Prediction markets have already made their mark on Americans, but right now they are especially persistent about attracting a particular audience: women. Social media campaigns are popping up online, urging women to place their bets on sites like Kalshi and Polymarket. Instead of sports, though, women are wagering on their knowledge of pop culture.

Gambling is in its #girlboss era

Up until recently, prediction markets have had a “dude problem,” said The Atlantic. Despite hosting all kinds of wagers, including celebrity gossip like Taylor Swift’s possible bridesmaids, the user base has skewed mostly male. They have largely become “yet another place for men to bet on football and March Madness.” Now, Polymarket and Kalshi are trying to lure more women to their sites using “social media campaigns that parrot the language of female empowerment and girlish memes.”

Some posts are company advertisements, while others are paid influencer partnerships. These are “either undisclosed partnerships” or made by “women who are just super excited to post a suspicious amount of links to Polymarket,” the Atlantic added. When the markets attempt to entice women, they “especially tend to lean into the idea that all of this is investing, not gambling.” Kalshi, in particular, has been “ramping up its efforts with women.” The fact that one of the company’s co-founders, Luana Lopes Lara, has become the youngest self-made female billionaire only adds to the #girlboss appeal.

A campaign that seems to be gaining particular steam appeals to the fanbase of the popular dating reality show “Love Island USA.” The massive fandom, which includes a large proportion of women, is “already doing the forecasting work of analysts,” so the “pipeline from group chat guesswork to prediction markets” is “evidently short,” said Time. Kalshi is capitalizing on the cultural phenomenon by “showing up where the fandom already lives,” sponsoring influencer posts that are “turning episode recaps into market analysis.”

In the first two weeks of the latest season of “Love Island USA,” the show’s markets “amassed more than $20 million in trading volume on Kalshi,” said Time. For context, the latest Oscars race for Best Picture “drew $25 million in trading volume.” The show is testing whether “social-media dominance” can translate into “record trading volume for a television show” and whether the show’s “female-skewing audience can reshape who trades on prediction markets.”

The value of women traders

Prediction markets “operate on a simple premise”: Prices get “smarter when a more diverse public participates,” and a “crowd dominated by one kind of trader can only be so wise,” said Time. The “significance in the marketplace” of “Love Island USA” may have “little to do with forecasting the winner of a reality dating show,” and everything to do with “bringing prediction markets closer to the wisdom of crowds they promise to harness.”

Simply put, women are “50% of the population,” Elisabeth Diana, Kalshi’s head of communications, said to The Atlantic, noting that 26% of Kalshi account holders are female — up from 13% just 10 months ago. The more women there are betting, the “closer these sites get to their stated goal of forecasting the future,” said the outlet. If they want to be able to predict the “Fed’s next interest rate, the winner of The Bachelor or whether or not it will rain tomorrow in Poughkeepsie,” a market “made up only of male sports fans won’t cut it.” If women start “using them en masse,” prediction markets will “burrow into American life even more deeply.”

Regardless, the threat of gambling addiction looms over the growing popularity of prediction markets. There is “going to be an absolute epidemic,” Kitty Martz, the executive director of Voices of Problem Gambling Recovery, said to The Independent. It is worrying that companies are targeting Gen Z and young millennials because they are at a stage of life when they are “trying to have some equity in getting into the workforce, [buying] homes and paying off tuition.” Women have these “very specific concerns,” and the prediction markets’ strategy seems to be to “convert that concern into contracts.” There need to be “actual, robust warnings” that the “more you do it, the more you’re going to lose.”

Desperate to soothe symptoms caused by unbalanced hormones, women are turning to a TikTok trend that recommends combining allergy medication and antacids to treat conditions like PMS or menopause. Despite a lack of clinical evidence, experts say there may be a reason the cocktail is helping some people keep persistent symptoms at bay.

OTC relief

People who feel “extra rotten in the days leading up to their period” are finding relief from this TikTok-approved concoction, said NPR. The over-the-counter combo “helps to combat premenstrual blues,” leading participants to feel “less irritable and more energetic.” Others going through perimenopause and menopause reported that it “helps to lessen similar symptoms.” The drugs also went viral last year amid claims they helped manage symptoms of premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD), where patients “experience depression and anxiety caused by premenstrual hormonal shifts.”

Some women struggling with “conditions marked by hormonal fluctuations” swear that the blend finally provides some relief, said People. It helps with “hot flashes, mood swings and sleeplessness often associated with these disorders.” The specific drugs most often “touted in this hormonal cocktail” are Allegra and Pepcid AC.

To date, there have not been any clinical trials testing the safety or efficacy of this trend. Those who are using the combo are operating in an “evidence-free zone,” Leigh Frame, the executive director of the Office of Integrative Medicine & Health at George Washington University, said to NPR. There is “no evidence that it does or doesn’t work."

However, experts agree there is a “plausible biological mechanism” for why some may be seeing benefits, said NPR. It has to do with histamine, a chemical released when you come into contact with an allergen, which triggers an inflammatory response. There is evidence that suggests “histamine also fluctuates with your menstrual cycle.” Estrogen, which stimulates the release of histamine, “ebbs and flows throughout the month,” while progesterone acts as a “sort of natural antihistamine.” But in the days leading up to your period, progesterone “takes a nosedive.” In perimenopause, too, the levels of both hormones “rise and fall rapidly, often erratically.”

Both allergy medication and antacids are histamine blockers that interact with different receptors throughout the body, said Mara Rivera, a psychiatrist who specializes in reproductive health challenges, to NPR. The theory is that this combination may help keep histamine in check, basically replacing the effect of progesterone. In some ways, the trend is a modern-day example of an old wives’ tale. Women have been “doing this forever, just talking to one another, and seeing what works,” Rivera said.

Feeling unheard

The popularity of the “DIY Allegra and Pepcid AC cocktail” stems in part from “women feeling like they are not being heard by their doctors,” said People. Women are “hungry to know more and to help themselves,” and they often “feel like they’re not being listened to,” Soma Mandal, the medical director of women’s health at Jersey Shore University Medical Center at Hackensack Meridian Health, said to People. It is important to “find someone who will listen,” who will “take complaints seriously” and who also understands that this is a “physiologic part of life and deserves the appropriate treatment.” If you are not getting that level of care with your current practitioner, “then it’s time to move on."

Experts are not against open discussion and the sharing of symptoms and potential remedies over social media. It is “great that we are asking these questions and bringing up these ideas,” because we “desperately need more research in midlife women’s health,” gynecologist Amy Voedisch said to Everyday Health.

On the small Caribbean island of St Lucia, a crisis is brewing. For “more than a decade”, residents have lived with an “intermittent water supply”, said The Guardian. But the most recent emergency has upended day-to-day life for thousands, turning everything from “normal hygiene” practices to “food preparation” into a struggle.

And despite “millions of dollars of investment”, including $80 million (£60 million) from World Bank financing, funds have merely “scratched the surface” when it comes to tackling the water supply issues pushing islanders “to the brink”.

‘Complex mix of challenges’

Water supply is among St Lucia’s “most politically contentious issues”, with the two major political parties, Labour and the United Workers Party, “routinely trading accusations” that resources have been “mismanaged”, said The Guardian. The island has a sole water company – the Water and Sewerage Company (Wasco) – which therefore has the monopoly on supply.

Wasco’s provision of water to homes and businesses is hampered by service issues including leaks, blockages “and damage to key transmission lines”, said the St. Lucia Times. But there is also a “complex mix of challenges” at play, ranging from climate change to the island’s “ageing infrastructure”. Rainfall patterns are now far “less predictable” and the island grapples with “drier years alternating with wetter ones”.

The “severe” water shortage even led the island’s government to consider the “unprecedented” measure of importing water from nearby Dominica at the peak of its tourist season, said Caribbean National Weekly. While the return of rainfall in May ultimately tackled the issue, many fear the implications for future supply issues.

The ‘new norm’?

While the “popular imagination” may lend itself to believing the “paradise” islands of the Caribbean would not struggle with supply, “water scarcity may become the new norm” in the region, said PreventionWeb in 2024. In fact, the Caribbean as a whole is “one of the most water-stressed regions in the world”. Trinidad and Grenada have grappled with drought, St Vincent and St Kitts have both had to ration water, and Barbados has previously implemented “water bans” to curb usage.

In the meantime, “urgent but carefully planned intervention” is required to keep the island’s water system afloat, said the St. Lucia Times. As a temporary solution, citizens have been urged to “engage in rainwater harvesting”. In the longer term, the government has already promised “significant investment” along with a “dedicated committee” to examine Wasco’s future. The supplier’s slogan declares that “water is life”, said the newspaper. If that is the case, it is also true that “clearly the company and its systems are gravely ailing”.

If a hacker steals your password, you can create a new one, but if someone gains access to your fingerprint or iris data, you can hardly replace your fingers or eyes. But a new study has shown promise with a technique that allows users to “update” their fingerprints, which could make us all safer online.

Spy novels

Concern about the security of using fingerprints instead of passwords has grown this month amid reports that scammers could extract close-ups of fingerprints from social media photos and “enhance them with AI”, said Moneywise. The criminals could then use the victim’s unique fingerprint ID to gain access to their accounts, or launch identity theft and phishing attacks, although they would still need access to a physical scanner, like a smartphone unlock key, to use the cloned fingerprint.

It “sounds like the stuff out of spy novels or ‘Mission Impossible’”, Vyas Sekar, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, told CBS News, but “in theory, it’s possible, especially if people are posting high-resolution images”. In 2014, a hacker claimed to have cloned a fingerprint of European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, then Germany’s defence minister, using close-up photos taken at a press event.

‘Scrambled and compressed’

A study in the International Journal of Computational Vision and Robotics has found that “irreversible identity theft” can be “largely avoided” by giving users a chance to “reset” fingerprints and other biometrics, said TechXplore.

The method is “similar to changing a password”, said Knowridge. Rather than storing a person’s original fingerprint or other biometric information directly, it transforms their data into a protected version. To do this, it identifies unique features in a fingerprint image, such as distinctive patterns and points, and “uses mathematical methods to convert these features into a different form that is difficult to reverse-engineer”. The data is then “further scrambled and compressed” into a secure digital version.

In this form, it can still verify a person’s identity, but the original biometric data is hidden. If the protected version is ever compromised, it can be “cancelled and replaced”. Even if hackers gained access to the stored information, the user would not be permanently exposed.

While postpartum depression is widely known as an issue that affects mothers, researchers are increasingly finding that it can be experienced by fathers too. Postpartum depression is often used as a shorthand for any perinatal mood disorder, which can include anxiety and OCD. Understanding how that manifests differently across genders could be key to getting men the help they need.

New parenting stress

Fathers are “at risk for the same things that mothers go through,” said Sheehan Fisher, a perinatal clinical psychologist, to The New York Times. About 10% of fathers develop symptoms like depression and anxiety during the perinatal period, which lasts from pregnancy through the first year after childbirth. That is about half the proportion of mothers who develop similar symptoms. Conditions in fathers could be more prevalent than assumed because “men may be less likely to seek help than women are and often have different symptoms,” said the Times.

Depressed dads are more prone to expressing aggravation, annoyance or even rage, Daniel Singley, a psychologist who founded a therapy center for men, said to the Times. Beneath those emotions, they are likely “feeling hurt, sad, afraid, ashamed, helpless, hopeless,” but “what we see externally is anger and irritability.” These feelings can also present with physical symptoms such as muscle tension or stomach pain.

Evidence suggests a relationship between “paternal employment, psychological status, history of maternal mental illness, first pregnancy, marital relationship” and paternal postpartum depression, researchers said in a 2021 study. Another major risk factor is a “prior history of depression in the man,” said Psychology Today. Men also “typically experience a decrease in testosterone levels during the woman’s pregnancy,” which can contribute to a higher risk of depression.

Postpartum depression in fathers is “real and affects a substantial number of fathers,” said Psychology Today. It can have “deleterious effects for the father, the mother and the baby.” Screening for PPD in men is “important and yet is underutilized.”

Seeking help

Men can go undiagnosed because they prioritize the mother’s concerns over their own symptoms, or because they have a “hesitancy to admit” that they are struggling, Fisher said to the Times. Nearly half of PPD cases in women start during pregnancy, with the first postpartum weeks considered a high-risk period. For men, the riskiest window is three to six months after babies are born, possibly related to the “infants’ growing needs and activity or to the mothers returning to work.”

The number one risk factor for paternal postpartum depression, though, is “maternal postpartum depression,” Singley said to the Times. There is “a lot of stress” because men “want to be supportive, want to be caregivers,” and the “system is set up, really, to support women,” Brett Biller, a psychologist, said to CBS News. As paternal PPD becomes more widely recognized, the availability of resources should increase as well. Whether it's “medication, talk therapy or both,” there is “nothing wrong with that,” Biller added. “Mental health difficulties are the same as physical difficulties, and there’s a correlation between the two.”

Men are sometimes taught that “seeking support for their mental health is a sign of weakness,” psychologist Adam Borland said to the Cleveland Clinic. “But it’s not.” If you’re living with male postpartum depression, “it’s the best step you can take to best care for yourself and your family.” Adjusting to a baby can be trying, but if your depressive symptoms persist for weeks, don’t hesitate to reach out for guidance.

There is “nothing shameful or embarrassing” about the condition, Borland said. Fatherhood is a “huge new job, with long hours and no pay and you deserve support.” Asking for help means you are “doing what you need to do so you can be the best man — and best dad — you can be.”

Alzheimer’s disease, a progressive brain disorder that gradually degrades a person’s cognitive and memory functions, is the No. 1 cause of dementia. There’s currently no cure, but according to a study published in the journal ACS Chemical Neuroscience, a new copper-based treatment may be on the horizon.

Clearing out

Alzheimer’s is “driven by the buildup of toxic proteins called amyloid beta,” said a release about the study. These proteins are usually flushed into the bloodstream through the blood-brain barrier. However, in those with Alzheimer’s disease, the “pumps doing the heavy lifting, called P-glycoprotein (P-gp), weaken significantly, clogging the drain and trapping the toxic proteins in the brain.”

A buildup of these proteins in the brain leads to memory loss and cognitive decline. But the copper-based compound Cu(ATSM), which has “anti-inflammatory and neuroprotective properties,” can clear them from the brain, said senior study author Joseph Nicolazzo in the release. It does so by “increasing the number and activity” of the P-gp pumps, said Newsweek.

The study is the first to show that Cu(ATSM) can boost the amount of P-gp pumps “by 24.1%, effectively linking the repair of the blood-brain barrier to a reduction in toxic proteins and improved cognitive function,” said lead study author Jae Pyun in the release. “Over 56 days, the treatment reduced toxic amyloid-beta by 42% and improved spatial learning by nearly 44%.”

Not just yet

Alzheimer’s disease is the No. 1 cause of dementia, accounting for about 60% to 80% of cases, according to the Alzheimer’s Association. The condition also worsens over time. In its early stages, “memory loss is mild, but with late-stage Alzheimer’s, individuals lose the ability to carry on a conversation and respond to their environment,” said the association. “On average, a person with Alzheimer’s lives four to eight years after diagnosis but can live as long as 20 years, depending on other factors.”

Cu(ATSM) improved the long-term spatial memory of mice, showing promise for future human clinical trials. The compound has also “already progressed to clinical testing for conditions like Parkinson’s and ALS,” said Nicolazzo in the release. However, “despite its promising results in animals, a pilot comparative analysis found that Cu(ATSM) provided no significant benefit to humans with ALS,” said Science Alert.

More than 7 million Americans 65 and older are estimated to be living with Alzheimer’s. By 2050, that number is projected to rise to close to 13 million, according to the Alzheimer’s Association. A drug that could prolong cognition and lifespan would be a game changer for patients and their families.

The disease itself is still full of unknowns. Alzheimer’s “involves the biological environment of the aging brain, including membrane biology, inflammation, vascular function, lipid metabolism and cellular resilience,” said neuroscientist Dayan Goodenowe to Newsweek. “So any single mechanism still has to be validated before we know whether it produces meaningful clinical benefit.”

California is tense, or at least its fault lines are. The southern part of the state is at risk of experiencing a devastating earthquake as stress levels along both the San Andreas and San Jacinto faults are at a peak. While researchers cannot predict when the earthquake will occur, understanding the state of these two fault lines and their associated risks can help to better prepare civilians and municipalities.

Tension at the gate

Stress levels along the San Andreas and San Jacinto fault lines have “now reached high levels,” and the “two fault systems may interact when their stress levels become similar,” leading to a massive earthquake, said a study published in the journal JGR: Solid Earth. After analyzing 1,000 years of paleoseismic data, researchers found that “stress along multiple portions of the faults is the highest it has been in at least a millennium,” said The Washington Post.

Earthquakes occur when a slip along a fault line “releases energy built up over time,” said CNN. Stress “accumulates as tectonic forces move the crust, but parts of the fault are locked and unable to slip freely.”

While the Los Angeles area has seen its share of small earthquakes over the years, its last devastating quake was in 1857. The “violent magnitude-7.9 tremor ruptured a 225-mile stretch on the southern part of the San Andreas fault,” said the Post. Since then, that portion of the fault has “remained largely dormant, with stress continuing to build elsewhere along the fault, as well as along the neighboring San Jacinto fault.”

The two fault lines meet at a point called the Cajon Pass that could serve as an “earthquake gate.” A gate can “either stop or transmit large ruptures between the two faults,” said CNN.

“The conditions that determine whether the earthquake gate at Cajon Pass opens or stays closed appear to be related to how closely the stress levels on the two fault systems are aligned with each other at the time of rupture,” said lead study author Liliane Burkhard in a news release. “Right now, with stress at historically high levels across the region and more than 160 years elapsed since the last major rupture, the system is in a critically loaded state.”

Magnitude prediction

Because of the comparable stress levels, the Cajon Pass could “facilitate a joint rupture of both the San Andreas and San Jacinto faults simultaneously — a scenario that could be significantly more damaging than a single-fault event,” said the release. The resulting quake would affect “densely populated areas including Los Angeles, San Bernardino, Riverside and the Coachella Valley.” Researchers predict the tremor would be between a 7.4 and 7.8 in magnitude and cause significant damage to “critical infrastructure such as major highways, railways and energy corridors over several cities simultaneously,” said CNN.

Major earthquakes have occurred in other parts of California. There was a devastating 7.9-magnitude earthquake along the San Andreas fault in 1906 that affected San Francisco and the Bay Area. However, earthquakes in “one part of the fault network do not relieve pressure elsewhere,” said the BBC.

This research does not predict when the next giant earthquake will happen, but it does “improve our understanding of earthquake interactions in Southern California,” said the study. And knowing the risk can “help refine regional hazard assessments.”

The US military will include Australia in a global pre-positioning programme for weapons, ammunition and vehicles for the first time, according to reports.

There is a “growing US footprint in Australia”, said Defence Minister Richard Marles, which is “important in terms of building our own military capability” but critics have asked if Australia is “acting like America’s 51st state”.

Rotating force

Although Australia does not permit foreign military bases on its soil, it hosts US Marines for exercises for six months of the year in the northern city of Darwin, and a “rotating force” of US-commanded submarines will arrive in Western Australia next year, reported France 24.

If the US and China “come to blows over Taiwan”, the naval base in Western Australia “offers a berth” that would bring American nuclear-powered submarines “close to the fight” – and provide a “haven if things go wrong”, said The Wall Street Journal.

In 2023, as part of a trial of pre-positioning US military equipment, the US Army left trucks at Bandiana, Victoria, after war games with Australia, which are held every two years. A separate US Marines storage facility in Australia is expected to reach full capacity by 2028, with a global defence contractor employing around 110 engineers and specialists.

The US Navy has allocated $30 million (£23 million) to build warehouses and offices in the state of Victoria in 2027. The “hugely significant American presence” in the Asia-Pacific is a counterbalance to China’s “very significant military build-up”, said Marles.

Trump whirlwind

Experts are divided over whether Australia should respond to Beijing this way. A report from the Lowy Institute warned that China has the capability to strike northern Australia with “ballistic missiles deployed to its South China Sea outposts”.

The think tank’s director of international security, Sam Roggeveen, told Agence France-Presse that this was a “relevant consideration” in locating a stockpile in Australia’s southeast because “once these facilities are operational, they would be obvious targets for China”.

There is “little political appetite” for a “massive increase in Australian defence expenditure”, said Australian National University professor of international security John Blaxland, so “facilitating greater US investment in Australian real estate is widely considered to be the most prudent approach to take”.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s “wholehearted embrace” of an “enhanced strategic relationship” with Japan “surely” confirms that Labor has “signed up totally to the United States and its regional policy in the teeth of the Trump whirlwind”, wrote international affairs expert James Curran in the Financial Review last month.

There is a growing “acceptance” that Aukus, the security partnership between Australia, the UK and the US, is “cannibalising the defence budget”, yet ministers “believe the problem only needs to be managed, not addressed”. There are “precedents” for close US allies withdrawing permission for US access to jointly operated military bases and airspace.

Spain “point-blank denied” Washington the use of two of its critical bases for Iran-related missions, while Saudi Arabia and Kuwait appeared to restrict Washington’s use of joint facilities that were critical to Trump’s mission in the Strait of Hormuz.

So Australia “could, if it so chose, do the same” – but is the country “even considering this might be an option in the future”?

While the world’s oceans have generally been heating up, one patch of the Atlantic located south of Greenland has been dropping in temperature. Dubbed the “cold blob,” the region’s cooling is likely tied to the growing unsteadiness of one ocean current system due to climate change. The collapse of the system could lead to disruptions in global weather patterns.

Current problems

The Atlantic cold blob has cooled by nearly one degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) since 1900. The region is also the “only part of the world” that has “cooled significantly since the 19th century, both in the atmosphere and ocean,” said a study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. Scientists believe that the climate anomaly is happening because of shifts in a network of ocean currents called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC).

Researchers analyzed decades of North Atlantic temperature and heat flux data going back as far as 1870. They found that the cold blob had “shown a marked decrease in the amount of heat escaping to the atmosphere over the last half-century, especially since 1993” and that the “largest drop in heat content has been in the top 1,000 meters — coinciding with the AMOC’s location,” said Science News. The decrease in heat content indicates that the heat supply provided by the AMOC has been declining over the past few decades.

The AMOC “works like a vast ocean conveyor belt, pulling warm water from the tropics to the Northern Hemisphere, where it cools, sinks and flows back south,” said CNN. Over time, the system has been “weakening as human-driven global warming melts ice and causes a surge of freshwater into the ocean, disrupting the AMOC’s delicate balance of heat and salinity.” Eventually, the current system may “become so weak” that it can “no longer distribute heat around the world,” said USA Today. The collapse of the AMOC has been deemed a climate tipping point after which there will be irreversible ecological damage.

Future problems

The cold blob and resulting disruption of the AMOC have been taking a toll on various regions of the planet. The Indian summer monsoon rainfall pattern has “shifted dramatically since 1999,” said a study published in the journal AGU Advances. “Northwest India receives 24.6% more rain during the monsoon season, while the Indo-Gangetic Plain has decreased by 4.4%, experiencing drought conditions.” Upon investigation, researchers found that the cold blob had “shifted the Indian monsoon by creating a strong temperature gradient over the North Atlantic,” which affected “jet stream winds and pressure systems in the atmosphere above Eurasia,” said Live Science, a sister site of The Week.

Similar effects are likely to occur around the world. While scientists do not know when the AMOC tipping point will be reached, it could “trigger dramatically cold winters in northern Europe” when it does, said Euronews. An AMOC collapse would also cause sea levels on the east coast of the U.S. to “rise rapidly since the current normally drives water away from the land,” and “storms in the Atlantic would increase in intensity.”

Summer is “a boom time for ice cream makers”, said Agence France-Presse – but in Japan, some of the country’s biggest firms are feeling the heat.

Officials from the Japan Fair Trade Commission (JFTC) have raided six firms on suspicion of colluding to hike prices in a cartel. Staff are believed to have “sent emails or met up for years to coordinate the timing and size” of the increases, said an anonymous source, violating anti-monopoly laws.

The anti-trust watchdog searched the head offices of Meiji, Morinaga Milk Industry, Lotte, Ezaki Glico, Morinaga & Co and Akagi Nyugyo, company officials have confirmed.

Prices ‘jumped in lockstep’

Since 2022, ice cream prices in Japan have risen every year around the same time, as heat and inflation climb. In the fiscal year ending in March, ice cream sales hit a record high of 663 billion yen (about £3.1 billion), according to the Japan Ice Cream Association, as the country sweated through its hottest summer since records began.

Now, the commission is investigating whether major manufacturers colluded to take advantage of inflation and raise their prices above the increase in the cost of raw ingredients, according to Kyodo News.

Sources say the six companies are “suspected of raising the suggested retail prices of ice cream” in increments of 10 yen, according to The Japan Times. The aim seems to be “securing profits for each company”.

Public broadcaster NHK used a graph to show how “the price of two flagship frozen delights” – Meiji’s ice cream and Morinaga Milk’s choco-ice bites – “jumped in lockstep four times” between 2022 and 2025, said The Guardian. Sources say this is the first JFTC investigation into a “suspected ice-cream-related price cartel”. The case has provoked anger among “frozen snack aficionados as they face a cruel summer ahead”.

Japan’s “sweltering and sweaty summers” are being intensified by the climate crisis. In April, authorities announced a new term for days reaching more than 40C – kokusho, meaning “cruelly hot”.

The ice cream ‘boom’

The case “threatens to undermine the reputations” of some of Japan’s largest food companies, said The New York Times. The ice cream industry has “boomed in recent years”. Last year, it was valued at more than $4 billion, up 3% from 2024.

But rising prices have “stoked public anger” in Japan, which is battling inflation for “the first time in decades”, fuelled by higher energy costs from the war in the Middle East.

The companies have issued statements saying the commission had raided their offices and that they “would cooperate with the investigation”. Natsuyo Suzuki, of Akagi Nyugo, said the firm would work with investigators following an “on-site inspection”.

The JFTC will analyse seized materials and interview individuals to investigate the suspected violation of antimonopoly laws. But if the commission “concludes that there was a cartel”, said AFP, the antitrust watchdog will “order the firms to improve their business practices and pay a fine”.

The new mayor of Paris, Emmanuel Grégoire, has promised to treat the alleged abuse of children in dozens of state nursery and primary schools in Paris as an “absolute priority” amid growing outrage from parents and the public.

Child protection officers carried out a wave of arrests last month, “dramatically accelerating the authorities’ response to a scandal that has shaken the French capital and undermined faith in its schools”, said France 24.

‘It’s a massive scandal’

The focus of the police investigation are so-called “monitors” in the capital’s after-school care system. They are not employed directly by schools or the education ministry but recruited by city or local authorities “often without training or professional diplomas and increasingly on a casual basis, with many paid by the hour”, said The Guardian.

Prosecutors have been examining more than 100 allegations of mistreatment, physical violence and rape of children as young as three by monitors during lunch breaks, nap times and after-school activities.

“We have investigations under way in 84 pre-schools, about 20 primary schools and about 10 daycare centres,” said Paris’ top prosecutor, Laure Beccuau. The number of institutions being investigated represents roughly one in six of such places in the French capital.

In late May, a 35-year-old man became the first person to go on public trial related to the after-school abuse scandal. He is accused of sexually assaulting five children aged between three and five at the Alphonse-Baudin pre-school in Paris’ 11th arrondissement.

“It’s a massive scandal,” said Florian Lastelle, a lawyer for three Parisian families who have filed police complaints over the alleged abuse of their children. “The state school system is a source of pride in this country, but unfortunately in France today it’s not possible to say that the public service guarantees children’s safety.”

#MeTooEcole

While the authorities are only now taking action, parents’ groups have been fighting for years for the allegations to be taken seriously.

Leading the charge is the #MeTooEcole collective, set up to support families who “found themselves faced with protocols that were deemed non-existent or inadequate, blurred responsibilities between institutions, schools and extra-curricular activities, and a profound sense of abandonment”, said Euronews.

Grégoire, the city’s new Socialist mayor who suffered sexual abuse in primary school during an after-school swimming club, has struck a “more conciliatory tone” than his predecessor Anne Hidalgo, acknowledging a “systemic” problem and apologising to parents on behalf of the city, said France 24.

As well as announcing dozens of suspensions and vowing better vetting of people who apply to be after-school monitors and improved training for recruits, he has also agreed to set up a cross-party inquiry and convene an assembly of parents tasked with exploring ways to improve child protection and rethink after-school hours.

“I know there is a clear breakdown of trust in the state school system,” he told the municipal council. “But we will get there; we have no choice.”

Relaxed scientific protocols and standards within the Department of Health and Human Services have led to an increase in clinics offering experimental stem cell treatments to parents of children with severe autism. Despite being technically unapproved by the Food and Drug Administration, parents are shelling out tens of thousands for treatments that claim to improve language and social skills and reduce problem behaviors.

Operating ‘beyond the bounds of FDA approval’

Although there is a lack of FDA approval and little evidence of its efficacy, stem cell treatments for autism are being steadily provided across the country. Children with autism “as young as 18 months old” are getting “unapproved stem cell treatments” at clinics in Florida, Texas and elsewhere, “part of a growing market operating beyond the bounds of FDA approval,” said The Guardian.

The procedure involves sedating a child before administering intravenous doses of millions of stem cells, “commonly derived from human umbilical cords harvested at birth,” said The Guardian. Sometimes the doctors providing the treatment have “no scientific expertise in autism or child development.” Instead, they have “entered the booming stem cell sector,” billing the procedures as “regenerative medicine” for children, “some of whom have severe disabilities.”

As stem cell clinics “multiply across America,” they are “finding an influential ally in the U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.,” said The Guardian. Kennedy’s influence could lead to new policy, said Paul Knoepfler, a stem cell biologist and unofficial watchdog of stem cell clinics, to the outlet. The FDA has not taken action in the last 18 months. This could mean a “big change coming from the FDA very soon, backing off oversight of birth-related stem cells.”

Several clinics prominently cite an early Duke University study involving 25 autistic children that “suggested possible improvements following umbilical cord stem cell infusions,” said Trial Site News. But a “larger and more rigorous follow-up trial” involving 180 children failed to “demonstrate significant improvements in core autism symptoms compared with placebo controls.” Similar results emerged from a “placebo-controlled study conducted by Sutter Health.” This has led researchers to conclude that the “evidence does not currently support routine use of stem cell therapies for autism outside formal clinical research settings.”

Up until now, Americans seeking stem cell therapies for autism have looked abroad to places where they are approved and federally regulated or operating in grey areas. There is a flourishing multibillion-dollar industry of “stem cell tourism” in places such as “Mexico and Panama” and “as far afield as Abu Dhabi,” said The Guardian.

But most European countries limit the use of stem cell injections to clinical trials, and they are not an approved treatment for autism. In January, the Indian Supreme Court ruled that stem cell therapy cannot be used as a clinical treatment for autism spectrum disorder, making it clear it is “not only unethical but amounts to medical malpractice,” said Indian network NDTV.

When ‘hope outpaces evidence’

The biggest lesson from this story is “not political,” said Trial Site News. “It is human.” Parents seeking unsanctioned stem cell therapies are “not irrational.” Most are “navigating difficult realities” with “limited options and enormous responsibility.” The danger emerges when “hope outpaces evidence.” The appropriate response is “neither unquestioning enthusiasm nor reflexive dismissal” but rather “rigorous clinical research, transparent reporting, long-term safety monitoring and honest communication with families.”

After RFK promised to find a cure for autism last year, some people were “appalled and fearful,” clinical social worker Jennifer Cork said at Psychology Today. Plenty of families whose children require substantial support, however, were “relieved that someone in a position of power was finally talking about their struggles.” The issue is that these families “don’t need untried, expensive treatments.” They need “affordable therapies, respite care and adequate accommodations that they don’t have to fight for.” They also need Kennedy to “remember that autistic people are human beings, not lab rats.”

Infecting yourself with internal parasites doesn’t sound like the best way to feel better but scientists have “engineered” the genes of hookworms to deliver medicine – and “it’s just crazy enough to work”, said ZME Science.

US researchers have genetically modified hookworms to produce and secrete specific antibodies. This is a “first step” towards creating “living pharmaceutical factories” that can deliver therapeutic proteins “directly inside the host”, they said in their study, published in Nature Communications.

Internal leeches 

The hookworm has “spent millions of years perfecting how to assure long-term survival inside a human host, and how to get molecules out of its body and into ours”, said senior author Makedonka Mitreva, from Washington University in St Louis, on EurekAlert.

They are like an “internal leech”, infecting upwards of 400 million people globally, mostly in tropical regions, said LiveScience. As they latch on to the inner wall of the gut to feed on blood, they release “anti-inflammatory and immunosuppressant compounds to prevent the body from flushing them out”.

Scientists have already noted that this “cocktail of compounds” produced naturally by hookworms could help treat some metabolic disorders. But the new study takes things further – by engineering in an extra molecule for the worm to secrete.

Mitreva and her team used CRISPR gene-editing technology to insert into a hookworm egg genome “a gene coding for an antibody known to counteract” the pufferfish poison tetrodotoxin, a lethal, weaponisable neurotoxin with no known commercial antidote. They then infected hamsters with the modified parasites, and samples taken later showed the hamsters had antibodies to tetrodotoxin circulating in their blood.

“It was like the perfect moment,” Mitreva told R&D World. Now “we can start embarking on hookworms being a two-in-one platform” because we’ve shown they “can not only deliver a drug, but produce that drug and deliver it”.

‘Internal allies’ 

The goal now is to use this technology on humans. In the future, we “could see these worms engineered to produce a variety of other medications and excrete them inside the human body”, said LiveScience. They could potentially provide long-term treatments for chronic conditions such as inflammatory bowel disease, or even protective treatments for military personnel exposed to chemical or biological threats. Mitreva’s study was, in fact, funded by the US Department of Defense with a view to developing a treatment for tetrodotoxin poisoning.

This is an “exciting” approach that “paves the way for all sorts of injection-free biologic drug delivery”, said ZME Science. It’s “tantalising” to think that “engineered hookworms could one day” be our “internal allies, providing continuous therapeutic benefits while living safely within a human host”.

If you have ever felt like you couldn’t stop eating your favorite sweet treats and savory snacks, that’s by design. The tobacco industry had a heavy hand in the growth of ultraprocessed food in the U.S. And despite no longer being involved, its marketing tricks remain.

A new addiction

Big Tobacco employed its tactics in marketing cigarettes to also market ultraprocessed food, according to a series of papers published in the American Journal of Public Health (AJPH). In the 1980s, U.S. tobacco giants Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds made a “major entrance into the food industry” when they had “strong cash flows yet experienced growing scrutiny regarding their tobacco products,” said one of the AJPH papers. Investing in food and beverages was an attempt to improve their corporate image, so the team acquired several major brands, including Del Monte Foods, General Foods, Kraft, Nabisco and 7UP.

Tobacco companies “spent decades amassing research on how to make cigarettes more pleasurable and addictive with chemical additives” and “deliberately applied this knowledge to food manufacturing,” according to “internal company records,” said NPR. Thus came the rise of added sugars and artificial flavorings in food and beverages. These additives are known to be “hyperpalatable,” activating the same part of the brain as cigarettes or other drugs.

Along with changing the composition of the products, aggressive marketing tactics became the norm. Big Tobacco “applied the same strategies to developing light and reduced food products with the express goal of retaining customers who might otherwise stop consuming some of their products,” said lead paper author Tera Fazzino, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Kansas, to NPR.

The companies “divested from the food system from 2000 to 2007,” said the papers. However, their impact has been long-lasting. Ultraprocessed foods “now account for 70% of packaged foods in the U.S. and 62% of the calories in children’s diets,” said Fast Company. These foods have been linked to a variety of health problems, including obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

“Children are really, really vulnerable to this kind of messaging,” said paper author Laura Schmidt, a professor at the University of California at San Francisco, to The Washington Post. “The goal is to hook the consumer at the youngest possible age because, as you grow up, they have instilled brand loyalty in you.”

Trying to quit

There have been growing calls for regulating the production and sale of ultraprocessed foods, notably as part of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again agenda. Last summer, for example, federal agencies “began a joint effort to define ultraprocessed food,” said Bloomberg. This definition could be “used on product labels in an effort to nudge consumers to reach for healthier items.” The ultimate goal is to implement labeling on the front of packaging that indicates what foods are ultraprocessed. But creating such a definition is not so simple, as it could “inadvertently ensnare some healthier items like yogurt.”

While Kennedy may be pushing back against ultraprocessed food, the Trump administration has made “policy changes that could exacerbate the problem,” said The Guardian. The administration also “failed to direct policy changes that could help, like redirecting government corn subsidies toward whole fruits and vegetables.”

But better monitoring could lead to needed changes. Countries might “consider establishing a baseline of ultraprocessed or hyperpalatable food availability in their food environments to monitor food system health,” said the papers. There may also be a “global need to consider regulation of multiple addictive products disseminated by tobacco companies.”

The Food and Drug Administration has approved the use of bemotrizinol (BEMT) in sunscreens. The chemical has been used in European and Asian brands of sunblock for decades. BEMT can provide better sun protection and last longer while being less greasy on the skin.

New kid in the block

Sunscreens are supposed to protect against both ultraviolet A (UVA) and B rays (UVB). UVB is “high-energy radiation that is typically associated with sunburns and can cause genetic mutations that lead to skin cancer,” said Scientific American. UVA rays have also “increasingly become recognized as relevant for skin health,” and their “longer-wavelength radiation” can “penetrate deeper into the skin than UVB, breaking down the skin’s structure and creating harmful, skin‑aging molecules.” Unfortunately, while most U.S. sunscreens are effective against UVB radiation, they “provided significantly lower UVA protection with the average unweighted UVA protection factor just 24% of the labeled SPF,” said a 2021 study.

BEMT, though, is capable of ”protecting against both ultraviolet A and B rays while not leaving white streaks associated with mineral-based sunscreens,” said The Associated Press. The ingredient is “generally recognized as safe and effective for use in sunscreens by adults and children 6 months of age and older,” said the FDA. “For too long, American consumers have been applying sunscreen and believing they were fully protected, not knowing that their product was delivering far less UVA protection than the label implied,” Alexa Friedman, a senior scientist at the Environmental Working Group, said in a statement.

Screening issues

There have been many efforts to get the government to approve new sunscreen ingredients, but they were “bogged down for decades by the FDA’s bureaucratic system for updating its lists of safe nonprescription drug ingredients,” said the AP. Bemotrizinol’s approval marks the “first ingredient to go through a streamlined process authorized by Congress in 2020.”

Sunscreen is an important step in preventing skin cancer, but there has been a mounting anti-sunscreen movement “amid an increasing distrust of the medical establishment and a desire by some for natural alternatives,” said The Washington Post. Much of the concern has surrounded chemical sunscreens, which get absorbed into the skin. In 2019, scientists from the FDA found that these sunscreens’ ingredients can stay in the body at unsafe levels after just one day of use. Bemotrizinol is “broad-spectrum and far more stable, so it doesn’t break down in the sun,” said NBC News. It “also has low levels of absorption into the body.”

Nearly half its customers paid nothing for their food and drink after a cafe in the US stopped charging customers and asked instead for voluntary donations.

But since it switched to this curious model, the Post Modern Times cafe in Minneapolis is making a profit after mostly posting losses for years.

Defying ‘fascists’

In a statement shared on Post Modern Times’ Instagram account in January, the cafe’s owner, Dylan Alverson, said he had decided to move to a donations-only model in response to a “government occupation” in Minneapolis.

The restaurant is just four blocks from where Renée Good was killed in January by Ice agents and six blocks from the site of George Floyd’s murder in 2020. “Effective tomorrow we are done making money for the fascists that occupy our city,” he said. “We refuse to generate taxes under the guise of a functioning for-profit capitalist business aligned with government strategy.”

What was “surprising” is “what ensued in the weeks and months that followed”, said The New York Times. Post Modern Times “thrived”, even as the number of customers who don’t pay for food “hovers between 40 and 50%”. Running on donations means the cafe doesn’t have to pay tax on sales and the staff are volunteers working for shared tips and community donations.

Alverson’s cafe generated $1.3 million (£960,000) in sales last year but still lost $18,500 (£13,800), “in spite of cost-conscious measures” like paying himself just $23,000 (£17,000) a year as “manager, chef and fix-it man”.

After “fighting to make a profit for 15 years”, he had concluded that it’s not “possible” without “taking advantage of people”. But since making the change, he has “succeeded more than I ever did when I was running a conventional business employing 22 people”.

Some 42% of restaurant owners said their businesses weren’t profitable last year, according to the National Restaurant Association. So, “what started as a workaround to paying sales tax” might “offer a solution to a broken industry-wide business”.

Establishing trust

“Pay what you wish”, or “PWYW”, is a “well-known, if not exactly common”, pricing strategy whereby the buyer sets the price of a given commodity, said The Guardian.

Although paying nothing is “always a popular option”, the “underlying idea” is to “establish trust” between a seller keen to provide value or expand market share, and a “fair-minded buyer”.

The fashion retailer Everlane held a PWYW sale in 2015 and when Radiohead self-released their 2007 album “In Rainbows”, it was as a PWYW download. Although 62% of fans paid nothing for the download, and the average overall price per download was just $2.26, this was still more than the share the band would have got by selling at full price through iTunes (about $1.40).

For the people of Gaza, “fear is no longer linked only to what falls from the sky”, but also to “what crawls from below”, said Prospect.

Rats and other rodents have “taken over everything in a frenzy” and, with summer approaching, their numbers are expected to soar even higher.

Physical and psychological threats

A “plague” of rodents is “terrorising” the area, said the Financial Times, as rats and weasels “chew their way into tents, biting children and contaminating food”. A Unicef spokesperson who visited Gaza this month said rodents are becoming “a huge, huge problem because of accumulated rubble everywhere”.

The threat they pose is more than psychological. Rats transmit diseases through urine and waste, causing fever and other illnesses. Diabetic patients are particularly vulnerable to rodent bites, as they may not feel it happening and serious complications can occur.

More than 72,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s war in Gaza, and rats began “eating human bodies under the rubble”, Samah al-Dabla, who was displaced from Beit Lahiya in northern Gaza, told Al Jazeera.

Rats are now appearing in the tents where many Gazans live. Al-Dabla has tried to buy rat poison but the prices are too high and she already struggles to afford enough food for her family. Any food she manages to obtain tends only to attract more rats.

Mounting problem

Dr Ayman Abu Rahma, director of preventive medicine at Gaza’s Ministry of Health, told Al Jazeera that the problem has three main causes: damage to sewage systems, decomposing bodies under the rubble, and the amount of rubbish building up in the territory. Gaza City’s main landfill site is a “breeding ground for rodents in a densely populated area”, said Al Jazeera.

Local officials want to convert waste into organic fertiliser, but the war has destroyed much of the equipment needed for such a process.

The urgency is clear: rubbish dumps are located close to tents in displacement sites, creating serious “health hazards that will increase as summer temperatures rise”, humanitarian officials and residents told the Financial Times.

Cogat, the Israeli Ministry of Defence body that monitors aid access to Gaza, said that “nearly 170 tons of pesticides and thousands of traps for rats, mosquitoes, and other pests have been brought into the Gaza Strip in recent weeks”.

But Salim Oweis, the Unicef spokesperson who visited Gaza, said the amount allowed in is “barely enough for a few weeks” and “the whole of Gaza” is affected.

“Just happy to be here.” That is the category assigned to a host of footballing nations, including Haiti, Panama and newcomers Curaçao and Cape Verde, by the San Francisco Chronicle ahead of the men’s 2026 World Cup.

Unlike the established national teams coming into the competition with “high expectations”, these unlikely contenders have spent decades on the fringes of international football.

“One of the most topsy-turvy weeks in World Cup qualifying history” saw a handful of heavyweight footballing nations fail to qualify, while several “tiny nations reached the finals for the first time”, said ESPN.

Punching above their weight

Fifa’s decision to expand the World Cup finals from 32 to 48 teams has created more pathways for smaller countries to qualify, including first-timers Curaçao, Cape Verde, Jordan and Uzbekistan. Many of these nations have spent years building a footballing infrastructure that punches well above their demographic weight.

Despite having a “land mass smaller than the Isle of Man” and a population of 156,000, the southern Caribbean island of Curaçao has relied on “well-drilled organisation” to help its team reach the finals, said the BBC. The team – nicknamed the Blue Family and led by “vastly experienced” Dutch coach Dick Advocaat – is “hard to break down and dangerous in transition”.

Meanwhile, “the Blue Sharks of Cape Verde are swimming in uncharted waters”, but “you wouldn’t want to bet against them” either, said The Guardian. “Physical and happy to defend”, this “eclectic” group of players has worked together “for the best part of half a decade”. Two years ago, they were joined by Rotterdam-born forward Dailon Livramento, who has proven “the missing piece for a team who have a host of talented wide players, but lacked a central presence up front”. Racking up four goals in the qualifying stages, he “has already cemented his status as a legend”.

There is cause for optimism even among the smallest participating nations, said The Athletic: when the women’s World Cup expanded its own group stage in 2023, there were predictions of drubbings, but “the underdogs fared much better than expected”.

Most of the “minnows” are likely to focus on defence against the stronger sides in their group and aim to “keep the scorelines respectable”, before taking a more aggressive stance against their weakest rival, “in the knowledge that a single win in the group stage may take them through”.

‘Real hope’

“For the football-mad boys of Port-au-Prince, the next month promises to be one of unparalleled excitement,” said ITV. Haiti have qualified for first time since 1974, long before the majority of its citizens were born.

Haiti is the poorest country in the tournament and its citizens are the subject of a US travel ban, so attending matches in person is out of the question for most of them. But regardless the nation “is entering the tournament in a spirit of optimism”. For many Haitians, the tournament is a chance to show the world that, “despite its profound challenges, this country can compete on a global stage”.

In Cape Verde, there is a sense of “real hope” that is “widely shared” among the islanders, said Reuters. Bars, restaurants and cafes are “gearing up” for the tournament of a lifetime. One bartender said the World Cup would help Cape Verde gain “more visibility in the world”.

The tournament also presents a significant earning opportunity: “about $10.5 million” (£7.85 million) for getting to the finals, said NPR. Such a cash injection could strengthen “youth development” opportunities and expand “scouting across the diaspora”.

And football is, perhaps “more than most sports”, known for its “shocks”, including when Saudi Arabia beat Lionel Messi’s Argentina, the eventual champions, in a 2022 group match, said Joshua McLeod and Hunter Fujak, sports lecturers at Deakin University, on The Conversation. “Could we see Cape Verde or Curaçao produce an even greater World Cup upset?”

Artificial intelligence systems can now convince you they are human. Two large language models have passed the Turing test, which determines if a machine can “show the same intelligence as a human being,” said The Independent. This significant development in AI is troubling, as anthropomorphizing LLMs can lead to deception and raise questions about what’s real and what isn’t.

Man or machine

In the test, a person “engages in text-based conversations with both a human and a machine without knowing which is which," said Stanford University. If the individual cannot tell them apart, the machine is considered to have passed the test. Researchers tested four AI systems and found that newer LLMs can “effectively imitate people in short interactions,” said a study published in the journal PNAS.

“Given the right prompts, advanced LLMs can exhibit the same tone, directness, humor and fallibility as humans,” study author Cameron Jones said in a release. “While we know LLMs can easily produce knowledge on nearly every topic, this test showed that it can also convincingly display social behavioral traits, which has major implications for how we think of AI.” The four tested AI models were GPT-4.5 and Llama-3.1-405B, which were state-of-the-art models, as well as the older baseline models GPT-4o and ELIZA, a simple chatbot from the 1960s.

Of the models, “GPT-4.5 was judged to be the human 73% of the time, meaning interrogators selected it as ‘human’ significantly more often than they selected the real human participant,” said the release. Llama-3.1-405B, “given the same prompt, was judged human 56% of the time,” making it “statistically indistinguishable from the humans it was compared against.” The baseline systems performed significantly worse, with ELIZA being mistaken for human only 23% of the time and GPT-4o being mistaken 21% of the time.

No man’s land

AI models passing for humans is a concerning development. The Turing test is a “game about lying for the models,” Jones said in the release, and “one of the implications is that models seem to be really good at that.” A big risk of the existence of AI models with this ability is the rise of “counterfeit people.” Thanks to the ease of deception, we “need to be more alert,” and “people should be much less confident that they know they’re talking to a human rather than an LLM.” Still, AI is not yet at a level where it can be deceptive on its own.

While the bots did pass the Turing test, they also required specific instructions to do so. Each of the systems was “instructed to adopt a persona, or a specific character and communication style,” said The Independent. These prompts “worked partly by leading the systems to make mistakes in the same way a human would.” When the models were not prompted, they were much less likely to be mistaken for humans, and GPT-4.5 fell to a 36% win rate and Llama-3.1-405B to a 38% win rate. The models “have the ability to appear humanlike,” study co-author Ben Bergen said in the release, “but maybe not as much the ability to figure out what it would take to appear humanlike.”

“As pervasive as ketchup” on chips, hot pepper sauce is an “obligatory accompaniment” for Caribbean cuisine, said the BBC. But a shortage of the fiery-flavoured condiment is “stifling supply” – both in the Caribbean, and in countries like the US, the UK and Australia, where consumers have developed a taste for its sweet, smoky punch.

It’s all about the main ingredient: Scotch bonnet, a scorching hot chilli pepper with an intense, fruity flavour. Susceptible both to “heavy rain and viruses”, and “walloped” by recent hurricanes, harvests have become devastatingly poor.

‘Confluence’ of issues

“From Jamaican jerk chicken to Haitian beef stew,” the Scotch bonnet pepper is a “foundational element” of Caribbean cuisine, said Chowhound. Not only does it pack a punch, it also adds “sweetness and an unmistakable scent”. It has a “smoky, recognisable spiciness” that has been successfully marketed the world over.

But now it’s “particularly hard to source”, said the BBC. Sauce and seasoning manufacturers such as Jamaica-based Walkerswood have cited a “confluence” of issues, including extreme weather and pests, just when global demand for hot sauce is skyrocketing; Walkerswood now exports “more than 95% of its products”.

It isn’t the first time a hot sauce shortage has had a global impact. Sriracha aficionados felt a “not so pleasant sting” four years ago, said The Guardian, as drought in Mexico resulted in a scarcity of the sauce’s “key ingredient”: red jalapeños.

Too ‘temperamental’

The Scotch bonnet shortage, blamed by many on climate change, “may be lasting” said Semafor. That’s not only a blow to the hot sauce industry but it could also change the landscape of plant growth in the Caribbean altogether. Continually disappointed by the “temperamental” Scotch bonnet, many producers are now turning to “hardier crops”, including sweet potatoes, to make a living instead.

Some parts of the Caribbean do seem to have escaped unscathed, though The island of Barbados has been “marked ‘safe’” from the hot pepper shortage, said Barbados Today. Its crops remain “resilient, pest-free, and available for production”.

The bees of the United States are in trouble and so is their honey. Disease and budget cuts have put bee populations in peril across the country even as honey demand has skyrocketed. The government is also planning on closing an important agricultural research center, risking further loss of both bees and their beloved nectar.

Honey, I shrunk the output

The U.S. demand for honey has grown significantly during the past three decades, mostly due to population growth and “consumers’ association of honey as a ‘superfood,’” said the USDA. However, as more people seek honey, the country is producing less. The U.S. has seen “staggering honeybee colony losses,” said the bee research nonprofit Project Apis m. Between June 2024 and March 2025, 1.6 million colonies were lost, with commercial beekeepers sustaining an average loss of 62%.

There are several reasons for the reduced honey production. The parasitic mite called the varroa destructor has “decimated hives ever since its appearance in the late ’80s,” said Bloomberg. More than 60% of honeybee colonies in the U.S. that died from June 2024 to January 2025 were “infected by mites resistant to the industry’s most widely used pesticide.”

For the bees that survived the mites, “it’s generally more lucrative for beekeepers to put them to work pollinating crops, rather than dedicating the insects to honeymaking.” As a result of the growing demand and reduced supply, “near-record imports are flowing in to fill that widening gap, with India, Argentina, Brazil and Vietnam emerging as some of the top suppliers.”

A bad place to bee

Alongside the ecological issues, the government is perpetuating the honey dearth. The USDA is planning to close the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center, a “6,500-acre agricultural research station in Maryland that is home to the nation’s premier bee research and disease diagnosis hub,” Jennie L. Durant, a research affiliate in human ecology at the University of California, Davis, said at The Conversation. Beltsville researchers “have helped beekeepers respond to varroa mites” and is now “helping them prepare for a deadlier mite that is infesting honey bees in Asia: Tropilaelaps mercedesae.”

The USDA has claimed that its reason for decommissioning the Beltsville center is that “building maintenance and renovations would cost an estimated $500 million,” said Durant. However, the price, experts argue, is well worth it. “The lab is $3.2 million a year for 20-plus scientists,” Zac Lamas, a researcher at the bee lab within the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center, said to The Associated Foreign Press. “We responded to a $600 million problem,” so the “idea that we’re redundant and expensive isn’t a good way to generalize the value of this lab.”

In addition to the Beltsville center, the Trump administration has “proposed eliminating the U.S. Geological Survey’s Ecosystems Mission Area, a move that could defund the USGS Bee Lab, an essential resource for research on native bees,” said Durant. The honey industry “has never been this stretched to keep healthy bees,” Jeff Pettis, who worked as a bee researcher at Beltsville from 1996 to 2016, said to Wisconsin Public Radio. And maintaining bee health is “what Beltsville was all about.”

The authorities in China have banned a prizewinning film because nationalists and the manosphere “resented its portrayal of their country”, said The Economist.

The movie, “Her Heart Beats in its Cage”, is a prison drama based on real killing, centering on Zhao Xiaohong, who may be perceived as a “star in the making”, a “feminist icon”, a “murderer” or “part of a calculated deception”, said The Times.

Deeply conflicted 

Zhao killed her husband with a fruit knife during an argument that “spilt over into a violent altercation” about the wider division of domestic chores. A court found her guilty of intentional killing in 2009 and sentenced her to 15 years in prison.

She was preparing for release from jail when Xiaoyu Qin, a film director, “discovered” her. He visited her prison, and was surprised to find “marginalised individuals full of personality and complexity, intense clashes between notions of good and evil” and “deeply conflicted stories”, he told China Newsweek.

For the film, Qin blended documentary-style footage of Zhao’s time in jail, filmed with the approval of the government, with scripted performances by her and her family, including her husband’s relatives. Critics claimed that Qin had “lured” the grieving family into participating and “feigning forgiveness”, said The Economist.

When the film was shown last year at the San Sebastian Film Festival in Spain, it “caused an immediate stir” and “made headlines back home in China”, said The Times.

It was quickly criticised online for allegedly whitewashing a convicted killer. Some argued that the film was “condoning violence” and “rewarding a criminal”, while others “questioned whether she was a victim of domestic violence at all”, noting that the judge had “rejected” her claim of self-defence.

There were also “the usual claims” on China’s “highly nationalistic internet” that the movie depicted the country in a “bad light”, which is the “sort of issue” on which censors “tend to agree with popular opinion”.

The film’s release in China was hotly anticipated, but as controversy raged, it disappeared from schedules less than a fortnight before its release. No explanation was given.

Meanwhile, the film’s cast and crew are not responding to requests for interviews, so “even finding out their defence to the accusations and counter-accusations” aimed at the film has “become more and more difficult”, as reports and reviews are “ruthlessly scrubbed”. Zhao’s social media accounts have also been blocked, according to reports in state media.

Touchy nationalism 

Chinese “propaganda” is “full of distortion and deception”, said The Economist, but much of the reaction online “reflected a touchy nationalism”, claiming the film was a “Western plot to undermine party rule by spreading liberal, pro-feminist values”.

China is undergoing its own “version” of the “West’s culture wars”, said The Times, with feminists “calling out the patriarchy and sexual harassment”, while men, particularly young men, are “crying foul”.

But “more informed online debate” about the movie has focused on reforms to the justice system. The law has been altered to allow judges assessing a self-defence claim to take into account any previous history of domestic violence.

Spinal-cord injuries are “notoriously difficult to treat,” said Rhys Blakely, science editor of The Times. But Zurich-based researchers think a solution may be in sight: injectable microrobots.

When the spinal-cord is damaged, recovery is often limited: nerve-fibre regrowth can be hampered by scarring, and the nerve cells usually cannot regenerate on their own. But studies by a team at the Multi-Scale Robotics Lab at ETH Zurich suggest that microrobots, made from stem cells with magnetic nano-particles, could “coax” these nerve cells to repair and regenerate.

The studies were carried out in a lab on zebrafish and mice, so there is “still a long way to go” before the microrobots can be tested on humans. But the results are promising, and scientists the world over are intrigued by the idea of “microscopic repair crews, guided by magnets”.

‘Near-complete recovery’

The decision to build this “fleet of living machines” came after other experimental treatments had fallen short, said Blakely. Attempts to inject immature nerve cells into the injured area, then implant electrodes to stimulate them to develop, had failed.

So the Zurich robotics team engineered microscopic machines about six micrometers wide – smaller than a red blood cell. Each one combines a neural progenitor cell (a spinal stem cell) with a cluster of customised nanoparticles. These nanoparticles have two layers: one is sensitive to magnetic fields, so the microrobot can be guided by a magnet; the other turns magnetic signals into electrical pulses. This “lets scientists steer the cells and then coax them, electrically, into maturing into new nerve tissue”.

Millions of these microrobots were needed during the animal trials. First, they were injected into injured zebrafish larvae and, in three days, the larvae were exhibiting “near-complete recovery of swimming and exploratory behaviours”, according to the study published in Nature Materials. Then, when tested on mice with severed spinal cords, the microrobots “promoted neural differentiation, and resulted in substantial improvements in motor function within four weeks”.

‘Reproducible and scalable’

Further research is needed before these microrobots can be tested on humans but the Zurich team is already thinking about ways they can be used in other medical settings. “The reproducible and scalable production of microrobots using our lab-on-a-chip system demonstrates” that there is a great deal of “application potential”, said study leader Salvador Pané i Vidal. With adaptations, the microrobots could be used in wound healing, and to make cardiology and oncology treatments “safer, more controllable and more effective”.

Different microrobots have already been shown to be successful in other areas of medicine, said Healthcare in Europe. Formed in droplets, they are effective at “precision-targeted drug delivery”, outperforming IV-delivery on the amount of drug than reaches the target tissue.

“When a river is alive, it has a sound”, Angela Ortigara, a senior adviser at WWF Netherlands, told CNN. “You hear it trickling down the rocks. You see vegetation around it. It is this flow of life.” And, said the broadcaster, “across Europe, that sound is now beginning to return.”

Environmental coalition group Dam Removal Europe has calculated that a record-breaking 603 dams were removed across the continent last year, as countries embark on a “broader reassessment of how rivers function in an era of climate extremes”.

Natural course

A dam is a large barrier built across a river or stream to block, control or redirect the flow of water. They help with water storage, generate electricity, control floods and aid navigation for boats.

Dam Removal Europe found that the number of dams dismantled in 2025, along with other water-flow controls like weirs, culverts and sluices, grew by 11% from the year before. In the US, an estimated 100 dams were dismantled last year, while conservation projects in China have resulted in the removal of hundreds of dams on the Yangtze River in recent years.

The removals allow waterways to “resume their natural course” as part of a “global trend to restore rivers to help wildlife thrive”, said The Guardian. The damming of rivers “disrupts ecosystems, hinders the transport of sediments” and is believed to have contributed to a 75% fall in Europe’s freshwater migratory fish population in the past 56 years.

The 2,324 miles (3,740km) of European rivers that were reconnected through barrier removals last year bring the European Union a “step closer to its goal of restoring 15,500 miles to their natural state by 2030”.

Connectivity conundrum

The process is “rarely as simple as tearing down concrete”, said CNN. There can be “years of environmental assessments, engineering studies” and careful “negotiations with dam owners and local authorities”. Sediment levels must be “managed”, riverbanks need to be “stabilised” to prepare for the restored waterway, and ecosystems need to be “monitored after demolition” for unforeseen negative impacts.

The wide-scale dismantling of dams and water barriers has been criticised by some farming groups and policymakers who have raised concerns about potential impacts on land use and rural livelihoods. A study published last year found that the presence of dams could slow the spread of invasive species, while barrier removals may also allow new threats to travel from one part of a river to another.

But “with careful preparation, monitoring and long-term management, these risks can be minimised”, Ellen Dolan, a biologist at Queen’s University Belfast and lead author of the study, told The Guardian.

A class of synthetic drugs called orphines is throwing a new wrench into the ever-evolving opioid crisis in the United States. These drugs have tenfold the potency of fentanyl and have led to numerous overdose deaths in 2026. Experts say removing them from the streets, or even identifying them, could be extremely difficult.

What are orphines?

They are a “class of opioids that was created in the 1960s,” said The New York Times, as part of a project to find “rapid, safe pain relievers for surgery.” Orphines were developed by Paul Janssen, a Belgian doctor, the same man who originally synthesized fentanyl. It was soon discovered that “orphines had life-threatening side effects such as acute respiratory depression and were highly addictive,” which halted their development.

Orphines are generally considered to be at least “10 times more powerful than fentanyl, even in quantities no greater than a few sand-size grains,” said the Times. Like fentanyl, orphines can be “lethal with stunning speed, with victims slumping over abruptly, respiration shutting down, chest walls rigid.” Naloxone, a drug that reverses the effects of opioids, is effective against orphine, but “numerous doses may be required, many more than the one or two doses typically needed for fentanyl.”

Why are they prevalent now?

Orphines started to become ubiquitous among street drugs in the “wake of global crackdowns on fentanyl,” said the Times. The “emergence of orphines appears to follow regulatory actions targeting fentanyl analogues,” said the industry outlet Pharmacy Times, forcing dealers and users to pivot to new drugs. Most experts “believe the drug is produced at scale by international, multilevel drug distribution networks, likely originating from regions like South Asia or China,” and is then funneled to the U.S., said The Independent.

By the end of January 2026, orphine usage had been “detected in New York, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Illinois, Louisiana, Texas, Washington, Nevada and California,” said The Hill. Overdose deaths from the drug have been reported in nearly all these states. At least 41 deaths from an orphine called cychlorphine occurred in Tennessee alone between July 2025 and February 2026, according to the Knox County Regional Forensic Center.

What next?

Doctors and researchers are trying to find ways to stem the flow of orphines. Doing so is difficult because it is “not hard for labs to pump it out,” said The Hill. The drug isn’t simply coming from a bathroom brew made “from a couple of products or in the U.S.,” Timothy Wiegand of the American Society of Addiction Medicine told The Hill. It is coming from international “drug distribution networks, some of the cartels or other isolated networks.”

As orphines continue to plague U.S. cities, medical examiners have “become frontline drug detectives, pressing to identify the new substances causing deaths,” said the Times. Many are “coordinating with law enforcement and local health departments to swiftly warn communities about the latest killer in their midst,” though local medical examiners’ offices are often chronically underfunded.

These drugs represent a “dangerous shift in the opioid crisis,” Dr. Rachel Wirginis, an addiction medicine and family medicine physician at the Oklahoma State University Addiction Recovery Clinic, said in a press release. Physicians are “seeing increasingly powerful synthetic opioids that require rapid recognition and aggressive intervention to prevent fatal outcomes.”

RCP8.5, a high-emissions climate scenario deemed to be the “business-as-usual” model under which no efforts are made to curb climate change, has been removed by scientists. This model represented what was thought to be the worst climate change could get. But thanks to strides in renewable energy and emissions reductions, it is now largely considered improbable.

Lowering the ceiling

It is difficult to determine how climate change will affect the future “because how much the planet will warm depends in large part on what humans do,” said Vox. So scientists build scenarios or “structured guesses about how the next century might unfold under different assumptions about energy use, growth and climate policy.” These scenarios get updated approximately every seven years. In a new paper published by an international team of researchers, the worst-case scenario was scrapped.

Under RCP8.5, “nations would make no effort to cut emissions and expand fossil fuel use,” Andrew King, an associate professor of climate science at the University of Melbourne, said at The Conversation. By 2100, “carbon dioxide levels would almost triple, to 1,135 parts per million and the world would be around 4.5°C (8.1°F) hotter than the preindustrial period.” Instead, the “new high-emissions scenario projects about 3.5°C (6.3°F) of warming by 2100,” said The Times.

Scientists have been positing that the worst-case scenario for climate change was becoming less likely over time. Despite this, the “use of RCP8.5 in climate modeling has remained, in part, as a way to study what might happen under a ‘baseline’ scenario in which the world does nothing to tackle climate change,” said The Washington Post. Using this model, however, has also “provided fodder for attacks,” with skeptics arguing that “scientists, activists and the media have overstated the risks that actually exist and given outsized attention to the most extreme scenario.”

Raising the floor

President Donald Trump claims that climate activism has been used to “scare Americans, push horrible energy policies and fund billions into their bogus research programs,” he said in a Truth Social post. But these recently updated scenarios are a “sign the expansion of solar, wind, electric vehicles and batteries have slowed emissions growth,” King said. “Taking RCP8.5 off the table is a sign of progress.”

Making progress does not mean all is well. Along with RCP8.5, the updated scenarios “discarded some very low-emissions scenarios because nations are unlikely to slash their fossil-fuel use as deeply as many world leaders had urged,” said The New York Times. Essentially, the “scenarios are becoming less pessimistic but also less optimistic.” The new models show that it is no longer possible to limit global warming to the recommended 1.5°C (2.7°F) above pre-industrial levels.

The new worst scenario of a temperature increase of 3.5°C (6.3°F) “would still be a very much worst-case scenario with considerable climate ­impacts,” Detlef van Vuuren, a senior researcher at the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency and lead author of the updated climate scenarios, said to The Times. “The brutal math of climate change is this,” climate scientists Zeke Hausfather, Glen Peters and Piers Forster, said in a commentary about the updated scenarios: “As long as CO2 emissions remain above zero, the world will continue to warm.”

Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon fell last year to its lowest level since 2019, according to a report from the MapBiomas monitoring network.

The findings are “good news” for President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva who made the “fight against deforestation” a “central tenet” of his reign, said France24. But how good is the news overall?

Breathtaking destruction  

South America's biggest country lost 985,000 hectares (2.4 million acres) of native vegetation in 2025, down 20.6% from 2024, the report found. Deforestation in the Amazon alone fell by 23.5%, while reductions were recorded across Brazil’s six major ecosystems.

“Even so”, said France24, the “rate of destruction” remains “breathtaking”. In the Amazon, the world's largest rainforest, five trees are still chopped down every second.

The “hardest-hit” biome last year was once again the Cerrado, a “vast, biodiverse savanna” south of the Amazon, which accounted for more than half of the deforestation.

The Amazon is the largest tropical rainforest on the planet and it absorbs more than a billion tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, helping to offset the effects of human-caused emissions. But agriculture, wildfire, logging and mining are stripping it of its powers. Agriculture accounted for 99% of vegetation loss across the country.

If deforestation and global warming “continue unchecked”, the Amazon could “begin a gradual transition” to a “degraded, grassland-like ecosystem” in “just a few decades”, said the New York Times.

The “consequences” of an “Amazon tipping point” are “catastrophic for the entire planet,” Bernardo M. Flores, an ecology researcher at the University of Santiago de Compostela in Spain told the broadsheet, so “we need to be careful not to get anywhere near those risks”.

Reality on the ground

Part of the problem with protection is the region is the chasm between theory and reality. A “protected area” may “exist in law” and “appear on maps, in international pledges, and in official counts of how much of Brazil is under protection”, said Mongabay.

But “on the ground” the reality depends on “staff, fuel, boats, radios, boundary markers, fire brigades, monitoring, community work”, and “the ability to respond when illegal miners, loggers, poachers, or land-grabbers arrive”.

Brazil has created of the world’s “most important protected-area systems”, but the most federal protected areas are still underfunded, with the largest shortfalls in the Amazon.

The Amazon’s protected areas are “expensive to manage” because “many are vast” and “some are difficult to reach”, so a field visit can “require a river journey, a flight, or both” and enforcement could involve “long patrols” with a single manager “responsible for an area larger than some countries”.

The line between gamer culture and traditional storytelling is being blurred, one quest notification at a time, as readers get addicted to novels that combine sci-fi and fantasy narratives with features from video games.

These “gamified novels”, which are based on video games, are “going mainstream” and selling in their millions, said The Economist.

Cosmic octopus 

Standing for “literary role-playing game”, LitRPG is a genre of fiction that combines a traditional story with mechanics from role-playing games and video games. Although a Russian publisher insists that it coined the term in 2013, versions of the genre had been popular in Asia since the turn of the century.

The books “borrow the tropes of video and tabletop games”, and the characters “face challenges and grow stronger” as they “go on quests to obtain rewards”.

For instance, in the novels of Matt Dinniman, whose books have sold over six million copies, the hero “gets tougher as he punches goblins” and “defeats a monster” that is a mix of a “cosmic octopus” and “your average, suburban, anti-vax, let-me-talk-to-your-manager mom”.

The reader is regularly “updated on his character stats, health bar, XP [experience points] and special skills”. “Video-game vernacular” offers a “useful shorthand” – “minor figures” in the story are called “NPCs: non-playable characters”.

“Unlike choose-your-own-adventure tales”, readers don’t “make narrative choices”, but they “often interact with their favourite authors and leave comments on chapters, which then shape the stories”. This means the authors are “thinking strategically on and off the page” and many “self-publish their work online, chapter by chapter”. Some writers are particularly “prolific, posting new material daily”.

Foot-shaped sex toys

The adulation of readers is quite something. Dinniman “knew things were getting out of hand” when “rabid” fans “started asking him to sign their feet”, said The New York Times last year. When he put out a statement drawing the line at signing feet, his “undeterred” fans brought “foot-shaped silicone sex toys”, “heart-patterned boxers, pink Crocs, ‘Gilmore Girls’ DVDs, stuffed cats and severed doll heads” – all objects that feature in his novels.

The money is impressive, too. His series is in development for television and is being adapted into graphic novels, a multi-cast audio drama and a tabletop game. Dinniman has a merchandise range that includes sweatshirts, baseball caps, phone cases, wall tapestries, action figures and plush toys.

“Quantity has been trouncing quality,” said The Economist, so the genre is “not going to win any prestigious awards”, but readers “looking for escapist thrills are often forgiving”. Although the core readers are “gamers in their 30s”, its “biggest audience” is audiophiles, ranging from “truckers to stay-at-home mothers”, because the novels “often have only one perspective, and are usually narrated in the first person”, making them “easy to follow”.

Many of the readers “grew up gaming or playing tabletop games like Dungeons & Dragons”, said USA Today. Brandon Dwane, a 28-year-old from Massachusetts, “never considered himself a reader”, but “that changed” when he began reading LitRPG. Now, he’s a “junkie” for the “dopamine” hits the novels give him.

Colossal Biosciences, a Texas-based biotech company known for its de-extinction agenda and previous claims about genetically engineering dire wolves, has successfully hatched 26 chicks from artificial eggs. The company now hopes to use the technology to bring back extinct birds, including the dodo and the giant moa. But skeptics say de-extinction is not possible and the company may be overstating its claims.

A whole new bird

Eggs are a biological wonder. They are the “largest single cell of any species” and a “self-contained engine of incubation, doing away with the need for a living womb to keep a growing organism safe,” said Time. Because of eggs’ unique properties, artificially engineering them is a difficult task. However, Colossal Biosciences has managed to 3D-print artificial eggs with a “semi-permeable, silicone-based membrane housed inside a rigid hexagonal support cup,” said the company in a release. The membrane was “engineered to replicate the gas-exchange function of a natural eggshell — allowing oxygen to pass through while retaining moisture and blocking contaminants.”

The company released a video showing the hatching chicks. Researchers “took recently laid chicken eggs and carefully poured their contents into the artificial shells, where they continued growing,” said MIT Technology Review. A “window on top lets researchers peek inside.” To “see them all moving around in their artificial eggs was absolutely mind-blowing,” said Andrew Pask, Colossal Biosciences’ chief biology officer, to the outlet. “You really feel you can grow life outside of the womb.”

“Artificial egg” may be a misnomer, according to some. “You’ve poured in all the other parts that make it an egg. It’s an artificial eggshell,” said Vincent Lynch, an evolutionary biologist at the University at Buffalo, to CBS News. In addition, “producing a chick from an artificial vessel is not necessarily new,” said Nicola Hemmings, who studies bird reproductive biology at the UK’s University of Sheffield, to CBS News. In the past, scientists “used cruder technology to create transparent eggshells that hatched chicks from plastic films or sacks,” mainly to “study chicken development and glean insights that can also be applied to other mammals and even humans,” said CBS News.

A crack at de-extinction

The company’s artificial shell is just a first step in larger de-extinction plans. Colossal Biosciences’ ultimate goal is to bring back extinct birds like the giant moa or dodo. The egg’s design is “variable in size” and “scalable from hummingbird-egg dimensions down to the soccer-ball-sized eggs of the South Island giant moa, which once stood nearly 12 feet tall,” said the release.

Before the company can resurrect an extinct species, “scientists will need to genetically engineer bird DNA at a much earlier stage,” said National Geographic. “Once the fertilized egg is laid, the embryo already has around 50,000 cells — that’s way too many cells to bioengineer,” Hans Cheng, a retired molecular geneticist who teaches at Michigan State University, told the outlet.

Colossal Biosciences previously claimed it revived the extinct dire wolf and hopes to resurrect species like the woolly mammoth and the Tasmanian tiger. The company has also suggested its technology could support conservation efforts but included “no data or peer-reviewed scientific publications” in its release about the hatching chicks, “making it difficult to independently assess the claim,” said Nic Rawlence, an associate professor in ancient DNA at the University of Otago, at The Conversation. “If the technology lives up to the hype, it won’t be a silver bullet or panacea to stopping species declines, but it might just help.”

Cuba is rapidly growing its solar infrastructure due to the U.S. oil blockade. With the help of China, solar farms have popped up all over the country. But renewable energy access is unequal across the island, and Cuba still has a long way to go before it can survive without oil.

Looking to the skies

Cuba’s “energy crisis is chronic,” and the United States’ blocked fuel shipments have “pushed an already fragile system to the brink,” said El País. The country, which ran out of oil in the middle of May, has been experiencing 24- to 30-hour-long blackouts regularly. In the last four months, “only a single oil tanker has reached Cuban ports, that of the Russian Federation,” said Juan Antonio Fernández Palacios, Cuba’s representative to Belgium and the European Union, to Jacobin. Cuba “requires, at a minimum, eight tankers per month simply to sustain the basic functioning of the country.” The situation is “critical, harsh” and “approaching the contours of a humanitarian emergency.”

But where one door closes, another opens. Cuba is “currently pulling off one of the fastest solar revolutions on the planet, with help from China,” said CNN. “Imports of Chinese solar panels and batteries have soared over the past year.”

Chinese exports of solar equipment to Cuba “skyrocketed from about $5 million in 2023 to $117 million in 2025 and show no sign of stopping,” said The Washington Post. Beijing “pledged last year to help Cuba build more than 92 solar parks by 2028, and more than half of these projects have come online.” Along with providing materials, Chinese companies have also been “facilitating installation” and “working directly in Cuba to build solar farms.”

Because of the U.S. blockade and Cuba’s longstanding energy crisis, the Cuban government announced plans to move completely to renewable energy by 2050. The “installation of 52 solar photovoltaic parks has been completed, contributing more than 1,000 MWp and generating, at peak output, 38% of the energy consumed during daylight hours,” said Granma, the official newspaper of the Central Committee of the Cuban Communist Party. Renewable energy “now accounts for some 10% of the island’s electricity, up from 3.6% in 2024,” said The Associated Press. However, “distribution remains limited, and few Cubans can afford such a system.”

Far to go

While solar power and renewable energy in general have ramped up in Cuba, it is “highly unlikely that, considering their current situation today, Cuba could achieve the goal of 100% renewables by the year 2050,” said Jorge Piñon, a researcher at the University of Texas at Austin’s Energy Institute, to NBC News. The “surge may be rapid, but solar power is not yet available at scale,” said CNN. Cuba’s solar parks are “small and scattered.” And solar power is “only generated when the sun shines, meaning it cannot meet peak evening demand.”

To make solar power work at all hours, batteries would be necessary. But much of the country does not have the necessary infrastructure. “You are talking about a major overhaul of a system that is old, is broken, is tired,” said Piñon to CNN. This overhaul is not cheap, and historically, the country’s energy problems have “disproportionately affected rural areas and provincial hubs,” said Bloomberg. Havana, the “wealthiest part of the island, would see greater uptake of solar panels,” as “battery systems that charge while the electric grid is on, to then power appliances when it’s not, are also commonly used in the capital.”

What started as online satire has spiralled into a mass movement for India’s disaffected youth.

The parody Cockroach Janta Party launched earlier this month and quickly amassed more than 22 million followers on Instagram – more than twice that of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the world’s largest political party.

Rotten places

The Cockroach Janta Party, or CJP, was created by Abhijeet Dipke, a public relations student at Boston University in the US. The 30-year-old launched the CJP via social media accounts and a website, inspired by comments from India’s Chief Justice Surya Kant, in which he compared unemployed young people to cockroaches.

While Kant later clarified his remarks, saying they only referred to some people acquiring fraudulent degrees, his comments drew “considerable ire”, said Al Jazeera, “mainly from Gen Z internet users, as they battle large-scale unemployment, inflation and bitter religious divides” following 12 years of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government.

“Those in power think citizens are cockroaches and parasites,” Dipke told the news site. “They should know that cockroaches breed in rotten places. That’s what India is today.”

With a cockroach as its symbol, the CJP has exploded across social media fed by “memes and short videos mocking corruption, joblessness and political dysfunction” that turned “absurdist humour into protest”, said The Associated Press. One million people have signed up to join the movement in the past week with “its tongue-in-cheek membership criteria” including “being unemployed, lazy, chronically online and capable of ranting professionally”.

“I don’t expect CJP to become a functioning political party, but its rapid growth sends a message to the ruling party that many, especially the youth, are unhappy with corruption and the economy”, 29-year-old digital marketer Oindrila Mohinta told The Telegraph India.

Neither side listening

After the CJP’s X account was blocked as a result of a “legal demand”, supporters flooded social media with claims the Indian government was behind the suspension, suggesting the movement had “rattled” the “establishment”, said The Times of India. Dipke has accused the government of trying to take down the movement’s official website, and claimed his personal Instagram account had also been hacked.

However, “the opposition should be careful before celebrating the CJP as a ready-made, anti-BJP youth wave”, said Rasheed Kidwai for NDTV. “Gen Z’s irritation with the ruling establishment is real” but “it does not automatically convert into faith in the opposition”.

“The viral success of the Cockroach Janata Party should not be seen only as a dissent against the ruling party but also a mirror to the opposition,” poll strategist Naresh Arora wrote on X. “India’s Gen Z youth feel neither side is listening to them.”

The CJP as an entity “may disappear within months”, said Vivek Surendran in The Indian Express. “Internet movements often burn intensely and collapse without consequence”. However, the message to the political establishment is that “inspirational” messaging is no longer cutting through with cynical younger voters: “what large sections of young Indians want is recognition of their exhaustion”.

A hypothetical doomsday for quantum computing could be on the horizon, computer scientists have warned for decades. But cybersecurity experts are now racing against the clock after Google announced that this “Q-Day” could be here much sooner than originally anticipated.

What is ‘Q-Day’?

It is the hypothetical day that quantum computers will acquire “enough resources and stability to crack conventional cryptography,” said CNN. When that day arrives, it could spell disaster for millions of people’s private information, as “every financial transaction, medical file, email, location history and crypto wallet protected by today’s commonly used algorithms could be unlocked.”

Unlike conventional computers, quantum computers utilize “quantum-mechanical phenomena” that allow them to “perform calculations that are practically impossible for even the most powerful supercomputers today,” said Forbes. Experts believe these computers could eventually crack RSA cryptography, the algorithm of prime numbers that helps to safeguard encryption. Some fear this could be accomplished “not in billions of years but in hours or days.” Others believe some “bad actors may already be collecting encrypted data” in secret, said CNN.

It was previously believed that Q-Day was still far into the future, giving the tech world plenty of time to prepare new safeguards. But Google recently announced it believes the day could arrive as soon as 2029, and the “new estimate means that governments, companies and other entities may have far less time to prepare,“ said CNN. Many are comparing Q-Day with “Y2K, or the millennium bug, a computer flaw that programmers thought might cause severe systemic problems after Dec. 31, 1999.”

What can be done?

Many companies are being urged to boost their cybersecurity initiatives as the potential for Q-Day looms. Google is also creating guidelines it hopes will “provide the clarity and urgency needed to accelerate digital transitions not only for Google but also across the industry,” the company said. To accomplish this, Google “specifically is pushing for a transition to post-quantum cryptography, or the use of new, quantum-resistant algorithms to secure data against future attacks,” said Barron’s.

Even if the 2029 date doesn’t come to pass, there is still a 10% chance Q-Day will occur by 2032, Justin Drake, a bitcoin security researcher who published a paper on the matter, said on social media. No matter the date, other precautions are being taken. For example, cryptographers “have devised new encryption algorithms that rely on problems that quantum computers don’t have an advantage over classical computers in solving,” said Ars Technica. The National Institute of Standards and Technology has also “advanced several algorithms that have yet to be broken and are presumed to be secure.”

Government entities have been weighing in too. In 2022, the National Security Agency (NSA) announced a plan to boost Q-Day readiness by the 2030s. But recently, the deadline “has been in flux as both the Biden and Trump administrations have issued executive orders prioritizing quantum readiness,” said Ars Technica. The NSA is currently “adhering to a 2031 deadline.” Despite these plans, experts remain worried, as encryption is “not a permanent state of protection,” said Forbes. It is a “time-locked safe that someone may already be holding, waiting for the combination.​”

Colombia is home to 1,900 identified bird species, a whopping 20% of all known bird species, said The Bogotá Post. And on May 9, Colombia won this year’s Global Big Day, an annual worldwide birdwatching event in which citizen scientists document the birds they have seen. Over the course of the day, 1,566 bird species were recorded by observers in the country, making Colombia the world’s most bird-diverse nation.

This avian supremacy is the result of geography and a complicated history of political violence. Today, the birds’ presence both promotes ecotourism and emphasizes the importance of conserving ecosystems.

Flying colors

Colombia’s Global Big Day triumph puts the South American country in a five-year winning streak. “This achievement confirms the Country of Beauty as a global benchmark for biodiversity and nature tourism,” said Carmen Caballero, the president of the promotion agency ProColombia, in a release. Birdwatching has become a “powerful platform to showcase Colombia’s extraordinary ecosystems, promote sustainable regional development and attract travelers seeking authentic and responsible experiences.”

Colombia is home to the “highest number of identified bird species on the planet: 1,900,” which is a whopping 20% of all known bird species, said The Bogotá Post. It’s also a “temporary home to over 200 migratory species each year.”

Colombia’s “global ranking is opening doors for regions that were once isolated but still hold incredible natural resources,” said Luisa Aguirre, a technical director at the Colombian environmental authority Regional Autonomous Corporation of Cundinamarca, a department in Colombia, said to The Bogotá Post.

Colombia’s biodiversity has given rise to “avitourism,” said The New York Times. Visitors come to see the birds and “generate needed income,” making it more “profitable to protect, rather than destroy, habitats.” The country “stands out as a destination where biodiversity, conservation and community-driven tourism converge to define the future of travel,” said Caballero in the release.

Nature vs. nurture

Colombia is only the 25th largest country in the world by land mass, but it “contains immense ecological diversity, from the Amazon rainforest to glacier-topped Andean peaks to palm-fringed Caribbean beaches,” said the Times. These geographic features have allowed myriad bird species to thrive.

Decades of political conflict have also contributed. The “conflict between the government, left-wing guerrillas, right-wing paramilitaries and narco-traffickers made many parts of Colombia too dangerous for development,” said CBS News. “Many bird habitats were preserved as a result.”

There being “illegal armed groups in this area for so long prevented” people from “coming and slashing and burning the habitats,” said Diego Calderón Franco, a researcher and birding guide, to CBS News. Thanks to the country’s troubled past, you can “look at that isolated mountain range and you might find a new species of bird for science.”

These unique species have turned birdwatching into a “great opportunity to support local businesses and promote the country’s biological heritage fairly and responsibly,” said Aguirre to The Bogotá Post. Colombia’s Global Big Day win is a “huge recognition of the hard work that local communities, guides and researchers do for nature conservation.”

The Naegleria fowleri amoeba can cause a rare but fatal brain infection that progresses quickly and can’t be cured. It has been found in several recreational locations in the U.S., with the number of cases likely to increase as global temperatures rise.

Unwelcome inhabitant

Scientists tested 185 water samples from 40 recreational waterways across five National Park Service sites. N. fowleri was found in 34% of the samples, according to a study published in the journal ACS ES&T Water. The amoeba was “detected in well-known and previously untested hot springs, including sites with high recreational use,” including Yellowstone National Park, Grand Teton National Park and Lake Mead National Recreation Area, said the study.

The single-celled organism is “very widespread” and “not just in national park hot springs,” said study author Brent Peyton, a professor at Montana State University, to Outside. The amoeba “thrives in soil and warm freshwater lakes, rivers, ponds and hot springs all over the globe,” said USA Today. It flourishes in “warm pools up to 115 degrees Fahrenheit,” as “water across western national parks is getting warmer,” said Outside.

Brain infection most often occurs when someone “goes swimming or diving in a lake, river or other fresh water during summer months” and the amoeba enters the nasal cavity, said the CDC. A few infections have occurred when people “used tap water that contained Naegleria fowleri to rinse their sinuses or cleanse their nasal passages.” However, you cannot get an N. fowleri infection from “swallowing water containing the amoeba,” get it “from someone else” or “pass it on to others.”

The infection, primary amoebic meningoencephalitis (PAM), advances quickly, destroying brain tissue and causing massive cerebral swelling, with most people dying “within one to 18 days after symptoms begin,” said USA Today. The amoeba can “infect their brain with a fatality rate of 98%.”

PAM symptoms include “headache, fever, nausea and vomiting,” said the CDC. And as the disease progresses, it can cause a “stiff neck, confusion, lack of attention to people and surroundings, loss of balance and hallucinations.”

Domain expansion

There’s “no need to be alarmed,” said Peyton. Infection can be “prevented by keeping water out of one’s nose.” Experts suggest people “hold their nose or wear a nose clip if they are jumping or diving into fresh water,” keep their “head above water in hot springs,” and avoid splashing around in shallow water, as the amoeba is more likely to be found there, said Fast Company.

Other bodies of water may also become more hospitable to N. fowleri due to warming temperatures. The findings “indicate that N. fowleri is present in thermally impacted areas across the western United States,” said the study. The amoeba’s presence underscores the “use of enhanced monitoring, public awareness and risk management strategies in thermally influenced recreational waters.”

People across Europe were enraptured when the potential bones of the soldier Count d’Artagnan — the inspiration for the legendary fourth musketeer from Alexandre Dumas’ iconic 1844 novel, “The Three Musketeers” — were unearthed in the Netherlands in March. But genetic testing to prove the bones belong to d’Artagnan has run into several problems that could make getting a definitive answer difficult.

Where were these bones found?

The completed skeleton was found under the chapel floor of St. Peter and Paul’s Church in the Dutch village of Wolder. Potentially locating d’Artagnan’s remains here wasn’t exactly unexpected, as the church for “centuries was rumored to be the final resting place” of the fourth musketeer, said The New York Times.

The bones were “buried with a 17th-century coin and a musket ball,” and the discovery has drawn a “deluge of unaccustomed attention” to the village, said the Times. The count was a “close aide to France’s Sun King Louis XIV” and later “killed during the Siege of Maastricht in 1673,” said the BBC. D’Artagnan’s life and legacy were “immortalized in the adventure stories” of Dumas as a “friend of the Three Musketeers.”

Why has confirming the identity been a problem?

Since the bones were found, there has been a push to confirm their identity using DNA testing. But “genetic verification to prove whether the skeleton is that of d’Artagnan has run into bureaucratic troubles,” including a potential illegal excavation and a slew of “scientific obstacles that cast doubt on whether the bones’ identity will ever be known,” said National Geographic.

Also, the “first samples collected from the skeleton were too degraded to be used,” according to several reports, which forced scientists to use different samples, said National Geographic. And the municipality of Maastricht, where the church is located, alleges that the “initial excavations were improper,” because “under Dutch law, the church is a heritage site.” The municipality “intervened to ensure that the situation was handled in accordance with applicable archaeological standards,” said a spokesperson for the local government to National Geographic.

However, factors are working in the archaeologists’ favor. The skeleton, for example, does “match history,” said Nat Geo. D’Artagnan was killed when a “musket ball struck him in the throat,” and the grave “contained fragments of a musket ball near the skeleton’s chest,” said National Geographic.

And yet despite the history lining up, genetic testing could be difficult. D’Artagnan has living descendants, but “French nobility often had extramarital affairs,” so it’s “at least possible that they are not biologically related to the musketeer,” said the Times.

Scientists are striving for a definitive answer. At least one “sample taken from the skeleton’s jawbone is on its way to Germany for DNA sequencing,” and anthropologists will “examine the skeleton for clues about how old the person was when they died,” said Ars Technica.

Even with all the obstacles, most scientists believe there’s a “decent chance” it’s d’Artagnan buried under the church, said Ars Technica. “I have been researching d’Artagnan's grave for 28 years,” said Wim Dijkman, an archaeologist on the excavation, to the BBC. “This could be the highlight of my career.”

Hearing that a “sought-after” London dealer was offering an “international” and “decadent” product that customers must pay for “by weight” may ring alarm bells for some, said Elizabeth Paton in the Financial Times. Yet, for the “initiated”, procuring “delicious and extremely expensive” Alphonso mangoes is a yearly challenge.

However, this year’s crop is proving more expensive than ever for aficionados. These prized mangoes “have complex supply chains that spread all over the world, from Dubai to London, Hong Kong to San Francisco”. And these are now increasingly fragile as a result of global unrest, climate change and a host of imitators.

‘Prized’ fruit

Known as the “king of mangoes”, for their “sweetness, rich flavour and distinctive aroma”, Alphonso mangoes – originally from India – are typically only found in the UK “between April and June”, said the BBC. However, the tropical fruit may not appear as frequently on stalls this year as supply chain issues have hit traders hard. But despite “higher costs”, demand “remains strong”, with customers from across London queueing up at stalls to get their hands on an Alphonso.

All across the world, “faithful” Indian mango devotees are “leaving work meetings, stalking WhatsApp groups and paying lobster prices” in the hopes of securing “their fix of the sweet delicacy”, said The Wall Street Journal. In the US, customers can expect to pay “$50 to $60” (£37 to £48) for a box “usually holding 10-12 mangoes” – a substantial “jump” from the $40 to $45 price tag typically charged last year.

A ‘sizable drop’

The scarcity of top-quality mangoes has been primarily attributed to the disruption caused by global warming. India’s place as the “world’s largest mango producer is a source of great pride”, said Time Out Mumbai, but this year’s “erratic weather patterns, extreme heat and rainfall shocks” have totally upended the industry in the Konkan region (Maharashtra, Goa and Karnataka). The result is a “sizeable drop”, one “projected to be as bad as 50-90% less yield” than expected.

More immediately, “highly unstable” conditions in the Middle East since the outbreak of the Iran war are causing contractors across Asia to “walk away from agreements”, with “uncertainty surrounding exports” rife, said Dawn. And in Pakistan, “unending orchard diseases” mean owners have been forced to “work laboriously to reap a better harvest”.

Suppliers must also grapple with the threat of “counterfeits” from other sources who seek to fill gaps in the market, said Bloomberg. Imitators are on the rise, not just within India but also from “other continents”. A failure to increase yields means consumers may soon see a “Ghana Alphonso taking New York by storm”.

Bacteria may be able to help mass-produce a natural UV-protectant ingredient called gadusol that is found in many fish and marine organisms. The chemical could be used to make sunscreen safer and greener in the future. However, much more testing is required to determine its efficacy and safety compared to other currently available sunscreens.

Like a fish out of water

Gadusol could potentially be produced using E. coli, according to a study published in the journal Trends in Biotechnology. The compound helps protect against ultraviolet damage but it is “scarce in nature, and extracting it is inefficient and can carry environmental costs,” Ping Zhang, a biochemist at Jiangnan University in China and lead author of the study, said in a release. “We want to find a scalable and greener way to produce gadusol.”

Gadusol is “transparent, unlike melanin, and yet is perfectly tuned to block out harmful UV rays from the sun, which makes it ideal for organisms hiding from prey,” said New Scientist. Instead of harvesting the compound directly from fish, researchers opted to turn the bacteria E. coli into “mini chemical factories,” said Popular Science. They “rebuilt a zebrafish’s pathway for making gadusol inside of an E. coli bacterium” then “tweaked the E. coli’s genetics and growing conditions.”

The modifications of the E. coli “increased gadusol yield by nearly 93 times, from 45.2 milligrams per liter to 4.2 grams per liter,” said the release. The lab-made gadusol also “showed promise in preliminary UV-protection tests.” The results suggest that “we may be able to meet future demand for natural sunscreen ingredients through microbial production,” Zhang said. However, the study didn’t compare gadusol’s effectiveness to currently available sunscreens. The process also needs to be assessed for long-term safety and whether it can be scaled for manufacturing.

A bright future

Finding natural sunscreens has become a growing interest, as some people have grown opposed to conventional sunscreen ingredients, “which can irritate sensitive skin, harm marine organisms or rely on petrochemicals,” said the release. There has also been concern that two common sunscreen ingredients, homosalate and oxybenzone, may have endocrine-disrupting properties. “While effects have been seen at high concentrations in animal studies, it is not clear whether these translate to humans exposed to sunscreen levels,” Ian Musgrave, a senior lecturer in pharmacology at the University of Adelaide, said at The Conversation in 2025.

Gadusol is promising not only for its sun protection but also because of its “antioxidant activity comparable to that of vitamin C, suggesting it may help neutralize cell-damaging free radicals from UV exposure,” said the release. We “haven’t necessarily given it the praise that it deserves,” James Gagnon, a researcher at the University of Utah who helped discover gadusol’s role as a sunscreen in fish embryos, said to New Scientist. “This is a great molecule.”

However, gadusol “won’t join your next beach day just yet,” said Popular Science. There are a number of hurdles to making the ingredient available for commercial use. The biggest is “finding a mixture of chemicals that bind it into a solution that works as a long-lasting application,” said New Scientist. “The active ingredient could be gadusol, but I guarantee 99% of what’s in that bottle of sunscreen someday in the future is going to be just stuff to hold the gadusol to your skin so it doesn’t wash off,” says Gagnon. “There’s still a lot of work required on the material science side.” The product would also need regulatory approval.

As the Iran war continues, food and vital medicines in the country are becoming increasingly scarce, said The Australian. The costs of some medicines “have risen by 400%”, and antidepressants and sleeping pills are reportedly being “dispensed without prescriptions”.

This is not unique to the Middle East, as other countries around the world face the threat of conflict, or suffer under pressures of economic and political repression. As mental health crises and resources continue to stretch, many fear the consequences could echo the fallout from the Covid pandemic.

A ‘kind of coma’

Some pharmacists in Iran have called the boom in antidepressants a form of “mass sedation”, said The Australian. These healthcare professionals believe that relaxing the strictness of distribution policy keeps the public in a “state of artificial calm” designed to “delay any popular uprising while the war continues”.

Access to the country’s black market has also been damaged since the start of the war. Built on sanctions, import shortages and “hoarding” by middlemen, the black market is “not new”. But with the joint threat of war and internet shutdown, the “shadow supply chain” has been significantly “disrupted”. As the war continues, Iran is stuck in a “kind of coma, caught between economic collapse and the dream of a better future”.

The rise in antidepressant use is part of a broader system to “doctrinise control of Iranians’ minds and bodies”, said Atlantic Council. Observers from abroad have “overlooked the concerted regime strategy to deliberately engineer this state of depression as a suppression mechanism”. By outlawing cultural events such as Valentine’s Day, “Chaharshanbe Suri (the festival of fire)” and “Shabeh Yalda (winter solstice)”, the regime has arguably “promoted gloom and hopelessness to the extent that citizens become paralysed and incapable of challenging the political status quo”.

Like Iran, Lebanon has been struck by the ongoing conflict, and has appeared to follow a similar pattern of “pushing anxious residents toward sedatives and sleeping pills”, said Y Net News. Though no official data has been released, news outlet Al-Akhbar, which has ties to Hezbollah, claimed that the “demand for sedatives had jumped by 300% since the fighting began”, said Y Net. This figure, though unverified, “points to a population under mounting psychological strain”.

Global impact

And in Cuba, economic and political crises present an “outlook that feels bleaker than the collapse of the Soviet Union”, said The Guardian. As a growing mental health crisis “envelops the island”, many citizens are “turning to prescription drugs” to cope with the US-imposed oil blockade, and still reeling from years of economic decline.

Cuba is stuck in a vicious cycle, as the economy shrinks – GDP has “contracted by 17% since 2019” – it means state pharmacies lie “empty”, while demand for their services increases. People are “leaving in large numbers”, which exacerbates the cycle further. In the last five years, “up to 20% of the population” has emigrated, which has in turn added to the “psychological load on those who chose (or were forced) to remain”.

In its ongoing campaign against Ukraine, Russia is experiencing a “spiral” of antidepressant use, said El País. The country has registered “record sales” of the medications every year since 2020. Last year’s total “nearly tripled pharmaceutical consumption” from 2019. In the same year, figures from Russian consultancy DSM show that after peace negotiations were “unsuccessfully reinitiated” in 2024, sales of antidepressants grew 36%. It appears the war, with its subsequent health crises, has had a “larger emotional impact on its population” than the Covid pandemic.

There’s been a fierce debate over the past two decades about the status of the distant icy world of Pluto after it was contentiously stripped of its planethood and reclassified as a dwarf planet.

Nasa chief Jared Isaacman has indicated that he might revisit the matter but it won’t be an easy decision because scientists are still “worlds apart” on the issue, said The Observer.

Rock and ice

Pluto was discovered on 18 February 1930 by an American astronomer called Clyde Tombaugh. He was using one of the most powerful telescopes of his day at the Lowell Observatory in Arizona.

For 76 years the “tiny ball of rock and ice” was recognised as the ninth, smallest and most distant planet of the solar system. But in 2006, nine years after Tombaugh died, members of the International Astronomical Union voted on the criteria for a planet.

To qualify, the group decided, an object must orbit the Sun, be nearly round in shape, and be the largest object in its path. Pluto meets the first two conditions but not the third, because it shares its orbit with other icy objects, in a region called the Kuiper Belt. So its status was downgraded to a dwarf planet.

This decision was “controversial” and “not just because it forced schoolchildren” to “learn a new mnemonic for our solar system's major denizens”, said Space. Earth and Jupiter share orbital space with lots of asteroids, “so why was Pluto singled out?” Pluto was “beloved and remains so”, especially in the US, because “it’s the only planet discovered by an American”.

The “most vocal” Pluto advocate has been the planetary scientist Alan Stern. “Science isn’t about voting,” he said in 2016 of the IAU’s decision. “We don’t vote on the theory of relativity. We don’t vote on evolution.”

There was a “significant escalation” in the pro-Pluto campaign in July 2015, when Nasa’s New Horizons spacecraft produced the “first-ever up-close imagery” of Pluto, revealing a “stunningly diverse world” with “towering mountains, vast nitrogen-ice glaciers and other jaw-dropping features”, said Space. But the “historic flyby” wasn’t enough to “get Pluto its planethood back”.

Maga echoes

But now, Nasa boss Isaacman has signalled that the US space agency might re-examine the case for Pluto to be given its planet status back. Last month, he told a US Senate committee that he was “very much” wanting to make Pluto a planet again. He added that “some papers” were under way at Nasa to “revisit this discussion”.

With an “echo of Maga”, “make Pluto a planet again” is a phrase that suggests a “nostalgic journey back to a past of certainties”, when “everything was in its right place in the heavens”, said The Observer. But “actually it’s the Plutonists who represent the argument for radical change” and Stern has calculated that there might be as many as 1,000 planets in the solar system.

But first, the best thing that Nasa and other “Pluto advocates” can do is “escalate the discussion”, said Space.

Marine cloud brightening (MCB) is a form of geoengineering in which salt water is fired into the clouds in order to increase their brightness and reflectivity. The method shows promise in helping to curb warming temperatures due to climate change, however there may be unforeseen ecological consequences.

Cloud cover

Injecting sea salt aerosol into the clouds can restrict the “future global-mean surface air temperature and precipitation change,” said a study published in Communications Earth & Environment. In a computer simulation, the scientists salted “four cloudy regions in the eastern Pacific Ocean every year from 2020 to 2100” and found that the injection “compensates well for the global warming induced by anthropogenic aerosol reductions over both land and ocean.” Scientists, in a separate research project in the U.K., are testing the geoengineering process in a three-story “cloud chamber,” with the potential for a real world test in 2028.

MCB enhances the “natural process of cloud formation” similar to the “natural effects of sea spray on cloud properties over the ocean,” said a release about the U.K. project. The sea salt aerosol particles “act as sites for the formation of cloud droplets when the air becomes humid enough, the more particles present, the more cloud droplets form and the more reflective clouds become.” The sea salt then “scatters more sunlight back to space and prevents some solar radiation from reaching the Earth’s surface in that area.” With less light reaching the planet, the temperatures cool.

The process is not perfect. In the simulation, MCB was found to “not fully mitigate the warming in some regions, including Europe, the U.S., northeastern China, central and eastern Siberia and the Arctic,” while it did help in other regions, said the study. This discrepancy is likely because the sea salt injections “would indirectly cause the ocean conveyor belt known as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation to speed up,” said Anthropocene magazine.

MCB also affected rainfall. Though the total amount of rain globally remained the same as in 2020 when the simulation began, the distribution varied. The U.S. “would become hotter and drier by the end of the century, while India, Australia, the Amazon and the semi-arid Sahel region of Africa would be cooler and wetter than they are now.”

Silver lining

Real world testing of MCB is still needed despite the study’s findings. “One model cannot settle whether marine cloud brightening could work safely in the real atmosphere over decades,” said Earth.com. Cloud behavior remains difficult to simulate because “droplets, particles, winds and ocean currents interact at many scales.” There is “very limited understanding of whether such approaches are scientifically sound, so it is essential that we understand whether spraying sea water can be performed effectively and what the effects might be,” Hugh Coe, a professor of atmospheric composition at The University of Manchester and the lead of the U.K. project, said in the release.

The focus of the “cloud lab” tests is “to find the ideal ‘Goldilocks’ size for the salt particles, said The Times. “Too large, and they risk soaking up all the moisture before smaller droplets can form. Too small, and they won’t ‘activate’ properly, meaning the cloud won’t brighten enough.” If the tests are successful, MCB could be tested in the real atmosphere as soon as two years from now. Geoengineering is a controversial measure that is “opposed by environmentalists who fear it is an excuse for not cutting the carbon emissions driving climate change,” said The Times. Other experts argue that reducing emissions is not enough.

“Decarbonization is the only sustainable route out of the climate crisis,” Mark Symes, the program director of the U.K.’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency, which is funding the project, said to The Independent. “However, decarbonization is not happening quickly enough to protect many parts of the world from the worst effects of global heating.”

Scientists are pushing for “radical” measures against climate change, proposing the construction of a dam across the Bering Strait that would link Alaska and Russia, said Science.

A study by University of Utrecht academics Jelle Soons and Henk Dijkstra suggests that this would be a decisive way to protect the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), which is instrumental in regulating the planet’s sea temperature and climate.

Three separate dams would be needed across the strait, which is 51 miles (82km) wide at its narrowest, due to the two islands that lie in the middle, with the longest section spanning roughly 24 miles (38 km), said LiveScience. Similar structures already exist in the Netherlands and South Korea, although “not in remote locations with strong currents and sea ice, or with rival geopolitical powers on opposite sides”.

‘Grave’ dangers

Building a dam in the Bering Strait is just as “out there” an idea as “refreezing the Arctic” or “floating a giant parasol in outer space”, said The New York Times. The concern for the continuation of the AMOC is very real, however.

Acting as a “vast oceanic conveyor belt”, it carries tropical, salty currents from the Atlantic towards Europe. There, it releases the warmth into the air, which regulates the temperature across the continent. Once cooled, it circles back south, influencing rainfall patterns in Africa, South America, and beyond.

There is a “growing body of evidence” that human-caused global warming could cause it to “shut down or slow significantly”, which would have “grave effects” on weather patterns on multiple continents.

“At first glance”, the role of the Bering Strait “isn’t all that obvious” in this global cycle. However, it acts as the “gateway for large quantities of fresh water” to flow from the Pacific into the Arctic Ocean, then into the Atlantic. A dam in this region would alter the balance of fresh and salt water in all three oceans.

The University of Utrecht study was based on simulations indicating that the AMOC was “much stronger” in the Pliocene era – roughly 5.3 to 2.6 million years ago. During this era, sea levels in the strait were lower, exposing an intercontinental land bridge, leading Soons, the study’s lead researcher, to wonder “could we do this again?”, said New Scientist.

No ‘escape hatch’

It is an “audacious proposal”, and a project that would be on an unseen and “truly epic scale”. Researchers have been “mulling it over” at the European Geosciences Union general assembly in Vienna this month. But “because we don’t fully understand the AMOC, we can’t be sure of the consequences of such an intervention”. “These drastic things really do have big uncertainties attached”, Jonathan Rosser, a climate researcher at the London School of Economics, told the magazine.

“This is one of those climate ideas that sounds almost ridiculous when you first hear it”, said Earth.com. In fact, the “real takeaway” from the study, and its discussion at a conference level, is “how worried scientists have become about the AMOC”. “When researchers start seriously modelling something this extreme, it tells you that the level of concern is high.”

Even if this project were given the green light – following much more advanced and rigorous modelling – it would “raise huge environmental, political, legal and logistical questions”. The scale of the intervention, let alone the complex political relations between the US and Russia, would mean this project would not be anywhere as simple as “building a bridge or a seawall”. “It would be one of the boldest and strangest geoengineering projects ever seriously contemplated.”

Even then, it does not promise an “escape hatch”, or get-out-of-jail-free card. “Once you are debating mega-dams to prop up ocean currents”, it’s a clear sign that progress towards reducing emissions “has not gone nearly well enough”.

A new report by Human Rights Watch argues that the compulsory use of Chinese as the primary language in schools in Tibet raises “serious concerns under international human rights law”.

Detailing the effects of the “Children’s Speech Harmonization Plan” five years ago, as well as more recent updates to the “National Common Language Law”, the organisation argues that measures are marginalising Tibetan identity to the point of erasure.

“International concern about these developments has grown,” said Jianli Yang in The Diplomat. These language laws fit into a pattern in recent years of “intensified policies” aimed to “reshape” Tibetan identity through “cultural control”.

‘Eroding’ Tibetan culture

Both politically and legally, “China is steadily narrowing the space for minority autonomy in education, language, and religion”, said The Diplomat. In December last year, the National People’s Congress revised the “National Common Language Law”. It now requires Mandarin to be the “fundamental teaching language” and mandates standardised textbooks throughout the education system. The codification of assimilation policies “marks a new phase” in Beijing’s strategy: it seeks “not merely to manage ethnic diversity but to fundamentally reshape it”.

Videos from Tibet on social media have shown young children “not even able to say their names in Tibetan, pronouncing them as if they were Chinese”, said Kris Cheng in The Guardian. Children, who have been brought up speaking Tibetan stop speaking it within a year of beginning school.

Parents face a “dilemma”: education in Chinese improves employment and career prospects, but it often comes at the cost of associating Tibetan with “social disadvantage”. Some are sending their children to Tibetan language classes in the school holidays, but authorities have been “cracking down” by “banning unsanctioned schools and classes in many places”.

Perhaps the most “profound policy shift” from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in Tibet was the 2021 “Children’s Speech Harmonization Plan”, said Human Rights Watch. For the first time, it mandated the use of Chinese language as a “medium of instruction” in all preschools. Though not explicitly banning Tibetan in educational settings, it effectively “downgrades” the freedom for minorities to develop and continue their language.

This law was not a “sudden rupture”, however, but the “near final step in a decades-long process” of “eroding the role of Tibetan as a medium of instruction”. It was a “key acceleration point” in the drive to reshape the “linguistic, cultural, and social foundations of Tibetan society”.

‘Narrowed’ tolerance

China’s stance “turned sharply against expressions of separate ethnic identity among minorities” when Xi Jinping came to power in 2012, said Josh Chin and Niharika Mandhana in the Wall Street Journal. Officials targeted Tibetan alternatives to state schools and expanded the boarding school system. Resistance since the uprising of 1959 has persisted under the current Dalai Lama, a “potent force despite decades of propaganda, political crackdowns and education drives aimed at undermining his authority”, living in exile in India.

During the earlier years of Communist Party rule China “espoused a certain notion of pluralism for non-Han people”, but the space for tolerance has “narrowed”, said Joe Leahy in the Financial Times. Look no further than Xinjiang, where more than a million Uighurs have been “subjected to mass internment”. China denies mass detentions of Uighurs and “blames unrest on terrorists”.

Recent years have seen a gradual transformation from a “first-generation ethnic policy” to the “second-generation ethnic policy”, said The Diplomat. The earlier framework, under Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping, “formally emphasised” ethnic and language autonomy. For instance, legislation in 1994 stipulated that all schools should “use Tibetan as the principal medium of instruction”, whilst “improving a bilingual Tibetan-Chinese education system”. Implementation was often “uneven”, but it at least “recognised the legitimacy of cultural pluralism within the Chinese state”.

Second-generation ethnic policy, however, marks a “significant departure” from this philosophy. It seeks to “minimise” the significance of ethnic distinctions, instead of preserving diversity. The Chinese state now sees minority languages as “potential threats” to Xi’s “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation”. Viewed more broadly, China’s current policies in Tibet represent “more than a shift in language education”, they reflect a “structural transformation” in how China perceives ethnic minorities.

Scientists studying a distant region of the solar system near Pluto have discovered the unexpected: a minuscule object with its own atmosphere. It was previously believed that such small celestial bodies located that far from the sun are incapable of having their own atmospheres. Now, the new finding could unlock insights into planets in our solar system millions of miles away.

What did scientists discover?

The 310-mile-wide celestial body, officially named 2002 XV₉₃, is classified as a trans-Neptunian object (TNO) because its distance from the sun, approximately 3.5 billion miles, lies beyond the outermost planet, Neptune, according to Japanese astronomers in a study published in the journal Nature Astronomy. And though the icy body was identified many years ago, only now has it been observed to be “swaddled in a layer of air,” said The New York Times.

The TNO is “thought to be the solar system’s smallest object yet with a clearly detected global atmosphere bound by gravity,” said lead study researcher Ko Arimatsu, the head of Japan’s National Astronomical Observatory, to The Associated Press. The discovery of the thin atmosphere is surprising because the “gravitational pull of such a small celestial body is weak, and any air surrounding it should have long ago floated away into space.”

The highly fragile atmosphere appears to be “roughly 5 million to 10 million times thinner than Earth’s robust atmosphere and about 50 to 100 times thinner than Pluto's tenuous atmosphere,” said Reuters. Scientists believe this atmosphere may have formed due to “cryovolcanoes on the small, icy body, which release internal gas such as methane, nitrogen or carbon monoxide from beneath its surface” — a previously unknown phenomenon, said CNN.

At the edge of the solar system, temperatures “are so cold that most of the molecules that exist as gases in Earth’s atmosphere freeze solid,” said the Times. And any air that does “not float away would be expected to turn into ice and fall to the surface,” not become an atmosphere.

Why is this so significant?

Because a TNO shouldn’t have one, the discovery of the atmosphere could offer an “unprecedented glimpse” into how one “forms and remains around a small object,” as well as “change how astronomers think about objects,” said CNN. And it suggests that “some small ​icy bodies in the outer solar system may not be completely inactive or unchanging, as previously assumed,” said Arimatsu to Reuters. “Even in a distant, cold world, there ​are dynamisms we haven’t imagined,” said study co-author Junichi Watanabe, the director of Japan’s Koyama Space Science Institute, to the outlet.

Others say more information needs to be gathered. This is an “amazing development, but it sorely needs independent verification,” said Alan Stern, the scientist behind NASA’s New Horizons mission to Pluto, to the AP. The “implications are profound if verified.” But the researchers who made the discovery are optimistic. “It changes our view of small worlds in the solar system, not only beyond Neptune,” said Arimatsu to the AP. The finding is “genuinely surprising.”

What if a cling wrap could fight disease? A newly developed plastic film has successfully killed viruses on contact. The material could be easily mass-produced and doesn’t have to be reapplied. In the future, it may even replace traditional chemical cleaners.

Predatory plastic

Scientists have created a thin, acrylic film that can kill viruses, according to a study published in the journal Advanced Science. The film contains nanopillars, which are “ultra‑fine structures” that “grab and stretch the outer shell of the virus so much that it ruptures, killing the virus through mechanical force rather than chemical disinfectants,” said a press release about the study. The material was tested on human parainfluenza virus 3 (hPIV-3), which causes bronchiolitis and pneumonia, and it “successfully killed (or damaged irreparably) 94% of the viruses with which it came into contact after just one hour,” said Popular Mechanics.

There have been other surface viral disinfectants developed, but these “often involve incorporating materials such as graphene or tannic acid and other natural agents into personal protective equipment such as masks, gloves, goggles, hard hats and respirators,” Elena Ivanova, a professor of physics at RMIT University and senior author of the study, said at The Conversation. While efficient, these disinfectants “can pose a risk to human health” and may also be “environmental hazards due to chemical leaching.” Plus they have “declining effectiveness over time as the potency of the active ingredients weakens.”

Other disinfectants, like wipes and sprays, require more effort. Disinfectant “must remain wet for some time to kill germs,” said Ivanova. The surfaces can also be “recontaminated quickly when other people touch them.” Acrylic films, by contrast, are “continually effective (meaning they don’t have to be reapplied over and over again), they don’t harm the environment and they don’t contribute to antimicrobial resistance,” said Popular Mechanics. The film is also much more scalable and could potentially be produced in a similar manner to cling wrap.

Film of the future

While the plastic film shows promise, we are not quite at the place to replace current disinfectants with it. The product was tested only on hPIV‑3, which is an “enveloped virus with a fatty outer membrane,” said the release. This membrane makes it more conducive to getting caught and being ripped apart by the nanopillars. Researchers are now planning to “test smaller and nonenveloped viruses to see how broadly the nanotextured surface works.”

The effectiveness of the nanotexture also depends on the distance between each pillar. The closer the features are together, the more virus-fighting ability the film has. There need to be “more tests on curved surfaces, which — by their geometric nature — spread the pillars apart,” said Popular Mechanics. The material can also degrade over time.

“As nanofabrication tools get better, our results give a clearer guide to which nanopatterns work best to kill viruses,” Samson Mah, the lead author of the study, said in a press release. “We could one day have surfaces like phone screens, keyboards and hospital tables covered with this film, killing viruses on contact without using harsh chemicals.”

This week, the separatist group Stay Free Alberta submitted a petition for a referendum on the issue that had amassed 302,000 signatures – well ahead of the 178,000 (10% of eligible voters) required for the authorities to consider such a vote. It marks “a key step” towards a possible independence referendum said The Associated Press.

“This day is historic in Alberta history,” said Mitch Sylvestre, head of the organisation, delivering the signatures to the Elections Alberta office in Edmonton. “It’s the first step to the next step – we’ve gotten by Round 3, and now we’re in the Stanley Cup final.”

‘Western alienation’

The separatist movement is rooted in what is known as “western alienation”, said the BBC. Some believe Alberta is “often overlooked by decision-makers” in Ottawa. Anger with the federal capital has “long been brewing” in Alberta, particularly over its abundant natural resources.

Some Albertans believe the federal government, especially under the ruling Liberal Party, has “stood in the way of the province’s oil and gas industry in favour of pro-climate legislation”. Separatists maintain that independence would “unlock resources”. The overwhelmingly right-wing movement was once “on the political fringes”, but over the past year, a “unity crisis has become increasingly likely".

The “economic, fiscal, and political grievances about the seemingly unfair treatment of Alberta” increased during Justin Trudeau’s premiership, Daniel Beland, political science professor at Montreal’s McGill University, told Sky News, but “they have peaked and even declined since he left office”.

Last year, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith reduced the number of signatures required for citizens to trigger a constitutional referendum, down from more than half a million. And she has blamed previous federal governments for legislation that disabled Alberta’s ability to produce and export oil. The provincial government also changed how citizen-led referendums work, so that now, they can “pose questions that would run afoul of the Canadian constitution”, said The Guardian.

Forever Canadian, not American?

The petition “stumbled immediately” after a separatist-linked group posted the personal data of nearly three million voters online. One of the biggest data breaches in Canada’s history, it has “unleashed political chaos” in Alberta and sparked fears of “a possible political interference crisis”.

The verification of signatures has also been paused while a court considers a legal challenge by a group of indigenous First Nations. It argues that Albertan separation would infringe on its rights as agreed in treaties with Britain, long before the creation of the province. In December, a judge ruled that an independence referendum would be unlawful because it violates the group’s constitutional rights – the latest case is asking if that decision still holds.

The First Nations also warned that a vote to leave Canada would “enable foreign interference” by the US. Last year, separatists “held covert meetings with members of Donald Trump’s administration”, said the paper.

CBC reported that US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told a right-wing TV station in January: “We should let them come down into the US” because Alberta is a “natural partner”.

Stay Free Alberta said they doubted anyone in their movement wanted to join the US. “People want sovereignty, and that’s what people in the US have, but we want sovereignty independent of the US,” said Sylvestre.

So far, there has been no response from Prime Minister Mark Carney to the petition. But even if the signatures are verified and the court rules against the challenge by the First Nations, and the federal government allows a referendum to go ahead in October, a vote for “yes” still wouldn’t automatically trigger independence.

Polls suggest the majority of Albertans would vote no, with only 26% supporting independence from Canada, according to a recent survey by Abacus Data. A petition by anti-separatist group Forever Canadian received 450,000 signatures.

Hundreds of migrants, most of them from Haiti, left the southern Mexican city of Tapachula on foot last month, in search of better living conditions further north. These caravans “used to aim for the US border”, said The Associated Press. But many Haitians have “lost hope of making it to the US due to the restrictions that the Trump administration has placed on asylum seekers” and instead now seek to “settle down in large Mexican cities”.

Final destination

Mexico is “increasingly” becoming a destination for people “fleeing war, oppression, crushing poverty, gang violence or combinations of those problems”, said The Guardian.

As Haiti faces widespread violence, mass displacement and serious humanitarian issues, over one million people have been displaced and hundreds of thousands have fled the country to seek asylum, many of them in Mexico.

Many arrive after lengthy migration journeys that include stops in countries such as Brazil or Chile before crossing into Mexico via the Guatemalan border. Reaching the US has become harder under Trump, increasingly turning Mexico from another transit country into a destination.

According to Mexico’s national agency for refugees, 127,000 Haitians filed petitions for asylum in the country between 2020 and 2024, and Haitians account for around 25% of all asylum petitions filed in Mexico.

Because Mexico forbids asylum seekers from leaving the state where they first filed for protection, Chiapas – the country’s southernmost state, with the city of Tapachula only a few miles away from the border with Guatemala – receives 60% of Mexico’s asylum applications. However, substantial Haitian communities have also developed in Mexico City, and in the northern US-border city of Tijuana.

Legal limbo

Mexico’s asylum system is overwhelmed, and Haitians face particularly low approval rates. Around 62% of Haitian asylum claims are denied. Even for those who are approved, it can be a long wait. Although the asylum process is supposed to last just 45 business days, in reality “the wait can take more than one year”, said The Haitian Times.

This leaves many people in legal limbo, unable to fully settle or move forward with their lives. “Without documents, we can’t work, and we are people who strongly believe in working,” one Haitian refugee told the newspaper.

Those who are able to find work are usually restricted to low-paid, irregular jobs such as construction, food service, or street vending. The language barrier can often impose further limitations; many refugees only speak Haitian Creole or French, with limited Spanish.

But despite the challenges, many Haitian refugees have been able to build a better life in Mexico. “Haitians are very resilient,” Andrés Ramírez, coordinator of the Mexican Commission for Refugee Assistance, told Yucatán Magazine. “They can integrate into Mexican society, despite coming from quite a different culture.”

Giovanni Rotschild was forced to flee Haiti in 2022 after receiving threats against his life as armed groups took control of several neighbourhoods in the capital, Port-au-Prince, where he lived. Within months he was recognised as a refugee and later received permanent residency in Mexico. “In that moment I felt free,” he told the UNHCR. “For the first time, I could live without fear, without stress. Now, I can do everything legally, and that makes me incredibly happy.”

Now, he wants to use his nursing skills to help others, and plans to start a health initiative in Mexico.

Poor architecture can be a public health crisis. And in Tanzania, moving families into specially designed Star Homes has resulted in a marked reduction in the spread of deadly diseases among the children living in them.

Old vs. new housing

Most houses in Tanzanian villages use “mud and thatch” and are “single-story, placing the sleeping spaces at-grade,” said The Architect’s Newspaper. These living arrangements likely contribute to the spread of malaria, diarrhea and acute respiratory infections (ARIs), which are the “major causes of mortality in young children in sub-Saharan Africa,” said a study published in the journal Nature Medicine.

Designed by researchers, Star Homes are “novel double-story” houses that “provide an insect-proof, cleaner, cooler and smoke-free environment, with a reliable supply of water and sanitation,” said the study. They have “screened facades to allow airflow while keeping out insects, bedrooms on the top floor because mosquitoes mostly stay close to the ground, and an outdoor latrine and a system to harvest and store rainwater to help reduce the spread of diarrheal diseases,” said Science. They also have a “rodent-proof storage room, self-closing doors and a solar-powered electric light.”

To test the new housing, scientists randomly placed households with children under age 13  in either “110 Star Homes or in 513 traditional mud and thatched-roofed houses,” said the study. After 36 months, children living in Star Homes had a “significantly reduced risk of malaria (44% reduction), diarrhea (27%) and ARIs (18%) compared to children living in traditional mud and thatched-roof homes.”

The improved housing also led to a “reduction in stunting,” where children under age 5  were “taller for their age than those living in traditional homes,” said the study. Healthier children are the “ultimate measure of success,” said Salum Mshamu, the lead field investigator of the Tanzanian research consulting firm CSK Research Solutions, to The Architect’s Newspaper. “Reducing stunting has lifelong consequences for education, earnings and well-being.”

More for less

The findings show that “architecture can function as a health intervention on a par with medicine when it’s developed and documented using scientific methods,” said Jakob Knudsen, the lead architect of the Star Homes, to The Architect’s Newspaper. Traditional homes in Tanzania and other sub-Saharan countries tend to “absorb heat during the day and discharge it into the houses at night,” said The Architectural Review. “High interior temperatures lead to low use of bed nets (temperature rises further inside the net), increasing the risk of mosquito bites.”

The Star Home solves many of these problems and “costs 24% less in materials than a conventional single-story cement-block house, requires 73% less concrete and generates 57% less embodied carbon,” said a release about the study. “We now hope that the building industry will adopt some of the important features of our healthy house design,” said Steve Lindsay, a professor of biosciences at the U.K.’s Durham University and the author of the study, in the release. Better building practices can “turn a dangerous home into a safe one.”

Ahead of the nation’s 250th anniversary this July, you might spot a historical exhibit on wheels: Six mobile museums are crisscrossing the contiguous United States to showcase the country’s history. But these ‘Freedom Trucks,’ funded by the right-wing company PragerU, heavily feature artificial intelligence, and some say this AI presents a whitewashed version of the country’s past.

What do these museum trucks showcase?

The trucks are a “traveling exhibition of touchscreen displays, Revolutionary War artifacts and AI,” designed to teach children about the United States’ founding, said The New Yorker. They are part of PragerU’s goal of “developing programming for America’s birthday,” and the trucks themselves “received a $14 million grant from the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services,” an agency that provides funding for educational institutions.

The museums feature AI-generated displays of early figures in colonial America, including “Revolutionary figures like George Washington, Betsy Ross and the Marquis Lafayette,” said 404 Media, as well as a wall of 50 “American heroes” throughout U.S. history. The museums also feature digital copies of famous American documents such as the Declaration of Independence alongside quizzes on U.S. history. Each AI video “ended with a title card showing the White House and PragerU’s logo,” plus a closing video of President Donald Trump.

Why are the trucks controversial?

They have come under fire for their perceived whitewashing of history, as well as their use of AI to do so. The trucks do not completely omit non-white figures, as “several Black luminaries are mentioned: among the 50 American heroes are Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks,” said The Guardian. But the majority of the exhibits are geared “toward the white men who led the charge to nationhood, with minor roles granted to their women dutifully holding the fort back home, and on God as the source of the country’s greatness.”

Christianity features heavily in the displays. The AI-generated Washington “says that ‘our rights are a gift from God,’” while a nearby placard “makes the point overtly: ‘The foundational principles of America are rooted in the Western and Judeo-Christian traditions,’” said The Guardian. Many dark moments in U.S. history are also allegedly downplayed; slavery “makes an entry, though it is presented as a sort of wrinkle in America’s perfect design that was ironed out in time,” not as an endeavor “whose consequences still loom large over the country.”

Other marginalized groups are reportedly treated similarly in the museums. Native Americans “get barely a look in,” and there isn’t a “single reference to the large swathes of the country that were acquired from Spanish colonies and Mexico,” said The Guardian. Some critics claim the museum as a whole is historical revisionism. The trucks are a “work of propaganda that promises to tell only one side of American history” and “promote only one set of so-called American values,” said Book Riot.

While controversy looms over the content of these trucks, the people directly involved don’t appear to have many concerns, including Trump himself. “I want to thank PragerU for helping us share this incredible story,” the president says on the museum’s closing video, which reportedly plays on a loop. “I hope you will join me in helping to make America’s 250th anniversary a year we will never forget.”

The popularity of the tile game mah-jong “spans continents and centuries”, said Vanity Fair. And, these days, it’s moving firmly from “amusing pastime” to “a lifestyle” for many young people.

A combination of “ritual and mystery”, the game requires “skill and intelligence” and can feel “nearly impenetrable” to observers. But Gen Zs are increasingly entranced by the “hypnotic and persistent clicking of tiles” and “silent swapping of pieces”.

‘Pattern recognition’ skills

Originating in 19th century China, mah-jong was brought to the West in the 1920s by Joseph Park Babcock, a US Standard Oil representative who’d been living in Shanghai. Back then, it was played with imported, heavy, traditional tiles. These “could easily stand on edge on a table” but soon “cheaper, lighter” tiles were being manufactured in the US that needed additional racks and pushers for support.

Babcock adapted the game’s rules to “an American style of play”, and what had started out in China as a male-dominated gambling game “associated with insalubrious venues” was picked up fervently by “society women” in the US. They had a “wealth of time to play and money to buy tile sets”.

The game’s current boom in popularity has been driven, in no small part, by social media and popular culture, said The Economist. In manga and anime, mah-jong is often used as a “narrative device to “ramp up tension”, and there’s a “pivotal” game in the 2018 hit movie “Crazy Rich Asians”. Over the past year, TikTok has seen “a 70% surge in mah-jong content”, with many videos “extolling the pleasures of playing with friends”. The activity provides a “sensory experience” and a feeling “of community” that is far more “enriching” than doomscrolling the evening away.

It also requires pattern recognition and memory skills, both of which help keep cognitive function in top gear. You can “learn a lot about someone’s true nature by how they play”, said Angie Lin, founder of mah-jong community East Never Loses, in Dazed. You can see how impulsive a person can be, as well as judge their attentiveness.

‘Building connections’

Mah-jong lovers are also posting videos of new sets online. Content creators unbox the game and showcase the gleam of their newly purchased tiles. A set’s design is highly significant, with luxury brands such as Hermès and Prada releasing sets styled as objets d’art.

In America, the “whitewashing” of mah-jong has been a major point of controversy in the past but “Asian-led” communities are now changing the narrative, said Lin in Dazed. A new generation of players who are passionate about “reconnecting with their roots” have helped foster a real sense of community with other Asian-Americans.

At a time where most of us are suffering from digital fatigue and isolation, the game is “perfect vehicle for building connections”. Everyone can have a seat at the mah-jong table, as long as they have “respect” for its cultural past.

Along with wind, rain and lightning, the weather may bring about unexpected health problems. Acute attacks of “thunderstorm asthma” can worsen pollen allergies and exacerbate respiratory conditions. And as climate change is likely to cause more storms in the future, more people will be put at risk.

Storm surge

Generally, “rain tends to lower pollen counts by cleansing the air, and many people find that rainy weather tends to reduce asthma symptoms triggered by allergies,” said Harvard Health Publishing. But thunderstorms are an exception because they can cause cold downdrafts, which “concentrate air particles, such as pollen and mold.” The particles are then “swept up into clouds where humidity is high,” and “wind, humidity and lightning break up the particles to a size that can readily enter the nose, sinuses and lungs.” Strong gusts of wind disperse the pollen and mold, irritating lungs.

The rapid breakdown and spread of air particles can cause thunderstorm asthma. “Right after a thunderstorm, people can have more asthma,” Clifford Bassett, the founder and medical director at Allergy and Asthma Care of New York, said to The Weather Channel. The phenomenon is caused by a “complex interaction between environmental and meteorological factors, coupled with intense aeroallergen exposure in susceptible individuals,” Constance H. Katelaris, a senior staff specialist of immunology and allergy at Campbelltown Hospital and Western Sydney University, said at InSight+.

Those most likely to experience thunderstorm asthma are people with pollen allergies and hay fever (rhinitis), as well as those with preexisting asthma and poor asthma control. Adults in their third or fourth decade of life appear to be especially susceptible. Older children are also vulnerable, being in the “peak ages for expression of allergic rhinitis,” said Katelaris. There may also be a “significantly increased risk among individuals of Asian and Indian descent,” according to data from the “largest and deadliest episode of thunderstorm asthma recorded to date,” in Melbourne in 2016. “Six of the 10 people who died were of Asian or Indian descent.”

A big storm’s a-coming

While thunderstorm asthma “may seem like more of a curiosity than a serious threat to public health,” when it “affects a large population area, emergency rooms can become overwhelmed,” said Harvard Health Publishing. During the Melbourne episode, over 3,400 people experienced severe asthma symptoms and 10 people died. “Any pollen, any dust, anything that is sitting on the ground will be dispersed, and it will be blown onto cars, into the circulating air, perhaps into homes, if the windows are open, and onto anyone who is outside and unfortunate to be in the path,” meteorologist Dante Ricci said to National Geographic.

Cases of thunderstorm asthma are expected to increase in the future due to climate change. Globally warming temperatures can lead to “prolonged allergenic pollen seasons combined with increased pollen allergenicity, as well as heightened likelihood of extreme weather events,” said a review published in The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology: In Practice. In the U.S., “more than 28 million people have asthma and about 81 million people have seasonal allergies,” said Harvard Health Publishing. The best way to prevent thunderstorm asthma is to have rescue inhalers and medicine handy and to avoid going outside for 24 hours after a storm if you experience pollen allergies or preexisting asthma.