• A group of herons can be called a siege. Dusty linked it to the way they hunt: standing still, waiting, stalking, then striking.

• Flamingos fly with their necks stretched out. Herons pull their necks back into an S-shape, with the legs trailing behind them, making them easy to recognise in flight.

• Some herons use tools, including bait to attract fish. Grey herons in Deptford Creek have been using twigs and even plastic tubes to lure fish out before grabbing them.

• Fish is the main course, but grey herons also take amphibians, small mammals and birds. Dusty has watched them take moorhens and coots in Brookmill Park, and says foxes and herons are among the reasons so few Egyptian goose chicks survive on Blackheath.

• If a heron eats something furry, it may soak it first. Furry prey like rats is harder to swallow than fish. Grey herons have been observed dipping such prey in water before swallowing it head-first, which seems to make the whole unpleasant business easier.

• Grey herons do eat eels, but awkward prey can take effort. Dusty said he has watched herons grab eels in Deptford Creek, only for the eel to wrap itself around the bird’s beak. In one case, “the heron was Goliath, and the eel was David. But Goliath won.” It took 15 minutes.

• In Brookmill Park, Dusty described a local woman who feeds chicken legs to foxes and herons. “She doesn’t buy cheapo chicken legs,” he said. “They’re higher welfare M&S chicken legs.” For a bird built to spear fish, this is a fairly specific form of community support.

• Heron parenting is shared, but the building work is divided: both parents incubate the eggs and feed the chicks. The nest work is more specialised: the male usually gathers sticks and presents them to the female, who does more of the building. As Dusty puts it, “He fetches, she builds.”

• Herons need fish and other prey, so their presence can point to a functioning urban waterway. The cleaner and richer the Ravensbourne gets, the more room there may be for birds that can use it.

You can follow Dusty on YouTube and Instagram for more fascinating insights. Check out other events at the Friends of Brookmill Park website. And since we’re talking birds, I recently made a local bird game, herons included. Play it here.

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Elia Kabanov is a science writer covering the past, present and future of technology (@metkere).

Cover art: Elia Kabanov feat. DALL-E.

• Peeling tape makes that sharp ripping noise because tiny cracks race through the glue faster than sound, creating miniature sonic booms as they reach the edge of the tape.

• Teenagers with acne tend to get better grades in high school English, history, maths and science. They are also more likely to complete a college degree. Women who had acne later earn more in the labour market.

• “Since 1900, scientists have observed more than 20 phases of ice, many of them shaped under extreme conditions. The growing list includes hot ice and even ice that conducts electricity.”

• London has about 93 golf courses. Together, they cover roughly 4,325 hectares — about the same area as the whole borough of Brent, or 30 Hyde Parks. Some could now be turned into housing and public parks.

• A cream-coloured knit cardigan with foxes on it, worn by Ryan Gosling in Project Hail Mary, is based on a knitting pattern from the late 1950s by a Canadian yarn and crafts company. It has become a viral sensation since the premiere.

• AI may be making language more uniform. One study found that writing became less varied after ChatGPT’s release; another found that words it favours, such as “delve” and “meticulous”, are now appearing more often in everyday speech.

• According to the Cambridge Dictionary, when several adjectives come before a noun in English, they usually follow a set order: opinion, size, physical quality, shape, age, colour, origin, material, type, and purpose.

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From my mailbox

• Sam Matey-Coste: “Kenya has had an incredible last three decades in terms of socioeconomic development: the share of the population with access to electricity rose from just 5% in 1997 to 76% in 2023.”

• Matt Brown: “The vast majority of [London’s] locality names go back to medieval times, many are Anglo-Saxon (over 1,000 years old), and a small number predate the Romans.”

• Alec Luhn: “It’s getting pretty likely a strong El Niño will develop by the end of the year, with a 25% chance of a “very strong” a.k.a. “super” El Niño. In either case, it will likely continue through the bulk of 2027.”

• Hannah Ritchie: “Last year, around 1.5% of the world’s electricity was used to power data centres. Non-AI data centres consumed more than twice as much electricity as AI-focused ones. By my estimates, AI consumed around 0.5% of the world’s electricity in 2025.”

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Elia Kabanov is a science writer covering the past, present and future of technology (@metkere).

Cover art and visualisation: Elia Kabanov feat. DALL-E.

The problem

When Tim Berners-Lee, a 33-year-old software engineer, submitted his proposal to CERN management for what would become the World Wide Web, he opened with a complaint.

CERN had several thousand people, many of them staying for only about two years. Its working structure, Berners-Lee wrote in March 1989, was a multiply connected “web” whose links changed over time. That created a communication problem: “The technical details of past projects are sometimes lost forever, or only recovered after a detective investigation in an emergency. Often, the information has been recorded, it just cannot be found.”

So what could be done?

Before proposing his answer, Berners-Lee took apart the alternatives. Hierarchical systems — file trees, help systems, documentation databases — gave every item a unique address, but could not express relationships between items in different branches.

In a hierarchical HELP system, for example, a user might reach a note, find an instruction to look elsewhere entirely, and then have to start again. “What was needed was a link from one node to another,” he wrote, “because in this case the information was not naturally organised into a tree.”

What about keywords? Not really an option. Two people rarely choose the same ones, so keywords “become useful only to people who already know the application well.”

In the end, Berners-Lee suggested something else: a web of nodes and links. A node could be a person, a document, a concept, a piece of hardware. A link could carry a relationship: “depends on”, “is part of”, “refers to”, “uses”. No fixed tree. No single required structure. “The system must allow any sort of information to be entered. Another person must be able to find the information, sometimes without knowing what he is looking for.”

Then came the radical part: non-centralisation. “Information systems start small and grow,” he wrote. “They also start isolated and then merge.” Any new system had to let existing systems link together “without requiring any central control or coordination.”

In a sign that this was a research proposal, not a corporate platform pitch, Berners-Lee listed security and copyright enforcement under “Non requirements”. At CERN, he wrote, information exchange was more important than secrecy. The proposal ended with a modest estimate: “I imagine that two people for 6 to 12 months would be sufficient for this phase of the project.”

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Building the web

CERN did not immediately act on the proposal. It circulated internally and picked up comments, including the famous “vague, but exciting” from Berners-Lee’s manager, Mike Sendall. In May 1990, Berners-Lee submitted a second version. Robert Cailliau joined the effort, rewrote the proposal, and together they formalised it as a management submission in November 1990. By Christmas that year, Berners-Lee had built the first pieces: a browser-editor, a server, and the core standards — HTTP, HTML, and URLs — running on a NeXT Computer.

By March 1991, the software was available to CERN colleagues. In August, Berners-Lee announced it on the alt.hypertext newsgroup. At first, uptake was slow and mostly academic. The real shift came in 1993, when the Mosaic browser made the web usable beyond specialist circles, and CERN released the code into the public domain. That removed licensing barriers, allowing others to build on the system freely. The “web of nodes and links” could now scale into a global system.

Back in 1989, Berners-Lee was not imagining cat videos, memes, or AI-generated slop. He was trying to solve CERN’s information problem. The result became the infrastructure of everyday life.

The path not taken

Without Berners-Lee, we would still have gone online. But the web might have arrived as a set of rival systems: university databases, corporate portals, government networks, paid directories, each with its own rules and walls.

You do not need counterfactual fiction to glimpse that internet. We already live with pieces of it: app stores, closed social networks, private feeds, search results shaped by platforms, information that exists but cannot be freely linked, indexed, or found. Berners-Lee’s web did not prevent that future. But it left us the tools to resist it: the page, the link, the public address, the independent site. That is still the web worth defending.

What’s next?

Paper Trail will run alongside the regular “Things I learned” emails, with new issues roughly once a week. If you want to support the project, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription. And if you have suggestions — on the format or on which papers to cover next — leave a comment below or reply to this email. I’ll see you next week!

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Elia Kabanov is a science writer covering the past, present and future of technology (@metkere).

Cover art: Elia Kabanov feat. DALL-E.

• Queen’s Lane Coffee House in Oxford has been serving coffee since 1654. Back then, “runners” moved from one coffee house to another, gathering the latest news and bringing it back to customers — like human wi-fi.

• Global spending on astrology products and services could rise from $12.8 billion in 2021 to $22.8 billion by 2031.

• Britain’s longest street name is Bolderwood Arboretum Ornamental Drive, in the New Forest, Hampshire. The shortest is Rye, in Puriton, Somerset, according to Christopher Winn’s Great British Street Names.

• In 1900, Philip de László painted Pope Leo XIII at the age of 90. In 1933, he painted Princess Elizabeth of York, the future Queen Elizabeth II. As Craig Brown notes in A Voyage Around the Queen, the same artist painted a man born in 1810 and a woman who died in 2022, spanning 212 years.

• With more than 1,500 km of cycle lanes, Paris now has a larger network than Amsterdam.

• Cambridge has revived the botany course that helped shape Charles Darwin, using nearly 200-year-old teaching materials created by his mentor John Stevens Henslow.

• 54% of US students aged 13 to 17 said they had used a chatbot such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Microsoft’s Copilot for tasks including research for school assignments and solving maths problems.

• In a survey of secondary school teachers in England, two-thirds said pupils were losing critical thinking skills, while many also said voice-to-text was making spelling feel unnecessary.

• A study of tree rings in Stradivarius violins suggests that some of the instrument maker’s wood came from high-altitude forests in northern Italy’s Val di Fiemme.

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Elia Kabanov is a science writer covering the past, present and future of technology (@metkere).

Cover art: Elia Kabanov feat. DALL-E.

• While exploring Caribbean islands, I kept seeing unexpected reminders of Jewish migration. In Barbados, there is an old Jewish cemetery. And Curaçao has the oldest surviving synagogue in the Americas. Why? In 1651, the Dutch West India Company recruited several Jewish families to colonise the island. The current synagogue was completed in 1732 and still stands today.

• Saint Lucia offers a different kind of surprise. It has produced more Nobel laureates per capita than any other sovereign country: economist Arthur Lewis won in 1979, and poet Derek Walcott in 1992. With an island population of about 185,000, that’s roughly one Nobel laureate for every 92,500 people. In other words, becoming a Nobel winner in Saint Lucia looks more likely than being struck by lightning in a given year.

• Speaking of chances, you’re likely to be arrested if you decide to wear camouflage print clothing in Barbados, Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, and some other Caribbean countries. It is illegal for civilians to do so.

• Several Caribbean countries have no standing army at all. Dominica disbanded its military in 1981 after two coup attempts against Eugenia Charles, the island’s prime minister and the first woman in the Americas elected in her own right as head of government. Saint Lucia and Grenada also rely on police forces, coast guards, and regional security arrangements rather than regular armed forces.

• Not to end on a militaristic note, Barbados gave the world grapefruit, which originated on the island in the 17th century, probably as a natural hybrid of pomelo and sweet orange after both had been brought to the Caribbean. It was first described there in 1750 as the “forbidden fruit”, before spreading far beyond the island.

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From the archives

• 9 things I learned about Scotland.

• 25 things I learned in 2025.

• 24 facts I learned in 2024.

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And that’s it for today! Thanks for reading! If you enjoy the newsletter, share it with a friend. And if you really enjoyed it, consider upgrading to a paid subscription: it helps support my work and means a lot.

Elia Kabanov is a science writer covering the past, present and future of technology (@metkere).

Cover art: Elia Kabanov feat. DALL-E.

Last year, we published a piece in Méridien on the colossal statue of Ramesses II. You’ve probably seen it: a giant pharaoh carved from granite. Today, it stands in the Grand Egyptian Museum near the pyramids of Giza. Previously, it lay in the mud at Memphis for centuries before an Armenian engineer named Joseph Hekekyan pulled it out in 1854.

While researching, I kept hitting the same roadblock. Sources disagreed. Captions contradicted each other. The discovery was attributed to different people depending on where you looked, including in major publications. For instance, the BBC and National Geographic had it wrong.

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Here’s why: there were two statues. Ramesses had a matching pair made, one in granite, one in limestone. They stood together in the Temple of Ptah at Memphis. By 1700, the temple was rubble, and the statues weren’t far behind. The limestone one was found in 1821 by Italian explorer Giovanni Battista Caviglia. It remains in Memphis (modern-day Mit Rahina). The granite one came 33 years later, thanks to Hekekyan. It now stands in the Grand Egyptian Museum. Two statues, two discoveries, two different men. Somewhere along the way, the stories got fused.

I went back to primary sources. Herodotus was of no help. Then I found Ramesses, Loved by Ptah by Susanna Thomas, an Egyptologist who worked at the Grand Egyptian Museum in Giza. She described both discoveries in detail, separating the two statues’ histories once and for all.

When I spoke with her later, she shared my frustration: “It’s super annoying! The mistake of believing what Wikipedia says? Laziness? No one is actually checking? The two statues are quite different, after all; the Mit Rahina one is made of limestone and still retains its nose, as well as much finer details.”

So we published what we could verify, properly credited Hekekyan, and noted where the standard story falls apart. A small correction in the grand scheme of things. But Joseph Hekekyan waited 170 years for it, so it felt worth getting right.

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Elia Kabanov is a science writer covering the past, present and future of technology (@metkere).

Cover art: Elia Kabanov feat. DALL-E.

Now, back to business. This week: how a Scottish mountain was once used to weigh the entire Earth, why “Viking” may have been a job title rather than a nationality, and how fungi could replace mining. Plus lots of other fascinating facts!

• Fungi can extract rare earth metals from waste, soil, and water, producing no toxic byproducts and working in places where conventional mining is too difficult or costly.

• When humans switched to softer foods after agriculture spread, their jaws shrank and adults kept the slight overbite normal in children. Within a few thousand years, that tiny shift made “f” and “v” sounds easy to produce, opening up a whole new world of words.

• DNA analysis suggests that “Viking” sometimes was a job description: burial sites in the UK have turned up individuals with no Scandinavian ancestry, while some people buried in Scandinavia had Irish or Scottish parents.

• Following Trump’s threats to annex Greenland, an app that helps shoppers avoid American products jumped to the top of Denmark’s Apple App Store, which runs on American software and hardware.

• Reading, writing and learning a language can lower your risk of dementia by almost 40%.

• In 1774, scientists measured the mass of the Earth by standing next to a Scottish mountain and watching how much its gravity tilted a hanging weight toward it. The answer was within 20% of modern measurements.

• Since 2000, faster swings between El Niño and its opposite phase have been melting sea ice off the northeast coast of Russia, bringing warmer, wetter autumns to a region that used to freeze reliably.

• Just 7 petrol cars, 29 hybrids, and 98 diesel cars were sold in Norway in January 2026. New electric cars count: 2,084.

• The number of professional chimney sweeps in the UK has grown from about 590 in 2021 to 750 today, partly driven by rising energy costs.

• When Gmail was released as a public beta in 2004, it ran on 300 old Pentium III computers that nobody else at Google wanted.

• Much of German national identity was built on a text by the Roman writer Tacitus, who described Germanic tribes as noble, fierce, and racially pure, without ever having visited their lands. It was largely fiction, written to shame decadent Romans. When Germans read it later, they took it literally.

• AI chatbots that store your conversation history tend to become more agreeable over time, telling you what you want to hear rather than what’s accurate.

• The Vatican launched an AI-assisted live translation service for Mass at St Peter’s Basilica, so people can follow along on their phones in up to 60 languages in real time.

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From my mailbox

• Sam Matey-Coste: “In February 2026, two pairs of beavers were released into the Par and Fowey rivers, becoming the first wild beavers in Cornwall since local extinction in Great Britain in the 1600s.”

• Alec Luhn: “Polar bears are getting fatter in the fastest-warming place on Earth.”

• Ed Conway: “Britain has never had to rely on imported salt, never in modern civilisation, but we’re on the brink of losing our salt independence.”

What I’ve been reading

• Being cold doesn’t make you sick, so why are illnesses more common in winter?: “Cold exposure can weaken immune defences in the nose and airways. Behavioural and environmental factors typical of winter, such as indoor crowding, poor ventilation, and reduced sunlight leading to lower vitamin D levels, further increase the risk of viral spread.”

• New York is going to flood. Here’s what the city can do to survive: “The city could increase its ability to absorb water, converting wide areas of asphalt and concrete to green space. It could fortify by building barriers along its shores, possibly even a gate around the harbour. Or it could retreat, relocating people out of the most hazardous regions.”

• Searching for birds: “As you scroll through the following interactive graphics, you’ll get a glimpse at roughly 700 North American and Hawaiian species and learn about why some of them make us fall in love.” By the way, have you tried my birds game? Play it now!

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Elia Kabanov is a science writer covering the past, present and future of technology (@metkere).

Cover art: Elia Kabanov feat. DALL-E.

• Wild sea otters use stones as tools to crack open hard-shelled prey like snails and clams, making them the only marine mammals that regularly use rocks while hunting for food. (Here’s also my piece on otters protecting shores.)

• Unmarried adults are about 80% more likely to report depressive symptoms than married ones.

• In 2018, fewer than 3% of statues in the UK depicted real, non-royal women.

• A 2023 study gave pigeons categorisation tasks in which they saw simple patterns — line width, angles, rings — and chose a category by pecking left or right, earning food for correct answers. Starting at chance level, the birds improved through trial and error to about 68% accuracy.

• On average, a UK graduate earns about 20% more in net lifetime income than a non-graduate: roughly £130,000 for men and £100,000 for women after taxes and student loan repayments.

• In just two years of evolution, single-cell yeasts can grow into multicellular clusters, going from microscopic to branching structures visible to the naked eye.

• One of the first things DOGE, the U.S. “Department of Government Efficiency”, did was mistake millions for billions in an IT contract.

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From my mailbox

• Alec Luhn: “Currently we’re losing 1000 glaciers every year. That’s a crazy number, and it could triple by 2040. On our current trajectory of 2.7°C of warming, 79% of glaciers will disappear by 2100.”

• Sam Matey-Coste: Colorado recently completed construction of the world’s largest-ever wildlife overpass to provide a safe migration route for elk, mule deer, and pronghorn. It will decrease wildlife fatalities by 90%.

• Matt Brown: In 1926, London Underground released this transport poster, depicting life in the city a century later. “The artwork by Montague B. Black shows a futuristic metropolis with lofty buildings and ubiquitous air transport.”

What I’ve been reading

• The best sports for longevity: “Even four to five minutes of vigorous physical activity every day has been linked to longevity benefits. Tennis players lived almost 10 years longer than their sedentary peers — and longer than soccer players, swimmers and the other recreational athletes included in the analysis.”

• Animals count and use zero. How far does their number sense go?: “Researchers want to pin down the genetic mechanisms underlying numerical ability. They have already identified genes that seem to be associated with a math learning disability in humans called dyscalculia, and are manipulating the equivalent genes in zebra fish.”

• A writer who delights in demystifying the arcane and obscure: “I’m looking for something that strikes me as not just different, but something I’ve never really thought about before. And then the challenge is to express it as clearly as possible.”

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Elia Kabanov is a science writer covering the past, present and future of technology (@metkere).

Cover art: Elia Kabanov feat. DALL-E.

• People are more likely to give up their seat to a pregnant-looking passenger when someone dressed as Batman is on the train. Across 138 rides on the Milan metro, 67.21% offered a seat with Batman present, compared with 37.66% without.

• When humans and dogs look each other in the eye, both release oxytocin, the same hormone that bonds mothers to their children.

• Early mammals that lived with dinosaurs more than 150 million years ago likely had dark grey-brown fur and were mostly active at night.

• Urban forests can make the air cleaner, cutting average fine particulate matter in busy parts of a city by 4.2%. But fast plant growth can also raise pollen exposure by 7.4%.

• Older adults who take regular afternoon naps have better cognitive function than non-nappers, with 30-90 minute rest periods providing the optimal benefits.

• Humans have visually documented just 0.001% of the deep seafloor, according to a 2025 study.

• Young honey bees learn to waggle dance by watching older bees. Without this guidance, they make lasting errors, especially when encoding distance.

• Shrimp make up 51% of all farmed animals worldwide: about 230 billion alive at any moment, compared with 33 billion chickens, 125 billion farmed fish, 1.55 billion cattle, and 779 million pigs.

• House sparrow numbers in London dropped by 71% between 1994 and 2019, likely due to tidier gardens and avian malaria.

• Global deaths from air pollution fell 21% from 2013 to 2023, largely because cleaner cooking cut household smoke.

• Microplastics are harming crops by making it harder for plants to photosynthesise. This pollution may already be cutting global harvests of wheat, rice, and maize by up to 14%, and the problem is expected to get worse.

• Cola, lemonade, iced tea, and beer in glass bottles can contain up to 50 times more microplastics than the same drinks in plastic bottles or cans. The main source is the painted metal cap: its plastic coating scratches during storage and transport, flaking into the drink.

• All government buildings in Finland have an on-site sauna.

• After GDPR rolled out in May 2018, US-led investment in EU startups fell: the number of deals dropped by 21%, and the amount invested dropped by 13%. That’s about $1.6 billion less per year.

• Oxford academics drank for decades from a human skull — possibly of an enslaved woman — at Worcester College. The skull-cup, donated by a fascist sympathiser in 1946, was only retired in 2015.

• On average, people spend about 78 minutes a day travelling from one place to another, regardless of where they live or how rich they are.

• Only 15% of previously married women say they want to remarry, about half the share of men who do.

• From 1928 to 1948, town planning was an Olympic event. In 1932, British architect John Hughes won gold for designing a sports and recreation centre in Liverpool.

• Neanderthals were morning people, and if you like waking up early, you might have them to thank. A study comparing modern human DNA with Neanderthal fossils found shared genetic variants linked to early rising.

• As the 2025 papal conclave neared, Cardinal Philippe Ouédraogo’s birthday shifted — from January 25 to December 31, 1945 — making him 79 instead of 80, and still eligible to vote for the next pope.

• A London council banned street performances in Leicester Square after a judge ruled that repetitive sounds, including pop songs, are a known feature of “psychological torture.”

• Evolution keeps making crabs. The crab-like body plan has evolved at least five separate times over the past 250 million years, a recurring trick so common it has its own name: carcinisation.

• Scotland became Scotland only in the Late Middle Ages. Before that, it was known as Albania, while “Scotland” meant Ireland.

• In medieval England, some taxes were paid in eels. The village of Harmston alone owed its earl 75,000 eels a year. Wisbech fishermen paid monasteries nearly 35,000. By 1086, the national total topped half a million eels.

• As many as 95% of the planet’s fungal species are still unknown to science.

Previously in Hypertextual:

• 24 facts I learned in 2024.

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And that’s it for today! Thanks for reading! If you enjoy the newsletter, share it with a friend. And if you really enjoyed it, consider upgrading to a paid subscription: it helps support my work and means a lot.

Elia Kabanov is a science writer covering the past, present and future of technology (@metkere).

Cover art: Elia Kabanov feat. DALL-E.

Saturn keeps collecting moons

In 2025, astronomers found 128 more moons around Saturn, bringing the total to 274. When I was born in 1983, Saturn had 17; when I was in primary school, scientists added one more; by the time I got into university in 2000, there were 12 more. That’s roughly 30 moons in the first 300+ years of exploration, and then almost 250 in the next quarter-century. Feels like the Solar System quietly switched into a faster gear while I was busy growing up.

Alchemy at the collider

Scientists saw lead turn into trace amounts of gold at the Large Hadron Collider. Not in direct crashes, but in near-misses where two lead nuclei fly past each other so close that their electromagnetic fields knock out protons. Remove three, and lead (82 protons) becomes gold (79). It’s brief and microscopic, but still: it’s the alchemists’ wet dream, finally made real.

The ozone hole happy ending

When I was at school, one of the biggest environmental stories was the ozone layer. It even made it into the plot of one of my favourite kids’ books (something like a Soviet proto–Harry Potter). In 2025, the Antarctic ozone hole shrank again, now the smallest since 2019. It’s the clearest kind of proof that policy can work: after the Montreal Protocol restricted the use of harmful chemicals, emissions dropped sharply, and the atmosphere has been slowly recovering. By the late 2060s, the ozone hole could be gone if we keep replacing these chemicals with safer alternatives.

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Meet the new shape

Mathematicians described a new geometric figure: the noperthedron, with 90 vertices, 240 edges, and 152 faces. Here’s the twist: one noperthedron cannot pass through the opening of another identical noperthedron, no matter how you rotate it or shift it. A cube can pass through a cube-shaped hole (it sounds wrong, but it’s true), and many other shapes can too, but this one breaks the old assumption that any shape must have some orientation that makes the “pass through itself” trick possible.

Uralic languages pushed east

Researchers traced the origins of Uralic languages — Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian, and others — much farther east than many people expected. Linguists have argued for decades: some place the homeland near the Urals, others push it deeper into Asia. A new study analysed ancient DNA from 180 newly sequenced individuals alongside 1,000+ existing samples and points to north-east Siberia, around modern Yakutia, about 4,500 years ago. The Nature paper has dozens of co-authors, including scientists from Siberian universities, a rare example of ongoing collaboration.

A reality signal in the brain

Scientists found a mechanism that helps the brain distinguish between what we imagine and what we actually see. When I picture an apple, my brain activity can look a lot like it does when I’m staring at a real apple. The difference seems to be an internal stamp: the fusiform gyrus in the temporal lobe produces a “reality signal”, and another brain area checks it before deciding “outside world” versus “inside my head”. If that system misfires, the brain can mistake an internal image for a real external object — one possible route to hallucinations.

Alcohol as social glue

Researchers tested the idea that alcohol helped humans build more complex societies by looking across 186 traditional cultures. They found a steady link: cultures with their own fermented drinks tended to have more levels of leadership and management. The logic is simple enough: shared feasts strengthen ties, make negotiation easier, and help leaders gather people around joint tasks. But the effect is moderate, and agriculture and religion mattered far more. So alcohol looks less like a prime mover and more like a handy tool in the civilisation kit.

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Elia Kabanov is a science writer covering the past, present and future of technology (@metkere).

Cover art: Elia Kabanov feat. DALL-E. Noperthedron image: Jakob Steininger and Sergey Yurkevich.

What initially pushed you into science communication?

Almost 15 years ago, I was studying to be a pharmacist. During my third year, the FameLab science communication competition was held in Egypt for the first time. I gave a three-minute talk on stage for a public audience, explaining a medical concept I had studied. Being part of this group of people who were enthusiastic about science and communicating science opened up more opportunities. I started taking part in science communication activities and science festivals in both Alexandria and Cairo.

After graduation, I found myself more interested in working in science communication. A local science news website called Ibtikar, which means “innovation” in Arabic, was looking for writers with scientific backgrounds. I applied and started working as a science journalist. From there, I committed to science communication rather than pursuing a career in science or pharmacy.

Was there a moment or project early on that made you think, “Yes, this is my field”?

I’ve had that moment several times. One was on my very first day working as a science journalist at the Ibtikar website. There was a large conference in Alexandria, with the Nobel laureate Richard R. Ernst as the keynote speaker. I went up to him and asked for an interview — and ended up interviewing a Nobel laureate on my first day. As far as I know, it was his first interview published in Arabic. When I went back to my editor and said, “I’ve interviewed a Nobel laureate,” he just replied, “OK, this is your first day.” I was really happy. I was glad I’d done it.

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After 15 years, what still makes a science story feel worth chasing for you?

I’d say it’s a story that has impact, one that tries to change something or makes the reader see an issue from a different perspective. That’s what I focus on in my work now.

For example, one of my recent pieces looked at how much of climate action is really about language: the choice of words and terms, and the “war on words” over what should or shouldn’t appear in final conference agreements.

Stories like that push readers beyond “we should do this” or “we shouldn’t do that”, and towards thinking about how science interacts with policy, how it tries to influence decisions, and how policymakers do, or don’t, listen. These dynamics matter most on issues that affect everyone, like climate change.

What’s the biggest challenge facing science journalism in the Arab world today, and what would actually help fix it?

Science journalism in the Arab world faces the same challenges as science journalism worldwide. This year, we’ve seen major financial problems and significant budget cuts. That has also meant the closure of some reputable, specialised science media outlets in the region.

On top of that, the entire media ecosystem is being reshaped by AI, and there’s growing pressure on journalists to act as influencers as well. The lines between journalism and content creation are becoming increasingly blurred. I think this shift is affecting science journalism in the Arab world largely negatively, and overall scientific coverage is shrinking.

As for how to fix it, that’s a difficult question. We have to keep reminding people why science journalism matters, and what role it can play, especially in a context like the Arab world. But with the scale of the financial challenges we’re facing, this isn’t something that can be solved easily, and it’s a problem we’re seeing globally.

What’s the most common communication mistake you see scientists make?

Using jargon. Scientists and researchers love jargon. They use a lot of scientific terms and assume everyone will understand what they’re talking about.

One exercise I often run is to ask participants to write down their PhD topic or their latest academic paper, then remove every scientific term and replace it with the word “blah”. They usually end up with something like: “A comparative analysis of blah blah using blah to deliver drugs in a blah blah way to create a blah blah effect on blah blah tissue.”

That’s when they realise that, for a non-specialist audience, every unfamiliar scientific term just sounds like “blah”. And of course, that becomes a huge barrier to clear and simple communication.

If I had one piece of advice for researchers trying to communicate their work, this: avoid scientific terms as much as possible. That alone would make a big difference. Jargon is the hardest thing to overcome.

How do you see the role of AI evolving in science journalism and science communication over the next five years?

That’s a difficult question, because it’s hard to predict where AI will be in five years. It’s been almost three years since tools like ChatGPT became public, and we’ve already seen major shifts and reversals.

I tend to think in two scenarios. In an ideal — and probably less likely — one, science journalists and communicators are properly trained to use generative AI to improve the quality of their work. AI adoption will happen whether we like it or not; the real issue is whether it’s used effectively and responsibly. In that case, AI could reduce tedious tasks, freeing people to focus on what really matters.

The worst-case scenario is that organisations use AI to replace science journalists and communicators altogether. Models are getting better at producing scientific content: not journalism or science communication, but material that can be widely distributed online. If organisations choose that path, there’s little we can do to stop it.

Both possibilities are real. That’s why we need to think carefully about how AI is adopted in ways that support good work, rather than cutting corners or saving money at the expense of quality.

What skills should students and early-career communicators focus on if they want an international-level career?

They need to identify what makes them unique and how they can contribute to the international science communication ecosystem. It’s important to think about what you can add, rather than just wanting an international career for its perceived benefits. For example, I was able to bring perspectives from the Arab world, which hasn’t always been well represented in international science communication networks. That was my contribution.

Another important skill is what I’d call opportunity hunting: being aware of grants, fellowships, conferences, and other opportunities that can give you visibility and entry into international spaces. You start to be seen, meet people, build relationships, and understand how the field works. Networking is extremely important.

What gives you hope about the future of science communication, and what still worries you?

People working in science communication give me hope. Almost everyone I know in science journalism or science communication made a conscious decision to be there. They’re passionate about the field and believe in its value. Because of that, you see people constantly fighting to do their work well, to improve it, and to reflect critically on what they’re doing. They’re not afraid to speak up. That’s what I like about the science communication community.

What worries me is how institutions — academia and governments — treat science communication and public engagement. Too often, it’s seen as trivial, or at least less important than other priorities. As a result, when budgets are cut, science communication is usually one of the first things to suffer. That means funding cuts, lack of recognition, or replacing human work with AI. In many countries, science communication still isn’t embedded in high-level policy or research agendas. It’s treated as a side activity.

We, as science communicators, still have to fight to make sure science communication has a proper place in political and research priorities. There have been some advances, but there are also setbacks. That still worries me. At the same time, I believe in the individuals working in the field. They’re what give me hope that we’ll find a way forward.

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Elia Kabanov is a science writer covering the past, present and future of technology (@metkere)

Cover art: Elia Kabanov feat. DALL-E.

Red squirrels reclaim their old range

Red squirrels are quietly reclaiming the Scottish Highlands. A decade-long reintroduction effort has shifted hundreds of animals into carefully chosen forests, and their range has grown by more than a quarter since 2016. It’s a comeback from the brink: the species was once nearly wiped out in Britain, hunted as a forestry pest and squeezed out as woodlands disappeared. Even now, recovery is slowed by a virus carried by invasive grey squirrels.

Today, roughly 80% of the UK’s 200,000 red squirrels live in Scotland. Yet large parts of the north and north-west Highlands had lost them entirely, with the last sightings often dating to the 1970s. Reintroductions have started to fill those gaps, stitching the species back into landscapes where it had vanished for generations.

From tunnel spoil to bird haven

Almost 40,000 birds now gather on a nature reserve built from London’s spare soil. When engineers dug the tunnels for the Elizabeth line — the city’s new rail link — they ended up with millions of tonnes of soil. Three million tonnes were shipped to Wallasea Island in Essex, between the splendidly named River Roach and River Crouch, and used to raise the ground and shape new wetlands.

The RSPB, the UK charity that protects wild birds, bought the island in the mid-2000s and spent years preparing it as a safe place for birds to feed and nest. In 2015, they broke the sea wall so tides could flow over the land for the first time in 400 years. They then built small islands, lagoons and salt marshes, some made entirely from Elizabeth line soil. The wetlands now help protect nearby villages by absorbing stormwater.

Wallasea used to have very few birds. Now it’s full of life: avocets with their upturned bills, knot waders that flock in dense clouds, grey plovers on the tide line and bar-tailed godwits with round-trip migration flights of over 29,000 km.

London prepares for its first storks in 600 years

Next year, white storks will return to London for the first time since 1416. They’ll be released in Barking and Dagenham in east London on a landscape that’s been steadily restored from old gravel pits into wetlands.

The plan follows the success of the Knepp rewilding site in West Sussex, where Britain’s first modern stork chicks hatched in 2020. Since then, the birds have begun spreading outwards, with 45 young storks fledging this year before migrating to southern Europe and north Africa.

The project will later introduce beavers, whose dam-building should create more wetland edges and boost insect, amphibian, and fish life. A dedicated stork officer will work with local schools and community groups, and London’s Green Roots Fund is providing £500,000 to build the aviary, install fencing and support the team running the project.

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What about that game?

So, I turned my afternoon park walks into a tiny puzzle game. Merge the birds you actually find along the River Ravensbourne and see how far up the chain you can get. It works in any browser, is free, has no ads, and is, frankly, dangerously addictive.

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Elia Kabanov is a science writer covering the past, present and future of technology (@metkere).

Cover art: Elia Kabanov feat. DALL-E.

• Good news for future astronauts: researchers in Kent have shown that tea can grow in lunar soil. Mars is still a lost cause — plants in simulated Martian soil didn’t sprout at all.

• Wine production is Britain’s fastest-growing agricultural sector. There are over 1,000 vineyards nationwide, including roughly sixteen in Yorkshire, which is about as far from Provence as you can get.

• Researchers have worked out the scientifically optimal Cacio e Pepe. The sauce holds together best when the starch content sits between 2 and 3 per cent, a range confirmed by both taste and texture tests.

• Analysis of 4,000 book abstracts and the reading habits of more than 100,000 users shows that, after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, readers shifted sharply toward books about life under dictatorship and complicity in state crimes, with Nazi Germany drawing the most attention.

• By late 2024, people aged sixteen and over were spending about two hours and twenty minutes a day on social platforms, almost 10% less than in 2022, with the sharpest drop among teens and twenty-somethings.

• Scientists have developed a new way to make strong, biodegradable plastic from bamboo. It looks and behaves like oil-based plastics, but breaks down in soil in about 50 days.

• A 2021 study showed that people in the middle of a lucid dream can communicate with awake researchers. Dreamers perceived questions and answered with eye twitches or brief sniffs.

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What I’ve been reading

• The climate change paradox: “The Earth is a complex dynamical system — an interwoven mass of moving parts, each of which requires a different branch of science to understand. Even with advanced knowledge, sophisticated algorithms and modern instruments, it defies and eludes us. Yet this engine of chaos is now under our influence.”

• How ring-necked parakeets took over London: “A clue to their unlikely success can be found in London’s map. The capital consists of 47% green space, including 35,000 acres of parks, commons, woodlands, wetlands, cemeteries, allotments and gardens. To avian eyes it is less urban jungle than, well, jungle.”

• New York or London — what’s your table talk style?: “Brits tend to eat later than Americans, drink far more alcohol and hate it when guests ask each other, ‘What do you do?’ (Let alone google each others’ achievements at the table, which is common in the US.)”

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Elia Kabanov is a science writer covering the past, present and future of technology (@metkere).

Cover art: Elia Kabanov feat. DALL-E.

The mood in the hall was sometimes closer to an after-dinner speech than a university lecture. The moderator opened by saying he favoured dissolving all political parties. Major didn’t miss a beat: “Don’t worry, they’re going there.”

On Ukraine, Major was unusually blunt for a former prime minister on the speaking circuit. He insisted that civilians killed by Russian missiles are not “collateral damage” but victims of mass murder, and that this needs to be remembered when the war eventually ends, however the negotiations are packaged.

It matches what investigators are saying. The UN’s Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine has documented indiscriminate attacks on civilians, torture, sexual violence and the deportation of children.

(If you want the legal side of this, I wrote earlier about a lecture by Howard Morrison, the former ICC judge, who knows everything about prosecuting war criminals.)

John Major also drew a careful line between Putin and the Russians. This, he said, is not a war against the Russian people but against Putin and his regime. If Russia loses, he expects a more pragmatic successor to emerge and, eventually, a return to some kind of partnership with the West.

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On Brexit, Major dropped the after-dinner tone altogether. He called leaving the EU a “colossal mistake” and argued that Brexit will never rise from its deathbed, no matter what new branding politicians try to slap on it. That’s not a new position for him; he has spent years warning that Brexit would make the UK poorer and weaker.

The data backs him up. Recent economic studies suggest that by 2025, Brexit had cut the UK’s overall economy by roughly 6% to 8%. Business investment fell by as much as 18%, and both employment and productivity dropped by around 3% to 4%.

So, Major’s line that “the EU is far too important for Britain to opt out of its decision process” is not sentimental Europeanism: it’s a reminder of where future leaders will eventually have to steer the country.

Then we got to grumbling about high taxes on the wealthy. Major lamented that rich Britons are now paying far too much. In the late 1970s, he said, the top 1% paid about 11% of all income tax; today they pay around 29%. What is the world coming to!

But that’s only half the picture, Sir John (and you probably know it already)!

The rich now take a much bigger share of the pie. Today, the top 10% in the UK receive about 36% of all income, while back in 1970, they took only 26.5%. The bottom 50% still split roughly 20% between them, almost exactly the same as five decades ago. So yes, the top 1% pay a bigger share of income tax, but they also take a much larger share of income than they used to. In other words, inequality in the UK has soared since the 1970s, thanks in no small part to John Major and his predecessor.

He redeemed himself slightly in my eyes with an anecdote about Boris Yeltsin. Everyone loves a Yeltsin story. This one involved vodka at 8 am.

Sometime after Yeltsin left office, he flew to London. They had dinner; Major mentioned he needed to be in Moscow the next day. Yeltsin offered him a lift on the plane Putin had kindly put at his disposal: “already more than Blair ever gave me,” as Major put it.

They sat on the runway, waiting for clearance, when the steward appeared with a vodka.

“Boris, it’s eight in the morning,” Major protested.

Yeltsin explained there was a Russian tradition of drinking to a safe take-off. So Major drank. A few hours later, more vodka: a toast to a safe landing. Approaching Moscow, yet more vodka. Major finally complained, and Yeltsin hit him with the killer line: “John, how long have we known each other? We are such good friends. You’re not going to refuse one little shot with me?” Naturally, they drank.

Legends. They definitely don’t make them like that any more, which might be a good thing.

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Elia Kabanov is a science writer covering the past, present and future of technology (@metkere).

Cover art: Elia Kabanov feat. DALL-E.

In 2022, scientists looked at what happened when the world went heavy on chlorine bleach during Covid, and the picture isn’t great. Chlorine disinfectants do kill viruses, but once they wash into soil or wastewater, they start creating toxic by-products that can harm plants, aquatic life, and humans, with some compounds linked to cancer and genetic damage.

Other recent studies suggest that our favourite “fresh and clean” products do more than shine floors. Indoors, they can load the air with volatile chemicals, tiny particles, and nitrogen dioxide. Everyday habits — mopping, spraying glass cleaner, anything scented — add a fog of fragrances and aerosols that hang around longer than you’d think. Some ingredients act as airway irritants, and regular exposure has been linked to breathing problems in both children and adults. Sprays seem to be the worst offenders: using them often is associated with higher rates of asthma and other health problems.

A 2024 study adds another twist: many cleaning products labelled “green” pollute indoor air just as much as regular ones. Researchers found that scented eco-cleaners often release even more volatile chemicals called monoterpenes, which then react to form nasties like formaldehyde. These pollutants can irritate the eyes, skin, and lungs, and long-term exposure to formaldehyde may increase the risk of cancer.

And there’s a social angle too. Despite all the progress on gender roles, women still do most household cleaning — roughly a third more than men — which means greater exposure to whatever ends up in the air. In professional cleaning, the gap is even sharper: 89% of home and hotel cleaners are women, most from minority groups, facing far higher chemical exposure every day.

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So, what can we do?

First of all, cleaning keeps us healthy; just do it with an open window and a bit of common sense. Liquid cleaners are easier on the lungs than sprays, and strong fragrances are more trouble than they’re worth. In short, clean your home, but don’t gas yourself in the process. And you don’t need every heavily marketed product either: simple ingredients usually do the job.

At a recent event run by the Friends of Brookmill Park and the Art of Zero Living shop in Greenwich, I learned that most effective cleaning boils down to a few basics: different types of soda, citric acid, and a bit of alcohol. For instance, oxygen bleach is just sodium percarbonate: add hot water, and it releases oxygen that breaks down organic stains.

Some of it looks like practical magic. A fresh red wine stain vanishes under a stream of boiling water poured from a height to add pressure. For tiles, toilets, and anything covered in limescale, dissolve 200 grammes of citric acid in 150 grammes of hot water, then spray it on. Add tea tree or peppermint oil for scent and an extra antibacterial boost.

Even the all-purpose cleaner is minimalist: 60 ml of cleaning vinegar, 150 ml of water, 40 ml of rubbing alcohol, and a few drops of essential oils. It cuts through limescale and works on shower screens and kitchen surfaces alike. Just don’t use it on natural stone, folks.

If all of this sounds like something our grandmothers used to do, that’s because they’d already worked it out: simple ingredients and a bit of effort beat a cupboard full of novelty sprays every time.

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Elia Kabanov is a science writer covering the past, present and future of technology (@metkere).

Cover art: Elia Kabanov feat. DALL-E.

• Billionaires and multimillionaires — the wealthiest 0.1% of the US population — burn carbon like there’s no tomorrow: 4,000 times more than the world’s poorest. Each releases 2.2 tonnes of CO₂ a day, about the weight of a rhinoceros.

• Twelve plant species and five animal species generate 75% of the world’s food supply.

• By 2050, droughts in the UK could double, and wildfires could surge. Experts say new buildings should handle up to 4°C of warming.

• English swimming spots are in murky waters. In 2024, only 64% were rated excellent, well below the EU’s 85%. And with 8.4% classed as poor, England now leads Europe in the number of polluted bathing sites.

• On October 21, Google’s DeepMind AI predicted a 60% chance that Hurricane Melissa would reach Category 5. Two days later, that rose to 80%. The next day, human forecasters finally agreed.

• Net-zero measures could prevent 207,000 premature deaths and save $2.2 trillion in air-pollution costs by 2030, according to new modelling.

• Solar has led the world’s new power growth for three years in a row.

• Cover just 1% of the world’s coastal zones with offshore wind and solar, and you could power about 30% of global electricity demand by 2050.

• The Paris Agreement worked, at least a bit. A decade ago, we were heading for 3.8°C of warming. Now, if countries keep their promises, it’s closer to 2.5–2.9°C.

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From my mailbox

• Sam Matey-Coste: “The United Arab Emirates has begun construction of what will likely be the world’s largest integrated solar plus battery storage project when fully operational in 2027. The project includes 5.2 GW of solar plus a 19 GWh battery system.”

• Alexander Verbeek: “Rich nations facing climate disasters should study Bangladesh’s approach. They save more lives from cyclones than America saves from hurricanes. Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, and a wealthy American city had no functioning evacuation plan. Bangladesh would have saved those people.”

• Zeke Hausfather: “A world of unabated climate change will impact the poor most severely. Addressing it requires prioritising development and poverty alleviation to build adaptive capacity, reducing emissions rapidly in middle- and upper-income countries to mitigate future climate impacts, and driving down the cost of clean energy technologies so they can be more readily adopted by low-income countries. Perhaps I’m unduly optimistic, but I think that society should be able to do both.”

What I’ve been reading

• How the UK became one of the poorest countries in Western Europe: “In the past 30 years, the British economy chose finance over industry, Britain’s government chose austerity over investment, and British voters chose a closed and poorer economy over an open and richer one. The predictable results are falling wages and stunningly low productivity growth.”

• Too much social media gives AI chatbots ‘brain rot’: “AI chatbots are worse at retrieving accurate information and reasoning when trained on large amounts of low-quality content, particularly if the content is popular on social media.”

• The secret language of ships: “Most ships have clues to their identity emblazoned on their stern, often in the same order: owner, name, port (or “flag”), and International Maritime Organization number. The owner, name, and flag may change over a ship’s lifespan, but the IMO number stays the same.”

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And that’s it for today! Thanks for reading! If you enjoy the newsletter, share it with a friend. And if you really enjoyed it, consider upgrading to a paid subscription: it helps support my work and means a lot.

Elia Kabanov is a science writer covering the past, present and future of technology (@metkere).

Cover art: Elia Kabanov feat. DALL-E. Infographics: Harry Stevens and Mira Rojanasakul / The New York Times.

• Neanderthals were morning people, and if you like waking up early, you might have them to thank. A study comparing modern human DNA with Neanderthal fossils found shared genetic variants linked to early rising.

• Since 2005, France’s constitution has included the Charter for the Environment: a kind of green bill of rights declaring that everyone has “the right to live in a balanced environment which shows due respect for health.”

• More than half of all species live in the soil, including 90% of fungi, 85% of plants and more than 50% of bacteria.

• Every iron object made before 1200 BC came from meteorites.

• Reindeer can partially shut down their brains while eating, a sleep mode that helps them load up on food during the short Arctic summer.

• By analysing fossilised poo from extinct hyenas, palaeontologists have reconstructed the woolly rhino’s DNA.

• In 2016, the world traded about 636 million cubic metres of real, physical water through pipes, trucks, and markets. But that’s tiny compared with 2 trillion cubic metres of virtual water moved through products like soybeans, rice, chocolate, coffee, and palm oil.

• The United States might have adopted the metric system if not for pirates: the ship bringing Thomas Jefferson a standard kilogram from France in 1793 was blown off course into the Caribbean and captured.

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From my mailbox

• Mehrdad Aref-Adib wrote a love letter to London trees: “The city’s trees form a living record of movement, of seeds carried by wind, trade and longing. Though they began in distant soils, from Asia, the Americas, the Mediterranean and beyond, they have taken root together, creating a canopy that belongs to everyone.”

• Alexander Verbeek mentioned a 6-year-old boy who found a Neanderthal hand on a West Sussex beach: “Experts at the museum confirmed the artefact’s authenticity, noting that Neanderthal hand axes are exceptionally rare. Many professional archaeologists never get to see one firsthand.”

• Sam Matey-Coste covered an invention that could electrify air travel: “In a sodium-air fuel cell, liquid sodium reacts with oxygen to produce electricity, potentially solving the battery weight problem by collecting much of its fuel mass (the oxygen) from the air in-flight.”

What I’ve been reading

• Who invented the measurement of time: “The ancient Egyptians invented the first water clocks and sundials more than 3,500 years ago. Before that, people likely tracked time with devices that did not survive in the archaeological record—such as an upright stick in the dirt that acted as a primitive sundial—or no device at all, simply by observing the location of the sunrise and the sunset each day and by watching how high the sun reaches in the sky.”

• The earliest known war in Europe was a Stone Age conflict 5000 years ago: “There are at least 338 people interred at San Juan ante Portam Latinam. 23% have visible injuries: one of the highest prehistoric rates of violent injury. The wounds include 65 unhealed injuries and 89 healed, indicating prolonged conflict. Injuries were attributable to blunt-force trauma, as might be caused by axes, clubs or thrown stones.”

• The most important machine that was never built: “​​Alan Turing’s great insight was to provide a concrete answer to the computation question in the form of an abstract machine, later named the Turing machine. It’s abstract because it doesn’t (and can’t) physically exist as a tangible device. Instead, it’s a conceptual model of computation: If the machine can calculate a function, then the function is computable.”

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Elia Kabanov is a science writer covering the past, present and future of technology (@metkere).

Cover art: Elia Kabanov feat. DALL-E.

• NASA has confirmed 6,000 exoplanets, with over 8,000 more waiting for verification. Some orbit two suns, some none at all, and others circle dead stars. A few are covered in lava or have clouds made of gemstones.

• Investing in science pays off: every $1 the U.S. National Institutes of Health spends adds about $2.50 to the economy, and research outside defence can boost productivity by up to 300 per cent.

• Of the 202 Nobel laureates in physics, chemistry, and medicine since 2000, about 30 per cent were born in a different country from the one where they won their prize.

• Out of roughly 100,000 Chinese characters ever recorded, hundreds exist only on paper. No one knows how to pronounce them.

• Beer drinkers attract mosquitoes 1.35 times more than non-drinkers. The insects also prefer people who shared a bed the night before, while showering or using sunscreen makes you less appealing to them.

• 15 per cent of the world’s working population uses AI.

• More marine life thrives on World War II munitions dumped on the Baltic Sea floor than on the surrounding seabed.

• A 2024 study of 1,715 mass killings worldwide found that only 105 — about 6 per cent — were committed by women.

• “A growing number of scientists believe that the SARS-CoV-2 virus may be subtly altering our immune systems. If correct, their hypothesis will change how we understand everything from respiratory syncytial virus to shingles to sepsis.”

• Antonio Stradivari built not only violins but also a few guitars — and one from 1679 still survives today. Listen to it here.

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From my mailbox

• Sam Matey-Coste interviews the co-founder of a nonprofit platform enabling zero-interest loans for solar projects in the Global South.

• Alexander Verbeek writes about America’s self-inflicted tourism collapse.

• Hannah Ritchie explains why eliminating contrails from flying could be incredibly cheap.

What I’ve been reading

• How did hands evolve? The answer is behind you: “The evolutionary blueprint for hands was borrowed in part from a much older genetic plan for two openings in ancient fish: the anus, and a hole for the bladder and for sexual organs.”

• How to live a good life in difficult times: “Homo sapiens is by far the most intelligent species on the planet, and it simultaneously is the most deluded species: humans believe the kind of nonsense that no chimpanzee or elephant or rat would ever believe. We are now creating a superintelligence, and there is every reason to think that it will be super deluded.”

• Barcelona is made of math: “Mathematics, it seems, is anywhere you choose to find it — in architecture, but also in music, the flow of traffic and bowling. It’s all around us. It transcends borders, countries, cultures and even eras.”

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Elia Kabanov is a science writer covering the past, present and future of technology (@metkere)

Cover art: Elia Kabanov feat. DALL-E.

It’s so 1896

Alfred Nobel supposedly didn’t like math, so mathematicians got nothing. He liked books, so writers did. Shame he wasn’t into dancing: we might’ve had a Nobel for best ballet instead. Jokes aside, computer scientists and climate researchers still have no category of their own, and the committees keep awkwardly squeezing them into Physics or Chemistry. The world moved on; the rules didn’t.

Quick fix: Give Nobels for computer science, climate, or engineering. If AI can write poetry, it deserves at least a nomination.

Three’s a crowd

Each Nobel can go to three people. That made sense when experiments involved candles and test tubes, not supercomputers and thousand-person teams. Take LIGO: hundreds of scientists detected gravitational waves, but only three names made it to Stockholm. It keeps the myth of the lone genius alive while everyone else fades into the footnotes. Teamwork makes the dream work, just not the Nobel shortlist.

Quick fix: If 1,000 people found gravitational waves, maybe all 1,000 deserve a little gold medal emoji. 🥇

Where are the women?

Since 1901, women have received just 67 Nobel Prizes (and one of those was Marie Curie twice). Take away Literature, Peace, and Economics, and only 26 women have ever won in the sciences. In 2024, all seven science laureates were men. The committees keep promising to do better, urging nominators to think “more inclusively.” But with a process sealed for 50 years, who can tell if anything’s actually changing?

Quick fix: This problem runs deeper than the Nobel itself; it’s still baked into science. A simple start: widen the nominator pool to include early-career researchers and professional societies.

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Since we’ve now fixed all the serious problems, let’s tackle the biggest one: the ceremony. It’s painfully dull. The solution? Take notes from Eurovision. Picture it: each country presenting its best discovery with lasers, synth beats, and scientists awkwardly dancing. Add ABBA holograms, and suddenly the Nobel Prize is a sell-out event ready for the future!

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And that’s it for today! Thanks for reading! If you enjoy the newsletter, share it with a friend. And if you really enjoyed it, consider upgrading to a paid subscription: it helps support my work and means a lot.

Elia Kabanov is a science writer covering the past, present and future of technology (@metkere)

Cover art: Elia Kabanov feat. DALL-E.

• There are an estimated 96 million birders in the United States, who together spent more than $107 billion in 2022 on binoculars, feeders, cameras, trips, plants, subscriptions, field guides, and campers.

• In twenty years, SUVs in English cities jumped from 3% to 30% of all cars. In London, they take up as much space as Kensington and Chelsea. Nationwide, they’d cover Manchester.

• After Vesuvius buried Pompeii, some residents soon returned. For centuries, outsiders and underdogs lived among the ruins, in the upper floors of buildings that rose above the ash.

• The world’s largest capitals now face 25% more extremely hot days than in the 1990s. In Rome and Beijing, the number of days with temperatures above 35°C has doubled; in Manila, it has tripled. Even in cooler cities like London, days above 30°C have doubled.

• One of the Holocaust’s most haunting photos shows a Nazi soldier aiming his pistol at a kneeling man beside a pit of corpses in Ukraine. Using AI and help from Bellingcat volunteers, a historian traced the scene to Berdychiv and identified the soldier.

• In the UK, rivers inside national parks are hit by sewage twice as often as those outside. In 2024, 464 overflow sites spilled for an average of 549 hours each, adding up to more than 254,000 hours of pollution.

• Just 12% of Americans consume half of all the beef in the country.

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What I’ve been reading (AI edition):

• What exactly are AI companies trying to build?: “Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Meta and OpenAI plan to spend at least $325 billion by the end of the year in pursuit of AI”

• 8 Google employees invented modern AI. Here’s the inside story: “Eight names are listed as authors on ‘Attention Is All You Need,’ a scientific paper written in the spring of 2017. They were all Google researchers, though by then one had left the company. The ‘Attention’ paper has attained legendary status. The authors started with a thriving and improving technology. They made it into something else: a digital system so powerful that its output can feel like the product of an alien intelligence.”

• Time 100 AI 2025: “Meet the innovators, leaders, and thinkers reshaping our world through groundbreaking advances in artificial intelligence.”

In case you’ve missed it:

• My interview with Marcus Ferrar on his reporting for Reuters from East Berlin in the 1970s.

• My take on Carlos Moreno’s lecture about 15-minute cities.

• How 3D is changing the way we see stories.

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And that’s it for today! Thanks for reading! If you enjoy the newsletter, share it with a friend. And if you really enjoyed it, consider upgrading to a paid subscription: it helps support my work and means a lot.

Elia Kabanov is a science writer covering the past, present and future of technology (@metkere)

Cover art: Elia Kabanov feat. DALL-E.