Why JansBrief exists
Jan Stenbeck was the smartest person I ever met. Not smart in the way academics are smart. Smart in the way that changes the world. He saw what nobody else saw. He understood that mobile telephony would revolutionise countries that hadn't even laid copper wire yet. He broke state socialist monopolies when everyone said it was impossible. He built empires out of ideas.
Every day Jan received a binder. Two people read all the world's important newspapers and magazines for him and pulled out what mattered. The things others missed. The faint signals that foreshadow great change.
I worked with Jan. I learned from him. And I have never forgotten that binder. JansBrief is my tribute to him, a modern version: global, AI-driven, available to everyone with ambition.
In memory of Jan Stenbeck
1942 — 2002
Jan Stenbeck
Tele2, Millicom, MTG, Metro
In today's edition · 16 May 2026
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 — conducted in New York's Jamaica Bay — has now returned results, and they are quietly significant. New Scientist reports that researchers found no adverse effects on seafloor organisms after months of monitoring, removing the single biggest objection regulators and marine biologists have raised against the technique.
Enhanced ocean weathering works by accelerating a natural process. Olivine, a magnesium-iron silicate mineral abundant in the Earth's mantle and in surface deposits across Scandinavia, the Pacific Northwest and parts of Africa, dissolves slowly in seawater. As it dissolves it binds CO₂, converting it into stable bicarbonates that remain locked in the ocean for tens of thousands of years. The problem has always been uncertainty: would dumping mineral powder into coastal ecosystems harm the shellfish, crabs, worms and microbial communities that hold marine food webs together?
The Jamaica Bay pilot — small in scale but rigorous in design — monitored benthic communities before, during and after olivine application. The finding: organism diversity and abundance remained statistically unchanged. No die-offs. No algal blooms. No detectable shifts in sediment chemistry beyond the intended alkalinity increase.
This matters because ocean-based carbon dioxide removal has been stuck in a credibility gap. Land-based direct air capture is energy-intensive and expensive — current costs hover around $400–600 per tonne of CO₂. Enhanced weathering with olivine could theoretically bring that below $50 per tonne at scale, because the mineral is cheap and the ocean does the thermodynamic work for free. But "theoretically" has been the operative word for a decade. Without ecological safety data, no coastal regulator would approve large-scale deployment.
The Jamaica Bay results do not close the case. A single site in a temperate estuary cannot speak for tropical reefs or Arctic shelf waters. Scaling from pilot to planetary would require mining and crushing billions of tonnes of olivine, with its own energy and land-use footprint. And the long-term fate of added bicarbonates in a warming, acidifying ocean is not fully understood.
Yet the signal is clear: enhanced ocean weathering has moved from the whiteboard to the waterline, and the first ecological veto has not materialised. Several startups — including Vesta, which ran an earlier Caribbean pilot — are now in discussions with regulators in Norway and the UK about larger deployments. If the next round of trials replicates these results across different marine biomes, the technique could enter the carbon-removal toolkit alongside reforestation and direct air capture within three to five years.
For a world that has spent a decade arguing about whether negative emissions are real or fantasy, a bucket of green sand with a clean bill of ecological health is the kind of quiet breakthrough that changes the math.
Source: New Scientist · 15 May 2026
Now — The regulatory ice breaks: Coastal regulators in the US, UK and Norway now have the first peer-reviewed safety dataset they can point to when drafting permits for enhanced ocean weathering. Until this week, every application sat in a regulatory void: no data meant no permits. The Jamaica Bay results give environmental agencies something to work with. Expect the first commercial-scale permit applications within twelve months.
Soon — Carbon markets get a credible ocean product: The voluntary carbon market is plagued by junk credits from forestry offsets that burn down or are never verified. Ocean alkalinity enhancement offers a measurably permanent form of removal — bicarbonates do not re-release CO₂ the way a logged forest does. If monitoring protocols standardise around this trial's methodology, buyers like Microsoft and Stripe, who have committed billions to durable removal, will have a new asset class to purchase. This reshapes carbon credit pricing by 2028.
Later — Coastal nations become carbon sinks for hire: Countries with long coastlines and abundant olivine deposits — Norway, Oman, Madagascar, the Philippines — could become the next generation of carbon-removal hosts, earning revenue by processing the world's emissions through their territorial waters. This inverts the resource curse: instead of exporting fossil fuels that create CO₂, coastal states import the problem and dissolve it. The geopolitical implications are enormous. Small island developing states, currently the most vulnerable to climate change, could become the most valuable players in the removal economy. Source: New Scientist · 15 May 2026; Carbon Brief · 8 May 2026 ---
The Democratic Republic of Congo's health ministry has confirmed a fresh Ebola outbreak in the eastern Ituri province, with 80 deaths reported. Ituri is already torn by armed conflict, complicating health responses. International agencies are scrambling to deploy ring vaccination, but insecurity and displacement make contact tracing exceptionally difficult. The world's muscle memory from the 2018–2020 Kivu outbreak will be tested again. Source: Straits Times · 15 May 2026
S&P Global Ratings raised Nigeria's sovereign credit rating by one notch, rewarding three years of painful structural reforms including fuel subsidy removal and exchange rate unification. But the agency immediately flagged election-year inflation as the main risk: with Nigeria heading toward polls, the temptation to reverse reforms through populist spending is real. The upgrade could unlock cheaper borrowing and attract portfolio flows — if politicians resist the sugar rush. Source: Business Day Nigeria · 15 May 2026
Bolivian President Rodrigo Paz thanked Argentina's Javier Milei for dispatching two C-130 Hercules aircraft to airlift food and supplies to cities blockaded by political opponents. Bolivia's internal crisis has escalated to the point where basic goods cannot reach urban centres by road. The Milei intervention marks an unusual moment of Argentine humanitarian projection — and a sharp contrast to the two countries' historically frosty relations under previous governments. Source: Mercopress · 15 May 2026
A study published in Nature reveals that even routine, sub-concussive impacts — the kind American football players absorb in every practice — alter the composition of the gut microbiome over the course of a season. Certain beneficial bacterial species became measurably less abundant as cumulative head impacts increased, even in players who were never diagnosed with a concussion. The finding opens an entirely new front in the sports brain-injury debate: the damage may not stay in the skull. If the gut-brain axis is being disrupted by hits that fall below the clinical radar, current safety protocols built around concussion diagnosis are missing the broader biological toll. The research has implications well beyond football — for military personnel, construction workers and anyone exposed to repeated low-grade cranial impacts. Source: Nature · 15 May 2026
NextEra Energy, America's largest utility by market capitalisation, is in discussions to acquire rival Dominion Energy in a mostly stock deal that would create a roughly $400 billion colossus. The driver is not traditional utility logic but the explosive demand for electricity from AI data centres, which are straining the grid across Virginia, Texas and the Southeast. If the deal closes, it would be the largest utility merger in US history — and a signal that the AI boom's real bottleneck is not chips but kilowatt-hours. Source: Financial Times · 15 May 2026; Bloomberg · 15 May 2026
Japan is preparing to accept its first liquefied natural gas shipment via the Strait of Hormuz since the waterway's de facto closure during the Iran conflict. The delivery — a logistical and diplomatic feat — signals a partial normalisation of Gulf energy flows, though Adnoc tankers are still going dark in the Persian Gulf to avoid detection. Japan's energy security, utterly dependent on Middle Eastern gas, hangs on whether this trickle becomes a stream. Source: Nikkei Asia · 15 May 2026; Bloomberg · 15 May 2026
A decade after American venture capital firms flooded into India and bankrolled its startup boom, local investors have quietly taken the lead. Rest of World reports that Indian VCs now dominate deal flow across the country's tech sector, outpacing US firms in both the number and value of early-stage investments. The shift reflects maturing domestic capital markets, deeper local networks, and a growing scepticism among Indian founders toward the strings that come with Silicon Valley money — including pressure to chase American metrics over Indian market realities. The trend mirrors what happened in China a decade earlier and signals that India's startup economy is entering a self-sustaining phase. Source: Rest of World · 15 May 2026
British artist Matthew Collings is defending his exhibition "Drawings Against Genocide" after the show was cancelled and falsely characterised as anti-Semitic, according to the artist. The case highlights the increasingly fraught intersection of art, political speech and institutional risk-aversion — where venues cancel first and investigate later. Collings says the drawings address multiple genocides and are explicitly humanist in intent. Source: Al Jazeera · 15 May 2026 ---
Here is a story about solving one problem with the leftovers of another. Researchers have found that grape pomace — the soggy mass of skins, seeds and stems discarded after winemaking — can replace conventional antibiotics in poultry farming while keeping chickens almost equally healthy. Anthropocene Magazine reports that birds fed pomace-enriched diets showed comparable growth rates, gut health and disease resistance to those dosed with standard antimicrobial treatments.
The significance is not about chickens. It is about the collision of two crises that rarely appear in the same sentence. The first: antimicrobial resistance, which the WHO calls one of the top ten global health threats. Roughly 70 percent of the world's antibiotics are used not on sick humans but on healthy livestock, to promote growth and prevent infection in crowded industrial conditions. Every tonne of antibiotics fed to a chicken accelerates the evolution of superbugs that will eventually defeat human medicine. The second crisis: agricultural waste. The global wine industry produces roughly 10 million tonnes of pomace annually. Most of it rots in landfills or is spread on fields, where it can acidify soil and leach into waterways.
The pomace works because grape skins are dense with polyphenols — naturally occurring compounds that suppress harmful bacteria and reduce gut inflammation in poultry. The birds do not need the antibiotics because the pomace is doing a version of the same job, through a mechanism that bacteria cannot easily evolve resistance against.
What Jan would have loved is the elegance: no new technology, no proprietary molecule, no patent. Just a waste stream from one of humanity's oldest industries redirected into another. The vineyards of Bordeaux and the Barossa Valley already produce the raw material. The chicken farms of Brazil and Thailand already need the solution. The gap between them is logistics, not science.
This is the kind of lateral thinking that sustainability discourse needs more of — not grand engineering projects, but the patient work of noticing that one industry's garbage is another's medicine.
Source: Anthropocene Magazine · 15 May 2026
The artist and set designer Es Devlin — known for monumental commissions from the Serpentine to the Super Bowl — is creating a living portrait of the entire United Kingdom at the National Portrait Gallery in London. The project invites ordinary people to submit their faces, which are composited into a single evolving artwork. It's a democratic inversion of the portrait gallery's traditional function: instead of powerful individuals on the walls, everyone at once. Devlin's work has always been about scale and spectacle, but this is her most explicitly political piece — a statement that a nation is its people, not its leaders. Source: Artnet News · 15 May 2026
Aeon has released a short documentary on Silvesterchlausen, a centuries-old New Year tradition in the Appenzell region of Switzerland where masked figures in elaborate costumes roam from farm to farm, yodelling and clinking cowbells. Nobody — including the participants — knows exactly why they do it or when it started. The film is beautiful and unsettling, a reminder that Europe still harbours genuinely mysterious folk practices that resist the modern compulsion to explain everything. Source: Aeon · 15 May 2026
Vancouver's Science World — the Buckminster Fuller-influenced geodesic dome designed by architect Bruno Freschi for Expo 86 — is being covered with hundreds of panels to transform it into a colossal replica of the Trionda match ball for the 2026 FIFA World Cup. Dezeen reports that the project is both a feat of temporary architecture and an irresistible piece of urban spectacle: a beloved scientific landmark dressed as a toy. The dome's geometry — already evocative of a football's pentagonal panels — made the conversion almost inevitable. It is the kind of civic gesture that works precisely because it is absurd: serious engineering in the service of play, turning a skyline into a conversation starter as the tournament approaches. Source: Dezeen · 15 May 2026
Milan-based duo Andrea Trimarchi and Simone Farresin of Formafantasma have been named Monocle's Designers of the Year for 2026. Their work is not about chairs and lamps — it is research-driven design that investigates ecology, colonial extraction and the hidden politics of materials. Their recent project on the lava stone industry in Sicily traced how a seemingly natural material is entangled with land rights, organised crime and geological memory. Design as a form of investigative journalism. Source: Monocle · 15 May 2026
Chef Makoto Harada runs a restaurant in Yamagata prefecture — deep in Japan's snow country — combining Italian technique with the wild ingredients of northern Tōhoku: mountain herbs, river fish, aged miso. The Japan Times calls it one of the best meals in the country, and it requires a bullet train and a local bus to reach. The best food is increasingly found at the greatest distance from convenience. Source: The Japan Times · 15 May 2026
Condé Nast Traveler reports that spas in North America are hosting live music inside saunas and bathhouses, turning thermal wellness into communal performance. Othership, a Toronto-based bathhouse company, says demand for its sauna concerts has outstripped every other offering. "People are craving real connection," says co-founder Amanda Laine. The format is intimate by necessity — heat limits audience size, acoustics are strange, and no one looks at their phone. A small, sweaty antidote to the stadium economy. Source: Condé Nast Traveler · 15 May 2026 ---
South Korea's Hangang Bridge CCTV Integrated Control Centre, established in 2021, now uses AI to monitor 900 cameras across 17 of Seoul's 21 pedestrian-accessible Han River bridges. The South China Morning Post reports the system has helped stop 99% of suicide attempts. The AI detects behavioural patterns — hesitation, lingering, climbing barriers — and alerts human operators who dispatch responders, often reaching people within minutes. This is AI doing something most tech discourse ignores: saving lives in real time, in a society where suicide is the leading cause of death among young people. The system is not flashy. It does not generate art or write code. It watches, flags and connects a person in crisis to another human being. South Korea's suicide rate remains among the highest in the OECD, but the Han River bridges — once the country's most notorious sites — have seen their numbers collapse. The model is being studied by municipal governments in Japan and Taiwan. The ethical questions are real: pervasive surveillance of public space, algorithmic profiling of behaviour, the risk of false positives. But Seoul's response has been to keep humans in the loop — the AI recommends, humans decide. It is a rare example of surveillance technology being deployed not to control but to care. Source: South China Morning Post · 15 May 2026
Nature reports that a bespoke DNA vaccine — tailored to each patient's specific tumour mutations — has shown promising results against glioblastoma, the most lethal and treatment-resistant brain cancer. The vaccine works by encoding fragments of the patient's own cancer proteins, training the immune system to recognise and attack glioblastoma cells that would otherwise evade detection. Glioblastoma has a median survival of around 15 months. Nearly every experimental therapy has failed because the tumour mutates so rapidly that no two patients' cancers are alike. The personalised vaccine approach accepts that heterogeneity and makes it the treatment's foundation: each dose is manufactured for one person, based on sequencing of their tumour. The trial is early-phase and small. But it represents a convergence of technologies — rapid DNA sequencing, mRNA/DNA platform manufacturing, and computational neoantigen prediction — that were prohibitively expensive five years ago and are now within reach of academic medical centres. If this approach works at scale, it will not cure glioblastoma alone. But it may transform the deadliest cancers from death sentences into chronic conditions. Source: Nature · 15 May 2026 ---
99
99%
That is the proportion of suicide attempts on Seoul's Han River bridges that are now prevented, according to the city's AI-monitored CCTV control centre. Before the system launched in 2021, the bridges were South Korea's most frequent site of suicide — a grim distinction in a country where self-harm kills more young people than any disease or accident.
The number is startling because it quantifies something technology is rarely credited with: emotional rescue. The 900 cameras and their algorithms do not predict who will attempt suicide. They detect the moment of crisis — the pause, the climb, the solitary figure at 3 a.m. — and compress response time from minutes to seconds. The human operators who make the final call report that most people, once reached, accept help.
South Korea spends roughly $300 million annually on suicide prevention. The bridge monitoring system costs a fraction of that. If the model transfers to other high-frequency sites — subway platforms, rooftop edges, rural bridges — the country's overall rate could fall meaningfully within a decade. Japan and Taiwan are already studying the Seoul system.
In a world saturated with anxious debate about what AI will take from us, here is a number about what it can give back.
Source: South China Morning Post · 15 May 2026
In perspective
That is the proportion of suicide attempts on Seoul's Han River bridges that are now prevented, according to the city's AI-monitored CCTV control centre. Before the system launched in 2021, the bridges were South Korea's most frequent site of suicide — a grim...
8 — Today's Wisdom
Crushed green rock that dissolves carbon dioxide in seawater for under fifty dollars per ton. Grape residue from wine production replacing antibiotics in chicken farming. AI cameras on Seoul's bridges catching people in crisis before they jump. Three completely different breakthroughs from the same week, and they have one thing in common: none of them required a new Manhattan Project. None needed a trillion dollars in government funding or ten years of international negotiations. They built on what was already there. Olivine that had been sitting in the bedrock for billions of years. Grape press residue that had been rotting in landfills for generations. Surveillance cameras that were already hanging on the bridges.
That's what real progress almost always looks like. Not like a rocket lifting off, but like someone suddenly realizing that puzzle pieces that have always been right in front of us can be put together in a new way. And that requires a certain kind of thinking. Not genius in the traditional sense, but a stubborn refusal to accept that problems must be solved with the same tools that created them.
I've been building companies for thirty years and the best thing I've learned is that the most underestimated force in innovation isn't technology. It's seeing value where others see waste, opportunity where others see a dead end. The world is full of olivine. What's missing is the eye that sees what it can become.
Johan Staël von Holstein
Serial entrepreneur · wakopa.ai