All editions of JansBrief
Tuesday, 1 September 2026
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Something unusual is happening in the economics of early childhood education in the United States, and it has nothing to do with federal subsidies or tax credits. A handful of childcare providers —...
Read editionMonday, 31 August 2026
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Nigeria did something radical. In 2023, it amended its constitution to let individual states generate, transmit, and sell electricity — breaking a federal monopoly that had kept Africa's largest...
Read editionSunday, 30 August 2026
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A German designer has built a button-up shirt that hides the wearer from AI surveillance systems. To the human eye, Simon Weckert's Digital Camouflage shirt is a cheerful abstraction of green, pink...
Read editionSaturday, 29 August 2026
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In the steep, rain-lashed hills of Galicia, José Taboada drives his Land Rover up a rocky path to show visitors the most effective firefighting technology money can buy. It is not a drone, not a...
Read editionFriday, 28 August 2026
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The signal is quiet but the ground is shaking. Across India's western and southern states, a land grab is underway that echoes the worst chapters of industrial enclosure — except this time the...
Read editionThursday, 27 August 2026
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Something strange is happening inside the UK's electricity grid. Hundreds of data center projects have reserved enormous slices of grid capacity — enough to power small cities — but many of them...
Read editionThursday, 13 August 2026
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Somewhere beneath the Pacific, about 1,850 kilometres south of Tokyo, lies Minami-Torishima — a coral atoll so small it barely registers on most maps. What lies beneath it, however, could reshape the...
Read editionWednesday, 12 August 2026
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A patient with a severe, antibiotic-resistant E. coli infection has been successfully treated using bacteriophages — bacteria-killing viruses — engineered with CRISPR gene-editing tools. The case,...
Read editionTuesday, 11 August 2026
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China has become the first major jurisdiction to impose binding rules on emotionally intelligent AI chatbots — the companion apps that simulate romantic relationships, friendships and therapeutic...
Read editionMonday, 10 August 2026
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It sounds like the plot of a discarded Bond film: engineers proposing to build enormous barriers of artificially thickened ice between Canada and Greenland to stop the Arctic's remaining sea ice from...
Read editionSunday, 9 August 2026
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A small clinical trial has produced a result that should make Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly nervous — not because it outperforms their blockbuster GLP-1 drugs, but because it hints at a radically...
Read editionSaturday, 8 August 2026
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The bottleneck threatening Europe's energy security this winter is not a pipeline — it is political will. According to Politico Europe, EU governments are failing to fill gas storage reserves fast...
Read editionFriday, 7 August 2026
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When governments flip the kill switch on the internet, most people go dark. But a growing ecosystem of offline messaging apps — tools that pass encrypted texts via Bluetooth, Wi-Fi Direct or mesh...
Read editionThursday, 6 August 2026
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Here is a fact that should be a scandal but has instead become furniture: Nigeria, Africa's largest economy and most populous nation, owns a fully operational security printing company — the Nigerian...
Read editionWednesday, 5 August 2026
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Something is stirring in church halls in Nairobi, community centres in Hyderabad, and co-working spaces in Detroit. Local groups — none of them affiliated with Big Tech, none funded by governments —...
Read editionTuesday, 4 August 2026
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Something quietly shifted in the global AI power balance last week, and most Western capitals haven't noticed yet. Moonshot AI, a Chinese startup backed by Alibaba, released Kimi K3 — a...
Read editionSaturday, 1 August 2026
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Something happened this week that matters far beyond football. Gianni Infantino, the president of FIFA, abandoned his plan to sell a $20 billion stake in the World Cup to private equity investors —...
Read editionFriday, 31 July 2026
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As of this week, Montana has created something that exists nowhere else in the United States: a legal pathway for biotech companies to sell experimental drugs directly to consumers without full FDA...
Read editionThursday, 30 July 2026
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In the vast desert of southwestern New Mexico, a small geothermal power plant was dying. The underground reservoir feeding it was cooling, the economics were collapsing, and the previous operator was...
Read editionWednesday, 29 July 2026
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Rathlin Island, a windswept outcrop off the northern coast of Ireland with fewer than 150 human residents, appears to have completed one of the most successful rat eradication campaigns ever...
Read editionTuesday, 28 July 2026
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In China, a new marketplace has quietly emerged: platforms where ordinary people rent out their faces to AI companies. For a few hundred yuan per session, participants sit in scanning booths or...
Read editionMonday, 27 July 2026
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Nigerian manufacturers pay between two and ten times more for electricity than competitors in Vietnam and China, according to the Manufacturers Association of Nigeria. The numbers are not new in kind...
Read editionSunday, 26 July 2026
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The US oil market just broke a pattern that had held for three decades. For the first time since records began tracking speculative positioning in this way, investors are simultaneously pricing in...
Read editionSaturday, 25 July 2026
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A research team has created functional textiles woven from living fungal mycelium — specifically from the parasitic species Cordyceps militaris — that can clean themselves, self-repair minor tears,...
Read editionThursday, 23 July 2026
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Something counterintuitive happened in Beijing this week. China's solar industry lobby, the body that has spent a decade cheerleading the most explosive energy buildout in human history, announced...
Read editionWednesday, 22 July 2026
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China's AI talent war has shifted to an unexpected front: high school. Companies including major labs and state-backed research institutes are now recruiting fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds through...
Read editionTuesday, 21 July 2026
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Switzerland has a quiet radical. Her name is Barbara Buser, and she has spent decades proving an argument so simple it sounds naive: stop building new buildings. Reuse the ones already standing. Her...
Read editionMonday, 20 July 2026
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Something is wrong with the most consequential weather system on Earth. India's 2026 southwest monsoon — the annual deluge that waters half the planet's rice and determines whether 900 million people...
Read editionSunday, 19 July 2026
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South Korea just did something most countries only talk about: it published a detailed roadmap to make its currency freely tradable by foreigners. The won — Asia's fifth-most-traded currency — has...
Read editionSaturday, 18 July 2026
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While the world watches wars and wildfires, Washington quietly announced plans to lease the ocean floor around American Samoa for commercial deep-sea mining — a decision that could set the template...
Read editionFriday, 17 July 2026
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Truth Social, the platform owned by Trump Media & Technology Group, announced on Thursday a new service: real-time, low-latency access to Donald Trump's posts, sold to Wall Street banks and trading...
Read editionThursday, 16 July 2026
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Something fundamental is changing about our planet's relationship with light. New research confirms that Earth's albedo — the fraction of incoming sunlight it reflects back into space — is declining...
Read editionWednesday, 15 July 2026
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Somewhere between protein and steel, marine bristle worms have evolved a material that materials scientists did not know existed. Researchers have discovered that the jaws of these common sea...
Read editionTuesday, 14 July 2026
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India's government has ordered Meta to disable a new WhatsApp feature that allows users to process messages using on-device AI without decrypting them server-side. The feature — essentially a...
Read editionMonday, 13 July 2026
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Something terrifying is unfolding in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the world is responding with the bureaucratic equivalent of a shrug. The Ebola outbreak that began in Équateur province has...
Read editionSunday, 12 July 2026
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A quiet revolution in hospital staffing is unfolding between the Philippines and the United States — and it reveals more about the future of work than any AI product launch this year. US hospitals,...
Read editionSaturday, 11 July 2026
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Something important is happening inside Kaiser Permanente's hospitals, and it is not about one company. It is about the collision between artificial intelligence and the profession most essential to...
Read editionFriday, 10 July 2026
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Something genuinely unsettling — and genuinely illuminating — emerged from Anthropic's research lab this week. The company built a tool called the Jacobian lens that peers into the internal states of...
Read editionThursday, 9 July 2026
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Something has shifted in the relationship between the world's largest companies and the systems designed to govern them. The Economist this week published a detailed examination of a phenomenon that...
Read editionWednesday, 8 July 2026
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The global supply chain conversation has been dominated by rare earths, semiconductors and lithium. But a quieter dependency may prove just as consequential: fluorine. China controls not just...
Read editionTuesday, 7 July 2026
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China's largest web-novel platforms — operated by Tencent, ByteDance, and Baidu — are imposing daily word limits on authors and tightening quality standards to combat a flood of AI-generated fiction...
Read editionMonday, 6 July 2026
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Sweden's armed forces have just launched something that sounds like a Silicon Valley cliché but is anything but. Two reserve officers — Jakob Blomqvist and Fabian Duke — have created what they call...
Read editionSunday, 5 July 2026
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Starling Bank, the British digital-only lender that once positioned itself as the scrappy challenger to high-street incumbents, is cutting 130 jobs as it accelerates an AI-driven restructuring. The...
Read editionSaturday, 4 July 2026
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For decades, transplanting a complete human eye has sat in the same category as regenerating a severed spinal cord — theoretically conceivable, practically impossible. The surgery itself is brutally...
Read editionFriday, 3 July 2026
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Something quietly significant is happening in India's AI landscape, and it has nothing to do with billion-dollar foundation models or GPU clusters. A new government-backed hackathon is inviting...
Read editionThursday, 2 July 2026
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A European regulator has just approved a novel form of dietary fibre — a modified beta-glucan derived from oats — that demonstrably stimulates the body's own release of GLP-1, the same hormone...
Read editionWednesday, 1 July 2026
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Somewhere on a Chilean mountaintop, the largest digital camera ever constructed — 3.2 gigapixels, the size of a small car — has just opened its eye. The Vera C. Rubin Observatory began its Legacy...
Read editionTuesday, 30 June 2026
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A Chinese shopping app has quietly conquered one of the world's smallest and most geographically isolated nations — and the government cannot stop it. Rest of World reports that Temu has become so...
Read editionMonday, 29 June 2026
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A New York startup called Shift has made a proposition so brazen it deserves a moment of silence. In exchange for a free professional housecleaning, you allow a team into your home equipped with...
Read editionSunday, 28 June 2026
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Every society runs on people willing to do harm on its behalf. Soldiers, police officers, private security guards, cartel enforcers, gang members — they occupy different moral categories but share a...
Read editionSaturday, 27 June 2026
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Two thousand years ago, Mount Vesuvius buried the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum under metres of volcanic debris. Its library — the only intact library surviving from the ancient world — was...
Read editionFriday, 26 June 2026
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Scientists have identified the single gene that, when activated, initiates the entire developmental programme that transforms a fertilised egg into a human body. The gene is NANOG, and while it has...
Read editionThursday, 25 June 2026
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China and the West have chosen opposite paths for the millions of electric vehicle batteries reaching end of life — and the divergence will reshape energy geopolitics for decades. China, which...
Read editionWednesday, 24 June 2026
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The 2026 World Cup is the most data-saturated sporting event in history. Every sprint, every tackle, every off-ball movement is being tracked, tagged, and fed into models that shape coaching...
Read editionTuesday, 23 June 2026
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In the rainforests of Queensland, Australia, researchers have identified a new-to-science spider that constructs a mechanical trap with no precedent in the animal kingdom. The spider — yet to be...
Read editionMonday, 22 June 2026
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A blast ripped through Qatar's Ras Laffan gas terminal on Sunday night as workers attempted to restart operations at the facility Iran had bombed during the war. At least 54 people were injured and...
Read editionSunday, 21 June 2026
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A startup called Shinkei has built a refrigerator-sized robot named Poseidon that kills fish. That sentence alone should stop you. In an industry where quality is determined in the first seconds...
Read editionSaturday, 20 June 2026
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The Israel-Hezbollah ceasefire and the advancing US-Iran deal dominated today's headlines. But buried in the diplomatic noise is a structural shift that will outlast any agreement: Iran's...
Read editionFriday, 19 June 2026
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A fibre-optic cable from Chile to Hong Kong sounds like telecommunications plumbing. It is not. It is the latest front in a contest that will determine who controls the physical infrastructure of the...
Read editionThursday, 18 June 2026
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Scientists have identified the oldest known evidence of plague in human populations — pushing the origins of Yersinia pestis infection back by roughly 200 years to approximately 5,500 years ago. The...
Read editionWednesday, 17 June 2026
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ChapsVision, a French cybersecurity and data-analytics firm most people outside the defence world have never heard of, is set to replace Palantir in a major contract with France's Direction Générale...
Read editionTuesday, 16 June 2026
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While the world's attention was fixed on the US-Iran deal and reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, the Bank of Japan quietly did something it hasn't done in 31 years: it raised its benchmark interest...
Read editionMonday, 15 June 2026
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When a war disrupts a shipping lane, it reshuffles commodity flows in ways that take years to unwind. Nigeria's urea exports surged 64 percent year-on-year in the first quarter of 2026, driven by the...
Read editionSunday, 14 June 2026
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The story that should unsettle every AI executive this week did not come from a regulator, a competitor, or a congressional hearing. It came from the Vatican. Pope Francis issued a papal letter on...
Read editionSaturday, 13 June 2026
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On Friday, Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel announced a sweeping package of economic reforms under the banner "Economic and Social Program for 2026" — the most significant liberalisation effort the...
Read editionFriday, 12 June 2026
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While the world watches SpaceX price its record-shattering $75 billion IPO and diplomats scramble to de-escalate the Iran crisis, the most consequential development of June 2026 is atmospheric: El...
Read editionThursday, 11 June 2026
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A senior figure in Ukraine's defence industry has confirmed to New Scientist what military ethicists have feared for years: fully autonomous drones have killed human soldiers. The test, which took...
Read editionWednesday, 10 June 2026
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For four centuries, freedom of the seas has been the invisible subsidy underwriting global trade. Ships move between continents without paying a cent for passage — no tolls, no usage fees, no...
Read editionTuesday, 9 June 2026
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Nigeria sits on Africa's largest proven natural gas reserves — over 200 trillion cubic feet — and yet flares roughly $1 billion worth of gas annually, burning it off at wellheads as waste. Now, as...
Read editionMonday, 8 June 2026
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A year ago, the Cambodian government launched what it called a decisive crackdown on the cyber-scam compounds that had turned the country into the world capital of online fraud. International...
Read editionSunday, 7 June 2026
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Something remarkable happened in Paris this week that most international observers will miss beneath the noise of war and geopolitics. SFR — France's second-largest mobile operator, owned by Patrick...
Read editionSaturday, 6 June 2026
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A team of researchers has, for the first time, performed precise genome editing on human embryos using base editing — a refined variant of CRISPR that swaps individual DNA letters without cutting the...
Read editionFriday, 5 June 2026
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The most revealing financial document of 2026 is not a balance sheet. It is a story — the one SpaceX is telling Wall Street to justify a $1.78 trillion valuation, which would make it the most...
Read editionThursday, 4 June 2026
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Indonesia's currency smashed through the psychologically critical 18,000-per-dollar level on Thursday while the Jakarta stock exchange hit a near six-year low. This is not a blip. The rupiah has been...
Read editionWednesday, 3 June 2026
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The continent that agonises most about its dependency on Chinese critical minerals is sitting on a deposit it has barely touched — its own waste. A landmark EU-funded study, published this week by...
Read editionTuesday, 2 June 2026
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A paper published today in Nature describes a machine-learning model that can measure your heart rate passively — in the background, while you scroll through Instagram or read the news — using...
Read editionMonday, 1 June 2026
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On Monday, Malaysia became the first major Southeast Asian economy to enforce age-gated social media access backed by government-issued identity verification. Under the Online Safety Act 2025,...
Read editionSunday, 31 May 2026
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In 1865, the English economist William Stanley Jevons observed something counterintuitive: as coal-burning engines became more efficient, total coal consumption rose rather than fell. Cheaper energy...
Read editionSaturday, 30 May 2026
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Somewhere in Brussels, a small team maintains EM-DAT — the Emergency Events Database — a public ledger of every flood, earthquake, drought, epidemic and industrial accident recorded since 1900. It is...
Read editionFriday, 29 May 2026
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The bottleneck in robotics has never been legs or eyes — it's been hands. A human hand has 27 bones, 34 muscles and roughly 17,000 mechanoreceptors, making it the most complex manipulator evolution...
Read editionThursday, 28 May 2026
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Iran's citizens are reconnecting to the outside world, but the state is making sure it happens on its terms. After months of near-total internet shutdown — imposed during the wave of anti-regime...
Read editionWednesday, 27 May 2026
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Poland is the economic miracle nobody questions anymore. GDP growth has outpaced the EU average for two decades. Warsaw gleams. The zloty holds. Unemployment is negligible. But inside the country's...
Read editionTuesday, 26 May 2026
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Something happened in Rome today that will reverberate far beyond the automotive industry. Ferrari — the company whose entire mythology is built on the sound, heat, and fury of internal combustion —...
Read editionMonday, 25 May 2026
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On Sunday, Pope Leo XIV will present his first encyclical — and its subject is not poverty, migration, or war. It is artificial intelligence. The document, prepared over months with input from...
Read editionSunday, 24 May 2026
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Something is crystallising in the food-delivery industry. Uber Technologies has proposed a takeover of Delivery Hero, the Berlin-based platform, at a valuation of approximately €10 billion ($11.6...
Read editionSaturday, 23 May 2026
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Somewhere between chemistry and magic, a team of environmental engineers has demonstrated that cold plasma — ionised gas generated at atmospheric pressure — can strip industrial wastewater of heavy...
Read editionFriday, 22 May 2026
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A finding published this week in Anthropocene Magazine quantifies something solar engineers have suspected but never pinned down at scale: pollution from coal-fired power plants is cancelling out...
Read editionThursday, 21 May 2026
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A bat disease is repricing municipal debt in the United States — and in doing so, it has accidentally created a new asset class for conservation finance. White-nose syndrome, caused by the fungus...
Read editionWednesday, 20 May 2026
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For two decades, the carbon footprint has been the dominant metric of environmental accountability. It reshaped consumer choices, corporate reporting, and government policy. But a pioneering study...
Read editionTuesday, 19 May 2026
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Something quietly corrosive is happening to the last professional network that still pretended to trade on merit. LinkedIn — the platform where executives cultivate reputations as thought leaders,...
Read editionMonday, 18 May 2026
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Vanke, one of China's largest and most respected property developers, has reported a colossal annual loss — the latest and most alarming sign that China's real-estate crisis is not stabilising but...
Read editionSunday, 17 May 2026
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Somewhere in the permafrost, in ancient salt deposits, and in the deepest ocean sediments, there are microorganisms that have survived for tens of thousands of years in suspended animation. As the...
Read editionSaturday, 16 May 2026
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The idea sounds like alchemy: scatter crushed green rock along the coastline and let the ocean eat carbon dioxide. But the first controlled field trial of enhanced ocean weathering with olivine —...
Read editionFriday, 15 May 2026
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Somewhere between biology and engineering, a team of researchers has just figured out how to keep bioluminescent algae glowing on demand for 25 minutes straight — no electricity, no batteries, no...
Read editionThursday, 14 May 2026
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The antibiotic pipeline has been dying for decades — not because the science is impossible, but because the economics are perverse. A new antibiotic that works brilliantly earns less than a mediocre...
Read editionWednesday, 13 May 2026
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The Strait of Hormuz crisis has dominated headlines through the lens of oil prices and naval confrontations. But buried in a warning issued this week by FAO Director-General Qu Dongyu is a threat...
Read editionTuesday, 12 May 2026
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The next revolution in environmental surveillance will not come from satellites, drones, or ground sensors. It will come from breathing. Researchers are now systematically harvesting DNA from the air...
Read editionMonday, 11 May 2026
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When Tola Talabi proposed building a dedicated electricity ring around Victoria Island — Lagos's most commercially dense square kilometres — experienced investors told him he was mad. The national...
Read editionSunday, 10 May 2026
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The protein problem is, at bottom, a pollution problem. Every kilogram of farmed fish produces waste nitrogen and phosphorus that silts up coastlines and starves water of oxygen. Scaling aquaculture...
Read editionSaturday, 9 May 2026
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You bought the phone. You pay the bill. You carry it everywhere — to the bedroom, the bathroom, the hospital, the protest. But the device in your pocket was not designed for you. It was designed to...
Read editionFriday, 8 May 2026
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Something quietly revolutionary is happening in state legislatures across the United States, and almost nobody in the mainstream press is paying attention. Dozens of US states are now considering...
Read editionThursday, 7 May 2026
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Somewhere off the coast of the eastern United States, nineteen sharks are doing science. Fitted with small sensor packages that measure temperature, salinity and depth as the animals dive through the...
Read editionWednesday, 6 May 2026
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The biggest available reduction in delivery emissions has nothing to do with electric trucks, drone drops or hydrogen fuel cells. It is about persuading competitors to share the same vehicle. A...
Read editionTuesday, 5 May 2026
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Iceland has quietly built something extraordinary: a circular economy around cod. Not the glamorous kind of innovation that attracts Silicon Valley pitch decks, but the kind that transforms an entire...
Read editionMonday, 4 May 2026
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In a laboratory in Brazil, fire ants exposed to biochar — the carbon-rich soil amendment made by pyrolysing organic waste — began foraging twice as fast, building nests three times more complex, and...
Read editionSunday, 3 May 2026
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In New York's East River, scientists have discovered something that could transform how we monitor every city on Earth. By scooping up ordinary buckets of river water and analysing the environmental...
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