The outgoing year was a mixed one in the fight against global warming. While some countries, including the UK, continued to make positive steps towards net zero, the return of Donald Trump to the White House exacerbated an already fraying international climate consensus. But a series of scientific breakthroughs in 2025 holds out some hope for a greener future.

Automated food waste upcycling
AI-powered food waste management uses real-time data and predictive analytics to monitor, categorise and reduce food waste. Food scraps can effectively be upcycled into resources for “composting and biogas systems”, said The Sweaty Penguin environmental podcast.

Published in science journal Frontiers, this technology can also support “nutrient cycling” by enabling food waste to be returned to soil systems. Automated waste sorting can also “separate food waste from plastic waste, reducing plastics and organics going into landfills, producing quality compost for agriculture, while helping slash methane, CO2 and nitrous oxide emissions”.

Gene variant protects rice from rising temperatures
Chinese researchers led by plant geneticist Yibo Li of Huazhong Agricultural University have discovered a naturally occurring gene variant that can preserve both the yield and quality of rice from excessive heat. Rising temperatures are a “major and growing threat to rice production”, said Science, citing a 2004 study that found yields fell by 10% for every degree Celsius average night-time air temperature rose.

The impact of this “major breakthrough” could “ultimately be even broader than rice”, said Argelia Lorence, a plant biochemist at Arkansas State University, as the same gene variant can be found in other cereals that are at a similar risk from heat.

Sodium batteries make electric flight possible
While still in the experimental stage, sodium batteries could eventually lead to electric-powered flight, which is more sustainable and much cheaper even than non-petroleum aviation fuel. A new sodium-air fuel cell – designed by a team led by Yet-Ming Chiang, a professor of materials science and engineering at MIT – works by combining liquid sodium with oxygen drawn from the air in a continuous reaction. The device is “based on well-established electrochemical principles”, said The Times, but “unlike conventional batteries, which must be recharged, it is designed to be refuelled, with its energy-rich material being replaced as it is consumed”.

Here are our choices of the most meme-orable, eye-rolling, jaw-dropping and head-scratching moments of the year.

Coldplay kiss cam
The moment of the year unravelled on a fateful mid-July day at a Coldplay concert in Foxborough, Massachusetts. Andy Byron, then CEO of tech company Astronomer, and the company’s chief people officer Kristin Cabot broke away from a cosy embrace and ducked for cover to avoid being caught on kiss cam. A ripple of gasps in the audience and Chris Martin delivered the iconic line: “Oh, what…either they’re having an affair or they’re just very shy.” Byron and Cabot subsequently left the company.

Labubu craze
These dolls were everywhere. First seen swinging from the bag of South Korean Blackpink band member Lalisa Manobal – known as “Lisa” – they were soon adopted by music icons Rihanna and Dua Lipa. “Après Lalisa, la delulu”, said essayist Mireille Silcoff in The New York Times. The “junky-looking fuzzy toy” spiralled into a “weird totem of adult fashion juvenilia”, as both adults and children queued for hours to get their hands on the newest colour or style.

Blue Origin space mission
The space race took a strange turn in April, as a star-studded crew – including singer Katy Perry – embarked on an 11-minute space mission, rising more than 100km above the Earth. The Blue Origin mission was funded by Amazon boss Jeff Bezos, whose wife Lauren Sánchez was also on board. The crew were slammed for these flights which were described as “essentially just joyrides for the super-rich” and Perry, who performed Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World” during the flight, said she felt like a “human piñata” for the online abuse she later received.

Louvre robbery
October’s heist at the world’s most famous museum was a plotline straight out of “The Thomas Crown Affair”. Armed with a vehicle-mounted mechanical lift, four suspects arrived at 9.30am, shortly after the Louvre opened to visitors. They raised the lift to the first floor, cut through the glass, and made off with around £76 million of loot. Four suspects were later arrested. The jewellery haul, however, remains at large.

Crew members on the Ocean Viking rescue ship, operated by the French SOS Méditerranée humanitarian group, take part in a night exercise during a thunderstorm. The vessel, which has been rescuing migrants since 2019, is preparing to resume operations after it was fired on by the  Libyan Coast Guard in August.

Sameer Al-Doumy / AFP / Getty Images

From “One Battle After Another” to “Sinners”, it’s been an incredible year for film – and 2026 looks just as exciting. Whether you’re a “Star Wars” fan or Christopher Nolan’s latest epic is more your speed, these are the must-see movies to catch at the cinema in the new year.

Wuthering Heights
The trailer for Emerald Fennell’s “ravishingly stylish” adaptation of Emily Brontë’s only novel sent much of the internet into a “tizzy”, said GQ. This “definitely isn’t the ‘Wuthering Heights’ you read for your GCSEs”. In her “gleefully anachronistic romance”, Margot Robbie (pictured above) and Jacob Elordi take on the starring roles of Catherine and Heathcliff.

The Bride
Maggie Gyllenhaal’s “fresh take” on Mary Shelley’s classic novel stars Jessie Buckley as the “kick-ass outlaw lover for a punk Frankenstein”, said The Hollywood Reporter. Christian Bale takes on the role of a “lonesome” Frankenstein who recruits Dr. Euphronious (Annette Bening) to create him a companion by bringing a murdered young woman to life.

The Mandalorian & Grogu
“‘Star Wars’ fans are one step closer to returning to a galaxy far, far away,” said Jordan Moreau in Variety. The action follows Pedro Pascal as The Mandalorian, a bounty hunter, and his “adorable sidekick” Grogu (aka Baby Yoda). Other big names include Jeremy Allen White as Jabba the Hutt’s son Rotta and Sigourney Weaver as a fighter pilot.

The Odyssey
After cleaning up at last year’s Oscars with “Oppenheimer”, Christopher Nolan will return to the big screen with his 13th feature film – and the director is “dreaming even bigger”, said Ben Travis in Empire. Nolan will be “going back to where it all began”, tackling Homer’s ancient Greek epic poem. “Big locations, big stars, big spectacle.” It’s not to be missed.

We’ll never escape Britain’s stupid class system
Robert Taylor in The Spectator
Our “class system” has “always been a load of self-defeating, nonsensical garbage”, writes Robert Taylor. It’s “a mass of silly contradictions that make it utterly useless” because unlike “sex and skin colour, class is a purely human construct” that’s based on “such silliness as what your father does or did for a living”, and “ludicrous notions such as how you hold your knife and fork and how you say the word bath”. Yet we “remain utterly wedded to it”.

Why 2025 was the year I finally fell out of love with Pret
Jack Burke in The Independent
“When was the last time you actually enjoyed something from Pret?” wonders Jack Burke. Once a “welcome mirage”, it’s “curdled into a beige cathedral of culinary capitalism” where “nothing tastes of anything” and “everything costs too much”. It “taps into” our “masochistic relationship with lunch”, the “hunched-over-keyboard lunch”. There’s been a “gustatory flattening” and “once you start noticing it, this flattening is everywhere”. While “nothing is actively bad”, “nothing is good enough to remember”.

Here’s to the year we all become civil again
Jenny McCartney in The Times
“As 2025 peters out”, it’s “marked by the flourishing of insults”, writes Jenny McCartney. The “flashiest slurs” have come from the White House and when Trump “declined to criticise” the white supremacist podcaster Nick Fuentes and Andrew Tate, who is accused of human trafficking and rape, the message was that “the ethical lines you sought to draw” are “no longer secure”. But in Britain, a “mistrust of crude, belligerent posturing has deep roots” and “we should hang on to that in 2026”.