What happened
Consumer prices last month shot up 3.8% from a year earlier, the biggest year-over-year uptick since May 2023, the Labor Department reported yesterday. The heated inflation was driven largely by a 28% year-over-year jump in gasoline prices tied to President Donald Trump’s war with Iran. 

Who said what
The lastet consumer price index underscored how “daily life in America is getting more expensive,” The New York Times said. Airfares were up 21% from a year ago and food prices rose 3.2%, with coffee prices jumping 19% and tomatoes up 40%. Trump’s tariffs are “still slowly filtering through to some goods,” The Wall Street Journal said, but the war “has presented a much quicker and more obvious shock that could be hard to reverse.” 

Asked yesterday if cost-of-living concerns were motivating his dealmaking with Iran, Trump said “not even a little bit.” His only concern is Iran’s nuclear program, he said. “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody.” 

What next?
In a separate report yesterday, the Labor Department said real average hourly wages fell 0.5% from March to April, “meaning most workers are effectively taking a pay cut even as the White House touts its economic record,” The Washington Post said.

What happened
Engaging in the arts, whether directly or by going to museums or concerts, helps people age more slowly, British researchers reported in the journal Innovation in Aging. The benefits were found to be comparable to physical exercise and quitting smoking, and were most pronounced for people over 40 and those who engage in a wider range of artistic endeavors.

Who said what
The University College London researchers looked at how often 3,556 adults in the U.K. engaged in some artistic pursuit — singing, painting, dancing, crafting or photography — or visited an exhibition or heritage site. Those who did so weekly aged 4% slower in blood tests of their “epigenetic clock,” or biological aging. “We found” that “people were around a year younger biologically if they’re regularly engaged in the arts,” study lead author Daisy Fancourt told NPR News yesterday. Monthly arts engagement slowed aging by 3%.

Slower biological aging “does not necessarily mean someone will live longer,” The Guardian said, but “previous studies have suggested a link between arts engagement and longer lifespan.”

What next?
The research “builds on a growing body of evidence” that arts activities “reduce stress, lower inflammation and improve cardiovascular disease risk,” said study senior author Feifei Bu. Regular creative engagement should be treated not “as a luxury” but “an essential,” Fancourt told The Art Newspaper, “just like we promote 10,000 steps a day or five-a-day of fruits and vegetables.”

A form of geoengineering in which salt water is fired into the clouds to increase their brightness and reflectivity shows promise in helping to curb warming temperatures due to climate change, according to new research.

The method, known as marine cloud brightening, could restrict the “future global-mean surface air temperature and precipitation change,” said a study published in Communications Earth & Environment. In a separate research project in the U.K., scientists are testing the same geoengineering process in a three-story “cloud chamber,” working toward a potential real-world test in 2028.

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

Still, geoengineering is a controversial measure “opposed by environmentalists who fear it is an excuse for not cutting the carbon emissions driving climate change,” said The Times of London. “Decarbonization,” Mark Symes, the program director of the U.K.’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency, told The Independent, “is the only sustainable route out of the climate crisis.”