive terroir”.

They are a “valuable export” and a “draw for many visitors”, as well as a “historic national industry” and a “point of national pride”, said CBC. The Cubans who farm tobacco are a symbol of “nationalism and resistance”.

But it’s getting harder to farm tobacco in Cuba, because climate change has made growing conditions “increasingly unpredictable, with a longer and wetter rainy season, and more intense storms”, including hurricanes.

Other challenges facing Cuba’s tobacco farmers include “finding workers and making their product financially viable”, as “falling global demand” for cigars means “lower prices for the leaf”.

But since the US imposed a “de facto oil blockade on the island, the Cuban cigar industry is facing its greatest challenge yet”, said Al Jazeera.

Since the start of the year, precious “little oil” has entered Cuba and the resultant energy crisis has “complicated the cultivation” of tobacco crops. The shortage has been worsened by the US seizing oil shipments from Cuba’s long-standing ally Venezuela.

Manufacturing has also been hit. Dried tobacco leaves are driven to Havana, where they are hand-rolled in state-run factories, but the “scarce supply” of petrol makes transportation “difficult”, and the “lack of electricity” to provide lighting for the factories “complicates production”.

In February, Cuba’s “iconic” annual cigar fair was postponed, said The Associated Press. Tabacuba, a state-run tobacco company, blamed “the complex economic situation” that the island is facing, due to the “intensification of the economic, commercial and financial blockade” imposed by the US. The organisers did not set a new date for the 26th edition of the cigar fair.

The cosmos may be speckled with black hole stars, celestial entities that have the properties of both black holes and stars. But only now have scientists discovered one for the first time, which could provide important insight about our universe.

Huge size and energy

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) previously spotted unidentified little red dots in space in 2024 that scientists have now designated as a new astrophysical source, according to a study published in the journal Nature. Deemed a “black hole star,” the celestial object “resembles an enormous star, spanning the size of our solar system,” but also puts out “100 billion times more energy than any known star can physically produce,” similar to a black hole, said a release about the study.

The NASA telescope was used to “look into deep space, back when the universe was a few hundred million years old,” to “look for galaxies that actually formed at those early times,” said the release. While analyzing JWST’s images, astronomers found the red dots that at the time of their discovery had them convinced that “something broke in the James Webb Space Telescope,” said Gizmodo. “Much about the universe’s earliest days remains a mystery,” so “pinning down the true identity of little red dots,” which are “relics from the cosmic dawn,” would “represent a huge advance in our understanding of our universe’s history.”

Researchers analyzed one specific bright red dot called MoM-BH*-1 and found that its properties were “too intense to be explained as normal star behavior,” said Wired. Instead, they posited that the dot is a “black hole devouring matter and releasing enormous amounts of energy” and surrounded by a “massive gas envelope.”

The energy “would pass through that gas before escaping into space” and “acquire some of the characteristics we would normally expect to find in starlight,” said Wired. The black hole star likely has a “central black hole that is 100,000 times as massive as the sun,” said lead study author Rohan Naidu in the release.

New questions, more research

The black hole star is a “very special thing to find,” as it is an “object with no comparison given the vast stores of data on billions of stars, galaxies and black holes that we have in our archival databases,” said Naidu to Gizmodo. MoM-BH*-1 is perhaps the beginning of “what will likely be the first of more black hole stars to come,” said Popular Science. And “many other red dots lurking in JWST models may soon be explained by the new astrophysical model.” What is unique about MoM-BH*-1 is that the “black hole star is essentially completely outshining its surrounding host galaxy, such that we are seeing pure black hole star light,” said Naidu in the release.

The study’s findings “raise new questions and insights into little red dots and, by extension, the state of the early universe,” said Gizmodo. If the “distinct color of little red dots is caused by gas,” it “could explain why the earliest supermassive black holes are far larger than what’s predicted by conventional cosmological models.”

Scientists are planning further research on the “detailed physics of these remarkable objects,” said Naidu. Perhaps it will answer exactly how “massive” they are and what their “‘stellar’ features tell us about their ‘stellar’ atmospheres.”

Imagine being thrown into No. 10 Downing Street and being forced to contend with a “public that is always fuming, a press that is consistently hostile, a cabinet that behaves badly, and backbenchers who never stop moaning about something”, said GQ Magazine. No, it’s “not one of Starmer’s recurring nightmares,” but a mobile game that has “skyrocketed in popularity”.

In the last fortnight, the average daily userbase of “No. 10: Full Confidence” has “leapt from 300 to 21,000”, propelling it to near the top of the UK paid-games leaderboard. “Absurd, nihilistic, so-tragic-it’s-hilarious – the perfect allegory, you might say, for British politics in 2026.” And its popularity, along with other similar apps, reveals a lot about the “current political mood in the UK”.

‘Close to the bone’

The game – which costs £2.99, with the option to pay extra for a “special adviser pack” – suggests that “becoming prime minister isn’t the difficult part, it’s staying one that’s tricky”, said Metro. The current average term achieved by players is two years and 11 months (in game time), which is “longer than the last three real prime ministers, and only a little shorter than the reigns of Theresa May and Boris Johnson”. Released in May, in a case of “excellent if accidental timing”, the “jury’s still out on whether this will make people more sympathetic to former PMs” such as Keir Starmer, but historical precedent suggests it seems “very unlikely the new incumbent will be able to beat the game’s high score in real-life”.

The app’s creator and developer Benjamin Brewis told GQ that the game is meant to focus on “satire rather than political advocacy”. All 350 potential scenarios are tailor-made, and some are influenced by real events, from both sides of the political divide. “Scarily”, when I speak to people in politics or the civil service, they say how “close to the bone it is”, Brewis said. Especially in scenarios where decisions need to be made quickly, and “chaos just ensues and then nothing gets done in the end”.

The first decision is selecting a chancellor. Players must decide between Harriet Voss, a “former investment banker who has ‘never expressed a political opinion in public’”, or Reginald Forthwright, who advocated for “a flat tax of 3% on everything” and “has written a book described as ‘dangerously coherent’”. While people tend to only last a couple of years, the record is “1,885 months, which is a long time. 157 years”, said Brewis. And at that point, “that’s no longer a democracy at all”.

First among equals

“Full Confidence” is not the only game based around Westminster “wheeling and dealing”, said the BBC. “Fantasy Parliament”, designed by Evan Roberts, is a “browser-based game”, where players can draft a “fantasy league” of real-life cabinet ministers and MPs, who score points based on their real-world media coverage. And later this year, Black Cannon Games is scheduled to release “UK Politics Simulator”, which is “built on real UK data down to ward level”.

The success of such apps suggests that the “dramatic recent ebb and flow of Westminster may have inspired a popular new sub-genre”. Dr Russell Foster, a lecturer in British and International Politics at King’s College London, told the broadcaster that the “churn of prime ministers” and “growing presence of politics on social media” could also explain the burgeoning popularity of such games.

This game shows us the “depressing” environment that has been “co-created by us, the unforgiving voters”, said Zoe Williams in The Guardian. Prime ministers are “evasive” because they don’t trust the reaction of the electorate, who in turn “lose trust” in their figurehead.

“Westminster hasn’t been so united by an app since the early 2010s, when everyone was trying to figure out what David Cameron saw in ‘Angry Birds’.” But “Full Confidence” is also a “useful corrective”, challenging dissatisfied voters to put themselves “in a prime minister’s shoes”.

The frozen landscape of Antarctica is holding a dangerous metal. The continent is releasing higher levels of mercury into the ocean and marine ecosystem because of climate change, and the toxic metal is accumulating in the region’s wildlife, causing health problems in the food chain. Mercury has also reached the commercial fish industry, potentially risking poisoning in humans.

Mercurial matter

Mercury accumulation in Antarctica, specifically on the Antarctic Peninsula, has “doubled relative to the global shelf average and risen sharply since industrialization,” said a study published in PNAS. The increase is “driven not only by atmospheric deposition but also by climate-warming–induced ice melt and erosion that remobilize legacy mercury stored on land.” Essentially, climate change “acts as an amplifier of mercury cycling,” said study co-author Maodian Liu, an environmental scientist at Peking University in China, to Eos.

The scientists “analyzed 16 sediment cores collected from the continental shelf off the Antarctic Peninsula” and “used a variety of chemical analyses to determine the amount and sources of mercury that was deposited in the sediment over the past 200 years,” said Eos. “Nearly all the sediment cores showed a significant increase in mercury accumulation since industrialization.” And on average, “cores in the region showed a 160% increase in accumulation since industrialization, with rates accelerating particularly quickly beginning in the 1950s.”

Mercury can be released into the environment “naturally by volcanoes and geological weathering,” said Science Alert. The continent has been “functioning as a kind of mercury ‘sink,’ locking away large amounts of pollution in its layers of ice,” which has “probably been helping reduce the amount of mercury getting into marine food chains (and our seafood).” Polar warming and ice melt are now “turning Antarctica’s cryosphere from a mercury sink into an active secondary pollution source, with important implications for future mercury risk in polar oceans and ecosystems,” said the study.

Metallic marlin

Mercury “reaches Antarctica through the atmosphere, traveling from sources such as coal plants and mining operations to settle on Antarctic ice and the Southern Ocean,” said Eos. As the metal “accumulates in sediment, it can transform into methylmercury, a more toxic form that more readily accumulates in living organisms.”

Methylmercury “enters and travels through the Antarctic food web, taken up by plankton, then krill, fish, seabirds, and marine mammals,” said Eos. The toxin can “harm animals’ neurology, behavior, growth and reproduction.” It can also get to commercial fisheries, where mercury pollution can affect human health. Now, mercury levels in “Antarctic species such as Antarctic toothfish, marlin and sharks frequently exceed previous records and food safety limits,” said Science Alert.

Antarctica is not the only place experiencing toxic mercury. In the Arctic, “permafrost thaw has begun to release trapped mercury into ecosystems,” said Eos. In the “northeastern United States, increasingly intense storms are accelerating erosion and mobilizing nutrients and metals, including mercury.” While reducing emissions is the best way to reduce the level of ice melt and mercury leaking, said Liu to Eos, “environmental mercury burdens” are “unlikely to decline immediately in step with emission reductions.”

The city of Dakhla, on a “peninsula where the Sahara meets the Atlantic”, is advertised to holidaymakers as “Morocco’s hidden gem”, said the BBC. But tourists flying to this part of Western Sahara might not know they’ll “be landing in one of the world’s longest ongoing territorial disputes”.

A former Spanish colony, Western Sahara was annexed by Morocco in 1975. Since then, it has been the subject of a dispute between Morocco and its indigenous Sahrawi people, led by the Polisario Front and its government-in-exile in Algeria. Now classified by the United Nations as a “non-self-governing territory”, around 80% of the country is occupied and administered by Morocco, with an earthen strip separating that area from a Sahrawi-controlled portion in the east. Numerous UN-brokered talks to resolve Western Sahara’s future have failed.

‘Tomorrow’s Dubai’

Morocco has been pouring considerable resources into Western Sahara. Since 2015, it has spent £7 billion trying to “level it up”, said The Spectator. There are now water desalination plants, 620 miles of motorways, and plans for eight “green hydrogen plants” and a “centrepiece” £1 billion Dakhla Atlantic Port. This “massive undertaking” is still under construction but, when finished, “35 million tons of goods are expected to pass through every year”.

King Mohammed VI’s “development plan” for the country he refers to as Morocco’s “Southern Provinces” includes “metamorphosing” Western Sahara’s coastline into a hub for business and tourism. Christopher Nolan filmed several scenes for “The Odyssey” on the “otherworldly” White Dune, just outside Dakhla, and it’s hoped many will want “to follow Odysseus’ footsteps and flock” to this city on the up: “think of it as tomorrow’s Dubai”.

Western Sahara also has plenty of natural resources that Morocco could exploit. Surveys have pointed to “promising deposits for gold, silver and iron” in the region, said Bloomberg.

‘International consensus’ shift

Nolan’s decision to film in Western Sahara was bound to “revive debate” over this “half-century-old territorial dispute”, said Bloomberg. Morocco’s annexation has created “one of the world’s most enduring yet overlooked refugee crises”, said Metro. For the past 50 years, the indigenous Sahrawi people have been “forced to live under occupation or go into exile”: 173,000 Sahrawi refugees live in camps in Algeria, in the “harshest part of the desert”. Each camp is named after a city in Western Sahara, but “many have never set foot” in these places “where their parents or grandparents were born”.

In recent years, international consensus has shifted and consolidated in favour of Morocco’s “autonomy plan” for Western Sahara. Spain has endorsed the plan and both France and the US have recognised Morocco’s sovereignty over the region. In October, the UN Security Council approved a resolution that gave the “strongest backing yet” to Moroccan control, “while making no mention of the independence referendum” sought by the Polisaro Front, said Bloomberg.

Last month, Donald Trump thanked Moroccan authorities for naming a highway after him, said Al Jazeera. The gesture has not been confirmed by Rabat but “would be far from surprising”, since the US has provided “crucial support” in bringing Morocco “closer to securing greater control” over the Western Sahara. In recent weeks, the US Department of Commerce announced it would fund “the early stages of an ammonium project” in the region, adding “a new economic dimension” to the long-running, “competing claims over the territory”.

France has taken a major step to crack down on telemarketers with the passage of a new law. It may make French people happy, but at least one country across the Mediterranean Sea is concerned about the move. Moroccans worry the new French law, which bans unsolicited cold calls, could have a negative impact on Morocco’s job market.

What is the new French law?

The law means that French companies are no longer “allowed to advertise goods and services through such calls unless consumers previously gave their consent or if the calls are about a preexisting contract,” said The New York Times. While many countries have attempted to enact no-contact lists for telemarketers, the law represents a new, much more proactive approach in France. Violators of the law will be subject to fines of up to $86,000.

Previously, French people who “wanted to avoid marketing calls had to register their number with a government-run service, but consumer groups said some call centers ignored the list,” said The Associated Press. Officials hope the law will fix what has been a persistent issue in France; at least 97% of French people “are annoyed by telemarketing calls,” according to a 2025 report from France’s National Assembly, while 72% say they are contacted by telemarketers “at least once a week.”

Why are Moroccans up in arms?

Despite the joy in France, the feeling in Morocco is different. Given the nations’ close proximity, Morocco “represents a major market for telemarketing companies” contacting French customers, said the Times. Moroccan officials “indicated that between 40,000 and 50,000 jobs could be at risk of disappearing” because of the new law, according to Moroccan newspaper Le Matin. France represents the majority of the Moroccan industry; Morocco’s call center business “makes 80% of its revenue from phoning French customers,” said Semafor.

Small- and medium-sized telemarketing ventures are particularly vulnerable because they “represent more than 60% of the call center network in Morocco,” said Le Matin. Despite the controversial nature of telemarketers, the centers they operate generated nearly “1.3 billion dirhams [$140 million] in investment in 2023 and generate between 10 and 12 billion dirhams [$1.1 billion and $1.2 billion] in added value annually.” Morocco’s “low labor costs, a large French-speaking workforce and relatively weak unions” make the country an “attractive outsourcing destination,” said the AP.

Some in France are also lambasting the effects of the new law. The leader of France’s direct-selling trade association, Frédéric Billon, has “criticized the reforms for adding what he said were administrative burdens for businesses,” said BBC News. Telemarketing companies will “have to obtain written consent from your customer, and you'll also have to keep proof of that consent,” Billon told BBC News. Despite some of the pushback, polls show most French people favor the law, leading Morocco to explore other avenues.

Moroccan officials are currently “rolling out a plan to ease the impact of the French law and support the sector,” said Moroccan news outlet Hespress. The plan starts by “encouraging companies to expand into new markets in Europe, including Germany, Spain and Italy, as well as in Africa and Latin America.” Officials are also urging companies to “shift from traditional telemarketing to higher-value services, including technical support, digital logistics, consulting and market research.”

A methamphetamine known as the “crazy pill” is wreaking havoc in Bangladesh and fuelling an addiction crisis. The authorities have struggled for some time to crack down on yaba, which is also known as “Nazi speed”. Their efforts are bearing some fruit but tackling the widespread use of the drug remains an uphill battle.

Black market

Yaba is a street name for pills containing methamphetamine, a powerful, highly addictive stimulant. Users generally crush and smoke the pills, although some swallow them whole. They increase alertness and energy, and raise the heart rate and blood pressure of users. Heavy use can bring on a range of problems, including paranoia, psychosis, seizures, cardiovascular problems, and even death.

Yaba, which means “crazy pill” in Thai, is “pushing thousands into addiction” in Bangladesh, said The Telegraph. The tablets, which are a blend of the stimulant with caffeine and other adulterants, are particularly common in South and Southeast Asia.

Bangladesh has become a leading destination and market for yaba because of its geographic proximity to Myanmar, where production of the drug is particularly concentrated. Rebel militias there are increasingly using yaba and crystal meth as “partial payment for smuggled Bangladeshi goods”, said the Dhaka-based newspaper The Daily Star.

The drug is trafficked westward from Myanmar into Bangladesh, through border areas that are difficult to control. Fishing boats transport Bangladeshi goods to Myanmar and “return with narcotics”. Although most of the drugs are consumed in Bangladesh, some packages are flown on to Oman, Saudi Arabia and Dubai.

Daily drudgery

Since 2006, yaba has been a common for the poor and the realities of the “daily drudgery, which makes life so hard for so many of Bangladesh’s 178 million people”, means there is “little to dull the allure” of the drug, said The Telegraph.

“The reason yaba has become so prevalent here is that it is so easy to transport and far cheaper to buy than other drugs,” government social worker Adnan Zobayer told the newspaper. “People get an easy buzz and quickly become dependent.”

Authorities in Bangladesh have been fighting for years to stamp out trade in the stimulant. In 2018, the government passed a law which makes possession of yaba punishable by death. They are having some success: enforcement agencies seized 43,562,811 amphetamine-type stimulant tablets, including yaba, last year, up 90.58 % from 22,857,751 in 2024. However, drug lords are still able to “churn out” millions of yaba pills from camps in the jungle borderlands of Myanmar at a “relentless” rate, said The Telegraph.

There’s trouble brewing in the water. The ongoing war with Iran has stranded more than 1,500 ships in the Strait of Hormuz, a waterway connecting the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of Oman, since February. While closure of the strait has led to severe economic consequences, there is also a burgeoning ecological crisis. Invasive species growing on the hulls of the trapped ships could soon voyage across the globe.

Ships, wrecked

There is a “high likelihood” that the idle ships in the Strait of Hormuz will “facilitate the extensive spread of economically and ecologically damaging invasive species as they reenter the global shipping network,” said a study published in the journal Biological Invasions. The stagnant ships’ hulls are “becoming encrusted with marine life,” from “microbes and algae to barnacles and other invertebrates,” a phenomenon called biofouling, said The Guardian. These organisms can “hitchhike to ports around the world” when trade resumes.

The “Persian/Arabian Gulf is home to more than 50 marine nonnative species, and many species native to the region have already been introduced across the globe,” said four of the authors of the study in The Conversation. The circumstances, however, are different this time.

Ships “normally only remain at anchor in a harbor for one to three days, limiting the growth of organisms on their submerged surfaces,” said The Guardian. In the case of the current block of the Strait of Hormuz, many vessels have “remained stationary for months, allowing dense marine communities to establish themselves.” The marine organisms of the Middle East “can withstand extremes,” Mario Tamburri, a professor at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science and the study’s lead author, said to USA Today. They are “tolerant organisms, which makes them good candidates for invasions when they go to a new location.”

New waters

Marine invasive species “have profound ecological and economic impacts on coastlines across the globe” and are “extremely difficult, if not impossible, to eradicate once they become established,” Carolyn Tepolt, a biologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and co-author of the study, said in a statement.

Invasive species can outcompete local species, fundamentally altering the ecosystem. They can also perpetuate the spread of “parasites and diseases that are either entrained within ship ballast tanks or associated with organisms attached to ship hulls,” April Blakeslee, an associate professor of biology at East Carolina University and co-author of the study, said to Live Science (a sister site of The Week).

The organisms can “cause millions of dollars’ worth of damage” as well, Tamburri said to ABC News. Biofouling can “lead ships to have more drag as they move through the water, burning extra fuel and increasing exhaust emissions,” said USA Today. Invasive species can also disrupt fisheries and aquaculture, requiring extra money to manage.

The Strait of Hormuz may be the current invasive species risk, but climate change and warming temperatures have been increasing the level of global spread. “Current ship biofouling management and regulatory frameworks are insufficient to mitigate the impacts of large-scale, unplanned vessel lay-up events,” said the study. “While the human and economic consequences of events like the war in the Middle East will always remain the highest priority, ecological impacts cannot be overlooked.”

The disappearance of 43 students in 2014 has come to symbolise Mexico’s “brutal cartel violence and government impunity”, said The Guardian.

The case “rocked” the nation, and continues to “haunt” it. Now, the former governor of the state of Guerrero has been formally charged over his alleged involvement, after a judge ruled that Mexico’s attorney general had sufficient evidence to proceed.

Ángel Aguirre, who resigned as governor a month after the students vanished, is accused of “forced disappearance”, as well as the “obstruction of justice”: ordering the destruction of surveillance footage that “may have shed light on what happened”. He was ordered to remain in maximum-security detention pending trial. A lawyer for Aguirre denied any wrongdoing.

An elaborate cover-up

In September 2014, 43 students from Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College “commandeered several buses” in the city of Iguala, Guerrero state, to get to a protest in Mexico City, said The Associated Press.

The local cartel is believed to have attacked the students “in collusion with security forces as well as local, state and federal authorities, including the millitary”. The students are presumed to have been killed, but only bone fragments of three of them have ever been identified.

Now, the federal prosecutor’s office has confirmed what international investigators “denounced years ago”: that camera footage, which recorded the moment security forces stopped a bus, was “hidden or destroyed to conceal evidence”.

It shows the students “lying face-down on the back of police pick-up trucks as they were spirited out of the city”, said the BBC. An initial investigation concluded that “corrupt municipal police” had “handed the students over” to the cartel, but that federal police and the military had been “uninvolved”. This provoked “widespread scepticism”; international experts called the findings “scientifically impossible”.

It was an “elaborate cover-up”, said The Guardian. Suspects were “tortured into giving false confessions”, and evidence from the crime scene was “manipulated”. A “years-long international investigation” later determined that both federal police and the military were involved, either by “participating directly”, or “failing to intervene as the students were taken away” and killed.

A state crime

The case, considered one ​of Mexico’s “worst human-rights atrocities”, has been “marred by missteps and interference”, said Reuters.

The Mexican government’s 2022 truth commission concluded that the cartel, Guerreros Unidos, and government authorities had been involved. Then-President Andrés Manuel López Obrador described the case as a “state crime”. But almost all of those detained have since been released. Many claim López Obrador’s administration “blocked the investigation as it began to close in on the military”, said the BBC.

Last year, President Claudia Sheinbaum formed an investigative unit to re-examine the case, and the new attorney general, Ernestina Godoy, began a re-analysis. Godoy said new testimony had helped establish that Aguirre not only requested the footage, but had ordered its destruction. The concealment was “the result of a malicious operation, deliberately orchestrated from the highest levels of the State Executive Branch”, she told reporters last week.

“Key questions” still remain unanswered, said AP News. The motive is also “unclear”. Authorities believe the case is linked to “heroin trafficking in buses to the US”, organised by the cartel “in collusion with authorities”. But Aguirre’s indictment is the “biggest breakthrough” since the 2022 arrest of Jesús Murillo Karam, Mexico’s attorney general in 2014, said The Guardian. Karam faces charges of forced disappearance, obstruction of justice and torture.

“We want no more deception,” said Meltión Ortega, spokesperson for the 43 students. The victims “deserve to have the actual perpetrators and the masterminds punished”.

What does Enid Blyton’s Land of Spells have in common with the Bay of Pentos in “Game of Thrones”? asked The Guardian. Both were portrayed by the same “sunny archipelago in the Mediterranean”: Malta.

The EU’s smallest country, “no bigger in size than Sheffield”, has over the past decade become “one of the most popular places” for American and British filmmakers to work. It has hosted more than 30 film and TV productions in each of the past three years, including “Jurassic World Rebirth” and Ridley Scott’s “Gladiator II”. The “microstate” just south of Sicily has stood in for Greece, southern France and even the Caribbean – in Guy Ritchie’s upcoming “Viva la Madness”.

Malta is “really punching above its weight”, said Adrian Wootton, the chief executive of the British Film Commission. It’s been “very aggressive, in a positive way”.

Small but mighty

Over the last century, the “small but mighty” republic has become “an appealing global destination for major film productions”, said Variety in 2024. After the Hollywood actors strike the previous year, requests to film came in “like crazy”, said co-founder of Valletta Pictures Joshua Cassar Gaspar. “The strikes didn’t affect us because the independent productions kept going, and many of us in Malta service TV shows, which were also unaffected.”

Providers were also less “Hollywood-dependent” than some European countries, such as the UK, said the news site. And productions benefited from a “hefty 40% tax rebate”. It’s probably “the most generous cash rebate in the world”, the producer of “Gladiator II” said on Deadline.

“Every euro that we invest in the rebate, the industry generates back four,” Malta’s film commissioner Johann Grech said in June. Today, film production is one of Malta’s “most effective” sources of investment, he said in MaltaToday. According to an independent report published this year, the industry contributed 0.28% of Malta’s gross value added between 2005 and 2017. That reached a record 2.16% in 2023. Since 2018, film production has contributed €1.2 billion to the GDP.

And “the economic effect is felt throughout the country”, driving infrastructure development, boosting hospitality and tourism, and attracting “numerous high-net-worth individuals” to the island. Film production is “one of Malta’s economic engines”.

A parallel universe?

As ever with “generous rebates”, there has been “some local pushback”, said Deadline. Malta’s infrastructure is “being tested to the limits as its cities, towns and villages regularly turn into film sets”, said The Guardian. Road closures and parking restrictions “have become a bugbear” for locals.

Critics say Malta’s rise as a filming location has “come at the cost of neglecting local cinematic talent”. The Malta Film Commission is “focused on courting international productions”, while domestic production is dependent on the arts council and its much smaller budget. Examples of Maltese films reaching international audiences are “few and far between”. With local crews in demand from international companies, Maltese directors “often find themselves being outbid by Hollywood”.

“There’s a bit of a parallel universe,” said Teodor Reljić, a Malta-based screenwriter. “People in servicing are thriving, but local filmmakers can’t pay a DOP [director of photography] because they are expecting ‘Jurassic World’ fees.”

“It is tempting to sit back and believe the local film industry to be ‘strong’ simply because many foreign productions shoot in Malta,” said producer Malcolm Scerri Ferrante in The Times of Malta. But volume alone “does not constitute a robust film industry, and certainly not an indigenous one”.

The total solar eclipse, occurring on Aug. 12, 2026, in Spain and other parts of Europe, is bringing all the scientists to the yard. During a total eclipse, the moon completely covers the face of the sun, darkening the sky and revealing just the sun’s outer atmosphere called the corona. That astronomical ring provides a unique opportunity to learn more about the sun as well as its effect on Earth.

Fellowship of the ring

Researchers around the world are investigating the eclipse in different ways. NASA is taking its research aircraft, the WB-57, to the skies with the mission of “chasing an eclipse, but in reality the eclipse is chasing them,” said The Guardian.

During the flight, the “pilot will aim to reach the point of greatest eclipse, when the largest fraction of the sun is obscured by the moon, at the moment the shadow catches up with them,” said The Guardian. The aircraft also contains four cameras to “take high-resolution images of the corona in several different wavelengths of visible and infrared light,” said NASA.

The cameras will “capture at least 20 images per second” to “learn more about the formation of prominences (solar material that gets suspended above the sun’s surface), better understand the corona and how it gets heated,” and “investigate how material in the corona and the solar wind are related,” said NASA. Scientists at the European Space Agency will be studying the eclipse to learn more about solar winds.

NASA scientists in Iceland are also launching a “total of 80 balloons starting 18 hours before the eclipse until eight hours afterward to study how the eclipse affects Earth’s ‘boundary layer,’ the part of the atmosphere that touches the ground,” said NASA. In Spain, “three balloon teams will launch a total of six balloons with 360-degree cameras to image the eclipse shadow from above” to “measure levels of ozone in the atmosphere, which requires sunlight to form.” At Spain’s Javalambre Astrophysical Observatory, researchers are testing a new linear spectrometer prototype that “has a circular slit and can capture the spectrum of the entire corona at a certain distance from the centre of the Sun in a single photograph,” Federico Landini of the Astrophysical Observatory of Turin said to Reuters.

Return of the ring

From “our unique perspective on Earth during a total solar eclipse, scientists can study the sun’s corona in a way we can’t from anywhere else in the solar system,” Kelly Korreck, the eclipse program manager at the NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C., said in the NASA article. The sun “impacts our daily life, satellites and astronauts in space, and we can take advantage of this moment to advance our understanding of that influence.”

The sun’s corona extends about 6.2 million miles and is approximately one million times less intense than the surface. In noneclipse times, “scientists study the sun’s atmosphere with satellites equipped with a coronagraph,” which blocks out the sun’s surface, said the Agence France-Presse. However, total eclipses “allow them a rare glimpse of the chromosphere, the layer of atmosphere between the corona and the surface.”

We are “incredibly lucky” that the “moon is 400 times smaller than the sun,” as well as “400 times closer to us,” Allan Sacha Brun, an astrophysicist at France’s Atomic Energy Commission, said to the AFP. “Our work aims to understand the physical mechanisms underlying the sun’s activity” and “to put the sun back into context within its evolutionary timeline, from its birth to its death.”

“For once the colour associated with a boom in Zimbabwe is blue, not gold,” said The Economist. The country’s blueberry industry is booming; it is exporting 40 times more of the fruit than 10 years ago as part of a wider fresh produce drive across the continent.

“The success of Zimbabwean blueberries, Kenyan flowers and South African oranges” would suggest that there is “huge potential for African agriculture to play the sort of role long envisioned for manufacturing”, said The Economist. And if Africa can learn from such success stories, “there will be fruitful returns”.

‘Momentum is still building’

Just a few years ago, blueberries in Zimbabwe were seen as a “relatively small niche crop”, said Linda Nielsen, CEO of Horticultural Development Council, on Fresh Fruit Portal. Now, it is becoming “one of the country’s most exciting horticultural export success stories”. In 2025, 9,500 tonnes of blueberries were exported from the country, this year the total is expected to reach 12,000 tonnes. And “momentum is still building”.

New production techniques promise “exciting development”, planting “improved blueberry genetics” from international “breeding houses”, with “encouraging” results. These newer varieties are showing “strong performance in yield, fruit quality, shelf life and production timing” and could “significantly speed up industry growth over the next few years”. And with “favourable growing conditions, competitive labour availability, improving technical expertise, and strong international demand for our premium blueberries”, the future is looking bright too.

One major reason for the African blueberry boom is improved trade with China, said Fruitnet.com. Zimbabwe has maintained strong export links to the EU, UK and Malaysia, but China offers a market “capable of absorbing considerably larger volumes”. Growing consumer interest in healthy eating has meant “premium fresh fruit” has become much more attractive to the Chinese.

New commercial agreements have also strengthened Zimbabwe’s position. At the start of May, China’s zero-tariff policy for 53 African nations, including Zimbabwe, took effect. The first arrival of blueberries into China represented “far more than a symbolic shipment”: it marked the “opening of a potentially significant new trade channel” for the industry.

However, compliance with China’s rigorous import protocols could add “another layer of cost and complexity”. Additional steps such as methyl bromide fumigation for airfreight needed to be approved by the Zimbabwean government, and fluctuations in seasons either in Zimbabwe, or competitors Morocco and Peru, could mean the African nation being squeezed out.

A ‘boon for Africa’

Beyond blueberries, a wider emphasis on fresh fruit could be a “boon for Africa” and “force a rethink of what is meant by farming and manufacturing”, said The Economist. “In recent years African agribusinesses have responded to rising global incomes – and demand for fresh produce.”

For example, Kenya and Ethiopia account for a combined 8% of global cut-flower exports and, last year, Europe consumed more than one million tonnes of avocados for the first time, and “much of its demand was met by Morocco and Kenya”. South Africa, whose biggest export has been citrus fruit since wine was overtaken in 2010, recently replaced Spain as the world’s largest citrus exporter.

This milestone in particular not only “marks a significant shift” in the fruit trade, but also “South Africa’s growing influence in international agribusiness”, said Business Insider Africa. Yet, while South Africa leads the export market by volume, China and Brazil dominate global production, though most is used domestically, said South Africa’s agriculture minister John Steenhuisen. Forecasts have been trimmed due to bad weather and war in the Middle East, but South Africa’s position in the industry is becoming more and more established.

People might soon have a lot more to see. A retinal implant that can restore vision degraded by age has been approved for use in Europe and could soon be available in the U.S. Researchers are also evaluating the applicability of the implant for other eye conditions.

So much to see

The PRIMA retinal implant, created by the Science Corporation, can “restore functional central vision” in those with geographic atrophy (an advanced form of macular degeneration), said Stanford Medicine. The implant has shown measurable vision improvement, allowing “those who were considered legally blind to read letters and words.”

“Normal vision in the U.S. is 20/20, and blindness is 20/200,” Frank Brodie, the medical director for vision and the PRIMA implant at the Science Corporation, said to New Scientist. “Patients using PRIMA reached about 20/160, so they went from blind to not blind.”

The implant is “about the size of a pinhead and is inserted beneath the retina” and “used alongside glasses with a frame-mounted camera,” said New Scientist. It operates with a brain-computer interface (BCI), in which the camera “captures and processes images, then projects the result onto the implant’s chips using near-infrared light.” The method “offers users black-and-white vision and the ability to zoom in on objects” without interfering with any existing vision, said Stat News. “We have a cochlear implant for vision now,” Max Hodak, the founder and CEO of Science Corporation, said to Stat News.

Geographic atrophy affects eight million people globally and over one million in the U.S. Currently available treatments for geographic atrophy are “extremely limited.” We “have two [U.S. Food and Drug Administration]-approved medications for the treatment of geographic atrophy that slow down the progressive disease but, unfortunately, cannot bring back lost vision,” Sunir Garg, a doctor at the Wills Eye Hospital in Philadelphia, said to New Scientist.

New field of vision

PRIMA has been approved for use and sale in Europe and is set to launch in Germany, Italy and the Netherlands. The implant also “received a Humanitarian Use Device designation from the FDA in March,” said Stat News. The designation “puts the device on track to debut in the United States early next year if it receives agency approval.” If PRIMA received FDA approval, it would be only the “second brain-computer interface (BCI) to enter the U.S. market.”

Cost could be a barrier. “Each PRIMA device is expected to cost in the hundreds of thousands of dollars,” said TechCrunch. Science Corporation and “its medical partners in Europe are currently in discussion with healthcare providers over reimbursement.” In the U.S., “most of the patient population for the device is over 65, so they expect the device to be covered by Medicare, though those details are yet to be finalized,” said Stat News. Researchers are also evaluating PRIMA for other retinal conditions like Stargardt disease and retinitis pigmentosa.

Archaeologists have uncovered hundreds of vast earthworks in the Amazon rainforest, which they say are evidence of a “lost civilisation” that flourished nearly 2,000 years ago, said New Scientist.

Researchers believe the geometrically patterned structures, known as geoglyphs, were built by an advanced pre-colonial society, known as the Aquiry, between 600BC and AD850 – without metal tools or animals. But they are almost impossible to detect under the dense tree canopy of the deep rainforest.

The scientists used cutting-edge airborne laser scanning technology and found hundreds of previously unknown earthworks. They combined the light detection and ranging (LiDAR) data with previous findings to estimate that there might be up to 30,000 structures across the Aquiry territory. The results “strongly suggest” that at its peak, the civilisation may have numbered 1.25 to 3 million, they wrote in a study published in Nature.

‘Astonishing’ scale and precision

Indigenous people have known about some of the earthworks for generations, “regarding some as sacred”, said The Times. Archaeologists first identified several in the western Brazilian state of Acre in 1977, when deforestation began to clear parts of the forest. In 2003, archaeo-anthropologist Martti Pärssinen, from the University of Helsinki, and his team flew overhead and observed ancient straight roadways connecting the sites, in a region that had long been regarded as “virtually untouched”.

“It was a common idea that the Amazonian forest was a virgin wilderness, occupied only by small groups of hunter-gatherers,” said Pärssinen, the study co-author. “These earthworks totally change our understanding of the supposedly pristine Amazon.”

Pärssinen theorised that the earthworks had been built by a complex, pre-Columbian civilisation. In 2021, he “officially introduced the name Aquiry”, said LiveScience, after the Indigenous name for the Acre River, which flows from Peru and Bolivia into Brazil.

In 2024, his team used aerial photographs and satellite imagery to count nearly 1,300 structures across southwestern Amazonia. But “the full scale remained lost beneath the trees”, said ScienceAlert. LiDAR technology “changed everything”.

The team flew over around 1,700 square miles, firing rapid laser pulses at the ground. Some pulses penetrate gaps in the forest canopy and bounce off the ground, reflecting back to the sensors. Computers can use that to create “a three-dimensional map of the ground under most vegetation”, said New Scientist.

The survey revealed 432 geoglyphs – “nearly 400 of which were completely new to science”. The largest covered an area of nearly 50 hectares. “The scale and precision of these constructions is simply astonishing,” said Pärssinen. An average-sized geoglyph would have required about 300 people to build and maintain it.

Pärssinen’s estimate of a population of up to 3 million people is bold, said Michael Heckenberger, from the University of Florida, but “plausible and extremely important, even mind-blowing”.

They lived ‘in harmony with the forest’

Over the past two decades, LiDAR has become “one of archaeology’s most exciting modern tools”, said National Geographic. It has been credited with driving an “archaeology revolution”. In the early 2010s, archaeologists were “astonished” when it revealed a lost Maya city.

But we still don’t know much about the Aquiry – they left “no written records, and their dwellings are long gone”, said ScienceAlert. We don’t know why they suddenly disappeared, between about AD850 and 1000. But the findings suggest that the view of the Amazon as a practically untouched wilderness should be “abandoned”, said Pärssinen.

The presence of thousands of geoglyphs is “leading archaeologists to rethink assumptions about pre-colonial civilisations and urban development”, said LiveScience.

While Romans were “laying roads and building temples”, the Aquiry were “carving vast circles, squares and monumental enclosures” on the other side of the world, said The Times. Their territory extended across “an area slightly smaller than Britain”. And the geoglyphs suggest “sophisticated planning and organised labour”.

Pärssinen said the civilisation is “likely to have resembled ancient Greece”: dispersed communities with shared beliefs and traditions, rather than a single centralised empire. The “great enclosures” appear to have been “ceremonial and political centres” where communities met to “make decisions, feast and perform rituals”.

The Aquiry also cultivated maize, squash and manioc, grew Brazil nut trees and peach palms, and cleared forests for the huge earthworks and extensive roads, “without destroying the Amazon”.

“They lived in harmony in that way with the forest,” said Pärssinen. “They made clearings, but not too big to change the ecological systems. Despite their huge numbers, they never converted the rainforest into savannah.”

An AI company has “destroyed” millions of books as part of a “controversial project” to train its models, said City A.M.

Tech giants want to “feed an insatiable demand for training data” but their methods could have serious ramifications for the publishing industry and the quality of future books.

Suspicious orders

The alarm was first raised when antiquarian booksellers in the UK and across Europe started to receive curious requests for thousands of obscure titles from anonymous buyers.

A London-based seller of rare books received two “unusually large” enquiries for specialist books from anonymous email addresses, with “no names or company details attached”, said City A.M. The buyers asked for additional photographs of the books before placing sizeable orders.

When the bookseller asked the purchasers “who they were and where the books were going, neither replied”. The retailer suspects the orders were placed by AI companies.

According to recent court documents, Anthropic, the developer behind Claude, launched an internal programme known as “Project Panama”, which concluded that books were “essential” for training advanced AI models.

One senior executive at the AI giant said that books taught systems “how to write well”, as opposed to using “low-quality internet speak”. The company bought millions of second-hand books, “sliced off their spines” using “industrial cutting machines”, scanned every page and recycled the rest.

Internal planning documents at Anthropic also showed bosses wanted to keep the programme secret, said Futurism. One executive said: “We don’t want it to be known that we are pursuing this project,” according to those recent court documents.

Orders have also come from Canadian company Zoom Books, according to AA, but the company has denied participating in the digitisation and destruction of books for AI development.

‘Legal loopholes’

This trend has “raised fresh concerns about copyright and the future of physical books”, said AA. But dealing with the issue could be quite another matter; copyright violations are “difficult to prove in court” because of “legal loopholes”.

Thomas Koch, of the German Publishers and Booksellers Association, said it “appears to be yet another example of AI companies using vast quantities of copyright-protected works to train their language models, without consent and without payment”.

The absence of disclosure obligations makes it “nearly impossible” for authors and publishers to determine whether their works have been incorporated into AI training datasets. Also, the legal standing “differs significantly across jurisdictions”.

AI systems have been “trained on copyrighted books” and can now produce new books “almost instantly”, leading to an “influx” of “low-cost, AI-generated titles” on digital marketplaces. Publishers are calling for stronger regulation from national governments and the EU.

Plastic products could soon have a built-in self-destruct feature. Scientists have found a way to incorporate bacteria into plastic products that can completely break down the plastic after activation. If this technique is applied widely, it could greatly reduce the amount of plastic pollution in the environment.

A plastic kill switch

Scientists have created a plastic capable of degrading quickly without producing microplastics, according to a study published in the journal ACS Applied Polymer Materials. The key is using microbes. Living plastics “contain dormant microbes capable of degrading the surrounding polymer,” said a release about the study. Earlier living plastic designs “often depended on a single enzyme, which limited how efficiently the material could be broken down.” However, in the new study, researchers engineered the bacteria “Bacillus subtilis to produce two polymer-degrading enzymes that work together.”

The two enzymes team up to break down the plastic polymers. The first enzyme “cuts the long polymer chains at random points, reducing them into shorter sections,” while the second enzyme “works from the ends of those fragments, breaking them down further into their individual monomer building blocks,” said the release. With the embedded microbes and the enzymes, “plastics could effectively ‘come alive’ and self-destruct on command, turning durability from a problem into a programmable feature,” Zhuojun Dai, a corresponding author on the paper, said in the release.

The researchers “incorporated dormant spores from the engineered bacteria into polycaprolactone (PCL), a biodegradable polyester used in products ranging from surgical sutures to 3D printing materials,” said Food & Wine. The living plastic material “retained the strength and structure of conventional plastic but could be triggered to degrade when no longer needed.” The scientists “activated the dormant spores by placing the material in a warm nutrient broth heated to about 122 Fahrenheit” where the “spores began producing both enzymes, which together had completely broken down the plastic within six days.”

Worldly applications

Most of the world’s plastic ends up in landfills or the ocean. Plastic can take anywhere from 20 to hundreds of years to break down because of its chemical structure. It can also degrade into microplastics, which have “turned up in water, food and even human bodies,” raising a number of health concerns, said The Cool Down. But creating plastic that can break down completely rather than releasing tiny fragments “could reduce one path for that contamination.” Still, the living plastic has not yet been “validated in real-world conditions in the ocean, a landfill or a roadside ditch,” said ZME Science.

Plastic that decomposes in a short time period makes “life easier for consumers by reducing the buildup of everyday products that turn into long-lasting trash,” said The Cool Down. In addition, if “disposable packaging, medical products or short-term electronics can degrade more cleanly, communities could face lower cleanup costs and less expensive waste management over time.”

While the researchers only incorporated the bacterial spores in one type of plastic, they eventually hope to “develop a method that activates the bacterial spores in water, where a significant share of plastic pollution accumulates,” said the release. The same strategy used for the PCL “could be adapted for other materials, including plastics widely used in disposable products.”

TV might actually be rotting our brains. Watching television for extended periods of time could increase the risk of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, new research says. To combat this danger, experts recommend taking breaks from binge-watching and engaging in more mentally stimulating activities.

Your brain on TV

Frequent TV watching in midlife was associated with reduced volume in the parts of the brain vulnerable to Alzheimer’s disease, according to a study published in Alzheimer’s & Dementia. The diminished brain systems include those associated with memory and cognition as well as executive functioning. More surprisingly, the brain volume reduction was not tied to sedentary behavior but specifically to watching TV. “People whose jobs involved sitting for much of the day tended to have healthier-looking brains,” said ScienceAlert. Also, “when the researchers accounted for differences in overall physical activity, that didn't seem to impact the outcome.”

The results also showed that men were particularly vulnerable to these brain changes. “This could be because men and women accumulate sedentary time differently,” Natan Feter, a biological scientist and the lead author of the study, said to ScienceAlert. “Women may interrupt their sitting more often,” or “biological differences in how the brain responds to prolonged sedentary behavior” may be to blame. In general, “women tend to prefer TV programming in shorter chunks, though they spend more time watching overall,” said ScienceAlert. By contrast, “men’s preferences for watching sports and movies” mean they are are “more likely to spend long, uninterrupted periods on the couch.”

Researchers analyzed a sample of 1,712 adults with an average age of 53 years who did not have a diagnosis of dementia when the research began. Between 1987 and 1989, “participants completed a detailed physical activity questionnaire during an in-person interview” where they reported “how often they watched television during their leisure time,” as well as “answered specific questions about how often they sat down during their work hours,” said PsyPost. Between 2011 and 2013, the participants underwent an MRI of their brains.

The study “shows an association, not a cause-and-effect relationship” between TV and dementia, Feter said to Healthline. The researchers also “relied on self-reported data for TV consumption, which can be less precise than timed tracking,” said a news release about the study.

Beyond the screen

“For years, we’ve focused on how much people sit,” David Raichlen, a professor of biological sciences and anthropology at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences and the senior author of the study, said in the news release. But these findings “suggest we should also pay attention to what they’re doing while they’re sitting.” For example, working from home, while sedentary, is more “intellectually stimulating” compared to watching TV, said the release.

Because TV watching appears to specifically affect the brain, “we might eventually see a different approach to health guidance around sedentary activities,” said the release. “Rather than just directing their patients to move more, for example, physicians might recommend they reduce television time and add cognitively engaging activities for when they do sit.” Activities like “puzzling, crafts and even texting, which require your brain to work while you are sitting might also change how much sitting negatively impacts your brain,” said ScienceAlert.

“The goal is not to eliminate passive rest,” Dung Trinh, a doctor at the MemorialCare Medical Group and the chief medical officer of Healthy Brain Clinic in Irvine, California, said to Healthline. It is to “build more cognitively engaging moments into the day.”

This year’s Tour de France Femmes has been rocked by allegations that some riders are artificially exaggerating their bust size to gain an aerodynamic advantage.

Several women’s World Tour teams have raised concerns that cyclists on rival teams are padding their sports bras to give them a boost in time trials, according to leading Dutch cycling news site, WielerFlits.

Every second counts

The practice of “chest fairing” – also known as “bra boosting” or “bra doping” – involves increasing the surface area of the chest to change the airflow around the torso. Other forms of chest fairing include placing a water bottle or radio receiver under your cycling jersey. This can reduce drag, potentially saving valuable seconds in a time trial, where aerodynamics are crucial.

An optimised chest fairing can reduce drag by as much as 3.6%, which could gain a time-trial cyclist at least 0.78 seconds every kilometre, according to research published in the Journal of Wind Engineering and Industrial Aerodynamics in 2024. “You won’t gain tens of seconds,” said study lead Bert Blocken, an aerodynamics expert at Heriot-Watt University in Scotland. But over a 20- to 30-km time trial, “it could save enough seconds to make the difference”.

“We’ve done some testing with a push-up bra versus a sports bra” and “we’ve definitely found some differences there”, Koen de Kort, head of technical and innovation at professional cycling team Lidl-Trek, told The Athletic. We haven’t used enhanced bras in competition, as we “don’t think it’s in the spirit of the sport” but I’m sure other teams “have found the same results and have experimented with it”.

It’s a controversy that has echoes of the row at the Winter Olympics earlier this year, when male ski jumpers were accused of artificially boosting their penis size in order to be fitted into ski suits with larger, more aerodynamic dimensions in the crotch area.

Grey area

Using any item to “artificially modify the morphology” of a rider to gain an advantage is banned by the UCI, cycling’s governing body. Riders found violating these rules can be disqualified and fined. Yet, at present, they are “virtually unenforced”, said WielerFlits.

For male riders, the policing of chest fairing “is relatively easy”, said Cycling News, but it becomes “complicated for women, who all have different sized breasts and use all different kinds of sports bras during races”.

On Monday, the UCI took the unusual step of issuing a warning that the Tour de France Femmes race jury overseeing final checks for yesterday’s stage 4 time trial will play “particular attention” to clothing and accessories which “could modify riders’ morphology”.

But “confusion remains as to what exactly” the jury was tasked with looking for, said Cycling Weekly. I don’t see how they are going to police this in future, de Kort told The Athletic, describing sports bras as a “grey area”. How can you define how much padding “a woman needs”?

Microplastics could be responsible for a lot of heartache. The tiny pieces of plastic have been found in high amounts in patients who suffered from heart attacks, leading experts to question their effect on cardiovascular health. Plastic likely has a more significant impact on health than we currently know and should be taken into account in analyzing environmental risk management.

Heart of plastic

Microplastics were “detected significantly more frequently” in patients who suffered heart attacks, said a study published in the European Heart Journal. Among those who had heart attacks, “micro and nanoplastics were detected in 84% of patients, compared with 40% of patients with chronic ischemic heart disease and 32% of patients with normal coronary arteries,” said a press release about the study.

The “highest levels of plastics were in blood drawn from the blocked artery itself, at the site of the blockage,” said Time. These tiny plastic particles are “found virtually everywhere in the environment, including the air we breathe, the water we drink and many foods we consume,” Pasquale Paolisso, the first author of the study, said in the release. “Scientists have begun to detect these particles in human tissues and organs, raising concerns about their potential health effects.”

The study also found that “people who smoke were six times more likely to have detectable micro and nanoplastics in the blood supplying their hearts than non-smokers,” David C. Gaze, a senior lecturer in chemical pathology at the University of Westminster, said in The Conversation. Therefore, along with the well-known detrimental effects of cigarettes, they “may also act as an efficient delivery system for microscopic plastic particles.”

The same pattern for smoking held for those who were exposed to bad air quality. “Both exposures appeared to amplify each other,” Paolisso and Emanuele Barbato, another author of the study, said to El País. “All patients who smoked and lived in areas with high air pollution had detectable plastics, compared with only one in eight of those who neither smoked nor were highly exposed.”

World of plastic

The study’s findings “do not prove that microplastics cause heart attacks, but they reveal a strong association between environmental exposures, microplastics in the blood and cardiovascular disease,” Barbato said in the press release. Microscopic plastic particles are present in “synthetic clothing fibers, tire wear, degraded packaging and countless other environmental sources,” Gaze said in The Conversation. But “at the moment, we cannot measure our exposure to plastics” in an accessible way, Rocco Montone, an interventional cardiologist at Fondazione Policlinico Universitario Agostino Gemelli in Rome, said to Time.

Microplastics were previously “found inside the liver, kidney, intestine and human brain, among other tissues,” said El País. Scientists have been interested in the health implications for some time. This study “reframes the issue of microplastics not as an isolated curiosity but as another link in a wider environmental exposome interconnected with the air we breathe and our habits,” the study authors said to El País.

The apparent connection between microplastics, smoking and air pollution also “underscores the urgent need to shift from isolated risk factor management toward comprehensive environmental health strategies,” said the study. Such strategies may include the “integration of air quality monitoring, anti-smoking interventions, plastic pollution reduction and exposomic assessment into cardiovascular disease prevention guidelines.”

While the jury is still out on whether diet and zero-sugar drinks are really better for your health than sugary sodas, a recent study has found that the artificial sweeteners they use may have one very unintended side effect: memory loss, particularly among younger consumers. But even though the study found a significant link between artificial sweeteners and memory issues, experts say this is still only a correlation, not causation.

What did the study find?

Several widely used artificial sweeteners may be “associated with faster declines in memory and thinking skills over time,” according to the study published by the American Academy of Neurology. It followed 12,772 adults in Brazil for about eight years and examined their intake of seven sugar substitutes: aspartame, saccharin, acesulfame K, erythritol, xylitol, sorbitol and tagatose. These are “frequently added to ultra-processed products, including flavored water, soft drinks, energy drinks, yogurt and desserts marketed as low in calories.”

Researchers found that the people who consumed the highest amount of artificial sweeteners “experienced a 62% faster rate of cognitive decline than those with the lowest intake,” said USA Today, a rate “estimated to be comparable to about 1.6 additional years of brain aging.” People who were in the mid-range of consumption “experienced cognitive decline that was 35% faster than those in the lowest-intake group.” The memory loss itself was also most prevalent in study participants who were under 60; researchers “did not find the same association among participants older than 60,” said the study.

When it came to the amount of sweetener consumed, those in the “lowest consumption group averaged 20 milligrams per day, while those in the highest group averaged 191 milligrams per day,” said the study. Regarding aspartame, one of the most common artificial sweeteners, the “amount consumed by the highest group was roughly equal to the aspartame in one can of diet soda.”

What is the bigger picture?

This study suggests that sugar substitutes are not as good for you as their marketing makes them seem. “Low- and no-calorie sweeteners are often seen as a healthy alternative to sugar; however, our findings suggest certain sweeteners may have negative effects on brain health over time,” the lead study author, Dr. Claudia Kimie Suemoto of Brazil’s University of São Paulo, said in a press release.

This is not the only new study to suggest that artificial sweeteners have negative health effects; recent research published in the journal Current Atherosclerosis Reports showed that these chemicals are “linked to higher fasting insulin levels and a higher HbA1c — a measure of long-term blood sugar control,” said HealthDay. It also “found that people who consume more artificial sweeteners may have a higher risk of cardiometabolic conditions, including type 2 diabetes and heart disease.”

When it comes to memory issues, scientists are careful to point out that this research doesn’t necessarily mean artificial sweeteners cause lapses. The study “identified a relationship between sweetener intake and cognitive decline but could not determine whether the sweeteners caused the changes,” said USA Today. The data also “did not include every artificial sweetener currently used in foods and beverages,” and Suemoto emphasized that more research was needed.