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.

“Having an older sibling can be a mixed blessing,” said The Times. You have a “ready-made playmate”, but younger siblings must endure hand-me-downs, while sharing toys and the attention of their parents.

But a new study shows that birth order could also affect the likelihood of developing certain conditions. Research led by the University of Chicago has analysed data from more than 10 million siblings in the largest ever study of its kind. It found associations between the order of birth and susceptibility to autism, anxiety, hay fever and migraines, among other health conditions.

Though the findings should not be read deterministically, and have not yet been peer-reviewed, more than a third of medical conditions (150 out of 418) showed “birth order associations”, according to the study. “Of these, 79 were more common in firstborns, while 71 were more common in those born second,” said New Scientist.

What it shows

Previous studies have been criticised for “cherry-picking data or failing to control for confounding factors”. And more research has been done on the links between birth order and IQ. For example, a “landmark” study in 2015 analysed data on 20,000 children and found that birth order had “almost no bearing on personality and only a small association with IQ”. It recorded a “drop of about 1 to 2.5 IQ points between oldest and youngest siblings”.

The latest study, however, focused on the “likelihood of developing different conditions”, said New Scientist. In order to “mitigate some confounding factors”, such as the “influence of how parents might treat their first and second children differently”, researchers first compared 1.6 million pairs of siblings by “coupling firstborns from one family with those born second from another family”. They were matched on sex, birth year, parental age and sibling age gap.

The study analysed more than 10 million individuals from more than five million families, and found that elder siblings were more likely to be diagnosed with “neurodevelopmental conditions”, such as autism, ADHD and allergies, as well as acne and childhood psychoses, said Scientific American. Second-born siblings, on the other hand, were more likely to be diagnosed with “substance use disorders, shingles and gastrointestinal disorders”.

How far siblings are born apart also “appears to matter”. If the age gap was less than four years, siblings were associated with a lower rate of asthma and other allergies. This aligns with the “hygiene hypothesis”, which suggests that “lower exposure to allergens in early life” can lead to them overreacting to allergens later.

Strengths and limitations

“Overall, this seems like a really rigorous study,” Rohrer told New Scientist, though the associations are modest. Additionally, “we will only observe every person in one birth-order position” and “never know how their life would have played out differently in another position”.

The study’s “strength” is in its “large sample size and design”, which allowed cross-comparison between different families to “control for socioeconomic status and genetics”, said Scientific American.

However, a limitation was that researchers used “administrative insurance claims data” instead of “reviewing the prevalence of health conditions”. Parents could be more likely to seek diagnoses for their firstborn than any subsequent children. “You can’t get a diagnosis if you don’t seek it,” said Rodica Damian of the University of Houston, who was not involved in the study.

Though the variations between siblings identified in the study are small, “they can have an effect” at the “population level”. As Rohrer said: “It could be that all of these small effects of birth order come together to make a difference.”

With the Trump administration ramping up ICE raids and mass deportations, some immigrants are falling victim to scammers going after these vulnerable communities. Many of the targeted immigrants, including those who are in the country legally, say they’ve lost thousands of dollars and are often left with no recourse.

How are these scams perpetrated?

Legal organizations and immigrant rights groups “have warned that scams targeting immigrants and attorneys have increased to an alarming level,” said Mother Jones. Scammers may look to focus on these people because of the “desperate positions many immigrants find themselves in today as the Trump administration ramps up detention and deportation efforts.” The exact schemes vary, but scammers frequently “adopt the name of a reputable law office” and “advertise themselves on Facebook as law firms.”

These scammers then coerce their victims into handing over large sums of money in exchange for purported legal advice. At least “six immigrants in five states — Florida, Iowa, Michigan, New York and Washington — lost between $1,300 and $11,000 to criminal networks operating on Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp,” said NBC News. One legal resident of the U.S., Odalys González Silvera, sent scammers $5,488, and Evelyn Molina, a Peruvian asylum seeker, was “scammed by a purported law firm on Facebook that promised her residency through a fictitious virtual hearing.”

Some of the scammers also pretend to be law enforcement. One man in San Diego recently pleaded guilty to “impersonating an immigration agent in order to con tens of thousands of dollars from Orange County immigrants” seeking green cards, said KNSD-TV San Diego. The man victimized undocumented immigrants by “telling them he could help with work permits, legal U.S. residency and U.S. citizenship,” and reportedly charged between $10,000 and $20,000.

How can people protect themselves?

Some officials are working to stem the flow of these scammers. Most notably, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg sent a letter to Meta, the parent company of Facebook, asking them to crack down on the schemes. Meta can “play an important role in protecting users from fraud and theft” and should “prioritize addressing reports of imposter accounts where criminality is alleged and temporarily suspend those accounts while the investigation is conducted,” Bragg’s letter said.

There are other ways experts say immigrants can protect themselves. One major step is to verify that the person in question is a licensed attorney. All states “have a website where you can confirm whether an attorney or accredited representative has an active practice license,” said NBC News. People should also refrain from paying via instant transfer systems like PayPal, Venmo or Zelle, as “legitimate legal organizations and private lawyers always present a formal contract and collect payment in a planned manner.”

Despite these tips, the fight to stop the scamming is ongoing, and the “impacts on victims are endless,” said Mother Jones. Beyond the money lost, the victims may also end up “missing court deadlines and hearings in their cases at a time when the system is increasingly hostile to them.” The scams “hurt the rule of law. It hurts our standing as a system of justice,” Charity Anastasio, a counsel at the American Immigration Lawyers Association, told Mother Jones. The legal system is “under enough attack now already. We really don’t need this added criminal element.”

The giant kraken, a mythical marine beast, may not be entirely fiction. New evidence suggests that octopuses up to 62 feet long likely roamed the waters of ancient Earth, ripping and devouring prey in their path.

Monster under the sea

These gigantic octopuses might have been formidable predators of the ocean approximately 100 million years ago, according to a study published in the journal Science. “With their large bodies, long arms, powerful jaws and advanced behavior, they represent what could be described as a real Cretaceous Kraken,” said Yasuhiro Iba, a paleontologist at Hokkaido University in Japan and the lead author of the study, to Reuters. The invertebrates would have "rivaled” and “possibly even preyed upon apex predators such as mosasaurs and plesiosaurs,” said The Guardian.

Though octopuses are some of Earth’s oldest animals, they are difficult to study from the past, because they lack hard external shells and have very few fossils. So researchers studied the fossilized beaks of the animals, revealing two extinct species: Nanaimoteuthis jeletzkyi and Nanaimoteuthis haggarti. The beaks and jaws were used to deduce the size of the creatures, between 23 and 62 feet, as well as their feeding habits.

The jaws showed "signs of intensive wear, with patterns indicating that these animals were dismantling hard-shelled prey,” said Live Science (a sister site of The Week). “To see a beak this size is quite amazing, to be honest. It was a massive animal,” said Thomas Clements, a paleobiologist at the University of Reading, to The Guardian. “I certainly wouldn’t have wanted to go swimming in the ancient oceans if these things were swimming around.”

Large and in charge

The octopuses of today are notoriously intelligent, and that was likely the case in the past, as well. The researchers found that the octopuses’ jaws were “ground down on one side by as much as 10% of their total size, based on reconstructions,” said Live Science. This “lopsided loss suggests lateralized behavior, which is linked to being brainier.”

“Some of those remarkable traits” that are also present in the modern-day creatures “may already have been emerging in early octopuses during the Cretaceous,” said Iba to NPR. Along with intelligence, ancient octopuses probably also used their strong tentacles to rip prey apart before eating it, similar to modern octopuses’ hunting patterns.

“For roughly the past 370 million years, marine ​ecosystems have been thought to be dominated by large vertebrate predators — first fishes and sharks, then marine reptiles and later whales,” said Iba. “Giant invertebrates, namely octopuses, also functioned as apex predators in the Cretaceous sea,” according to the research.

However, there may be some inaccuracies in the findings because the researchers used “error-prone” methods in estimating the size of the octopuses and produced the largest possible size range for them, said René Hoffmann, a paleontologist focusing on fossil cephalopods at the Ruhr University Bochum in Germany, to Live Science. Their size also doesn’t necessarily mean that the octopuses were apex predators.

Despite this, the results provide valuable new information about the ancient animals. “It’s a big old planet,” said Neil Landman, a paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, to The Associated Press. “So we have lots to look at to piece together the marine ecosystem through time.”

Breaking up is hard to do, but a gift registry could ease the pain. Functioning much like the wedding or baby shower version, a divorce registry lists items to purchase for a newly single person, to help them transition to their new life. The trend took off last year after the influencer Becca Murray created one following her divorce.

Financial and emotional loss

Divorces can be a heavy financial burden. Aside from hiring a lawyer, “you have to file your divorce with the court, potentially sell your marital property or negotiate a deal to buy it out, and deal with many other types of negotiations,” said Apartment Therapy. The process can “take years before it’s finalized.” And buying the small items required to rebuild amid such tumult is a drag.

A divorce registry “helps support people” who may be “suddenly losing half of their income, moving to a new home or refilling a half-empty one, all while paying for a divorce, which can cost five to six figures,” said Apartment Therapy. While married or dating, a couple “usually shares a lot of household essentials, like electronics, cookware and furniture,” which require replacing after splitting them and going separate ways, said Cafe Mom.

The products in divorce registries are “exactly what you think people need,” said Olivia Howell, the founder of the gift registry Fresh Starts, to CBS News. It’s the items that “your partner may have touched a lot: dishes, cups, utensils, towels, sheets, bedding, blankets.”

Healing and destigmatizing

“Even everyday items can carry heavy memories and leave homes feeling half-empty,” said CBS News. So receiving a gift from a breakup or divorce registry is a “great way to begin the healing process,” whether it’s a “cute pair of earrings” or “accessories to make your space your own again,” said the lifestyle publication Chatelaine.

Research shows that “emotional processing can be easier when the nervous system feels safer and more regulated,” said Jessica O’Reilly, a Toronto relationship expert with a Ph.D. in human sexuality, to the outlet. And a present from a loved one and a newly established routine can help regulate the nervous system.

Most of the people building divorce and breakup registries are women. But a breakup is nonetheless the great equalizer, and a “lot of men are in the same position [that] a lot of women are in,” said Howell to CBC. “They don’t have anything when they start out” after a divorce. And even though men may also be struggling, “culturally, a lot of men are told to not ask for help or support.”

The “shift toward destigmatizing divorce was already underway,” said the Fresh Starts website. A registry gives it “infrastructure, language and legitimacy.” Plus, filling your home with gifts from loved ones “helps bolster your confidence,” said Howell, and lets you “make bigger, bolder decisions in life.”

Japan could soon be selling more arms overseas after it lifted a ban on exporting lethal weapons, including fighter jets. It’s the country’s biggest overhaul of defence export rules for decades and a “major shift” to Japan’s “post-World War II constitution”, said Al Jazeera.

Pacifist nation no more

“Pacifist restraints” have “shaped” Japan’s post-war security policy, said Reuters. The previous rules, introduced in 1967 and enacted in 1976, restricted military exports to non-lethal arms, such as those used for surveillance and mine sweeping.

There was a partial easing in 2014, when then-Prime Minister Shinzo Abe lifted the self-imposed ban on arms exports and defence industry cooperation. Then, last year, Australia sourced advanced frigates from Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, a deal that meant Japan began to emerge as a “major arms exporter”, said Newsweek.

Now, the five export categories that had limited military exports to rescue, transport, warning, surveillance and mine-sweeping equipment, are being removed. Instead of banning exports of lethal arms outright, ministers and officials will assess the merits of each proposed sale.

Some export principles will remain: strict screening, controls on transfers to third countries, and a ban on sales to countries involved in conflict. But the government said exceptions could be made when deemed necessary for national security.

It’s thought that nations interested in buying Japanese-made weapons include Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines and Indonesia. Sources told Reuters that warships for the Philippines may be among the first exports.

“With this amendment, transfers of all defence equipment will in principle become possible,” the PM, Sanae Takaichi, posted on X, adding that “recipients will be limited to countries that commit to use in accordance with the UN Charter”.

New rules for a new world

Explaining the shift in policy, Takaichi said that “in an increasingly severe security environment, no single country can now protect its own peace and security alone”.

Takaichi, who is regarded as a China “hawk” and often referred to as Japan’s “Iron Lady”, is among a number of recent Japanese leaders to have “pushed back against the country’s pacifist stance”, said Al Jazeera.

There is an “increasingly severe security environment”, said the Japan News. So her government feels that the regional environment has become significantly more dangerous, because of China’s growing military power and tensions over Taiwan, North Korea’s missile and nuclear programs, Moscow’s activity in the region, and the knock-on effect of tensions in the Middle East.

So it wants to deepen military cooperation with friendly countries and share the burden of regional security, instead of relying almost entirely on Washington. There’s also an economic dimension: Japan hopes to scale up production, attract revenue, innovation and investment.

We “shouldn’t underplay how important this will be”, William Yang, a senior analyst on north-east Asia at the International Crisis Group think tank, told The Telegraph, because “over the last few decades, Japan has been secluded from the global defence and arms supplies markets”.

People have long sought drug-assisted therapy. Now, rumors of certain drugs helping to treat or even heal mental health disorders has led to a surge in psychedelic retreats. These trendy respites operate overseas in countries like Jamaica and Peru; they also exist in the U.S., albeit with legal gray areas. But safety concerns have cropped up following a recent study.

Dubious precautions

Mounting interest in the potential benefits of psychedelic drugs has led to a rise in psychedelic retreats around the world. Such places offer multiday trips where attendees “pay for drug-assisted experiences” and are promised “psychological healing” and “personal growth,” said The Associated Press. Nearly all of the drugs typically offered at these retreats are “illegal under U.S. federal law,” including “magic mushrooms, ayahuasca, MDMA and LSD.” But retreat companies don’t always “make that explicit.” Sometimes they claim they are “protected by a rare legal exemption for religious organizations that traditionally use psychedelics.”

The “hard line between clinical intervention and all other uses” of drugs, such as spiritual and recreational, has blurred, said Hadas Alterman, a psychedelic medicine attorney, to Fox News. Psychedelics now “serve people who aren’t in crisis but aren’t merely thrill-seeking either.”

Many retreats have safety protocols in place, but they still carry the risk for “physical, psychological and interpersonal harms,” said researchers in a paper published in JAMA Network Open. It is therefore important that anyone interested in a psychedelic retreat “do their research” and “talk to the organizers or facilitators to get more information about what is being offered and how,” said Amy McGuire, a biomedical ethicist and co-author on the study.

The study, which surveyed dozens of retreats, documented a wide range of concerning practices, including “companies offering multiple psychedelic drugs,” said the AP. Many retreats have health professionals on site, but “their roles and responsibilities are often vague.” In some cases, they “take psychedelics alongside participants,” which could impair the professionals’ “ability to respond in an emergency.” Almost 90% of the surveyed retreats additionally “require or recommend that attendees stop taking certain medications,” including antidepressants, before using psychedelics. These “washout periods” ranged from “one day to six weeks before the psychedelic experience.”

Regulatory changes on the horizon

While psychedelics are not federally approved in the U.S., that may soon change. President Donald Trump last week signed an executive order directing the Food and Drug Administration to “accelerate reviews of psychedelics that show potential for conditions like post-traumatic stress disorder,” said the AP. The order also directs “law enforcement agencies to quickly lower restrictions on any psychedelic approved by the FDA.”

Due to the state-level decriminalization of psilocybin, Oregon and Colorado have become psychedelic retreat hubs for what some call “transformative travel,” said Parade. Relying on state regulation is risky because “each one is going to be slightly different,” Albert Garcia-Romeu, the associate director of the Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research at Johns Hopkins University, said to The Guardian. It would make more sense to go the “FDA-approved medication route” because that comes with a “set of authoritative guidelines from major medical and regulatory bodies.”

People in the field say today’s retreats are safer than they have been in past decades, when “psychedelic experiences were almost always conducted underground with few safety precautions,” said the AP. The growing market for psychedelics has also “allowed retreats to expand their services, hire more medical and coaching staff and take safety more seriously than we’ve ever seen in the past,” said Brad Burge, who has worked with psychedelic nonprofits, drugmakers and retreat operators, to the outlet.

Still, there are no “industrywide standards or regulations for how participants are screened, prepared or monitored afterward,” said the AP. So “what does that mean about the quality of care you’re going to have?” said Joshua White, the founder of the Fireside Project, which runs a hotline for people experiencing distress during psychedelic trips, to the outlet. Without regulation, there could be a “race to the bottom where there is no liability or accountability.”

Companies want to fly you to the moon and let you stay among the stars. Four startups are developing and launching commercial space stations in prime locations like the planet’s orbit, the moon and maybe even Mars.

Think modern, not luxurious

Voyager Technologies in Colorado is readying a space hotel for 2029. The first few visitors to its space station will likely be government-sponsored astronauts and researchers. “Instead of ‘luxury,’ ‘modern’ or ‘advanced’ is a better word,” said Dylan Taylor, the company’s CEO and chair, to Scientific American.

Galactic Resource Utilization (GRU) Space wants to go beyond Earth’s orbit. It plans to run its first mission in 2029 and operate a lunar hotel in 2032, according to its website. The startup hopes to “engineer the infrastructure required to harness resources and sustain on new worlds, ultimately creating a self-sufficient industrial autonomy on the moon, Mars and beyond,” said a company white paper.

Those “interested in a berth” just have to “plunk down a deposit between $250,000 and $1 million, qualifying them for a spot on one of its early lunar surface missions in as little as six years,” said Ars Technica. The hotel’s clientele is “expected to be participants of previous commercial space flights and rich, adventurous newlyweds looking for an out-of-this-world honeymoon experience,” said Space.com (a sister site of The Week).

‘Inflection point’ with challenges

So far, lunar exploration is limited to government missions and large companies like SpaceX. “I realized we needed to create a third pillar: the space tourism industry,” said Skyler Chan, the founder of GRU Space, to Ars Technica. “We could extend a proven market to the Moon and build the first hotel there. And then once we build the hotel on the Moon, we can build out our structures,” like “roads, warehouses and bases.”

“We live during an inflection point where we can actually become interplanetary before we die,” said Chan in a statement. “If we succeed, billions of human lives will be born on the moon and Mars and be able to experience the beauty of lunar and Martian life.”

The “shift from public to private space stations, a first in human history, brings with it new opportunities for reimagining what life in orbit will look like,” said Scientific American. But as of now, “even with all the best intentions, there are some aspects of living in a confined space in orbit that, for now, can’t be made plush.”

“Maintaining a comfortable, clean atmosphere, much less a five-star experience, on a functioning spaceship will present all kinds of hurdles,” said Scientific American. “I’m skeptical,” said Jeff Nosanov, a former NASA proposal manager, to the outlet. The “challenges of keeping a space station functional are very underappreciated.” The first space hotel is set to launch next year.

As conflict continues to destabilise the Middle East, the Gulf States elite are seeking solace in European alternatives that offer comparable financial benefits with a far lower risk of war on the doorstep. One such destination is the small Swiss town of Zug, which is becoming a “bolt-hole” for Gulf-based wealth, said the Financial Times.

‘Swiss Monaco’

Switzerland’s reputation as a magnet for the world’s financial elite is nothing new. In 2025, the country recorded the “densest concentration of millionaires” with an estimated 146 per 1,000 adults last year, said The Times. Now home to around 135,000 people, Zug’s canton – also named Zug – used to be the “poorest corner of Switzerland” until it lowered its tax rates in the 1950s. “Now it has corporate tax rates of 16.2% compared with 40% in the US and 33.3% in France.”

“In almost all ways Zug is unremarkable”, with its traditional Swiss architecture and cobbled waterfront lanes. But if its “Alpine lake water is clear”, the financial scene is more “murky”. Many credit Marc Rich and Pincus “Pinky” Green, founders of metals and minerals trading firm Glencore, with the transformation of Zug from a “Swiss backwater” to its status as the “Swiss Monaco”. The multinational is headquartered just outside Zug, and has made the town a “global powerhouse for trading crude and refined oil products”. It should be “no surprise” that the “1% of the world’s 1%” are taking shelter there, and at the same time, hoping to still “keep a hand in the oil business”.

“Industry estimates suggest that tens of billions of dollars could flow into Switzerland depending on how the current conflict evolves,” said the Outbound Investment Group. The “immediate trigger” for the “surge in interest” from Gulf-based investors is the war in the Middle East. However, Switzerland’s underlying appeal is its unwavering “Swissness”: “political neutrality”, “strong legal frameworks”, and reputation for wealth preservation. It’s a safe bet with no sign of slowing.

‘Availability tightening’

There are some drawbacks, said the FT. For “would-be arrivals”, the appeal of the region for Middle Eastern residents comes with “practical constraints”. Those outside the EU “face a higher bar”. Usually, the condition of residency is “tied” to employment or company formation. For the “very wealthy”, there is the added option of “negotiated lump-sum taxation agreements with cantonal authorities” that allow individuals to “pay a flat annual tax based on living expenses rather than global income”.

Even if they are holders of EU passports, the “main bottleneck” is the availability of property. Competition is “intense” and “rental supply is extremely limited, with properties often snapped up within days”. With Zug’s “availability tightening”, other cantons in the region with similar tax arrangements could benefit, such as Lugano, an Italian-speaking city in the Ticino region.

The uncertainty of the duration of the conflict is one of the most pressing concerns, said Bloomberg. The recent breakdown of ceasefire talks risks “forcing a reckoning for the professional and expat classes considering options after putting down roots in the Middle East”.

The short-term benefits of physical safety from leaving the Gulf are clear, but changing tax residency “takes time” and practicalities such as finding schools and “conforming to national requirements such as opening local bank accounts” is often “complicated and time-consuming”. The region’s ultra-wealthy are facing “uncomfortable decisions on whether to make the move permanent, especially with the end of the school year in sight”.

The Internet Archive has been responsible for saving and providing access to trillions of websites over the past 30 years. AI is putting a damper on the organization’s work, as large language models are using the data without permission. As a result, many companies are no longer allowing their content to be archived, which could lead to a large loss of historical records in the future.

Access denied

The Internet Archive is a non-profit that is building a “digital library of internet sites and other cultural artifacts,” according to its website. The organization uses web crawlers to capture snapshots of sites. These snapshots are then made available through the public-facing tool, the Wayback Machine, which operates like a library, providing “free access to researchers, historians, scholars, people with print disabilities and the general public.” However, amid the rise of AI, the Internet Archive’s “commitment to free information access has turned its digital library into a potential liability for some news publishers,” said an analysis by Nieman Lab.

Currently, “241 news sites from nine countries explicitly disallow at least one out of the four Internet Archive crawling bots,” including The New York Times and Reddit, said Nieman Lab. Of these sites, 87% are owned by USA Today Co., the “largest newspaper conglomerate in the United States, formerly known as Gannett.” The Guardian has also restricted the Internet Archive; the publication does not block the crawlers, but it “excludes its content from the Internet Archive API and filters out articles from the Wayback Machine interface, which makes it harder for regular people to access archived versions of its articles,” said Wired.

Many of the same media outlets banning Internet Archive’s crawlers have used the resource themselves to access older data and articles. “Journalists rely on the Archive as a resource in our reporting, and many digital investigations into issues like misinformation or censorship are possible only because it preserves material that would otherwise disappear,” said the organizations Fight for the Future, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Public Knowledge, in a letter to the Internet Archive. “Without that ongoing work to preserve the web, large parts of journalism’s recent history would already be lost.”

On record

Artificial intelligence is the biggest reason sites are blocking the Internet Archive. There is “evidence that the Wayback Machine has been used to train large language models,” said Forbes. The archive allows tech companies to “skirt copyright laws by using the Wayback Machine as a workaround for training language models on their content,” said Morning Brew. Despite this, Mark Graham, the director of the Wayback Machine, “emphasizes that the digital archive has controls to limit abuse of AI automation and prevent large-scale data extraction.”

Unfortunately, a few bad apples ruin the whole bunch. The Internet Archive “tends to be good citizens,” Robert Hahn, the head of business affairs and licensing at The Guardian, said to Nieman Lab. “It’s the law of unintended consequences: You do something for really good purposes, and it gets abused.” The nonprofit “has taken on the Herculean task of preserving the internet, and many news organizations aren’t equipped to save their own work,” Nieman Lab said.

There is “no widely available public tool comparable to the Wayback Machine,” said Wired. If it “continues to lose access to major news sources, its preservation efforts could erode to the point where early digital records of history become much harder to access or are even lost altogether.”

India has an “entrenched culture of outsourcing household work”, said Reuters, with domestic help traditionally organised through word of mouth and paid in cash. But new apps are changing the practice and turning the system digital.

Although the start-ups offer attractive fees for clients alongside competitive earnings for workers, concerns around safety will be harder to pay off.

Attractive numbers

Start-ups like Urban Company, Pronto and Snabbit are offering on-demand bookings in cities for short tasks, entering a “vast, largely unregulated market” that boasts an estimated 30 million domestic workers. It includes many women with “few formal job options”, said the BBC.

The model of the agencies works a bit like Uber: the helpers get bookings, pointing them to jobs in homes in designated neighbourhoods on their apps. They press a countdown timer in the app before they start work.

The numbers are currently attractive for both clients and workers: companies are “betting big” and “burning millions of dollars” to “lure busy professionals” with charges of less than 99 rupees (79p) an hour that “have no global parallel”, said Reuters. For instance, similar services can cost around £22 an hour in the US, and around £5 in China.

In a country with a per capita income of around £2,200, workers on these apps can see annual earnings reach £3,700 by working eight hours a day. “My income has roughly doubled,” a 32-year-old from West Bengal, who worked through Snabbit, told the Indian Express.

Greater risks

So far, so good. But the “craze” is “tempered by concerns” about women’s safety in a ⁠country with “high rates of sexual harassment”. Unlike delivery drivers who spend “just brief moments at doorsteps”, the workers may spend hours inside private homes, “exposing them to greater risks”, said Reuters.

Pronto and Snabbit have an SOS button within the app that alerts area supervisors in case of emergency. Pronto also offers self-defence training for workers. Urban Company says it offers a women-only safety helpline and an SOS app feature.

But a women’s rights activist noted that while the companies run extensive background checks on workers before hiring them, they don’t vet the credentials of customers, who can simply log in on apps to book home help.

In between bookings, the workers “have only the cold, dusty sidewalk to sit on” and for some, the uniforms they wear are “visible identifiers that they’d rather not have”, said The Indian Express. One worker said there “should be a place for us to change back into regular clothes” because “many of us don’t want everyone to know what we do”.

It would be to the advantage of the platforms if they could “successfully crack the safety protocols” because they will “earn the deepest consumer loyalty” and “the most sustainable market returns”, Soumya Chauhan, a principal at Dutch e-commerce investor Prosus, which has a stake in Urban Company, told Reuters.

One species’ trash is another’s treasure. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch in the Pacific Ocean is now home to dozens of species, and the floating plastic island emphasizes how human civilization can influence even the most remote areas. More species in the open ocean can also facilitate the spread of invasive types.

Moving in

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is located within the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, a “huge rotating current system between California and Hawaii” where “floating objects tend to get trapped instead of drifting away,” said Earth.com. The gyre has essentially created an island of tens of thousands of tons of plastic trash, approximately 80% of which originated on land. The size and shape of the patch is constantly changing.

Plastic is not the only thing present at the patch. Over time, much of the plastic has gained living inhabitants, according to a 2023 study published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution. Scientists found 484 animals from 46 species on plastic debris from the gyre. Inhabitants were not “merely riding the debris to a new location” because “brooding females, rich with eggs and young” were found, as well as “animals at all life stages, including juveniles and adults,” said IFL Science. This range of life indicates that the organisms are there for the long haul and not just temporarily.

Many of the species living and thriving in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch “were able to reproduce asexually, essentially cloning themselves,” said Earth.com. “Their larvae also did not need to spend much time drifting freely in the water,” therefore “young animals could grow right on the same surface as the adults.” The reproductive cycle “fits well with a small, isolated raft of plastic that slowly circles within the gyre.”

House hunting

The discovered organisms largely made up two categories: coastal and pelagic, meaning species found in open water. “Barnacles, sea anemones, hydroids, amphipods, crabs and bryozoans are all represented, and most appear to come originally from the western Pacific, including the coasts of Japan.” said Econews. The mix of coastal and ocean life is called a “neopelagic community,” which is a “human-made ecosystem that exists only because of long-lived plastic floating far from land.”

Plastic may be the key for certain populations to expand into the open ocean. “Unlike natural floating substrates such as driftwood or pumice, plastic can persist for decades, thereby providing a continuous surface for attachment,” said The Economic Times. The plastic allows “coastal species that once would have died long before reaching remote islands” to “travel for years on these rafts,” said Econews.

The sampling of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch done by the study “likely doesn’t capture the biodiverse richness floating in the Pacific’s most polluted area,” said IFL Science. “Some animal groups, such as molluscs, were unexpectedly absent from the Patch, whereas others, such as sea anemones, were more common than in tsunami debris.” Unfortunately, open water travel “comes with serious risks,” especially introducing new invasive species, said Econews. Foreign species can use plastic to reach new areas where they “could compete with native corals, algae and invertebrates on reefs that are already stressed by warming, pollution and overfishing.”

Even though there is life on the Patch, it “does not diminish the urgency of reducing plastic production and improving waste management,” said The Economic Times. Instead, it “underscores the complexity of ocean systems and the long-lasting consequences of synthetic debris.”

Appearing straight out of science fiction, portable computers called cyberdecks have been growing in popularity, especially among Gen Z. They can be built with minimal parts and customized both in their purpose and aesthetic. The trend is a response to a perceived lack of creativity in mainstream technology, as well as a way to fight back against data harvesting. And many want to use technology without the influence of large corporations, similar to the days of the early internet.

From mind to machine

A cyberdeck is a transportable, homemade computer “used to access an online interface,” said Daily Dot. The term originated with the 1984 sci-fi novel “Neuromancer” by William Gibson. And since then, cyberdecks have been a “staple of the cyberpunk genre and aesthetic.” Building them has become a trend among Gen Z, blending “retro-futuristic aesthetics with practical computing,” said Newsweek.

Cyberdecks are generally simple to construct, often using “single-board systems like Raspberry Pi paired with small screens, keyboards and custom enclosures,” said Newsweek. Many are also “built from thrifted or repurposed materials, giving each device a distinct look and function shaped entirely by its creator.”

These hand-built computers serve a variety of purposes, including gaming machine, e-reader, information database or MP3 player. And building a cyberdeck “can be as complex or simple as you choose to make it,” said The Cyberdeck Cafe. “People of all skill levels have constructed their own.”

Cyberdecks are “open systems, meaning components can be swapped, modified or redesigned,” said Newsweek. The flexibility is “part of the appeal for younger users who want to experiment with hardware and software without restrictions.”

The trend comes at a time when technology and social media platforms have become controlling with “more data harvesting, more algorithmic control, more ads, more surveillance,” said Quasa. Cyberdecks are “less about replacing everyday devices and more about reclaiming control over technology,” said Newsweek.

Sticking it to the man

Building a portable computer is a “way fringe and anti-establishment engineers and cyberpunks are creating a digital identity all their own,” said Daily Dot. Cyberdecks “combat the unbounded corporatization, invasiveness and homogeneity of widespread tech, in addition to individualizing the tech experience according to a user’s aesthetic.”

They are “quietly rebellious” and a “direct middle finger to the boring, minimalist ‘everything-is-a-sleek-black-rectangle’ aesthetic that dominates tech design,” said Quasa. Much of the love for cyberdecks is a result of disillusionment with the state of modern technology. The “early internet’s wild, private, joyful chaos feels like a distant memory.” Gone is the world in which “you didn’t chase likes or dread the next feed update.”

While technology has been “shaping the world’s digital future,” cyberdecks are “driving users back to the past — a time when a simpler, less corporatized and aggressively monitored online reality once existed,” said Daily Dot. The trend is “self-defense and nostalgia at the same time,” said Quasa. “When you are making something that’s truly yours, why be boring? Make it fun. Make it ridiculous. Make it you.”

The invasion of the golden oyster mushroom is posing a threat to native species. And with temperatures warming, further expansion could lead to dire ecological consequences.

Yellow flag

The golden oyster mushroom was brought to the U.S. from Asia during the 2000s mostly because it “can grow quickly, which was a boon, as it’s considered one of the most delicious mushrooms a forager can find,” said Vice. What was once deemed a benefit turned out to be a threat. The bright yellow mushroom’s ability to reproduce quickly has caused it to spread across the continent, making it notoriously invasive. The species has already been found in 25 states.

The fungus is “invisible for most of the year, living as mycelium, fungal strands within the wood,” said the BBC. In the spring, it “sends out its fruiting body,” which is “what we would recognize as the mushroom itself.” The “huge yellow clusters cascade out of logs and trees, each mushroom itself producing millions of microscopic airborne spores.” Though the golden oyster mushroom “isn’t yet posing a significant risk to Western forests, it is taking hold in the Northeast and Midwest,” said The Cool Down.

When the mushroom is present in a forest, the “fungal community composition significantly changes, and fungal species richness significantly decreases,” said a 2025 study published in the journal Current Biology. Trees colonized by the fungus have “about half the fungal biodiversity as trees without the golden oyster,” Aishwarya Veerabahu, a mycologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and lead author of the study, said to the BBC. “That was a huge indicator that they are likely outcompeting the native fungi that were there.”

Settling the spore

The golden oyster mushroom “mainly grows on dead or dying hardwood trees, breaking down the tough wood fibers,” said the BBC. The fungi are gilled mushrooms, which have the ability to “release up to billions of spores.” These oyster mushrooms also “happen to be one of the few carnivorous mushrooms” and mainly prey on nematode worms.

Dead wood is a “crucial habitat for small animals and tree seedlings in the forest,” said Veerabahu. The spread of the mushroom could pose a risk to a variety of species. The golden oyster “grows and ‘chews’ through woods so rapidly,” and it could spell bad news for the “rate of decay of wood and for the carbon emissions that come from that.” Not only this fungus but all invasive fungi are “especially dangerous because so little is known about them,” said Oregon Live.

Human trade brought the mushroom west. “It’s a problem created by the way we use, grow and transport fungi,” said the BBC.

And warmer temperatures due to climate change are creating conditions increasingly suitable for its spread. The mushroom’s “proclivity for expansion means it could soon become a problem in new territories,” including urban areas, said The Cool Down.

To prevent the fungus from overtaking forests everywhere, “continued research, management efforts anchored in social theory and collaborative conversations about microbial endemism” will be necessary, said the study. “The cultivation of local species or development of sporeless mushroom strains could also mitigate risks.”

India’s programme to reintroduce cheetahs to the country is “flourishing”, but mounting opposition to “Project Cheetah” from local farmers has “teeth”, said The Times.

The big cats were declared extinct in India 70 years ago because of habitat loss, prey reduction and “rampant Raj-era poaching for luxury fashion”, but now they are back, and causing plenty of division.

Ambitious vision

India’s links with the “world’s fastest land animal date back centuries”, and the word cheetah itself comes from Sanskrit citra, meaning spotted. Royals “kept them as pets”, and in the 12th century they became a “popular hunting animal” and the Mughal emperor Akbar was believed to have collected some 9,000 of them.

Legend has it that the last three cheetahs in India were shot dead by the Maharajah of the historical state of Koriya, on a nighttime drive in 1947. Sightings were reported “intermittently” after that but the big cats were declared extinct in the country in 1952.

Then, in 2022, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, launched an ambitious scheme, with the aim of re-establishing the cheetah within its historical territory in the central state of Madhya Pradesh. The government claimed the project would aid global conservation and “improve livelihood options for local communities through ecotourism”, said The Hindu.

Re-establishing a cheetah population initially relied on importing cheetahs from countries like South Africa, Namibia and Botswana. Last month, “nine wild African cheetahs were tranquillised in Botswana’s savannah, quarantined for a few weeks in the country, and then taken on a 10-hour flight over the Indian Ocean by the Indian Air Force” before being delivered by helicopter to a national park in Madhya Pradesh.

The latest arrivals from Africa bring the total number of cheetahs in India to 53, 33 of which are native-born cubs. In December, the government said India was on course to have a self-sustaining population of cheetahs by 2032.

Land grab

But the project has had its “hiccups”, said The Times. Several cheetahs went into septic shock and died during a monsoon. Others perished from climate stress and parasitic infections as a result of their transition from Africa’s savannahs to India’s “scrub forest ecosystems”.

The new population of predatory carnivores is also proving a headache for local livestock farmers. One villager in Chak Kishanpur said she had lost her goats, worth 10,000 to 15,000 rupees (£90-£120) each, and is now forced to harvest wheat in a nearby field instead.

Some scientists are also opposed: conservationists have called for a ban on importing cheetahs, demanding that the most recent batch should be the last, citing an “abysmal lack of habitat and prey”, said The Hindu. The project is currently entirely based in the Kuno National Park, which will become more and more crowded if the free-ranging cheetah population continues to multiply.

This is a land grab in the name of conservation, Nitin Rai, a fellow at the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment, told the outlet. Pointing to past conflict between state-led conservation efforts for tigers and the land rights of Indigenous communities, Rai said that “the cheetah, like the tiger, is being used as a proxy for territorial control of land and to move out forest dwellers.” The officials behind the cheetah scheme have “run roughshod over local opinions, understanding and histories of landscape change”.

Below the Antarctic ice lies a treasure trove of minerals, including copper, iron, gold, silver, platinum and cobalt. Warming temperatures due to climate change could unearth these minerals and, in turn, fuel future geopolitical conflict, potentially leading to a reversal of the current Antarctic drilling ban. If the ban is lifted, there may also be an increase in emissions. Those emissions would raise temperatures even more.

Iced out

Though under 0.6% of Antarctica is estimated to be free of ice cover today, scientists predict there will be up to a 550% increase during the next 30 years, according to a study published in the journal Nature Climate Change. And this climate-driven melting will lead to a “likely rise in the economic viability of Antarctic mineral resources over the coming centuries.” New accessible resources could pose problems in the future when it comes to determining whether these minerals can be mined and by whom.

A country’s interest in Antarctic mineral resource development may be “linked to whether it holds a territorial claim, the economic value of mineral resources within that claimed territory and the extent of land emergence,” said the study. The largest land emergence in Antarctica is “likely to occur over territories claimed by Argentina, Chile and the United Kingdom,” said Eos. But “all territorial claims on Antarctica were suspended by the 1959 Antarctic Treaty and are not recognized by other nations,” said The New York Times

Global copper demand is “currently at 28 million metric tons and is expected to jump to 42 million metric tons by 2040 as demand for electricity grows,” said the Times. Access to resources is going to become more important than ever. Changes to Antarctic ice cover could “put pressure on the region’s legal framework surrounding mineral resource activities,” said Eos. And interest may come from “states without territorial claims or non-state actors,” said the study.

Melting the ice

The Antarctic Treaty was signed in 1959 as a response to World War II and global interest in keeping Antarctica unmilitarized. The agreement stipulated that Antarctica should be “used for peaceful purposes only” and that “no acts or activities taking place while the present treaty is in force shall constitute a basis for asserting, supporting or denying a claim to territorial sovereignty,” said the treaty. It also bans any mining or drilling activities for commercial purposes.

These provisions may change in the future. Nations, beginning in 2048, will be able to request adjustments to the Antarctic Treaty. Along with Argentina, Chile and the U.K., Australia, New Zealand, France and Norway also made formal land claims to Antarctica before the treaty. “Major powers like the United States and Russia, though not formal claimants, retain strategic interests and could play a key role if rules around resource extraction change,” said Money Control.

Drilling in Antarctica can have significant negative environmental impacts, including the release of trapped greenhouse gases. Increased greenhouse gases would lead to worsening climate change, which would cause additional ice melt. In the future, “environmental impacts of mineral resource extraction activities will be weighed against societal pressure for sustainable resource development,” said the study.

Nonetheless, the ice melt is ”unlikely to trigger a major change to Antarctic governance on its own,” Tim Stephens, a professor of international law at The University of Sydney Law School, said to Eos. “The continent will still remain a very challenging environment for mineral resource extraction.”

The deep, blue sea is becoming deeper — in color, that is. Climate change, along with human development, has reduced how much light can filter through the water. Reduced light can significantly disrupt the marine food chain as well as lead to the large-scale worsening of climate change.

Zoning issues

Ocean darkening occurs when “changes in the optical properties of the oceans reduce the depth to which sufficient light penetrates to facilitate biological processes guided by sunlight and moonlight,” said a 2025 study published in the journal Global Change Biology. The color shift can make the water look more opaque. The part of the ocean that sunlight is able to penetrate is called the photic zone and it is “home to 90% of marine species,” said the World Economic Forum. Organisms like phytoplankton also “convert sunlight and CO2 into energy, producing nearly half the planet’s oxygen and absorbing vast amounts of carbon emissions” in the photic zone.

Rather than just some patches of darkening, the phenomenon has affected “large, connected regions,” Tim Smyth, a marine scientist at Plymouth Marine Laboratory and co-author of the study, said to New Scientist. “Roughly one‑fifth of the world’s oceans have darkened in some way.” Already, the depth of the photic zone has reduced by more than 10% “across 9% of the global ocean,” said the study.

In coastal areas, darkening is “closely linked to changes in the rivers that flow into the sea,” Smyth said. “Shifts in land use affect what becomes dissolved or suspended in the water, which, in turn, alters the optical quality of the water entering the ocean.” In addition, “fertilizers used in industrial agriculture are washed into rivers, stimulating phytoplankton growth,” which reduces “how deeply light can penetrate the water column.”

However, darkening is not limited to the coast. The open ocean has also increased in opacity, which “may be linked to shifts in phytoplankton blooms driven by climate change.” There have been “rising ocean temperatures, more frequent marine heatwaves and changes in salinity in some regions.” Such changes “influence large‑scale ocean circulation patterns.”

Light direction

Dark oceans are bad news and the consequences have already begun to appear. As the photic zone shrinks, “many marine species are forced to move closer to the surface in order to survive,” said Diario AS. This “pushes large numbers of organisms into a much smaller space, increasing competition for food, raising biological stress and leaving them far more exposed to predators, including human fishing vessels.”

Along with disrupting the marine food chain, ocean darkening hinders the ocean’s ability to perform photosynthesis, weakening the “ocean’s role as a carbon sink, its natural capacity to capture and store the carbon dioxide that warms the planet.” If the ocean isn’t helping to sequester carbon from the atmosphere, climate change will worsen at a faster rate.

Some of the main culprits of ocean darkening are “sediment runoff from agriculture, deforestation and development,” especially in coastal regions, said the World Economic Forum. Improved land management can play a large role in reducing the level of darkening. This includes reducing fertilizer use as well as encouraging conservation efforts. In the open ocean, the problem is much more difficult to tackle as “even if global emissions dropped to net zero tomorrow, the ocean would take decades, if not centuries, to respond,” said Smyth. The good news is that the ocean “still has a remarkable capacity to heal itself. Give marine ecosystems a little room to recover and they often respond with surprising speed.”

Having kids is a decision with a lot of gravity, literally. Scientists have found that sperm in space can’t find their direction during their pursuit to fertilize an egg. Such digressions could pose a problem in the future as the possibilities of human colonies in space become more likely.

Spacing out

A lack of gravity “impaired directional navigation and fertilization capacity” of human sperm cells, said a study published in the journal Communications Biology. “This is the first time we have been able to show that gravity is an important factor in sperm’s ability to navigate through a channel like the reproductive tract,” Nicole McPherson, a senior lecturer at Adelaide University’s Robinson Research Institute and the senior author of the study, said in a release.

Researchers tested human, pig and mouse sperm by putting them into a “microgravity simulation chamber designed to mimic the female reproductive tract and tested the swimmers’ ability to navigate,” said Scientific American. The results showed a “significant reduction in the number of sperm that were able to successfully find their way through the chamber maze in microgravity conditions compared to normal gravity,” said McPherson. The results repeated “across all models, despite no changes to the way sperm physically move.” The sperm’s directional loss “was not due to a change in motility but other elements.” In the case of human sperm, “less than 20% of them reached the finish line in near weightlessness,” compared to 50% in Earth’s conditions,” said Smithsonian Magazine.

There may be a way to lead sperm in the right direction: the hormone progesterone. “Progesterone works as a chemical signal, a kind of biological homing beacon that the egg releases around the time of ovulation,” McPherson said to Scientific American. “Sperm have receptors on their surface that detect this signal and use it to orient themselves and swim toward the source.” However, the progesterone only helped at concentrations “considerably higher” than those found in nature, so it is not yet a “simple fix for fertility in space.”

A new home

Having babies in space may be a necessity in the future as humans aim to establish settlements on the moon and Mars. The human body “evolved over ​millions of years to function optimally in Earth’s environment, including its gravity,” said Reuters. “Trekking beyond Earth’s confines causes many physiological changes that affect human health.” Until now, research had not been done about “whether the cells can successfully navigate the female reproductive tract and fertilize eggs,” said Smithsonian Magazine.

Despite the potential to get lost in space, “many healthy embryos were still able to form even when fertilized under these conditions,” McPherson said. “This gives us hope that reproducing in space may one day be possible.” The next research step is to investigate “how varying gravitational environments, such as those on the moon, Mars and proposed artificial gravity systems, impact sperm navigation and early embryo development,” said the release. As of now, “NASA and other governmental space agencies maintain that no one has ever had sex in space,” said Scientific American. “But future human spacefarers may want to have families and reproduce while in a microgravity environment.”

A new dating service has sprung up in Japan, aiming to get around the country’s ban on married couples having different surnames.

In a series of match-making events held this spring, every participant shared the same family name. The concept, the organisers said, is simply that “two people who already have the same last name won’t have to agonise over which one to use after marriage”.

Are you a Sato, Suzuki, Tanaka or Ito?

Japan’s current civil code, which dates back to the 19th century, specifies that a husband and wife must use the same family name. While there is no stipulation which name the couple adopts, in the country’s male-dominated society it is the man’s in 95% of cases. While critics claim this affects women’s employment prospects and contributes to Japan’s low birth rate, conservatives maintain that any change would undermine the traditional family unit and cause confusion among children.

Either way, it leaves young couples with an added pressure when trying to find a life partner. Four in-person gatherings in Tokyo, each focusing on one of Japan’s most popular surnames – Suzuki, Tanaka, Sato or Ito – “offer a rare opportunity for people who share a surname to meet someone they could legally marry without either person having to change names”, said news site The Mainichi.

It is not hard to see the appeal. A recent survey conducted by Asuniwa, a Tokyo-based association that advocates for a selective separate surname system and co-organises the events, and dating app Pairs, polled 2,500 people in their 20s and 30s. They found 36% of women and 46% of men “felt resistance” about changing their surname, while a smaller proportion had misgivings about their partner changing their name. Around 7% said they would break up if neither partner wanted to change their surname, while just under 6% said they would “wait until the (separate surname) system is legalised” to tie the knot.

“I hadn’t given much thought to the idea of marrying another Suzuki, but I can see now why it’s a safe option,” Taisho (not his real name) Suzuki, a 33-year-old company employee, told The Guardian. “I don’t want to give up my surname when I marry, and I know a lot of women feel the same about their names.”

For others it is more of a novelty. “To be honest, I’m not too fussed about keeping my maiden name, but I thought it would be fun to meet another Suzuki,” said Hana (not her real name) Suzuki, a 34-year-old nurse.

‘Bump in the app before you bump in bed’

For would-be couples in Iceland, the problem is being related to your partner. With a population of just 330,000, the risk of pairing up with someone genetically similar to you is high.

“Now, as social media and apps expand the dating pool”, many people are turning to a website “to ensure they aren’t swimming in the same gene pool,” said The Wall Street Journal.

Tracing a person’s lineage in Iceland is “especially challenging because last names are no indicator of historic family lineage”. Usually, a person’s last name is the father’s first name, followed by “son” or “dottir”.

“Íslendingabók”, or the Book of Icelanders, is an online database that contains the full genealogy of 720,000 Icelanders, living and deceased. While the historical work dating from the 12th century was not originally designed for dating, it led to a spin-off app that allows users to bump their phones together to instantly trace whether their family trees are intertwined, sparking the tagline “bump in the app before you bump in bed”.

China’s parent trap

In China, meanwhile, some parents are taking matters into their own hands to find partners for their children.

There is a long tradition of in-person outdoor “marriage markets”, where parents display handwritten CVs of their unmarried children in the hope of finding suitable partners.

Many are now “increasingly turning to ‘find a daughter-in-law’ or ‘find a son-in-law’ platforms online, turning partner-seeking into direct negotiations between parents”, said South China Morning Post.

“Instead of trying to persuade single young adults who resist matchmaking”, a few “sharp-eyed businesses” are now “directly targeting a different demographic: anxious parents with strong purchasing power”.

Quarterly membership costs 399 yuan (£43), for an online profile with an individual’s age, education, occupation and income, as well as home ownership status and expected timeline for marriage, prioritised above personality traits, hobbies, and interests.

A new injectable filler is making a splash for being minimally invasive and for the source that fills its vials: donated human fat from cadavers. The eerie origins of the shots have led to a mixed response. Some praise the innovations; others worry about future complications.

The rise of ‘corpse cosmetics’

Tiger Aesthetics’ new product, AlloClae, has become popular with “patients eager to look their best in the boardroom” without “undergoing general anesthesia or taking days off for recovery,” said Business Insider. Rather than using an implant or a patient’s body fat to add volume to hips or augment breasts, AlloClae relies on “donor fat from a cadaver as a first-of-its-kind body filler.”

While the procedure could cost as much as $100,000, people are “paying for the convenience,” cosmetic surgeon Sachin Shridharani said to Business Insider. It is about “not having the downtime, not needing more aggressive procedures, not having an anesthetic.” On social media, influencers sometimes refer to buttocks injections of AlloClae as ‘zombie BBLs,’ ‘zombie filler’ and ‘corpse cosmetics.’

The rise in GLP-1 use has contributed to the trend, along with “filler fatigue,” as traditional fillers can “cause problems such as puffiness and lymphatic issues,” said The Guardian’s Ask Ugly column. People who are on Ozempic or are dieting heavily are “really thin and don’t have enough fat to transfer,” plastic surgeon Melissa Doft said. They want their “legs and their belly to be skinny but want their breasts to be fuller.”

Even though AlloClae comes from cadavers, the product is “less macabre than you may think,” said Business Insider. Tiger Aesthetics purchases abdominal fat cells from organ donations at tissue banks. Then the company “screens it for diseases, purifies it and processes it.” The practice of using cadaver material is not unprecedented. There is already a donor fat product called Renuva, used for facial injections, while AlloClae uses higher volumes for the body. Cadaveric bones have also been recycled in dental grafts. Cadaver tissue, known as “allografts,” is “commonly used in surgically treating ACL tears,” said The Guardian.

Concern brews among surgeons

While a select few plastic surgeons have begun offering AlloClae injections, others have concerns, “especially when it comes to using AlloClae in the breast,” said The Cut. Breast is not “just fat, it’s glandular, hormonally active and requires lifelong imaging for cancer screening,” said plastic surgeon Adam Kolker. Anything injected can “create new densities, nodulifications or cysts,” which can “complicate mammography and ultrasound.” Without imaging and safety studies, physicians can’t responsibly predict how AlloClae will “behave during cancer surveillance.” A new “biologic material with unknown imaging behavior” becomes a “big diagnostic question mark.”

AlloClae is a “good tool,” said surgeon Glenn Lyle to The Guardian, but there is wariness about how eagerly people are adopting it. The industry is “moving too fast with this” without “follow-up studies.” The product is “being put in willy-nilly.” AlloClae is FDA compliant, which is “not quite the same as it being FDA approved,” the outlet said. Because human fat tissue is considered an existing product, it is “not subjected to the same standards as cosmetic interventions such as botox, dermal fillers or breast implants.”

Others are worried that fears about the origins of AlloClae could have a negative impact on organ donation. If people start “restricting their participation” due to fears of the product being used for cosmetic purposes, the “harm may outweigh the good,” Ryan Pferdehirt, the vice president of ethics services at the Center for Practical Bioethics, said to The Guardian. We need “skin grafts, bone marrow transplants and organ donation.” That is “far more important, I think, than the cosmetic aspects.”

Rather than blood in the water, sharks are finding drugs in the water. The aquatic predators have tested positive for both legal and illegal drugs in parts of the Bahamas. These substances have the potential to cause behavioral changes in the sharks and indicate that humans have a stronger hand in ecosystem changes than expected, even in isolated places.

Drugged and dangerous

Scientists found cocaine, caffeine and painkillers in sharks around Eleuthera Island in the Bahamas, according to a study published in the journal Environmental Pollution. The blood of 85 sharks in the region was tested for several drugs. Twenty-eight of those sharks from “three species had caffeine, anti-inflammatory painkillers or other drugs in their blood,” and some even tested positive for multiple, said Science News. “Caffeine was the most common, followed by acetaminophen and diclofenac,” the active ingredients in Tylenol and Voltaren, respectively.

This is not the first time cocaine has been found in sharks. A study from 2024 found the drug in Brazilian sharpnose sharks in waters near Rio de Janeiro. But this is the “first report of caffeine and acetaminophen detected in any shark species worldwide and the first report of diclofenac and cocaine in sharks from the Bahamas,” said the study. “We are talking about a very remote island,” said Natascha Wosnick, the 2024 lead study author and a biologist at the Federal University of Paraná, to Science News.

While the Brazil study found sharks’ exposure to cocaine, the scientists only “tested the liver and muscle tissue of sharks,” said Smithsonian Magazine. In the 2026 study, the researchers tested blood, which “reflects more recent exposure to drugs.” The sharks were captured in popular areas for diving and cruising. The exposure is “mostly because people are going there, peeing in the water and dumping their sewage,” said Wosnick.

Fins of the future

While cocaine sharks are concerning, the “widespread presence of caffeine and pharmaceuticals in the blood of many analyzed sharks is equally alarming,” said Wosnick to CBS News. “These are legal substances, routinely consumed and often overlooked, yet their environmental footprint is clearly detectable.”

The Bahamas sharks’ blood also had “changes in some biological markers, which can point to how tissues are functioning,” said Smithsonian Magazine. These markers “might be leading to higher stress and higher energy use as the aquatic predators’ bodies work to detoxify their systems,” said Science Alert.

The study findings are a “reminder that coastal infrastructure, tourism and marine food webs are tightly connected,” said Tracy Fanara, an oceanographer who helped produce the documentary “Cocaine Sharks,” to Science News. Researchers are still unsure about how detrimental the blood changes could be to the sharks’ health.

“Our primary concern is not an increase in aggression toward humans but rather the potential implications for the health and stability of shark populations," said Wosnick. “Chronic exposure to these anthropogenic compounds, many of which have no natural analogue in marine systems, may lead to negative effects that are still poorly understood.” These effects could be the subject of research in the future.

One of Germany’s most famous actors has claimed her TV presenter ex-husband spread deepfake pornographic images of her online – and triggered demonstrations demanding the government tighten up the laws on digital violence against women.

The case has gripped Germany, said the BBC and “exposed anger about what campaigners say are glaring gaps in criminal law”.

Secret online accounts

In bombshell allegations published under the headline: “You virtually raped me”, Collien Fernandes alleged in Der Spiegel last week that her former husband, Christian Ulmen, had secretly opened online accounts in her name and used them to share sexually explicit deepfake pornographic images of her with 30 other men. She also claimed he used computer-generated audio to impersonate her voice for phone-sex encounters with some of the men. Ulmen denies the allegations and has not been charged.

Fernandes had known about the fake images for many years, and in 2024, she’d talked about them, and the effect they’d had on her, in a documentary about deepfake abuse. That Christmas, after she’d reported the abuse to the police, she said Ulmen confessed to her that he was her abuser.

Ulmen has never “produced and/or distributed deepfake videos of Ms Fernandes or any other individuals. Any such claims are false,” his lawyers told the BBC. They also said Ulmen will be taking legal action against Der Spiegel for publishing “fake facts” and “inadmissible coverage based on suspicions”.

Call for tighter restrictions

Fernandes’ claims have shocked Germany, in a similar way that Gisèle Pelicot’s trial rocked France, said The New York Times. Crowds at rallies and demonstrations in several cities called for tighter legal restrictions on the creation and distribution of deepfake pornography. They said politicians had not done enough to prevent such digital abuse.

The scandal “is also putting political pressure on Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who has long been accused of being out of touch when it comes to younger, female voters”, said the BBC.

Justice minister Stefanie Hubig has now announced plans to incorporate into German law an EU directive on banning non-consensual deepfake pornography, and to make both the production and distribution of it a specific criminal offence, punishable by up to two years in prison.

India has long recognised a “third gender” and was one of the first countries to allow people legally to self-identify as transgender. But its parliament has just passed controversial amendments to such laws, which remove the right to self-identification and narrow the definition of ‘transgender’.

The Bharatiya Janata Party-led government got the bill through both houses last week, despite a boycott by opposition parties and widespread protests by the LGBTQ+ community.

Virendra Kumar, minister for social justice and empowerment, says the amendments still protect people who “face severe social exclusion due to their biological condition”. But Congress party leader Rahul Gandhi called it a “brazen attack” on transgender rights.

‘Third gender’

People of a “third gender” have been recognised in India for thousands of years. They feature heavily in Hindu holy texts – the half-male, half-female deity Ardhanarishvara, for example – and were often revered under Muslim rulers of the Mughal Empire.

The most common third-gender group in South Asia are the hijras: often born male, they dress in traditionally female clothing, and many choose to undergo castration; others are born intersex. Hijras were traditionally “treated with both fear and respect”, said Harvard Divinity School but that “did not survive” colonial rule. The British, “shocked by third-gender people”, classified them as criminals in 1871. Criminalisation was repealed shortly after independence, but years of stigmatisation “took a toll”.

Hijras are expected to perform ritual roles at Hindu births and weddings but are otherwise “often treated with contempt” and “almost always excluded from employment and education”. They are “often stricken by poverty” and “victims of violence and abuse”.

But in 2014, India’s Supreme Court “officially recognised third-gender people as being citizens deserving of equal rights”. And that paved the way for the 2019 Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, which included the hijras and the kinnars, another third-gender group, along with transwomen and transmen in a more inclusive definition of transgender people. The act also affirmed the right to self-identify as transgender or non-binary.

‘A major reversal’

The new amendments to the 2019 law remove those rights to self-identify, requiring instead a medical certification of gender reassignment. It also limits the definition of transgender to intersex people and those from socio-cultural groups such as the hijras.

The government argues that the changes protect those facing “extreme and oppressive” discrimination, and strengthen laws against exploitation and trafficking. They say the definition of transgender is “too vague” and makes it difficult to identify the most marginalised; a narrower definition would help welfare benefits “reach those who need them”.

But critics say the new bill will exclude many, and that mandatory medical certification for those undergoing gender transition “undermines dignity and autonomy”. The amendments “appear to contradict the 2014 ruling”, which held that “requiring medical procedures for recognition was both unethical and unlawful”, said Delhi-based journalist Namita Singh in The Independent.

“It has shattered our identity,” transgender rights activist Laxmi Narayan Tripathi told reporters. India’s last census in 2011 recorded nearly half a million people in the “other” gender category. The true number is likely far higher; some estimates reach six million.

If India’s president signs the bill into law, it will be “a major reversal” of “hard-won rights”, said Jayshree Bajoria, Asia director of Human Rights Watch. It also puts people at risk by introducing additional offences of “coercing or alluring” people to be transgender. That’s “reminiscent of the colonial-era laws” that criminalised hijras.

This law, said N Kavitha Rameshwar in The Times of India, “seeks to be that one rogue wave that will wash away” a decade of progress in transgender rights, “as if it were all but a castle of sand”.

The concrete cap of a tomb encasing radioactive fallout now has cracks, and what’s beneath can rise from the dead. The U.S. military, in 1958, conducted a nuclear test on Runit Island in the Marshall Islands with an 18-kiloton bomb called Cactus. The resulting blast left behind an almost 33-foot deep crater, which later became a dumping ground for the debris from a myriad of nuclear tests from the 1940s to 50s. In 1977, the Runit Dome was created to contain that radioactive waste. But the dome’s deterioration could contaminate the ocean and displace hundreds of people.

Nuclear consequences

The Runit Dome contains more than 120,000 tons of contaminated material from nuclear testing, including lethal quantities of plutonium. The isotope plutonium-239 is a “radioactive element used in nuclear weapons that remains dangerous for more than 24,000 years,” said the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC).

Merely coming into contact with the radioactive element can kill you. Concrete, unfortunately, does not endure that long. “There are already cracks in it in less than 50 years,” Arjun Makhijani, a nuclear engineer and president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, said to the ABC.

Since the concrete tomb was built, “groundwater has penetrated the otherwise-unlined crater, beneath which there lies a bed of porous coral sediment,” said Science Alert. The leaked water in the dome is “soaking the radioactive waste with the daily rise and fall of the tide,” said ZME Science. The tomb’s outer shell also contains cracks, “allowing contaminated waste to wash into the surrounding lagoon,” said the ABC. Runit Dome is approximately 20 miles from a human population that regularly uses the lagoon. Continued radioactive waste would lead to its displacement.

While these are the current problems, there are also “concerns that layers of the dome intended to sit above sea level are not going to stay above water much longer,” said Science Alert. “Sea levels are rising and there’s indications that storms are intensifying,” Ivana Nikolic Hughes, a senior lecturer in chemistry at Columbia University and president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, said to the ABC. “We worry the integrity of the dome could be in jeopardy.” Higher water levels could bring radioactive contaminants further into the Pacific Ocean.

Radioactive risks

Despite experts’ concerns about the Runit Dome, the U.S. Department of Energy has claimed that the “dome was not in imminent danger of collapse,” the “cracks were consistent with aging concrete” and the “lagoon already contained large amounts of radioactive material from past tests,” said the ABC. The U.S. conducted 67 nuclear tests across the Marshall Islands between 1946 and 1958, some of which were bigger than Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Over 300 Marshallese people were removed from the area in 1946 before the U.S. began nuclear testing.

The ocean has been “steadily encroaching on the dome over the years,” and “residents fear nuclear contamination if the site were to collapse,” said The Cool Down. The problem is expected to worsen over time without climate change mitigation. “Legacies of nuclear testing and military land requisitions by a foreign power have displaced hundreds of Marshallese for generations,” Paula Gaviria Betancur, the UN Special Rapporteur, said in 2024, and the “adverse effects of climate change threaten to displace thousands more.”

“When you come for the king, you best not miss,” said New Scientist – “particularly if the king in question” is Tyrannosaurus rex, a nine-tonne dinosaur with “the biggest teeth of any known land predator in history”.

Researchers have found that far from being a “one-species monopoly” under T. rex, the dinosaur “landscape” may have “hosted a tiered guild of hunters”, said Scientific American, including one of the most hotly contested dinosaur species: the Nanotyrannus.

‘Tyrant lizard king’

Tyrannosaurus rex has quite a fan base. It was the “tyrant lizard king” and it has “developed tremendous loyalty,” said Greg Paul, a dinosaur researcher. “There’s even a rock band named for the animal.”

For decades, palaeontologists have argued whether the single skull used to define the Nanotyrannus represented a true species in its own right or whether it was merely a young T. rex.

Now, a study in the journal Science argues that this thorny question has finally been resolved: Nanotyrannus was nearly fully grown and not a juvenile T. rex.

The researchers, who set out to “cut T. rex down to size”, investigated the microscopic details of a bone and compared it with those of modern birds, crocodilians and other dinosaurs. They concluded that Nanotyrannus was a mature and distinct predator.

Complete rethink 

But Team Tyrannosaurus “aren’t yet ready to rewrite the family tree of T. rex and its kin”, said Scientific American. They insist that “skeletal maturity alone doesn’t define a species”. There is a need for “more small T. rex fossils” to be studied and, without those, “distinguishing growth from evolution remains difficult”. And “if every small skeleton is Nanotyrannus, where are the juvenile T. rexes?” said Stephen Brusatte, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Edinburgh.

Now that the researchers behind the new study have “corrected the record on Nanotyrannus”, said co-author James G. Napoli, a palaeontologist at Stony Brook University in New York, they think it’s “possible that other smaller tyrannosaur fossils are misidentified”, so there may be “many more species awaiting recognition”.

It is not often that “opinions on a high-profile dinosaur change so rapidly and so dramatically”, said New Scientist. This latest shift has “profound implications” because it means we “may need to completely rethink the way that dinosaur ecosystems were organised” and “how and why the dinosaur-dominated world came crashing down”.

And, “most exciting of all”, the reassessment of T. rex itself is “only just getting started”. This research “raises new questions”, such as how did the various tyrannosaurs “carve up the ancient landscape between themselves?”

As ICE raids continue in cities across the United States, many people taken into custody are leaving behind forgotten victims: their pets. These animals are often abandoned when their owners are caught up in raids; others may get left behind when undocumented immigrants choose to self-deport. Though rescuers are working to save these animals, many say it is an uphill battle.

How many pets have been abandoned?

The exact number of animals left behind following ICE raids is likely impossible to quantify. These figures are “not tracked by the patchwork of government agencies responsible for animals or by the local and national nonprofits that fill gaps in care,” said The New York Times. Some cities, though, have been able to report data on the abandoned animals.

In Minnesota, the government agency St. Paul Animal Services “recorded a 38% increase in stray, seized and relinquished cats and dogs in January 2026 compared with January 2025,” said the Times, the increase coinciding with ICE’s Operation Metro Surge in the Twin Cities area. Other cities face similar problems: In Tampa Bay, the nonprofit Mercy Full Project took in “record numbers of abandoned pets linked to families leaving the U.S. from the recent immigration crackdown,” said Fox 13.

In California’s Los Angeles County, total dog surrenders to animal shelters “more than tripled in the fourth week of June” last year, said the Los Angeles Times. The number of animals at one shelter doubled in June 2025 compared to June 2024, while at another, the “count jumped by roughly 50% over the same period.” It isn’t only deported pet owners who are affected. When Renee Good was shot and killed by ICE in Minneapolis, video footage “revealed that she had a dog in her vehicle during the incident,” said People.

How can these animals be helped?

Pet parents taken by ICE are “likely not given the opportunity to make arrangements for their cats and dogs,” said pet lifestyle company Kinship. Encounters like these can be “traumatic for both the animals and the people who love them, and they underscore how critical preparedness and community awareness are,” Rachel Mairose, the executive director of rescue organization The Bond Between, told Kinship.

Providing assistance for these animals “often begins with helping neighbors, friends or family members understand the proper steps, like first contacting animal control,“ said Kinship. The “most important step is having a pet care preparedness plan” for those who are concerned about encounters with ICE, Mairose said to Kinship. The main part of this plan includes identifying someone who could watch over the animal in the event of your absence and also “having veterinary and vaccination records easily accessible or shared in advance.”

For the pets who are abandoned, certain groups are taking steps to help. Beyond shelters taking in more animals, people nationwide are also volunteering to foster “pets that had been left behind by former neighbors,” said the Times. In New Orleans, a dog named Heinz was “spotted near homes where immigration enforcement had occurred.” A local rescue organization reached out to find a foster for Heinz; this foster parent “posted a short biography of Heinz on the rescue’s website. Within a week, he had a new home.”

Male-pattern hair loss affects 80% of men at some point in their lifetime (and female-pattern hair loss affects half of all women over the age of 70). But “until recently, we knew remarkably little about how to slow, halt and reverse its seemingly inevitable onset”, said Tom Howarth on BBC Science Focus.

For all the recent messaging about “body positivity”, the search for a balding “fix” has become “increasingly desperate – and financially lucrative”, said Esquire. The hair-loss industry is well on track to be worth £9 billion by 2030.

Balding happens when hair follicles on parts of the scalp produce gradually thinner and lighter hairs, until eventually they shrink and stop producing hairs at all. Until now, conventional treatments have focused on drugs that might help stimulate hair follicles or stop them shrinking. But they don’t work for everyone, can have unpleasant side effects and aren’t always available on the NHS. Other “solutions”, from micropigmentation to hair transplants and scalp-reduction surgery, have mixed results and can be very expensive. But now scientists think they have found new ways to make things look much better up there.

Hair loss cures in the pipeline

“Declarations of hair loss cures” have always been “a dime a dozen,” said Popular Mechanics, but recently there have been signs of genuine progress with new techniques – either to replace shrinking hair follicles with healthy ones or to use stem cell therapy to regenerate hair growth.

An “early frontrunner” is hair cloning, said Howarth on BBC Science Focus. Also known as hair multiplication, it’s a form of “hair banking”: before baldness hits, healthy hair follicles are extracted from your scalp and cryogenically frozen; once hair-thinning starts, these follicles are taken to a lab and the skin cells around them are isolated and multiplied; these “cloned” cells are then injected into balding patches on your head to produce lovely new hairs. A few private clinics already offer hair cloning in the UK; it’s pricey but costs may come down as the market increases.

For those whose days of hair-banking possibility are long behind them, autologous fat grafting holds some promise. Stem cells, harvested from fat cells taken from the belly, are injected into the scalp to stimulate hair growth. A study review of this technique, published in the Journal of Cosmetic Dermatology, found it to be “effective” in supporting hair regrowth and increasing hair density and diameter.

Meanwhile, in Japan, researchers are having success with their quest to grow hair follicles from scratch in a lab. Their “bioengineered hair follicle germ” has achieved follicle growth in mice, according to a study published in Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications. It’s a milestone in hair-treatment technologies, said Popular Mechanics.

Which is the most promising?

The “big one” is a drug called PP405, developed by US pharmaceutical company Pelage, said Lane Brown in New York Magazine. “The internet’s gathering places for the bald and balding” went wild when news broke that, in Pelage’s early clinical trials, it seemed not only to slow hair loss but to reactivate “parts of the scalp that have already surrendered”.

“We were blown away,” said Qing Yu Christina Weng, Pelage’s chief medical officer, told the magazine. After four weeks of applying the drug as a topical gel, not only were the treatment group “growing new hair where there wasn’t any before, it wasn’t peach fuzz or baby hair – it was proper, thick, terminal hair”. By week eight, 31% of those treated with PP405 had a 20% increase in hair density, compared to 0% in the placebo group, according to a Pelage press release.

The drug, which is designed to stimulate the activity of a metabolic enzyme called LDH in hair-follicle stem cells, still has further, bigger trials and safety tests to get through before it can be approved by regulators. But, if it is, its potential is obvious. “After decades of snake oil and broken promises,” it feels as though “the end of baldness” is within sight, said Brown. Call it “the faint stubble of hope”.

Activists have returned to court in South Africa to try to enforce a court order banning an anti-migrant group from blocking foreign nationals from accessing public health facilities and schools.

The campaigners say that migrants and their children are still being barred from two Johannesburg clinics by Operation Dudula, a controversial group, despite a judge ordering authorities to “stop the harassment” in December, said News 24.

‘Aggressive tactics’

In the Zulu language, “dudula” means to remove something by force. The “populist movement” was founded in 2021 as a vigilante force against crime and drug trafficking in the township of Soweto, just outside Johannesburg, said Deutsche Welle.

Operation Dudula, now registered as a political party, also campaigns against migrants in South Africa, which is home to about 2.4 million migrants, just under 4% of the population. They come mainly from neighbouring countries such as Mozambique, Lesotho and Zimbabwe.

The group’s supporters are known for “aggressive tactics”, including “forcing their way into residential buildings, searching for migrants, checking their ID cards, and blocking access to public services”.

Although it’s often “accused of using force to make its point”, an Operation Dudula candidate will fight a by-election in Johannesburg next month. “We are trying to put our people first,” Alton Stephens, a 51-year-old security company director, who will stand as a ward councillor, told The Telegraph.

‘Contemporary scapegoats’

Apartheid “created two societies in South Africa”, Fredson Guilengue, a project manager at the left-wing Rosa Luxemburg Foundation in Johannesburg, told DW: a “white society with an abundance of security, good health, education and prosperity” and a “society of Black people without rights” in which they “had to compete for the few resources available”.

Now, foreigners have “become the contemporary scapegoats” for South Africa’s continuing inequalities, three decades after apartheid ended.

Operation Dudula’s supporters see its activists as “concerned citizens taking a stand to defend the rights” of South Africans and their “straining public services”, in a country that’s “overrun by migrants”, said The Telegraph. But to their critics they’re “mob-rule vigilantes trading in dangerous xenophobia”.

In 2022, a report by the Institute for Security Studies in Pretoria found that many of Operation Dudula’s claims are based on exaggerations about the number and effect of foreign nationals in South Africa, including “false claims that immigrants commit most crimes or overload public services”.

But the “fringe movement poses no real threat” to the country’s democracy, Lizette Lancaster, one of the report’s authors, told DW, because “most South Africans, over 90%, do not support violence against migrants in their communities”.

Many people might think of powdered or injectable drugs as being widespread items in jails and prisons. But now something far simpler has reportedly become ubiquitous. Correctional facilities across the United States have seen an uptick in drug-laced paper being smuggled into their complexes, causing concerns that these maneuvers are leading to deadly overdoses among inmates.

Why has drug-laced paper become a major problem?

At least 16 states have prosecuted individuals for introducing drug-laced paper into correctional facilities, according to The New York Times, with the issue stretching from “New York to Texas to Hawaii.” Paper is often seen as an easy way to bring drugs into these facilities because paper is a “lifeline in jail, a tether to parents, partners and children in the outside world.”

One of the most problematic institutions for this laced paper is Chicago’s Cook County jail. In 2023 alone, at least six inmates “died of overdoses, putting the jail at the vanguard of a new kind of drug war,” said the Times. Drug manufacturers are “churning out a dizzying array of synthetic drugs — not only fentanyl but also hazardous new tranquilizers, stimulants and complex cannabinoids.” These drugs are then “sprayed onto the pages of the most innocuous-seeming items: books, letters, documents, even photographs,” and they are then smoked.

But while Cook County is the epicenter of the problem, cases have been springing up across the country. A librarian in 2025 was “accused of smuggling sheets of paper infused with synthetic marijuana” as part of a “$65,000 drug ring” into a jail in Dartmouth, Massachusetts, said CBS News. This year, an attorney in Houston claimed he was “tricked into smuggling drug-laced paper into the Harris County jail,” said KTRK-TV Houston. Inmates are “taking advantage of lawyers that are trying to build trust with their clients,” Brent Mayr, the president of the Harris County Criminal Lawyers Association, told KTRK-TV.

How can this problem be solved?

The drugs themselves make this a difficult task since “as quickly as the authorities ban one substance, narco-chemists drum up novel, more potent variations that have not been outlawed,” said the Times. Simply ridding inmates of their access to paper would “rob them of what they missed most in lockup: human connection.” To “dismissively say we’re going to ban everything from coming in, it was just something that I didn’t want to do,” Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart told the Times.

But there have been efforts to crack down on drug-laced paper. Cook County jail “stepped up random searches and taught inspectors to master the natural touch and smell of paper,” said the Times. In Ohio, officials with the state’s correctional department have “confiscated over 16,000 pieces of synthetic drug-laced paper,” said WOIO-TV Cleveland. Officials in Kansas cited the laced contraband being smuggled into prisons as the “reason for changing print newspaper subscription policies,” said the Kansas Reflector.

This sounds promising, but experts say there is a long way to go to eradicate these drugs. In 2024, Cook County jail officers found a single piece of paper with 10 different chemicals sprayed on it, a “mix of opioids, depressants, cannabinoids and stimulants,” said the Times, “all jumbled together on the same page, like a Rosetta Stone of synthetic drugs.”

A leading publisher has cancelled the US publication of a horror novel after claims that generative AI was used in its writing.

In what “appears to be the first commercial novel from a major publishing house to be pulled over evidence of AI use”, Hachette has blocked the US publication of “Shy Girl” and its UK edition has been discontinued, said The New York Times.

The “stunning fact” that the book got this far shows how AI is “seeping into even traditionally published fiction” and “how unprepared many in the book world are” for the “dawn of an uncertain new era”.

‘Gaps in logic’

“Shy Girl” was originally self-published in February 2025, before being published in the UK in November. It was all set for a US release until The New York Times published claims of AI use.

Max Spero, founder of AI detection programme Pangram, ran a test that suggested 78% of the text was AI generated. The paper’s own analysis using several detection tools found “recurring patterns characteristic of AI generated text, like gaps in logic, excessive use of melodramatic adjectives and an over-reliance on the rule of three”.

Author Mia Ballard denies that she used AI and insists that an editor was responsible for the passages under scrutiny. “My name is ruined for something I didn’t even personally do,” she told The New York Times, while Hachette said it “remains committed to protecting original creative expression and storytelling”.

‘The plagiarism machine’

Everyone in publishing “knew a scandal like this would hit sooner or later” and “every editor I know has been crossing their fingers” that it wouldn’t be them, said author Lincoln Michel on his Counter Craft Substack. “More than a few” published books have been “partially or entirely written” by AI, but this fact has been “disclosed” and they used the technology in “thoughtful, artistic ways”.

The “layers of vetting and editing” used by traditional publishers are supposed to guarantee “a certain level of quality control” and “trust”, so they “may need to be a lot more careful now”. The episode may also make life harder for “emerging authors” because the “gatekeepers” of the industry will “have no choice but to figure out a way to drastically filter the flood” of AI, which might mean “leaning even more on connections” with established writers.

This “will not be the last time we see crap like this happen”, said Kayleigh Donaldson on political blog Pajiba. “More and more ‘authors’ will be exposed as users of the plagiarism machine”, but once a “big name writer” admits it there will be “no pushback” because they “make too much money”. Instead, there will be “smarmy think-pieces claiming that people are just jealous of AI and actually it’s sooo much better at writing than you are”.

Life on Earth may have origins from far, far away. Scientists have found a full set of life-building molecules in a nearly pristine asteroid sample, and the discovery suggests that the necessary ingredients to kick-start the evolution of life on Earth may have come from a celestial-body delivery. It also raises questions as to whether more complex molecules are present all over the solar system.

Back to basics

Asteroid Ryugu has all five of the primary nucleobases, according to a study published in the journal Nature Astronomy. The nucleobases — adenine, thymine, guanine, cytosine and uracil — are “compounds that make up the nucleic acids DNA and RNA when combined with sugars and phosphoric acid,” said New Scientist. They are the building blocks of the genetic code, and life as we know it could not exist without them. The bases are split into two categories: purines (adenine and guanine) and pyrimidines (thymine, cytosine and uracil).

Samples of asteroid Ryugu were collected by the Japanese Aerospace Agency’s (JAXA) Hayabusa2 mission. The samples were brought to Earth in December 2020. Asteroids like Ryugu “formed 4.6 billion years ago when the planets were being born around the infant sun,” said Space.com (a sister site of The Week). Since then, they have “remained relatively unspoiled.” Finding these nucleobases on the asteroid “hints that they can be formed without the presence of life and may offer clues into how these compounds could be transported across the solar system.”

Ryugu is not the only asteroid with nucleobases. They were also found in samples from asteroid Bennu, which were brought to Earth in 2023, as well as in the Murchison meteorite collected from Australia in 1969 and the Orgueil meteorite collected from France in 1864.

However, the “precise mixture of molecules” varied “depending on the asteroid’s chemical environment and history,” Kliti Grice, a professor of organic and isotope geochemistry at Curtin University, said at The Conversation. Ryugu contained roughly equal amounts of purines and pyrimidines, while Murchison was richer in purine nucleobases. Orgeuil and Bennu were richer in pyrimidine nucleobases. Ammonia may be the reason for the different balances, as “samples from Ryugu, Bennu and the Orgueil meteorite that contained more ammonia all tended to have a lower ratio of purines to pyrimidines,” said Gizmodo.

Obscure origins

Discovering these components in these otherworldly sources gives more insight as to how life developed on Earth. The nucleobases in all four of the samples “suggest key components of genetic material may have formed in space and later delivered to the early Earth,” said Grice. The “story of life on our planet may be deeply connected to the chemistry of such ancient asteroids.”

Much is still unknown about these compounds’ origins. “​Ammonia may have played an important role in shaping the composition of nucleobases in these materials,” Toshiki Koga, a postdoctoral researcher at the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology and study co-author, said to Gizmodo. “Because no known formation mechanism predicts such a correlation, it may indicate that previously unrecognized chemical pathways contributed to the formation of nucleobases in the early solar system.”

The detection of the bases in Ryugu also “strongly supports their ubiquity in the solar system,” Yasuhiro Oba, an astrophysical chemist at Hokkaido University in Japan and study co-author, said to New Scientist. Other asteroids may contain actual strands of DNA and RNA and not just the components. “It is very likely that more complex organic molecules like nucleic acids are formed on asteroids.”

Warming temperatures from climate change will likely lead to high levels of physical inactivity in the future, which could have significant public health implications. Heat leads to dehydration, exhaustion and overall inhospitable conditions. Regions with less air conditioning and cooling facilities will see the highest reduction in activity, but without intervention, more places will be affected.

Running hot

Rising temperatures are “projected to increase the prevalence of physical inactivity, translating into additional premature deaths and productivity losses,” said a study published in The Lancet Global Health. The study analyzed data from 156 countries between 2000 and 2022 to create a model for future physical activity globally. The results showed that by 2050 “each additional month with an average temperature above 27.8°C (82°F) would increase physical inactivity by 1.5 percentage points globally and by 1.85 percentage points in low- and middle-income countries,” said a release about the study.

With this reduction in physical activity, there would be a “predicted 0.47-0.70 million additional premature deaths annually and $2.40-3.68 billion in productivity losses,” said the release. The effects were mostly concentrated in low- and middle-income countries, and “some hot spot countries closer to the equator show estimated increases in physical inactivity of more than 4 percentage points by 2050,” said The Washington Post. On the other hand, high-income countries had no discernible difference in physical activity levels because they tend to have better infrastructure to combat heat.

The inactivity levels would increase gradually. The “real-world picture is usually not that people suddenly stop moving altogether,” the study’s lead author Christian Garcia-Witulski, a research fellow at the Lancet Countdown Latin America and a professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of Argentina, said to the Post. Instead, “heat gradually erodes the safe, comfortable and practical opportunities people have to stay active in everyday life.” Warmer temperatures would hinder activities such as “jogging outdoors or walking to work, particularly in areas which don’t have strong adaptive measures like proper shading or cool pavements,” said Time.

Internal conflict

Even without the climate pressure, “nearly one third (31%) of the world’s adult population, 1.8 billion adults, are physically inactive,” said the World Health Organization (WHO). Between 2010 and 2022, the number of people who “do not meet the global recommendations of at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity physical activity per week” increased by 5%. Climate change is only expected to increase the number further. While lower-income countries face the brunt of the decrease in physical activity, “the pattern was not uniform,” and “some colder areas, such as North America, Argentina and South Africa, also report high rates of physical inactivity,” said the study.

“Outdoor laborers, street vendors and subsistence farmers cannot easily shift physical exertion to cooler hours,” said the study. Also, “women and adolescents often lack access to climate-controlled recreational spaces.” Physical activity “contributes to prevention and management of noncommunicable diseases such as cardiovascular diseases, cancer and diabetes and reduces symptoms of depression and anxiety,” said WHO.

“The link between physical inactivity and chronic diseases is so strong that any compromise to achieving regular exercise” will “pose broad public health risks,” Jonathan Patz, the chair of health and the environment at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said to the Post. Prioritizing reducing greenhouse gas emissions as well as building cooling infrastructure will be necessary for human health.

Funerals may be postponed, new dress codes are being imposed at work and people are taking the stairs rather than escalators, as the war in Iran has curious effects in Asia.

Countries across the region are facing “crippling shortages” of oil and gas, said The Guardian, because most supplies have been “held up in the Gulf” since the US and Israel began bombing Iran.

Shrinking reserves

Sri Lanka is introducing a four-day working week to “preserve its shrinking fuel and gas reserves”, said the broadsheet. Starting this week, state institutions, schools and universities, began to operate only four days a week, and civil servants are being ordered to work from home where possible.

After an emergency meeting chaired by the president, Anura Kumara Dissanayake, the commissioner general of essential services said the government was also asking the private sector to “declare every Wednesday a holiday from now on”.

As well as changing how people work, the war could also alter how they mourn, because it is “threatening sacred funeral ceremonies” in Thailand, and Buddhist temples are “scrambling to obtain diesel for cremations”, said Bloomberg.

The abbot of Wat Saman Rattanaram in Chachoengsao province, about 50 miles east of Bangkok, warned that cremation services may have to be suspended. “In more than 50 years, I’ve never seen anything like this,” he said.

Last week, the Thai government ordered civil servants to take the stairs rather than the lift, and it’s increased the air-conditioning temperature to 27C. It will tell government employees to wear short-sleeved shirts rather than suits.

Vietnam has asked companies to allow people to work from home to “reduce the need for travel and transportation”, while the Philippines is pushing for a four-day work week, and has told officials that travel should be limited to “essential functions only”, said Fortune.

Load shedding

In Bangladesh, the final Ramadan holidays began early for students, “but for all the wrong reasons”, said The New York Times. Lectures at the country’s main universities have been cancelled until later this month as the government closed the campuses to save electricity.

The government has also begun to impose temporary blackouts and other measures to conserve power, because “if the gas runs out, so does the electricity that turns on the lights and powers the factories that are crucial to Bangladesh’s export-oriented economy.”

Bangladesh already uses “load shedding”, or planned blackouts, to “reduce the strain on over-burdened power stations”. Usually lasting a couple of hours, they are the “scourge” of modern factories, which can’t afford to “idle thousands of workers”.

What if the sun never set? The California-based startup Reflect Orbital aims to set that possibility in motion by launching thousands of mirrors into space. The company has identified the mirrors as a way of harnessing renewable energy. Detractors are worried about the environmental consequences.

Daylight savings

The company is “trying to build something that could replace fossil fuels and really power everything,” Ben Nowack, Reflect Orbital’s chief executive, said in an interview with The New York Times. The plan is to deliver a “spot of sunlight on demand with a constellation of in-space mirrors,” said Reflect Orbital’s website. The space-mirror constellation would intercept the “solar energy that misses us” and enable humanity to employ it.

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is considering whether to permit Reflect Orbital to launch the mirror satellite. If the FCC allows it, the company would send up a prototype satellite “equipped with a 60-foot mirror,” said Futurism. Ultimately, Reflect Orbital’s goal is to deploy 50,000 mirror satellites in orbit around the Earth by 2035, a sum more than “five times the size of the largest satellite constellation in the world.” These satellites would be used to power solar panels, even during non-peak sun hours, as well as to illuminate disaster zones and expand daytime hours.

Manipulating sunlight has raised concerns among experts about the effect of light pollution on the environment and biodiversity. “The beam reflected by these satellites is very intense, four times brighter than the full moon, and they will be flying multiple satellites in a formation,” John Barentine, an astronomer at the Silverado Hills Observatory and consultant at Dark Sky Consulting, told Space.com (a sister site of The Week). The brightness will “have an effect on wildlife in the directly illuminated area but also, through atmospheric scattering, on the surrounding areas.”

Light complications

The mirrors “could distract airplane pilots, mess up astronomical observations and interfere with circadian rhythms,” which would ultimately impact humans, animals and plants’ ability to “know when to wake and sleep, when to bloom, when to migrate and so forth,” said the Times. To address these concerns, the light from the mirrors is supposed to be “contained within the spot,” able to be “turned off quickly and at any time so that none of it reaches the Earth” and “intentionally avoid sensitive areas like research observatories or protected habitats,” said Reflect Orbital’s website.

Despite the company’s claims, many are skeptical. “Light is inevitably scattered by particles of air, and glow from the beam could brighten the night sky miles farther away, an effect that is evident with the street lighting of even small towns,” said the Times. In addition, “brightness estimates suggest that thousands of these satellites could be visible to the naked eye,” even “potentially outnumbering the stars visible in the night sky,” said The Times.

Such environmental implications may not play a role in the FCC’s decision. Activities in space, per the agency, are “not subject to environmental review,” said the Times. Instead, the FCC “checks to ensure that a spacecraft’s radio communications do not create interference problems for others and that the spacecraft will be safely disposed of at the end of its operational lifetime.” The night sky is a “valued part of human heritage,” Robert Massey, the deputy executive director of the Royal Astronomical Society, said to The Times. Space mirrors “would utterly destroy this and permanently scar the natural landscape. We hope the FCC wholeheartedly rejects the plans.”

The Shetland Islands are famed for their remote beauty but for locals this comes at a cost. Now campaigners are pushing for the island’s ageing ferries to be replaced with undersea tunnels.

“The ferry service has served our islands very well but that’s a 20th-century form of transport,” Alice Mathewson, from North Yell Development Council, told The Guardian. “In the 21st century the answer is: dig a hole. Scotland has to drag itself into the 21st century.”

Short journey can take hours

Shetland is connected by a fleet of 12 ferries that make around 70,000 sailings a year to nine islands carrying about 750,000 passengers. The council says many of these vessels are operating beyond their intended working life and that ferries are a significant contributor to local carbon emissions.

A journey of a few miles can take hours, provided the ferries run at all given bad weather, common in the North Atlantic, mean sailings are often cancelled.

“For time-pressed islanders, care workers and businesses, it adds delays, stress and costs,” said The Guardian. The social consequences of relying on ferries are also “significant”, because they drive “depopulation and isolation”.

Cut journey times by up to 80%

The answer to Shetland’s problems may lie 230 miles to the northwest. Between 2002 and 2022, a £360 million project connected the Faroe Islands through a series of undersea tunnels. Boasting what is thought to be the world’s first submarine roundabout, the road network has cut journey times by up to 80%, been credited with helping to revitalise the territory’s economy and contributed to net immigration over the past decade. Funded largely by borrowing, the costs are being recouped by tolls that start at £2 for residents.

With Shetland’s “unreliable” ferry service “holding the Scottish islands back”, it is hardly surprising its residents “are contemplating building a tunnel system of their own”, said The Times. Earlier this month a delegation of Scottish MPs visited the Faroe Islands to see if such a scheme could be replicated on Shetland.

‘Steeped in Scandinavian engineering’

A campaign by residents on Yell and Unst, the most northerly of Shetland’s islands and backed by the local Lib Dem MP, Alistair Carmichael, is “credited with forcing tunnels and bridges firmly on to the political agenda”, said The Guardian.

Last year, the group commissioned and funded geological surveys and engaged advisers “steeped in Scandinavian tunnel engineering” to try to “prove their economic, social and financial value”.

A report on Shetland Islands Council’s inter-island connectivity programme published last summer proposed four undersea tunnels be taken forward for consideration. There are “no cost estimates at this stage”, said Shetland News, though it would be expected to run into the hundreds of millions.

“Three major European tunnelling contractors” were appointed in December “to undertake the next phase of work on proposals to replace some Shetland ferry routes with fixed links”, said New Civil Engineering. They will “assess” the “test case” that is under way at the Yell Sound crossing, one of the busiest inter‑island routes. Councillors are expected to consider the next stage in summer 2026, when preferred options for each of eight island routes in the programme will be selected.

“I have always said the most difficult tunnel to be built would be the first one,” said Carmichael. “Once you’ve proven the concept, you won’t have to make the case [for others]. Communities will be banging on your door.”

When US Secretary of State Marco Rubio made the case for Donald Trump’s war in Iran, there was an unexpected distraction: his shoes were “at least two sizes too big”, said Séamas O’Reilly in The New Statesman.

The shoes had been given to him by Trump. The president has gifted pairs of the same shoes to several colleagues who are reportedly too scared to not wear them, even if they don’t fit.

Dangling loose

Trump is handing out Florsheim Oxfords, which cost $145 (£109). This new “stylistic choice” has “caught the public’s eye”, said CNN, after Rubio and Vice President J.D. Vance were pictured wearing “black dress shoes with visible gaps between the shoe’s collar and the wearer’s foot”, which leaves the ankle to “dangle loose in the opening like the clapper in a bell”.

The shoes are the “hottest and most exclusive MAGA status symbol”, said The Wall Street Journal. The president ordered the footwear for colleagues after telling them they had “s***ty shoes”, said the paper. According to Vance, he, Rubio and a third politician gave the president their shoe sizes: 13, 11.5 and 7, respectively. (The UK equivalents are 12, 10.5 and 6.)

But Trump has “taken to guessing people’s shoe size in front of them”, asking an aide to “put in an order” and then, a week later, a brown Florsheim box “arrives at the White House”, said the broadsheet. The president “sometimes signs the box or attaches a note of gratitude”, sources told the paper.

“You can tell a lot about a man by his shoe size,” said Trump, but the shoes he gave the men are “clearly too big”, menswear expert Josh Peskowitz told CNN. So perhaps Vance and Rubio “prefer the ideal of the feet they wish they had to the reality rattling around inside their new shoes”, said the broadcaster.

According to reports, the staff are now “reportedly so terrified of offending” Trump, that they “constantly wear these cheap, ill-fitting shoes any time they’re in his presence”, said The New Statesman. For Trump, the arrangement “seems to work out pretty well”, he told Fox News, adding that his colleagues now “look all spiffy and nice”.

Could this be “hazing”, an “expression of affection” or a “loyalty test”, said Robert Armstrong in the Financial Times. The “weird surface” conceals the “irony” that Florsheims are made in Cambodia, India and – mainly – China. The company has hiked prices after Trump’s tariffs.

Hidden lifts

Politicians and footwear have history. Napoleon Bonaparte, who was around 5ft 6in tall, wore shoes with “hidden lifts”, which “added a few extra inches to his stature”, helping him “reinforce his authority both on the battlefield and in political settings”, said Jennen.

If Trump believes you can tell a lot about a man by his shoe size, he might find food for thought in the fact that Abraham Lincoln had the largest feet of any US president, wearing a size 14 shoe, while Rutherford B. Hayes, in office from 1877 to 1881, had the smallest feet of any US president – a size 7.

Theresa May, who was one of the first foreign leaders to visit Trump in his first term in the White House, was the subject of countless column inches about her choices of footwear. “Love them or loathe them”, it can’t be denied that May’s shoes were “something of a phenomenon”, said Woman & Home.

“Never before had a politician’s feet endured such scrutiny.” She “kickstarted a 60% rise” in sales of leopard-print shoes as home secretary, and as prime minister she was credited with “bringing back the kitten heel”.

Rishi Sunak followed in her footsteps by hitting the headlines for his footwear fashion: super-casual slides, pricey Prada loafers and, most famously, Adidas Sambas.

Step aside, girl dinner! Boy kibble is, according to social media, the new way to eat. Focused on protein loading and very little else, the trend is popular among Gen Z men and glorifies eating a bowl of tasteless mush. But it also reflects a push toward disordered eating and hypermasculinity.

Dog food for humans

Referring to the food as kibble is no accident, as most of the time these recipes involve a carb (like rice) and a form of protein (like ground beef) mixed together in a slop-like concoction that has glaring similarities to dog food. “Pleasure-seeking details like flavor and aesthetics are tossed to the side,” said The New York Times. However, this form of dinner may be “less nutritionally complete even compared to what you may be feeding the four-legged members of your family,” said Parents.

While some will opt to add vegetables to their kibble, for the most part, the goal is to maximize the amount of protein consumption, often at the expense of overall nutritional value. Many of these meals forgo fruits, whole grains and healthy fats. “When your meals lack these essential nutrients, deficiencies in fat-soluble vitamins and essential fatty acids, and micronutrients like calcium, vitamin D and iron, can result,” said Parents. Also, the “lack of fiber in boy kibble puts kids at risk for constipation and does not support a healthy gut microbiome,” Madison Szar, a pediatrician with Bluebird Kids Health, said to the outlet.

“Proteinmaxxing” is a trend increasing in ubiquity among young men, especially as Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. rolled out new diet guidelines emphasizing protein consumption. At the same time, “grocery prices and fitness trends continue to shape online food culture,” said Newsweek. With these combined factors, boy kibble “reflects a broader shift toward streamlined, protein-forward meals that prioritize convenience over presentation.”

Healthy facade

The goal of eating boy kibble is to consume an easy, nutritional meal, even if the nutritional value is debatable. But the boys are largely ignoring seasoning, making the meals themselves not very tasty or enjoyable, a mere means to an end. “This kind of moralizing of food or turning suffering through meals into a badge of honor” can “map on to some kind of disordered eating patterns and risks, no different than, say, orthorexia,” Abbey Sharp, a registered dietitian and the author of the book “The Hunger Crushing Combo Method,” said to Fortune.

The entire movement is a male response to the 2023 girl dinner trend, “where women devised elaborate hodgepodges of charcuterie-like plates, consisting of assorted meats, breads, cheeses, fruits and leftovers,” said Fortune. While girl dinner showcased the tendency to cobble together meals from things readily available in the kitchen, tying the slop-consumption to the word “boy” helps “soften what could be perceived as toxically masculine consumptive behaviors,” Emily Contois, an associate professor of media studies at the University of Tulsa and the author of “Diners, Dudes and Diets: How Gender and Power Collide in Food Media and Culture,” said to the Times.

The entire branding of boy kibble is “served with a heavy dose of internet irony,” said Newsweek. Using the term is “allowing men to sidestep the more feminine aspects of dieting,” Adrienne Bitar, a professor at Cornell University who studies the culture of American food and health, said to the Times. Dieting has been “seen as vain, frivolous, attention-seeking, superficial,” but by taking part in a trend, men can say “this isn’t about vanity” or “appearance, necessarily” but instead about “optimization and quantifying how to become my best self.” The trend reflects a recent “backlash moment of men wanting to reclaim a more traditional, conventional masculine authority.”

A viral video of a young girl being pushed over as she poses for a photo in the street has sparked consternation about safety in Japan’s public spaces.

The clip, posted last week by a Taiwanese social media user, was filmed in February at Tokyo’s famous Shibuya crossing. Like others around her, the girl pauses to smile for the camera and someone in a mask “strides up from behind” and “shoves the girl, who falls to the ground”, said the South China Morning Post. “This was no accidental clash of shoulders in a crowded place,” said The Guardian. It was “one of the most visible examples” of butsukari otoko – literally “bumping men” – incidents in Japan.

‘Reflection of modern society’

The butsukari otoko phenomenon “entered the Japanese public consciousness in 2018”, said The Guardian, after a video went viral of a man “deliberately barging” into women at the busy Shinjuku railway station. Other incidents were reported at Tokyo’s Tamachi station; one woman was hit so hard, she “suffered broken ribs”. Last year, a 59-year-old professor in Fukuoka was arrested on suspicion of assault, for allegedly striking pedestrians with his bag as he walked past.

The term refers to men who deliberately collide with others (mostly women) in crowded public spaces like stations and crossings. But “it’s not just men doing the bumping”; at Shibuya crossing, it was a woman, and other social media clips show men and women alike “purposely striding” through public spaces “in readiness to administer a shoulder barge to unsuspecting victims”.

It is a “reflection of modern society”, said Kiryu Masayuki, a specialist in criminal psychology at Toyo University, last year. “Old-fashioned ideas” about gender roles and male superiority “are still deeply rooted” in Japanese society. And “in today’s world, where the job market is tough and people are uncertain about the future”, bumping into women is a “low-risk way” to vent frustration.

Intimidation, aggression

“Japan remains incredibly safe, but the clip highlighted a real pattern of harassment that people here have observed for years,” said Japan Today. Butsukari otoko is “typically about intimidation or aggression”. Commentators also cite factors like “a desire for control, displaced anger, stress or the anonymity of dense crowds”, exacerbated by Japan’s tourism boom. Bollards and designated pedestrian lanes have been introduced to “better separate commuter traffic”.

There are no official figures because shoving attacks are not counted separately in Japan’s crime statistics. “Considering how fast it happens and how easy it is to brush off as an accident, it goes largely under-reported.” But, in a 2024 survey of nearly 22,000 people by IT consultancy MediaSeek, 14% said they had been the victim of butsukari otoko, and 6% said they had witnessed it. Of course, “crowds of people in a hurry make it easy to dismiss a forceful collision as part of the rush-hour chaos” and that’s what makes the phenomenon “so frustrating: the perpetrator keeps walking, no one intervenes and the victim is left wondering whether they are imagining the intent”.

The trend has begun to spread from Japan to other large world cities like New York and London. It’s “commonly associated with misogynistic subcultures and self-identifying incels”, said Glamour. “I’m struck by what this trend exposes: a deeper, systemic discomfort with women taking up space,” clinical psychologist Arianna Masotti told the magazine. “It’s about reminding women, in a visceral way, that their bodies don’t belong in public.”

NASA crashed a spacecraft into an asteroid in an attempt to change the asteroid’s trajectory in 2022. Now, scientific observations have shown that the mission had more far-reaching effects than previously thought, affecting both the struck asteroid and the larger one it orbits. This could be a promising answer to the question of how to protect the planet from future cosmic threats.

No crash dummy

NASA’s DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) spacecraft intentionally crashed into a small asteroid called Dimorphos in September 2022. The goal of the mission was to “prove that if a killer space rock ever threatened Earth in the future, humans could deflect it,” said The New York Times. The hit was quite the success, altering not only the orbit of Dimorphos around a larger asteroid, Didymos, but also the orbit of the pair around the sun, according to a study published in the journal Science Advances.

Dimorphos and Didymos are a binary pair, which means they circle each other while orbiting the sun. The crash changed Dimorphos’ orbit around Didymos to be 33 minutes faster than it was before the strike. Scientists also found that DART made an even bigger impact than expected. Observations of the asteroid pair’s motion “revealed that the 770-day orbital period around the sun changed by a fraction of a second after the DART spacecraft’s impact on Dimorphos,” said a NASA release. That change “marks the first time a human-made object has measurably altered the path of a celestial body around the sun.”

While shifting the orbit by just 150 milliseconds per circle around the sun may seem insignificant, “given enough time, even a tiny change can grow to a significant deflection,” Thomas Statler, the lead scientist for solar system small bodies at NASA, said in the release. The study “validates kinetic impact as a technique for defending Earth against asteroid hazards and shows how a binary asteroid might be deflected by impacting just one member of the pair.”

The space between

When DART hit Dimorphos, the “impact blasted a huge cloud of rocky debris into space, altering the shape of the asteroid,” said the NASA statement. The debris “carried its own momentum away from the asteroid,” giving the asteroid an “explosive thrust.” The study found that the “debris loss doubled the punch created by the spacecraft alone.” And because Dimorphos is part of a binary pair, a “measurable change for one will affect the other,” said CNN.

Didymos “was never on a path toward Earth, and the DART experiment could not have placed it on one,” said a press release about the study. However, the “small shift in orbital speed demonstrates how spacecraft could be used to redirect a threatening asteroid if scientists detect it early enough.” In that case, a “spacecraft would strike the object and slightly alter its velocity,” and that “tiny change could accumulate into a large enough deviation to prevent a collision with Earth.”

NASA, in a similar guardian vein, is also developing its Near-Earth Object Surveyor mission, which “could spot dark, risky asteroids that have remained nearly invisible from Earth-based observatories,” said CNN. Being able to identify potential threats in space along with knowing how to change their orbit goes “hand in hand with how space agencies envision protecting Earth.”

Following pilot schemes in several US cities last year, Uber has launched a women-only service across the country.

The new feature on the Uber app – which gives women the choice to request trips with female drivers – is designed to help them “feel more confident” both in the passengers seats and behind the wheel.

Safety concerns

Uber and rival company Lyft have “faced criticism over their safety records” for years, said The Associated Press. The ride-hailing apps have had “thousands of reports of sexual assaults from passengers and drivers”, with many female users losing trust in the service.

In February, Uber was ordered to pay $8.5 million (£6.2 million) to a woman who said she was raped by one of its drivers in Arizona three years ago. The plaintiff claimed Uber had “been aware of a wave of sexual assaults committed by its drivers but had not taken basic action to improve safety”, said the BBC. A jury deliberated for two days before finding Uber was responsible for the driver’s behaviour – “a ruling that could influence the outcome of thousands of other cases against the company”.

Uber intends to appeal against the verdict, claiming the incident had not been foreseeable as the driver had a high user rating on the app and no criminal record. It maintains its drivers are contractors not employees and therefore it should not be liable for their conduct.

According to the company’s latest safety report, the number of sexual assaults reported during US rides has dropped from 5,981 from 2017-18 to 2,717 from 2022-23 – which Uber says represents 0.0001% of rides across the country.

Sex discrimination?

The new service lets women request a female driver when they order a trip or reserve a trip with a female driver in advance. Women can also toggle on the preference in their settings to increase the likelihood of being matched with a female driver in the area, and opt for another ride if they end up waiting too long. Those with a teen account can also use the service.

According to Uber, around a fifth of its drivers in the US are female – a figure that varies by city. Like passengers, female drivers have the option of changing their preferences to request female riders. The programme was piloted in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Detroit last summer before spreading to 26 cities in November. It is now available for female drivers in 40 countries, and for riders in seven countries, including Portugal and Saudi Arabia.

The roll-out is going ahead despite an ongoing court case in California brought by two Uber drivers who argue the policy is discriminatory against men and violates the state’s Unruh Act, which prohibits sex discrimination by businesses. The case claims that the new feature “gives its minority female drivers access to the entire pool of passengers, while leaving its majority male drivers to compete for a smaller pool of passengers”, said The Guardian. It also argues the policy “reinforces the gender stereotype that men are more dangerous than women”. Uber disputed that Unruh had been violated and said its “women preferences” feature served a “public policy interest in enhancing safety”.

“I take Uber rides at all times of day and night,” said Lakshmi Varanasi on Business Insider. There’s a “wide grey area between assault and a perfectly uneventful Uber ride”. The women-only driver option could give both riders and drivers more “control” over uncomfortable situations. “I, for one, will try this out.”

Next time you go to a seafood restaurant, you may have trouble ordering one of the ocean’s delicacies. Maine’s lobster industry declined for the fourth-straight year, state regulators said this month, in a continuing drop that marks a 17-year low for the state’s lobster haul. This has led people in the state lobster business to sound warning bells, given that the vast majority of lobster in the United States comes from them.

Why is Maine’s lobster industry having trouble?

Lobster fishers have been forced to “grapple with soaring business costs, inflation and a changing ocean,” said The Associated Press. Increasing prices fueled the significant decline in Maine’s lobster industry last year. Maine fishermen caught a total of 78.8 million pounds of lobsters in 2025, compared to more than 110 million pounds in 2024, said the Maine Department of Marine Resources in a press release. It was the lowest statewide haul since 2008.

The principal cause is a large drop in the number of fishing expeditions in the state. Maine lobster harvesters “took over 21,000 fewer fishing trips in 2025 than in 2024, a nearly 10% decline in fishing effort,” Carl Wilson, the commissioner of the Department of Marine Resources, said in the press release. These fishermen were forced to take fewer trips because “rising bait, fuel and gear prices made many trips economically unviable,” said the Portland Press Herald. Shifting climate patterns also play a role, causing a “late molt that limited access to the soft-shell lobsters that feed Maine tourists.” Delays like these can lead to a much less bountiful harvest.

How will this decline impact the larger industry?

Experts fear that the decline of lobster fishing in Maine could have ripple effects for the nationwide industry. At least 80% of the country’s lobster is caught in Maine, according to the state’s lobster marketing website, though other sources claim this figure is as high as 90%. But the evolving lobster industry is shifting the “economics of a fishery that has long dominated Maine’s working waterfront,” said the Press Herald.

Fishermen also “operate across a bunch of micro-economies now experiencing boom, bust or something in between,” and Maine has become one of the last bastions for lobster due to the “near extinction of once-robust lobster fisheries in Rhode Island, Connecticut and Ireland,” said Bloomberg. Diners across the country may also be finding it harder to stomach the price of a restaurant lobster as fishing for them becomes more difficult.

Not all is lost, though. While the industry in Maine faces the aforementioned “challenges from climate change, regulation and increased fishing,” said Bloomberg, it is also “booming elsewhere on the back of high prices and Chinese demand.” This is particularly true in Canada, which “now has triple the lobster catch of the U.S. — and even processes 40% of Maine lobsters.”

Lobster fishing has also always been a generational business, and that isn’t likely to go away. “My youngest son didn't go to college, and now my oldest son wants to come home and go fishing,” Sonny Beal, a member of the board of directors at the Maine Lobstermen’s Association, told Marketplace. “You can’t raise these guys fishing and being on the ocean and expect them not to do it when they get older.”

Humans are living out their animal instincts through the therian movement. A small online subculture, those who identify as therians claim to have a nonhuman identity — one they embrace in their everyday lives. The movement has gained traction on social media, leading to demonization and ridicule. Experts warn against openly rejecting the culture, as doing so could cause harm.

The animal within

A therian is a person who “identifies as a nonhuman animal on an integral, personal level,” said the Therian Guide website. Many also adopt animal-like behaviors or characteristics or “identify as something animalistic which may not have existed on earth.” The trend has been most popular in Uruguay and Argentina but has been expanding to other parts of Latin America.

The term “therian” is a shortening of the Greek term “therianthrope,” meaning half-human, half-animal. The word began to “circulate in the 1990s on internet forums,” said Euronews. It “grew discreetly, almost clandestinely, through mailing lists and websites of the pre-Facebook era.” However, with the rise of social media, the community has become more public on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube. “The therian phenomenon is a perfect example of how algorithms and social media, with a mixture of political interest and morbid curiosity, can fabricate a news story out of thin air,” Adrián Juste, an analyst at the Al Descubierto think tank in Spain, said to El País.

The existence of therianthropy has been attributed to a variety of causes. Some claim it comes from “reincarnation or misplaced souls,” said the therian guide website. Others point to “scientific or psychological reasons such as imprinting, an innate predisposition” or “abnormalities in neurological wiring.” Those who are therians “will know it,” with a “feeling of ‘this is what I am.’”

Predator and prey

The growing exposure and growth of therians has led to backlash and judgment. The community’s increasing popularity landed it in the “hands of the far right” and is fueling “algorithms that reward scandal,” said El País. Similar to an “attack against trans people, against LGBTQ+ people,” the assault on therians is “reinforcing the narrative about the decadence of modern society," when “going against human nature or the designs of God ultimately leads us to decadence,” Juste said. In the U.S., this would-be decadence manifested as a false claim that children were using litter boxes at school.

The therian movement is mostly popular among adolescents and young adults, as it “may be a response to experiences of alienation, low self-esteem or a search for community,” according to some critics, said Al Día. Labeling the phenomenon as a “dangerous new trend” could “reinforce feelings of otherness or isolation among those who already feel marginalized,” while “ignoring it entirely would mean dismissing an experience that feels deeply meaningful to a segment of young people.”

The attraction to therianthropy is not inherently a harmful thing. “If the experience does not affect a young person’s ability to form relationships, attend school or maintain healthy routines,” said Al Día, “there is no reason to automatically pathologize it.”

“They say beauty is pain, but it isn’t supposed to be deadly,” said Sheilla Mamona in Glamour. Yet, for millions of Black women across the world who regularly wear braids, twists and extensions, troubling new evidence suggests the synthetic hair used to create these styles may expose them to toxic substances.

A number of studies in recent months have revealed many popular braiding hair products include dangerous chemicals and carcinogens. The latest, published by Consumer Reports in the US, found lead in 29 of the 30 brands of extensions tested, while another peer-reviewed study published by Silent Spring Institute earlier this month discovered hazardous ingredients across 43 hair samples.

Such findings “paint a grim picture”, said Mamona. In a market where hosts of products contain potentially “harmful, and even deadly” products, Black women find themselves “disproportionately” at risk.

‘Beyond the scalp’

Across the globe, braids are one of the most “common and beloved hairstyles” for Black women, worn by “people of all ages”, often for “weeks at a time”, said The Guardian. Braids carry important “cultural significance”, serving as a way for Black women to “embrace” their afro-textured hair and wider “Black identity”. And the “low-maintenance hairstyle” is often convenient – used to “promote hair growth and combat breakage”.

Skin irritation is perhaps the most common side effect from using synthetic braiding hair, yet many problems “go beyond the scalp”, said Healthline. Some of the “most concerning” chemicals found in braiding hair include organotins, acrylonitrile, phthalates and styrene. There are “multiple types of harm” associated with these chemicals, including hormone and reproductive health disruption, immune system impacts and links to cancer.

Many products are also “ingredient-blinded”, meaning the synthetic hair lists “no ingredients at all”, said BET. This, combined with the fact many women keep extensions in their hair “for weeks”, means the potential for exposure to dangerous chemicals is “more frequent and more prolonged” than with other cosmetic products.

‘No parameters’

Despite these risks, synthetic hair is not always regulated like other beauty products. There are “no parameters” in the US for what materials can be used in synthetic braiding hair, said Kayla Greaves in Marie Claire. In the UK in January, the Commons Science, Innovation and Technology Committee of MPs did hold an oral evidence session on greater regulation for hair products – “the first evidence session of its new inquiry”.

But in the meantime, Black women are “refusing to accept the lack of new innovation” for braiding hair, said Greaves. Many are looking for “ethically sourced” and “plant-based” alternatives, and also calling for “expanded testing” of not just synthetic hair, but also human hair products.

Problems, though, continue to exist “beyond” the braiding hair itself, said CNN. There are various brands of “gels, glue, edge-control, oil sheen, detangling spray and other everyday products” used by Black women already found to contain dangerous chemicals, including “formaldehyde-releasing preservatives”.

People looking to spend tons of money on a car will soon have a more eco-friendly option, as a variety of luxury auto companies are developing electric vehicles. High-end automakers are taking different paths to market: Companies like Ferrari are all-in on EVs; others have a more muted approach. As the jostling continues, there are concerns that the luxury car market might be the wrong platform for EVs.

What luxury companies are making EVs?

Ferrari, Lamborghini, Mercedes-Benz and Porsche are all experimenting with EV development. Ferrari has been pushing ahead at a rapid pace. The company “doesn’t have an EV on the market yet, but its first model, called Luce, is expected to be open for orders later this spring,” said CNBC. Still, there are hurdles ahead for the iconic Italian brand.

For starters, electric cars can go extremely fast just like gas-powered Ferraris, but “much of what makes an internal combustion Ferrari compelling is missing,” Karl Brauer, an executive analyst for iSeeCars, said to CNBC. People purchase Ferraris for the “way it stirs a person’s senses: the look of it, the sound and feel of the engine and the smell of the exhaust.” Experts say many of these experiences may not exist in an electric Ferrari.

Though Ferrari’s plans are in motion, the same cannot be said for Lamborghini, which has “pulled the plug on plans” for its EV in the “face of collapsing demand among its well-heeled customers,” said The Times. Instead, the company will debut a hybrid model. It admits this is a demand issue. The “acceptance curve” for EVs in Lamborghini’s market is “flattening and close to zero,” Lamborghini CEO Stephan Winkelmann said to the Times.

What does the market say?

Others in the auto industry have also noted the demand problem raised by Lamborghini executives. For “many years, many of the electric vehicles that Americans bought were luxury models, like the Tesla Model S, the GMC Hummer and the Porsche Taycan,” said The New York Times. All of these vehicles sell for more than $80,000, while Lamborghinis and Ferraris routinely sell for six figures (the Ferrari Luce EV is expected to cost at least $500,000).

Geopolitical factors, particularly tariffs implemented by President Donald Trump, are also being considered. Mercedes-Benz “had been selling electric versions of its luxury sedans and SUVs in the United States but recently said it would stop importing them,” said the Times. Volkswagen has similarly “slowed production of the ID.Buzz, an upscale electric van that’s made in Germany.” Many automakers have seen the “largest losses from luxury models. Now fewer sales will mean smaller losses.”

While luxury brands may be struggling with EVs, the “picture is very different for worldwide EV sales for brands not on the high-end,” said Wired, as this vehicle market is booming. It could also be that luxury buyers simply don’t want electric cars. For “luxury brands, which operate lower volumes and higher R&D costs,” said Philip Nothard, Cox Automotive’s insight director, to Wired, the industry’s challenges are “even more pronounced.”

Businesses in the Australian state of Victoria will be “forced to allow staff to work from home two days a week” under what the state government described as “world-first” laws.

The “sweeping measures”, said The Times, will apply to employers of all sizes and put in place a “legal guarantee” that all Victorian workers who can “reasonably” work from home will be eligible.

However, the state government, which faces elections in November, has received concerns from small businesses that the law will restrict growth, and sparked fears that firms will move inter-state or abroad as a result.

Remote working no longer ‘under threat’

Working from home suits families because it “saves time and money and it gets more parents working”, said Victoria’s premier, Jacinta Allan. “If you can work from home for a small business, you deserve the same rights as someone working for a big bank.”

The government had previously indicated that small businesses “might be exempt from the laws”, but it was confirmed this week that staff working for this type of company would also be able to “benefit” from the measures, said The Times. The government had “insisted” that existing working-from-home rights “would be under threat” if new legislation were not introduced.

“More than a third” of employees “regularly” work from home, said the state government, and they can save on average A$5,308 “every year” from doing so. It also “cuts congestion” and “gets more people working: workforce participation is now 4.4% higher than before the pandemic”.

The law will come into effect on 1 September and be “enshrined” in the state’s Equal Opportunity Act, said Bloomberg. Businesses with “fewer than 15 workers” will have a delayed start of 1 July 2027 to “allow them to prepare for the change”.

Small business ‘backlash’

“It is hard to keep up with Australia,” said Pilita Clark in the Financial Times. It has recently passed “some of the toughest anti-vaping laws on the planet”, a “world-first ban on social media for kids under the age of 16” and banned “artificial stone used for kitchen worktops that is linked with lung disease”.

Even when the work-from-home law was in the planning stage, it was seen as “another groundbreaking move”; it is “shaking the politics of remote working in a way that governments elsewhere may find hard to ignore”.

Several business owners have been “calling for more staff to return to the office”, said the FT. For instance, Nuno Matos, chief executive of ANZ bank, said poor office attendance would be “reflected in lower bonus payments”.

In last year’s national election campaign the Liberal Party promised to “crack down on ‘unsustainable’ remote working patterns” to force staff back to five days a week in the office. That policy produced a “political spark” and Allan’s Labor Party has sought to benefit from it. Its working-from-home initiative will form a large part of her “re-election campaign” in November.

There has been a “backlash” from small business owners over the law, said The Guardian. It could place a significant “regulatory burden” on firms that “don’t necessarily have HR departments to engage with and to consult”, said Scott Veenker, acting chief executive of the Victorian Chamber of Commerce and Industry. “It’s just another added impost”, which could lead to businesses “moving operations interstate or potentially overseas. If you make business too hard, they’ll go elsewhere and that’s the last thing we need in Victoria right now.”

This is already happening, said Sumeyya Ilanbey in the Australian Financial Review. Investors are “fleeing Victoria” because of the plans, believing they will “entrench the state’s reputation as anti-enterprise”.

Politically, the law aims to “wedge the coalition opposition”. They face the choice of “opposing a plan that Labor is convinced is popular with many voters or backing it and losing faith with business supporters”.

While it is widely known that rising carbon dioxide emissions have significantly impacted the climate and our ecosystems, scientists recently found a less expected outcome. Increased CO2 levels have altered the chemical balance of human blood, which may have negative long-term health ramifications. The rate at which emissions are increasing also does not allow time for the human body to adapt.

A bloody problem

Increased CO2 levels in the atmosphere have correlated to an increase in bicarbonate (HCO3-) levels and a decrease in calcium (Ca) and phosphorus (P) levels in human blood, according to a study published in the journal Air Quality, Atmosphere & Health. If these trends continue, “blood bicarbonate values could be at the limit of the accepted healthy range in half a century, and Ca and P will be at the limit of their healthy ranges by the end of this century.”

In human blood, CO2 is converted into bicarbonate, which at normal concentrations has an important role in maintaining healthy pH levels. However, the concentration of bicarbonate increased by about 7%, or 0.34% per year, between 1999 and 2020. Calcium and phosphorus levels dropped by 2% and 7%, respectively. This is because when carbon dioxide dissolves in the bloodstream, it “alters the body's acid-base balance,” said Science Alert. In order to keep the blood pH within its healthy range, the “kidneys conserve bicarbonate, a buffering molecule that helps neutralize excess acidity.” Bones “can also buffer acid by exchanging minerals such as calcium and phosphorus.”

Code red

Elevated CO2 can lead to a range of adverse health effects. Even “moderate increases in carbon dioxide indoors can affect thinking and focus,” said Earth.com. Certain levels “have been linked to slower decision-making and changes in brain activity in some groups.” It can also “increase stress hormones and cause oxidative stress, which can damage cells.” As far as the changes in our blood, “chronic CO2 retention can lead to metabolic acidosis, which may cause the calcification of kidneys and arteries as the body attempts to manage pH levels,” said Down to Earth. Calcium and phosphorus are also extremely important for our health.

There is a "delicate balance between how much CO2 is in the air, our blood pH, our breathing rate and bicarbonate levels in the blood,” Phil Bierwirth, a retired environmental geoscientist and one of the authors of the study, said in a release. “CO2 in the air is now higher than humans have ever experienced,” and we may “never adapt.” Because of this, many experts believe it is important to take action against climate change to reduce emissions and limit the levels of atmospheric carbon.

Rising CO2 levels are “especially relevant for children and adolescents, whose developing bodies will experience the longest cumulative exposure,” said the release. “We’re not saying people are suddenly going to become unwell when we cross a certain threshold,” Alexander Larcombe, a respiratory physiologist and author of the study, said in the release. “But this suggests there may be gradual physiological changes occurring at a population level, and that's something we should be monitoring as part of future climate change policy.”

Prosecutors in Taiwan indicted 62 people on Wednesday for their alleged links to the Prince Group, a multinational network accused of running a vast system of scam centres from Cambodia.

Scam centres across Southeast Asia have become so powerful and entrenched that they are now building into “scam states”.

Sprawling, industrial-scale criminal economy

Scam states are similar to narco-states, which are countries where the entire government and economy become profoundly corrupted and controlled by the illegal drug trade.

A “scam state” is a country where an “illicit industry has dug its tentacles deep into legitimate institutions, reshaping the economy, corrupting governments and establishing state reliance on an illegal network”, said The Guardian. They’re growing in number because the “multi-billion-dollar global scam industry” has become “so monolithic”.

After beginning as small online fraud rings, scamming has transformed into a sprawling, industrial-scale criminal economy in parts of southeast Asia, an illicit industry has penetrated local economies and institutions to a degree that rivals some of the world’s most entrenched illegal trades.

According to analysts, the growth of scam states has been rapid and systemic, driven by sophisticated technology, weak law enforcement, and political tolerance or complicity.

KK Park in Myanmar’s Myawaddy region was once one of the most notorious scam centres. Ostensibly business complexes, these sites housed tens of thousands of workers – many of them trafficked or coerced – who were forced to defraud victims globally via romance scams, fake investment platforms, and so-called “pig butchering” cons, or investment fraud involving gaining the trust of victims and persuading them to invest in fake opportunities.

When authorities raided and destroyed parts of KK Park, operators had already moved their operations elsewhere, illustrating the adaptability and mobility of the scam networks.

States slow to dismantle networks

The “scale of the compounds” shows “how much the states hosting them have been compromised”, experts told The Guardian. For instance, in Cambodia, it's thought cybercrime operations contribute billions of dollars annually, amounting to a significant portion of the economy. Critics argue that state institutions have been slow to dismantle the networks and that political elites benefit directly or indirectly from their persistence.

The US and UK have launched joint efforts, like the Scam Center Strike Force, to target these networks and the infrastructure supporting them, but dismantling scam states is a complex task.

Analysts warn that without targeting the leadership and financial core of these networks, law enforcement may merely displace the problem rather than eliminate it. The rise of scam states highlights a new frontier of organised crime – one that intertwines digital innovation, exploitation and corruption on a vast scale.

Though the alleged sex trafficking on Jeffrey Epstein’s Caribbean island, Little Saint James, has dominated the national discourse recently, another Epstein property has largely stayed out of the news — but perhaps not for long. A ranch outside Santa Fe, New Mexico, that belonged to the disgraced financier has been the subject of on-and-off investigations, and many are now reexamining what role the ranch may have played in Epstein’s crimes.

What is the ranch in question?

The compound, named Zorro Ranch, includes a 30,000-square-foot mansion that “sits on a ridge overlooking thousands of acres of southwestern land,” said The New York Times. The ranch is in the middle of the desert, an area with low population density where the “nearest neighbors are miles away and most everyone minds their own business.”

Epstein first purchased the ranch in 1993, and it made his seven-story Manhattan penthouse “look like a shack,” he said to Vanity Fair in 2003. Recently released photos by the Department of Justice “provide a look inside the tightly guarded gates” of the compound, said the Santa Fe New Mexican, including images that “show Epstein and others posing” throughout the ranch. In addition to the main house, Zorro Ranch also had a “three-bedroom lodge and off-the-grid log cabin as well as a 4,400-foot airstrip with an aircraft hangar and helipad.”

Why is the ranch being investigated?

Given the isolated nature of Zorro Ranch, there are numerous allegations about “what role the secluded spot played in sexual abuse or sex trafficking of underage girls and young women,” said The Associated Press. Several of Epstein’s public victims have claimed they were trafficked at the ranch, but “New Mexico leaders say there has never been a thorough investigation of the criminal activity that may have occurred” on the property, said the Times.

There was previously a minimal investigation into the ranch, which was “taken over by federal prosecutors in 2019, and then apparently fizzled, according to New Mexico officials and recently unsealed records,” said the Times. However, unlike Epstein’s other properties, federal agents “did not appear to have ever searched Zorro Ranch,” according to a report from The Guardian. Officials were “paying attention to Paris, Little Saint James, New York and Miami, but they didn’t pay attention to Zorro Ranch,” Eddy Aragon, an Albuquerque radio D.J. and Epstein researcher, told the Times.

Following public pressure related to Epstein, New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez recently “ordered that the criminal investigation into allegations of illegal activity at Jeffrey Epstein’s Zorro Ranch be reopened,” the New Mexico Department of Justice said in a press release. But since Epstein’s 2019 death, the ranch has come under new ownership, meaning an investigation may not be simple.

After the most recent batch of Epstein documents was released, the “claims in the documents have proved impossible to ignore,” said the Times. Most notable is a 2019 email alleging that in the “hills outside the Zorro, two foreign girls were buried on orders of Jeffrey and Madam G,” the latter apparently referencing Epstein’s accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell. “Both died by strangulation during rough, fetish sex.” The sender of the email was “redacted by the DOJ,” said CNN. It is “not clear that those allegations have been investigated by law enforcement.”