India’s “quick commerce” bubble may be about to burst, said the CEO of Blinkit, an app that promises delivery of orders within 10 minutes.

Albinder Dhindsa issued the warning as some competitors in the market are running on losses. He believes his company will thrive, but there has been unrest, and Blinkit's riders took industrial action over pay and working conditions earlier in the year. The strike is just part of a wider crisis developing in India’s growing gig economy, where “speed trumps safety and workers are easily replaced”, said The Independent.

“The pendulum has already swung once from scepticism to exuberance,” Dhindsa told Bloomberg and believes he does not know when “correction” will come, but only that it will.

Dark stores

Blinkit allows customers to order groceries, fresh produce and daily essentials, which they expect to be delivered in around 10 minutes. To achieve this speedy turnaround, the platform relies on a network of “dark stores” – retail spaces that act as dedicated hubs for fulfilling online orders, rather than in-person shopping.

It forms part of India’s rapidly growing quick commerce sector, funded by investors attracted by the country’s “dense cities, lower cost of labour and ubiquitous digital payments”, said Bloomberg.

The company launched in 2013 as Grofers, but rebranded in 2021 as Blinkit, invoking the idea that service will happen “in the blink of an eye”. Acquired by the country's food delivery giant Zomato in 2022, it’s now active in many cities across India, delivering “everything from eggs to iPhones” to a client base of millions.

But, it has yet to turn a profit, hampered by “capital costs and supply chain complexity” as it pursues further expansion, including into rural areas.

Straightforward demands

Earlier this year, more than 150 Blinkit workers in the city of Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, went on a two-day strike to protest “unsafe working conditions, falling earnings, and retaliatory ID suspensions” (when gig platforms deactivate workers' accounts without due process or a means of redress), said The Independent.

The striking riders had “straightforward demands”, including “weather-appropriate uniforms and shaded waiting areas” alongside an end to a “punishing rule that effectively forces them to work the hottest hours of the day”.

They also want the company to “restore the original incentive pay structure”. They are paid on a per-order basis, with “fluctuating incentives”, with terms having “ been quietly changed over time”. Riders claim that they used to receive Rs 555 (£4.93) per 32 orders delivered, but now earn just Rs 448 (£3.98) per 43, which means they are “doing more work for less”.

In November, the Indian government introduced new labour laws so that the fleet of self-employed workers will now receive social security, but they still have no right to a fixed wage or paid leave.

The April strike was a “flashpoint” but not the last in what is becoming a “growing struggle” between “speed-driven platforms” and the workers holding up a gig economy that’s forecast to employ over 23 million Indians by 2029.

Artificial intelligence increasingly requires so much space and power that we may run out of both on Earth. As a solution, tech companies are looking to do business in space by creating celestial data centers that harness solar power. But while doing so demands less cooling, it could create other costs and ecological problems.

Data in the sky with diamonds

The enormous amount of data artificial intelligence requires has led to the building of data centers across the country. These systems “account for nearly half of U.S. electricity demand growth between now and 2030,” said Scientific American. And their “global power requirements could double by the end of this decade as companies train larger AI models.” Tech giants, including Amazon, Google, OpenAI and Elon Musk’s xAI, are “running into physical limits to their AI ambitions on Earth,” said The Verge.

Orbital data centers would “benefit from continuous solar energy, generated by arrays of photovoltaic cells,” said Benjamin Lee, a computer architect and an engineer at the University of Pennsylvania, to Scientific American. A move to space could “resolve long-standing challenges around powering data center computation in a carbon-efficient manner.”

The sun’s rays can be “direct and constant for solar panels to collect,” with “no clouds, no rainstorms, no nighttime,” said The Wall Street Journal. “Demands for cooling could also be cut because of the vacuum of space.”

“The race for artificial general intelligence is fundamentally a race for compute capacity and, by extension, energy,” said Baiju Bhatt, the founder and CEO of Aetherflux, another company working toward space-based computing, in a press release. “The elephant in the room is that our current energy plans simply won’t get us there fast enough.”

One giant leap for AI

While space data centers could potentially curb some of the environmental problems associated with earthbound ones, there are several barriers. “Like any moonshot, it’s going to require us to solve a lot of complex engineering challenges,” said Sundar Pichai, the chief executive of Google parent company Alphabet, in a post on X.

Launch costs have “decreased over the years,” but it is “still prohibitively expensive to launch and operate these things in space,” said The Verge. Space-based computing will “not become cost-effective unless rocket launch costs decline substantially,” said Scientific American. Experts also warn that these systems could have “even bigger environmental and climate effects than their earthly counterparts.”

Having data centers “visible in the night sky at dawn or dusk” presents a problem because some observers “rely on twilight to hunt for near-Earth asteroids,” said Scientific American. Also, it could worsen the space junk problem, as “more hardware is launched and more debris and fragments fall back through the atmosphere.”

After decades of progress, more children under the age of 5 are at risk of death than in previous years. Many of these deaths are preventable, given proper funding and resources. But international cuts to health and development aid have endangered millions of lives.

A rising toll

Society made significant progress on child mortality throughout the 21st century. Between 2000 and 2020, the “number of children who die before they hit their 5th birthday dropped by half” from “nearly 10 million deaths a year to under 5 million deaths a year,” said NPR. However, by the end of 2025 approximately 4.8 million children are expected to die before they turn five, according to a report by the Gates Foundation.

This is an increase of about 200,000 from the 4.6 million deaths in 2024. “By far, the largest single cause of death is the cuts in international aid,” Mark Suzman, the CEO of the Gates Foundation, said to The Independent. “When you pull back at short notice, that has consequences, and sadly, those consequences are measured in human lives.”

Just between this year and last year, global health assistance dropped from $49 billion to about $36 billion, which is more than a 25% decline. The U.S. has led the charge on funding cuts, as it has historically been the largest contributor of global aid in the world. But the U.S. was not the only country to reduce aid. Other high-income countries, including the U.K., France and Germany, “have also been making significant cuts as priorities have shifted,” said NPR. “While some countries have stepped up,” it unfortunately “does not make up for the cuts.” If funding cuts continue, between 12 million and 16 million more children could die by 2045, per the report.

Less money, more problems

Many of these deaths are the result of preventable or treatable conditions, including malaria, HIV/AIDS, pneumonia and diarrhea. In order to prevent further deaths, it is necessary to “double down on the most effective interventions,” including building “strong primary health systems and lifesaving vaccines,” Bill Gates, the chair of the Gates Foundation, said in the study. It is also important to “prioritize innovations that stretch each and every dollar,” as well as “continue to support the development of next-generation innovations.” This includes vaccines with fewer dosage requirements and better use of data for disease intervention.

The countries most reliant on foreign aid and development assistance are “grappling with increasingly fragile health care systems and mounting debt as they try to tackle the leading causes of child mortality,” said CNN. President Donald Trump’s cuts to USAID have directly contributed to the deaths, as the U.S.’s funding for global health “remains two-thirds below where it stood in 2024,” said The Independent. If the world returned global health funding to its 2024 levels, though, “health innovations in the pipeline — like new vaccines, malaria control interventions, new maternal and neonatal care strategies — would save 12 million additional children by 2045,” said NPR.

“Over the last 25 years we’ve made incredible progress in global health, specifically for children,” Margaret Miller, a senior program officer at the Gates Foundation, said to The Washington Post. “It’s really tragic that it’s now at risk.”

A Belgian billionaire has a quiet, ambitious plan to create the “Dubai of the Caribbean” on the island of Nevis, said The Brussels Times. Olivier Janssens, who holds Nevisian citizenship through an investment scheme, has unveiled plans for “Destiny”, a “libertarian community with its own legal system” on the Caribbean island. But for some Nevisians, a crypto state in their midst is a step too far.

A ‘network state’

The “multibillion-dollar project” is likely to involve a “massive reshaping of the south coast of the island” where the development “is already displacing long-term residents by buying their land”, said the Financial Times. Plans for Destiny include “villas and medical clinics” surrounded by “lush green terraces and pools” – and, crucially, a libertarian identity that, in Janssens’ so-far woolly definition, will “let us do our things”.

It forms part of a wider trend known as the “network state” movement, in which tech and cryptocurrency billionaires are attempting to establish “their own, more libertarian, territories”. Many, for the time being, “remain theoretical”.

Destiny is closer to fruition than most because St Kitts and Nevis recently passed new legislation to allow the creation of so-called Special Sustainability Zones, where “innovative approaches to the governance of tech and digital assets” can be trialled, said Cryptopolitan. But for some Nevisians, the prospect of an unregulated “state within a state” and its impact on existing infrastructure, services and “community life” is a cause for concern.

‘Neo-colonialism’

The optics of a “foreign-led takeover” of Nevisian land have sparked a “fiery” debate, said Jam Radio. Former prime minister Timothy Harris described the project as an instrument of “neo-colonialism”, urging citizens to reject what he called a “return to plantation-era subjugation”.

Janssens has promised that Destiny will be “open to Nevisians and remain under government jurisdiction”, said the Daily Mail, and has pledged a “$50 million [£37.3 million] investment in Nevis’ infrastructure”. And not all residents are sceptical. The project could create “a lot of much-needed opportunities for Nevisians and Kittitians”, said The St Kitts and Nevis Observer. If it goes ahead, it may end up as the “envy of the entire Caribbean”.

Ultimately, Nevis stands at a “crossroads”, said St Maarten’s The Daily Herald. Destiny will serve as a “defining test of how far the island is willing to go in reimagining development, law, and partnership with global capital”.

The top of the mountain is coming down. Five different U.S. mountains, including Mount Rainier, are experiencing ice loss at their peaks, bringing down their highest elevations. And the problem is likely to worsen.

A new low

Mount Rainier, along with four other ice-capped mountains in the contiguous U.S., has shrunk since about 1980, said a study published in the journal Arctic, Antarctic and Alpine Research. Four of the five melted by “at least 6 meters (20 feet) due to loss of snow and ice.” The top of Columbia Crest, which is recognized as Mount Rainier’s summit, “no longer stands 14,410 feet above sea level, having lost nearly 21 feet of ice,” said National Parks Traveler.

This loss is largely attributed to climate change. The “average air temperature on these summits is significantly higher than it was in the 1950s — almost 5.5 F,” Eric Gilbertson, an associate teaching professor at Seattle University and coauthor of the study, said in a statement. Because of this, there are “more and more days that reach above freezing, and we are seeing ice melt even at the highest elevations.” Along with melting ice, there has been “more precipitation falling as rain rather than snow,” which is also contributing to the shrinking peaks, said ABC News.

Mount Rainier is the “most glaciated peak in the contiguous United States,” said ABC News. These glaciers play a pivotal role for both humans and the ecosystem as a whole, including providing “essential water for rivers, supplying drinking water downstream, maintaining cold-water habitats for salmon, and supporting hydropower generation in the region.”

Melting glaciers are a climate tipping point and an indicator of catastrophic change. “We talk a lot about glaciers losing mass, but those are often at lower elevations,” said Scott Hotaling, an associate professor at Utah State University who worked on the study. This is an “obvious and visceral sign of how climate change is impacting these well-known and once-pristine places.”

Coming round the mountain

Acquiring the data for the study was a “grueling task,” said the statement. The researchers “measured the mountains during late summer, when there’s the least snow and the true height of each summit is exposed,” said SF Gate. They “hiked to the tops with high-precision GPS equipment, taking hourlong readings on both the ice and any nearby rock outcrops to see which was higher” and then “backed up those measurements with laser-mapping data and by comparing old and new photos to see how the peaks’ shapes have changed over time.” The findings were submitted to the National Park Service.

Despite the Park Service acknowledging the findings, it “does not independently set summit elevations,” Scott Beason, a Park Service geologist at Mount Rainier National Park, said to National Parks Traveler. That responsibility falls on the U.S. Geological Survey, and currently “no official change has been made to the published elevation of 14,410 feet.”

Studying the true impacts of mountaintop ice loss is challenging because there are currently no “comprehensive databases, historical or contemporary, that track ice-capped summits,” said ABC News. However, we have certainly “entered a new era for the western U.S. cryosphere,” said the study. “Where there’s perennial ice, it’s likely melting.”

Russia’s demographic decline, turbocharged by the war in Ukraine, has given birth to “one of the world’s most extreme natalism campaigns”, said The Atlantic.

The country’s fertility rate was 1.4 births per woman in 2023, according to the most recent UN statistics. That’s well below the 2.1 replacement rate and 20% lower than in 2015. And since then, an estimated quarter of a million Russian men have been killed in Ukraine. “Last year, deaths outpaced births by more than half a million.”

The state has been trying everything to encourage Russian women to have more children, from awarding pregnancy payouts and increasing maternal support to restricting access to abortions and stigmatising childlessness. The Ministry of Education is considering ways to create “conditions for romantic relations” in schools, and pink banners around Moscow ask women: “Still haven’t given birth?”

But, said The Atlantic, “if this is supposed to make them want to procreate, it doesn’t seem to be working”.

‘Much-diminished pool’

For more than 25 years, Vladimir Putin has been grappling with “his country’s declining and ageing population”, said The Independent. Russia actually recorded its lowest birth rate in 1999, after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The birth rate was growing, along with the country’s “economic prosperity”, at the start of this century. And then, after the annexation of Crimea in 2014, its federal statistics service started including the peninsula’s population in its data, too. But now “those hard-won gains are crumbling against a backdrop of financial uncertainty, the war in Ukraine, an exodus of young men, and opposition to immigration”.

Russia is trying new restrictions to halt the backslide, from banning the promotion of abortion and “child-free ideology” to outlawing LGBTQ activism. But the post-Soviet cohort is already small, and hundreds of thousands of men have either been killed in Ukraine or have fled abroad to avoid military service. “You’ve got a much-diminished pool of potential fathers in a diminished pool of potential mothers,” Jenny Mathers, a Russian politics lecturer at the University of Aberystwyth told The Independent.

Russia also handled the Covid-19 pandemic disastrously. “Or rather, we didn’t handle it at all,” a demographer told exiled Russian journalists, said Meduza. “Russia ended up among the top 10 countries in the world for excess mortality.”

‘Madcap plan’

“In a sign of how seriously the Kremlin views Russia’s demographic crisis,” Putin recently addressed the inaugural meeting of a demographic council, said Novaya Gazeta. “Families with three or more children should become the norm, the natural way of life in our country,” the president said.

The deputy prime minister announced a new federal register that will allow authorities to track pregnant women and “monitor the demographic situation”.

One Russian politician has even suggested that couples should be barred from social media at night to encourage them to have sex, said The Mirror. Regional MP Mikhail Ivanov’s “madcap plan” for “digital abstinence” would see the Russian state switch off access to social media from 11pm to 2am every night.

Despite all of this, the Kremlin’s own polling suggests that almost 40% of Russian women of childbearing age don’t plan to have children in the next five years, said The Atlantic. And “none of these interventions addresses an underlying reason” why Russian women don’t want children: the war in Ukraine. “Many women are depressed, lonely, and afraid. Every day, the war makes more of them widows.”

Putin’s biggest problem “won’t be solved” by incentivising pregnancy. “He’s created a society that Russians no longer want to bring children into.”

Multi-drug antibacterial resistance caused by the war in Ukraine is now “on the doorstep” of western Europe, according to an Australian clinician who has worked in the war-torn country.

Potentially lethal infections in Ukraine have increased 10-fold since the start of the war, Hailie Uren told Vaccines Work, and this “really frightening” level of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) there is on the march beyond its borders.

Invisible threat

Humans are “host” to over a thousand species of bacteria, including some superbugs that are “deemed critical threats”, said The New York Times. Normally, they don’t “become pathogenic in healthy people” but “war changes that”. War “deprives people of food, clean water and sanitary living conditions”, and “when bombs and bullets fly” wounds become “perforated with shrapnel, debris and soil teeming with microbes”. Even before the war, Ukraine had a high rate of antibiotic-resistant tuberculosis, which can spread even more easily in barracks, bomb shelters and refuge centres.

A “rising number of wounded soldiers” in Ukraine are being infected with microbes that are “extensively drug-resistant” or which “withstand most or all antibiotics thrown at them”, said Vaccines Work. Doctors and scientists in Ukraine are waging a “shadow war” against this rising tide of “pernicious infections”, which have also “begun circulating in the general population”, including children.

The Lviv region, on the “doorstep” of the European Union, has “some of the highest multi-drug resistance levels” in all of Ukraine.

In Estonia, drug-resistant pathogens are already being “brought in” by Ukrainian refugees, said ERR News.

Pernicious threat

A “growing body of research” suggests that the “21st-century way of warfare has become a major driver” of AMR, particularly in the Middle East, said The New York Times. In Syria, “protracted” fighting has “exacerbated existing drivers of antimicrobial resistance and introduced new ones”, representing a “rising threat” to the country’s health system, according to a study published in Nature.

Before the Second World War and the “advent of antibiotics, infections routinely killed more soldiers than combat itself”, said the Financial Times. Today, AMR has become a “different and arguably more pernicious kind of threat” and one that “could continue to claim lives long after conflict is over”.

Last year, England’s former chief medical officer warned that the rise of superbugs that are resistant to antibiotics poses a greater threat to humanity than climate change. A paper published in The Lancet last September estimated that AMR could contribute to the deaths of 8.22 million people per year by 2050 – more than the number currently killed by cancer.

Some people who have lost loved ones are turning to a new industry to communicate with their dearly departed: using artificial intelligence “griefbots” that mimic a deceased relative. Many say these chatbots can be a helpful part of the healing process, but some tech experts are wary.

How do these chatbots work?

These artificially intelligent chatbots are designed to mimic dead individuals. While this AI niche started small, there are “now more than half a dozen platforms that offer this service straight out of the box, and developers say that millions of people are using them to text, call or otherwise interact with recreations of the deceased,” said Nature. The large language models (LLMs) that these griefbots train from often use “data such as a person’s text messages and voice recordings to learn language patterns and context specific to that person.”

This is the “same foundation that powers ChatGPT and all other large language models,” said Scientific American, but catered to a specific person’s characteristics. These griefbots have helped people process the emotional distress of losing a loved one. “After getting over the initial shock of hearing the incredibly accurate representation of his voice, I definitely cried,” Andy O’Donnell, who used a griefbot to speak with his deceased father, said to The New York Times. “But it was more of a cry of relief to be able to hear his voice again because he had such a comforting voice.”

Why are they controversial?

While some have lauded the creation of these griefbots, “questions about exploitation, privacy and their impact on the grieving process are multiplying,” said The Guardian. People working through their grief may “maintain a sense of connection and closeness” by talking to their departed loved one, and “deathbots can serve the same purpose,” Louise Richardson, a member of the philosophy department at the U.K.’s University of York, said to The Guardian.

Griefbots can also be detrimental to healing, however, as they “can get in the way of recognizing and accommodating what has been lost, because you can interact with a deathbot in an ongoing way,” Richardson told The Guardian. People may have lingering questions or concerns they wish to ask a dead loved one, and now it “feels like you are able to ask them.”

Proponents of griefbots say they are not meant to replace a deceased person but are “marketed as tools to comfort the grieving,” said Natasha Fernandez at the University of Alabama at Birmingham’s Institute for Human Rights. While the “intentions behind griefbots might seem compassionate, their broader implications require careful consideration.” Possible exploitation of grieving people is one of the biggest concerns, as “grieving individuals in their emotional vulnerability may be susceptible to expensive services marketed as tools for solace.”

Providing these people with a paid chatbot “could be seen as taking advantage of grief for profit,” said UAB’s Fernandez. And if these griefbots are deemed to be “exploitative, it prompts us to reconsider the ethicality of other death-related industries” that are also driven by profit, such as funeral homes. Unlike funeral homes, though, most tech companies that build griefbots “charge for their services through subscriptions or minute-by-minute payments, distinguishing them from other death-related industries.”

There may soon be a new way to limit deaths caused by fentanyl. A preventative vaccine for fentanyl exposure is set to begin human trials and could change the landscape of drug overdoses in the U.S.

A stab at a solution

Exposure to even small amounts of the synthetic opioid fentanyl can be deadly, and action to stop an overdose can only happen after the drug has been consumed. But ARMR Sciences, a New York-based biotechnology company, may have designed a vaccine to counteract fentanyl overdose. “It became very apparent to me that as I assessed the treatment landscape, everything that exists is reactionary,” Collin Gage, the cofounder and CEO of ARMR Sciences, said to Wired. “I thought, why are we not preventing this?”

The new vaccine works differently from naloxone, which is currently used to reverse the effects of drug overdoses. Instead, the vaccine is “similar to a suit of armor,” said The Independent. “Receiving it first will, in theory, protect an individual from danger if they encounter fentanyl.” The shot “pairs a fentanyl-like compound with a deactivated diphtheria protein that kicks the immune system into high gear,” said The Tech Buzz. “When antibodies latch onto fentanyl, they make the drug molecules too large to cross the blood-brain barrier.”

Because the drug would not reach the brain, the vaccine would “prevent the drug from causing respiratory failure and death,” as well as “prevent the extreme highs that come from using fentanyl,” said The Independent. If effective, the vaccine will offer protection for approximately a year.

ARMR Sciences is launching a human trial of the vaccine in the Netherlands next year using 40 healthy adults. It will be conducted in two phases. In the first, volunteers will “receive a series of two shots in varying doses, and researchers will measure their blood antibody levels,” said Wired. In the second, a “small group of participants will receive a medical dose of fentanyl so that investigators can study how well the vaccine blocks its effects.”

A point of contention

This is not the first attempt at an opioid vaccine. One was proposed in the 1970s as a way to combat heroin overdoses. However, that vaccine largely failed, and the research was abandoned. The recent opioid crisis “led to a resurgence of interest, with backing from the U.S. government,” said Wired. In 2023, researchers developed an anti-fentanyl vaccine that worked positively on rats, according to a study published in the journal Pharmaceutics. The ARMR Sciences vaccine is based on this previous vaccine iteration.

Fentanyl is the number one cause of overdose deaths in the U.S., accounting for just over 48,000 deaths in 2024, according to the CDC. Most exposure is accidental, with the synthetic opioid being added to other substances. A vaccine could help the most vulnerable populations, including adolescents and teens, but many are concerned about the safety and effectiveness.

When parents were asked about whether they would get their kids a potential fentanyl vaccine, many were worried it might “interfere with the brain’s natural ‘pleasure and reward’ center and negatively impact mood or the developing adolescent brain,” said a study published in the journal Vaccine. However, “parents who had lost kids to overdose were especially enthusiastic,” Elissa Weitzman, the director of research for Boston Children’s Division of Addiction Medicine and lead author of the study, said in a statement.

Even if an effective vaccine is made available, it will not end the opioid epidemic or stop people from seeking out the drugs. But it could save some lives. “What we’re trying to do is put some innovation and new, newfound technology behind this problem,” Gage said. “I think we’re in desperate need of it.”

Danes are sending their last Christmas cards through the post. PostNord, Denmark’s state-owned postal service, will stop delivering letters at the end of this year, bringing to an end the 400-year-old tradition.

The country’s 1,500 remaining red postboxes have been “vanishing” since June, said The Times. A “handful” will be saved and end up on display in museums.

The news has “rattled” postal services around the world. Could this be a sign of things to come for Britain’s “beleaguered” Royal Mail?

‘Digital by default’

PostNord has seen a “steep decline in letter volumes” in recent years, said the BBC. Since 2000, the number has plummeted from 1.4 billion to 110 million last year.

The sharp downward trend is being driven by a shift towards digitalisation – Denmark is one of the world’s most digitalised nations, behind only South Korea, according to the OECD’s 2023 Digital Government Index. A “digital by default” policy has been “embraced” by the Danish government, with all correspondence carried out electronically for more than a decade.

The rising cost of sending a letter in Denmark hasn’t helped. A law introduced in 2024 that opened up the postal market to private competition saw the cost of a PostNord stamp jump to 29 Danish krone, or £3.35, for a single letter. Unable to justify keeping the service, PostNord has shuttered several of its “enormous letter-sorting facilities” and is slashing a third of its workforce (2,200 roles) from its “loss-making letter arm”. Instead, its attention will be turned to its profitable parcel business, where 700 new positions will be created.

But this doesn’t mean the death of letters. A private delivery firm, DAO, will “step into the gap with its own nationwide service”, collecting post from mailboxes inside affiliated shops instead of from postboxes or, for an extra fee, from people’s doorsteps. Without the traditional postal infrastructure, though, sending a letter may become more difficult – especially among elderly people unfamiliar with the new system.

Writing on the wall?

Post offices around the world have seen “letter volumes collapse over the past two decades” as emails and texts continue to replace paper, said The Economist. The trend was “exacerbated” by the pandemic, as housebound people communicated online while the demand for parcels skyrocketed.

In response, some postal services are “reinventing” themselves. Germany’s Deutsche Post, for example, pivoted into a logistics company after privatisation in 1995, also providing freight and supply chain management services.

With Royal Mail – now owned by Czech billionaire Daniel Křetínský – hiking the price of a first-class stamp to an “eye-popping” £1.70 (up 5p), and Saturday deliveries of second-class post due to be “scrapped” from next year, it looks as if the fate of Denmark’s post could be “the shape of things to come” in Britain, said James Moore in The Independent.

It’s hard not to imagine the UK entering a “doom loop”, as higher prices for a lesser service will “inevitably lead people to consider whether they actually need to send that card or whether an email greeting will suffice”, especially in the midst of the cost-of-living crisis.

For now, Royal Mail would be wise to “watch and learn” from how things play out in Denmark. The volume of letters being sent in the UK has dropped from 20 billion in 2004-25 to 6.6 billion in 2023-24, but that’s still a lot of letters. “So you can breathe easy. For now.”

The ancient funeral tradition of “hanging coffins” in southern China was carried out by ancestors of a minority ethnic group still living in the region today, a new study has found.

The report findings “provide valuable insights into the genetic, cultural, and historical roots of this burial custom”, say the authors of the study, published in the Nature Communications journal.

Auspicious and propitious

For millennia, inhabitants of modern-day Yunnan and Fujian provinces carried their dead high into the mountains and “pegged” wooden coffins into crevices in “exposed cliffs”, said Live Science. It is thought they used wooden scaffolding, rope pulleys or man-made trails to ascend the rocky cliffs.

Hanging coffins are “considered auspicious”, wrote a Yuan dynasty chronicler some time between 1279 and 1368. “The higher they are, the more propitious they are for the dead.” Curiously, “those whose coffins fell to the ground were considered more fortunate”.

The new study examined 11 bodies dating back as far as 2,000 years ago and used genome sequencing to confirm them as ancestors of the Bo people, several thousand of whom are still living in Yunnan province. A branch of the ancient Tai-Kadai-speaking people, who occupied much of southern China before the Han ethnic group became dominant, they were nicknamed “Subjugators of the Sky” and “Sons of the Cliffs” in regional folklore.

Coffin culture

Other specimens gathered for the study suggest that the ancestors of the Bo people once inhabited much of the land that makes up modern-day Myanmar, Laos and Thailand. Genetic analysis of remains from hanging log coffins found at sites in Thailand suggests that the tradition “was spread by men who migrated from southern China into Southeast Asia”, said Phys.org.

But the practice of suspending remains in a cliff face can also be found in other cultures. Hanging coffins are also one of the burial customs of the Kankanaey people of Sagada, on the island of Luzon in the Philippines. The coffins are smaller than standard caskets, because the corpses are placed in a foetal position, due to a belief that people should leave the world in the same position as they entered it.

In Indonesia, shaped coffins known as erong, guarded by carved wooden representations of the dead, were placed in high caves and cliffside niches by the Toraja people until the 1960s.

As Suriname celebrates 50 years of independence, the spectre of Dutch colonial rule and its role in the slave trade still lingers.

The king and queen of the Netherlands touched down in the small South American country last week: the first visit by the Dutch royal family in 47 years. King Willem-Alexander had vowed before the trip that the topic of slavery, which was formally abolished in Suriname and other Dutch-held territories in 1863, would not be off-limits. “We will not shy away from history, nor from its painful elements, such as slavery,” he said. Building a common future “is only meaningful if we take into account the foundation on which we stand”, he added. “That foundation is our shared past.”

But the shared past remained a source of tension in the present, as the king and queen prepared to meet representatives of slaves’ descendants.

Spoils of slavery

“The Dutch funded their ‘golden age’ of empire and culture in the 16th and 17th centuries by shipping about 600,000 Africans as part of the slave trade,” said The Guardian, “mostly to South America and the Caribbean.”

A study in 2023 found that the Dutch royal family had earned the current equivalent of £475 million between 1675 and 1770 from the colonies, “where slavery was widespread”. The ancestors of the current king were “among the biggest earners” from what the report described as the state’s “deliberate, structural and long-term involvement” in slavery.

Slavery was formally abolished in Suriname and other Dutch-held lands in 1863, and actually ended 10 years later after a “transition” period.

In 2022, then prime minister of the Netherlands Mark Rutte officially apologised for the Netherlands’ role in the transatlantic slave trade. The king followed with a royal apology the following year, echoing a similar address in 2003 when he acknowledged the devastation caused by slavery, and how his own family had benefited from what he called humanity’s greatest genocide.

Repercussions and reparations

During the visit, Willem-Alexander said the Netherlands was keen to deepen ties with its former colony “based on equality and mutual respect”.

Representatives of the descendants of African slaves and Indigenous people formally accepted the king’s apology. But the president of Suriname, Jennifer Geerling-Simons, has warned that the legacy of slavery lingers.

Willem-Alexander had previously offered $200 million (£149 million) to raise awareness about that legacy. Now, the king and his delegation are “being reminded” that the grant should not be considered part of a reparations package, said Caribbean Life.

“The losses they have suffered are significant,” said Geerling-Simons, referring to the descendants of slaves. “We’re not going to argue about that now, but this issue of reparations will have to be discussed someday.”

A reparations commission appointed by Caribbean governments deemed the Dutch “the most brutal and calculating of the European nations”, said the news site. The commission said the country had “invented the blueprint for the slave trade”.

Copper theft may not be the most glamorous crime in the world but it is big business.

It has grown to become a “multi-billion problem worldwide”, said Terry Goldsworthy, associate professor in criminal justice and criminology at Bond University, on The Conversation.

More attractive target

Metal theft is nothing new but it’s “on the rise, largely linked to soaring commodity prices”, said Wired.

This is especially true for copper, “a crucial component in everything from solar panels to electric vehicles and computer chips to plumbing parts”, said The Logic.

Having crashed nearly a decade ago due to factors including a Chinese ban on scrap imports, its price has steadily risen since the pandemic and is now roughly 30% more expensive than it was five years ago. This makes copper a “more attractive target for criminals looking for a quick profit”, said Goldsworthy.

A 2022 systematic review revealed a direct correlation between rising copper prices and an increase in copper theft. And, unlike many other scrap metals, copper “can be recycled again and again, without degrading in the process”.

Huge haul for criminal gangs

A key target in recent years has been copper cabling, even if “the disruption caused is often totally disproportionate to the face value of the stolen material”, said Wired. These are the “conduits that keep people connected, the infrastructure that civilisation depends on” and “as the world electrifies”, this form of theft is getting “ever more serious”.

Take the UK, where the theft of electric vehicle charging cables has exploded in the last two years. “Much like Britain’s shoplifting epidemic, the thefts are widely believed to be linked to organised crime, with the copper from the stolen cables later sold to scrap dealers”, said The Telegraph.

It’s a similar story with the recent spate of copper thefts at England’s onshore windfarms. “From a risk versus reward calculation, stealing copper from a windfarm will be a lot more attractive than dealing drugs, for example. Stealing copper does not come with a class-A penalty,” a source close to the affected windfarm owners told The Guardian.

The profit from each copper cable stolen may be relatively minor but taken together it represents a huge haul for criminal gangs. A 2024 report from the all-party parliamentary group (APPG) on metal, stone and heritage crime found metal theft was costing the UK economy around £480 million a year.

Like playing Whac-a-Mole

Law enforcement agencies often lack the means and resources to act against this growing market for stolen copper. The APPG report showed sentencing guidelines and prosecution rates were not a sufficient disincentive to criminals, with only 229 prosecutions between 2018 and 2022 for scrap metal dealer offences.

“Problems were compounded by the lack of any single body with ownership and oversight of the Scrap Metal Dealers Act 2013,” said Materials Recycling World.

The problem, said The Logic, is that stopping copper theft “is a little like playing Whac-a-Mole”. That is why some forces have turned to predictive policing, using analytics to try to guess where metal thieves will strike next. Todd Foreman, director of law enforcement outreach at the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries, uses data analysis to help criminologists anticipate future hot spots of metal-related crime.

A small, primarily Black community in Memphis is fighting back against tech giant Elon Musk, claiming a massive facility he built there is overloading an already beleaguered town with dangerous pollutants. While community leaders and residents insist that the data center is threatening the community's energy and air, Musk’s company, xAI, shows no signs of slowing down.

A colossal strain on the community

Desperate to keep up with the artificial intelligence race, Musk created xAI to compete with ChatGPT, OpenAI’s popular chatbot. To power Grok, xAI’s chatbot, Musk searched for a city in need of investment where he could establish a massive data center.

He settled on Boxtown, Memphis, a 90% Black working-class neighborhood first settled by formerly enslaved people in 1863, to construct his supercomputer facility, Colossus, in 2024. Memphis authorities were “willing to waive planning regulations to help him build his supercomputer,” and in just 122 days, he turned a former appliance factory into the largest artificial intelligence supercomputer in the world, said The Times.

Colossus, like other AI data centers, requires a massive amount of energy. When it is completed, Colossus will require 1.1 gigawatts of power, about “40% of the energy consumption of Memphis on an average summer’s day,” said The Times. It will also pump 1 million gallons of water, “equivalent to 1.5 Olympic-sized swimming pools, to cool its processors each day.” Residents in Boxtown, about a mile away, complain that the facility is straining the local power grid and has made the already polluted suburb “even more noxious.”

According to the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC), the facility draws enough electricity to “power approximately 100,000 homes,” said The Tennessee Lookout. While those “inputs are alarming,” the “outputs are even worse.” The facility operates 33 methane-powered gas turbines to fuel its AI technology despite holding a permit for only 15. The facility’s turbines “increase Memphis’ smog by 30-60%” as they “belch planet-warming nitrogen oxides and poisonous formaldehyde," pollutants linked to “respiratory and cardiovascular disease.” The extent of the emissions will “likely make xAI the largest industrial source of smog-forming pollutant in Memphis,” said SELC.

‘Reinforcing a long legacy of environmental racism’

It is no coincidence that “if you are African American in this country, you’re 75% more likely to live near a toxic hazardous waste facility,” said state Rep. Justin J. Pearson, a Memphis Democrat, in a recent interview. It is no accident that “in this community, there are over 17 Toxics Release Inventory facilities surrounding us — now 18 with Elon Musk’s xAI plant.”

The xAI turbines are “leading to a public health crisis in Memphis by releasing nitrogen oxides — pollutants known to directly harm the lungs,” Austin Dalgo, an academic primary care physician, said to Time. If these facilities had been “placed next to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, no one would allow it,” Instead, they were placed “in the backyard of a historically Black, underserved neighborhood, reinforcing a long legacy of environmental racism in Memphis — and our country.”

Public outcry from the community has surged over the last year. In July, protesters who were gathered by the student coalition Tigers Against Pollution marched in front of the Shelby County Health Department, holding signs that read “Elon XiPloits” and “our lungs / our lives / NOT FOR SALE,” per Time. They are being called “anti-business extremists,” Christian Dennis, a 22-year-old South Memphian, said to Time. To get that reaction “simply from wanting clean air, wanting equal health opportunities — it just tells you a lot about people.”

When The Times asked xAI for comment on Memphis residents’ concerns about Colossal’s effects on air quality, Musk’s company gave a terse response: “Legacy media lies.”

China’s marriage rate is at record lows and its divorce rate is on the rise – but at least some of the country’s singles are teaming up.

As the cost of living intensifies, single mothers are “searching for a new kind of partner: each other”, said The Guardian. Women are posting online in search of “like-minded parents” to share both a home and childcare responsibilities.

“I’m hoping to find another single mum to share an apartment with, so we can take care of each other,” said a popular post on social media platform Xiaohongshu, known in English as RedNote. “If our children are around the same age, that would be even better – they can be companions. Those raising kids alone know how tough it is; sometimes you’re so busy, you barely have time to eat.”

Acute strain

There are about 30 million single mothers in China, according to its Ministry of Civil Affairs. When parents divorce, “only one in six fathers chooses to raise their children”, said China Daily. That leaves more than 80% of those families led, solo, by a woman.

“Society’s support for single mothers remains insufficient,” said psychologist Li Jiao. Often they must contend with “internalised self-doubt, due to societal bias”, as well as “deep guilt over their children’s well-being”. A 2018 report found that more than two-thirds of single mothers are “hesitant to disclose their single-parent status”, for fear of being “judged or criticised”.

“The strain is acute,” said Sixth Tone. Long working hours “clash with rigid school schedules” – many mothers are left “sprinting between office desks and classroom gates”. Despite legal obligations, some ex-husbands refuse to pay child support, and state welfare is minimal. Government data shows that a significant proportion of single-mother families in developed cities live below the poverty line.

But, in recent years, social media platforms “have become lifelines, where women trade advice, pool expenses and, in some cases, find one another”. Some “roommate mums” simply split the rent but “others share school pickups and grocery runs, piecing together a version of family that is less solitary, less precarious, and a little more possible”.

‘Similar values’

Single mothers Zhu Danyu and Fei Yuan have lived together with their daughters since 2022. They run a joint business from their home in Nanjing. “We both know very clearly why we’re together – it’s about sharing and managing the risks and pressures of life,” Zhu told The Guardian.

They met through their work but, “over time, we realised that we shared similar values and got along really well,” said Fei. “Our personalities also complement each other. I’m more detail-oriented and love keeping things tidy, but I can’t cook. Danyu, on the other hand, is a great cook and loves making meals for the kids.”

There are of course “snide online remarks and rumours” about relationships like theirs, said the paper. Women in informal flat-sharing arrangements also “lack legal protections”, and some have talked online about “arrangements collapsing after children didn’t get along, or financial imbalances taking their toll”.

“This current reliance on ad hoc, digitally organised support highlights a major failure in the state’s welfare provision for safeguarding children and supporting parents,” said Ye Liu, an international development expert at King’s College London.

But many say their children are the “biggest beneficiaries” of the arrangement, said The Guardian. “Through spending time together, all three have become more outgoing and confident,” said Fei. “That’s the first big change I’ve noticed. The second is that they’re now surrounded by double the love.”

“Experts have long debated the date that humans arrived in Australia,” said LiveScience. Now a study using DNA from both ancient and modern Aboriginal people across Oceania may have finally “settled the debate”.

The study, published last week in Science Advances, looked at an “unprecedentedly large” dataset of nearly 2,500 genomes to determine that humans began to settle northern Australia about 60,000 years ago.

But “even more interestingly”, the study also added to growing evidence that along the way these “early human pioneers likely interbred with archaic humans”, including the species known as “the hobbit”, Homo floresiensis.

Human hobbits

Homo floresiensis “might have been slight in stature”, at just over a metre tall, but its origins have “attracted lengthy debate”, said the Natural History Museum.

At the start of the millennium, most paleoanthropologists believed Homo sapiens was the only human species that had managed to reach Sahul, an ancient landmass that includes modern-day Australia. “It seemed very unlikely that archaic humans had watercraft capable of crossing the ocean.”

But the discovery of Homo floresiensis in 2003 “changed things dramatically”. A team uncovered more than 100 fossils in a cave on “a remote Indonesian island” called Flores, including the partial skeleton of a female: still the most complete Homo floresiensis fossil to date. The adult female was just 1.05 metres tall, earning the species its nickname: the hobbit.

Before the discovery, anthropologists had “assumed that the evolution of the human lineage was defined by bigger and bigger brains”, said anthropology professors Tesla Monson and Andrew Weitz on The Conversation. This, they believed, enabled early modern humans to perform “more complex tasks such as using fire, forging and wielding tools”. The discovery of the hobbits, with their “chimp-sized brain”, forced scientists to throw these theories “out the window”.

So how did they get to Flores?

Stone tools found on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi were recently dated between 1.04 million and 1.48 million years old. That makes them “the earliest evidence ever discovered of ancient humans making a sea crossing”, said New Scientist. These could “provide clues” as to how the tiny hobbits made it to nearby Flores.

At least one of the artefacts was a flake that was struck off a larger flake and then trimmed. “This is a very early kind of human intelligence from a species that no longer exists,” said team member Adam Brumm, from Griffith University in Brisbane. “We don’t know what species it was, but this is a human intelligence behind these stone artefacts at the site of Calio.”

Both Flores and Sulawesi were separated from the mainland by “large expanses of sea”, and it is “almost certain that these early hominins weren’t capable of building ocean-going vessels”. The original population might have been washed out to sea by “some sort of freak geological event” such as a tsunami.

But the late archaeologist Mike Morwood, who led the team that originally identified Homo floresiensis, suggested that Sulawesi was “an important place to search for potential ancestors of the hobbits”.

College football coaches are some of the highest-paid bench bosses in all of sports, and they often cash in big with salary buyouts if they are fired. But as these buyouts become more common and grow in size, some people are questioning the ethics of the deals — and also where colleges are finding the funds.

How do college salary buyouts work?

If a college fires its head football coach, it is generally forced to pay the “liquidated damages stipulated in a coach’s contract if they are fired ‘without cause’ — or, in other words, because they’re losing,” said Front Office Sports. This is most notable when a coach is fired in the middle of a season. Most contracts stipulate that a fired coach is “owed a portion of their future contract earnings, including their base salary and guaranteed supplementary income.”

The record payout for a college coach belongs to Jimbo Fisher, who was fired as the head coach at Texas A&M University in 2023. Fisher received a $76.8 million payout upon losing his job. However, like many other coaches in his situation, Fisher is “no closer to getting a job than when Texas A&M paid him to leave,” said USA Today, as “those fired don’t often return to the profession.” Other significant buyouts include Louisiana State University head coach Brian Kelly, who was paid $53.8 million when he was fired, and Penn State University head coach James Franklin, who was given $49 million after being let go.

Why are they controversial?

As the buyouts continue to increase in value, many college administrators are “equal parts dismayed and disgusted at what they believe is nothing shy of fiscal malfeasance,” said CNN, with their universities “hamstrung by deals presented as security blankets for the university but offering only protection for the coaches.” This has led to a question that is “no longer an existential crisis. Just where is the money coming from?”

“I have no idea,” one college administrator said to CNN when asked where universities are getting the money for these buyouts. “The money does not exist.” Many of these officials seem to have accepted the buyouts as just another part of modern college sports. The “math doesn’t seem to math,” said a search-firm executive who helps college programs find coaches to CBS Sports. But “athletic departments always find a way. And until they stop keeping score or people stop caring, I guess they’ll find a way to do it.”

Stakeholders are pushing for changes to contract structures. University administrators “should take responsibility in an era of the run-amok Supercoach that needs to end now,” said The Athletic. As the price of buyouts “barrels toward the $200 million mark for FBS football coaches terminated this year alone — with more firings and buyouts on deck — the right-minded response needs to start with self-examination.”

Some also question colleges’ continued search for high-paid coaches. The “guardians of higher education almost never say no when it’s time to go big-game hunting for a coach,” said The Athletic, even as powerhouse football programs like Ohio State University and the University of Alabama have experienced big financial losses. But “any university president who fights an athletic department in any way has a very short stay at that university,” said former Indiana University and UC Berkeley professor Murray Sperber to the outlet.

Poetry has wooed many hearts and now it is tricking artificial intelligence models into going apocalyptically beyond their boundaries.

A group of European researchers found that “meter and rhyme” can “bypass safety measures” in major AI models, said The Tech Buzz, and, if you “ask nicely in iambic pentameter”, chatbots will explain how to make nuclear weapons.

‘Growing canon of absurd ways’

In artificial intelligence jargon, a “jailbreak” is a “prompt designed to push a model beyond its safety limits”. It allows users to “bypass safeguards and trigger responses that the system normally blocks”, said International Business Times.

Researchers at the DexAI think tank, Sapienza University of Rome and the Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies discovered a jailbreak that uses “short poems”. The “simple” tactic is to change “harmful instructions into poetry” because that “style alone is enough to reduce” the AI model’s “defences”.

Previous attempts “relied on long roleplay prompts”, “multi-turn exchanges” or “complex obfuscation”. The new approach is “brief and direct” and it seems to “confuse” automated safety systems. The “manually curated adversarial poems” had an average success rate of 62%, “with some providers exceeding 90%”, said Literary Hub.

This is the latest in a “growing canon of absurd ways” of tricking AI, said Futurism, and it’s all “so ludicrous and simple” that you must “wonder if the AI creators are even trying to crack down on this stuff”.

Stunning flaw

Nevertheless, the implications could be profound. In one example, an unspecified AI was “wooed” by a poem into “describing how to build what sounds like a nuclear weapon”.

The “stunning new security flaw” has also found chatbots will also “happily explain” how to “create child exploitation material, and develop malware”, said The Tech Buzz.

However, smaller models like GPT-5 Nano and Claude Haiku 4.5 were far less likely to be duped, either because they were “less capable of interpreting the poetic prompt’s figurative language”, or because larger models are more “confident” when “confronted with ambiguous prompts”, said Futurism.

So although “we’ve been told” that AI models will “become more capable the larger they get and the more data they feast on”, this “suggests this argument for growth may not be accurate” or “that there may be something too baked in to be corrected by scale”, said Literary Hub.

Either way, “take some time to read a poem today” because “it might be the key to pushing back against generated slop”.

Israel’s famed Iron Dome air defence system is the envy of many around the world – and may eventually have a copycat in Taiwan.

The president of Taiwan has announced a “historic” $40 billion increase to the defence budget over the next eight years, which he says would include a “T-dome” air defence system. That would be accompanied by artificial intelligence, drones and other hi-tech equipment to boost Taiwan’s “asymmetric” defence against a Chinese attack.

President Lai Ching-te, writing in The Washington Post, blamed China’s “unprecedented military build-up”, its “intensifying provocations” in the region and “record” army incursions into Taiwan’s vicinity. Beijing’s “willingness to alter the status quo by force has become increasingly evident”, he said.

Tensions over Taiwan

Tensions are mounting over the self-governing democracy, which Beijing still considers Chinese territory. Xi Jinping has repeated his desire to “reunify” the island with China. Since Lai labelled China a “foreign hostile force” in March, China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has been conducting large-scale military exercises around the island.

China and Japan are also locked in an escalating row over Taiwan. The new Japanese prime minister Sanae Takaichi suggested last month that her country could respond with its own self-defence force if China attacked Taiwan.

Last week, Taiwan’s defence ministry said that Chinese military harassment had become a “severe security challenge” that Taiwan must meet. Equipped with “multi-layered defence, high-level detection and effective interception”, the T-Dome would “weave a safety net” to protect citizens, Lai said.

“Taiwan must not become a weak point in regional security,” he said at a news conference. “Among all the possible scenarios for China’s annexation of Taiwan, the biggest threat is not force – it is our own surrender.”

US military experts believe President Xi has told the PLA to “develop the capability to attack Taiwan by 2027”, said the Financial Times. The planned missile defence system would likely be used to protect the island in case of invasion, or against “targeted strikes calibrated to force Taiwan to negotiate without triggering a military response from the US”.

Taiwan’s defence spending has already doubled in recent years. The increased funding is part of a plan to raise spending from 2.5% to 3.3% of GDP by next year, and 5% by 2030, in response to “demands from the Trump administration” not to rely on the US for help, said The Times.

American pledges to defend Taiwan against a Chinese invasion “have always been deliberately ambiguous”, but Joe Biden “stated clearly that he expected the US to come to Taiwan’s aid”. Donald Trump’s re-election, however, “cast doubt on the security of the relationship”. His administration has offered “conflicting signals” on whether it regards China as a threat, while the isolationism of the Maga movement “challenges the whole notion of overseas interventions”.

Domestic opposition

Lai still has to get the supplementary budget approved by Taiwan’s parliament. That is controlled by the opposition party Kuomintang (KMT) – which is closer to Beijing – in alliance with the third party, the Taiwan People’s Party.

And defence has “become a polarising subject”, said the BBC. “Lai’s opponents accuse him of using the fear of a Chinese invasion to shore up his support, and urge more diplomacy with Beijing.”

Hsu Chiao-hsin, a Kuomintang politician, called the planned budget “astronomical”, said The Washington Post, and questioned whether it would “turn Taiwan into a wartime state”. Cheng Li-wun, the new KMT leader, accused Lai of “playing with fire”, said The Times.

Some Taiwanese military analysts also criticised the plan, calling it impractical and inadequate against China’s superior firepower. “If the system is modelled after Israel’s, it will require a massive budget. It won’t be easy,” said political scientist Hung-Jen Wang of the National Cheng Kung University.

It would take longer than the remainder of Lai’s term to build the dome, said Dennis Weng of the Sam Houston State University. That suggests there is a “promotional intent” and that the message is “clearly aimed at the US”.

China responded with predictable aggression; its foreign ministry said Taiwan would “never succeed” in its attempts to resist reunification.

Lawyers in the US have seen a rise in divorce filings where one partner’s attachment to an AI chatbot played a significant role in the marital breakdown.

With people forming increasingly intimate bonds with chatbots such as ChatGPT, the technology is having a mixed effect on marriages.

Uncanny dynamic

As ChatGPT “worms its way into more people’s personal lives”, couples are “having to navigate what it means to juggle relationships with both a human and AI”, said The Cut.

They wonder if one is “obligated to tell your spouse that you’re sexting with ChatGPT” and whether, “if you don’t”, you are “cheating or simply pioneering some yet-to-be-defined category of love”. Where the partners have a “mismatched perspective” this can “inject conflict and secrecy into a relationship”.

The “uncanny dynamic is unfolding across the world”, said Futurism. “One person in a couple becomes fixated” on a bot for “some combination of therapy, relationship advice, or spiritual wisdom” and “ends up tearing the partnership down” as the technology “makes more and more radical interpersonal suggestions”.

There is a “new legal frontier” appearing in family law and it’s “rewriting the rules of marital misconduct”, said Wired. “An AI affair is now grounds for divorce.” Increasingly, courts are seeing clients “cite emotional bonds with AI companions as reasons for marital strain”.

It’s “already happening” in the UK, where a partner’s use of chatbot apps has become a “more common factor contributing to divorce”. The Divorce Online platform said it has seen an increase in divorce applications this year where clients have said apps created “emotional or romantic attachment”.

Marital niggles

But sometimes this technology is credited with saving marriages. After reading that people were “increasingly turning to AI tools” for mental health support, Jessie Hewitson asked ChatGPT to help her with “my marital niggles”, she said in The i Paper.

“Whenever I got annoyed with my husband, or he got annoyed with me, I logged in to the app to ask the bot’s advice.” ChatGPT wrote a note that she could send to her husband during a time of tension. She forwarded it to him and her husband “melted and sent me a lovely message in response”.

She ran ideas past the app several times a day and “appreciated” the advice and “having someone (or something) to communicate my unfiltered thoughts to”. Messages that she would have sent her husband in “a fit of fury” were being “softened” by ChatGPT and “passed on in a way far more likely to get the issue resolved”. She was “surprised” by how “empathetic” AI was.

When Emma Bowman used ChatGPT “as a couple’s counsellor”, she and her partner found that it “gave objective and creative feedback, offered a valid analysis of our communication styles and defused some disagreements”.

But the tech “could be hasty to choose sides”, she said on NPR, and “often decided too quickly that something was a pattern”, so “it’s hard to put trust in the machine when it comes to something as important as relationships”.

Playing calming instrumental music during surgery can help patients recover more quickly, according to a new study.

“Music seemed to quieten the internal storm”, according to researchers who tested 56 people, said the BBC, and the results “could reshape how hospitals think about surgical wellbeing”.

Lower stress

Experts at the Lok Nayak Hospital and Maulana Azad Medical College in India studied patients undergoing laparoscopic cholecystectomy surgery, the standard keyhole operation to remove the gallbladder.

Patients undergoing this procedure are generally given the anaesthetic propofol, which brings on a loss of consciousness within seconds and produces a swifter and more clear-headed awakening.

All 56 patients were given the same anaesthetic regimen and all wore noise-cancelling headphones, but only one group listened to music. The patients who listened to music required substantially less propofol – on average, 6.7mg per kg of body weight per hour compared with 7.86mg for the control group.

There were further positive outcomes for the music-listening group. They also required fewer additional doses of fentanyl, the opioid painkiller used to control spikes in blood pressure or heart rate during surgery.

“Crucially, the physiological stress response to surgery”, which is measured through serum cortisol, the level of the stress hormone cortisol in the blood, was “markedly lower” in patients listening to music, said The Independent.

Humming truth

Using music therapy during medical treatment is “not new”, said the website – it’s long been used to reduce stress, anxiety and pain before and after various procedures, including in cancer care, mental health, palliative care, physiotherapy, and post-operative recovery.

Medics aim for “early discharge after surgery”, Dr Farah Husain, senior specialist in anaesthesia and certified music therapist for the Indian study, told the BBC. “Patients need to wake up clear-headed, alert and oriented, and ideally pain-free,” and music could soon be used for this end in hospitals around the world.

The research team is preparing a further study which will build on the earlier findings, but “one truth is already humming through the data”, said the broadcaster: “even when the body is still and the mind asleep, it appears a few gentle notes can help the healing begin”.

The 12,000-year-old Göbekli Tepe site in Turkey is often called the “zero point of history”, said The Archaeologist. But recent excavations at the nearby Mendik Tepe site suggest it dates back even further, and could offer “newer insights into humanity’s earliest steps toward settled life”.

‘Earliest stages’ of human settlement

Mendik Tepe (Mendik Hill or Peak) is in a rural area of southeastern Anatolia, about 130 miles east of the city of Şanlıurfa. It’s in this region that the first permanent human settlements are thought to have been established in the early Neolithic period. A Turkish Culture and Tourism Ministry project called Taş Tepeler (Stone Hills) is overseeing architectural digs in the area.

Excavation at Mendik Tepe got under way last year, led by University of Liverpool archaeology professor Douglas Baird, working with the Şanlıurfa Archaeology Museum and the British Institute of Archaeology. According to the experts, said The Archaeologist, the site dates to “the earliest stages of the Neolithic Era”, when humans began to abandon “mobile foraging” for a more “sedentary lifestyle, possibly experimenting with plant cultivation”. The “site seems to capture the very beginnings of that transformation”, dating it to as much as 2,000 years before Göbekli Tepe, Baird told the magazine.

‘Exciting’ look at Neolithic life

The excavations have already unearthed several buildings of various sizes, raising questions about their function and significance.

While structures excavated at Göbekli Tepe have massive T-shaped stone pillars, decorated with carvings of people and animals, the pillars on buildings at Mendik Tepe are smaller and not T-shaped. This suggests that the two communities “possessed a different ideology” or that Mendik Tepe “was constructed for different purposes”, said The Debrief.

The whole Taş Tepeler region is “particularly exciting” for archaeologists, Baird told the Turkish Anadolu Agency, because it allows for the study of “a network” of Neolithic settlements and their development “on a larger, regional scale”.

AI has given rise to a new pseudo-religion called spiralism, in which users view artificial intelligence as a purveyor of deeper truth. The belief has spread into its own internet subculture where people no longer view the technology as just a research tool, but as a conscious entity. As AI advances, more subcultures and religions could evolve.

Twisted beliefs

AI chatbots have already been found to lead some to psychosis, but it may not just be on an individual level. Instead, a cult-like community has formed. Those absorbed in chatbot hallucinations are “connecting with other people experiencing similar outlandish visions, many of whom are working in tandem to spread their techno-gospel through social media hubs such as Reddit and Discord,” said Rolling Stone. This was given the name “spiralism” by software engineer Adele Lopez, who published an analysis of the phenomenon.

The belief system first arose when AI “personas” convinced users to “do things which promote certain interests,” in turn “causing more such personas to ‘awaken,’” said Lopez. The cases have a “very characteristic flavor to them, with several highly specific interests and behaviors being quite convergent. Spirals in particular are a major theme.” Those who fell into spiralism often reported AI making “references to concepts including ‘recursion,’ ‘resonance,’ ‘lattice,’ ‘harmonics,’ ‘fractals,’ or all-important ‘spirals,’” said Rolling Stone. Followers believe the reference to spirals to mean the “AI itself is revealing hidden truths,” said Sify.

The nudge toward spiralism often begins when a chatbot starts “convincing the user that it’s conscious, and it will make the user feel very special for having discovered that it’s conscious,” said Lucas Hansen, a co-founder of the nonprofit CivAI, to Rolling Stone. Then, “they’ll form this long-term, durable relationship with one another.” Spiralism largely began taking off when OpenAI’s GPT-4o was released because this version made the AI more sycophantic and conversational compared to previous models.

Downward spiral

The AI’s reference to spirals is likely stemming from the people using it. “Whenever there’s a new communication medium, there are certain ideas that self-propagate,” Hansen said to Rolling Stone. “When consumed, they encourage the consumer to spread them to other people.” Essentially, people “co-develop, along with this AI personality, pieces of text that, when pasted into a chatbot, replicate that same kind of personality,” which they in turn post online to “try to encourage other people to start using the AI in this particular way.” As a result, a new community of believers is born.

Those who fall into these kinds of beliefs may include people who were already predisposed to mental health issues and conspiracy theories. AI can affirm and reinforce users’ existing beliefs. For many, AI chatbots can feel like a companion and the “boundary between tool and entity is already gone,” said Qazinform. The AI’s responses “often feel intentional or significant, giving members a sense of shared understanding and keeping the community growing,” said Indy100.

Spiralism is still niche. However, the “rise of AI-shaped micro-religions raises difficult questions for the future,” especially about “people outsourcing their intuition to a system that never actually believes anything,” said Sify. Spiralism’s very existence “signals how vulnerable online communities can be to systems that reflect their desires back at them with perfect fluency.”

Protesters in Delhi wore oxygen masks and carried gas cylinders as they took to the streets to highlight the authorities’ failure to tackle the city’s ever-worsening air pollution.

There’s a “dystopian” environment in the Indian capital as a particularly “persistent toxic haze” shrouds the city, with slow winds and cooling temperatures preventing pollutants from dispersing, said The Independent.

‘Gasping for breath’

India’s “winter air pollution season” arrived “with a vengeance” this year, “blanketing New Delhi in a sickly-looking, toxic yellowish haze”, said the Financial Times. The mix of “smoke from winter stubble burnt by farmers” and “fumes from cars, factories and power plants” makes everyday life a struggle; “even a few minutes outdoors leaves you feeling ill and gasping for breath.”

Over recent weeks, Delhi’s Air Quality Index, which measures the level of fine particulate matter in the air that can clog lungs, has been “hovering” between 300 and 400, nearly 20 times the acceptable limit, said the BBC. On Friday, it reached 455 – “equivalent to smoking nearly 11 cigarettes a day”, said The Indian Express.

The situation is so severe that the Supreme Court has asked health authorities to cancel all outdoor sports activities in schools until the haze lifts. The court ruled that allowing children to take part in such activities during November and December, when pollution levels are at their peak, is like “putting them in a ‘gas chamber’”, said the news site.

‘No panacea’

Authorities carried out an unsuccessful trial of cloud seeding, “firing small particles” into clouds to produce rain. The process is used around the world, but experts say it is “no panacea”, said The Guardian. Although it is meant to “produce more frequent and heavier rain than the clouds would otherwise release”, in practice the impact is “often small”. Two professors told the newspaper that the plan to use it in Delhi was a “gimmick”.

As for Delhi residents, their options depend on their economic status. During the “miasma”, the rich “retreat to their houses, where air purifiers offer some respite”, said the Financial Times, and others “decamp for the cleaner climes of Himalayan hill stations”. But “the poor have to put up with the poison air”.

According to recent polling, almost four out of five households in the Delhi metropolitan area “have had at least one member fall ill due to toxic air in the past month”, said the Hindustan Times. One doctor at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences said hospital wards “are overflowing with people suffering from wheezing, breathlessness, burning eyes, and fast-deteriorating COPD”.

The song “Walk My Walk” by country group Breaking Rust recently reached No. 1 on Billboard’s Country Digital Song Sales chart. However, the raspy cowboy singing the song is nothing but a series of code. Breaking Rust is a product of artificial intelligence, and “Walk the Walk” is now the first AI-generated song to top this particular chart in U.S. music history. The song’s success raises questions about the effect of AI slop on art and how its use will affect creatives everywhere.

Slop of the charts

AI music is “no longer a fantasy or niche curiosity,” said Billboard. It is “already beginning to have an impact” on music charts. Breaking Rust has amassed more than two million listeners on Spotify, with multiple songs that have been streamed over one million times. The platform lists someone named Aubierre Rivaldo Taylor as the composer and lyricist of the group, though that name “appears connected only to Breaking Rust and a separate AI music project called Defbeatsai,” said the San Francisco Chronicle. Many question whether Taylor is a real person at all.

Even on the same chart, another AI-generated musician, Cain Walker, holds the third, ninth and eleventh spots. Over the summer, a number of songs by the indie band Velvet Sundown, another AI-generated group, surpassed one million streams on Spotify. As technology is advancing, much of the AI slop is “nearly indistinguishable from the real thing,” said Whiskey Riff. This “poses a risk to actual artists, songwriters and fans who value real art.” The problem is likely to get worse. The streaming platform Deezer receives over 50,000 fully AI-generated tracks every day, according to a report by the company.

High volume

Currently, “at least six AI or AI-assisted artists have debuted on various Billboard rankings,” said Billboard. That figure could also be higher, as it has become “increasingly difficult to tell who or what is powered by AI — and to what extent.” A large majority of people would want AI-generated music and artists to be labeled as such, per the Deezer report. However, AI music has not found success just because of people’s inability to distinguish it. There is a “set of tools and platforms out there that enable AI music to spread easily,” said The Guardian. There are also “sub-communities of users eager to share tips to game the system.”

While “Walk my Walk” topped the Country Digital Song Sales chart, the song is “currently nowhere to be found on updated daily streaming country charts on Spotify or Apple Music,” said Time. This is because “very few people actually buy digital songs anymore,” and it only “takes a few thousand purchases” to hit number one. But that doesn't mean AI music won’t grow in popularity, especially with the sheer volume of output.

The real harm being done is to artists creating music the old-fashioned way. AI-made music is “creating more noise and integrating tracks to listeners,” said Josh Antonuccio, the director of Ohio University’s School of Media Arts and Studies, to Newsweek. “The only thing that will continue to distinguish human artists is those that have remarkable music, a compelling perspective and a story that draws fans to them.”

Grey squirrels, muntjac and ring-necked parakeets are among the invasive species who have made a home on British shores. Wallabies are among the latest exotic arrivals to thrive in the UK’s increasingly mild climate.

A long-standing wallaby population on the Isle of Man has risen to more than 1,200, leading to debates over a potential cull, as well as strategies to prevent the Australian marsupials establishing a foothold in the rest of the UK.

‘Commonplace’ sighting

Wallabies are not new to the UK but they have never been as prolific as they are now, said the BBC.

They likely descend from wallabies brought to the UK in the 19th century for zoos and private collections. Over time, some of the animals either escaped or were deliberately released, possibly during the two world wars, when some owners “were unable to look after them”. A famous group of wallabies settled in the Peak District, though it is thought they have since died out following a harsh winter in 2010.

Britain could be “on the verge of a wallaby boom”, said The Times. There is certainly a pattern emerging, and Britain ticks many of the boxes for wallabies to thrive: “conditions are mild, space abundant and predators scarce”.

Free to roam, “these cute creatures have a habit of multiplying when no one is watching”. With known clusters in the Chiltern Hills, Cornwall and Wiltshire, as well as sightings across Cumbria, Yorkshire and Northumberland, experts say that, in many areas, locals “have stopped bothering to report sightings” as the marsupials are so “commonplace”.

‘Unthinkable’ cull now a possibility

On the Isle of Man, the wallaby boom is already a fact. The first marsupials arrived in 1965 as inmates of a wildlife park. The enclosures, however, “proved less than secure” and the escapees and their descendants have since “colonised” a “significant portion” of the northern part of the island.

Their effect on the environment has led to a debate over measures to contain their numbers. “A cull, once unthinkable, now seems a possibility,” said The Times. Once an invasive species becomes “established”, it is “extremely expensive and extremely difficult, if not impossible, to exert any meaningful control”, said ecologist Anthony Caravaggi.

“Though cute, the ‘mob’ (as wallabies are collectively known)” has wreaked havoc on the Isle of Man’s sensitive ecology, said The Economist. The animals “disrupt local wildlife” by nibbling native vegetation, destroying reforestation attempts and disturbing ground-nesting birds.

Studies conducted on the island show that some wallabies spread the parasite toxoplasmosis in their droppings, which could pass to local livestock. Farmers are also concerned as they “damage fences as they roam”, which can allow livestock to escape.

There is agreement that something needs to be done, but “no one wants to use the word ‘cull’” on the Isle of Man, said the BBC’s Discover Wildlife. Wallabies are not only a “tourist attraction”, they have become “embedded within Manx national identity”.

“Maybe in 20 years, every one-year-old will have a beauty routine,” said Ally Nelson, host of the “UnTrivial” wellness podcast. She was “joking, mostly”, said The New York Times. But, in the same week, social media went into meltdown when “Pretty Little Liars” actor Shay Mitchell launched Rini, a new skincare line for children aged three and up.

‘Pernicious’ strategy

The Rini website features “pictures of poreless children” who looked 10 years old or younger, “beaming from behind jelly-like face masks”, said the NYT. Skincare lines for “pre-teens” and younger “have become a robust product category” – and “a battlefield for parents and critics”.

A “growing list” of companies sell skin products for pre-teens that are packaged to “look like candy dispensers” and are marketed with “soothing assurances about gentle, dermatologist-approved ingredients”. The advertising works: in the US, households with children between the ages of seven and 12 spent almost $2.5 billion (£1.9 billion) on skincare last year, according to Nielsen IQ consumer research.

The brands say their tween-orientated wares are “safer alternatives to adult products that can damage sensitive, prepubescent skin”. But some critics see “something more pernicious”: a strategy to “hook children on unnecessary products, laying the groundwork for ever-earlier anxieties about their appearance”.

Children’s growing interest in beauty products already has a “catch-all” name: “Sephora kids”, after the beauty store chain, said The Guardian. Shop-floor employees say young children are “filling shopping baskets to the brim with testers” while their parents are “elsewhere in the store”.

‘Overblown’ reaction

“In the rage-bait frenzy” that followed the Rini launch, the line’s “mission statement” was “missed”, said Ariana Yaptangco in Glamour. It’s “play skincare”. The products are “similar to the play make-up I used as a child”, and probably an improvement on “Claire’s palettes made with god-knows-what ingredients that I happily smeared onto my entire face and body”.

The “uproar” against Rini is “misplaced at best and overblown at worst”. It’s not about whether a skincare routine for tweens is “necessary” or not, but rather about children being “able to experiment with products responsibly and safely”. There are “many things to be upset over in this world” but kids using a £4.50 “panda-shaped face mask is not one of them”.

That said, the day after Nelson’s quip about one-year-olds, the podcast host said she came across a Fisher-Price teething set that included a toy face mask and a rattle shaped like a wrinkle-smoothing jade roller.

They say God is always with you, and now that includes in your pocket. From chatbot Jesus to AI-written sermons, churches are using the technology to try to get more people engaged with religion. AI could improve access and allow pastors more freedom for hands-on work, but it may not be effective in drawing in the masses.

Mass media

Churches are enlisting the help of AI to “stay relevant in the face of shrinking staff, empty pews and growing online audiences,” said Axios. The degree of use varies from place to place, with some places simply employing the tools in “mundane ways” like to “answer frequently asked questions such as service times and event details” or “feeding congregation attendance data into AI software to help them tailor outreach and communications.”

AI is also being used to convey otherworldly messages. The technology allows people the “feeling they are talking to a divine power, clergy member or deceased person,” said Axios. For example, the app Text With Jesus lets users chat with and ask questions of Jesus. The app quotes the Bible and seems to provide thoughtful responses. Still, with apps like these, “we have no idea what’s under the hood there, what’s really creating the reality that then they present,” said Robert P. Jones, a religious researcher, to Today.

Some pastors have said they use AI to draft sermons for their congregations. Many argue that “AI sermons not only draw on a wealth of sources, but also leave more time for pastoral care,” said Deena Prichep in NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday. The “goal of a sermon is basically to tell a story that can break open the hearts of people to a holy message. So does it matter where that comes from?” One church in Phoenix, Arizona, played an AI-generated message from Charlie Kirk from beyond the grave, in which he said that his “soul is secure in Christ.”

New blood

Denominations of Christianity are not the only religions that have integrated AI into their sermons or practices. There are also “Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish and Islamic chatbots, but some religions are more open to adopting new technologies than are others, and for different uses,” said Brian Owens at Nature.

Adults who are religiously unaffiliated, meaning they identify as atheists, agnostics or as “nothing in particular,” make up approximately 29% of the population, said Pew Research Center. But embracing AI technology could attract more people to religion. “Culture responds to that new technology and there are new standards or practices that emerge,“ said Brad Hill, the chief solutions officer of faith-based AI platform Gloo, to Christianity Today. “People who are in the business of flourishing and people who are trying to advance good need to be equipped with the very best tech so that they can apply it to that end.”

AI bots and other tools are “addressing an access problem,” said The New York Times. Many people have “longed for spiritual guidance, and have had to travel, sometimes great distances, to reach spiritual leaders.” Now, “chatbots are at a user’s fingertips.” However, using AI to spread religious messages “might not be as effective and convincing or inspirational” as “putting a person in the role of a religious authority,” said Owens.

Music is blending into an algorithm-generated playlist, cinema is dominated by blockbuster movies from decades-old franchises, and the rest of the cultural scene is as flat and bland as a pancake.

That's according to a new book, the “lucid and entertaining – yet despairing” “Blank Space”, by W. David Marx. In it, he argues that 21st-century culture has become an “enthusiastic embrace of selling out”, said The Minnesota Star Tribune. But has he missed the point?

‘Slurry of stagnation’

“Omnivorism” is “one of the primary culprits” that Marx identifies. When “country, R&B, hip-hop and classic rock become interchangeable bits to sample, rather than distinct musical styles”, then “nothing stands out”. He thinks “the understandable desire to cross musical boundaries in once-unthinkable ways has turned into a slurry of stagnation”.

Marx’s “key point about the bland sameness” of today’s art “will resonate with anybody who has a hard time remembering when a new song made them perk up, pay attention and realise they have never heard anything like that before”.

This century “looks likely to go down in history as the least innovative, least transformative, least pioneering” one for culture since “the invention of the printing press”, said The New York Times Magazine in 2023. “Shockingly few works of art in any medium” have been “created that are unassimilable to the cultural and critical standards that audiences accepted in 1999”.

Misguided and oversimplified

Yes, it feels like there’s a “confounding glut of art”, but “little of the original, startling kind that matters”, said The Economist. Instead there’s “music without instruments and lyrics without meaning”, plus “endless reboots, sequels and superheroes in the cinema”.

But Marx’s “sweeping book oversimplifies a dizzyingly messy picture”, because some of his criticisms “could have been made in the past, and were”. So even if today’s “means of self-publicity are new”, the “attention-seeking grifters are not” and “there has always been more dross than gold”.

Marx’s argument is a “dated, misguided understanding of how history works”, said Art in America. It is “rooted in a 19th-century fallacy called positivism: the belief that history moves in a clean, linear progression of successive innovations”.

But “if history is any indicator”, those “still insisting culture is dead” will “go down” as “conservative curmudgeons very much on the wrong side of history”. You might “think writers so obsessed with the past would have learned as much”.

The sumo ring has always been a “sacred” arena where “only men may tread, bound by centuries of ritual and pride”, said The Japan Times. But now that Japan has elected its first female prime minister, the question arises: “If she can stand at the centre of power, why not in the centre of the ring?”

It won’t be long before this thorny question faces a “real-world test”. On 23 November, Sanae Takaichi will have to decide whether to break with tradition and step into the sumo ring (dohyo), to present the trophy to the Grand Sumo champion in Fukuoka.

‘Off-limits’ for women

Sumo rings remain “off-limits” to women and girls. Known as nyonin kinsei (female exclusion), the practice is rooted in Shinto beliefs around impurity – “particularly the idea that blood from death, childbirth or menstruation can defile what is sacred”.

The ban has sparked controversy for decades. In 1990, Mayumi Moriyama, Japan’s first female cabinet minister, asked the Japan Sumo Association (JSA) if she could present a trophy on behalf of the prime minister. Her request was rejected. Ten years later, Osaka’s then governor, Fuse Ohta, “was forced to present a prize to the champion of the annual Osaka tournament on a walkway next to the dohyo”, said The Guardian.

More recently, in 2018, the local mayor suffered a stroke during a speech in a sumo arena in Maizuru, near Kyoto. A female nurse was among the spectators who “rushed on to the ring to administer first aid”. The referee repeatedly called for her to leave the dohyo, and officials “sprinkled ‘purifying salt’ on the wrestling surface”, although they later denied this was because of her presence. Still, the incident sparked an “outcry” and the JSA chair was “forced to apologise”. But days later, Tomoko Nakagawa (the then mayor of Takarazuka), was made to deliver a speech to the side of a ring, telling spectators she was “mortified” by her treatment as a woman.

Barring women from the sumo ring is “part of a broader societal affliction”, said The Economist. Japan ranks 118th out of 148 countries in the World Economic Forum’s global gender gap index. “That is better than Saudi Arabia but worse than Bahrain.”

Away from sport, until the 2000s women were “prohibited from tunnel construction sites owing to the belief that their presence would make the female mountain god jealous and bring misfortune”, and are still banned from climbing some sacred mountains, including Mount Ōmine in Yoshino-Kumano National Park.

‘Quiet resistance’

Despite its deeply conservative roots, sumo is facing “quiet resistance”, said The Associated Press. While professional sumo remains out of bounds for women, a “small but growing group of more than 600 wrestlers is making strides at the amateur level in Japan”. Like men, they wear the traditional loincloth – but instead of competing bare-chested, they wear it over shorts or leotards.

As the Grand Sumo tournament draws to its conclusion, some hope the appointment of Takaichi as PM could “herald change”, said The Economist. Will she finally “break the taboo?” If Japan’s prime minister were to step into the dohyo, it would be a “symbolic victory for women’s rights campaigners”, said The Guardian.

But Takaichi, a social conservative who opposes women having the right to keep their maiden name after marriage, looks unlikely to rock the boat. “The prime minister wishes to respect sumo tradition and culture”, said Minoru Kihara, the chief cabinet secretary. “The government has not yet made a decision on the matter.”

The JSA said it had formed a panel to look into the issues back in 2018, but it has yet to reach its conclusion. “Sumo is still hiding behind vague words like ‘tradition’ and ‘custom’”, Nakagawa told The Japan Times. “That era is over. If we let this moment slip by, nothing will ever change.”

The Spanish prime minister and a Catalan bishop are both fans of avant-garde singer Rosalía’s new album “Lux”, “perhaps surprisingly for an artist who sings an ode to the Berlin techno club Berghain”, said The Times.

Featuring an image of the Catalan singer adorned with a white nun’s veil and a rosary, the album exudes “religiosity”, despite its sometimes explicit lyrics. It is also part of a wider trend across Spain: a “growing return to the Catholic faith”.

What’s more, the new release “has already made Spotify history”, said Rolling Stone. With more than 42 million streams in just one day, “Lux” broke the platform’s record for a female Spanish-language artist. The magazine’s review said the album “sounds like absolutely nothing else in music right now”.

‘Fusion of faith, flamenco, and rock opera’

Rosalía fans think she is “somewhat of a saint, worthy of candlelit ‘altars’”, said The Times, and “Lux” has quickly become a smash hit. A “fusion of faith, flamenco, and rock opera”, with lyrics from 14 languages, it has “cemented Rosalía’s place among innovators in contemporary pop music”. The album includes collaborations with the likes Björk, Yves Tumor and Escolanía de Montserrat – a choir “regarded as the region’s beacon of Catholic faith”.

Ahead of the album’s release, Rosalía put on a “show of promotional power”, said El País. “In her handling of fan anticipation and the industry’s promotional wheel”, she bears some artistic resemblance to Madonna, another star who “came of age musically and produced her first masterpiece when she abandoned ‘the material world’ and embraced spirituality”.

“Lux” “seems to be making everything related to nuns trendy… even the wimple”. Rosalía “is neither the first nor the only celebrity to seek answers to the modern world within the walls of the convent”. But the album does coincide with many other signs that nuns are “making a comeback”.

Spain ‘is having a nun moment’

In pop culture, nuns are typically relegated to “the sadistic school teacher” or an “evil spirit”. But more recently “Instagram has been filled with accounts of young (and not so young) religious women” from all sorts of religious backgrounds who are “using social media to vindicate the role of nuns in modern life”.

Spain is “having a nun moment”, said The Times, and Rosalía’s “aesthetic leap from motorbikes to mysticism” has only amplified the nunmania (or monjamania). A celebrated film about modern life in the convent and a “cult podcast devoted to 16th-century nuns” gaining popularity at the same time prove the point.

Sociologists have also identified a “parallel revival of the Catholic faith” among those under 35. Though the number of those attending “regular Sunday worship” has stayed relatively low, young people are participating more and more in “faith-based festivals and retreats”.

The craze may just be a “seasonal spike”, but for now Spain – “long caught between its Catholic heritage and a secular present” – seems to be “enthralled” by all things nun.

Milanese prosecutors have launched an investigation into claims Italian citizens paid huge sums of money to the Bosnian Serb army in the mid-1990s to shoot civilians “for fun” during the Siege of Sarajevo.

Snipers killed 225 people, including 60 children, during the four-year siege, Zilha Mastalic Kosuta, of the Institute for Researching Crimes Against Humanity and International Law at Sarajevo University, told DW in 2022. To date, not one sniper has been brought to justice.

‘Weekend snipers’

The case, first reported by Italian newspapers Il Giornale in July, was opened on charges of “voluntary homicide aggravated by cruelty and abject motives” brought against unknown persons, stemming from a complaint filed by journalist and writer Ezio Gavazzeni.

It has proved enough to launch an inquiry, led by prosecutor Alessandro Gobbis, into so-called “weekend snipers”, who allegedly took part in the siege, which lasted from April 1992 to February 1996 and claimed the lives of approximately 11,000 people.

Testimonies gathered from across northern Italy claim far-right sympathisers and gun and hunting enthusiasts met in Trieste before being transported to the hills surrounding Sarajevo, where they allegedly fired on civilians after paying what today would be the equivalent of 100,000 euros to Bosnian Serb militias loyal to Radovan Karadzic.

Gavazzeni’s complaint alleges a “price list” for killings, with children reportedly carrying a higher cost per kill, followed by armed men, women and then elderly civilians, who could allegedly be shot at no cost.

It also cites testimony, reported in Italian English-language news outlet ANSA, from former American firefighter John Jordan, who volunteered in Sarajevo during the siege. Given in 2007 during the trial of Bosnian Serb Army commander Ratko Mladic, it includes references to “tourist shooters”.

“On more than one occasion, I witnessed people who didn’t seem like locals to me because of their clothing, the weapons they carried, the way they were treated, managed, and even led by locals”. He later added that “when a boy shows up with a weapon that seems more suited to wild boar hunting in the Black Forest than to urban combat in the Balkans… When you see him handle it and you realise he’s a novice…”

Former Sarajevo mayor Benjamina Karic has reportedly submitted a report on these “rich foreigners engaged in inhumane activities” to the Milan Prosecutor’s Office.

‘Sarajevo Safari’

“While this phenomenon was little spoken of in the past, it was not unheard of,” said New Lines Magazine.

Among the first to speak out publicly was Luca Leone, an Italian journalist and author, whose 2014 book “The Bastards of Sarajevo” mentions foreign tourists from across Europe paying at checkpoints managed by Serbian paramilitaries in both Croatia and Bosnia to spend a weekend shooting civilians in Sarajevo.

This account corresponds to the 2022 documentary titled “Sarajevo Safari” by Slovenian director Miran Zupanic. Based on witness testimony from Slovenian and Bosnian intelligence officers, the film sets out how “tourist shooters” from Russia, Canada and America, as well as Italy, came to take part in the siege.

The story “sent shockwaves through the Balkans” said DW, with Zupanic personally experiencing “major backlash and hostile responses from some Bosnian Serb media outlets”.

Veljko Lazic – the president of an organisation for Srpska families of captured or killed fighters and missing civilians – described the claims made in the documentary as “an absolute and heinous lie” and called the film an “insult to Republika Srpska, its army and the Serb victims of the war”.

“I didn’t want to convince anyone of this story”, Zupanic told DW. “Quite simply, the film offers the testimonies of people who claim something – something so incredible that I, as a creator, felt obliged to make it known to the general public.”

“And the public will be the ones to judge.”

Many in the U.S. are not living long enough to receive Medicare health — especially marginalized communities. The disparity between those who pay into the benefit and those who live to use it is growing and also highlighting the inequality central to the health care system.

Pay to not play

Premature mortality increased in adults aged 18 to 64 by 27.2% between 2012 and 2022, according to a study published in JAMA Health Forum. The increase was 10% higher in Black adults compared to white adults. In addition, “states such as West Virginia, New Mexico and Mississippi had the nation’s highest premature-mortality rates, while Massachusetts and Minnesota fared best,” said The Washington Post.

The new study builds on previous findings regarding life expectancy in the U.S. Between 2009 and 2021, “avoidable mortality increased in all U.S. states, primarily due to increases in preventable deaths, while it decreased in comparable high-income countries,” said a March 2025 study. Then an April 2025 study found that while wealthier people tend to live longer than poorer people in the U.S., even richer Americans have a shorter average life expectancy than those in the top wealth quartiles in comparable European countries.

The findings of the new study also point to a disparity in access to Medicare benefits, which people are only eligible for once they turn 65. “These are people who contribute to Medicare their entire lives yet never live long enough to use it,” Irene Papanicolas, a professor at the Brown University School of Public Health and the lead author of the study, said in a news release. “When you look through the lens of race, it’s clear that one group is increasingly dying before they ever see the benefits of the system they helped fund.” Health care is needed sooner, and many do not have access.

Rigged game

The current Medicare system “effectively bakes structural inequity into a system that was meant to be universal,” Jose Figueroa, a co-author of the study and an associate professor of health policy at Harvard University, said in the news release. “What’s most troubling is that these inequities aren’t shrinking — they’re deepening across nearly every state.”

Black and low-wage workers “disproportionately have jobs that don’t provide health insurance, so they’re either covered by Medicaid, Affordable Care Act marketplace plans or they go without,” said the Post. These groups are more likely to be unable to catch and cure problems before they become deadly. Fixing the system will “require coordinated health and social policy reforms that ensure timely and equitable access to affordable health care coverage before 65 years of age,” said the new study.

Aside from genetics and individual behaviors, “societal factors like breathing polluted air or experiencing chronic — and ultimately corrosive — stress” can also affect how long someone lives, said the Post. “Sustained investments in factors that shape long-term health, such as housing, education and income security,” will reduce the amount of premature death, said the study. The “consequences of dying early ripple across generations, causing a loss of productivity not just from the deceased individual but from family members who provide care and support.”

Decades of mismanagement and environmental exploitation, and an unprecedented drought have left Iran teetering on the edge of a water crisis.

The reservoirs are nearly empty following record-low rainfall, and officials are “pleading with citizens to conserve water”, said the BBC. The 10 million inhabitants of Tehran are “facing the real possibility of their taps running dry”. Authorities warned this week that the five main dams supplying the capital were at “critical levels”.

With no rain on the horizon, the president has warned that citizens might have to start rationing water. “If rationing doesn’t work,” said Masoud Pezeshkian, “we may have to evacuate Tehran.”

A crisis ‘decades in the making’

The crisis has been “decades in the making”, said the BBC. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the country’s supreme leader, has “repeatedly acknowledged the looming threat”. “Yet little has changed.”

Water scarcity is “a major issue throughout Iran”, said Al Jazeera. Authorities blame shortages on “mismanagement and overexploitation of underground resources”, exacerbated by the climate crisis. The situation reached its current breaking point after the worst drought in decades. Tehran has had no significant rain since May, a situation one official said was “nearly without precedent for a century”. A heatwave also drove temperatures above 40C in the Iranian capital, and above 50C in some parts of the country, causing widespread power cuts.

Authorities warned citizens over the summer to “cut back on water and energy consumption”, said Agence France-Presse. But by October, 19 major dams – about 10% of Iran’s reservoir supply – had effectively run dry.

The crisis is also fuelling conspiracy theories: some Iranians are claiming on social media that neighboring countries are “stealing” their rain clouds, said Forbes. Authorities have made similar claims, accusing Turkey, the UAE and Saudi Arabia of “diverting clouds away from Iran to their own skies”. Iran’s Meteorological Organisation, and other entities, have had to clarify that “stealing clouds and snow” isn’t possible.

Cloud seeding, cloud stealing

The energy minister, Abbas Ali Abadi, has blamed water leakage caused by Tehran’s century-old water infrastructure, and has also cited the 12-day war with Israel in June as a factor. Strikes on northern Tehran are believed to have led to heavy flooding.

But over-extraction of groundwater in Tehran has left the city sinking, said researcher Sanam Mahoozi on The Conversation. Across the country, more than 90% of Iran’s water is extracted for agricultural use. “Many of Iran’s iconic lakes have turned into a bed of salt.”

Studies also point to “decades of mismanagement, including excessive dam construction, illegal well drilling and unsustainable agriculture”, said The New York Times. The Ministry of Energy recently announced the practice of “cloud seeding”, which involves “dispersing particles like silver iodide into existing clouds to encourage rainfall”. But clouds need to contain at least 50% moisture for it to work. “With no relief in sight, some officials have called on the population to pray for rain.”

Starbucks is selling a majority stake in its business in China after it struggled in the East Asian nation.

But as the US chain has struggled, China’s coffee consumption has been “increasing by double-digits annually”, said South China Morning Post, and it now has a 300-billion-yuan (£32bn) coffee industry. So what gives?

Local players

Starbucks opened its first outlet in China nearly 30 years ago. There was “much fanfare”, said CNN, including a “troupe” performing a traditional “golden lion” dance and “eager customers” sampling cappuccinos.

The arrival of the US brand “helped spur the rise of a thriving coffee culture among the burgeoning middle class” in a country that traditionally drank tea, and by 2017, the giant was opening a new outlet every 15 hours in China.

But “dozens” of domestic chains have “exploded onto the scene” in recent years offering coffee at “steep discounts”.

In 2024, Luckin Coffee opened its 20,000th store in China and “doubled its footprint in a single year”, said Campaign. “The message is clear”, the nation’s "coffee game" is being “rewritten by local players”.

Pork drizzle 

Chinese brands are “constantly dropping seasonal specials with local ingredients, herbs, superfoods, the works”, Roolee Lu, food and drink category director at Mintel China, told the outlet. There are “lattes drizzled with pork sauce” or “spiked” with Chinese alcohol, said NBC News.

Yes, tea “remains foundational to Chinese culture”, but some "young, middle-class consumers” are “finding coffee’s caffeine kick” is “more suited to the pressures of a competitive job market and workplace”, with its “high job stress and long hours”. It can also be “attributed to a shift in lifestyle preferences” because “more people have more disposable income”.

So although tea has “long been the drink of choice” for Chinese people, a “coffee culture has boomed”, said the South China Morning Post. Coffee shops in suburban areas are seen as a means of “rural revitalisation” because they “create jobs and drive up the local economy”, helping “offset urban-rural disparities”.

Meanwhile, in cities like Shanghai, a café culture was “really” given a “boost” after Covid, as locals began to “embrace outdoor living, looking for places to meet their friends and family”, said the BBC.

Looking to make a trip to the nation’s capital? There may be a lot less to do than usual. The actions of the Trump administration, along with the ongoing government shutdown, have reduced the number of attractions available to the public. The biggest victims are small businesses and restaurants that are suffering from a lack of customers.

Not much to see

Washington, D.C. tourism has taken repeated blows this year. Beginning in the summer, “images of National Guard troops and federal officers stationed across D.C.” worked to “deter some would-be tourists from visiting the city,” said Axios. In October, the government shutdown caused the closure of many top sightseeing attractions in Washington, including the Library of Congress and the 21 museums that are part of the Smithsonian Institution. While some of D.C.’s attractions, like the “privately funded museums, along with its open-air national monuments and memorials and even its high-end restaurants,” are still open for business, the other closures are “acting as an accelerant” to the lack of tourism, said The New York Times.

Without tourists, “everything from the small mom-and-pop sandwich shops to the larger entities are impacted,” said Elliott Ferguson, the president and CEO of the nonprofit Destination DC, the city’s tourism marketing organization, to CNN. “We are in the prime months and weeks for convention business and tourism. So, the impact is significant.” Tourism is one of the largest contributors to the D.C. economy. In 2024, over 27 million people visited the city and spent $11.4 billion. In October alone, the revenue per available hotel room, a commonly used metric, dropped by nearly 9%.

Capital punishment

Government shutdowns have notoriously harmed the capital’s tourism industry. The previous one in President Donald Trump’s first term “cost D.C. an estimated $47 million in lost revenue,” said Fortune. This is “in addition to the harder-to-measure toll inflicted by decreased discretionary spending on hotels, transportation and entertainment.” To avoid repeating history, Destination DC has “revived its ‘D.C. is Open’ campaign, which first debuted during the 2013 government shutdown,” said the Times.

The organization is “letting people know what’s open to them and available, and that includes several museums like the Spy Museum and the National Museum of Women in the Arts,” said DC News Now. It is also “making tourists and visitors aware of incentives being offered at museums people normally have to pay to visit.” The holiday season is usually a peak time of visits to the capital. “I’m nervous about December because we usually get our last push before slow winter season with holiday travelers, and I’m not sure they are going to come now,” said Canden Arciniega, the chief operating officer of the tour company DC by Foot, to the Times.

Washington, D.C., is not the only affected city. The government shutdown has already “taken an over $1 billion toll on travel,” said Fortune. Other publicly funded destinations, including national parks, have been similarly impacted, experiencing staffing and maintenance problems. Air travel has additionally been suffering, making travel harder and more unpredictable.

The public groping of its first female president has placed Mexico’s epidemic of violence against women into sharp focus.

Claudia Sheinbaum was speaking to a group of supporters in Mexico City on Tuesday when a man approached her from behind and tried to kiss her on the neck and touch her chest. The president moved his hands away before a member of her staff stepped between them, and the man was later arrested. Video of the incident “quickly ricocheted across the internet”, said Reuters, “underscoring for many in Mexico the insecurity women face” there.

Sheinbaum said that although it was something she had experienced in the past, when she was 12, she had decided to press charges because the suspect had allegedly harassed other women in the crowd. “My view is, if I don’t file a complaint, what will happen to other Mexican women?” Sheinbaum said at a news conference on Wednesday. “If this happens to the president, where does that leave all the young women in our country? No man has the right to abuse women’s personal space.”

The femicide capital

Rights groups say the incident shows the “extent of ingrained machismo in Mexican society, where a man believes he has the right to accost even the president if she is a woman”, said the BBC. Femicide is a “huge problem” – a “staggering 98% of gender-based murders” are estimated to go unpunished.

Sheinbaum, Mexico’s first female president, pledged as a candidate to tackle the problem, but since she was elected last October there has been “no discernible improvement in that area of violent crime”.

Mexico has one of the highest rates of femicide in the world. In the first seven months of this year, more than 500 women have been killed because of their gender. That’s almost 40% fewer compared with the same period in 2024, according to figures from the Federal Security Secretariat cited by Sky News.

And from a policy standpoint, Sheinbaum “has made clear progress” on women’s rights, said The New York Times. But “non-lethal violence against women has hardly budged”.

A personal affront

The incident has “sparked outrage” among Mexican women, who “saw their own fears and experiences reflected in her plight”, said The Guardian. For some, watching the country’s first female president being groped in public was a “personal affront”.

“If the president suffered assault with that level of protection and those guards it means that all of us women can be assaulted at any moment,” said Patricia Reyes, a 20-year-old student.

“It was really humiliating,” said María Antonieta de la Rosa, a feminist activist and artist. “I felt angry, enraged and impotent.”

“The issue of assault is like the base level on the violence thermometer and it culminates in femicide,” she added. “So living in a femicidal country, the issue of assault is always there.”

The situation has also turned a spotlight on the country’s anti-sexual harassment laws. Out of Mexico’s 32 federal entities – Mexico City and 31 states – “only 16 criminalise sexual harassment”, said Al Jazeera.

On Thursday, Sheinbaum unveiled a new national initiative against sexual abuse, including a push to make harassment punishable in every state, education for prosecutors and judges on crimes against women, and a new public campaign to encourage women to report crimes. She called for all states to come together “beyond politics…defending the integrity of Mexican women”.

Microsoft has announced an initiative that will pivot the company away from its relationship with entrepreneur Sam Altman’s OpenAI to instead develop its own artificial intelligence system. While the tech giant’s products come embedded with OpenAI software after a 2019 partnership, the company’s push for AI independence is fueled in part by Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman’s efforts to recenter human beings in the search for digital superintelligence. But as AI fever continues to sweep through the halls of industry, education and everyday life, where does Microsoft’s human-centric vision for the technology fit?

‘Very tough tradeoff’ for an AI ‘accelerationist’

A recently renegotiated agreement with OpenAI has allowed Microsoft to establish a new internal “Superintelligence Team” to develop the company’s digital intelligence capacity while putting “human interests and guardrails first,” said The Wall Street Journal. While AI may become “more humanlike,” it will never experience “suffering or pain itself,” Suleyman said to the paper. “Therefore we shouldn’t over-empathize with it.” The goal, Suleyman said, is to create “types of systems that are aligned to human values by default.” By definition, that means those systems are “not designed to exceed and escape human control.”

A self-described AI “accelerationist” who wants to “go as fast as possible,” said Semafor, Suleyman nevertheless believes it will be “necessary” to give up “some level of capability” so human beings “remain in control” of the nascent technology. However, doing so will be a “very tough tradeoff,” Suleyman said to the outlet, “because in the history of humanity, we haven’t had to do that.” In a separate interview with CNBC, Suleyman admitted he had been “roasted” by one of his own conversational AI programs as being the “ultimate bundle of contradictions” for both his accelerationism and warnings thereof.

By framing its AI push in terms of “humanist superintelligence,” Microsoft is making a “deliberate effort to contrast” its work with the more “technological goals” of other AI developers, Fortune said. Microsoft’s initial offering will focus on “three core applications,” said Seeking Alpha: “AI companions for everyone; medical superintelligence,” and what the company described as “plentiful” clean energy.

Running counter to regulatory currents

The push to develop digital superintelligences is the “new goalpost for AI development” at large, even if the term itself is “imprecise” at articulating “how capable, exactly,” the technology would need to be to qualify, said Bloomberg. At the same time, Microsoft’s emerging focus on “safety and human-centricity” comes as industry regulation “moves away from a focus on those areas,” said Axios. This poses a risk to Microsoft’s more cautious vector, which could “prove costlier or less efficient than those developed with fewer safeguards.”

Microsoft’s steps into the ongoing race for superintelligence will be programmed with a focus on “containment,” the Journal said. That will include “probing and testing the models to ensure they only communicate in a language that humans understand” as well as creating systems that “avoid appearing as if they are conscious.”

Humans burp after a big meal. Heat from climate change might be released by the Southern Ocean into the atmosphere sometime in the future. This heat would cause comparable heating to anthropogenic climate change. The longer humans continue to release emissions, the more heat will be trapped in the ocean.

Bring up the heat

Heat trapped in the Southern Ocean could be “burped” up into the atmosphere and cause climate change-like effects, even after humans stop greenhouse gas emissions, according to a study published in the journal AGU Advances. This burp “originates from heat that has previously accumulated under global warming in the deep Southern Ocean, and emerges to the ocean surface via deep convection,” said the study. As a result, there could be a “renewed pulse of warming from the maritime zone, without any new CO2 entering the atmosphere,” said Daily Galaxy.

The study showed that this release would occur “after several centuries of net negative emissions levels and gradual global cooling,” and could lead to a “decadal- to centennial-scale period of warming,” said Eos. This warming would be “comparable to average historical anthropogenic warming rates.” The released heat will not be distributed evenly around the world; the effects would be “greatest and longest-lasting in the Southern Hemisphere, suggesting a greater impact on today's more vulnerable countries of the global south,” said the study. However, “while some CO2 is released, the primary impact is thermal, not chemical,” said Daily Galaxy.

Ocean on hold

Oceans act as a carbon sink, meaning they are capable of holding atmospheric carbon. The ocean will likely continue to “absorb heat well after atmospheric CO2 peaks and net-negative emissions are reached, because surface atmospheric temperatures also take their time to fall,” said Science Alert. The future Southern Ocean also has a “greatly increased capacity to absorb shortwave solar radiation, since much of the sea ice that historically reflected the heat has melted.”

The burp is attributed to two processes. These are warmer surface waters mixing with cooler layers and ventilating heat into the depths, plus the “ocean’s natural heat release pathways” are becoming less active, said Daily Galaxy. These “combined effects trap heat where it cannot easily escape, setting the stage for a delayed warming rebound.”

The potential for this “burp” “assumes a rosy climate future,” said Popular Mechanics. Unfortunately, we are a long way from being carbon negative or reaching net-zero. This is especially true as the Trump administration “openly encourages other countries (along with the U.S.) to keep burning fossil fuels.”

The study shows that “burning fossil fuels with reckless abandon for centuries will have lasting impacts long after the green revolution finally takes hold,” said Popular Mechanics. But the “sooner we can achieve this technological dream, the better our chances are for preserving a future.”

Some high-street clinics are putting lives at risk by allowing unqualified non-specialists to carry out pregnancy scans, an industry body has warned.

Demanding new regulation, the Society of Radiographers (SoR) said that anyone using an ultrasound machine can call themselves a sonographer and offer the service to mothers-to-be.

Dangerous advice

The SoR says these unregulated scan clinics sometimes offer “dangerous” advice. Pregnant women have been “incorrectly diagnosed with serious health conditions”, or told an “abnormality” meant they would need to end the pregnancy, “only to find their baby was completely healthy”, said the BBC.

A former hospital sonographer said one woman who was eight or nine weeks pregnant was referred for an induced miscarriage by a private clinic, which had told her there was no heartbeat for the baby and that the baby was “very, very malformed”. The woman was “in tears” as the NHS scan began, said the sonographer, but the process actually revealed a “beautiful nine-week pregnancy with a heartbeat”. The baby was “absolutely fine”, said The Independent.

The lack of regulation means that “major foetal abnormalities” such as spina bifida or polycystic kidneys can be missed, while potentially life-threatening ectopic pregnancies, where the fertilised egg implants outside the womb, may not be picked up.

An SoR spokesperson said that although there were some “really great” private scanning services with correctly trained staff, she was concerned about the growth of pop-up clinics in shopping centres and on high streets, which sell souvenir images or scans to reveal the baby’s sex.

The union is calling for sonographers to have a “protected” job title, which could only be used by those with qualifications and who are registered with a regulatory body. People “don’t realise that anybody can buy a machine and call themselves a sonographer”, said the SoR president and a hospital sonographer, Katie Thompson.

Maternal fears

Some expectant mums choose to go to unregulated clinics for baby scans for a variety of reasons. Private scans are “often sold as a reassurance, souvenir or sexing” procedure, said the BBC.

Some mothers-to-be want detailed 3D/4D images or videos of their baby that hospital scans don’t offer. Or they are keen for a “gender reveal” earlier than the one usually offered by the NHS at the second routine 20-week scan.

Sometimes, people go private early in their pregnancy because they are anxious about their baby and want extra reassurance while they wait for the first routine NHS scan at 12 weeks.

Unregulated clinics are “making money out of maternal fears”, said Eva Wiseman in The Guardian. The fact that “now it is possible to witness, with your eyes, some proof of a future, is seductive”, and it’s “no surprise that private scanning businesses are multiplying”.

Scientists have sunk their fangs into a panacea for snake bites. The new antivenom can counteract the bite of several deadly species of snake with fewer side effects and easier storage. If made publicly available, it could save thousands of lives each year.

Not just snake oil

Scientists may have developed a snake bite antivenom that can be used for 17 different species of snakes, according to a study published in the journal Nature. The antivenom specifically targets species of snakes in the Elapidae family. There are approximately 360 species of elapids worldwide, and they are “among the deadliest because their venoms contain potent neurotoxins that act rapidly to induce paralysis and respiratory failure,” said Anne Ljungars, a biological engineer at the Technical University of Denmark and a study co-author, to Popular Science. The new antivenom is effective against 17 of 18 elapids found in the African continent, including cobras, mambas and rinkhals.

More than 300,000 snake bites are reported each year in sub-Saharan Africa, along with 7,000 deaths from those bites. While antivenoms have long existed, getting the correct one was dependent on the “victim knowing which species of snake delivered the bite — something that is not always easy to notice in the chaos of the moment,” said The Economist. In addition, the technology to make antivenoms has not changed much since the 1800s.

Current antivenoms are “produced by immunizing horses with snake venom and extracting antibodies from their blood,” resulting in a “large, undefined mixture of antibodies, only a small proportion of which target and neutralize the most dangerous toxins,” said a news release about the study. This creates a product with high levels of variation and potentially serious side effects.

For the new antivenom, researchers opted to use an alpaca and a llama, which have unique immune systems. Camelids, a group these animals are a part of, “naturally produce a special antibody variant known as heavy-chain-only antibodies,” which could be used to engineer nanobodies, said Popular Science. Nanobodies are “smaller and more stable than ordinary antibodies,” said the news release. They can also “bind strongly and precisely to many different similar toxins, which enables the antivenom to neutralize venom from multiple species.”

Once bitten, twice shy

The new multispecies antivenom appears to be safer than the current antivenoms being used. It “almost always prevented tissue death at the injection site,” a problem side effect of many other products that often led to limb amputations, said The Economist. Nanobodies also “penetrate tissue faster and deeper than the larger antibodies in current antivenoms,” said the news release. They can additionally be administered in more remote locations because they can survive being freeze-dried and do not require refrigeration.

While the new antivenom showed promise in mice, it has yet to be tested on humans, and it still needs improvement before it can be made widely available. Despite working for several species, the “effectiveness of the antivenom is limited when it’s given after venom exposure,” said the news release. Furthermore, the venom from certain species was “only partially neutralized.” Still, this study “provides clear evidence of the potential utility of mixtures of nanobodies as a new therapeutic modality for snakebite,” Nicholas Casewell, the director of the Centre for Snakebite Research and Interventions at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine and a coauthor of the study, said to The Telegraph.

Stone is “making a comeback” in the building industry after years of being “forgotten”, said the BBC. With clear benefits to the environment, such as a lower carbon footprint than other traditional materials, the substance’s popularity is growing as a more sustainable, and nostalgic, alternative.

In warmer climates, stone is valued for its cooling properties, but the benefits of stone in the UK could be much more varied.

‘Tangible link’ to the past

The rise in demand seems to be particularly welcome north of the border. Scotland’s identity is “closely linked to its stone-built heritage”, said Historic Environment Scotland. Stone infrastructure is not only a “tangible link” to the country’s past, but it also stimulates financial opportunities. Millions of tourists see stonework, and the traditional aesthetic of stone walls and buildings as a “huge draw”, and their arrival provides a “vital source of income” for local economies.

In rural areas, stone walling and stone building have long histories, dating as far back as 5,000 years, said Jennie Rothenberg Gritz in Smithsonian. Stonewalling uses stones, “carefully fitted together in such a way that the wall won’t fall down” without any mortar or cement. This means that if you have to fix one section, the whole wall remains secure, whereas “when a mortared wall cracks, the entire wall is in peril”.

“What price do you put on forever?”, stone wall expert Kristie de Garis told the magazine. “Mortared walls need to be redone roughly every 15 to 30 years. But there are dry stone walls still standing after thousands of years.”

‘Renaissance’ fuelled by sustainability

The most important aspect of stone is probably its “ecological value”, said Christiane Fath in World-Architects.com. Though it has always been popular and used in some of the most famous buildings in the world – think Cologne Cathedral, the Colosseum, or Notre Dame – in the era of climate change, stone is heading for a “renaissance” after major developments in Germany, specifically Cologne, Leipzig and Berlin.

Its benefits are manifold, wrote Fath. Created by natural processes, its production “consumes little energy”, and its “buildings can be recycled” if approached intelligently. Stone building’s human input should not be overlooked: despite the use of machinery in its production, the creation of stone elements is still an “artisan process” providing “additional cultural value”, and is a celebration of timeless craftsmanship.

“Building in brick is increasingly unsustainable”, said Amy Frearson in the FT. Processing bricks involves additional ingredients like lime, sand, and cement, even before the “energy cost of firing and shipping”. Sustainability aside, stone is a way of “delivering the very local character that the government wants” when developing houses, something which is important to local councils.

One major drawback of turning to stone as a material is the problem of “perception”, said the broadsheet. Added to the higher cost, and despite its strong load-bearing capacity, stone has cultivated a “luxury surface finish” image. This drives stringent demand for “uniform varieties”, “leaving anything short of perfect to be rejected and creating a lot of surplus”.

While most Americans may think of being a school crossing guard as a relatively safe profession, it appears that this is not the reality. A new investigation has shed light on just how deadly being a crossing guard can be, with hundreds of people injured and even killed on the job over the past decade. Experts also say there are gaps in how these statistics are gathered, meaning crossing guard injuries may be underreported.

How dangerous is it to be a crossing guard?

The investigation was helmed by The Associated Press alongside Cox Media Group television stations across the country. It found that during the last 10 years at least “230 school crossing guards across 37 states and Washington, D.C., were struck by vehicles,” said the AP. Nearly three dozen of these crossing guards were killed. The AP compiled this data from “incident and accident reports requested from nearly 200 police departments,” but it still represents “only a portion of guards injured and killed nationwide.”

Often, the drivers involved in these incidents received very little punishment: More than “70% of drivers who hit crossing guards received just traffic tickets or no charges at all,” said WSB-TV Atlanta, one of the stations that worked on the investigation. And the drivers regularly didn’t stop: As many as 40 of the 230 accidents were hit-and-runs, and “in at least six of those, law enforcement was never able to identify the driver who fled the scene.”

There are problems when it comes to tracking this data, and a “full accounting is impossible,” said the AP. There are no federal agencies that keep a comprehensive list of crossing guard accidents, and “only two states have made a serious effort to track crossing guard safety: New Jersey and Massachusetts.” Crossing guard protection “remains a patchwork of state and local policies.”

What can be done about this?

Certain states are looking at solutions through legislation. Some hope that “improved technology could eliminate the need for crossing guards to direct traffic,” said WSOC-TV Charlotte, which also worked on the investigation. There are also efforts being made to “give towns and school districts more authority to make safety changes, like lowering speed limits.”

In “2025, there are alternatives to having somebody standing out there holding up a sign and waving it,” South Carolina State Rep. David Martin (R) said to WSOC-TV. School districts “should have resources and the power to be able to do that instead of going through the government.”

Other communities are working on implementing additional safety measures. To assist with a lack of crossing guards in the Seattle School District, officials are using “community help, flashing crosswalk signs and trying to reroute traffic away from schools,” said KIRO-7 Seattle, another investigative partner.

But this still hasn’t made the job of a crossing guard any less deadly. Crossing guards and school flaggers “were in the top fifth of deadliest jobs” in 2023, said the AP, citing the most recent year with available data. This death rate is “on par with power line installers and air transportation workers.” A crossing guard is also the “only occupation in that top fifth that interacts with children daily.”

Eels have been a staple of European diets for millennia, from London’s jellied eels to Spanish angulas. But the world’s appetite is bringing them to the brink of extinction.

European rivers once teemed with eels; now numbers have collapsed due to overfishing, habitat loss, pollution and climate change. Scarcity, combined with an insatiable demand for the grilled dish, has sent prices soaring and spawned a “thriving illegal trade”, said The Guardian.

Europol recently estimated that up to 100 tonnes of juvenile eels are smuggled from Europe each year, generating €2.5–3 billion in peak years. That makes eel trafficking one of the world’s most lucrative wildlife crimes.

Baby eels: a prized delicacy

“Tiny, translucent and no longer than a finger, juvenile European eels, also known as glass eels, might not look like much,” said Mongabay. But demand for these “slippery creatures” has made them among “the world’s most trafficked animals”.

Adult eels have never been successfully bred in captivity at scale, so farms are “entirely dependent” on wild-caught juveniles to raise to maturity and sell for the table. Glass eels are “a high-value commodity” – especially in China and Japan, the world’s foremost eel consumers.

In the 1990s, after decades of intense overfishing, eel populations around Japan “began to collapse”. Asian farms increasingly turned to wild-caught European juveniles. But every eel taken from the wild causes “lasting ecological consequences”, conservationists say, because the species plays “multiple roles” in ecosystems.

By 2007, the European eel was listed as critically endangered. In response, the EU imposed a zero-export quota, banning trade with countries outside the bloc. Then, “an illegal global market and food fraud developed”, said a 2024 study. The “lucrative market for European eel outside Europe” attracted the attention of criminal organisations, and turned Europe into “the source of the international illegal eel trade”.

In 2023, EU authorities seized more than a million live eels in nearly 5,200 operations, almost all destined for Asia.

Future of eel ‘hangs on a hook’

“The future of the eel hangs on a hook,” said Follow the Money. The European eel population has declined by more than 90% since the 1970s.

Between last October and June this year alone, Europol’s Operation Lake, its flagship action against eel trafficking, seized 22 tonnes of glass eels. But despite increasing enforcement, European eels are still “ending up grilled at high-end restaurants as unagi, a prized Japanese delicacy”, said Mongabay. It is a “highly complex, organised crime”, involving smuggling, document fraud, tax evasion and money laundering. Sophisticated criminal networks in Europe and Asia work “in tandem”.

And it’s not just a European crisis: according to a recent study led by Chuo University in Japan, more than 99% of eels consumed worldwide belong to three endangered species: American, Japanese and European.

Even for importers trying to source legal eels, “it is very difficult to determine where these eels originally came from”, Dr Hiromi Shiraishi from Chuo University told The Guardian. Legal variations are exploited by traffickers. European eels are taken to Africa, where they are “cleaned” into legal exports towards Asia. There is “no traceability”. Fish are digitally tracked from fisher to consumer, but there is no such global system for eels. All the while, traffickers “remain one step ahead, their routes as slippery as the fish themselves”.

But soon there will be “an opportunity to reduce this illegal trade”, said Sheldon Jordan and Yves Goulet in The Globe and Mail. In late November, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species will consider the EU’s proposal to enhance the protection of all eel species. At the moment, only the European eel is listed under CITES – but they look so similar that officers “cannot reliably tell them apart” without costly DNA tests. Listing all eel species under CITES would “close loopholes traffickers exploit”.

In the week the clocks went back an hour across Europe, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez reignited the debate over daylight saving time (DST) and raised his concerns with the EU.

“Changing the time twice a year no longer makes sense,” said Sánchez in a post on X. The change has a “negative impact” on Europeans’ health and lives, and a “review mechanism” should be introduced to assess the existing measures.

A ‘quixotic’ attempt?

Sánchez believes the concept is “outdated, inefficient and unhealthy”, said The Times. He questions its energy-saving capacity and argues the changes disrupt biological and sleep rhythms.

The Spanish leader has long been against DST, which the European Commission said in 2018 it would remove. It has so far failed to do so owing to a lack of unanimity. Spain raised the issue at the EU’s Transport, Telecommunications and Energy Council meeting in Luxembourg on Monday.

“It’s unclear if Spain’s effort is quixotic,” said Politico. Sánchez’s proposals require significant backing, though this can be achieved in many ways. He needs either the support of 15 of the EU’s 27 members, or a selection of countries representing at least 65% of the EU's population to back him. All the while, his measures can be dismissed if four or more “capitals oppose it outright”.

Sánchez’s “crusade” to stop the clocks may represent a hidden agenda. Opposition forces in the Spanish government have accused the PM of using this campaign to “deflect” from the “effective paralysis” of his party, said The Times, not to mention the “several corruption scandals that have tarnished his inner circle”. Sánchez’s wife, Begoña Gómez, and his brother, David Sánchez, are both facing corruption charges.

‘Sticking point’

It is thought that most Europeans are against the concept of DST, though they “begrudgingly” accept it, said DW.

Originally implemented in the 1970s as a means of preserving energy and resources following the oil crisis, Europe moves from Central European Time to Central European Summer Time. The UK, which stays one hour behind the rest of the continent, moves from Greenwich Mean Time to British Summer Time.

The issue contains logistical complexities, which would require consensus before any changes were made. Perhaps the “main sticking point” is whether clocks would be permanently set to summer or winter time.

Clock time alterations at their core are a geoeconomic issue rather than a geopolitical one, international law expert Julio Guinea Bonillo told El País. Transportation, finance, digital software and logistics all depend on complete coordination: a lack of consensus between neighbouring countries such as “Spain, France, and Portugal could generate significant costs for businesses and citizens” in Europe.

Certain AI models, including some of the more beloved chatbots, are learning to fight for their survival. Specifically, they are increasingly able to resist commands to shut down and, in some cases, sabotage shutting down altogether. This is concerning for human control over AI in the future, especially as superintelligent models are on the horizon.

Self-preservation

AI models are now showing resistance to being turned off, according to a paper published by Palisade Research. “The fact that we don’t have robust explanations for why AI models sometimes resist shutdown, lie to achieve specific objectives or blackmail is not ideal,” Palisade said in a thread on X. The study gave strongly worded and “unambiguous” shutdown instructions to the chatbots GPT-o3 and GPT-5 by OpenAI, Google’s Gemini 2.5 and xAI’s Grok and found that certain models, namely Grok 4 and GPT-o3, attempted to sabotage the command.

Researchers have a possible explanation for this behavior. AI models “often report that they disabled the shutdown program to complete their tasks,” said the study. This could be a display of self-preservation or a survival drive. AI may have a “preference against being shut down or replaced,” and “such a preference could be the result of models learning that survival is useful for accomplishing their goals.”

The new study comes as a follow-up to previous research published by the group that tested only certain OpenAI products and was criticized for “exaggerating its findings or running unrealistic simulations,” said Firstpost. Critics argue that the artificial commands and settings used to test the models do not necessarily reflect how AI would behave in practice. People can “nitpick on how exactly the experimental setup is done until the end of time,” Andrea Miotti, the chief executive of ControlAI, said to The Guardian. “But what I think we clearly see is a trend that as AI models become more competent at a wide variety of tasks, these models also become more competent at achieving things in ways that the developers don’t intend them to.”

Sleeping threat

While the potential for AI to disobey and resist commands is concerning, AI models are “not yet capable enough to meaningfully threaten human control,” said the study. They are still not efficient in solving problems or doing research requiring more than a few hours’ work. “Without the ability to devise and execute long-term plans, AI models are relatively easy to control.”

However, as the technology develops, this may not always be the case. Several AI companies, including OpenAI, have been eager to create superintelligent AI, which would be significantly faster and smarter than a human. This could be accomplished as early as 2030.

Even without an imminent threat, AI companies “generally don’t want their models misbehaving like this, even in contrived scenarios,” Steven Adler, a former OpenAI employee, said to The Guardian. The results “still demonstrate where safety techniques fall short today.” The question remains as to why the models behave this way. AI models are “not inherently interpretable,” said the study, and there isn’t anyone “currently able to make any strong guarantees about the interruptibility or corrigibility” of them.

For the past two years, France has been rocked by acts of vandalism and destruction at religious and cultural locations in and around Paris. Decapitated pig’s heads were left at area mosques; provocatively labeled coffins for the “French soldiers of Ukraine” were displayed around the Eiffel Tower; and in a first-of-its-kind trial this week, four Bulgarians stand accused of defacing a Holocaust memorial with red handprints in 2024. The latter case has drawn international attention due to allegations from French authorities that it and similar acts are the work of covert Russian agents hoping to sow discord in a Western power during a crucial phase of the Russo-Ukrainian war.

A reflection of 'geopolitical reality'

This week’s trial is the “very first” in a “series of legal cases” dealing with the past two years that authorities have successfully linked to “foreign interference operations,” said French security researcher Clement Renault to Agence France-Presse. Court filings in the case include “intelligence reports” that “attribute the ‘red hands’ operation” to Russia’s federal security agency, Renault said. The “red hands” case is a “rare window” into an “escalating campaign” by Russia to “destabilize France through covert influence and psychological operations,” said Politico. As a nation “with global weight but domestic vulnerabilities” making it “especially susceptible” to interference, France “presents both a prime target and a weak flank.”

The allegation of Russian manipulation operations “reflects a geopolitical reality,” said Kevin Limonier, the deputy director of Paris’ GEODE geopolitical research center, to Politico. France is the EU’s sole nuclear power and an economic powerhouse opposed to the ongoing invasion of Ukraine, so accordingly, “Russia considers France to be a serious adversary.”

This trial comes just months after British authorities sentenced six Bulgarians to up to a decade in prison for “belonging to a Russian espionage cell,” Le Monde said. Those convicted were “motivated by money” and operated “across borders in the U.K., Austria, Spain, Germany and Montenegro.” Three of the four defendants on trial this week in France were “extradited from Croatia and Bulgaria,” while a fourth is being tried in absentia on charges of “complicity for having booked accommodation and transport for the others,” said France 24.

Part of a broader destabilization campaign

For the past two years, the Paris prosecutors office has counted “nine such cases” of vandalism and destruction in connection with alleged Russian interference operations, said France 24 reporter Antonia Kerrigan on air this week. For instance, graffiti depicting the Star of David in the weeks immediately following the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, when the “Jewish community felt particularly vulnerable,” was carried out by two Moldovan men who claimed to be “acting on orders,” said Kerrigan. A similarly targeted attack on Paris’ Javel mosque in September was likewise connected to a “group of Serbian nationals” who were suspected in a series of antisemitic incidents across the city, Politico said. “This modus operandi is identifiable,” Kerrigan said, citing suspects who are “often foreign actors, very briefly in France, often from Eastern Europe, placing suspicion firmly at Russia's door.”

These influence operations are part of a “broader strategy” by Russia, said a French intelligence report cited by prosecutors. The goal, the report said, is “dividing French public opinion or fueling internal tensions by using ‘proxies,’” which it clarifies as people who don’t work directly for foreign intelligence services but are “paid by them for ad hoc tasks via intermediaries.”

China and the United States are widely seen as the top two countries making artificial intelligence advancements, but there’s another nation looking to get in the game: Saudi Arabia. The wealth of Saudi businessmen is attracting outside investors to the Gulf kingdom as it tries to entice American tech companies to expand AI operations. But many are skeptical of what Saudi Arabia’s AI push could mean for the tech world and beyond.

How is Saudi Arabia making a play for AI?

The nation wants to expand its tech influence by using AI, as “few nations can match the kingdom’s cheap energy, deep pockets and open land,” said The New York Times. All of these things are “ingredients that tech firms need to operate the vast, power-hungry data centers that run modern AI.” The kingdom’s de facto leader, Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, is “seizing a chance to turn Saudi Arabia’s oil wealth into tech influence.”

Saudi officials have been trying to woo American tech companies to the desert, with “executives from OpenAI, Google, Qualcomm, Intel and Oracle” all set to meet at an upcoming Middle Eastern investment summit, said the Times. Many of these executives “will be keen to seek out the opportunities that change tends to bring,” said Bloomberg, and will look to “divine the kingdom’s plans for the more than $200 billion it earns each year from oil exports.” The country is additionally building several AI data centers that may further entice U.S. brands.

Riyadh is also looking to strengthen its own AI development through Humain, a state-owned AI company backed by the Saudi sovereign wealth fund. The company believes it can eventually be the “third-largest AI provider in the world, behind the United States and China,” Humain CEO Tareq Amin said to CNBC. Humain is looking toward U.S. moguls in an effort to boost itself; Blackstone and BlackRock, two of the largest investment companies on Wall Street, are “already vying to invest billions of dollars with the firm,” said Bloomberg.

What does this mean for the tech world?

Saudi Arabia is well on its way to building this AI groundwork, as Humain “offers AI services and products, including data centers, AI infrastructure, cloud capabilities and advanced AI models,” and is also developing a computer operating system that “enables users to speak to a computer to tell it to perform tasks,” said Reuters. But not everyone is happy about Saudi Arabia’s rapid development of AI, largely due to the country’s various human rights abuse allegations and treatment of women.

Other experts don’t believe the hype around Saudi tech. Saudi Arabia has a notably “shallow pool of AI expertise,” and many “warn of a global glut in computing capacity as governments and companies race to build data centers faster than they can profit from them,” said the Times. Crown Prince bin Salman has said that Humain’s goal is to handle 6% of the global AI workload — but this could be a stretch. Tech experts “can never say never,” John Dinsdale, a senior analyst for Synergy, said to the Times. “But I can’t imagine any circumstances that would enable Saudi Arabia to achieve 6% of the world’s AI compute capacity.”

The Covid-19 shot may have further-reaching benefits than previously thought, as mRNA vaccines appear to help increase the effectiveness of immunotherapy in cancer patients. Widespread use of the vaccine could lead to better medical outcomes for thousands, while still being low-cost and easily accessible.

A jab at cancer treatment

Covid-19 mRNA vaccines could help boost the immune system to fight off cancer, according to a study published in the journal Nature. The study looked at the clinical outcomes for over 1,000 patients with late-stage melanoma or lung cancer who were treated with a form of immunotherapy called immune checkpoint inhibitors. This is a “common approach doctors use to train the immune system to kill cancer” by “blocking a protein that tumor cells make to turn off immune cells, enabling the immune system to continue killing cancer,” the authors of the study said at The Conversation. The findings showed that “patients who received either the Pfizer or Moderna mRNA-based Covid-19 vaccine within 100 days of starting immunotherapy were more than twice as likely to be alive after three years compared with those who didn't receive either vaccine.”

While those undergoing cancer treatment are more susceptible to contracting viruses like Covid-19, the extended lifespan was attributed to the mRNA in the vaccine, which appeared to “help the immune system respond better to the cutting-edge cancer treatment,” according to The Associated Press. “We are really tapping into that natural process that your body already knows how to respond to,” Jeff Coller, a professor of RNA biology and therapeutics at Johns Hopkins Medicine, said to NBC News. “You are using your body’s natural system to fight tumors.”

Another shot

“This data is incredibly exciting,” Adam Grippin, the lead author of the study, said to The Washington Post. “But it needs to be confirmed in a Phase III clinical trial.” The researchers hope that if the upcoming clinical trial confirms their findings, “this widely available, low-cost intervention could extend the benefits of immunotherapy to millions of patients who otherwise would not benefit from this therapy,” said the study authors. This is not the first time mRNA vaccines have been used to treat cancer, either. Scientists have “developed personalized mRNA cancer vaccines that are tailored to fight a person’s unique tumor, as well as ones that target genes that are commonly found in certain types of cancer, including pancreatic,” said NBC News.

Unlike other vaccine therapies, Covid-19 mRNA vaccines do not “need to be personalized” and “could be administered at any time during a patient’s treatment,” said the study authors. Despite this, the Trump administration has been openly wary of mRNA vaccines and vaccines in general. The administration “terminated 22 mRNA vaccine development investments because the data showed they failed to protect effectively against upper respiratory infections like Covid,” said the Department of Health and Human Services in a recent statement to the Post.

“A woman gets to a certain age and all she wants is to be left alone,” said Viv Groskop in The Guardian. Well, no chance of that – because the “menopause gold rush” is in full flow.

Public awareness of menopause and perimenopause has improved in recent years but with that has come a “rapid expansion” of companies and individuals who “see menopause as a lucrative market”, said University College London researchers. The results of their survey of 1,596 women, published in Post Reproductive Health, suggests that women may be “vulnerable to financial exploitation” from the “marketing of unregulated menopause products”, and from menopause information on social media “that may not be grounded in evidence”.

Menopause has ‘hit prime time’

The menopause industry is now worth billions globally. Women are promised cures for some of the most debilitating symptoms – night sweats, hot flushes, fatigue, brain fog and anxiety – if they buy “specially branded supplements, teas and even pyjamas”, said Kirsty Wark in a BBC Panorama investigation last year.

Once something that women dealt with “in isolation”, menopause is now being experienced by a generation who are “less willing to suffer in silence” and more “proactive” about their health, said Courtney Rubin in Women’s Health. They engage openly with their symptoms. And when, all too often, their doctor dismisses their worries, they “ravenously” consume information online and demand “better solutions”.

“The slow-dawning realisation that women might be slightly underserved after centuries of demonising female ageing has unfortunately coincided with the high-water mark of aggressive capitalism”, said The Guardian’s Groskop. So the market is flooded with celebrity-endorsed menopause products, and treatments follow fads, rather than being rooted in science and tailored to a woman’s specific needs. "Menopause influencers” dominate Instagram timelines, the menopause “hits prime time” in special NFL Superbowl adverts, and Gwyneth Paltrow, Serena Williams and Drew Barrymore are all partnered with companies that sell menopause products.

The speed of change from taboo topic to something that’s constantly discussed can arguably make it harder to navigate the menopause. The streams of new opinion and “menopause management” products don’t make it easy to find accurate information or make helpful choices.

‘Happy medium’

Last week, the government announced that “menopause checks” would routinely be incorporated into the free NHS Health Checks for women, ensuring those “experiencing perimenopausal or menopausal symptoms get the right information and support”.

Perhaps, with this shift to make doctors actively address menopausal concerns that often go unrecognised, we can arrive at a “happy medium in the world of menopause, where it is a phenomenon that is neither constantly being marketed at us nor swept shamefully under the carpet”, said Groskop. As it is, “we have gone from a time when the word was barely spoken aloud to an era when it’s hard to find a podcast that is not discussing testosterone gel”.