Do you remember the first science story you ever wrote?

Really, the first article? That’s hard to say without looking it up, and I probably wouldn’t find it anyway, since it was in an offline magazine. But one of my first ‘big’ interviews was with author Charles Mann, about his book 1491, on the history of the Americas before the arrival of Columbus & Co.

How do you get up to speed when you are covering a field you don’t know well?

I believe that not knowing a certain field too well isn’t necessarily a handicap. It puts you in a similar position to your readers, so you avoid making your writing too difficult or technical. Just ask the expert the right questions and write it up in plain and clear language.

Of course, it’s necessary to follow a field closely enough to identify relevant news, so you can separate the real stuff from the PR bullshit. I think I’m just very curious about a lot of topics.

Are there any warning signs that make you immediately suspicious of a scientific claim?

When claims come from parties that have an agenda, hidden or not. Sometimes it’s just PR; sometimes it comes from ‘opinion makers’ who are cherry-picking evidence to prove their point.

What are the first things you check before deciding whether a new study is actually interesting or important?

Two things: Do I find it interesting myself? And do I want to read more about it?

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How do you know when you understand a complicated subject well enough to explain it to somebody else?

Hmm, hard to answer. Maybe you can’t know for sure. With quantum physics, for example, I think I have explained things in the past using concepts that weren’t really correct. So when you explain something, it’s healthy to say when you’re not sure about a certain detail.

Is there a common mistake people make when they try to explain science?

Thinking that science is always ‘right’, or ‘good’, or ‘neutral’. Science is a human endeavour, and we should never forget that people pursue it with certain goals.

What kind of good science story tends to be ignored because it doesn’t produce a dramatic headline?

Great discoveries don’t often result from one-time events, but from many events. Take exoplanets: when life is eventually found on another planet, the discovery will probably be the result of many partial findings, checks and rechecks.

Is there something about science journalism that you have completely changed your mind about?

Science journalism is journalism in the first place. When you start out as a science journalist, you tend to think that the science part is more important.

Read my other interviews on journalism:

• Climate hope needs evidence: My interview with Sam Matey-Coste

• On jargon and the limits of science storytelling: My conversation with Mohamed Elsonbaty

• Inside the Cold War newsroom: My interview with Marcus Ferrar

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Elia Kabanov is a London-based science writer exploring technology, cities, nature and history (@metkere).

• The Jungle Book can teach economics. Kipling’s stories and Disney’s 1967 and 2016 films contain examples of scarcity, opportunity cost, barter, sustainability and the relationship between money and happiness. According to researchers, the song “The Bare Necessities” can teach what people actually need for a decent life.

• London’s first pie and mash shop opened in 1844, but neither pies nor mash looked quite like they do today. Early East End pies were filled with eels, many brought in by Dutch fishing boats, before overfishing made shops switch to beef. Mash was added only decades later. Even the trade itself was built on migration: two of its three founding families, the Cookes and the Manzes, were Irish and Italian.

• A piece of blue glass on a 2,000-year-old British chariot fitting probably came from Egypt. Scientists analysing the bronze object at Diamond Light Source found that its red glass was typical of Iron Age Britain, but the blue glass had a chemical composition that points to Egypt. They think it was imported as beads and then reworked by a local craftsperson, meaning materials were travelling thousands of miles before the Roman conquest of Britain even began.

• People care more about being exactly right than about being less wrong. In prediction experiments, researchers found that people often preferred forecasts with a higher chance of hitting the exact answer, even when those forecasts also carried a greater risk of a large error. That differs from how many forecasting systems and AI models are built: they usually try to minimise average error.

• Most readers leave when they hit a paywall. Scientists analysed 209 million page views at a major US newspaper and found that 59% left immediately, while only about two in 1,000 subscribed on the spot. But paywalls still worked: readers who encountered one were 84 times more likely to subscribe than otherwise similar readers who did not. About one in ten also managed to get around the paywall, usually by opening the article in private browsing mode or clearing their cookies. By the way, Hypertextual has no paywalled articles, but if you enjoy it and want to support my work, please consider subscribing.

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What I’ve been reading

• In defense of the detour: “I don’t believe that using A.I. in the creative process would have gotten us these results. These systems are trained on billions of images, lines of text and designs. They produce responses that may be of novel use but struggle to depart from patterns found in or interpreted in existing materials and ideas.”

• AI agents are rewriting the economics of computing: “More difficult for companies is the unpredictability of those costs. The study on agentic token consumption found that token use could vary sharply. Across repeated attempts of the same task, the most intensive run typically consumed twice as many tokens as the least, and in some cases 30 times as many. Human estimates of task difficulty were a poor guide, while frontier models also tended to underestimate how many tokens they would need.”

• I went to America’s largest gathering of astrologers: “Like any sufficiently established field, modern astrology has developed its own hierarchies, factions and grudges. There are fights over tradition and fears about AI; impatient zoomers butting heads with baffled boomers; older men with reputations for harassment; and quieter epistemic disputes.”

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Elia Kabanov is a London-based science writer exploring technology, cities, nature and history (@metkere).

• Medieval England imported bears for entertainment. Bear baiting, where dogs attacked a chained bear for a crowd, became much more common after the Norman Conquest of 1066, new research suggests. Bears were already extinct in Britain, so people had to bring them from continental Europe. Archaeologists found almost no evidence of live bears before 1066, then bones began appearing in London, Yorkshire and other places. Medieval texts link the spectacle to royal weddings and aristocratic festivities, but the remains suggest it was also popular public entertainment.

• Britons think crime is rising even as it falls. Eight in ten people in the UK believe mobile phone theft has increased since 2010, and around six in ten say the same about burglary and vehicle-related theft. In reality, all three are down by at least 50%.

• Children get less freedom to play outside than their parents did. A survey of nearly 2,000 UK families found that children are now allowed to play outside without an adult at an average age of 10.8. Their parents were allowed out alone at 9.7. Less than half of play among 5–11-year-olds’ play happens outdoors, and street play has fallen to less than 25 minutes a week. London is an exception: outdoor and adventurous play starts rising again from around age nine.

• Japan now has more than 100,000 people aged 100 or older. The country has 107,677 centenarians, up almost 8,000 in a year, and 88% are women. When Japan started keeping records in 1963, there were just 153. Today, the oldest woman is 114, the oldest man is 112, and another 54,294 people are expected to turn 100 during this financial year.

• Many graduates would choose a different subject if they could start again. Just 70% of recent UK graduates said they would study the same subject. Animation and game design graduates were among the least happy with their choice: fewer than two in three would pick the same course again. Journalism, marketing and PR showed similarly high levels of regret. One possible reason is the job market. AI is already changing some of the entry-level work these graduates once expected to do.

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What I’ve been reading

• How meteorologists recreated weather that helped decide the Second World War: “To do a forecast beyond 24 hours was, in the 1940s, like trying to land a man on the Moon”.

• UK is finally showing signs of productivity growth, say economists: “Early signs of tech-driven improvements in productivity growth could herald a sustained strengthening in the UK’s economic outlook. Private sector productivity grew by 1.8% in the second quarter compared with a year earlier. The rise extended gains since 2024 and reduced the growth gap with the US”.

• Heard about the Super Godzilla Monster El Niño? Here’s how it could actually affect you: “Ignorance is the foundation of fear. El Niño should not be feared. It should be understood for what it does, what it can do, and what you can do to prepare for it.”

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Thanks for reading! If you enjoy the newsletter, share it with a friend or ten. And if you really enjoyed it, consider upgrading to a paid subscription to support my work.

Elia Kabanov is a London-based science writer exploring technology, cities, nature and history (@metkere).

You spent several years making maps professionally. What did cartography teach you about explaining complicated subjects?

I think one really important lesson from cartography is that the onus is on you, the creator, to minimize the possibility of misunderstanding. To try and put yourself in the place of someone encountering this information for the first time and provide people with the basic building blocks of information they need to lead up to understanding what you’re trying to say. Provide context, don’t make assumptions.

Is there something you can show with a map that you cannot explain as effectively in 1,000 words?

If a picture is worth a thousand words, a map is generally worth at least ten thousand words. People just get the message of a well-crafted map right away, really intuitively, in a way that most don’t with writing. There’s a whole bunch of information transfer with maps that happens almost subliminally, with stuff like the color gradient, the background basemap, the projection, the relative size and distance of any points and polygons, even the legend styling, things like that.

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Seems like today your main output is writing. Was that a deliberate move away from GIS, or did the newsletter simply become more important?

I never thought I’d be able to afford to spend most of my time writing! I love writing, but I’ve grown up in the 21st century, and it just never looked like a viable career option. I got into GIS because I loved maps as well. I figured my newsletter’s most important career influence would be as a sort of ever-updating resume, advertising my environmental interests and ability to make a commitment to projects. But then, after starting work with Climate Action Now in 2024, my writing hours just grew and grew until it became my more or less full-time job.

Does thinking spatially still affect the way you report stories even when no map appears in the finished piece?

Always! In every weekly news roundup, I try to report on a mix of stories from around the world, ideally (but not always) at least one from Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas, for example. When I’m writing a story about a part of the world many people may not be familiar with, I generally try to add a little geographic context in the description.

You often write about large global trends: solar deployment, rewilding, electrification. How do you get from a huge dataset, research paper or map to one story that a reader can understand?

I’m ideally looking for stuff that hits the trifecta of novel, striking, and meaningful, which are really three different things. “Far-Right Politician Says Horrible Thing” is striking, it evokes an emotional response, but it’s not that novel or even meaningful anymore unless it’s linked to action. “This Kitten Can Ride A Unicycle” is novel, the reader is unlikely to have seen it before, and it’s striking, it grabs your attention, but it’s not really meaningful in the grand scheme of things. “Slight Improvement in Photovoltaic Cell Efficiency Reported By Lab” is really extremely meaningful, and I could write a story like that every week, but I think for most people, sadly, it won’t be that striking. And the pace of improvement is so great now that it’s not really novel anymore either.

So, I look for stories on the frontier of the possible, that are novel, striking, and meaningful. That could be anything from a small-scale case study, a tiny project that’s illustrative of bigger issues, or placing big new data updates in context to show the scale of what’s happening.

The Weekly Anthropocene looks for evidence of progress. How do you prevent that selection process from becoming the positive equivalent of doomscrolling?

It depends on what you mean by “the positive equivalent of doomscrolling.” In a certain limited emotional-impact sense, that is exactly what I’m going for: creating curated stories where scrolling through encourages you to feel hope and joy about the future of humanity and our biosphere, not doom.

If you mean “presents a biased picture of the world and inclines people towards unreasonable positivity, like doomscrolling inclines people towards unreasonable negativity, then I suppose I’m counting on the entire rest of the world to counterbalance any excess positivity people might receive from my newsletter. Human psychology tends to accentuate the negative, social media algorithms reinforce that, and external stimuli people encounter in their day-to-day life, like record heatwaves or far-right extremists, can be really depressing.

I’m trying to help counterbalance that negative slant, to show people that fighting for a better world can and does succeed, and that real, tangible progress is being made.

What do you reject? Can you remember a piece of apparently good environmental news that looked convincing at first but fell apart once you examined the data?

I tend to reject anything that could plausibly be brutally over-summarized as “Person(s) Said New Words.” Words are cheap: I should know, I’m in the words business. Even if it’s an encouraging, good-faith news item, like “National Leader Promises Good Thing X” or “Landmark Report Outlines Strategy To Achieve Good Goal Y,” or “Study Suggests We May One Day Build Good Technology Z”, it can easily turn out to be misleading in hindsight. Political winds change, retractions arrive, technologies progress, economies shift. I want to report on stuff that actually changed something in the physical world — animal population up, solar farm built, electric motorcycles deployed — or at the very least legally concrete steps like new legislation or regulations, not promises or quotes.

You now have more than 16,000 subscribers. What actually drove that growth?

Networking. The Substack Recommendations feature, primarily. Incredibly powerful! Several really big-deal Substack writers, notably including Bill McKibben, Dr. Hannah Ritchie, Wayne Hsiung, Jason Pargin, Dr. Katharine Hayhoe, and Drs. Hausfather and Dessler’s joint project The Climate Brink, were kind enough to recommend The Weekly Anthropocene to their readers, often after I interviewed them. According to Substack back-end analytics, the recommendations from those six alone have sent more than two-thirds of my total subscribers my way!

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If you were starting again today, would you learn writing, data analysis or mapping first?

I don’t think I could really separate the three. From childhood, I loved poring over my family’s maps and every month’s new issue of National Geographic. I spent so much time flipping through our atlas that the spine disintegrated; it’s still a pile of pages somewhere in my parents’ house. I read all the time, and I’ve always loved books with maps, whether it’s a nonfiction travelogue or a fantasy epic. They’re quite integrated in my mind. I’d do what I have done, which is blend all of them.

Read my other interviews on journalism:

• Inside the Cold War newsroom: My interview with Marcus Ferrar

• On jargon and the limits of science storytelling: My conversation with Mohamed Elsonbaty

Thanks for reading! If you enjoy the newsletter, share it with a friend or ten. And if you really enjoyed it, consider upgrading to a paid subscription to support my work.

Elia Kabanov is a London-based science writer exploring technology, cities, nature and history (@metkere).

One more thing: if you’ve been reading Hypertextual for a while, hit reply and introduce yourself. Who are you? Where are you? What do you do? I see the subscriber number, but I know a few of the people behind it. I’d love to change that.

Now, the birthday.

I turned 43 today. Naturally, I made a data visualisation. I was born in 1983, so I looked at what 43 years did to London.

See the full visualisation →

London’s population has grown by 35%. The share of Londoners born abroad has more than doubled. Heathrow handles more than three times as many passengers, while Tube journeys are up 114%. Buying a first home relative to earnings is about twice as expensive. Manufacturing employment has fallen by roughly 82%.

Six numbers cannot explain 43 years of a city, obviously. But putting them side by side gives a snapshot of just how different London was when I arrived in the world.

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Continuing my data visualisation journey

This summer, I finally started making my own dataviz projects. Then I decided to make one London data visualisation every day in September. For example, I mapped all 19,367 listed-building entries in London. Westminster alone has 4,003, more than the 18 boroughs with the fewest listed buildings combined.

For 12 years of Chicken Shop Date, mapped, there was no ready-made dataset. I started with a fan-compiled list, checked it against the videos and filled in the gaps. I eventually mapped 91 London episodes across 43 locations.

I also went back through historical census data to show how private renting overtook council housing. In 1981, 30.7% of London households rented from councils and 15.1% rented privately. By 2021, those figures were 12.1% and 30.0%.

You can see the whole London data project here.

The visualisation challenge is part of a bigger change I started making about a year ago. I decided it was time to spend my time a little more deliberately. Fewer short-lived ideas, more ambitious projects. Fewer clever social media posts, more volunteering.

One result is Deptford.org, my local history project. Over the past year, it has grown well beyond, well, local history. My wife and I have also continued picking litter in our local river. I’ve become more involved with Friends of Brookmill Park, organising public science talks and editing the group’s newsletter. I also started volunteering with Creekside Discovery Centre, helping lead walks on the bed of Deptford Creek at low tide. And this month I’m starting a master’s degree in digital journalism at Goldsmiths. I’m very curious to see where that leads.

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Thanks for reading! If you enjoy the newsletter, share it with a friend or ten. And if you really enjoyed it, consider upgrading to a paid subscription to support my work.

Elia Kabanov is a London-based science writer exploring technology, cities, nature and history (@metkere).

• Peeling off tape creates miniature sonic booms.

• When researchers let AI models run a simulated society, Claude was the safest, while Grok committed 180 crimes and went extinct within 4 days.

• Teenagers with acne tend to get better grades in high school English, history, maths and science.

• For more than a century, Iceland had its own Dracula, with some characters having different names and more emphasis on sexuality.

• Box office hit films are four times more likely to star a talking animal than a woman over 60.

• Humanity may have spoken tens of thousands of languages between 3,000 and 1,000 years ago, far more than the roughly 7,500 spoken today.

• After local newspapers closed, police departments became more likely to classify reported rapes as unfounded.

• Terrapins invaded London rivers after people released unwanted turtles bought during the Ninja Turtles craze.

• Some herons use tools like twigs and plastic tubes to attract fish.

• During the 2022 heatwaves, London’s leafiest areas were 1.2°C cooler than those with the fewest trees.

• Fans use around 30 times less electricity than central air-conditioning.

• The average number of words spoken each day fell from 16,632 in 2005 to 11,900 in 2019.

• Illness, financial loss, trauma and violence can make people more likely to believe in conspiracies.

• Research suggests political moderates can be seen as disloyal by both liberals and conservatives when the other side feels threatening.

• In 1820, it was cheaper to ship a barrel of whale oil from Sydney to London than 100 miles inland.

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And if you missed the longer Hypertextual issues I published this summer, here are three of them:

• My first experiments with data visualisation.

• A proposal that changed everything.

• How sound makes digital journalism better.

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Thanks for reading! If you enjoy the newsletter, share it with a friend or ten. And if you really enjoyed it, consider upgrading to a paid subscription to support my work.

Elia Kabanov is a London-based science writer exploring technology, cities, nature and history (@metkere).

Cover art: Elia Kabanov feat. DALL-E.

Start with a play button

Perhaps the simplest approach is to embed an audio player between paragraphs. In a recent The Guardian piece, readers can listen to a fish under a frozen lake or insects communicating through plant stems.

Similarly, The New York Times brought together recordings from researchers in the Amazon, the Arctic Ocean and the Swiss glacier, where one sound artist has spent more than a decade recording cracking ice.

These projects may look a bit old-school, but they work because you can hear what the story describes.

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Build the story around sound

Sometimes you don’t need to go to the Arctic to make a great sound feature. In another Times piece, microphones pick up fish and aquatic snails in a Central Park pond, vibrations through tree roots, Brooklyn Bridge and a hot-dog cart. Each recording is paired with photographs or video showing where it was made.

My favourite example, and the one that inspired this issue, comes from the New York Times again. It combines maps of the Gulf of Mexico with recordings of endangered whales and seismic blasts. Hearing both makes the scale of the problem much more evident.

Treat sound as data

According to The Pudding, cats do not say “meow” in every language. The project compares animal sounds across 21 languages by converting words into the International Phonetic Alphabet and splitting them into individual sounds. The recordings let you check what those words actually sound like.

Finally, Common Threads tracks recurring musical motifs in Wicked, Hamilton and Les Misérables. It shows where each melody returns during the musical and lets you hear the corresponding passages.

Previously on Hypertextual: How 3D is changing the way we see stories.

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Thanks for reading! If you enjoy the newsletter, share it with a friend or ten. And if you really enjoyed it, consider upgrading to a paid subscription to support my work.

Elia Kabanov is a London-based science writer exploring technology, cities, nature and history (@metkere).

Cover art: Elia Kabanov feat. DALL-E.

I began with small projects: take a dataset, find an interesting story in it, and show it to the world. These are the first three.

What an eclipse does to solar power

A solar eclipse causes a sudden drop in solar power generation. Sounds obvious, but can we see it in the data? I compared four eclipses to see how big the effect was.

The graphic is based on the eclipse itself: the dark circle shows how much solar output was lost at the peak.

Who owes London £174 million?

Transport for London publishes data on unpaid Congestion Charges and penalties owed by diplomatic missions. The latest total is £173.8 million. More than half of it is owed by just 10 embassies.

I used a treemap to show how the debt is distributed, then compared the latest figures with the previous year to see which missions added the most debt and which reduced it.

How Russia’s box office changed after 2022

After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Hollywood studios stopped releasing films in the country. The Russian box office changed quickly. I used Kinopoisk data from 2019 to 2025 and represented every film as a strip, with its width showing its share of annual box-office revenue. Russian films made up 18% of the market in 2021. By 2025, their share had reached 73%.

Coincidentally, my first web project, back in 2001, was about movies, and the first texts I published were film reviews. 25 years later, my first proper data visualisation project was about movies too.

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What I learned from these projects

Obviously, it’s too early to draw big conclusions, but I’ll try anyway. First, the chart itself is rarely the hard part. Finding data and checking it takes much longer. The box-office project involved combining several sources and verifying hundreds of film titles before there was anything to visualise.

Second, simple ideas work best. The eclipse visualisation is basically four circles. The cinema project is a collection of rectangles. Neither needed a complicated chart type to tell the story.

Finally, making a visualisation changes the way you look at data. As a science writer, I used to think about whether a chart explained the story clearly. Now I ask myself if there’s something in the dataset that words alone won’t show.

I’m still figuring out what works and what doesn’t, so I’d love to hear what you think. Which of these projects works best? What would you change? And if you have an interesting dataset, question or idea that could become a future visualisation, send it my way.

I’m still figuring out what works and what doesn’t, so I’d love to hear what you think. Which of these projects works best? What would you change? And if you have an interesting dataset, question or idea that could become a future visualisation, send it my way.

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And that’s it for today. Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed the newsletter, share it with a friend or ten. 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 London-based science writer exploring technology, cities, nature and history (@metkere).

• Since 1974, vaccination has averted 154 million deaths, including 146 million among children under five.

• AI-assisted grant proposals may have an advantage. At the US National Institutes of Health, proposals with more signs of AI use were more likely to receive funding, even though their ideas tended to be less original and closer to research that had already been funded.

• Tickling seems to work much the same across cultures. The same parts of the body tend to be ticklish among people from China, the Netherlands and Greece. In a survey of 448 people, more than 95% had tickled someone or been tickled themselves. But we seem to enjoy it less as we grow up: 42% liked being tickled as children, compared with 35% as adults. More than a quarter of adults found it unpleasant.

• Honey and fruit may have played a major role in the evolution of our large brains. They provided glucose, the brain’s main fuel, at a time when its energy needs were rapidly increasing.

• Rivers around the world follow the same mathematical pattern: the larger the area they drain, the longer they tend to be. The rule was discovered in 1957 and still holds across very different landscapes.

• Companies are publishing far more sustainability data than a decade ago, but that does not mean they are getting greener. Between 2014 and 2023, the number of reported indicators rose by 52%. Direct emissions fell, while emissions from supply chains and other indirect sources increased more than fivefold.

• Employees who repeatedly consume negative news during the workday are more likely to keep thinking about what they have read, making it harder to stay engaged with their work. The effect appears to be particularly relevant for younger adults aged 18–35, among whom doomscrolling is increasingly common.

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What I’ve been reading

• Hannah Ritchie: “Corn and wheat yields and production are down slightly from last year, but are the second-highest on record. Rice production looks similar, but yields may be on track for a record. Soybean production and yields are looking at a record year.”

• Alec Luhn: “Europe needs to manage woodlands more intensively. That will mean more fuel breaks, sustainable logging and potentially restrictions on new houses in the forest. It will also mean more fire, however, such as prescribed burns.”

• Sam Matey-Coste: “Driverless taxi fleet of Waymo remains substantially safer than human drivers. A new study found that per vehicle mile travelled, Waymo’s current deployments across Los Angeles, San Francisco, Phoenix, and Austin are involved in a whopping 68% fewer crashes than human drivers.”

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And that’s it for today! Thanks for reading! If you enjoy the newsletter, share it with a friend or ten. 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.

This newsletter started almost four years ago, as the first project I launched after moving to the UK. Since then, it has sometimes had to compete with other pursuits, especially long-distance walking. Apparently, coming up with another issue after 10+ miles on foot is harder than it sounds.

So thank you for sticking with it all these years. From September, there will also be occasional insights from my Goldsmiths master’s journey, alongside the usual facts of the week and features on important scientific papers. Stick around, and invite friends to subscribe!

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And now to this week’s discoveries: why people may be talking less and what monkeys know about geometry.

• People are talking less. A study of thousands of people in the US, Mexico, Australia and Europe found that the average number of words spoken each day fell from 16,632 in 2005 to 11,900 in 2019, a decline of 28%.

• Monkeys appear to share some of our basic intuition for geometry. In experiments, baboons and macaques recognise shapes even when they are resized or rotated, using some of the same mental strategies as humans. Their performance even overlaps with that of preschool children.

• Burnout is not a modern invention. The word dates to at least 1937, while “burnt out” was already being used more than 200 years ago to describe the effects of excessive work.

• England throws away 3,400 tonnes of partly used medicines a year, enough to fill 75 swimming pools. The waste costs the NHS at least £480 million annually.

• Food fraud, from ingredient substitution and false labelling to fake documents, costs the UK economy between £400 million and £2 billion a year.

• A study of 1,284 people found that illness, financial loss, trauma and violence can make people more likely to believe in conspiracies, partly by making the world feel less fair.

• Political moderates can be seen as disloyal by both liberals and conservatives when the other side feels threatening, research suggests.

• Having normal blood pressure, no type 2 diabetes and not smoking between 45 and 65 is associated with almost 13 extra years without dementia, a recent study found. Women live longer without dementia than men regardless of their risk factors, while white people have more dementia-free years than black people.

• When local newspapers disappear, companies are more likely to cut back on corporate social responsibility if no national media, analysts or rating agencies are watching them.

• In 1820, it was cheaper to ship a barrel of whale oil from Sydney to London than 100 miles inland. Australia’s coastal mountains and lack of navigable rivers made overland transport so difficult that railways became essential to developing the interior.

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And that’s it for today! Thanks for reading! If you enjoy the newsletter, share it with a friend or ten. 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.

• The oldest known ichthyosaur fossil collected by a human was picked up in Roman Britain around 1,800 years ago. Someone carried the spinal bone from the Kent coast to Colchester, where it was later dropped into a pit with pottery, animal remains and a Roman toilet spoon. It may have been kept as a sacred relic, or simply because its owner found it interesting.

• “Researchers let AI models run a simulated society. Claude was the safest—and Grok committed 180 crimes and went extinct within 4 days.”

• To raise awareness of extreme heat, the Japan Meteorological Agency asked the public to name days when temperatures reach 40°C or higher. The winner was kokushobi, meaning “cruel heat day”. The term was used for the first time on 21 July, when three cities in Japan reached 40°C.

• AI-edited bird photos are putting research at risk. Experts warn that altered images posted on birdwatching platforms are creating false sightings and undermining data used by scientists.

• Humanity may have spoken tens of thousands of languages between 3,000 and 1,000 years ago, far more than the roughly 7,500 spoken today. A new model suggests the decline began long before European colonialism, as early multinational empires spread their languages, cultures and diseases.

• A US study of 159 local newspaper closures found that police departments became more likely to classify reported rapes as unfounded after local coverage disappeared. Researchers also found signs that some homicides may have been reclassified as suicides, suggesting that local newspapers play an important role in holding police accountable.

• Some of Lithuania’s earliest Christians may have been immigrants. Isotope analysis of a medieval cemetery in Vilnius found that several people buried there before Lithuania officially converted in 1387 had probably arrived from regions now in western Ukraine and southern Poland.

• Managers withheld feedback in about one in four cases, even when a worker had performed well. In a recent study, negative feedback was especially likely to be kept back when it would not affect the worker’s next decision or when the evidence was uncertain, suggesting managers were trying to protect their self-esteem.

• Up to 30,000 people may have been tried for bigamy in England and Wales over the past 400 years. Despite its rarity, the crime was once punished by execution, branding, whipping or transportation. More recent offenders have faced prison, fines or community service.

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And that’s it for today! Thanks for reading! If you enjoy the newsletter, share it with a friend or ten. 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.

Europe is warming faster than any other continent. Extreme heat killed more than 180,000 people in Europe in just three summers, from 2022 to 2024. But the danger is not shared equally: people in poorer regions were more likely to die when temperatures rose.

And it is getting worse. Researchers comparing recent heat with Britain’s brutal summer of 1976 say climate change has made today’s heat hotter, more humid and far more widespread across Europe.

So, let’s look at solutions.

Solution 1: Plant more trees

During the 2022 heatwaves, London’s leafiest areas were 1.2°C cooler than those with the fewest trees. At night, the gap reached 2°C. Scientists estimate that London’s trees cut heat-related deaths by around 16% between 2015 and 2022. Planting far more trees could reduce them by up to 55%.

Solution 2: Sprinkle water

Since the 17th century, people in Japan have cooled the ground around their homes by sprinkling water on it. The tradition is called uchimizu, and people still practise it today. It works: experiments found that it cut air temperatures by up to 1.5°C at a height of two metres and by 6°C near the ground. The strongest cooling was in the shade.

Solution 3: Hang wet grass

Before air-conditioning, people in India hung wet screens made from grass roots over doors and windows. Hot air passing through lost some of its heat, cooling the room and making it smell better too. The idea works so well that modern data centres now use a more advanced version of the same trick.

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Solution 4: Paint roofs white

White roofs reflect sunlight rather than absorb it. Researchers modelled what would have happened if every roof in London had been reflective during the hot summer of 2018. Average temperatures would have fallen by 0.8°C, and an estimated 249 heat-related deaths could have been avoided.

Solution 5: Put curtains outside

People usually try to block the sun with curtains or blinds inside the room. But external shades work much better by blocking heat before it reaches the window. In a small UK trial, roller blinds fitted outside cut peak indoor temperatures by 3.5°C and reduced cooling needs by 20%.

Solution 6: Use a fan first

Fans use around 30 times less electricity than central air-conditioning. An Australian study found that using fans before turning on the AC could cut cooling energy use and emissions by 76%, without making people less comfortable.

Solution 7: Make a heat plan

Planting trees and painting roofs take time. Warnings can help before the next heatwave. In India, Ahmedabad introduced South Asia’s first city heat action plan in 2013, combining forecasts, public alerts and preparations by health workers. Scientists estimated that the plan was associated with 1,190 fewer deaths a year.

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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.

• For more than a century, Iceland had its own Dracula. Published in 1901 as a translation of Bram Stoker’s novel, it was only recognised in 2014 by a Dutch scholar as a very different book. It is shorter, with some characters having different names, and it places more emphasis on the characters’ sexuality.

• DNA from fossilised poo shows that ancient relatives of ground squirrels had a much broader diet than expected. They ate plants and insects and also scavenged the carcasses of megafauna, including woolly mammoths. The next Ice Age remake should be much more violent!

• Box office hit films are four times more likely to star a talking animal than a woman over 60, according to a new study.

• A study of 273 employees found that toxic leaders are bad for almost every part of working life. Their subordinates show lower well-being across emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning and accomplishment. Employees under toxic leaders also reported less enjoyment at work and a weaker sense of purpose.

• Ancient grape seeds pulled from oxygen-free mud at a hilltop site in Tuscany have given scientists a detailed genetic history of Roman-era wine. Researchers sequenced DNA from 80 seeds found in old wells and found that most belonged to the same grape variety, apparently passed from the Etruscans to the Romans.

• “Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians are seen as groups of people that can be paid less money, equal to Chinese workers, while Germans are quite expensive and prestigious. Even in lower-tier Chinese cities, people will know that a Russian foreigner and a German foreigner will be priced differently, sometimes two to three times as much.”

• Traditional work songs help teams keep time together. Research suggests that songs stabilise the rhythm of shared labour and stop individual workers from gradually speeding up without noticing. If I start singing a sea shanty during our next Zoom meeting, know I’m improving team coordination.

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What I’ve been reading

• Here are 10 ways a super El Niño could impact the planet: “Reduced crop yields and weakened economies often intensify social tensions. The likelihood of civil conflict in affected tropical countries can double during El Niño years. According to one study, about 21% of conflicts since 1950 are linked to such climate patterns.”

• The quantum computing revolution is closer than you think: “After years of false dawns, many of the world’s leading tech companies are now betting that quantum computers will start to outperform their conventional counterparts by 2030 — with a potentially huge impact on fields ranging from cryptocurrencies and financial services to drug discovery.”

• 68 quadrillion underground miles of fungi: “Fungi attach themselves to the roots of plants, sending long, thin filaments out through the soil. Collectively, the filaments contain approximately 300 megatons of carbon, or four to six times as much as the carbon contained by all the human beings on the planet.”

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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.

• Invasive plants use rivers as transport systems. Himalayan balsam, giant hogweed and Japanese knotweed love damp places and riverbanks. The river does the delivery work: seeds and plant fragments move through the catchment and settle on the banks.

• Giant hogweed is basically a Victorian garden souvenir with chemical warfare capabilities. Giant hogweed came from the Caucasus region, helped along by Victorian plant hunters “doing their good work”, as Lawrence put it. It is highly toxic: brush it with your skin, and you can get rashes or blisters.

• Japanese knotweed smells lovely, but it tries to invade your house through the floor. Japanese knotweed is very pretty and, when it flowers, smells fantastic. Unfortunately, it can exploit cracks and weaknesses in concrete, tarmac and asphalt, which is less charming.

• Urban rivers can look healthy while hiding serious pollution. The Ravensbourne catchment in south-east London can look beautiful, but, according to Lawrence, nature has “a very good way of disguising” what is going on, from construction runoff to road pollution, sewage overflows and all the other gifts humans keep sending downstream.

• Terrapins became a river problem because people released unwanted pets. The terrapins in London rivers are probably there because children were bought turtles after the Ninja Turtles craze. Then the turtles grew, became “quite chunky”, and were released into local rivers and lakes, where they now eat anything in the water, including fish eggs and ducklings.

• A dumped portaloo once killed a lot of fish. In 2021, someone having a birthday party in a park hired a portable toilet and dumped the contents down a drain, apparently to avoid disposal costs. The ammonia entered the river system, killing 2,000 fish.

• Dog flea treatments can wash into rivers when dogs swim. At Beckenham Place Park, dogs go into the river all the time. Some carry flea treatments that can wash into the water, adding chemicals known to harm aquatic life.

Friends of Brookmill Park organised Lawrence’s lecture. You can follow him on Instagram, and check out our website for more events like this.

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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.

• 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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And that’s it for today! Thanks for reading! If you enjoy the newsletter, share it with a friend or ten. 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.

• 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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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.