• 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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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.