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?”

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”.

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.”

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.

What if plastic waste could be turned into something useful? That dream may soon become a reality, as scientists have found a way to turn plastic into acetic acid using sunlight. Plastics and microplastics have been found everywhere from waterways to remote ecosystems to the bodies of humans and animals. Worldwide plastic usage has also continued to increase over the past 60 years. But this new method would mark a uniquely environmentally friendly way of dealing with plastic pollution.

Sunny solutions

Scientists have created a “sustainable, highly efficient” method to “upcycle plastics to value-added acetic acid,” which is the main component of vinegar, said a study published in the journal Advanced Energy Materials. The process is a “bio-inspired cascade photocatalysis using iron atoms embedded in carbon nitride,” said a release about the study. It is similar to “how certain types of fungi break down organic matter using enzymes.”

“Our goal was to solve the plastic pollution challenge by converting microplastic waste into high-value products using sunlight,” said Dr. Yimin Wu, a professor of mechanical and mechatronics engineering at the University of Waterloo who guided the study, in the release. When the photocatalyst is exposed to sunlight, it triggers two back-to-back chemical reactions. The first one “breaks plastic down into smaller molecules,” and the second “converts those molecules into acetic acid,” said Earth.com. The reaction also takes place in water, “making it particularly relevant for addressing plastic pollution in aquatic environments,” said the release.

The other benefit is that the system works on a variety of plastic types. Acetic acid could be produced from “common plastic wastes, including PVC, PP, PE and PET,” and remained “effective across mixed plastic compositions,” said the release. This makes it a valuable tool for real-world waste streams where different plastics are all mixed together.

Acidic answers

Global plastic use has grown from 20 megatons (Mt) in 1966 to 460 Mt in 2019, according to the Center for Sustainable Systems at the University of Michigan. It is expected to reach 1,231 Mt by 2060. Unfortunately, there is no great way to deal with plastic waste. The majority of it ends up in landfills, where it stays for thousands of years. It can also get stuck in the ecosystem or in waterways. Some can be incinerated, but that releases chemicals and smoke into the atmosphere. Recycling is another option, but not all types of plastic can be recycled, and many current processes require the use of fossil fuels.

This newly discovered alternative “allows abundant and free solar energy to break down plastic pollution without adding extra carbon dioxide to the atmosphere,” Wu said. In addition, while acetic acid is used to make vinegar, it also has several other uses and a “global annual demand of approximately 18 million tons,” said The Engineer. The material is “widely used across the chemicals sector and also has some energy applications.” The study’s findings also “point to new possibilities for addressing microplastics directly,” as the “process degrades plastics at the chemical level,” which “could help prevent the accumulation of microplastics in water systems,” said the release. The technology is still in the laboratory phase.

North Korea, one of the world’s most secretive and patriarchal countries, dominates in a surprising arena: women’s football.

The hermit kingdom became a powerhouse after the regime invested heavily in the women’s game as a tool of soft power and propaganda. The youth team still excels internationally, but after losing the Asian Cup final to Australia in 2010 the senior team “all but disappeared from global competition”, said The Guardian.

Now, the Eastern Azaleas are back in the tournament, playing their opening match against Uzbekistan in Sydney tomorrow. Invigorated by a “new generation of youth World Cup winners”, they are “hoping to return to the summit of Asian football”.

Rise and fall

At Fifa’s annual congress in 1986, the Norwegian delegate “demanded the creation of a World Cup for women”, said The Guardian. North Korean officials, so the story goes, were “inspired”. They returned to Pyongyang with a plan to use women’s football as a “tool to reassert their collapsing power on the world stage”.

Like China, the government saw sport as an opportunity to “strengthen their international profile”. Under Kim Jong Il, the women’s game “became a proxy platform” for North Korea’s political agenda. The government introduced development programmes in schools, built new facilities and even had teams in the military where players trained full-time at the state’s expense. That investment “paid off almost immediately”.

Between the 1990s and the 2010s, North Korea had one of the world’s best women’s football teams, winning three Asian Cup titles and more trophies across the continent. Then Kim Jong Un came to power in 2011 and, like his father, made competitive sport a “key policy priority”, said Jung Woo Lee, senior sport lecturer at the University of Edinburgh, on The Conversation. Any victory on the global stage “helps boost nationalism among the country’s people”. As North Korea grew more internationally isolated, sport became one of the only avenues through which it could assert itself.

But in 2011, a major doping scandal “put the brakes on this success”. Five players tested positive for a banned steroid at the Women’s World Cup in Germany. North Korea had a “bizarre excuse”, said The Times, claiming they had been “struck by lightning” and given a traditional Chinese medicine of deer musk gland, which caused the positive tests. Fifa was “not persuaded”.

North Korea was banned from the 2015 World Cup, then failed to qualify for the Asian Cup in 2018 and the World Cup in 2019. Tightening sanctions also made it impossible for players to sign overseas contracts. Then, when the pandemic hit, North Korea shut its borders and withdrew from both tournaments.

The missing decade

During the senior team’s missing decade, the youth teams flourished. The regime has “developed a sporting powerhouse of young girls”, said The Observer.

In 2013, it opened a state-run elite training facility to develop talent. At the Pyongyang International Football School, young girls are “selected, developed and educated following a highly disciplined and scientific approach”, said DW.

The first generation of graduates from that school are the reigning under-20 and under-17 World Cup and Asian Cup champions, and have won five of these titles since 2020. They have “cemented their status as the dominant force in women’s youth football”.

Their success is “the product of a broader strategy aimed at strengthening national pride and boosting the country’s international standing”, said Lee. Domestically, the regime uses the popular sport of football as a “propaganda tool to glorify their leaders and also how great their country is”, Lee told DW.

Many North Korean media reports say that players under a communist regime “do whatever they can, even if they’re physically exhausted”, said Lee. “Then they directly compare those mentalities with capitalist countries.” When those athletes are exhausted, they are substituted.

“That psychological element has seemingly given the team an edge, but beyond a strong sense of patriotism and years of disciplined work lies the motivation of a life-changing reward.” The regime can give players living in poorer rural areas, where food and healthcare shortages are common, a chance of a far better life in Pyongyang. It’s like “winning a lottery”, said Lee.

It remains to be seen whether North Korea can qualify for the senior women’s World Cup in Brazil next year. But this year’s Asian Cup, said The Guardian, will be “the best glimpse yet of whether this old, unlikely superpower of women’s football is rumbling back to life”.

Oil spills have a new whirlwind solution. Disasters like Exxon Valdez in 1989 and Deepwater Horizon in 2010 are difficult to clean up after and can cause catastrophic ecological damage — and there are thousands of them each year. The options to deal with the crude oil are either burn it and produce high levels of smoke and pollution in the process, or leave it to destroy habitats and kill wildlife. Now, scientists may have found a new way to burn the oil without releasing excessive emissions: by creating raging fire tornadoes.

A blazing idea

The most common method of removing oil from bodies of water is through on-site burning. This technique can “rapidly remove up to 95% of spilled oil from the water surface, reducing the risk of oil penetrating sediments or drifting to contaminate adjacent habitats,” said a study published in the journal Fuel. However, it also “produces a visible smoke plume containing soot and other combustion products, raising concerns about air pollution and potential health risks.” It also tends to leave a layer of black sludge on the surface of the water.

Fire tornadoes or fire whirls offer the “potential for cleaner, more efficient burns with reduced emissions in environmental applications like oil spill remediation,” said the study. These flames spread upward rather than outward, acting like a “natural turbocharger, sucking in oxygen and creating a flame that burns hotter, faster and far more efficiently than fire pools,” said a release about the study. The blazing tornado can also produce 40% less soot and consume up to 95% of the fuel.

Scientists tested this method in a controlled experiment during which they “built 316-foot walls and a rough triangle and generated a controlled fire whirl that reached 17 feet high,” said Vice. The tornado burned through the oil 40% faster than the on-site method and was able to “destroy the particles that form thick smoke plumes,” reducing the amount of emissions, said the release. This can cut the “environmental cost of emergency burning while vaporizing nearly all the oil before it can become a toxic tar mat on the ocean’s surface.”

Not so slick

As promising as fire tornadoes are, these “inferno giants are sensitive,” said the release. “Too much wind, and the column can collapse or destabilize. Too little control over airflow, and it behaves like a fire pool.” The thickness of the oil layer can also affect the whirl’s efficiency. However, “this is the first time anyone has conceived using fire whirls for oil spill remediation, and it’s really just the beginning,” said Elaine Oran, a professor of aerospace engineering at Texas A&M who led the study, in the release. “Our goal is to harness the chaotic nature of fire whirls as a powerful, precise restoration tool, to protect coastlines, marine ecosystems and the environment as a whole.”

There is still a lot of work to be done before widespread use becomes possible. For now, the method to create the whirls using three walls is “not directly applicable to open ocean environments where large oil spills typically occur,” said the study. More research should be done to “explore applicable methods for inducing fire whirls in open water conditions,” like using “mobile or deployable structures” or “leveraging natural atmospheric conditions.”

This research could also be applied to other uses, like to “help engineers design high-efficiency combustion systems” or to “better predict and control wildfire behavior on land,” said Earth.com. “By understanding the physical laws that govern fire whirls, we can harness their power beyond oil spill remediation,” said Oran.

India has long been a “centre for outsourced IT support” but, with the arrival of AI, there are rising concerns for the welfare of female workers in the industry.

As tech companies move to reap the benefits of using remote workers or employing people at lower cost in smaller towns and rural areas, more and more Indian women are finding work as data annotators, said the BBC. They help “fine-tune” the behaviour of AI models, said Business Insider, by labelling content as “helpful” and “natural-sounding” or flagging it as “wrong, rambling, robotic, or offensive”. Much of the content they must view is violent, abusive and disturbing.

'Psychological toll’

“Women form half or more of this workforce,” said The Guardian. Annotator roles are “promoted aggressively online”, promising “easy” or “zero-investment” job opportunities that are flexible and require minimal skills or training. In reality, annotators are exposed to about 800 videos a day, many containing pornography, sexual assault, child abuse and graphic violence.

“The world sees cleaner feeds” as a result but remains largely blind to the women who must absorb “the trauma” so the machines can learn what to block, said India Today. They are exposed to the “internet’s darkest material”.

Such exposure can lead to disrupted sleep, distorted social relationships and a protective “emotional numbness” that is “rarely acknowledged”. There is “limited mental health support”, even though “images linger long after shifts end”. Often working remotely, balancing other aspects of life, these women are left “unseen, unheard and exhausted”.

Their “psychological toll” is “intensified” by legal isolation, said The Guardian. They are bound by “strict non-disclosure agreements”, meaning they are often unable to speak to friends or family about the content they view at work. “Violating NDAs can lead to termination or legal action.”

‘Income without migration’

There’s an “estimated workforce of at least 200,000 annotators” in India’s rural towns and villages, according to US firm Scry AI, said Agence France-Presse. This amounts to “roughly half of the world’s data-labelling workforce”.

Women are seen by companies as “reliable, detail-oriented” hires, and “more likely to accept home-based or contract work”, said The Guardian. These jobs offer them “rare access to income without migration”, and a rare opportunity for an “upward shift”.

The “appeal is understandable”, said India Today. Women can feel the “empowering” force of paid work without having to leave their communities. Even “modest pay can support families, fund education, or provide a degree of independence” which might otherwise be limited.

Though Johannesburg is often called the City of Gold, the residents of South Africa’s largest city aren’t feeling very fortunate amid a significant water shortage. The dearth has left many residents without water for several weeks, and some throughout the city have begun to speak out against Johannesburg’s infrastructure.

Why is there a water shortage in Johannesburg?

It is due to factors that have plagued South Africa, and specifically Johannesburg, for years. This includes “municipal neglect, corruption and well-documented mismanagement,” said NPR. The confluence has led to hardships in getting clean water to the 6.6 million people in the Johannesburg metropolitan area.

While Johannesburg has long had trouble maintaining its water system, the last couple of years have seen a “tremendous infrastructure collapse” that has “shifted from a maintenance backlog to full-scale system failure,” said South African business website BusinessTech. The issue has become so pervasive that it “might eventually be cheaper and easier to start from scratch, building another city, than to rescue the current one,” William Gumede, a public policy professor at Johannesburg’s Wits University, told BusinessTech.

Some Johannesburg residents “haven’t had a drop of water for more than three weeks straight: forced to travel to get water from municipal tankers and washing with buckets,” said NPR. Many have taken to the streets in protest.

As the crisis continues, Premier Panyaza Lesufi of the city’s Gauteng province took a different tack to reckon with the slow drip. “In some instances, I had to go to a certain hotel so that I could bathe,” Lesufi said in a press conference, leading to angry commentators and political cartoons describing him as tone deaf. Others were “quick to compare Lesufi’s remarks to Marie Antoinette’s apocryphal ‘let them eat cake’ comments,” said NPR.

What can be done about this?

The South African government is taking steps to abate the crisis. Officials recently gave Africa’s largest bulk water supplier, Rand Water, an “urgent license to take more water from a key river system that feeds its richest province,” said Bloomberg, with the intention of sending this extra water to Johannesburg. The goal is to help “rebuild reservoir levels.”

Rand Water will be allowed to extract an additional 7 billion cubic feet of water from the river for the next four months, South Africa Water and Sanitation Minister Pemmy Majodina said in a statement. But this is “not a long-term solution to the water supply challenges being experienced.” Officials have pushed for more systemic fixes, including the “removal of illegal connections by the municipalities” and “improved communication between the municipalities and the public.”

Meanwhile, water taps “remain dry across large parts of Johannesburg,” said local newspaper the Daily Maverick. Local leaders have pressed for additional changes, but there has been a “long history of commitments without delivery, and a proliferation of task teams has not inspired confidence,” said a spokesperson for South Africa’s People’s Water Forum. There must be “concrete action that reaches every community, especially the most marginalized.”

“Hundreds of thousands of people” on the city’s margins live in “informal settlements” despite Johannesburg’s wealth, said NPR. While the city is scrambling to get water to people who previously had it, there are others who “have never had running water at all.”

A colourful, traditional Ghanaian smock, once dismissed as outdated, is becoming a symbol of national pride again. The fugu, a distinctive, “structured, poncho-style garment”, also known as batakari, is being worn proudly by Ghanaians, many of them incensed by the online ridiculing of their president for wearing one on a state visit to Zambia, said the BBC.

‘Patriotic symbolism’

The fugu has been made for centuries on traditional looms, and is a powerful symbol of Ghanaian cultural tradition. Its “vibrant, striped patterns” are woven and stitched together by skilled craftsmen “from the Dagomba and Mamprusi tribes”, said the Ghana News Agency. Yet, despite its rich history, it had, in recent years, become seen as “too heavy to wear, and unfashionable” for modern life, better left as a “relic of the past”.

What changed was not the design but the narrative. When President John Dramani Mahama wore a flared, striped fugu on a state visit earlier this month, it “drew mockery from non-Ghanaians on social media”, said Agence France-Presse, with some saying his outfit was “inappropriate for a head of state”.

Since then, many Ghanaians have chosen to rally around the fugu for its “patriotic symbolism”. Weavers have reported a spike in demand. “People are coming specifically for it now,” Accra textile trader William Nene told AFP.

Weaving the future

The fugu is “more than a fashion choice”, said Gilbert Attipoe in Ghana’s Graphic Online. Its “vibrant colours, intricate geometric patterns and occasionally protective amulets” tell the story of its history as “warrior attire” and as ceremonial dress for important social occasions. Its revival is a “reclaiming of self-determination and dignity”, and a reminder to all African nations – who each have their own cultural attire – of the “common struggles and bright shared future that Africans can build together”.

The resurgence of interest in the fugu could have “far-reaching social and economic benefits” for local weavers and traders, said Ghana’s Tourism Minister Abla Dzifa Gomashie. But a “lack of locally grown cotton” means weavers must rely upon imported yarn and, without “increased government investments”, they could struggle to meet the growing demand, said The Associated Press. “Using our hands slows the process and limits our ability to be productive. We need industrial machines,” Abigail Naki Gabor of Ghana’s smock weavers and sellers association, told the news agency.

Pressures on the weavers are only likely to increase: the government has now declared every Wednesday is “Fugu Day”.

A scenario often featured in popular culture and hypothetical discussions has come true and left investigators baffled.

A double murder trial in France has reached a “bizarre legal quagmire” because two of the suspects are identical twins and so have the same DNA, said The Connexion.

Open question

The 33-year-old brothers are among five defendants on trial in Bobigny, a suburb of Paris, accused of a double murder and several attempted killings in 2020. They deny the charges. Although both twins are suspected of conspiring to plot the double murder, the DNA on an assault rifle used in one of the later gun battles could only be from one of them.

Identical twins develop from the same sperm and a single fertilised egg that splits during pregnancy, so they have exactly the same DNA, making forensic identification difficult. A police officer told the court that forensic experts weren’t able to tell which of the brothers had been conclusively implicated. “Only their mother can tell them apart,” said an investigator.

Although advanced genetic testing techniques can sometimes help distinguish between identical twins, experts concluded that the amount of blood available in this case is insufficient, so the estimated €60,000 cost may not be justified.

Adding to the sense of confusion, police said that the twins frequently share clothes and use the same phone numbers and ID documents. So prosecutors are being forced to try other methods to establish who fired the gun, including phone tracing, interviews and wiretapping.

But for now the “crucial question” of who fired the recovered weapon “remains an open one”, said Sky News.

Onerous costs

In 2013, French police investigating a series of rapes in Marseille were similarly stymied after they traced DNA evidence to twins but couldn’t establish which one was responsible.

“It’s a rather rare case for the alleged perpetrators to be identical twins,” chief investigator Emmanuel Kiehl told France 24, and the cost of sufficient tests to distinguish the DNA, estimated to be up to €1 million, was too “onerous”.

A breakthrough came when investigators eventually determined that some victims reported that the attacker had a speech impediment, which matched a condition caused by partial deafness in one of the twins, who eventually confessed to all the counts.

No such breakthrough has occurred in the current case, though. The trial continues, with the court expected to reach a decision in late February.

Minerals are a hot topic in 2026. Lithium, the crucial ingredient in batteries that power smartphones and electric vehicles, is in particular demand. While most of the discussion has been around the potential treasure troves of Greenland or Ukraine, Cornwall is believed to sit on the largest lithium deposits in Europe.

Mining company Cornish Lithium made a “major production breakthrough” last October, said The Telegraph: it produced lithium hydroxide, a raw material required to make lithium-ion batteries. “It is believed to be the first time lithium hydroxide has been produced in Britain outside of a laboratory.”

Cornwall’s ‘roaring future’

If the world is ever to get close to net zero, lithium will be at the centre of it, said The Times. It can store more energy than most elements and is ideal for rechargeable batteries. That means it is playing an “increasingly important role” in the energy system. When “hooked up to a grid”, batteries can “absorb renewable energy when it is abundant and release it when scarce”.

The world has developed a “sudden and ravenous appetite” for lithium. That demand is expected to triple over the next decade as the green transition accelerates, said the International Energy Agency.

“Lithium is now among the most important mined elements on the planet,” said The Guardian. Most is extracted in Australia, the so-called lithium triangle in South America (Chile, Argentina and Bolivia), and China. The latter also “processes and therefore controls a majority of it for use in batteries”.

Cornwall doesn’t compare in scale but it is “probably the largest lithium deposit in Europe”. Cornish Lithium and another company, British Lithium, are “leading the way to tap into it”. And as the race to secure critical minerals intensifies, “there’s renewed enthusiasm for domestic exploration projects for critical minerals”, said Jamie Hinch on The Conversation.

In September, the National Wealth Fund announced a £31 million commitment to Cornish Lithium. And last month, the government released its critical minerals strategy, which could be a “watershed moment” for Cornwall, said Cornwall Live. The promised funding could be a “huge boon for the Cornish economy not seen since the heyday of tin mining”.

‘Supply chain dominated by China’

The “reshoring of mining” back to Britain can mitigate the “decline of employment opportunities” through the loss of industry, said Hinch. Cornish Lithium said it will create more than 300 jobs over the Trelavour Lithium Project’s 20-year operation, and 800 during construction. There is a “tempered optimism” that lithium could “rejuvenate” the county, which has some of the most deprived areas in the UK.

Cornwall’s “mining renaissance” extends beyond lithium, said The Economist. Britain’s last tin mine, South Crofty, near Redruth, has been dormant for nearly 30 years. It is now “being resuscitated by Cornish Metals” and is scheduled to resume operations in 2028, as the only mine in Europe that primarily extracts tin. The Trump administration said this month it was willing to loan up to $225 million (£165 million) to support the reopening, for some of its output in return.

Cornwall’s mineral deposits also present political opportunities, said Politico. Labour MPs are “betting” that local development of lithium mines – not to mention copper, tin and tungsten – will “help them keep their seats” at Westminster.

But China still looms on the horizon, said Politics Home. The superpower “produces more than 50% of 17 of the top 27 critical mineral groups, and refines 90% of the world’s rare earths”. It controls “critical mineral extraction on five different continents”.

Though the UK could initially bypass China by refining lithium “on home soil”, it would still be “entirely dependent on a global supply chain dominated by China”, said The Times. Once lithium has been refined, it needs to be turned into a battery cathode, and “almost 90 per cent of cathodes are made in China”.

But if Britain found a way to circumvent this step, such as piggybacking on “plans for several” commercial cathode facilities in Europe, it could capitalise on the manufacturing of battery cells on its own shores. To that end, processing gigafactories are expected to open in Sunderland and Somerset next year.

Scrolling through TikTok, you may have noticed what appears to be an episode of a TV show with no notable actors, filmed entirely vertically and clocking in at just one minute. That's because entertainment has been moving from the big screen to the small screen in the form of microdramas. These shows are consumed in multiple parts and meant to be viewed on a cell phone. And their growing popularity is creating new opportunities in the entertainment industry.

Pocket pictures

Microdramas originated in China, where they are known as “duanju.” There, they have become a massive success, surpassing $6.9 billion in revenue in 2024. This prompted the U.S. to open its doors to the mini movies, which earned $1.4 billion in revenue in 2025. Microdramas are “perfectly suited for the shorter attention spans of today's online users,” said Hello! magazine. The scripted dramas are “typically broken down into minute-long episodes designed to be watched on smartphones, mirroring the way we consume TikTok and Instagram content.”

Microdramas are similar to soap operas, focusing on common tropes and over-the-top theatrics. Their total duration can be the length of a feature film, but split into 80 parts. The episodes “often end on cliffhangers, making viewers want to binge the whole thing,” said Hello!. A person can come across one episode and then the “next thing you know, a half an hour or two hours went by, and you just watched a whole movie,” said Marc Herrmann, an actor in several microdramas, including “Billionaire CEO’s Secret Obsession” and “My Sugar-Coated Mafia Boss,” to NPR.

While these shorts appear on TikTok and Instagram, platforms like ReelShort and DramaBox are growing in popularity as apps dedicated to microdramas. They can be quite profitable, as while the “first few episodes are typically free to watch,” but “once you want to see more, you’ll have to pay up,” said NPR. This could “cost viewers $10 to $20 a week or up to $80 a month.” Microdramas are cheaper to create, too, banking on “little-known actors, tight budgets and accelerated production timelines to churn out content drawing in millions of viewers and dollars.”

Big business

Microdramas are “sort of the ‘Triple Crown’ of the modern entertainment industry,” said Tomm Polos, the director of creator arts at the University of Southern California, to NBC News. “They’re social-friendly, they’re cost-effective and they’re data-driven. That is what everyone wants.” The potential microdrama profit prompted the Los Angeles City Council to vote to consider a $5 million subsidy for their production. “There are a lot of empty sound stages in Hollywood. There are a lot of empty studio spaces in Hollywood,” Polos said. “It should not surprise anyone if, in the coming quarters or years, those studio spaces get converted to be laboratories for microdramas, and that’s going to really help the economy of Los Angeles.”

Most microdramas are non-union productions, but that may soon change, as one studio in LA is “producing what has been termed one of the first ever SAG microdramas, which features an Oscar-nominated actor,” said Deadline. This could impact the industry, “proving that new formats can deliver top-tier creative work while upholding strong labor standards,” said Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, the national executive director of SAG-AFTRA, to the outlet.

In an Olympic event as fast as downhill skiing or speed skating, the margin between winners and losers can be measured by thousandths of a second.

Careers are “forever altered by that tiny difference”, said NBC News. There is a “baseline expectation” that “every result must be perfect”. And that is “determined by the most important team at the Olympics you don’t know about”: the Games’ timekeepers.

‘Tiny calibrations of a split second’

Swiss watchmaker Omega has been the official timekeeper of every Olympic event for nearly 100 years, initially chosen for the 1932 Los Angeles games as it was the only watch brand capable of providing accurate timing to the nearest tenth of a second.

The company dispatched one “intrepid watchmaker” from its Swiss headquarters with 30 high-precision stopwatches in his suitcase, said The Times. “Each night he would take the stopwatches back to his hotel room and recalibrate them, before handing them back to race officials the next morning.”

Omega now provides the timing for all 116 events, including (for the first time this year) ski mountaineering. The intervening years have, of course, seen “extraordinary technical developments”. Omega arrived in Paris for the 2024 Summer Games with “the most advanced tech it has ever delivered”: 350 tonnes of equipment, including 200km of cables, hundreds of scoreboards, and 550 professional timekeepers. The days of a ribbon breaking across a winning runner’s chest are “long gone”. World records are now regularly broken; margins of winning come down to “tiny calibrations of a split second”.

No margin for error

“We’ve come quite a long way since one watchmaker travelled” from Bienne, said Forbes. Planning for the current Milano-Cortina Games began three years ago, with more than 300 timekeepers and 130 tons of equipment dedicated to the Games, including high-speed cameras that can capture up to 40,000 digital images per second. This information can then be fed into AI models specifically programmed for each sport to produce graphic recreations of every movement. Judges have access to that data instantly – and this year, for the first time, so will viewers.

“For a person who is following action sports not on TV every weekend but once every four years, it’s very difficult to understand the differences in performances,” said Alain Zobrist, chief executive of Omega Timing. We are “trying to explain where these differences are and how these differences may impact the judging.”

But the final call is still human: an operator looks at a monitor with footage from the finish-line cameras, and “manually places a cursor where the athlete crosses the finish”, said NBC News.

“What you cannot learn is the pressure that comes with it when you operate it,” said Zobrist. “We take a lot of pride doing it, but it also humbles us a lot.” Billions of people are watching and waiting for the results to appear. An operator knows they’re “not allowed” to make mistakes; “as soon as you push that enter button, the result is released and public”.

Olympic time-keeping has grown so complex that preparations are well underway for the return of the games to Los Angeles in 2028. The only device still used that hasn’t changed since 1932? “A metal bell is still rung by hand to mark a race’s last lap.”

Switzerland will hold a referendum on capping its population at 10 million – a move that could damage its economy and endanger lucrative agreements with the EU.

Swiss citizens will vote in June on the radical proposal put forward by the far-right Swiss People’s Party, the government has confirmed. Switzerland’s permanent population currently stands at 9.1 million, having risen in recent years as foreign-born workers are drawn in by its high wages and good quality of life. The SVP, now the country’s largest political party, claims the “population explosion” has pushed public services to breaking point.

‘Sustainability’ initiative

Switzerland has one of the highest proportions of foreign-born residents in Europe: 27%, according to government figures. Since 2000, its population has grown by about 25%, faster than most neighbouring countries. Housing supply has struggled to keep pace, causing spiralling rents and shortages that have sharpened unease about immigration.

For years, the SVP has “sought to curb a rise in migration into the rich Alpine country”, said The Washington Post – “with mixed results”. The party, which has finished first in every election since 1999, has repeatedly put forward hardline proposals, such as deporting any foreigner convicted of even a minor offence. But, it said, after an “influx of over 180,000 people in a single year, action must finally be taken”.

Under Switzerland’s system of direct democracy, citizen-proposed initiatives that gather 100,000 signatures within 18 months are put to a national vote. Such initiatives have long been a favoured tool of the SVP, which says the “No to a 10 million Switzerland” initiative is about the country’s “sustainability”. Backers argue that a population cap would “help protect the environment, natural resources, infrastructure and the social safety net”, said The Washington Post.

If passed, the government would be forced to act if the population exceeds 9.5 million before 2050. It would have to “refuse entry to newcomers”, said CNN, “including asylum seekers and the families of foreign residents”. If the population exceeds 10 million, the government would have “to end its free-movement agreement” with the EU, Switzerland’s largest trading partner.

Frustration at housing shortages

The proposal is “strongly opposed by both chambers of parliament”, said The Guardian, as well as “the business and financial services community”. Switzerland benefits from its participation in Europe’s Schengen zone of visa-free travel. Any resident population cap would “threaten key agreements with the EU” and could “cripple the economy”. Many Swiss-based multinationals, such as Nestlé and Roche, rely on foreign-born workers.

But “domestic support for the vote is high”, said the Financial Times. A recent poll by research group LeeWas found that 48% of respondents support the cap. As in several European nations, frustration over housing shortages is fuelling support for far-right parties that champion stricter migration controls.

Critics point out that the initiative “imposes a hard cap”, rather than setting out a “detailed quota or migration-management system”. This would mean “a near-complete stop on additional workforce immigration” once the threshold is reached.

It could “derail” last year’s “carefully negotiated new deal between Bern and Brussels” to keep Switzerland’s access to the EU’s single market, and risk Switzerland’s place in the Schengen. It is, said business lobby group Economiesuisse, a “chaos initiative”.

Most Americans may not expect a robot to perform their surgery, but AI-powered surgical tools are becoming more ubiquitous in operating rooms. While these tools are only used to assist human surgeons during operations and don’t perform surgery themselves, recent investigations, along with several lawsuits, are causing some medical experts to reconsider the use of AI in hospitals.

What kind of surgical tools are powered by AI?

At least 1,357 AI-integrated medical devices are “now authorized by the FDA — double the number it had allowed through 2022,” said Reuters as part of an investigation into AI-assisted surgery. One of the most notable is the TruDi Navigation System, a device manufactured by Johnson & Johnson that uses a “machine-learning algorithm to assist ear, nose and throat specialists in surgeries.” Other AI-assisted devices are designed for surgeries on other parts of the body.

Many of these tools address the “area of vision enhancement,” said Forbes. Traditional laparoscopic surgery “presents surgeons with significant challenges: smoke obscures the surgical field, two-dimensional images make depth perception difficult and critical anatomical structures can be hard to distinguish.” AI surgical tools can eliminate these obstacles and provide surgeons with “crystal-clear views of the operative field.”

What has the result been?

There has been an influx of allegations and lawsuits against various AI tools, many of which claim these tools actively harmed patients. Several of these involve the TruDi tool, as the FDA has “received unconfirmed reports of at least 100 malfunctions and adverse events” related to the device’s AI, said Reuters. Many of the alleged errors occurred when the AI “misinformed surgeons about the location of their instruments while they were using them inside patients’ heads.”

In one case, this reportedly led to cerebrospinal fluid leaking from a patient’s nose, while in another case, a surgeon “mistakenly punctured the base of a patient’s skull,” said Reuters. Two other cases allegedly led to patients suffering strokes after major arteries were accidentally injured; in at least one of these cases, the plaintiff said the TruDi’s AI “misled” the surgeon, causing him to “injure a carotid artery, leading to a blood clot and eventually a stroke,” said Futurism.

FDA reports on malfunctioning devices “aren’t intended to determine causes of medical mishaps, so it’s not clear what role AI may have played in these events,” said Reuters. But TruDi is not the only AI-assisted medical device that allegedly has performance issues. One machine that analyzes prenatal images using AI, the Sonio Detect, has been “accused of using a faulty algorithm” that “misidentifies fetal structures and body parts,” said Tom’s Hardware. And Medtronic, a company that manufactures AI-assisted heart monitors, has faced allegations that its monitors “failed to recognize abnormal rhythms or pauses in patients.”

Overall, at least 60 AI-assisted medical devices have been linked to 182 product recalls by the FDA, according to research published in JAMA Health Forum. At least 43% of these recalls “occurred within the first 12 months” of the device’s FDA approval, said JAMA. This suggests that the FDA’s approval process “may overlook early performance failures of AI technologies.” But there is hope that the issue can be fixed, as shoring up “premarket clinical testing requirements and postmarket surveillance measures may improve identification and reduction of device errors.”

A group of engineers and scientists are planning to build a 50-mile underwater barrier around the melting “Doomsday glacier” in a bid to stop it collapsing into the ocean, triggering a disastrous rise in sea levels.

They can’t stop the glacier melting but they hope to “slow the rate of ice loss, buying time as global emissions reductions take effect”, said Euronews.

‘Almost certainty’ of collapse

Thwaites Glacier, on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, covers a vast area roughly the size of Great Britain and has earned its “Doomsday” nickname because it is so big and melting so fast. Its ice loss already accounts for about 4% of the annual rise in sea levels globally. “The glacier holds enough ice to raise global sea levels by around 65cm if it collapses completely,” said Interesting Engineering. To put that in context, “each centimetre of sea level rise exposes an estimated six million people worldwide to coastal flooding”.

Scientists aren’t agreed about how long it would take for Thwaites to collapse entirely – or indeed if it actually would any time soon. In a 2023 study published in The Cryosphere, glaciologists concluded that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet glaciers had yet to enter the phase of “irreversible retreat” that leads to total collapse. But it seems more and more likely that this will one day happen: we have gone from a stage of “we don’t know” to “an almost certainty” that it will, study co-author Hilmar Gudmundsson, of Northumbria University, told The New York Times.

Other scientists believe there is still time to “protect the glacier from oblivion”, if we can succeed in “cutting the carbon emissions that are driving climate change”, said the paper. But, with fossil-fuel emissions soaring to record levels in 2025, “nations are not exactly on track to make this happen”. Enter the Seabed Anchored Curtain Project.

‘Major technical challenges’

The project involves the construction of a flexible underwater barrier, anchored into the seabed. It would be 152m tall and stretch roughly 50 miles across key parts of the seabed in front of Thwaites Glacier. The aim is to block warmer ocean currents from reaching under the glacier’s fringing shelves, and causing the ice to melt.

But there are “major technical challenges”, said Interesting Engineering. The barrier would “need to survive extreme Antarctic conditions, deep water pressure, moving ice, and long-term ocean exposure”. And it could take many years “before any full-scale deployment is possible”.

The multinational project team – from Cambridge University, the University of Chicago, New York University, Dartmouth College, Germany’s Alfred Wegener Institute, Norway’s NIVA research institute, UK engineering firm Aker Solutions and the University of Lapland’s Arctic Centre – have worked out a roadmap that includes three years of research to choose and design materials, and test the technology.

The curtain project used to be a “fringe idea”, confined to academic articles, said The Atlantic. This kind of “geoengineering” project to “address the symptoms of climate change”, rather than its causes, “was a bête noire in the glaciology community”. But now more and more scientists are realising that such “targeted interventions” are “inevitable”.

People do need to “get over” the notion that “there’s a clean exit on climate change”, said David Holland, a climate scientist working on the project. What needs to be decided now is “what is the least brutal outcome for the world”.

Free-living amoebas, which are single-celled organisms that do not require a host to live, pose a dangerous threat to humans. They are prevalent in both natural water sources and drinking water systems. They are also notoriously difficult to kill and can harbor other pathogens. More research needs to be done to effectively control amoebic disease spread.

A Trojan horse

Amoebas’ “widespread presence in both natural and engineered environments poses significant exposure risks through contaminated water sources, recreational water activities and drinking water systems,” said a paper published in the journal Biocontaminant. While most species are harmless, there is a subset that can have serious public health consequences, like Naegleria fowleri, the brain-eating amoeba.

The brain-eating amoeba is not the only one to be worried about. Others can “cause painful eye infections, particularly in contact lens users, skin lesions in people with weakened immune systems and rare but serious systemic infections affecting organs such as the lungs, liver and kidneys,” Manal Mohammed, a senior lecturer of medical microbiology at the University of Westminster, said at The Conversation. The level of human exposure to amoebas is “likely substantially underestimated,” said the study, as “amoebic infections are prone to clinical misdiagnosis as other diseases.”

Free-living amoebas have the “ability to change shape and move using temporary arm-like extensions called pseudopodia,” or “false feet,” Mohammed said. This allows them to thrive in even the most inhospitable of environments, including extremely high temperatures and in the presence of strong cleaning chemicals like chlorine. Along with their resilience, amoebas “act as hidden carriers for other harmful microbes,” said a release about the paper. “By sheltering bacteria and viruses inside their cells, amoebae can protect these pathogens from disinfection and help them persist and spread in drinking water systems.” This is known as the Trojan horse effect, and it can contribute to the prevalence of antibiotic resistance.

Deep water

Unfortunately, “most water systems are not routinely checked for free-living amoebas,” said Mohammed. Since they can be rare, and may “hide in biofilms or sediments,” they “require specialized tests to detect, making routine monitoring expensive and technically challenging.” Generally, water testing “relies on proper chlorination, maintaining disinfectant levels and flushing systems regularly,” which can help but does not guarantee the removal of amoeba. There is a lack of knowledge on how to deal with amoebas, making it “challenging to establish science-based regulatory standards for water treatment that are guaranteed to be effective against all threatening species,” said the study.

The problem is also likely to worsen because of climate change. The rising temperatures are “expanding the geographic range of heat-loving amoebae into regions where they were previously rare,” said the release. Mitigating the spread “requires comprehensive strategies combining enhanced surveillance, rapid diagnostics and targeted environmental interventions,” said the study. There should also be more public awareness about the risk of amoebic infections, especially in natural bodies of water.

“Amoebae are not just a medical issue or an environmental issue,” Longfei Shu, the author of the study, said in the release. “They sit at the intersection of both, and addressing them requires integrated solutions that protect public health at its source.”

After more than 100 days on the road, a party of Buddhist monks have arrived in Washington, completing their 2,300-mile “walk for peace” across the United States.

The group, which set off from a temple near Fort Worth, Texas in late October, numbered around two dozen and included monks from Thailand, Vietnam, France, Burma and Sri Lanka. They have amassed more than five million followers across Facebook, Instagram and TikTok over the course of their journey, said Rolling Stone.

The monks plan to use their visit to the capital to petition for Vesak – the Buddha’s birthday – to be recognised as a national holiday, said the BBC. But they said on Dhammacetiya, their official website, that they were not marching with a political agenda or to “force peace upon the world, but to help nurture it, one awakened heart at a time”.

‘Hope and encouragement’

The journey has “not been easy”, said The New York Times. The southern states have experienced an “unusually harsh” winter. Faced with snow and ice, the walkers wore scarves and coats over their orange robes and those walking barefoot were forced to temporarily don boots. To make matters worse, before the group had even left Texas, a truck driver accidentally crashed into one of the support vehicles, which in turn struck two of the monks, one of whom was so severely injured he required a leg amputation.

Along the way, the monks ate and slept at temples, churches, universities and community centres, bedding down in sleeping bags on the floor or outdoors in tents. Two members of the group practised “dhutanga”, said The Guardian, a Buddhist form of asceticism in which devotees never lie down, even to sleep. Instead, they “sit down in a meditation position, and they meditate all night” to “replenish their energy”.

At every stage, crowds have “swarmed” around the monks, said The New York Times. These supporters have “transcended racial, religious, economic, educational and geographic lines”, sharing a common belief that the monks were providing “comfort”, “hope and encouragement” that “otherwise seemed to be in short supply” in a politically polarised nation.

Thousands of well-wishers followed the journey remotely via online trackers, while the monks’ dog, Aloka, whose name means “light” in Sanskrit, has “become a celebrity in his own right”, recognisable for the “heart-shaped mark on his forehead”.

End of the road

While “millions are finding hope in their journey”, said Rolling Stone, there has been “pushback” at multiple stages during the walk. Around “a dozen Christian protesters” have trailed the walkers, bearing signs reading “Jesus Saves” in opposition to what they see as “a religious movement, promoting Buddhism”.

And “although the monks’ walk is not a direct commentary on politics, it coincides with a sense of unease spreading across the country”, which has also generated some political resistance. In Georgia and South Carolina, protesters carried placards and megaphones, with some signs “resembling Maga flags”.

But the predominant response has been one of welcome, support and encouragement. “My hope is, when this walk ends, the people we met will continue practising mindfulness and find peace,” said the group’s leader, the Venerable Bhikkhu Pannakara.

Tuesday marked the final day of walking, taking the total number of days to 108, “a sacred number in Buddhism, Hinduism and Jainism”, said NPR. “It represents spiritual completion, cosmic order and the wholeness of existence.”

This won’t quite be the end of their journey, however. After a visit to the state capitol building in Annapolis, Maryland, the monks will take a bus back to Fort Worth, and then “will walk together again”, although this time only for six miles, to return to “the temple where their trip began”.

For thousands of years, humans have trained pigeons to race, deliver messages and “spy behind enemy lines”, said Bloomberg. “What would happen if people could bypass the training and steer their bird brains instead?”

A Russian neurotechnology company linked to Vladimir Putin’s daughter is claiming to do just that, said The Times. Scientists at Neiry have reportedly been implanting computer chips into the birds’ brains and strapping video cameras to their chests, trying to transform them into “living drones”.

There has been “no independent scientific verification” of the company’s claims – but in theory, the birds could be “adapted for military surveillance”.

Bio-drones

Under the project, codenamed PJN-1, neural chips are reportedly implanted into the birds’ brains, with flight paths controlled by remote operators. The Moscow-based company claims the birds can be steered by “stimulating their brains with electrodes to make them turn left or right”, said the paper.

Pigeons outperform traditional drones because animals “do not require battery swaps or frequent landings”, according to Neiry. They can fly up to 400km a day without a break, and can reach areas where drones would be restricted, the company says.

“Our current focus is pigeons, but different species may be used depending on the environment or payload,” said Alexander Panov, founder and chief executive. “For transporting heavier payloads we plan to use ravens.”

And there are other advantages to these bird-brained “bio-drones”, said Bloomberg. Drones may be “easier to control, can carry bigger loads and don’t need to eat or poop”. But birds are better suited to covert surveillance. A person is far more likely to notice a drone overhead than “one more pigeon flapping around”.

Remote-controlled assassins?

There’s plenty of precedent in attempts to control the minds of animals for military purposes. During the Cold War, the CIA tried to turn dogs into “remote-controlled canine assassins”, said The Times. It also inserted a microphone into a cat’s ear and a radio transmitter into its skull, “hoping to use it as a device to spy” on the Soviets.

Several countries, including China and the US, have also explored controlling birds through neural implants. Last year Chinese scientists “created cyborg bees” with brain controllers to direct their flight, said The Telegraph. And in January, Neiry unveiled “what it claimed was the world’s first rat connected to AI, allowing it to access online information and answer questions via a keyboard”.

Neiry says the birds are intended for peaceful purposes, to help with search and rescue operations and to monitor infrastructure. “We make every effort to ensure that our bio-drones are used exclusively for civilian purposes, with no concealed or secondary use,” the company said in a statement.

But experts warn the technology could “easily be adapted for military use”, said the paper. Russia already sends trained dolphins to guard its Black Sea naval base, and has reportedly “mounted Starlink terminals on horses to extend internet coverage along the front line”.

An investigation by T-Invariant, an independent anti-war outlet, found that Neiry had received about one billion roubles (almost £10 million) in funding, “much of it from Kremlin-linked sources”. The company has received funding “on a scale Russian neuroscience has never seen”, one neurologist told the outlet.

Brain implant technology has also advanced rapidly in recent years. Several companies are developing neural chips for humans to treat diseases and improve cognitive capabilities. Plus Russia has been expanding its drone capabilities in the war against Ukraine – a war keenly supported by Panov. He has “lamented what he called the ‘gentle style’ of Russia’s so-called ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine”, said The Telegraph. He has also described his “ultimate ambition” of creating the next human species after Homo sapiens: so-called Homo superior.

Pie and mash shops have been “pushed to the brink of extinction” in recent years, as gentrification sent Londoners out of the East End – taking the traditional Cockney cuisine with them, said Demi Perera in The New York Times.

But could the push to give pie and mash special protected status, and a younger generation’s renewed interest in jellied eels, spell a revival of the capital’s beleaguered eateries?

‘An acquired taste’

“Pie and mash is an integral part of Cockney culture,” said Perera in The New York Times. The first dedicated shop opened in the mid-19th century as shipping docks began popping up in east London, and workers needed “quick, cheap, warm meals”. To begin with, the pies were stuffed with eels (which were easy to source from the River Thames) but mincemeat fillings soon grew in popularity, relegating jellied eels to a side dish. The meal has remained intact ever since: “a handmade minced beef pie served with mashed potato scraped onto the side of a plate with a well of parsley sauce, known as liquor, poured into the middle”.

But London’s pie and mash shops have been “dwindling” in recent years, said The Economist. There are now fewer than 40 in the capital – down from almost 300 in the mid 1800s. Soaring rents and property prices have “pushed” many of the locals who once lived in neighbourhoods like Shoreditch and Hackney out to nearby counties like Essex and Kent. Food preferences are also shifting: “Jellied eels are an acquired taste.” For the same price as a pie and mash, young people are choosing to spend their lunch money in chains like Greggs and Pret a Manger.

Last year, the “iconic” family-run Harringtons Eel and Pie House in Tooting, south London, shuttered its doors after 116 years on the high street, said Freya Parsons in The Sun. In an “emotional” post on social media, the shop’s owner said the “very upsetting” decision had been made to sell the property and “move forward”.

“We have to save London’s pie and mash,” said Fat Tony in The Standard. It’s one of the capital’s “important” institutions, “as famous as Tower Bridge”, and jellied eels are “East End delicacies that you can’t find anywhere else”. He said he found it “bizarre” that people would rather go to Pret than enjoy the traditional “quintessentially London” dish. “It’s up to us to keep it alive.”

A new homeland

There are encouraging signs that pie and mash is “making a surprise comeback”, said Jonathan Thompson in The Washington Post. A younger generation is unearthing the “delights of minced beef pies and mashed potato, served with lashings of a Kermit-green parsley sauce”. And David Beckham celebrated his knighthood last year by taking his mum Sandra to a pie shop for a bowl of jellied eels. There has even been a “push in parliament”, led by Conservative MP Richard Holden, for traditional pie and mash to receive protected status like Scottish salmon and Welsh lamb.

London’s “elite restaurants” are keen to cash in on the buzz. The Wolseley in Mayfair added “the ultimate Cockney classic” to its menu last year to celebrate British Pie Week, served with a “twist of chilli vinegar”, priced at £24.50, “roughly four times the price” of an average pie shop. Going one step further, the five-star Rosewood Hotel has opened a dedicated “Pie Room” where “waiters in jaunty tartan trousers and bow ties serve braised-beef pies with bone marrow and an optional champagne pairing for a whopping £36”. This is a “far cry” from the origins of the “cheap, nourishing food”. Tony Lane, owner of Tony’s Pie & Mash in Waltham Abbey, isn’t impressed. “They’re taking the piss, to be honest”, he told the publication.

The pie and mash scene is “alive” and thriving in Essex, said Tomé Morrissy-Swan in The Guardian. New shops are cropping up everywhere from Basildon to Chelmsford, and “diners of all ages are tucking into pies”. It seems “London’s original fast food is finding a new homeland”.

Six travel and mountain rescue executives have been arrested and accused of conducting fake rescues on Nepal’s high mountains to scam millions of dollars from insurance companies.

The arrests come as the South Asian nation tries to strengthen its economy by boosting the number of tourists climbing and trekking in its mountainous provinces.

Rescue racket 

Every year, thousands of climbers travel to Nepal to “scale the highest Himalayan mountains”, and tens of thousands more arrive to “hike the mountain trails” that lead up to “the base camps of these high peaks”, said The Associated Press.
The terrain, and the weather, can be unforgiving and, each year, several climbers die and hundreds are rescued, “suffering from extreme exhaustion, altitude sickness or other medical issues”. With “few roads and limited medical facilities” in the mountains, rescuers often have to “charter expensive helicopter flights” to take patients to hospitals in Kathmandu.

This is where the trouble begins. In a series of insurance scams worth a total of $20 million (£14.6 million), tour operators and rescue services have been faking documents and submitting false claims for medical emergencies that involved expensive helicopter evacuations from remote trekking areas. This large-scale fraud has “badly tarnished Nepal’s image as a tourist destination”, said The Kathmandu Post.

There were similar problems in 2018 but the government said it had clamped down on the “fake rescue racket” by eliminating all “intermediaries” involved in arranging emergency evacuation services for trekkers and mountaineers. Ministers also made tour operators legally responsible for their clients from the start to the end of a trip.

Fabricated invoices

But, eight years on, the fake rescue scams haven’t stopped; in fact they’ve grown, according to Nepal Police. Its Central Investigation Bureau arrested six people from three separate travel and mountain rescue operators, accusing them of submitting fake but successful claims for close to $20 million between 2022 and 2025. All six are Nepali nationals.

The fake documents included manipulated passenger and cargo manifests for helicopter rescue flights, and fabricated or altered medical invoices and hospital reports. And the numbers are high: 171 of the 1,248 rescues claimed by one company were fake, leading to unjustified payouts of more than $10 million (£7.3 million). Another company is accused of fabricating 75 of 471 claimed rescues, and fraudulently claiming $8 million (£5.8 million), while a third is accused of making 71 fake claims with payouts totalling over $1 million (£741,000).

Meanwhile, Nepal is busy boosting its tourist climbing sector. It has made 97 of its Himalayan mountains free to climb for the next two years, in a bid to encourage climbers to its more remote areas, generating jobs and income for locals. It’s not clear if there are plans to improve infrastructure in these areas or if the local communities will be able to cope with an influx of climbers.

It may be time to hit the road in pursuit of scientific research. Millions of animals are struck by vehicles every year and killed as a result. These accidents have even pushed some species to extinction. While roadkill is never pleasant, these animals could bring an opportunity to conduct scientific research more ethically.

Road to discovery

Roadkill could be a “valuable source of animals for study that does not require and could even replace the use of live wildlife,” said a study published in the journal Biology Letters. Researchers identified approximately 117 different uses for roadkill across various scientific projects. “We found examples of successfully using roadkill to map species distributions, monitor disease and environmental pollution, study diets, track invasive species, supply museum collections and even discover species previously unknown to science,” said Christa Beckmann, the lead author of the study, in a statement.

One of the most common uses for roadkill is to identify and determine the populations of species in an area. Many species are “hard to see,” Beckmann said to Science. “You don’t just trip across them as you’re walking. So finding dead animals on the road might actually be an easier way to quantify the presence of these animals in the habitat.” Several lizard and rodent species were “first discovered as roadkill, while deer carcasses have been used as bait to attract eagles at the center of research,” said AAP. In another case, a “paleontologist took photographs of animals’ remains as they were repeatedly run over to teach students about the process of fossilization.”

The road less traveled

A big advantage of using roadkill for research is that it is “highly ethical,” said the study. It could be used as an alternative to invasive sampling methods. “If you want to take a genetic sample, you don’t need to trap live animals or handle them, both of which can cause stress,” said Beckmann. “You can just drive along the road and use samples of roadkill.” It aligns with the global guidelines for animal research known as the 3Rs: refinement, replacement and reduction. These tenets aim to reduce the number of animals needed for research, along with reducing suffering and protecting population numbers.

Researchers still need permits to collect and handle dead animals from the road because of potential biohazard and traffic risks. The animals can “harbor disease that is transmissible to humans,” which requires protective gear, said the study. In addition, it could be dangerous to collect the animals and “necessary precautions should be taken when collecting roadkill on and around roads and highways, such as wearing reflective clothing and being mindful of traffic.”

In a car-centric society, roadkill is an unfortunate side effect. Some species are even being “driven toward extinction because of traffic,” said Scientific American. “Vehicles continue to be overlooked environmental forces that are likely to decimate more and more animal populations.” Despite this, said Beckmann, “using these losses wisely could help drive scientific discovery and conservation forward, rather than letting valuable information decompose by the roadside.”

Located around Yokohama train station, there is an “especially unique watering hole”, specifically designed for customers who are contemplating quitting their jobs, said Japan Today.

At Tenshoku Sodan Bar, the bartenders are all trained counsellors, who offer impartial advice which you wouldn’t find from high-pressured friends and family, or unrelenting bosses who demand round-the-clock loyalty.

Though “job-hoppers” are still much less frequent in Japan than in Western countries, they are “on the rise”, said The Economist. The concept of a one-company-for-life worker – or “salaryman” – is “eroding”, as younger generations have “started to question this way of working”.

‘Resignation angst’

One “niche but increasingly popular” industry which helps workers break out from the “salaryman” cycle is “proxy quitters”, said The Washington Post. For a fee of up to ¥50,000 (£235), dissatisfied employees can hire someone to quit their job for them.

The service has boomed since the pandemic, with employees’ reasons including that they have been “bullied or harassed at work”, lack the nerve to confront their boss, or simply don’t know how to quit, as it is so rarely done. Nearly one in 10 Japanese companies have “received resignations via proxy quitters”, according to a 2024 survey by Tokyo Shoko Research.

This rise in proxy quitters has revealed a “darker side of Japan’s work culture” to the rest of the world, said CNA. Bosses often have “disproportionate power over employees”, which leads to the expectation of “long hours and unpaid overtime”. Workers are bound by the concept of “messhi hoko” – or “self-sacrifice for the public good” – which is “ingrained” in the Japanese working culture. The expectation to prioritise company needs over personal ones is often cited as one of the culprits for Japan’s declining birth rate. At its most extreme, it can “even be fatal”: the term “karoshi” refers to the phenomenon of “death by overwork”.

Proxy quitting services have emerged as a “direct answer” to these “intricacies of Japanese tradition and social conventions”, but their legality operates in a “grey area” and some employers argue they are “exceeding their authority”, said Leo Lewis in the FT. Even without legal challenges, however, the industry could peter out on its own. Predicated on “resignation angst” and a rigid workplace hierarchy, as office culture evolves, “demand will evaporate”.

Increased ‘leverage’

Evidence suggests that more and more people are defying traditional taboos and choosing to switch jobs, said The Japan Times. According to government data, around 940,000 people switched from one full-time employment to another in 2023, compared with 750,000 in 2018.

Changes in demographics are now working to young people’s favour, said The Washington Post. With a falling birth rate, “rapidly aging” population and “shrinking” workforce, employees wield considerably more leverage. Younger generations are less accepting of the excessively long days which are a “hallmark of Japanese corporate culture”. What was once the “revolutionary idea” of quitting for better terms is now a much more frequent possibility.

The numbers support this, said CNA. In the annual survey undertaken by the Tokyo Chamber of Commerce and Industry, 26.4% of young employees said they would “change jobs if given the chance”, while 7.6% planned to be self-employed in future.

Younger workers are also now more likely to claim the benefits which their employers are legally obliged to provide, said The Economist. “The share of men taking paternity leave has jumped from 2% of those eligible a decade ago to 30% in 2023.” More labour fluidity has caused Japan’s rigid payment structures to loosen, with salaries catching up with the rest of the world due to workforce demands. Though employers may be bracing for the impact of an influx of young, empowered workers, it could also “inject dynamism into Japan’s ossified institutions”.

Scientists are putting the pedal to the metal to develop new antibiotics. Metal-based drugs can open a new world of medicine, especially as antimicrobial resistance is growing. Researchers have also found a way to create and test these metal compounds much faster than before through the use of robots.

Metallic medicine

Robotic chemistry can be used to produce and test metal-based antibiotics, according to a study published in the journal Nature Communications. Most modern antibiotics are organic or carbon-based and tend to interact with bacteria in predictable ways. However, metal-containing compounds have a unique geometry that “allows them to interact with bacteria in completely different ways, potentially overcoming the resistance mechanisms that defeat current drugs,” said a release about the study.

Researchers used robots and “click chemistry,” a “method where two molecular components are ‘bolted’ together efficiently,” to produce over 600 compounds, said the release. “We opted to use liquid-handling robots to do the chemistry because it’s just combining different reagents in the right ratios," said Angelo Frei, the lead author of the study, to Live Science. This method allowed for the rapid testing of the compounds, turning months of work into just days, though careful checks were still required.

An iridium metal complex was specifically identified as a promising antibiotic drug. It “demonstrated high effectiveness against bacteria, including strains similar to the deadly MRSA (Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus), while displaying low toxicity to human cells,” said the release. The compound was “about 50 to 100 times more active against bacteria than it was toxic to human cells,” a difference that is “vital to ensure that the complex is simultaneously effective in treating an infection but safe to use on human tissues,” said Live Science.

Revved-up research

The findings come at a time when antibiotic resistance is becoming more of a danger. “The pipeline for new antibiotics has been running dry for decades,” Frei said in the release. “Traditional screening methods are slow and the pharmaceutical industry has largely withdrawn from this space due to low returns on investment. We have to think differently.” Different metal compositions “can hit bacteria in several ways, which matters when single-target drugs stop working,” said Earth.com. A metal center “can change its charge and grip key bacterial proteins, which can stall processes needed for growth.”

There has been a “misconception that metal-based drugs are inherently toxic,” said the release. However, “metal complexes actually have a higher ‘hit rate’ for being antibacterial without being toxic compared to standard organic molecules.” Still, because bacteria evolve quickly, there is a risk of resistance developing to these compounds over time. The good news is that robotic chemistry can significantly speed up research. “The iridium compound we discovered is exciting, but the real breakthrough is the speed at which we found it,” Frei said. “This approach could be the key to avoiding a future where routine infections become fatal again.” The method could also be used beyond antibiotics and help further several areas of biomedical research.

Poisoned apples may sound like the stuff of fairytales, but one of Europe’s favourite fruit might warrant a real-life health warning as environmental groups raise the alarm over toxic pesticide residues.

Pesticide Action Network (Pan) Europe, a coalition of NGOs, analysed apples bought in 13 European countries. It found residue from multiple pesticides – so-called “pesticide cocktails” – in 85% of apples.

In 71% of cases, the apples contained at least one residue of pesticides classed “among the most hazardous in the EU”, Pan Europe said.

The cocktail effect

Apples are the most widely grown fruit in Europe and “are also among the most heavily treated”, said Agence France-Presse.

Most of the pesticides employed by farmers target apple scab, “the main fungal threat to orchards”. The EU permits pesticide residue up to a certain level – but the Pan Europe research focused on the “cocktail effect”: exposure to several pesticides in one product.

The study, conducted last September, revealed that 64% of apple samples contained at least one residue of PFAS pesticides, also known as “forever chemicals”. Fludioxonil – a chemical toxic to human livers and kidneys – was found in nearly 40% of samples. “It should have been banned, but EU member states have been blocking this for a year now,” Pan Europe said in a statement.

Most residues also exceeded the stricter limits of pesticide levels for children under three. If the apples were sold as processed baby food, 93% of them would be banned.

A growing risk

The “damning report” criticised the EU’s risk assessment procedure, which assesses pesticides individually, or “in silos”, and disregards the “cocktail” effect, said Euronews.

“The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) was tasked 20 years ago to develop a methodology to regulate the cocktail effects of pesticides, but they still do not fulfil this legal obligation,” said Gergely Simon, a campaigner at Pan Europe. “Young parents are not aware that feeding their children with fresh conventional fruits or vegetables strongly increases their exposure to pesticides, sometimes more than 600 times.”

Residue levels are also rising. Between 2012 and 2022, the average pesticide residue levels in the top 10 fruits consumed by children rose by 17%, a Foodwatch Netherlands study found.

The European Commission and EFSA have been working since 2021 to “expand cumulative risk assessments to more pesticide groups”, said Euronews. But in 2025, the EU proposed changes that would “weaken pesticide regulation”. Now, with rules to address pesticide cocktails “in limbo”, campaign groups are urging the bloc to “speed up”.

There have been two confirmed cases of Nipah virus in a hospital in West Bengal, India. Close to 200 people were also exposed to the infection. This has sparked concern across Asia, as the virus is extremely contagious. Several Asian countries have now instituted Covid-era airport screenings to monitor the spread of infection for which there’s currently no vaccine or cure.

From bat to human

This zoonotic infection originates from direct contact with infected animals — mainly flying fox bats and pigs — or their contaminated tissues and secretions. The disease can spread easily from person-to-person through contact with bodily fluids and cause minor to severe infections with a fatality rate of between 40% and 70%.

Those infected are “typically sick for 3 to 14 days with fever, headache, cough, sore throat and difficulty breathing,” said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In more severe cases, people may experience “brain swelling (or encephalitis), where severe symptoms can include confusion, drowsiness and seizures,” which can lead to coma in 24 to 48 hours. Symptoms may appear anywhere from four to 14 days after infection.

While this virus is making headlines now, Nipah was first discovered in Malaysia in 1999. Since then, outbreaks have “occurred almost annually in Asia, particularly in Bangladesh and India,” between December and April, said The Washington Post.

But the current outbreak is West Bengal’s first since 2007. This represents a “return of Nipah to this area after a long gap, which is concerning from a surveillance standpoint,” Lauren Sauer, the director of the Special Pathogen Research Network at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, said to the Post. A total of 196 contacts of the infected were quarantined and tested negative for the virus.

The blueprint

While no official cases have been identified outside of India, Asian countries, including China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Nepal and Thailand, have taken preventative measures. Officials have “increased cleaning and disease-control preparedness at Phuket International Airport,” said The Independent. Other airports are also performing “health declarations, temperature checks and visual monitoring for arriving passengers,” said The Associated Press.

Many of these measures were established during the Covid-19 pandemic. When scientists were “racing to find the origins of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, the first Nipah outbreak was viewed as a case study in zoonotic disease spillover from animals to humans,” said the Post.

India has also “ensured timely containment of the cases” through “enhanced surveillance, laboratory testing and field investigations,” said the Indian Ministry of Health in a statement. Because there’s no preventive or curative medicine, avoiding infection is the best course of action.

If you have traveled or live in an area with an outbreak, wash your hands regularly with soap and water and avoid contact with items that could be contaminated by flying fox bats or pigs. Also avoid the bodily fluids of anyone who has come in contact with the virus.

“Work is ongoing to establish a global platform for countries to report genome sequencing of detected cases,” Singapore’s Communicable Diseases Agency said in a statement. Most of the more recent Nipah outbreaks were found in Kerala, India. In 2018, at least 17 people were killed by the virus.

A new high-resolution map of distant galaxies may finally help scientists understand a mysterious substance that binds the universe together.

Taken by Nasa’s James Webb Space Telescope, the latest images, published as part of a study in the journal Nature Astronomy, include information on new galaxy clusters dating back 10 billion years and, crucially, the strands of so-called “dark matter” that connect them.

‘Getting closer to unmasking dark matter’

Dark matter is “one of the most persistent and important puzzles in all of physics”, said Elizabeth Landau in National Geographic.

While ordinary matter – stars, planets, people, basically anything the eye can see – makes up just 5% of the universe, dark matter comprises over a quarter, with “dark energy”, a mysterious but constant force which pushes stars and galaxies away from each other, making up the rest.

Dark matter “doesn’t have much of an impact on your midday lunch order or your nightly bedtime ritual”, said Adithi Ramakrishnan, science reporter at The Associated Press, “but it silently passes through your body all the time and has shaped the universe.”

The problem is that it “doesn’t absorb or give off light so scientists can’t study it directly”. Instead, they have to observe “how its gravity warps and bends the star stuff around it – for example, the light from distant galaxies”. Only by studying these distortions across large swathes of the universe, can scientists “get closer to unmasking dark matter and its various hiding places”.

‘Gravitational scaffolding into which everything else falls’

The new images made with the Webb telescope are “twice as sharp as any dark matter map made by other observatories,” said Diana Scognamiglio of Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and lead author of the study.

Building on previous observations made using the Hubble Space Telescope, the new map “reveals dark matter’s influence on the largest objects in the universe, like galaxy clusters stretching millions of light years across”, said BBC Sky at Night. It shows “the overlap between dark matter and regular matter, confirming dark matter’s role in pulling regular matter together throughout the history of the universe”.

The findings “reinforce scientists’ current theory” that the gravity of dark matter “pulled ordinary matter into clumps that grew into the first structures in the universe”, said National Geographic.

“It's the gravitational scaffolding into which everything else falls and is built into galaxies. And we can actually see that process happening in this map,” said Richard Massey, study co-author and physicist at Durham University.

This matters because without it “there wouldn’t be enough matter to gravitationally bind galaxies together, and our Milky Way galaxy, housing billions of planets including Earth, would not exist in its current form”, said National Geographic.

Scientists are now using the high-res images to develop a three-dimensional version of the map, which they hope will unlock the properties of dark matter itself.

The moon is chock-full of Earth’s history. Elements from our planet’s atmosphere have made their way into moon dust, also called regolith, on a pathway created by the Earth’s magnetic field. These substances could help supply a lunar base, but using the dust might also be cumbersome and potentially dangerous.

Sharing is caring

Earth’s atmosphere “contributes significantly to light volatile elements” found in moon dust, said a study published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment. That is because our planet is surrounded by a magnetic field that “may actually help guide atmospheric particles” into space and toward the moon, said a release about the study. As a result, “lunar soil may not only hold a long-term record of Earth’s atmosphere,” but “could be even more valuable than scientists once thought for future space explorers living and working on the moon.”

Soil brought back from the Apollo missions in the 1970s contained volatile substances, including “water, carbon dioxide, helium, argon and nitrogen,” said the release. While some of these volatiles came from the “sun’s constant stream of charged particles, known as the solar wind,” the amounts of the substances, especially nitrogen, were “too high to be explained by solar wind alone.” In the study, scientists created computer simulations that showed that rather than “blocking atmospheric ions from being blown from our planet, the magnetic field lines within Earth’s tail act as invisible highways for charged particles,” said Live Science. This moves the particles toward the moon, allowing them to settle into the regolith.

That also means that this transfer of particles has likely been happening for over 3.7 billion years, since the formation of Earth’s magnetosphere. “By examining planetary evolution alongside atmospheric escape across different epochs, we can gain insight into how these processes shape planetary habitability,” said Shubhonkar Paramanick, the study’s lead author, in the release. The study could have “broader implications for understanding early atmospheric escape on planets like Mars, which lacks a global magnetic field today but had one similar to Earth in the past, along with a likely thicker atmosphere.”

All the dust is not gold

The elements in moon dust could be harvested and used in lunar bases. Substances like water and nitrogen could be “used for life support or fuel production, thereby reducing the need to bring everything from Earth and making a sustainable human presence more feasible,” said Techno-Science.net. Researchers have also conceptualized a device that could possibly turn moon dust into usable water and oxygen, according to a study published in the journal Joule. The method “takes advantage of the abundant solar energy and the extreme thermal conditions of the lunar surface” and “offers a potential route for sustaining human life on the moon and enabling long-term extraterrestrial exploration,” said Earth.com.

Despite this, moon dust can be a double-edged sword. While resources within could help supply lunar bases, the concentrations are trace. “Miners would still need to heat several tons of regolith for every household bucket they hope to fill,” said Earth.com. Working with the dust is also difficult. When it is “lightly agitated or showered by radiation, it becomes electrically charged,” which means it can “levitate above the lunar surface” and “glue itself onto astronauts,” said National Geographic. Inhaling it can also be dangerous to an astronaut’s health. “It’s very, very sharp. It’s very aggravating and agitating. It gets everywhere,” said Amy Fritz, a dust-mitigation researcher at Johnson Space Center, to the outlet.

Indonesia’s vast archipelago is covered with the fingerprints of human history: ancient cave paintings.

But on an island just off Sulawesi, archaeologists have now identified the world’s oldest known example of rock art to date: the outline of a handprint. Using new laser techniques, scientists dated the faded red imprint back to “at least 67,800 years ago”, said the study, published in Nature. That’s about 1,100 years earlier than hand stencils in Spain, previously thought to be the oldest (although that’s disputed).

Crucially, the tip of one finger appears to have been deliberately “narrowed”, researchers say, creating a “claw-like effect” that suggests complexity of thought – and a Homo sapiens artist. The finding adds to growing evidence challenging the “Eurocentric views of ancient intelligence that once dominated archaeology”, said National Geographic.

A window into the past

The handprint was first spotted in Liang Metanduno, a popular cave on the tropical island of Muna, in 2015. Sulawesi has a “rich history” of palaeolithic art, said The Guardian. But the “ancient hand stencil” had “gone unnoticed” among more recent, eye-catching paintings, being “faded and partially obscured”.

“There’s a lot of rock art out there, but it’s really difficult to date,” said project leader Maxime Aubert, an archaeologist at Griffith University in Australia. “When you can date it, it opens up a completely different world. It’s an intimate window into the past, and an intimate window into these people’s minds.”

The stencils were created by “spraying mouthfuls of ochre mixed with water” over a hand pressed flat against the cave wall. When the hand is pulled away, the negative outline is left in the pigment.

Like some other stencils on Sulawesi, the Liang Metanduno imprint has “narrow, pointy fingers”, which the researchers believe was intentional. “Whether they resemble animal claws or more fancifully some human-animal creature that doesn’t exist, we don’t know,” said Adam Brumm, who co-led the fieldwork on Sulawesi. “But there’s some sort of symbolic meaning behind them.”

It’s “a complicated thought”, said Aubert. “They are drawing something that doesn’t really exist.”

A new way of thinking

Cave art is “seen as a key marker of when humans began to think in truly abstract, symbolic ways”, said the BBC. It demonstrates “the kind of imagination that underpins language, religion and science”.

Many archaeologists believed art and abstract thinking “burst suddenly into life in Ice Age Europe and spread from there”. They argued for a mental “big bang” in Europe, because cave paintings, carvings and new tools “all seem to appear together in France and Spain about 40,000 years ago”. As Brumm said: “When I went to university in the mid to late 90s, that’s what we were taught.”

But a “new consensus is being shaped”, said the BBC. A series of discoveries in South Africa and Sulawesi has “overturned the old idea” and suggested “a much deeper and more widespread story of creativity”.

We’re seeing “traits of modern human behaviour, including narrative art”, in Indonesia, said Brumm. That makes the “Eurocentric argument very hard to sustain”.

While many people are scared of sharks thanks to their rows of razor-sharp teeth, the changing waters might be rendering the creatures from “Jaws” a little less fearsome. Growing acidity in the world’s oceans is changing the structure of sharks’ teeth, scientists investigating the “corrosive effects from acidification” on the “morphology” of those teeth reported in a marine science journal. This weakening of the teeth of the apex predators could affect the broader marine ecosystem, too.

What did the study find?

The study was helmed by a group of German scientists examining the effects of ocean acidity. The scientists “investigated the corrosive effects from acidification on the morphology of isolated shark teeth,” said the study, which was published in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science. The average ocean pH is currently 8.1, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, but it is expected to become more acidic in the coming centuries.

To simulate this, the study kept blacktip reef shark teeth in a pair of water tanks for eight weeks; one tank had a pH of 8.1 while the other had a pH of 7.3, the expected acidity of the ocean by 2300. It was found that the “teeth exposed to the more acidic water became much more damaged, with cracks and holes, root corrosion and degradation to the structure of the tooth itself,” said The Associated Press. Ocean acidification “can’t be disregarded as a threat facing sharks,” Maximilian Baum, a marine biologist at Heinrich Heine University Dusseldorf and the study’s lead author, told the AP.

This dental stress “would add to sharks’ other problems, which include prey shortages caused by overfishing,” said The Guardian. Many shark species can replace lost teeth naturally, but increasing ocean acidity could “speed losses past replacement rates.” And more than just sharks could be affected, as there could be “effects on the teeth of ocean predators in general when they are highly mineralized structures like we have in sharks,” Baum said to The Guardian.

What can be done about this?

Not all is lost, as the study “does have a few limitations,” said Smithsonian magazine. Most notably, the “repair process for teeth may be different in living species compared to in teeth that have fallen out.” And some experts have suggested that the rate of tooth replacement “could potentially keep up with any damage the animal’s teeth might face.” It will be “interesting to see in future studies if the damage to teeth seen in studies like this one results in a functional effect on a tooth’s ability to do its job,” Lisa Whitenack, a shark tooth expert at Allegheny College who was not part of the study, said to The Guardian.

Still, others are more pessimistic about the outlook for sharks and overall marine life. The study’s “main takeaway is that not only small organisms like corals or mollusks are at risk: even the teeth of apex predators show visible damage under acidified conditions, suggesting that ocean acidification could impact sharks more directly than previously assumed,” Baum said to CNN. By “isolating the chemical effects of acidified seawater on the mineralized structure itself, we want to provide a baseline for understanding vulnerability of shark teeth,” which could “highlight the potential damage to exposed hard tissues like teeth.”