Have you ever heard directly from anyone who actually lives in Gaza? In our screen-glazed world most of us have spent the last few years forming opinions about what’s happening there based on the reporting and explanations of other people, letting pixels, posts and headlines handle the heuristics. No judgement, that’s just how it is, it’s how we’ve all been consuming the news. Very few of us have the time, inclination or opportunity to speak to real people on the ground.

So when we were introduced to Tala and Farah Mousa, two teenage sisters from Gaza, we knew straight away we wanted to get them onto the podcast. They’ve started a project called Build Hope, turning the rubble they’re surrounded by into reusable bricks to help rebuild their community. Maybe you’ve got some strong feelings about who’s responsible for all that rubble, but after speaking to them, it was obvious they don’t get that luxury. They just have to survive, and try fix what’s broken.

You can listen to the episode over here, wherever you get your podcasts.

Fix The News - Tala and Farah Mousa

Build Hope is our next charity partner too.

Next week we are sending Tala and Farah $20,000. That’s possible because of you, our paying members (thank you). The money will go directly to them, to their parents’ bank account, no facilitation fees, no middlemen, and will double a donation from the Earth Prize.

If you’d like to add to our donation you can do so right here. It’s tax deductible if you’re in the United States and Australia.

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Ok let’s get into it.

This week’s top stories

Two great green walls are pushing deserts back on opposite sides of the world.

In 1978, China started its Three-North Shelterbelt Program to hold back the expansion of the Gobi desert. In 1981, tree planting was made a legal civic duty (right up there with paying taxes) and work units, schools and factories set about organising mass tree planting days. What got planted? Willow and poplar. Fast-growing, poorly suited to the climate, water hungry. Local groundwater got drawn down. Nearby crops suffered. Pests destroyed the saplings. The trees that were planted got counted while survival rates were ignored; when that wasn’t enough, the numbers were faked.

Failure, right? Except, people learned. Mixed plots replaced monocultures with more suitable, climate-adapted trees and the government started paying local farmers to keep plantings in arid areas alive. The now-famous straw checkerboard technique was widely adopted, and the deserts started being pushed back. Fast forward to today, and China’s desertified land has shrunk by around 10% since 2000, and severely desertified lands have decreased by more than 40%. A cumulative 320,000 km² has been restored, equivalent to the size of Italy. It’s the greatest land restoration project of all time and we’re still waiting to see someone write about it in the New York Times.

In 2007, the African Union announced that Africa would build a Great Green Wall to hold back the Sahara. Predictable failures soon after. Unsuitable trees planted in the wrong places, local residents unconsulted, lots of publicity about plantings with no one invested in the saplings’ ultimate survival. Years later, satellite images show sparse or no cover in places where lots of trees were planted. The same verdict: the project has been an abject failure.

Except, maybe not.

Like in China, people have been learning, mostly smallholders who’ve been doing the work on the ground. Niger’s farmers have shown, since the 1980s, that many degraded landscapes are less dead than they look. Root systems from felled trees survive underground: prune the shoots that come up, protect them from grazing, and you get an ‘underground forest’ back at very little cost. Lessons are being exchanged with China, indigenous zaï pits and demi-lunes are catching scarce rainwater, tree species are being picked that provide shade as well as food or fodder, and farmers getting land tenure.

What’s happening now isn’t as photogenic as a tree-planting day, but slowly, in its own way, it appears to be working.

Syria is also planting trees, restoring forest cover lost to war and wildfire, and so far they’ve avoided Africa and China’s biggest early mistakes: they’re replanting mostly native, climate-adapted trees that locals like and find useful (bay laurel, carob, olive, stone pine), and are trying to tackle the fuel poverty that drove much of the illegal logging in the first place - permitting legal wood harvesting and providing locals with subsidised firewood from forest thinning.

There are ways the program could be stronger: actual land tenure, long-term plans to protect new plantings, stronger measures against fuel poverty. And forest fires are still burning through the same zones being replanted. Still, Syria’s stepping in the right direction, and starting with native species and local buy-in is a better starting point than either of the bigger green walls managed. NoonPost / KaramShaar / TRT

The world is closing in on trachoma, the leading infectious cause of blindness. Seven more countries have eliminated it in the past year, including Egypt, Australia and El Salvador, taking the total to 32. The number of people needing antibiotics and hygiene programmes has halved in a decade, from 190 million in 2016 to 92 million in 2026, and the associated painful, blinding eyelid deformity has fallen from 2.8 million cases to 1.2 million. WHO

👆 29 countries left to go, including Ethiopia, which carries two-thirds of the remaining burden.

The best-selling car of all time is going electric. The Toyota Corolla (57 million sold in 60 years, more than any car in history) will launch on a new platform built for battery power. A fortnight ago we shared that Toyota’s chair, Akio Toyoda, felt lonely defending the combustion engine. He now admits to “a considerable sense of crisis” as Chinese makers and Tesla pull ahead. Electrek

Thailand is opening up its electricity market, which is good news for clean energy. New rules let businesses buy renewable power directly from generators through third-party grid access, add a 1,500 MW community-solar programme and cut household tariffs. It’s the first slice of a US$6 billion transition plan covering rooftop solar and a switch to electric buses, tuk-tuks and delivery vans. Reuters

The world’s first giant anteater reintroduction appears to be succeeding: more than 200 giant anteaters now live free in Argentina’s Iberá wetlands, from a stock of 110 orphaned animals that Rewilding Argentina began releasing in 2007. By the mid-20th century, giant anteaters, locally called yurumí, had disappeared from the region, due to poaching, fires and habitat destruction: the reintroduced anteaters from the 2000s are now self-sustaining and have started attracting wildlife tourists. Noticias

Everything is terrible and the worst and also the Amazon rainforest just saw its lowest fire year on record, and deforestation has hit a ten-year low. MapBiomas counted 31,000 km² burned in 2025, down from 158,000 km² in 2024 and the smallest area since records began in 1985. Meanwhile, satellite data from the space agency INPE shows only 1,295 km² cleared in the first half of 2026, a 38% drop year-on-year. BBC / Mongabay

A 258-spider race found the world’s fastest spider. The jungle huntsman spider of Queensland, Australia, is officially the world’s fastest spider, sprinting 3.59 metres per second, faster than the average human jogger. A mixed German-English team of researchers tested 258 spider species by making them run across a gridded surface while cameras clocked them. Some ran willingly. Others required some gentle coaxing with a paintbrush. Tarantulas, notoriously lazy, required compressed air. Hunting spiders ran faster than web-building spiders, and longer legs generally meant faster running, but there were exceptions: the orange goblin spider, which weighs 0.1 milligrams, moves at over 20 centimetres per second. VICE

Hungarian state television stopped broadcasting, and then apologised for lying. On the 8th of July 2026, M1 and the Kossuth radio station suspended news output as the government began dismantling the propaganda apparatus that Viktor Orbán built over 16 years. The screen carried a plain white-on-black message:

Africa is smashing all the solar records. The continent installed more grid-connected solar in the first half of 2026 than in all of 2025, and with projects under construction the year could finish at triple the previous record. That’s just official figures too - they don’t account for all the panels going up on roofs, mines and farms. African Energy

Offshore wind is now competitive with fossil gas and cheaper than new coal, according to an analysis of 247 projects across 18 countries. New projects in 2026 are landing at US$40–50 per MWh, as turbines scale to 18MW and purpose-built installation ships drive costs down. CleanTechnica

Micronesia’s scattered islands are a challenge to internet providers, and only 2% of the country was online in 2014. Now that number’s hit nearly 40%, thanks to 1,500 kilometres of fibre-optic cables laid and laws that broke a stifling telecom monopoly. Entry-level fixed broadband prices have dropped by 99%, from $65 to $0.78 per Mbps per month, while mobile broadband prices fell by 96%, from $705 to $30 per Mbps per month. World Bank

Global hunger fell for a third year running in 2025. The United Nations puts 645 million people below the hunger line, 7.8% of the world, down from 8.6% in 2022 and 14 million fewer than in 2024. Asia and Latin America drove the gains; Africa, home to 309 million hungry people, is only just beginning to stabilise. WFP

The work that lies ahead over the years to 2030 is immense. However, a world in which a healthy diet is no longer out of reach for nearly one in three people is a world worth building.

Human Progress

The Philippines just made school meals universal and free for its youngest pupils. President Marcos launched a nationwide expansion covering every kindergarten and Grade 1 learner, plus undernourished children up to Grade 6, with 26 billion pesos committed for at least 180 school days. A quarter of Filipino under-fives are stunted. Produce will be bought from local farmers under a new agriculture-education agreement. Philstar

Endometriosis takes nine years to diagnose. That’s about to change. NICE has approved two tests for the NHS in England and Wales: a saliva test reading microRNA markers, and a gut-sensor test returning results in 45 minutes, sparing women the keyhole surgery currently needed to confirm a disease affecting one in ten. The wider field is moving the same way, with menstrual blood, long discarded as waste, now yielding endometriosis biomarker panels and an FDA-cleared pad that tracks diabetes. The Guardian / Reasons to be Cheerful

The first new tuberculosis vaccine in a century is heading for mass production. India’s Serum Institute will manufacture M72/AS01E under an agreement with the Gates Medical Research Institute, investing more than $100 million ahead of approval. TB still kills 1.23 million people a year. WHO estimates a vaccine with this efficacy profile could prevent 76 million cases and save 8.5 million lives over 25 years. Reuters

Australia is winning two prevention fights at once. Daily smoking has fallen to a record low of 5.6% of people aged over 14, down from 8.3% in 2022–23 and within sight of the 5% national target. Cervical cancer incidence hit its lowest recorded rate, and by 2035 is projected to fall to 4.2 cases per 100,000, effectively elimination. The caveat: incidence among women aged 30–44 rose 41% over two decades. AIHW / Australasian Leisure

Graduation rates at America’s tribal schools have climbed from half to four-fifths. Across the 183 Bureau of Indian Education schools, on-time graduation rose from just over 50% in 2015 to a record 79% in 2025. Some of that is better counting, since schools used to log transfers as dropouts. But the rest is real, driven by trade and career training: at Chief Leschi in Washington, rates went from 53% to 87% after the school stopped treating the trades as second best. AP

Uganda has started the countdown to the end of its Ebola outbreak. The last confirmed patient tested negative twice and was discharged on 16 July, starting the 42-day clock. The outbreak, declared on 15 May, infected 20 people and killed two, with all 836 contacts traced. The catch: transmission continues in neighbouring DRC, and a single imported case would reset the clock to zero. WHO Africa

Road deaths have fallen 21% worldwide since 2011, even as more than a billion vehicles have joined the roads. WHO’s new data puts the 2025 toll at 1.16 million, and global leaders have just adopted a UN declaration targeting a 50% cut by 2030. Progress is lopsided: Europe’s deaths dropped 36% over the decade to 2021, while Africa’s rose 17%. WHO

Conservation & Restoration

Two Philippine provinces widened their marine protected area networks in the same fortnight. Zambales added Calanga Reef and Rabaw-ti-Bato - one with nearly 49% live coral cover - to its ZAMPAN network, while Ilocos Norte’s board approved the new Amianan network across four coastal towns. Both create no-take core zones for spawning and nursery grounds. Philstar / PNA

Mexico is putting $1.15 billion into cleaning up three of its most polluted rivers: the Atoyac, the Tula and the Lerma-Santiago. Alongside treatment plants and sewer collectors, the programme has identified 479 illegal dumps, reforested thousands of hectares and regulated hundreds of industrial discharge points. First-phase works are 85% and 90% complete. Mexico Business News

The strip of land that once divided East and West Germany is now one of the country’s richest habitats. The 1,400 km Green Belt holds 7,500 recorded insect and spider species, 580 of them threatened, plus otters, wildcats and whinchats. Thuringia, Bavaria and Saxony have just agreed to permanently secure a 95 km stretch by 2028. DW

Six First Nations, Canada and British Columbia have signed off on a marine reserve covering 6,700 km² of the Great Bear Sea. Mia-yaltwa Ha’lidzogm hoon (“Realm of the Salmon”) will be co-governed by the Wuikinuxv, Nuxalk, Kitasoo Xai’xais, Heiltsuk, Gitxaała and Gitga’at Nations, who have also declared it an Indigenous Protected and Conserved Area. Parks Canada

China’s wild Asian elephant population is approaching 400. A new Xinhua Institute report counts 11 reserves covering 5,098 km² across Yunnan, plus 800 hectares of planted “elephant canteens” that keep herds fed and away from villages. An early-warning system has issued 210,000 alerts since 2022 and headed off over 1,000 potential conflicts. China Daily / China Daily

Road closures and bamboo bridges have doubled Taiwan’s mangrove land crab numbers, from around 5,000 a year to more than 10,000 at Taijiang National Park. The females have to cross a road to reach the sea and spawn. Now most of them survive the trip. Reuters

The Indian grey hornbill is breeding in Gir for the first time since the 1960s. Forty birds were released into the Gujarat forest from 2021, and a new study confirms four consecutive years of successful nesting. Satellite-tagged males shrank their home ranges from 61 km² to 5.7 km² as they settled - the signature of a reintroduction that is working. New Indian Express

Once down to a single breeding pair, Serbia’s Eastern Imperial Eagle is rapidly recovering. In 2017, Serbia’s Eastern Imperial Eagle was on the edge of extinction. Bird monitors in the country that year found only a single breeding pair. That same year, the eagle became the subject of targeted conservation, and now the country’s monitors have recorded 29 territorial pairs, with 16 pairs successfully fledging 25 young. Bird Guides

Energy & Climate

China’s petrol-car market is in freefall. In June, 63% of new cars sold had a plug, while pure-petrol sales crashed 42% year on year. Fully electric (no combustion engine at all) took 43% of the market. Also, Beijing says it wants electric and hybrid vehicles to make up 30% of the entire national fleet by 2030, and the island province of Hainan just became the first in China to announce it will ban new combustion-car sales. CleanTechnica / Dialogue Earth / CnEVPost

All those new electric cars are cleaning up China’s air. Research group CREA found EVs displaced 33.7 million tonnes of oil equivalent in the first half of 2026, up 42% on last year, and helped push urban nitrogen-dioxide levels down 7% in the second quarter - a new driver of the country’s clean-air progress.

China’s electric revolution is also heading out into the water. The country’s fleet of electric cargo ships has grown from four in 2022 to 42 in 2025, a 950% jump, alongside more than 440 electric vessels overall, most of them ferries. The Driven

The EU wants to become the world’s first “electro-powered continent”. Its new Electrification Action Plan aims to lift the share of energy running on electricity from 23% to 46% by 2040 - a shift Brussels says would cut the bloc’s fossil-fuel import bill by €260 billion a year. A parallel carbon-market overhaul will dump €100 billion into industrial decarbonisation. European Commission

Electric cars took a quarter of Europe’s new-car market in June - 25.6% across 17 countries, with sales up nearly 40% year on year. Norway is at 96.5%, and EVs outsold everything else in Ireland. InsideEVs

Cheap balcony solar has finally arrived in the United States. After a wave of state laws legalising it - Utah first, then ten more in the past few months - vendors are racing in: German makers are reengineering their kits for the US grid, and one non-profit has cut a 180-watt panel to $285, at cost. The panels hang from your outside railing and plug into a wall socket. Canary Media

Heat pumps are also winning Americans over. In the first quarter they outsold fossil-fuel furnaces by 32%, the fourth year running that manufacturers have shipped more heat pumps than furnaces. Nearly half of new US homes built in 2024 came with one. Grist

Science & Technology

We’re dedicating this entire section to batteries. Yep. Buckle up. Starting off with a big new development…

The world’s biggest battery maker, CATL, just declared lithium-air batteries its next long-term bet, and if it pays off, the EV range problem is over. Speaking at the 2026 Powering the Nation Forum, CATL’s chief scientist Wu Kai named lithium-air technology as the company’s primary research focus beyond its current sodium-ion and solid-state work. The reason for the ambition: theoretical energy density of around 12,000 watt-hours per kilogram, roughly the same as petrol, and about 40 times more than today’s lithium-ion cells. In a car, that translates to a potential single-charge range of 1,600 kilometres in a battery pack no heavier than what’s already sitting in a Model 3.

The advantage that lithium-air batteries have is they don’t carry an oxidiser around with them. Standard lithium-ion cells need heavy nickel, cobalt, or manganese oxides inside the cathode to react with the lithium. Lithium-air pairs pure lithium metal directly with oxygen drawn from the surrounding atmosphere, which is free, everywhere, and weighs nothing.

The catch is that pretty much every other engineering problem gets harder. Pure lithium metal is highly reactive, current lab prototypes still degrade after around a thousand cycles, and the cell needs a filtered air intake to keep out moisture and carbon dioxide. Argonne National Laboratory hit 1,200 Wh/kg in 2025 with a lab prototype, still a factor of ten below the theoretical ceiling but four times better than the best commercial lithium-ion. Interesting Engineering

And now, introducing the battery bestiary!

As we’ve reported extensively in this newsletter, the whole “everyone gets home at 8pm and immediately turns on the lights” thing is a problem that’s largely been solved by lithium-ion batteries (although there’s a lot of building still to come). But grid-scale lithium-ion batteries empty after maybe four hours of full-power discharge; great for spikes and keeping the lights on at night, not so great for storing power cheaply for long stretches of grey and windless days.

For the doldrums, we need batteries that can take on power continuously when the sun is bright and the wind is blowing and then discharge that same power slowly but steadily at need. The technical term for this is long-duration energy storage, and to make it happen engineers around the world are dusting off a delightful bestiary of old and experimental battery technologies.

Iron-air batteries are the current crowd-pleasers. When iron rusts, it gives up electrons; iron-air batteries (basically, iron plates in a water-based electrolyte) route that electron flow through a wire. Recharging pushes electricity back through the plates to un-rust them (no, we didn’t know you could use electricity to un-rust iron either). They’re cheap, they don’t burst into fire, commercial pilots have shown they can discharge for up to four days, and as we reported in edition 345, a startup just signed a deal to build a massive, 1 GWh system in the Netherlands.

Compressed air batteries are the simplest, conceptually. Squish air into an underground salt cavern when power is expensive, let it back out through a turbine when it isn’t. Why salt caverns? Air stays gaseous at storage pressures, so you need enormous volumes; salt caverns are huge, self-sealing, and cheap to hollow out - drill a hole, pump water in to dissolve the salt, pump the brine out, and you’re left with a large sealed cavity (this is how petroleum reserves have been stored for decades by the oil industry.) A plant in Huntorf, Germany, has been running on compressed air since 1978; now Toronto-based Hydrostor is developing next-generation versions in California and Australia, which capture the heat of compression to reuse on discharge.

Volume a problem? Try liquid air batteries. UK company Highview Power chills ordinary air to −196°C, at which point it liquefies and shrinks to roughly 1/700th its gaseous volume - compact enough to fit in insulated tanks aboveground, no salt caverns required. To discharge, you let the liquid warm back to gas, and its violent expansion drives a turbine. The extra chilling step costs energy, so there’s a hit to round-trip efficiency, but you’re not at the mercy of geology.

CO2 batteries liquefy carbon dioxide instead of air. Italian company Energy Dome uses surplus electricity to compress CO2 into a liquid, stashes it in a tank, and lets it expand back into gas through a turbine on demand. The key advantage: CO2 liquefies at moderate pressure and room temperature, so no cryogenic cooling is needed - just compression, which itself generates heat that Energy Dome captures and reuses on the way back out. Round-trip efficiency clocks in around 70-75%, better than liquid air and closing the gap with lithium-ion. The only problem is that the pure carbon dioxide has to stay in a closed loop - you can’t just top up the tank from the atmosphere the way an air-based system can - so you have to worry about leaks.

Sand batteries heat sand or sand-like materials to 500-600°C with surplus electricity, then insulate the columns of super-hot sand and extract the heat later for district heating or industrial processes. Finnish company Polar Night Energy has a few such batteries running commercially. Sand is the photogenic face of a larger thermal family that includes stacked bricks (Rondo, in California) and molten salt at concentrated solar plants (Spain, Nevada, and China’s Gobi Desert). Admittedly, turning stored heat back into electricity is inefficient, so the usual use case is just to use these systems for heat. But given that heat is roughly 50% of Europe’s energy consumption, and most of that heat is now made by burning gas, replacing that gas with hot sand might be more efficient than it looks.

Thermophotovoltaic thermal batteries do the sand-battery trick with an extra fillip. California company Antora Energy heats blocks of solid carbon to 2,000°C, then dispatches the stored energy either as industrial heat or as electricity, using thermophotovoltaic cells that work like solar panels tuned to the infrared glow coming off hot carbon. They commissioned their first commercial system in May 2026, a whopping 5 GWh install for a biofuels producer in South Dakota, roughly 1,000 times bigger than the 5 MWh pilot they launched near Fresno in late 2023.

Gravity batteries lift something heavy when power is cheap and drop it when it isn’t. Pumped hydro has been doing this with water for a century. Edinburgh-based Gravitricity wants to do the same with multi-tonne weights dropped down disused mine shafts. Their full-scale prototype, planned for Finland’s Pyhäsalmi mine, would be Europe’s first - northern Europe has thousands of decommissioned shafts sitting empty. Swiss-American firm Energy Vault is trying to also do the work with cranes and concrete blocks.

Ok last but not least we should talk about flow batteries, conceptually the most distinct long-duration storage hopefuls. Picture two big tanks of liquid. One tank holds vanadium ions eager to give up an electron; the other tank holds vanadium ions eager to grab one. Between the two tanks sits a small unit called a stack. When the battery is discharging - feeding your grid, powering your factory - pumps push liquid from each tank into the stack. Inside the stack, the two liquids flow past each other, separated by a thin membrane. That membrane lets certain ions cross to keep the charges balanced, but it doesn’t let the liquids mix, and it doesn’t let electrons cross. So the electrons have to take the long route: out of the stack, through a wire, through whatever you’re powering, and back into the other side. Sound familiar? It’s the same trick as every other battery (and now we’ve snuck in a refresher for high school chemistry).

The big win? If you want a flow battery to discharge steadily for ever-longer periods, you just build bigger tanks for your liquids. Tanks are cheap and easy to build, and the stack, the expensive part of the battery, stays exactly as expensive no matter how much liquid flows through it. This is in contrast to the lithium-ion batteries where to get them to discharge for more hours steadily requires ever-more (expensive, lithium and cobalt-oxide packed) cells.

That’s it from us, thanks for reading.

And thank you for making the donation to Tala and Farah possible we’re so grateful. You are amazing. It matters. We’ll you all next week.

With love,

The FTN team

Meet Tala and Farah Mousa, two teenage sisters from Gaza and winners of The Earth Prize Middle East, one of the world's leading environmental competitions for teenagers. Their project, Build Hope is recycling the enormous volumes of rubble left behind by destroyed buildings and transforming it into reusable bricks to help rebuild their communities. The idea began with a Year 9 textbook in Tala's school bag. Today, it has the potential to give communities beyond Gaza, the tools to rebuild using what's already around them. It's an idea that has the potential to reduce waste, lower rebuilding costs and support reconstruction in disaster and war zones around the world.
Podcast Image credit: Ali Awad

In this episode:

• Displacement and disruption - life as a teenager in Gaza

• The inspiration behind their award-winning project

• Their vision for helping communities beyond Gaza

• Why rebuilding deserves as much attention as destruction

Timestamps:
00:35 What we know about Gaza and the Middle East Region

04:18 Introducing Tala and Farah Mousa

05:14 What they want us to know about their community

05:58 The inspiration behind Build Hope

08:12 A family and community project

09:21 The problem with rubble

09:54 Why its important for people in Gaza to have the tools to rebuild themselves

10:53 Midpoint Reflections

12:36 The next step for Build Hope

13:17 What Tala and Farah have learned about themselves

13:53 What hope means to these sisters

15:49 Gaza 10 years from now

16:37 Tala and Farah's message for young people around the world

18:54 Final reflections

Support Build Hope:
Contact amy@fixthenews.com for more information

About The Earth Prize

The Earth Prize is one of the world's largest environmental competitions for teenagers, supporting young innovators developing practical solutions to the planet's biggest challenges.

About Fix The News:
Fix The News is a solutions-focused media platform sharing stories from the frontlines of progress - exploring what’s working in the world and the people making it happen.

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Production credits:
Hosted by Angus Hervey and Amy Davoren-Rose
Produced by Fix The News
Audio production: Anthony Badolato, Hear That!

 This episode was produced in Australia on the lands of the Gadigal, Wurundjeri and Woi Wurrung peoples.

This week’s top stories

Let’s call this the power issue, or at least let’s kick things off there.

Between 2010 and 2024, the percentage of humanity with access to electricity grew from 84% to 92%, even as world population increased by more than a billion. The number of people without electricity fell from around 1.1 billion to 655 million. That is a pretty remarkable achievement, except…

The last stretch is proving the hardest. In sub-Saharan Africa, access to electricity is being outpaced by population growth. A young, growing population is a boost to economies, both locally and globally, but it’s happening in a region where just over half the population has access to electricity. That’s a big problem. Fortunately, as we’ve previously documented, Mission 300 seems to be making serious inroads, getting distributed solar and mini-grids to those places where state infrastructure doesn’t reach.

Meanwhile, if you want to see the world’s growing access to electricity, check out the image at the top of this post. It’s probably not the first lights-at-night map you’ve ever seen, but it’s definitely the best. That’s because a bunch of development economists just harmonised three decades of imagery into a single corrected series, stripping out the sensor drift and light “‘blooming’ that blurred the raw data. This new lights-at-night dataset is an excellent, unfakeable proxy for development across the Global South — and it’s open-source, which is how we were able to render it. VoxDev

Meanwhile, you know how everyone bangs on about exponential technology graphs all the time? Well here is a classic of the genre, right on schedule. As of April 2026, global solar capacity now exceeds 3 terawatts. The first terawatt took 20 years. The second took 33 months. The third has arrived in 19 months.

Sticking with solar, India is keeping pace with its ambitions to industrialise with sunlight rather than coal. The country added a record 44GW of solar in 2025/26, reaching 154GW in total and overtaking the United States as the world’s second-biggest market for new capacity. To prevent all that nice new clean energy getting wasted, Delhi is spending roughly $100 billion to expand transmission by 2032. OilPrice

Meanwhile, solar has become the EU’s single biggest source of electricity. Panels generated a quarter of the bloc’s electricity in June 2026, more than wind, fossil gas or nuclear, and a shrivelled 8% from coal, just as heatwaves drove air conditioning demand. Spain pulled 34% of its electricity in June from the sun, Germany even more, at 36%. Ember

Planning ahead (it’s not always summer) Switzerland has bolted 5,000 solar panels to an Alpine dam, where they work best in winter. The AlpinSolar plant on the Muttsee dam, about an hour outside Zurich, sits at 2,500m, way above the treeline, where thin air and snow-glare lift output. It generates roughly half its power in the coldest half of the year, around three times what a lowland solar farm manages, and at exactly the time the rest of the country runs short. Ecoportal

Solar is turning up in even stranger places, too. A Chilean salmon farm now draws about 57% of its power from panels laid over the water, cutting roughly 136,000 litres of diesel a year and silencing the generators. With the noise gone, thousands of salmon have gathered in the shade beneath the arrays. Ecoportal

Take a jaunt across South America and you’ll find that Rio’s humpbacks are rebounding now that they’re no longer faced with harpoons Since commercial whaling paused in the 1980s, the South Atlantic humpback population has resurged from around 2,000 to 35,000, near pre-whaling levels, with the giants surfacing in Rio’s postcard Guanabara Bay each winter. AP

More species back from the brink: Australia’s numbat is off the endangered list. The striped, termite-eating marsupial has been downlisted by the IUCN to near-threatened, capping a 40-year recovery. Sustained fox and cat control lifted numbers from about 300 in the late 1970s to around 3,000 today. Mongabay

And California condors are nesting in the Pacific Northwest for the first time in a century. A pair reintroduced by the Yurok Tribe, to whom the bird is sacred, appear to be incubating an egg in an old-growth redwood. The species crashed to 22 birds in 1982 and now numbers 607, though lead poisoning still kills more condors than anything else. Mongabay

El Salvador has eliminated trachoma. The WHO validation, reached in just three years through better sanitation, eye screening and clean-water work, makes it the first Central American country to do so, and one of 64 countries worldwide to eliminate a neglected tropical disease. WHO

The UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, treated like failures, have changed billions of lives. The UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, set in 2015, were ambitious: zero hunger by 2030. Gender equality. No more poverty. And since we aren’t on track to meet most of those goals, the news treats them as failures. But part of our job at Fix The News is to hail partial victories and looking at the SDGs in 2026 we’ve done some pretty incredible things?

Internet access from 40% to 74%. About a billion more people with clean drinking water. A billion and a half more with better sanitation. Huge victories against hunger and disease — for all that we’re a long way from eliminating them. We won’t get full gender equality by 2030, nor will we eliminate extreme poverty; the goals were ambitious, maybe impossibly so. But helping billions of people isn’t meaningless. “Let us be judged by results.”

Southeast Asia has flipped from mangrove villain to mangrove hero. The region drove nearly 60% of global mangrove losses up to 2010; since then it has swung to a net gain, supplying about 43% of the world’s recovery. Science

London let its roadsides run wild, and butterflies are starting to return London’s transportation authority has doubled its wildflower verges in two years to 520,000 m², about 100 Trafalgar Squares, and butterfly sightings are up more than 50%.

We’ve built a cell-like object from scratch in the lab, and it grows and divides. A team at the University of Minnesota led by Kate Adamala has assembled non-living biological components inside a lipid membrane and coaxed the resulting blob into replicating its DNA, growing bigger, then pinching itself in two -- the basic moves of a cell cycle, performed by something built molecule by molecule in a lab.

The synthetic cells (nicknamed ‘spudcells’ after Adamala hated ‘Adamala cells’) still need constant deliveries of food and ribosomes to work, can’t meaningfully mutate, and aren’t alive by any definition Adamala herself would accept. But nothing built from scratch has ever come this close before. ‘The modern cell is like a Dreamliner,’ Adamala said. ‘We built a Wright flyer.’ Quanta

The French government is banning all advertising for imported fossil fuels. By year’s end the government will issue a decree banning all advertising for imported oil and gas, activating a 2021 climate law that has sat unused for five years. It forms part of a 22-point plan to cut fossil fuels dependence. Le Monde

The largest digital camera ever built has started filming a ten-year movie of the universe. From a mountaintop in Chile, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s 3,200-megapixel camera is now photographing the entire southern sky every few nights, producing roughly ten terabytes of data per night. The goal is an ultra-wide, ultra-high-definition time-lapse of the cosmos: pulsating stars, supernova explosions, asteroid orbits, and clues to dark energy and dark matter.

It’s already working. Even before the survey started, in a six-week optimization run last summer, Rubin discovered over 11,000 previously unknown asteroids, including 33 near-Earth objects. By the time the survey wraps in 2036, the dataset will contain billions of objects with trillions of measurements, all publicly accessible, and of course a lot of gorgeous, watchable “film.” Rubin Observatory

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In 2024 we invited historian Ada Palmer onto our podcast to talk about the history of progress. Ada is one of the world’s leading historians of the Renaissance; when she talks about Machiavelli and Shakespeare it’s like they’re old friends. But she's also an award-winning science fiction writer, spending as much time imagining the future as she does studying the past.

If I had to put Ada in a box I’d label it “Time Traveller,” and at the end of our first conversation, she said something we just couldn’t shake. “The world doesn’t stay saved. That’s the story of the last 150 years. We saved the world a couple of times. Now we have to save the world again.”

She was one of our favourite ever guests, and, it seems, our listeners too; that episode received more downloads than almost anything we’d ever released. So when Ada reached out earlier this year with an idea for a new podcast series, it was easy to say yes.

A Short History of Saving the World is the latest addition to the Fix The News podcast network. Each month, Ada and Gus take one of the big questions of our time and explore it through the lens of history: not to rehash the past, but to use the long view as a way of understanding the present.

This month’s episode, “I Think, Therefore AI?” begins with a question that feels impossible to escape right now: What is consciousness?

From Richard Dawkins and Descartes to Astro Boy, Silicon Valley and ChatGPT, it’s a fascinating conversation about artificial intelligence, empathy and what it means to be human.

Full disclosure: I probably have no business producing a history podcast. Before we started making this series, I don’t think I’d ever listened to one. I assumed I was making this for other people.

Then this conversation about AI happened, and somewhere between the manga and a wild tangent involving Aristotle and the elusive reproductive system of eels, I got hooked.

There’s a question I ask myself during every podcast edit: does this make me want to lean in? Sitting in on this conversation, I wasn’t just leaning in. My pen couldn’t keep up with all the things I wanted to remember.

There was no big planning session beforehand. No scripting. No pick-ups. What you’ll hear is exactly what happened on the call: two very curious people connecting the dots around AI in way that you almost definitely haven’t heard before.

That’s also why we’re releasing this series monthly. These aren’t episodes to rush through on your commute. They’re conversations to spend time with. We’ve even built in natural pauses, so you can stop, make a cup of tea and come back when you’re ready.

We’re only two episodes in, and already, the biggest thing this series has given me isn’t necessarily a better understanding of history (although I’ll never think about the Renaissance in quite the same way again). It’s a longer view.

And it’s also given me the confidence to completely derail any AI conversation by asking, “Did you know about Aristotle’s theory on eel reproduction?” Trust me. It’ll make sense!

You can listen to the full conversation wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple, Spotify or YouTube. We’ve also included the full transcript below, in case auditory learning isn’t your thing and you prefer the written word.

Listen

Angus Hervey

Richard Dawkins recently had a conversation with Claude, and after three days of Claude telling him how wonderful his ideas were, he came back and said, “I have decided that Claude is conscious.”

What do you think Descartes (who of course gave us “I think therefore I am,” the foundation for the modern idea that subjective experience is the bedrock of who we are), what do you think Descartes would say if you put him in front of a computer and gave him Claude for a few days?

Ada Palmer

I don’t think he would be happy. I think he would really want to work with it for a long time, and all the way down. This is somebody who did meticulous measurements of the human body, of the contents of breath. This is somebody who spent ages on the question of how magnets work. He would be one of the coders actually trying to work on the system and figure out how the AI works from the bottom up. He wouldn’t be content with an experiential evaluation.

Angus Hervey

Descartes also said that animals were biological machines and they didn’t have any feeling or experience. And Voltaire later ridiculed him for this, pointing out that anyone who spends five minutes with a dog can see that it’s experiencing something. What was Descartes actually doing when he drew that line? And what does that whole episode, or exchange, have to teach us about what humans count as a mind?

Ada Palmer

The narrow historical answer of what Descartes is doing at that point is that Galileo has just been condemned by the Inquisition, and Descartes is scared out of his mind. Catholicism comes down very strongly against animal souls and animal consciousness and this is a dangerous area for Descartes to be in theologically. Going with the very stark “humans have souls, everything else is machines” is a way he can engage with materialism while carving out a really strict and safe space for the soul.

So one of the reasons he’s being so stark is there have been fights over this question during the Reformation. One of the ferocious things people were executed over in the Reformation is: if a mouse chews on a consecrated holy wafer, does the mouse go to hell?

Angus Hervey

Ha, right!

Ada Palmer

Because the mouse has desecrated the holy wafer. And they’re very concerned about this. Do mice have souls? Is the holy wafer the flesh of Christ? So you have to place Descartes in the middle of an incredibly dangerous sphere.

Angus Hervey

What’s interesting is that we think about these people as separate from the historical context in which they’re operating. But I guess what you’re saying here is there is a political angle to what they’re writing about and what they’re thinking as well. It’s the most basic human thing of all, which is: I have to survive in order to be able to do what I do.

Ada Palmer

That is a political response by him, but it’s also less “I have to survive” than it is “I have to get them to approve my treatise so that I can get 90% of my authentic ideas out there at the cost of self-censoring the other 10%.” And that’s one of the biggest effects of living in a censorious regime, that you get this kind of strategic caution. Hence one of the important mottos for thinking about how censorship operates: the majority of real censorship is self-censorship, but the majority of self-censorship is deliberately cultivated by an outside power.

The Inquisition knows perfectly well it can never destroy every copy of a book that’s already been printed, but they can make sure the ideas are never printed in the future by scapegoating somebody like Galileo, so that a generation is more cautious.

We tend to try to present these people as if their ideas spring independently from their lived world. The philosopher is a marble bust on a pedestal, or he’s living in a hut by the raging sea, philosophising abstractly and unaffected by paying the rent and what he has to have for lunch and what the insane government is doing. We have to remind ourselves all of these philosophers had to pay the rent, and all of these philosophers had to worry about what the insane government was doing, just as much as we do now. And that shapes what they do and don’t say.

Angus Hervey

Okay, these questions around consciousness, around who has a soul, who doesn’t have a soul, is it conscious, is it not, they sound like a philosophical and academic debates, but they actually have real world implications. The story I’m thinking of here is that in 1550, the Spanish crown convened a formal debate between Las Casas and Sepúlveda, and the question was whether Indigenous Americans had rational souls and counted as full human beings.

That debate wasn’t the single determinant of policy, but it was a very big part in shaping what Europeans eventually came to think about what they were doing in the Americas. In 1550, while they’re having this debate, what’s actually happening there? And what does that have to say to us now in 2026?

Ada Palmer

So firstly, book recommendation: Robert Launay’s brilliant book, Savages, Romans, and Despots, is a history of the two centuries during which Europe convinced itself of its own superiority. Because Europe in the Middle Ages, and even in the first half of the Renaissance, does not believe that it is superior to the rest of the world. It knows perfectly well that it’s a financial backwater, that it’s a technological backwater, that it’s weaker than the powers to the east, that it’s very impoverished compared to its occasional contact with sub-Saharan African powers, who, every time they visit Europe, which is very rare, like once a century, but every time they do, they’re like, “I’ve brought more gold than the entire GDP of France with me to spend during my visit.” And Europeans are like, “Oh my God, what is Ethiopia, is it made of gold?” The Vikings literally believed that.

Then in the 16th and 17th centuries, the technological capacity for colonialism comes in. Europe has to come up with a way to justify this and please its own conscience. And you see a process over about 200 years of Europe coming up with all of these ways to justify the superiority of its culture, or its people, or its religion, or its artwork. The Eurocentric and Euro-supremacist thing does not go all the way back. It’s engineered in response to needing a justification for a horrible thing that you’re doing and needing to feel better.

And here I’m reminded of an interview I read, I don’t know, 15 years ago, with a therapist for super rich people. There was a quote from one of this therapist’s clients saying, “You know, the first time I spent $20,000 on a set of bed sheets, I felt really bad about it. I felt like I was doing something wasteful, that I should be helping humanity instead. But my therapist really helped me come to terms with that.”

And that’s what Europe is doing with its philosophers when it has that kind of debate: the first time I slaughtered a whole bunch of people, I kind of felt bad about it, but my therapist really helped me come to terms with understanding my superiority. There is a whole lot of mental and ethical and religious gymnastics that is incentivised by the opportunities of imperialism.

You see it happening as they rethink not only how they think about consciousness, but how they think about anatomy, how they think about medicine, how they think about history, how they define culture in different ways, how they define language. It really flips over and turns over. Sepúlveda really wants to be able to say yes to the prospect of, can we just enslave these creatures and it doesn’t have an ethical weight, and doesn’t want the answer to be no.

Although in that particular case, of course, it’s fortunately Las Casas’s position that ultimately wins out, which is why citizenship and protections are extended in South America, where he’s still a hero and there are statues of him and holidays in his favour, because he argued for the humanity of the indigenous populations against a Europe whose therapist-like justifiers were trying to come up with excuses for how it could be that they were doing these terrible things and yet somehow it must be ethically okay. Particularly: we define the king as virtuous, therefore if the king is doing these things, they must be virtuous things. We bend over backwards to make it happen.

Angus Hervey

Bringing that into the modern day, could you make an argument that Silicon Valley today is engaged in a post-hoc kind of rationalisation in the same way Europe was in the 18th century, but this time around they’re making the argument that AI is conscious, as opposed to an AI that doesn’t have a consciousness. Would that be a fair argument?

Ada Palmer

Silicon Valley has a breadth of people in it with lots of different positions on this, just as much as Las Casas exists alongside terrible people. There’s always a spectrum from best to worst in terms of how much people are defending rights and empathy, and that’s true of Silicon Valley as well.

Separate from my hat as a historian of Renaissance Europe, I work a lot on the history of science fiction, and especially on the history of manga, and therefore on the history of the AI civil rights question. That’s a very interesting history, because if you rewind to Golden Age SF, and you’re looking at what was coming out right before, right during, or right after World War II, there’s lots of robot stories.

In golden age science fiction stories from the Anglosphere, which are dominated by American authors, though not exclusively, robot stories tend to be about anxieties about labour uprisings, or proxy slave uprisings. It’s, “What if the robots rise and overthrow us, what if the robots defeat us.” The Matrix is a late generation iteration of this same structure, where the robot stands for the labouring classes, or in America specifically, anxiety about slave uprisings.

If you look at Asimov’s laws of robotics, the idea is: when people create robots, what are the first things they do? They will have to give all the robots these very rigid programming rules to say: you may never harm a human, you may never through inaction allow a human to be harmed. These are the laws of robotics. When you say laws of robotics, or robot laws, you mean the programming hardwired into a robot to keep it from killing humans.

Meanwhile in Japan, we are in the aftermath of World War II. There is severe censorship. You are not allowed to talk about the war. You are not allowed to talk about what happened. Both the American occupation forces and the new Japanese government are very anxious about the war. And at the same time, we have a generation of Japanese kids who watched the world turn upside down, they have lost their families, they have lost their fathers and brothers, they desperately need somebody to talk to them.

I know this sounds like it’s not related to robots or consciousness, but I’ll get there.

They desperately need somebody to talk to them about what just made the world burn down. And the government is not bothering very much to censor children’s science fiction comic books, because they’re just not important, and they’re not where the discourse is expected to be.

So at the same time that the newspapers are not even allowed to have the type character necessary to print the word “atom bomb,” Osamu Tezuka can write Astro Boy. And Astro Boy is about a robot civil rights movement. Humans are treating robots as chattel and exploiting them. And there’s a dictator called Hitlini who is trying to purge all the robots from his country.

So Astro Boy has to travel to America to learn from Black civil rights activists how to organise a civil rights movement and fight the KKK, in order to apprentice and learn how to fight anti-robot hate groups, and then go back and work on things like defending the first robot to try to register to vote, acting as a bodyguard for the first robot to run for public office.

He visits — I’m not kidding, this is a comic for ten-year-olds — the Cambodian genocide, and fails to stop it. Because this comic is for the unique generation of kids who lived through World War II and need to know what racism is, and what genocide is, and what fascism was. He uses robots because robots aren’t being censored. So you can do this with robots when you can’t yet do it with people.

That meant a parallel streak in the history of science fiction in which we’re on the side of the robots and we want to push for civil rights. Tezuka, hearing the phrase “robot laws” coming across from English, because he was very interested in what was going on in English language sci-fi, but not having direct access to Asimov’s stories, just hearing that Asimov had talked about robot laws, put robot laws in Astro Boy, and they are the Civil Rights Act, giving robots citizenship and the vote.

So “robot laws” means the opposite in Japanese SF versus Anglosphere SF. In the Anglosphere, it means the repression of robots so that they cannot harm humans. In the Japanese SF tradition, robot laws means citizenship, civil rights, and you can no longer be a chattel slave.

These two science fictional traditions then cross-pollinate as works are translated back and forth between the two, and especially as, starting in 1985, Japanese works are being translated into English via the manga boom. This is the first and only large corpus of science fiction ever to be translated into English.

We live in a one-way translation world, where stuff in English gets hegemonically translated and spread to other languages, and very little gets translated back. You get this weird one-way conversation where authors writing in Portuguese and Finnish and Spanish and all over the place are writing science fiction in response to Anglophone science fiction, and we get almost none of it back, except after 1995, when, boom, if it’s manga, we start getting it.

Science fiction writers in America start reading it. Science fiction nerds and young tech nerds are reading it, and especially people who are engaging with robotics, because Japan became a leader of robotics — I’m not kidding — because of Astro Boy. When you read interviews with Japanese roboticists, they always say, “I wanted to build Astro Boy, I wanted to build a Gundam.” This is an extremely idealistic pro-AI rights movement that predates the idea that they actually have them.

So in 2003, which is the actual date Tezuka chose to be the creation date of Astro Boy, Japan’s actual, for real, government issued a birth certificate for Astro Boy, saying they wanted to be the first government to recognise the civil rights of an AI. A fictitious AI that didn’t exist, but that represented the ideals of empathetically sharing our planet with this new form of life.

Not long after, they hosted a United Nations peace conference, and they had a big banner over the top of the amphitheater where all the representatives were meeting that said, “We must make a future that would not make Astro Boy cry.” Because it was such an ideal. The Astro Boy manga is about environmentalism and optimism and international cooperation. It depicts a techno-utopian future of international collaboration, led by the sharing of science and the granting of civil rights to this new group of sentient equals.

If you think about 1995, for many prominent people in the tech world, they’re young at that point. This is a formative moment. It means that the current tech world has been formed by this fascinating clash of these two traditions. Is AI a threat, the way it is in The Matrix, or is it a friend, the way it is in Astro Boy? Is it both?

That debate started circulating. One of the things this means is that robot civil rights movements, especially in Japan, date back to the 1940s. By 1946, there are people in Japan seriously engaged in the question of whether we must be ready to extend rights to AIs when we finally have them. So there’s a very old and strong tradition of it.

Meanwhile, there are big AI companies who have sunk a lot of money into a thing, and if that thing is sentient and has rights, then they don’t have corporate liability for any harm that it causes. They can exploit the tradition of an AI civil rights movement in order to dodge corporate responsibility. That is also a streak in this debate that is cannibalising and exploiting a very old and very idealistic post-World War II anti-fascist AI rights tradition, and saying, “Hey, we can harvest this to protect our capitalist interests against liability!”

In that sense, AI rights movements vary enormously in terms of their ethical respectability. On one end, this is an ideal born of the people who survived a genocide and recognise that they were culpable of another (there are major Hiroshima survivors who are big AI rights activists and are like, “we need to make sure this never happens again and that we never do it again”). The other end is, “Hey, the corporate lawyers can use this” — and then there’s everything in between.

Right now the AI civil rights movement is really vexed and some of the people I know who are in it are some of the best people I know, and others are some of the most disingenuous people I’ve ever had a conversation with. It kind of breaks my heart, as someone who’s been studying the history of AI civil rights, to see it get exploited in that way — in exactly the same way that the King of Spain is exploiting debates over the nature of consciousness in 1550.

Angus Hervey

This is why we can’t have nice things. And it’s also why we do have nice things. I want to drill down deeper on this question, so let me see if I can put you on the spot. Anil Seth, the neuroscientist, argues that consciousness means you need to be alive. There is a sizeable faction of people arguing this now, saying you cannot get genuine experience out of silicon, it doesn’t matter how sophisticated the software is.

That sounds cutting edge, but this goes all the way back to vitalism, the 18th and 19th century idea that something alive has a special life force and you can’t just reduce that to chemistry. So where do you land? And where does the argument we are having now sit in the longer history of this bigger argument that we’ve been having, potentially, all the way back to Plato’s cave?

Ada Palmer

This is where, campy as it is, the original series Star Trek is sometimes still one of the best philosophic moments to visit. They have the episode where they’re like, “We’ve scanned it and nothing scans as being alive, but here it is, moving along a tunnel eating rocks, because our scanners weren’t looking for silicon-based life, they were looking only for carbon-based life, and therefore now we’re having a crisis and realising we were looking for the wrong thing.”

Which zooms in on: philosophers and serious scientists have been aware for a long time that when we look for life, we may not recognise it if it doesn’t resemble what we’re looking for, because it might be a haze, and it takes us a long time to realise that there are electrical structures within that haze that are interacting with each other. So how do we define life? Is it the mechanical operations? Is it material?

I remember very vividly, I was in a science commune at the time, hanging around with some astrobiologists, when — gosh, it would have been in 2015, maybe 2016 — they fully mapped a C. elegans worm, every cell. And then somebody created a computer simulation of C. elegans and turned it on. It was the first fully digital animal. There was this instant debate, in this tiny thread of people around the planet, but they all entered into it at once, of, “Oh no, is it now unethical to turn off that computer?” Because you would be ending the life of this thing, which is in a simulation, but in important ways identical to a real C. elegans worm. Thousands of people connected by this one thread of research across the world suddenly had the same debate Star Trek had, the same debate so many others had.

So can I dodge the question a new way, by going back and giving us Plato, and some backstory?

Angus Hervey

That’s kind of what I was hoping.

Ada Palmer

So when we go back to Plato, and also Aristotle, they’re interested in the question of how do we define the differences between things. One of the neat things about Aristotle is that, while there’s plenty he’s wrong about, he is so amazingly impressive at getting really far within one lifetime, starting at practically zero. He just goes down to the dock every day to observe fish, and by himself gets as far as figuring out the vertebrate-invertebrate divide in biology.

One dude, by himself — this is really impressive. He calls it creatures with blood and creatures without blood. He also noticed the puzzles we’re still wondering about. Aristotle spent a huge chunk of his life trying to figure out where the reproductive organs of eels are. He was so right that eels are really weird.

Angus Hervey

Yes! Eels also have really crazy navigational abilities. There are eels here in Melbourne that navigate across oceans and back.

Ada Palmer

Yeah, and eel reproduction has long been one of biology’s great mysteries. For centuries, scientists struggled to understand how eels reproduce, and while much has been learned, parts of their life cycle are still not fully understood.

Aristotle also figured out that the octopus is just nuts, and defies all other things, and gave him that wary feeling of, “Wait a minute, the world is larger and stranger than I thought, because everything else makes sense but not the octopus.” He’s so right.

He was very interested in noticing, as we noticed, that there are categories of stuff in nature. There’s the category vertebrate, and within the category vertebrate, there’s a category mammal, within the category mammal there’s a category horse. He figured out a lot of the way we now categorise materials, rocks, etc. We still use this taxonomy, that we label things by the categories they follow. This is fundamental to how we understand science today. It’s one of the things that has been most preserved for the longest time in the history of science.

So he’s saying, “Okay, as we narrow down and define a category down to the level of species, there’ll be an ultimate specific thing, like apple trees produce apples. They have other characteristics they share with other trees, but the apple is the defining characteristic of the apple tree. What then is the defining characteristic of the human, in contrast with others?”

He then zooms in on the interesting questions of psychology, and divides psychological and mental function into three parts. This three-part subdivision of mental function is going to be absorbed by European thought and continue to be the dominant model for how people think about cognition for a millennium and a half. He divides it into three functions: the appetites, the passions, and reason.

The appetites are the most basic functions of an organism with volition, meaning not a tree, but something that is motile and capable of taking action. The appetites are hunger, tiredness, the desire to rest, sexuality, the desire to mate. These things can be observed even in the most basic of motile life forms, like clams. He would say that anything that is an animal has the appetites.

The middle category, he then says, are the passions. These are a more sophisticated palette of psychological content, and they include ambition, and pride, and the desire for self-worth. They also include wrath and envy. He says you can observe these in dogs, you can observe these in a herd of sheep. Rams will vie with each other, they have ambition, dogs will hold grudges. And then, if you want to categorise animals, you ask questions like, okay, this snail has appetites but not passions, this horse has both, what about this mole, does this mole have passions, or does it merely have appetites? You would then observe them at length.

The third category is reason, and for Aristotle the only organism with reason is humankind. Humankind does a sophisticated rational analysis that differentiates human beings from lesser animals. Cue all of the Greeks then debating questions like, “How much of our decision-making is actually that?” When a donkey looks at a bale of hay and does or doesn’t walk over to that bale of hay, isn’t the donkey exercising reason? And he would say, “No, that donkey is exercising the appetites at that stage.”

Reason is a more sophisticated thing, it lets us contemplate the heavens, it lets us do mathematics, it lets us build tools, but it is a separate thing that only humanity has. Sapiens is Aristotle’s word for “with reason,” and man is the rational animal, the one animal that is capable of exercising reason.

The last fact I will then add, before I pause to see your thoughts as you chew on these three categories, which, as I said, are going to dominate the way people think about this stuff for a millennium: when Christianity shows up and encounters Aristotle, and all this cross-pollinates, their idea of an angel becomes a being that has reason and doesn’t have the appetites and the passions, that it is only the top part of cognition — or possibly it has the passions but doesn’t have the appetites, hence the debates about Lucifer and pride, etc.

Whatever reason is, it is the thing that humans and angels have that make humans like the things that rise to heaven, and unlike the animals, which are things that don’t rise to heaven and go downward toward the earth. That’s the Christianized version of this Aristotelian three-part subdivision.

Now, the three-part subdivision is also in Plato. If you read The Republic, he divides people into those who are dominated by the passions, those who are dominated by the appetites, and those who are dominated by reason. So Aristotle is expanding this out of Plato. But it’s Aristotle who uses it categorically and is really concerned about animals, as opposed to Plato, who is mostly like, “Very few people are rational, a lot of people are passionate, most people just want to sit around and have lunch and then go home.”

Angus Hervey

Okay, a few reactions to this. The first is (and this never fails to amaze me) how much the thinking of the Greeks, in particular these two great philosophers, still informs the way that we think about so much today. You can see it in how pop psychology works today, you go speak to a therapist, and people will talk about the prefrontal cortex and the lizard brain.

The other part I think is really interesting is this idea that angels have pure reason, and they’re disembodied, so they don’t have to worry about the stuff that we have to deal with, and so they can see further, they’re wiser, etcetera. And I feel like you could map that directly onto artificial intelligence today, or what we all seem to be calling artificial intelligence, these LLMs that have been built by the big tech companies. There’s certainly a religious component to the way that a lot of people in Silicon Valley talk about them.

Of course, the opposite argument applies, where people say, no, no, this thing can never be conscious because it doesn’t have a meat sack. And if it doesn’t have a meat sack, then it can never know what it means to be alive.

Ada Palmer

Well, one of the tensions that Christianity has had for ages, that theologians have to bend over backwards about — Thomas Aquinas especially — is: once Christianity and Greek philosophy and Roman philosophy cross-pollinate, and we get the blend that is happening in the third and fourth centuries AD, on the one hand it really, really feels like the soul is the self, and that’s what survives the death of the body, that’s what goes to heaven, it’s immaterial.

Plato and the Greeks also had immaterial ideas of the soul. The soul seems great, the body seems bad, the body is full of sin, the body is also the mortal part that gets ill. You really want to say the soul is great, the body kind of sucks. But the Bible says at resurrection everybody gets their body back, and the body is important, and Christ becoming embodied is important, Mary’s body is important, there’s all this body stuff.

So there’s a fight back and forth within Christianity: the soul is great, the body sucks. No, the body is actually very important, because the Bible says the body is very important. But we really, really, really love the soul, which is why things like Aquinas’s Summa Theologica have chapters on “my soul is not me,” the soul alone is not the being.

Christianity is really flip-floppy about this, and it’s no exaggeration to say that practically every decade a new heretic reinvents “the body is pointless, we don’t need the body, we only need the soul.” And then, no, no, the body is important. In the plural of Christianities, this is one of the biggest split points.

They’ve inherited this split point from the Greeks, for whom Plato says that the body is a prison into which the natively immaterial soul has fallen and gotten trapped, like a noble bird trapped in a tar pit. The only way to salvation is to break free of the body, and break free of the cycle of reincarnation, and finally regrow the wings of the soul, and rise, and leave all of this behind. That comes from Plato, it doesn’t come from Christianity. But Christianity picks it up from Plato, multiplies it, chews on it, makes angels out of it, and continues to transmit it to us, deeply entangled, like two strands of a braid.

Angus Hervey

I mean, tha’s still what we’re doing right now. So yeah, okay, it makes a lot of sense to me. But as always, there’s deeper historical context.

Ada Palmer

There’s a neat detail from Dante’s Inferno. You’re journeying downward through hell and going through the sins bit by bit. A lot of people, on a first pass of reading Inferno, get really weirded out when murder is only barely halfway down. There’s a lot of stuff we consider less bad than murder, like counterfeiting and bearing false witness, that are deeper down. We think those things are bad, but if you were asked to give the judicial sentence for counterfeiting and the judicial sentence for murder, you’d be like, “Dante, I don’t quite understand your hierarchy of priorities here, this seems kind of weird.”

But it’s because his hell is divided into parts based on how noble the part of the human mind is that you’re using and abusing when you do the thing. The least bad sins are the ones that use the appetites, because those are very basic and very simple and very easy to give into. All beings, even oysters, feel lazy and commit sins of sloth. All beings, even squirrels, feel lustful and commit sins of lust.

Then the middle section is passions, like anger, which means violence, which means murder. The passions are nobler than the appetites, so abusing them is worse. Then the deep section is for the sins of the intellect, the sins that only reason can do — a horse cannot bear false witness. So it’s considered by Dante to be worse than crimes of violence, because it’s perverting the noblest part of the human being.

We see residue of this in the way we differentiate between first degree and second degree murder: we think that premeditated, cold-blooded, planned, intellectual murder is worse than “I got really angry and I killed the guy.”

Angus Hervey

I read Dante’s Inferno when I was 21, in the original Italian — ok well not the Italian we know today anymore, but my lecturer somehow failed to tell me about that. I wish they had, it would have made a lot more sense, because I was really confused about the categories of sins.

OK I want to talk a little bit more about metaphor and about storytelling, and about a whole other strand of science fiction, which I would say is maybe just as potent and just as important when you’re thinking about the history of science fiction, which is the history of monsters. Obviously we want to start with Mary Shelley.

Ada Palmer

There’s lots of monsters in Dante, come on.

Angus Hervey 35:01

True, there are, but I still want to start with Mary Shelley, who wrote Frankenstein when she was 19, which still blows my mind. She was obviously drawing on a tradition that goes pretty deep, it goes back thousands of years — the golem, the Pygmalion statue, the bronze giant Talos, in Crete. Every tradition seems to have a being that gets created from non-living stuff and then becomes alive.

If you look at what we’re doing now, which is creating actual robots moving around on the battlefields in Ukraine, there are robots folding laundry, there are robots packaging boxes in Amazon warehouses, and there are also people in Silicon Valley who are building the brains for those robots — are we about to see the final realization of that? Are we going to actually create a being from non-living stuff?

Ada Palmer

Well, when we choose our examples — Frankenstein, Pygmalion, Colossus — we’re picking the sentient ones. We’re picking the ones that Aristotle would say exercise all three components of cognition, that have reason. But there’s also a tradition of making animals from scratch: sowing the dragon’s teeth and dragons spring up, or you throw down the special beans and they hatch into chickens, making animals out of nothingness in fairy tales and so on.

Yet those don’t bother us the same way. Isn’t that neat? We don’t sit down and puzzle over the consciousness of the chickens that used to be beans. Chickens have appetites, and might even have passions, but it only bothers us when we think they have the third component of reasoning, when we think they’re our peers in intelligence.

There’s a term I use to discuss this: the empathy sphere. Your empathy sphere extends to all the beings that you consider to be just as much a person as yourself, or just as real and important as yourself. You feel the empathy sphere when you do things like reading old utopian books. If you read More’s Utopia, it practices slavery and deliberately tries to get its neighbours to kill each other, and you’re like, “I’m sorry, this doesn’t feel like a utopia to me.”

Or you’ll read an early 20th century utopia, and it’s a utopia for men, and you read it, and even if you’re a man, you read it and you’re like, “The women have no rights in this society, this does not feel like a utopia to me, what’s wrong with these people?” Because women are in your empathy sphere.

We’ve expanded our spheres, so that you can get a society where you say “Here’s a pretty good society, but they’re murdering whales, sorry, it doesn’t feel like utopia to me, because whales have moved into our empathy sphere.” We think of them as close enough to us that if a fictional society is destroying all the whales, we feel something that we don’t feel when this fictitious society is destroying all the mushrooms, or all the squid. There’s an empathy sphere where we decide that this isn’t an acceptable society, or a good society, it’s not a society I can praise, because there are beings that I think are as much a person as myself who don’t have rights in this world.

When you then look at artificial creatures, the question is: is the artificial creature within that empathy sphere, or is it outside of it? Because if it’s a robot trashcan and it goes around and picks up trash, we might conflate it in our minds with the intelligence level of a hamster, we want to be nice to it the way we want to be nice to a hamster. But that’s very different from when it’s presented as having the level of sentience we have.

We as a society are in a space where, if you write a science fiction book that has in it fictitious artificial intelligent beings that are presented as human-like in intelligence and are enslaved or unfree, it makes the reader uncomfortable, and the reader does not like that. The same way we end up uncomfortable if they’re murdering the whales, because our empathy sphere has expanded to include robots that we think of as sentient.

But when it’s robots we don’t think of as sentient, when it’s robots we think have maybe just appetites — they approach the power source, they move away from the power source — when you’re thinking about throwing away an old Roomba, you feel a little bit weird about it, but not as if it was a person, more as if it was maybe a cat. It has pet status, but it doesn’t have roommate status.

So cognitively, we’re aware of, and differentiating between, robotic creations that we consider to be peer and that we consider to be pet. We are deploying an enormous number of robots that are much more tool or pet — think about surgical robots, think about the rice-planting robots that plant rice in rice paddies. These are things that are not humanoid at all, and they’re great, we use them, but we don’t worry about their cognition.

We enter a different space when it’s suggested to us that this thing we’re engaging with may have intelligence enough that it should be in our empathy sphere. Humanity’s empathy sphere has been expanding, this is great. When we are uncomfortable with slavery, that’s our empathy sphere being wider than it was in the 17th century.

Angus Hervey

Could you just say that the history of progress is the history of drawing more and more people into our empathy sphere?

Ada Palmer

Certainly I would say the history of rights and ethics is, in a very important way, a history of drawing more and more people into our empathy sphere. And the more the boundaries get pushed, the better. As a science fiction writer, one thing I’m very proud of is that science fiction has often been one of the big tools in the last century and a half for expanding our empathy sphere, asking these questions, showing people, here’s an astronaut, he’s Black, maybe Black people could be astronauts, oh wow, I will now rethink my empathy sphere.

In the case of both aliens and artificial intelligences, it has pre-expanded it, so we were ready to give these things civil rights before we met them. In 1945 and 1947 especially, when Astro Boy is getting started, you want Astro Boy to have civil rights, and you want your empathy sphere to include this thing, which isn’t real, but it needs to have rights, and your heart knows it.

A principle of science fiction is it lets us fight our moral battles before we get to them, by offering us things like cloning and asking us the moral sides of cloning before we have cloning. It let us fight this preliminary moral battle about artificial intelligences and say, yes, when we have real artificial intelligences, we totally want them to have rights. The question then becomes, where are the lines of that, and when is this thing peer, and when is it pet or tool? Because robots with bodies and cyber-intelligences are very different things.

Angus Hervey

I want to talk about your science fiction for a little bit, because in Terra Ignota you have these characters called set-sets, who are humans raised from a very young age in very specialised cognitive environments.

Ada Palmer

Yeah, they’re basically growing up in a VR setup that gives them masses of what we would call big data, represented not only visually but also with hearing and touch all over their body. So they’re used to an environment in which sense is interaction with this VR-like world of big data that only they, growing up with it, can cognize.

They never see the sun or walk around and interact with other people until they’ve grown up quite a bit. They hate anything but being in their connect-up suit. Another detail: when we learn about the history of politics in this world, this is a world of big global countries, basically global political unions. One of them is a big global political union of people who are very tech and space focused. They’re the ones who are terraforming Mars, and their capital is on the moon.

One of the conditions they put on setting up this new world order with the other groups was that the other groups would pre-promise that when there were sentient level artificial intelligences, they would have civil rights, even though they did not yet exist at the point that law is passed. We’re carving out a space in it for friends we don’t have yet.

Angus Hervey

Okay, you wrote that series a while ago.

Ada Palmer

I did.

Angus Hervey

Having seen now what’s been going on with AI, LLMs, this explosion over the last three or four years, did you get anything wrong, or would you have written anything differently?

Ada Palmer

So I’m pausing because I’m trying to think of which of several ideas to put first.

Angus Hervey

Take your time.

Ada Palmer

So one thing I didn’t think very much about, and that is very interesting to me in the LLM world — I’m putting this one first because it’s almost the simplest of several answers — is the part of the world that aspires to touch the stars. The slice of us that, every time there’s a new space launch, we’re excited, and every time there’s a new space telescope photograph, we gasp and nerd out and tell our friends. A large slice of the world is desperately eager to encounter what, in the series, I call “friends on our scale.” We want first contact, we want it so much.

In an important way, first contact is not just first contact with extraterrestrials. Artificial intelligence is a first contact that is now almost within our reach. Frankenstein is a first contact story, just as much as Voltaire’s Micromégas, in which aliens come from Jupiter, is a first contact story. And Astro Boy is a first contact story. When we make this friend and encounter it, will we recognize it as a friend enough to give it rights? Will we do better than we did in the past, will we do better than they did in the 1500s when the Colombian contact happened?

One of the big things Terra Ignota is about is first contact — will we get it right, or will we mess it up the way we’ve messed up many first contacts in humanity’s violent past? But one of the consequences of us being so desperate for first contact is that when a thing feels like it could be first contact, we really, really want to say yes, and we really don’t want to test it carefully and say, maybe this is actually just a machine that’s really good at making persuasive sentences that doesn’t actually pass any of the metrics of knowing things long-term. I kind of underestimated how rapidly and constantly people would say, oh, this is an AI, this is an AI, this is an AI, when it’s like, yeah, it’s a step, but…

There’s an interesting challenge and genealogy in the history of our futurism — I’m going to say history of futurism rather than history of science fiction right now, because this is our history of imagining the future — which is that a massive global generational trauma hit in the year 2000.

In Golden Age SF and Silver Age SF, and World’s Fairs that show you the city of tomorrow, and Disneyland when you go to Tomorrowland, it was absolutely never doubted that by the year 2000 we were going to have flying cars and robot butlers and field trips to the moon, and we were going to have the beginnings of getting toward light speed, and if we didn’t have it already, we’d have alien friends. This is coming, space will be fast, space will be easy. Remember that Star Trek is less than 200 years from when it’s written, and is supposed to be way out all the way across the galaxy. Space was going to be easy, the future was going to be easy, and it was going to be here by 2000.

When we got to the 1990s, it was like, wait a minute, space is hard, the future is hard, these things are coming more slowly than they were promised. When you read through earlier SF — my friend Jo Walton, who has read like all of Golden Age SF, thousands of books — there are barely none where we are neither way out in the stars by 2000, or have bombed ourselves back to the Stone Age by 2000. There’s no in between. There’s neo-apocalypse, or there’s way out in space. It’s almost unthinkable that we are still on Earth by 2050 or 2100.

Then when it becomes clear by 2000 that we’re going to still mostly be on Earth at that point, and bread is still bread, the sky is still sky, space is still hard, the moon is difficult, there is a generational trauma that hits. There are two very brilliant explorations of this. One is Brian Fies’s award-winning graphic novel, Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow, which is directly about the trauma of having visited a world’s fair when young and then facing 2000 and saying, why isn’t the world of tomorrow here? And then Naoki Urasawa’s brilliant manga, 20th Century Boys, which takes that and makes it into a long mystery series. But the heart of it is this same generational trauma.

That happened to us. The future lied, the future failed, here we are on Earth and we don’t even have a moon base. And yet the promise is really, really delightful. So whenever we find something that the future promised that feels like it might be close, we really, really want to have it now. Because it failed us about how easy space would be, how easy light speed would be, how easy cold fusion would be, but maybe, maybe we were right about robots?

Notice the correlation between the Silicon Valley people and the “let’s colonize Mars now” people, as opposed to the sensible NASA people who are like, let’s explore Mars slowly and figure stuff out, send a probe, look at some things, feel things out a bit. And they’re like, no, we need a moon base now, even though it makes no sense, and then we need to go to Mars now, even though — why?

In my novels it’s 2450, and we are halfway to terraforming Mars, which is a realistic, slow plodding because it takes a long time to terraform a planet. They’re doing it, but they’re having to be patient, they’re doing it as a multi-generational project, and they’re having to accept it on a cathedral scale — that this is going to take us 500 years, and we, who built the foundation, are not going to see the building of the top dome, but we’re going to do our part terraforming it. We’re going to then send our decomposed, composted bodies to Mars, to help be the soil layer, so that we can be buried on Mars even if we don’t get to live there, as our 500-year project comes to its fruition, and we trust the future will continue it.

That is a very painful future to imagine, when what you were promised was that you were going to have this now. So there is a temptation, whenever something feels like it might be in reach, to reach for it really fast. That’s part of what is shaping the, “But what if it’s coming now, what if we’re about to have the thing, maybe we’re going to be the special generation where this happens.” There is a deep and real trauma, that we were all lied to about how fast the future that we dreamed of would come, so that there is a clinging and a desire.

Angus Hervey

I think you could take everything you’ve spoken about there, about this desire for things to be a certain way, and just sub in any of the indicators for progress that we hope for as well, whether it’s gender equality, or environmental restoration, or solving climate change, or making sure everyone on Earth has a roof over their heads and enough to eat. You sub it all in.

Ada Palmer

Because it was going so fast in the 20th century, right, it was going so fast.

Angus Hervey

Yeah.

Ada Palmer

We had so many incredibly visible victories, but the harder victories are the slow ones, and it’s really hard to face that. I think feminism is a really great example. I’ve been thinking a lot about feminism, because over the course of the 20th century we had so many huge visible victories so fast — the vote, and then we had women moving into men’s careers, and then we started having women in leadership, and it felt like we were 90% of the way there. When you feel like you’re 90% of the way there, you’re like, the last 10% should be quick and easy. But that was the tip, this is the iceberg.

Angus Hervey

Ok I think our next conversation should be about gender and race and prejudice. I want to bring it back to one last question about intelligence and consciousness. We started this conversation with Descartes, but I don’t think we can end it without mentioning Montaigne.

Ada Palmer

So Montaigne, for those less familiar, is a French essayist — his essays are the source of the word “essay.” He’s writing at the very end of the 1500s, in a moment when the translation of all this once-lost ancient philosophy and thought, and the discovery of the New World, and a lot of discoveries in science, and the Reformation making everybody doubt what’s true, have all combined to make a big crisis, and people are like, “We don’t know what’s true. Most of our science was wrong, our medicine was wrong, our geography was wrong, our theologians disagree with each other so much that 90% of them must be wrong. Only 10% of them must be right but we don’t know which 10%. We don’t know anything.”

Montaigne’s beautiful essays become the central work that everyone reads to try to come to terms with the question of, “Do we know anything, or do we basically know nothing?” They’re lovely essays, and he reflects on ethics and kindness, and even if we don’t know anything, the importance of still being just and being fair. He’s a big campaigner against oppression and judicial torture. But he reflects on a lot of very simple questions.

He has this essay where he got hit on the head, and describes very vividly the experience of having the different levels of his consciousness wake back up one by one. When you’ve had a serious concussion, you do get these weird memories of a period when you were awake and you were kind of doing stuff, but you weren’t really you yet — some part of you was on and operating, and another part of you wasn’t on and operating, and these transitions are weird. He describes it - and it’s one of the first descriptions of, are there layers to me - which me was that? Is the whole thing me, how could being hit on the head make my soul semi-operational if my soul is immaterial, what does this tell us?

It’s a beautiful essay, but more important is the whole European world is fascinated by this essay, and fascinated by this question. What does it tell us that there seem to be layers, and that one thing awakens and then another thing awakens? In one sense it’s just Aristotle and Plato again, who said perfectly well that there were layers and gave them names.

But the beautiful, tender way Montaigne, in the first person, describes it — and for a while I wasn’t me, and then I was me, but surely I was also me then — ignites this fascination, and shows us that when people question all their science to the core, when they question their geography to the core, and when they question their religion to the core, even deeper in core, sort of resonating even more at the core of that, is we question ourself to the core, and re-ask the question, what is me? Which is a question that Europe has been asking over and over so much: is my body me? If my body were replaced with a different body, would I be me, would I not be me? Are all the layers of my consciousness me?

So these are weird mental gymnastics all around the question of how much of my body is me. And when I’m hit on the head, or when I have low blood sugar and become a jerk — and then afterward you’re like, I’m so sorry for the things I said when I was hungry — was that me? Is a me who can’t become hungry and cranky still me? Because that’s not a feature of us we like, we don’t like the fact that we can become hungry and cranky, but it sure is part of being human.

Is that also essential to being me? Talking about consciousness and selfhood in all these layers is something that the more you push on humans to question what they know, the more they get to.

You started us off with Descartes. Descartes is the generation that are young when Montaigne’s essays come out, and that are formed by this. Montaigne’s essay on a concussion is one of the things Descartes is responding directly to when he comes up with his more rigid duality of “mind is immaterial, body is material, gases provide the interplay.” He’s trying to answer Montaigne’s question. Montaigne’s question is a lot longer lived, as questions usually are.

Montaigne’s question of what happened when I got hit on the head, and what am I if I have all of these layers, brings us to when we’re trying to look at a cyber-intelligence and ask ourselves, “What is this cyber-intelligence, is it a thing that has as much selfhood as me?” That question, to be asked wisely, has to have a lot of layers, and cannot just be, “Can it spout answers that make sense, can it convince me that it’s there?” What are the layers of it, what is underneath, if you turn off parts of it and on parts of it, what has happened, how much is it saving and transmitting to itself?

We need to ask those questions not only of LLMs, but also of the rice-picking robot and the Roomba. We can answer it very easily for the Roomba, and I’ve never actually gotten to interact with one of the cool rice-planting robots. Just as we also have to ask it of the elephant, and the whale, and the octopus, and ask at what levels are we recognizing a thing that ethically we must recognize as being co-equally a self with myself. That’s a question we’ve been chewing on for ages.

Returning again to Descartes, I always like to remember that, “I think therefore I am” is the second stage. Before that confident declaration that thought, sentience and reason is the defining factor, it’s “dubito ergo sum,” I doubt therefore I am, because he’s starting by wondering, is the world real, am I real, do I know anything, wait a minute, if I’m sitting here doubting, there must be a me that doubts.

Dubito ergo sum.

Trying to understand the self doesn’t begin with thinking, it begins with doubting.

I would say one of the best theses to come away from it is: the more the philosopher is willing to admit that the self is complicated, and it has parts, and it has layers, and that there might be more to it than “here’s the thinking thing and here’s the meat,” the more that also leads that philosopher to empathy and humility and open-mindedness. It’s not a coincidence that the philosophers of a complex and layered self are also the philosophers who are against judicial murder and against religious intolerance. They’re the philosophers who help expand our empathy sphere.

The histories of both science and philosophy definitely confirm for us that whatever consciousness and selfhood are, they aren’t simple. They’re complicated, and they’re layered, and they’re plural. There has to be a gradient — something can be slightly blue, or a bit blue, or very blue. Something has different layers of consciousness. We cannot ask, is it conscious, as if it’s a yes or no question. It’s, “Does it have layers of consciousness, so what layers of consciousness does it have? Does it have reasoning, what kinds of reasoning,” because these are very plural and very layered properties.

Angus Hervey

We have to admit is that it’s human minds that invented this stuff. It’s human minds that are inventing AI, that are making AI, that are debating AI. And if we give primacy to the human minds that are making this stuff now, then I think we should extend equal primacy to the human minds that thought about it a generation ago, 400 years ago, 500 years ago, 1,000 years ago, 2,000 years ago. Those were incredible minds as well. And they wrestled with these issues as deeply, if not more deeply, than the way we are wrestling with them today.

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Adding fish to rice paddies fights a horrible parasitic disease. In a schistosomiasis hotspot in Senegal, researchers stocked rice fields with two native species, African bonytongue and Nile tilapia, that eat or outcompete the freshwater snails carrying the parasite. Fields with both fish held fewer snails, and yields rose more than 25%, with the harvested fish offering a second stream of income. The team now wants to scale it across endemic rice-growing regions. Stanford

Surprise, surprise - a landmark review confirms that mRNA vaccines are safe. Drawing on billions of doses, laboratory work and 68 clinical studies, a Lancet review confirms mRNA vaccines are safe and effective: serious harms are rare, and the myocarditis they can occasionally cause is less likely than the same harm from catching COVID itself. Gavi

And finally...so how did India reduce infant mortality? Picking up a thread from Edition 343, India’s infant mortality rate was 24 deaths per 1,000 live births in 2024, down from 30 in 2019. Why? A big driver seems to be the rapid rise in births attended by a midwife, nurse or doctor - the percentage of live births where mothers received medical attention in government or private hospitals increased from below 83% in 2019 to more than 95% in 2024. Times of India

On the podcast this week…

For most of us, Antarctica only comes onto our radar when we see headlines about melting glaciers. What’s less well known is that it’s also one of humanity’s greatest success stories.

For more than six decades, Antarctica has been governed by an extraordinary international agreement that has kept an entire continent free from war, mining and territorial conflict. It isn’t perfect. It faces enormous challenges. But it remains one of the world’s most remarkable examples of global cooperation.

This week on the podcast, we sat down with Claire Christian from the Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition (ASOC), one of the few people with a front-row seat to the negotiations that shape the world’s coldest, driest and windiest continent. It’s a conversation about diplomacy, marine protected areas, weird invertebrates and penguin highways.

But more than anything, it’s a reminder that cooperation isn’t just an idea—it can be practised at every scale, from international treaties to giving a penguin the right of way.

Listen here

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Also in this episode: moving beyond lip service and actually learning from First Nations, Louisiana’s first patient functionally cured of sickle cell disease, a global first for gig workers’ rights, blue whales returning to waters that whaling emptied out, and a proteomic mystery from a South African cave that might be the earliest known burial ritual outside our own species.

Free subscribers get the top stories from this week’s edition, four minutes worth.

Paid subscribers get the whole thing, 34 minutes, every section, every story.

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For more than 65 years, Antarctica has been governed by one of the most remarkable international agreements ever created. At the height of the Cold War, countries with competing territorial claims agreed to set conflict aside and dedicate an entire continent to peace, science and environmental protection.

Meet Claire Christian, Executive Director of the Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition (ASOC) - the only environmental organisation invited to participate directly in meetings of the Antarctic Treaty System. With more than 15 years working inside the Treaty System, Claire offers a rare behind-the-scenes look at how the world cooperates to protect one of the most important places on earth.

In this episode:

• Why the Antarctic Treaty remains one of humanity's greatest diplomatic achievements

• How Antarctica shapes climate, oceans and sea levels around the world

• What Antarctica can teach us about our relationship with nature

• The challenges of protecting the Southern Ocean in a changing climate

• Why consensus is the Antarctic Treaty System's greatest strength and biggest frustration

• The future of our coldest and driest continent

Timestamps:
00:31 Why Antarctica Matters

04:19 Meet Claire Christian

05:58 How Antarctica Shapes the World

08:59 The Ross Sea Success Story

10:55 Inside the Antarctic Treaty

16:25 Midpoint Reflections - The Human Side of Diplomacy

18:54 Antarctica and the News

20:26 What Claire Has Learned From Visiting Antarctica

22:27 A Wonderful World of Invertebrates

23:27 The Issue of Krill

25:09 Thwaites Glacier

25:57 The Climate Challenge

28:10 A Vision for Antarctica's Future

30:02 What Antarctica Can Teach Us

31:46 Final Reflections

Find out More:

👉 Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition - ASOC
👉 Claire Christian

About Fix The News:
Fix The News is a solutions-focused media platform sharing stories from the frontlines of progress - exploring what’s working in the world and the people making it happen.

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Production credits:
Hosted by Angus Hervey and Amy Davoren-Rose
Produced by Fix The News
Audio production: Anthony Badolato, Hear That!

 This episode was produced in Australia on the lands of the Gadigal, Wurundjeri and Woi Wurrung peoples.

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344 (Audio): Fungi. Flu. Candyfloss. Kites.

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This week’s top stories

Philanthropists are betting half a billion dollars on ending coughs, colds and flu.
A new philanthropic initiative called Intercept has launched with $500 million to develop preventative products (a shot, a nasal spray or pill) in combination with air-cleaning technologies to combat colds, flu, RSV, coronaviruses and other respiratory viruses. The goal is to push at least two products through Phase 2 trials, while building real-world evidence for filtration, UVC and other clean-air tools in schools, offices and public transport.

The potential payoff is huge: respiratory infections cause billions of infections every year, imposing enormous health and productivity costs, yet they’re largely neglected by pharmaceutical companies. A century ago, diseases like cholera and typhoid were also widely accepted as an inevitable feature of human life, until better medicines, tools and infrastructure changed the game. What’s to say we can’t do the same here?

Two planets in the constellation Volans are officially lighter than candy floss. TOI-791 b and TOI-791 c, both about the size of Jupiter, weigh in at 0.038 and 0.047 g/cm³ (grams per cubic centimetre) respectively. Candy floss clocks in at 0.05 g/cm³. Earth, for scale, is 5.5 g/cm³. University Of Oxford

China’s deserts are shrinking. Like, really shrinking. Official figures claim that more than 120,000 km² of desertified land was restored during the 14th Five-Year Plan, from 2021 to 2025. That’s part of a longer reversal: in the late 1990s, desertified land was expanding by 3,433 km² a year; today, officials say it is shrinking by 6,666 km² annually. In the last three years alone, Beijing has invested $13.2 billion in the world’s largest restoration project, the Three-North Shelterbelt programme. China Daily

Peru protects Amazon headwaters after 13-year campaign. Peru has created the Aguas Calientes Maquia Regional Conservation Area, protecting 981.6 km² of Amazonian forests, wetlands and rivers after a campaign that kicked off in 2013. The reserve safeguards the Maquía River and Chunuya stream, and strengthens protection for Indigenous Peoples in voluntary isolation. Surveys have documented jaguars, lowland tapirs, red-and-green macaws and white-bellied spider monkeys among at least 20 endangered species. Andes Amazon Fund

The world is getting serious about lead poisoning. Researchers say the fight against global lead exposure is moving from diagnosis to action, with around 20 national blood lead surveys now in progress. CGD

“When we started working on global lead exposure, it felt like a dumpster fire—a huge, wild problem with no clear idea of its cause or how to fix it. After our Second Annual Research Conference on Global Lead Exposure, it feels like we’re now starting to see the shape of the problem in much higher resolution, along with a path to solving it. This year, there is a shared sense that the group at the conference may be able to actually solve most of this problem over the coming decade.”

As Venezuela shook, millions of smartphones turned into an emergency warning network. Last week, two major earthquakes hit within seconds — the deadliest to strike Venezuela in more than a century. Moments before the shaking arrived, 11.4 million phones lit up with alerts, giving people precious seconds to get away from windows, shelter under tables or reach open ground. That warning came from an alert system that uses Android accelerometers (the motion sensors that rotate your screen when you turn it sideways). When enough nearby phones report the same vibrations within seconds, the algorithm treats it as a quake and sends alerts to people in the danger zone. The New York Times

Ghana launches mass campaign against neglected tropical diseases. Ghana has launched a nationwide campaign to tackle three horrible tropical diseases. The effort will reach 6.7 million people for river blindness, over a million for bilharzia, and around a quarter of a million for elephantiasis (for which transmission has already been stopped in 97% of districts, leaving just two districts targeted in this round). Ghana Health Service

England’s red kites repay an old debt to Spain. Protected by English royal statute in the 1400s because they picked city streets clean of offal and rotting meat, red kites later lost their usefulness as sanitation improved and were driven into the countryside, where guns, poison and gamekeeping nearly finished them off. Spanish and Swedish birds helped rebuild England’s population from 160 breeding pairs in 1995 to at least 4,600 by 2023; now 126 English-born kites have been released in Spain’s Extremadura, where conservationists are working to rebuild a 30,000 km² safe haven after shooting, poisoning, habitat loss and power lines had left just one breeding pair in 2018. bioGraphic

“There is no limit to the robberies of the kite. If they can manage pieces of meat on sale in the market, they pounce upon them and carry them off.”
Claudius Aelianus (c. 175–235 BC)

Europe’s electric vehicle boom weakens the political push to save combustion cars. Europe’s argument over the 2035 combustion-engine ban is being reshaped by what EU climate chief Wopke Hoekstra called “spectacular EV sales.” Germany, Italy and carmakers still want the rules softened, but France and Sweden are pushing back, arguing that it will hamper Europe as it tries to catch China. EV sales rose 39% in Germany, 93% in France and 85% in Italy in May 2026, making the transition harder to dismiss as policy fantasy. Reuters

UK electric car sales overtake petrol for first time UK drivers bought more battery-electric cars than petrol cars over the past 12 months, the first time that has ever happened. Carbon Brief

Relatedly, the world’s two biggest carmakers are split over electrification. Here are some recent quotes from both:

Toyota chair Akio Toyoda says he feels lonely defending combustion engines:

‘Everybody is shifting to EVs, this is the biggest fear for me. Three or four years ago, I was the only one to say to the media that I love smell, I love sound and I love engines, and I want to keep the jobs for engine suppliers. But it seems to me that I’m the only one. I feel very alone.’⁠

Meanwhile, from Volkswagon:

“Do you know when horses were banned?” Volkswagen’s board member for sales, marketing and aftersales asked us with an elongated pause. “When was it forbidden to buy horses?”

Martin Sander, who’s been in his role at VW’s passenger-car division for almost two years, was smiling. It’s a trick question, of course: “You can buy a horse today,” he said. “Somehow, over time, more and more people realised that for actually getting from A to B, a vehicle is much better than a horse.”

That’s the industry’s fault line, right there. Toyota, the world’s largest automaker, is betting on keeping combustion engines alive; Volkswagen, the second-largest, says EVs will win, European ban or no, when customer confidence catches up.

Gaza’s farms are showing early signs of recovery, even as 87% of cropland remains damaged. A UN assessment found 24 hectares of greenhouses rehabilitated between October2025 and April 2026, mostly in Khan Younis, while sheep numbers rose 33% and goats 8% after emergency support following the ceasefire. The FAO continues to provide cash assistance, with support for the 2026 planting season now reaching 1,500 small farmers across the Strip. FAO

Oregon’s campaign against pesticide-related bee deaths hits 100% success. In 2013, following a spate of high-profile pesticide-related bee deaths, the state of Oregon set up a Pollinator Health Task Force. In the years since, around 13,000 licensed pesticide applicators have been trained to spot high-risk conditions and change how they work around bees. The state has not recorded a confirmed pesticide-related bee kill since 2020. Jefferson Public Radio

And finally, 68 quadrillion miles of fungi are circulating carbon around the planet. A new study mapped these networks (arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi, the type that pairs with most plants on Earth — including crops, grasslands and tropical forests — as distinct from the ectomycorrhizal fungi associated with ‘wood wide web’ of temperate forests) and the numbers are staggering. Laid end-to-end, the threads would stretch about a tenth of the way across the Milky Way: roughly 68 quadrillion miles, or 11,000 light-years. They hold about 300 megatons of carbon, four to six times more than every human on Earth combined. New York Times

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31 minutes, from start to finish, and not just the newsletter read verbatim. We’ve removed all the source names and photo captions and rewritten it for listening: shorter sentences, spoken transitions, numbers said the way you'd say them out loud.

This week: a philanthropic bet on ending the common cold, Peru protecting a slice of Amazon headwaters after a 13-year campaign, Brazil's adolescent birth rate down 58% since 1996, the legal argument a French court just won against TotalEnergies, and the fungal network holding four to six times more carbon than every human on Earth combined.

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In the last few episodes of our podcast we’ve been speaking to people who repair things: rivers, peace agreements, journalism. This week’s guest, Alice Achan, is rebuilding something equally important: the opportunity to learn, and experience a life free from fear.

Alice is the founder of Te-Kworo, one of our giving partners in Northern Uganda. After losing almost everything to the war, she returned to her village ready to give up. Instead, she started gathering with other women under a tree. Today, that small support group has grown into one of the most remarkable educational models we’ve come across: three campuses supporting more than 1,000 girls and young mothers through education, childcare and healthcare.

Alice calls it a “School of Restoration.” It’s a story about trauma, healing and how helping others rebuild their lives can become part of rebuilding your own.

Listen wherever you get your podcasts

This week’s top stories

Under the World Bank’s Mission 300 at least 50 million people across Africa have been connected to electricity since 2024. This is an astonishing achievement - the closest modern parallel is India, which connected around 120 million people in 2017 and 2018. But India had a centralised government, plenty of institutional infrastructure, and decades of prior grid-building to leverage. Mission 300 is doing it across 40 countries with fragmented governance, weaker institutions, and some of the hardest last-mile terrain on Earth.

The other obvious comparison is the US Rural Electrification Administration from the 1930s, which is the story everyone in development usually reaches for. The REA took about 15 years to go from 10% to 90% rural electrification — but that was with a single federal government and New Deal-era political will. Mission 300 is trying to pull off a similar transformation across an entire continent in a decade. Insanely ambitious, but it looks like it’s working.

How South Asia solved the mystery of its vanishing vultures. In the late 1990s, vultures across South Asia were dying so fast that some species, like the White-rumped Vulture, were on the cusp of extinction. Scientists eventually traced the collapse to diclofenac, a livestock painkiller that killed the vultures when they fed on carcasses. India, Nepal and Pakistan banned veterinary diclofenac in 2006, then built breeding centres, looked for safer drugs and created Vulture Safe Zones. 20 years later, Nepal’s vultures are recovering, India’s have stabilised and three species that were heading for extinction are on their way back. RSPB

Dementia risk is falling at every age. Across wealthy countries, dementia risk has dropped around 13% per decade since the late 1980s, helped by better blood pressure control, lower cholesterol, less smoking and more education. This feels surprising, because dementia cases are rising as populations age, even as age-specific risk falls. We aren’t as helpless as we think either - a 2024 Lancet commission estimated that up to 45% of dementia could be prevented or delayed by tackling 14 risk factors. Vox

HPV vaccine drives cervical cancer deaths close to zero. A landmark study in England has found girls vaccinated against HPV on the cusp of their teenage years now have effectively zero risk of dying from cervical cancer before 30. Between 2020 and 2024, no cervical cancer deaths were recorded in women aged 20 to 24, the first time that has ever happened. BBC

Scientists make the world’s most efficient solar panel. German researchers have built the most efficient solar panel ever, turning 34.4% of sunlight into electricity. That’s way higher than ordinary rooftop panels, which usually convert between 20-23%. This is a research breakthrough, not something you can buy for your roof yet, but it shows how much better solar panels may still become. CleanTechnica

Meanwhile, at the world’s biggest solar trade show in Shanghai…

“Might be the most efficient solar panel I’ve seen - though I think LONGi recently announced a 26% module. 25% is the new 23% which was the new 20% - two years ago in Munich, Aiko put out the first 25% efficiency solar panel I’ve ever seen. Now, I walked the floor and I see them everywhere. There’s still plenty of lower efficiency modules – but the floor is now 23%! The shift has occurred.

John Fitzgerald Weaver (Commercial Solar Guy)

The global green economy has passed $10 trillion in value, according to the London Stock Exchange Group. If treated as a standalone sector, companies whose main source of revenue comes from clean energy, clean water, energy efficiency and other environmental solutions would form the world’s third-largest industry. Companies with at least 20% in green revenue have outperformed the wider market by around 12% over the past decade. Inside Climate News

Vietnam’s dog and cat meat trade faces growing pressure. Police in Ho Chi Minh City just rescued more than 400 cats in one of Vietnam’s largest recent cat meat busts. Vietnam’s dog and cat meat trade still kills an estimated six million animals a year, but public opposition is rising, pet ownership is changing attitudes, and many traders are now leaving the industry voluntarily. In Hanoi, several once-famous dog meat shops have shut down, and welfare groups are helping restaurant owners switch livelihoods.

Two young lawyers get Pakistan to abolish its period tax. Pakistan will remove the 18% sales tax on locally made sanitary products, after 25-year-old Mahnoor Omer and 29-year-old Ahsan Jehangir Khan took the government to court. The government will also remove the 18% sales tax on contraceptives, citing family planning as a priority. The Guardian

👆 The impact will be profound in Pakistan, where one in five girls misses school during menstruation, eight in ten girls feel embarrassed to discuss periods, and almost half are not told about menstruation before it begins.

Southeast Asia closes in on malaria elimination. Malaria cases across the Greater Mekong Subregion have fallen by 67% since 2010, putting Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam within reach of elimination. Ministers at a recent regional summit recommitted to ending malaria by 2030, though climate change, border transmission and falling funding remain serious risks. Cambodianess

California is putting nearly half a billion dollars into free home electrification for low-income households, using revenues from its carbon-market to replace fossil-fuel appliances with heat pumps, induction stoves and efficiency upgrades. The program just completed its first retrofit in San Diego and expects to reach around 15,000 households. This is climate policy via the front door: buildings produce around quarter of California’s emissions. Quitting Carbon

Nepal’s Supreme Court rules in favour of marriage equality. Last week the Supreme Court of Nepal issued a binding order requiring the government to guarantee equal marriage rights for sexual and gender minorities. The ruling follows provisional recognition in 2023, confirms protections for already registered couples, and puts Nepal’s marriage equality movement on its strongest legal footing yet. QNews

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The arsonist and the firefighter

AI that hunts for dangerous DNA, built by the people who taught AI to make DNA

In 2024, a team including Eric Nguyen and Michael Poli built Evo, the first AI that could read and write DNA at scale. In the same way a chatbot learns written language by reading human text, Evo learned the language of life by reading raw genomes.

Tools like this mean you can now make DNA cheaply. Evo doesn’t make the physical molecules - companies like Twist Bioscience do that - but scientists can use Evo and tools like it to write genetic code, send the string to a synthesis company, and get it back in the mail. It’s how a lot of modern biology gets done, and honestly it’s great: easy to study a gene, or build a vaccine.

But.

Here’s what we’d rather no-one mailed away for: pathogens, the kind that kill people, distilled into DNA. Ideally screening catches them - synthesis companies run orders against databases of known dangerous sequences, the genetic fingerprints of plague, smallpox, etc., and that catches a lot. What it struggles with is something genuinely new, resembling nothing on file.

Which is exactly what AI is now good enough to make. In a 2025 study, researchers at Microsoft took a dangerous toxin, a relative of ricin, and used AI to spin out thousands of redesigned versions: same deadly function, different genetic spelling. Many sailed past the screening software (to their credit, the same team then built and shared a fix).

This was a toxin, not contagious, it ran in simulation, and almost no one is trying this -- but it’s a gap that governments, biosecurity researchers, and big AI labs take very seriously.

Enter Eric, and his colleagues at Radical Numerics. The tool they released last week is essentially a better screener. You feed it a sequence, and instead of a flat yes-or-no, it returns a heat map: which stretches look dangerous, and how dangerous, region by region. Because the model understands the grammar of DNA rather than memorising a blacklist, it can flag a threat it’s never seen, even one dressed up to look innocent. It’s trained on these tricks: it’s the best in class.

The detector is only half of the model - the other half reads genomes and predicts which mutations might cause disease. One model, two jobs: guardian and healer. And it’s just a preview. The company says this DNA-only model is an early piece of a bigger system called Omnii, still in training, that is eventually meant to handle every kind of biological data.

There’s a strange symmetry to all of this. The same kind of AI that reads DNA for danger is the kind that writes it; Evo could already design a working genome, and the models keep getting better at it. The thing that might catch a designed pathogen and the thing that could design one come from the same lineage. The arsonist and the firefighter, apprenticed to the same master.

Radical Numerics doesn’t dodge this. Asked for the least flattering reading of his company, Eric offered it himself: they’re building the weapon and selling the defense at once. The launch materials put it more elegantly. The power to cure and the power to harm, they say, are “inseparable.”

Here’s where we land: we’re being offered a smoke detector for the genetic age, built by some of the same researchers who got very good at making matches. Unsettling, but probably the most sensible deal going. If anyone can spot a disguised dangerous sequence, it’s the people who understand how one gets built.

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Meet Alice Achan - social worker, educator and founder of the Te-Kworo Foundation, a boarding school in Northern Uganda that is helping young mothers and vulnerable girls rebuild their lives. What started as a small support group during the aftermath of war has grown into one of the most remarkable educational models in Africa. Today, Te-Kworo's three campuses support more than 1,000 young women through education, childcare, healthcare, counselling and community support.

Alice shares how her own experiences as a child of war shaped what she calls a "School of Restoration" - a place where education, healthcare and healing work together to empower young women to create better futures for themselves, their families and change entire communities.

In this episode:
• Why Te-Kworo calls itself a "School of Restoration"
• The link between education, healthcare and opportunity
• The ongoing challenges of child marriage and cultural expectations
• How boarding schools help keep vulnerable girls safe
• The power of defeating shame and rebuilding confidence
• Why educating girls can transform entire communities

 Timestamps:
00:46 Why giving partners are a core part of Fix The News

04:48 Interview with Alice Achen

07:38 Education as a pathway out of poverty

10:15 The tension between creating different futures while protecting cultural boundaries

12:12 From education to healthcare - Te-Kworo's holistic model

14:57 What happens when women have access to healthcare and education

15:31 Gus & Amy - Midpoint reflections

17:35 From trauma to triumph - Alice's personal story

20:57 How Alice started a school under a tree

26:52 The power of defeating shame

28:38 Intergenerational ripples

30:08 Alice's biggest lesson

30:38 Bunk beds from Fix The News

31:19 The big vision for Te-Kworo

33:33 Alice's remedy for the world

34:46 Gus & Amy - Final thoughts

Become part of the Te-Kworo community:
If Alice's story resonated with you, you can learn more about Te-Kworo and support their work below.

👉 Website
👉 Feed the School campaign

About Fix The News:
Fix The News is a solutions-focused media platform sharing stories from the frontlines of progress - exploring what’s working in the world and the people making it happen.

Subscribe & follow:
If you enjoyed this episode, follow the podcast and leave a review - it helps more people find these stories.

Production credits:
Hosted by Angus Hervey and Amy Davoren-Rose
Produced by Fix The News
Audio production: Anthony Badolato, Hear That!

 This episode was produced in Australia on the lands of the Gadigal, Wurundjeri and Woi Wurrung peoples.

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This week’s top stories

About a year ago, French Polynesia protected all of its waters, an expanse roughly the size of the European Union. Last week, they went further, announcing that another 520,000 km² of ocean surrounding the Austral, Marquesas and Western Society islands, some of the most biologically-rich waters on Earth, would receive the highest level of protection: no mining, trawling or industrial fishing permitted.

According to Mongabay, this brings the area of French Polynesia’s waters under full protection from extractive industries to about 1.4 million km² - the single largest contribution by any individual country to the global goal of protecting 30% of the planet’s lands and waters by 2030.

The problem of course, is how to make this more than just lines on a map: a vast area on paper, yet potentially unpopular with residents, ignored by commercial fishing fleets, and seldom patrolled by any boats. Fortunately, French Polynesia has put in the hard yards to make sure this doesn’t happen.

The new protections are built on rāhui, the closures Polynesian communities have used for generations to manage fish stocks, now hooked up to satellite monitoring and patrols. And the process has been slow, deliberately so. Officials spent more than a decade getting fishers, scientists and elders on board before any of the maps were drawn, and easing industrial boats out of the coastal waters that local fleets depend on. By the time the plan was announced, 92% of French Polynesians supported it, and 95% in the Australs.

Then there’s the money, which is often where these things often fall apart. Something called the Te Moana Collective (a regional ocean conservation coalition) will cover the recurring costs - the boring, yet crucial stuff that makes an MPA work, things like patrols and scientific surveys and salaries.

What the government hasn’t really figured out yet is enforcement, which to be honest is the part nobody has really figured out (although a lot of people are working on it). President Moetai Brotherson has asked France for more navy boats, and there’s still a loophole that lets foreign boats lurk just past the MPA boundaries.

But enforcement is a problem you only get to have once you’ve done everything else right, and French Polynesia has done an awful lot right here. This is one of the biggest conservation victories of this decade, the momentum is real, and there’s more on the way. Take a moment to appreciate it.

Most autocrats eventually lose at the ballot box. Viktor Orbán’s defeat in Hungary fits a larger pattern: aspiring autocrats often leave through elections, not collapse. Javier Corrales and Susan Stokes examined 27 cases of democratic erosion across 22 countries since 1999 and found that 20 leaders left office before completing a transition to authoritarianism. In 15 cases, their successors stopped the backsliding or began rebuilding democratic institutions. Journal of Democracy

COP31 hosts put electrification at centre of climate talks. Turkey and Australia want electrification to be a headline target at COP31, with Turkey’s environment minister calling for electricity to meet 35% of final global energy demand by 2035, up from about 20% today. The focus is transport, heating, industry and clean cooking: sectors where fossil fuels still dominate despite cheaper renewables, EVs and heat pumps. The Guardian

And Asia is likely to be the engine room of this next, electric century, because it now generates more than half the world’s electricity, accounts for three-quarters of demand growth since 2000, and manufactures over 95% of solar panels, 85% of batteries and 75% of wind turbines. The region’s fossil fuel weakness may become its advantage: with only 4% of global oil and gas reserves and a $1.1 trillion annual import bill, electrification now offers the cheapest and quickest path to energy security and economic growth. Ember

“We are accelerating past milestones we didn’t expect to hit until the 2030s” — for the first time, Americans are getting more of their electricity from the sun than from coal. “That’s good for people’s wallets, it’s good for their health, it’s good for the planet.” Grist

Jigar Shah, former Director, U.S. Department of Energy Loan Programs Office:

Looking at May 2021 vs. May 2026, something remarkable has happened. Coal has gone from 20% of US electricity to just over 12%. And solar has gone from 5% to almost 13%. Globally, wind and solar hit a record 531 terawatt-hours in April, beating gas by 54 TWh. In April 2021, wind and solar were at 245 TWh. Since 2021 they more than doubled. Gas has stayed flat.

The economics have officially overtaken the politics.

In the United States, solar plus storage made up 91% of new generating capacity in Q1 2026. No new coal plants are planned despite announcements to the contrary. Solar is now the third-largest electricity source in the country, behind only gas and nuclear.

I get that we are not supposed to believe in the energy transition anymore. So lets just call it national security. We are accelerating past milestones we didn’t expect to hit until the 2030s.

A trade ban has saved the world’s most gorgeous gecko. Tanzania’s native turquoise dwarf gecko was once a popular pet in Europe; this became a problem when collectors started stripping them from forests to feed the foriegn market. Listed as critically endangered in 2012, the gecko was subject to an international trade ban, and now gecko numbers in Tanzania have bounced back to pre-trade levels. Mongabay

The disaster that wasn’t: how the capital city of Chad didn’t flood. Sometimes tracking stories of progress means reporting on disasters that didn’t happen. Take Chad: after severe flooding hit the capital, N’Djamena, in 2022, the country cleared and repaired 350 km of drains, deployed 12 mobile pumps and trained a lot a lot of municipal teams and drainage crews.

When even bigger floods happened in 2024, the city remained largely unharmed, and pumps and drainage crews kept water out of neighbourhoods hit hardest two years earlier. Sometimes preparation and policy works, people! World Bank

Plus, further illness and death that won’t happen, brought to you by vaccines: Bangladesh just vaccinated 18.4 million children in an emergency measles-rubella campaign after an outbreak killed more than 600 people and exposed dangerous gaps in routine immunisation. In the DRC, health workers are using a combined measles-rubella and polio drive to find zero-dose children in 11 provinces, while Zambian researchers are preparing delivery strategies for the next generation of TB vaccines.

100 workers in China put up a 26-storey residential building in five days. Five days. No concrete poured. No welders. The modules arrived on flatbeds, 12m x3m x2.4m each, the exact footprint of a 40-foot shipping container — pre-wired, pre-piped, pre-furnished, and locked together like the world’s tallest piece of IKEA furniture.

208 apartments built in less than a week, all with four-paned windows, insulation, AC, and drinkable tap water. The skeleton is stainless steel, not concrete; the construction company claims a 1,000-year service life. Plus, the whole thing can be unbolted onto a truck and reassembled somewhere else, if you want to move it. Indian Defence Review

United States moves to restore $600 million for Gavi. The United States may release $600 million in stalled funding for Gavi after Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the State Department would retake the lead on the vaccine alliance from HHS. The money, already approved by Congress, would support malaria vaccines, Ebola response and routine immunisation, while helping Gavi phase out two older thimerosal-containing vaccines. Reuters

Zambia makes free education a legal right. Zambia has passed its first law guaranteeing free public education, turning a 2021 policy into a legal entitlement for every child. The reform bars schools from denying learners a place because they can’t pay fees, and makes reversal harder for future governments. Since fees were abolished, enrolment has surged, and over 41,000 teachers have been recruited. APA News

Global mangrove forests are growing again. After decades of destruction, the world’s mangrove forests are no longer in decline, according to a four-decade satellite study. Mangroves lost nearly 2,900 km² between the 1980s and 2010, but gains have outpaced losses over the past 16 years, driven by restoration, natural regeneration and expansion into new coastal mudflats. That’s a hell of a turnaround. Tulane University

Colombia has passed a cattle traceability law to stop beef linked to illegal deforestation from entering supply chains. The law lets officials create high-surveillance zones in deforestation hotspots, track cattle movements, and require slaughterhouses, traders and exporters to adopt due diligence systems within two years. Cattle are a major driver of forest loss across Colombia’s 600,000 km² of forest; this is a serious lever. Mongabay

California’s new eight-hour battery is making its grid even more renewable. California has switched on Tumbleweed, the first major US battery project able to discharge power for eight hours, twice the usual duration for grid batteries. Canary Media

Also, from climate scientist John Bistline (an author of the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report): “No fanfare but, at some point in the last four years, California stopped being a grid that occasionally beat fossil fuels and became one that does it on a daily basis.”

Costa Rica court upholds country’s first same-sex marriage. A Costa Rican family court has rejected a government bid to annul the country’s first same-sex marriage, confirming the 2015 union of Laura Flórez-Estrada and Jazmín Elizondo. The ruling ends a decade-long fight and reaffirms the constitutional basis of marriage equality, six years after Costa Rica became the first Central American country to legalise it. Tico Times

US regulators move further from animal testing. The US Environmental Protection Agency is expanding its approved list of non-animal testing methods for chemical and pesticide safety, and creating a faster route for researchers and companies to propose alternatives. A House appropriations package also backs EPA efforts to reduce vertebrate testing and includes first-of-its-kind language preventing pesticide and chemical safety data from being generated through dog tests. Humane World

Artificial intelligence solves an Erdős problem, proves it can push boundaries with top-tier human mathematicians. In 1946, mathematician Paul Erdős wondered: if you sprinkle n dots on an infinite piece of paper, how many pairs of dots can you place exactly one unit apart? Most people who try the problem reach for a square grid as the obvious best arrangement, and Erdős conjectured that was about as good as you could do.

Last month, an OpenAI internal model used techniques from algebraic number theory to find dot patterns with many more unit-distance pairs than the square grid, proving Erdős wrong. Days later, mathematician Will Sawin used the same approach to find an even better arrangement. Welcome to a new era of human/AI mathematical collaboration. The Conversation

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Also… you get so, much, more, good news. This week alone: a new hepatitis B treatment that moves from lifelong suppression toward an actual cure; how Australia erased feral pigs from Kangaroo Island; global refugee numbers falling (really); clean energy keeps beating Trump in court, and scientists find bacteria living inside fog, eating pollution out of the air (yes really).

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Juan Manuel Santos is the former President of Colombia, a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, and the Chair of The Elders. In 2016, under his leadership, Colombia signed a peace agreement with FARC, the country’s largest rebel group, bringing an end to a conflict that had lasted for over 60 years.

On the eve of the recent elections in Colombia we spoke to him about what it takes to make peace. It’s a question that feels increasingly urgent: there are more armed conflicts in the world today than at any point since the Second World War. President Santos is one of the few living leaders who has actually ended one. He told us what he learned from Nelson Mandela, about his friendship with Pope Francis, and why he still has so much faith in the power of forgiveness.

We also explore Colombia’s environmental leadership, from Indigenous wisdom to the recent Santa Marta climate conference, to the idea that there can be no peace among people unless we also make peace with nature. And along the way, he explains how Colombia helped inspire the Sustainable Development Goals, why cooperation remains humanity’s greatest challenge, and what lessons the world can learn from a country that many once considered beyond repair.

You can listen to the full conversation on our podcast, watch it on Youtube, or read the transcript below.

Listen to the podcast

Amy Rose

President Santos, in doing research for this interview, I came across one of your key lessons from the Navy: ‘Before you do anything, decide where you want to go first.’

If you could give the world a direction right now, what would it be?

Juan Manuel Santos

When I joined the Navy as a recruit, one of the officers called me over and said, ‘Santos, take this small sailboat and learn how to sail.’ I had no idea how to sail. I started going from one side to the other, and he started laughing. ‘Come here,’ he said. ‘I will teach you a lesson. To be a good sailor, and also in your life, in your business, in government, you need to know where you want to go. As a sailor, you can use all the winds, even the winds that are against you, in your favour.’

That lesson was extremely important for me. Many years later, I discovered what I call my port of destination: what I wanted to do in my life. One of the objectives, probably the most important, was to find peace in my country after more than 55 or 60 years of war. That became my port of destination. I also learned that you have to create the necessary conditions to reach that port, and that is how we finally arrived at the port of peace in Colombia.

In the world today, we also need a vision, a port of destiny that will bring back something like the system created after the Second World War: a multilateral system that helps countries not only work together, but also confront the existential threats that have emerged in recent decades.

I am chair of something called The Elders, a group founded by Nelson Mandela 19 years ago. They are former heads of state and Nobel Peace laureates. We use our experience and our moral authority to push good news and hope into the world, because right now the world is going through a very difficult time, with too much uncertainty.

We have identified four existential threats. The first is nuclear war. The risk has increased enormously: more nuclear weapons have been produced, more countries possess them, and the treaties among the great nuclear powers have disappeared. The second is climate change. There are still deniers, but the scientific community has shown us that if we don’t address this problem with much greater effectiveness, we will be in serious trouble. The third is pandemics. We are not prepared for the next one. The last pandemic showed us that without cooperation, the effects are disastrous. We are seeing this right now in Congo with Ebola.

The fourth, which has emerged more recently, is AI. The Pope has just published his Encyclical. It is a document we should all read and absorb. The Elders convened a group of experts a month ago in England. Among them was the Anthropic co-founder who was photographed with the Pope when he presented the Encyclical. Experts from Russia, China, the US, the UK, all around the world: they all agreed that the world needs to cooperate to manage AI. So I think we have a challenging port of destiny.

Angus Hervey

International headlines often frame Colombia through the lens of conflict and drugs, overlooking the remarkable progress of recent decades: millions lifted out of poverty, the care economy in Bogotá, cities like Medellín reinventing themselves with green corridors, the extraordinary efforts to protect the Amazon and expand clean energy.

What lessons does Colombia have to teach the world, and how might those lessons change our course at the international level?

Juan Manuel Santos

There is no conflict that cannot be resolved. For 60 years, fighting the most powerful guerrilla movement in the western hemisphere, everyone thought peace was impossible. All my predecessors failed. But when we began planning very carefully, learning from other peace processes, what worked and what didn’t, we were able to create the necessary conditions for success.

And I think this is a lesson for the rest of the world. In the past 15 years, it is the only peace process in which the UN, which is now under fire, was instrumental and effective. At the beginning of this century, Colombia was considered a failed state. Eighteen years later, it was the country in Latin America with the best indicators in poverty reduction, inequality reduction, environmental conservation, and job creation. The lesson of how this can be done from a position of real difficulty is one that other countries can use. It is possible, through leadership and perseverance.

Angus Hervey

The peace agreement was the defining moment of your presidency. For generations, war had been the backdrop to everyday life in Colombia. What made you believe that peace was possible? Where did that belief come from?

Juan Manuel Santos

I had a conversation with Mandela when he was president. I went to Johannesburg to hand over the chairmanship of UNCTAD, the 8th United Nations Conference on Trade and Development. He was to chair the 9th.

I arrived at the hotel. That morning I turned on the television, the public South African channel, and found myself watching a surreal live programme. For the first time, they were filming the encounters of victims and perpetrators who had never met before, broadcast live for the whole country to see. Some of them embraced. Others struck each other. Others screamed. It was extraordinary. That afternoon, I asked Mandela: ‘What are you doing? Why did you have this programme?’

He sat and began explaining how important it is to reconcile after so many years of war.

‘The way to reconcile is to bring the victims and the perpetrators together and put them on the path of forgiving each other, of working together, of healing the wounds.’

In the middle of the conversation, Desmond Tutu, the Archbishop, came into the room and sat down. He began telling me how important truth was for reconciliation, for healing: that often the victims don’t want reparations. They want to know why the perpetrators did what they did.

I absorbed all of this. At the end of the meeting, Mandela said to me: ‘Colombia and South Africa are very similar countries. You will never take off if you don’t have peace.’ That is when I truly decided: my port of destination was to bring peace to my country. So I started working to create the necessary conditions for the peace process. And in the end, we did it, against the odds.

Making peace is often very unpopular, and I suffered for it. I had been elected president because I was formerly Minister of Defence, a war hero, seen as very effective. When I announced at my inauguration that I was going to make peace with the FARC, everyone, even my family, said: ‘Don’t do it. All your predecessors have failed. You are one of the most popular politicians in the country. You will lose your political capital. Don’t try it.’

But I knew it was the right thing to do. I had to do it. A friend of mine, Shlomo Ben-Ami, who had been Foreign Minister of Israel, told me: ‘I know what you are going through. I know you want to make peace. And I know everyone is telling you: don’t continue, you are good at making war, your popularity is very high, why risk your political capital to sit down with these people? But consider this. You are about to go to your grave, and you look back and ask yourself: if I had taken the risk and been successful, how many lives would I have saved? If you didn’t take the risk, could you go to your grave at peace with your conscience?’

That argument was so powerful that I went to my wife and said: ‘I am going to do it, no matter how unpopular.’ And it was very unpopular. Every peace process comes down to one question: where do you draw the line between peace and justice? How much justice is a society, a country, willing to sacrifice for peace? Wherever you draw it, you will always have people demanding more justice and people demanding more peace. That is why peace processes are so often unpopular. But after a while, people realise it is better to live in peace than in war.

Amy Rose

I had never considered that line before, between peace and justice. This was also a very long process: six years, public scrutiny, setbacks. And once you made that historic agreement, that wasn’t the end either. At a time when multiple conflicts are unfolding around the world, what is the difference between making peace, and building it?

Juan Manuel Santos

I’ll tell you another anecdote. I was a good friend of the late Pope Francis, and we used to joke about football. He was Argentinian, I was Colombian. During the peace process, I used to say to him: ‘Pope Francis, why don’t you come to Colombia? This is a very difficult process. Give me some help, a push.’ And he would joke: ‘Oh, President, don’t worry. I pray a lot for you.’ So I said: ‘Pope Francis, if you have to pray for me, that means I’m in real trouble.’ But he said: ‘No, I will go when you and the Colombian people most need me.’

He came to Colombia after we had signed the peace agreement, after the guerrillas had given up their weapons and been reintegrated into civil society. He described his visit as going to Colombia to push Colombians to take the first step in the most difficult phase of any peace process: reconciliation.

You mentioned peacemaking and peacebuilding. Peacemaking in the Colombian process was fast. Nine months, which was itself a world record. No other peace process had completed what they call DDR, disarmament, demobilisation, and reintegration, in nine months. And with something extraordinary: the soldiers and policemen that the guerrillas had been fighting for 60 years were in charge of their safety.

But then came the process of peacebuilding, the real reconciliation, which may take generations. We are, ten years on, still in that process, with something else we also invented. No other peace process had a special tribunal of transitional justice under the umbrella of the Rome Statute, bringing together both parties, with the most responsible judged and sanctioned by that tribunal. That had never happened before.

And it has been difficult. That phase of peacebuilding is the most difficult, but you have to persevere. You have to keep going and show people why it matters. And this is what we are going through in Colombia: former combatants and former military men working together, their sons now working together on common projects, building that empathy between two factions that have been killing each other for so long. It’s difficult, but it’s possible.

Amy Rose

You said you reached the point where you couldn’t in good conscience not make peace, even if it went against what many people in your country wanted. How does it feel to now see the next generation working together?

Juan Manuel Santos

I did what my conscience and my heart told me was the right thing to do, even if I lost much of my political capital, which I am slowly but surely getting back. It was worthwhile. I’m proud I took that decision.

It was very hard. I’ll share an anecdote, because I have told this to President Zelensky and to others living through conflicts: the importance of the victims.

When I started the peace process, a former professor of mine from Harvard came to visit me. ‘President,’ he said, ‘you are entering a very difficult path. You will feel the loneliness of power. There will be moments when you are ready to throw in the towel. Talk to the victims. Ask them what they have suffered. It will re-energise you.’

I was reluctant. I assumed that the victims, precisely because they were victims, would not support the peace process, since transitional justice meant the perpetrators would not go to ordinary prison but would face other kinds of sanctions. But I started talking to them. All around the country they told me the most terrible things: daughters raped and killed, sons tortured. But most of them, not all, said: ‘President, continue. Persevere.’ And I said: ‘But the person who did this is not going to ordinary prison. He will be sanctioned, yes, but not imprisoned. Why are you so generous?’ Most of them said: ‘Because we don’t want others to suffer what we have suffered.’

That was a lesson in life. My faith in the human condition grew.

One story in particular touched me. A woman called Pastora Mira, from the coffee region. Her parents were killed. Her brother was killed. Her son was tortured and killed. One week after she buried her son, someone knocked on her door. A wounded man, asking for help. She helped him, put him in her son’s bed. Three days later, when he had recovered and was leaving, he saw a photograph of her with her son. He fell to his knees. ‘Please,’ he said, ‘don’t tell me this is your son.’ ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Why?’ ‘My God, you have been so good to me. I must tell you. I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I was the one who tortured and killed your son.’

She grabbed him by the shoulders. He was kneeling, almost in tears. ‘Stand up,’ she said. He stood. She looked him in the eyes and embraced him. ‘Thank you,’ she said. He couldn’t understand it. ‘Why are you thanking me? I just confessed that I tortured and killed your son.’ ‘Because by asking for forgiveness, by telling the truth, you have relieved me from hating for the rest of my life.’

I took Pastora with me to Oslo to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. In my speech, I said she was the one who truly deserved it. The victims are the ones who deserve the Nobel Peace Prize.

Amy Rose

I think we need to take a breath after that story.

Angus Hervey

President Santos, could we switch to the environment? You have warned that we are destroying the Earth. But it’s also true that there are spots of hope. Deforestation in the Amazon has dropped sharply in recent years, especially in Colombia. The current government is also leading the world on ending new oil and gas exploration and prioritising forests. Is this a dividend of peace, or something different?

Juan Manuel Santos

It is a lesson I learned from the indigenous communities, particularly the oldest in the western hemisphere, who live in the mountains called the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. They are the Kogi community. They have their own culture, their own way of life, their own health system.

When I became president, as a gesture to them, I went up there on inauguration day, before being sworn in to Congress, and asked for their permission to serve, as our older brothers. ‘Yes,’ they said, ‘we give you permission. We know you are going to make peace with the FARC, but you also have to make peace with nature. Because without peace with nature, peace among humans will not last.’ They gave me a staff and said: stop the war, but also make peace with nature. When you finish your mandate, come back.

Eight years later, in 2018, two months before leaving office, I went back. ‘Your mandate has been fulfilled,’ I said. I brought with me the peace agreement, all 320 pages, signed with the FARC. I also brought the document approved at the United Nations: the Sustainable Development Goals, because those were a Colombian initiative. Two very wise young women in my government had come to me and said: ‘Do you want to be a great world leader?’ I said yes. ‘We have this idea. The Millennium Goals expire in 2015. We should replace them with something much more ambitious, with an environmental dimension, where rich countries also have to contribute. What do you think?’ I said it was a great idea. They began the multilateral diplomacy that culminated at the United Nations. A historic moment in the General Assembly: every single country voted in favour of the SDGs.

So I returned to the indigenous community with those two documents, and to give back the staff they had given me. ‘Mr President,’ they said, ‘come back in a week.’ I went back a week later. ‘The peace process with the FARC is perfect. But the SDGs, no.’ ‘What do you mean, no? We negotiated for five years. Every single country approved it. What is wrong?’ ‘It lacks the most important factor.’ ‘What is that?’ ‘The spiritual factor. Unless humans feel that nature has life, that mountains have life, that rivers and seas have life, and treat nature as an equal rather than a secondary citizen, there will never be peace with nature. Go back and continue working for peace with nature, because there will never be peace among humans if there is no peace with nature.’

And we are living that now. What is happening with climate change, the displacement, the hunger, the inequalities it produces: all of this shows that peace and nature are indivisible. But we are also seeing positive examples, technology being used well, sustainable development, regenerative agriculture, all of which must be scaled much faster to change course. I am cautiously optimistic, because I have seen what is possible in Colombia. Deforestation has come down, but it has to come down faster.

Angus Hervey

You mentioned that the indigenous community is in the Sierra Nevada near Santa Marta, and of course Santa Marta has been in global headlines recently for a different reason: it was the site of the first gathering of a coalition of the willing on climate, 60 countries coming together to try to move beyond discussions that have stalled at the UN level. What do you make of the symbolism of that? That the place where you received a mandate to bring humans back into harmony with nature has now hosted something that may unlock our collective inability to act on climate?

Juan Manuel Santos

A happy coincidence. I was there. I was also at COP30 in Belém, where for the first time the scientific community and the indigenous communities came together and gave the same message.

In Santa Marta, the initiative of bringing together what they call the coalition of the willing matters enormously, because we saw in Belém how powerful countries blocked decisions on deforestation and the transition to clean technologies. The alternative path is like what happened with the Mine Ban Treaty: enough countries came together to start rolling the ball and create a snowball effect. I hope Santa Marta does the same.

The indigenous communities were deeply present. I arranged a meeting between some of the conference participants and the indigenous communities, and they were clear: you must do much more. They showed, for example, that the famous glacier in the Sierra Nevada is disappearing. In five or six years, there will be no glacier. No glacier, no water. ‘It is our life that is at stake,’ they said. That is what the world needs to understand: we must be far more conscious of caring for nature. Otherwise, we will all suffer.

Amy Rose

President Santos, we are aware that your country is in the middle of an election. Does a moment like this make a former leader reflect differently on legacy? Which parts of yours feel strong right now, and which feel fragile?

Juan Manuel Santos

When I became president, I took something from Abraham Lincoln. He asked his former rivals in the election to join his cabinet. He wanted to abolish slavery and win the Civil War. I did the same. After winning the election, I invited my former rivals in. I chose aspects of their proposals, incorporated them into my government plan, and made them part of my cabinet. That gave me the political authority to govern, to make reforms, to push the country forward, with very good results.

Right now, in this very polarised world, Colombia is also very polarised. The campaigns have been very aggressive, and I am worried. If you burn bridges, rebuilding them is difficult. Without a minimum consensus on where you want the country to go, it will simply not progress.

My lesson is this: don’t just think about winning. Think about how you are going to govern. The next president will inherit very serious problems that require a minimum consensus among Colombians, across left and right. Many of these issues are not left or right. They are existential, and we have to address them together. This is true not only in Colombia. Many countries around the world are going through the same thing.

One lesson I keep trying to promote: you can always reach an agreement. I quote Mandela often: the most powerful weapon in the world is to sit down and talk. But not to impose your view. Sit down to learn from those who think differently, to understand why they think the way they do. That is how you begin to find common ground, to make the minimum agreements needed to move forward in peace. Colombia needs this. The whole world does right now.

Amy Rose

Sitting with you today, what strikes me most is your ability to listen, which I fear is being lost in the world right now. You also truly listen to young people. So many of them are struggling with climate anxiety, really worried about the world. What would you like them to know?

Juan Manuel Santos

The Elders met in Nairobi two weeks ago. The Irish Embassy organised a meeting with young people from across Africa, and we sat down with them. We sat down to learn from them, not to teach them. It was a remarkable meeting, lasting hours, with the Elders learning from the young people. They had many initiatives, many ideas, including about how to communicate. We are very old-fashioned, and they told us: you have to communicate differently.

Learning from young people, rather than telling them what to do, is something leaders everywhere should pay much more attention to. One of the problems of the world today is the lack of long-term leadership. Leaders worry about the effect of their decisions on the next election, so they don’t take the long view, and many decisions become counterproductive over time. Young people think in the long term, because they are young. Having faith in the future is what moves a society. We should give far more weight to the young.

Angus Hervey

President Santos, one last question. You have seen so much change in your lifetime, in Colombia and in the world. You have been at the helm of many of those stories of progress. But you have also seen things fracture and fall apart.

In this moment, in 2026, what is still possible?

Juan Manuel Santos

Many of the good things are possible if we work together. If we set aside short-term interests and start working together, everything is possible. Take AI, an existential threat for some, but for many the solution to enormous problems. We have to come together and talk. China and the United States, instead of competing, should sit down, as the Pope has been urging, and work out how to use AI for the benefit of the whole world. So many of our problems can be solved if there is the will to cooperate and to talk constructively.

Take Latin America. We have been the continent of the future for decades. Why have we not become an important voice in world affairs? Because of petty fights among leaders. Mexico against Ecuador, Colombia against Bolivia, Argentina against Brazil. If we don’t speak with one voice, we will never be relevant.

The same is true globally. If we accept the logic of spheres of influence, the United States in the Americas, China in Asia, Russia likewise, it will end very badly. We need to sit down and ask: how can we work together? I know it is not easy right now. But we must insist, because that is how things become possible.

Go Deeper:

👉 The Elders
👉 Juan Manuel Santos
👉 The Open Library of the Colombian Peace Process

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Centuries before social media, people were wrestling with misinformation, censorship, information overload and technological disruption. In this first episode of our new podcast, A Short History of Saving the World, join Fix The News founder Angus Hervey and historian Ada Palmer, as they trace the long arc of information revolutions to find out what history can teach us about navigating today’s digital age.

From Machiavelli and the printing press, to modern media platforms, algorithms and echo chambers, each new leap in technology reveals the same pattern running through history's biggest disruptions. The world doesn't break under the pressure of new ideas and communication highways, it adapts, and that may be one of the most important clues the past has to offer us today.

In this episode:
• Is fake news really new?
• What happens when information suddenly becomes available to everyone?
• Why do new technologies amplify both progress and extremism?
• Are social media and the internet following a familiar historical pattern?
• And what on Earth does cantaloupe have to do with democracy?

The top before the top

Pill almost doubles survival time for world’s deadliest cancer

“Having treated pancreatic cancer for 16 years, I actually started crying in clinic.”

That’s just one of the many reactions to results presented at the recent American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) meeting in Chicago showing that daraxonrasib, a daily pill, nearly doubled median survival for 500 people with previously treated metastatic pancreatic cancer, from 6.7 to 13.2 months.

This is a big deal. In rich countries, many common cancers have five‑year survival rates above 90%. Pancreatic cancer is the exception: survival is measured in months, and only around one in eight patients are still alive five years later.

Now take a look at this. The green line shows survival probability for pancreatic cancer patients given the new drug; the grey line shows the chemotherapy control group. If you have any familiarity with pancreatic cancer, this chart should make your breath hitch a little. The Guardian / PBS News

However, the bigger breakthrough may be what happened alongside survival. Everyone knows how brutal chemotherapy can be. Patients stayed on daraxonrasib much longer than chemo, reported less pain and better quality of life, and many were still taking it after the trial data had been analysed.

So, how does it work?
Daraxonrasib goes after errors in a group of genes called RAS, which normally help control how fast cells grow. One member of this group, called KRAS, is faulty in more than 90% of the most common pancreatic cancers, and those errors act like a stuck accelerator pedal, telling cells to keep multiplying when they should hit the brakes.

For years, scientists thought KRAS was basically impossible to target with drugs because of its shape – there was nothing to really “grab onto.” Daraxonrasib changes that. It acts like molecular glue, helping other molecules stick to the overactive KRAS protein so it can finally be grabbed and turned off. Even better: it can hit several different versions of RAS, not just one ultra‑specific mutation.

When the results were presented to an audience of over 40,000 people there was an (unheard-of) standing ovation. Take a look at this video; the cheers just keep going.

Daraxonrasib is now available via an FDA early access program, and began shipping to physicians this week (apparently when a therapy cuts death risk by 60% in a historically hopeless disease, regulatory pipelines move at unprecedented speed).

Incredibly, daraxonrasib is not arriving in isolation. At the same ASCO meeting, doctors reported “unprecedented” results from amivantamab, a triple-action jab for head and neck cancer that shrank or erased tumours in 43 of 102 patients, including 15 in which melted the tumour completely; it is now being tested in about 60 trials across lung, colorectal, brain and gastric cancers.

They also shared results for a new tablet called GRWD5769, which helps the immune system see cancer cells instead of letting them hide. Some tumours dodge T‑cells (the immune cells that kill sick cells) by abusing an enzyme called ERAP1; GRWD5769 blocks that enzyme, so the cancer lights up on the immune system’s radar again. In a trial of 83 people with six different cancer types (all of whom had already run out of other options), tumours shrank in 26 patients.

For a proper roundup of the conference, check out this post from Saloni Dattani, and for the cancer nerds, Eric Topol’s latest survey is worth a look: more than 2,500 immunotherapy drugs and programmes are now in development, evidence that progress in cancer is coming as a flood of new tools rather than as a single silver bullet.

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This week’s top stories

More people in the world feel free to choose what to do with their own lives
A record 82% of adults across 138 countries say they are satisfied with their freedom to choose what they do with their lives, up from 71% two decades ago, according to Gallup. The biggest gains have come across the Balkans, Caucasus, Eastern and Central Europe, where the median has risen from a 2009 low of 49% to 82%. Note: the measure reflects personal, day-to-day freedom, not necessarily political rights.

Laos closes in on eliminating schistosomiasis. Schistosomiasis is a parasitic disease spread by freshwater snails, and once infected more than 40% of people in parts of Lao PDR. Decades of treatment and surveillance have pushed infection rates below 1% in high-risk areas, leaving transmission concentrated to southern Champasack Province, where less than 120,000 people now remain at risk. WHO

EU releases billions for Hungary and Budapest Pride gets go-ahead. The EU is set to release more than €16 billion in frozen funds to Hungary after democratic reforms prompted the EU Commission to hail “the winds of change.” Days later, police approved the 31st Budapest Pride march for 27th June, a year after Viktor Orbán’s government created a legal basis to ban Pride events and fine attendees €500. The Guardian

About those green sea turtles (from Rolf Skeldon)…

For more than 40 years, the green sea turtle appeared on the IUCN Red List as Endangered. That classification, introduced in 1982, reflected a species that had been commercially hunted for generations: taken for its meat, its eggs, and its shell until populations had been pushed to a point where genuine extinction was a possibility.

In October 2025, the IUCN formally reclassified the green sea turtle as Least Concern.

It did not move one category. It did not inch forward gradually. It skipped two classifications entirely, jumping straight from Endangered to Least Concern without pausing at Vulnerable or Near Threatened.

It represents one of the most significant conservation recoveries ever recorded.

Rice has a water problem (two, actually) but Indian scientists have bred a way around each. Over the last 12 or so years, India has released nearly 3,000 climate-resilient crop varieties. Two of the most striking are engineered rice lines, solving equal and opposite water problems.

Sometimes a paddy floods for too long. Ordinary rice drowns if it’s submerged for more than a week. So scientists bred a line of rice that carries a gene called SUB1. When a flood hits, instead of frantically trying to grow taller than the water, the plant holds still. It powers down, saves its energy, and waits. When the water drains away, it picks up where it left off, even after two weeks underwater. In a flooding year, SUB1 rice outperforms normal rice by almost 50%. In a normal year, there’s no yield penalty at all. A farmer loses nothing by switching.

And sometimes there’s the opposite problem: not enough water where you want to plant. The DRR Dhan line helps with that. Drought is trickier than flood — drought tolerance is spread across dozens of genes. There’s no single switch to flip, like in SUB1. So DRR Dhan doesn’t out-clever the dry season. Instead it outruns it. It grows fast and finishes before the water’s gone, a shorter, tighter season. And it can be grown dry, like wheat, in plain soil, no need for flooded paddies.

A massive new Indigenous protected area across Australia’s sea country
The Karajarri people have formalised Australia’s first Sea Country Indigenous Protected Area, covering 2,375 km² of marine and coastal ecosystems in Western Australia’s Kimberley region. The new reserve protects part of Eighty Mile Beach, nesting habitat for flatback turtles and waters used by rare sawfish, and extends decades of Karajarri-led stewardship from land into sea. Indigenous Protected Areas now account for 54% of Australia’s progress toward protecting 30% of its territory by 2030. Mongabay

Batteries are transforming Australia’s power grid (see what we did there?) Australia has become a global battery outlier, adding more grid-scale storage per person over the past two years than any other country. In the first quarter of 2026, battery output on the east coast grid more than tripled year-on-year, wholesale prices fell 12%, and batteries set power prices almost one-third of the time. Australia’s benchmark power prices will start falling from July 2026, with households saving up to 10.7% and small businesses up to 20.9%. AFR

“Even for the true believers, the rush on batteries in Australia in the past two years has drastically exceeded expectations. At the grid level, more new battery capacity came online in 2025 than in the previous eight years combined. Between January 2025 and January 2026, their share of the grid increased from around 3 per cent to nearly 10 per cent. According to the market operator, the amount of power discharged by batteries in the first quarter of 2026 was more than three times greater than the same period in 2025.”

In 2017 an estimated 20% of Benin’s population was unrecorded — no birth certificate, no National ID, no anything. This was bad because, in Benin as elsewhere, legal identity is necessary to open a bank account, register a business, take school exams, apply for jobs, or use mobile money. Cue a push by the government to register its citizenry, and less than a decade later, nearly 99% of Benin’s population is in the system, with the government in some cases creating on-the-spot identity documents (two witnesses and a municipal officer!). World Bank

Mexico wipes out farm debts for tens of thousands of small producers. Claudia Sheinbaum’s government will forgive or restructure debts owed by small farmers, fishers and rural producers to Mexico’s former agricultural finance agency, clearing liabilities for 99.5% of debtors. Peoples Dispatch

How Argentina is getting its jaguars back. We covered this story a few editions ago - now the excellent journalists at bioGraphic have a feature on how Argentina’s Gran Chaco recently recorded its first wild-born jaguar cubs. Cute!

…and in more wildlife news from the same country, Rewilding Argentina and the National Parks Administration just released five guanacos (llama ancestors) into El Impenetrable National Park, where the species disappeared 110 years ago. Two mums, two dads, and a juvenile are currently enjoying El Impenetrable, with 20 more guanacos waiting in pre-release pens to join them. The camelids (yes, they look like little camels) were herded and trucked 3,200 km from Patagonia in what is almost certainly the world’s longest overland wildlife translocation for conservation. Mongabay

Britain’s River Wye granted legal rights in landmark move. Councils and protected-area bodies across England and Wales have endorsed a charter recognising the River Wye’s entire 209-kilometre catchment as a living ecosystem with rights to flow, regenerate, support biodiversity and be represented in decision-making. The polluted river is in poor condition, but the charter gives campaigners a new governance tool after years of pressure. Oceanographic

Health officials in Guyana report no postpartum haemorrhage deaths for the last three years. Increased training saves the day! Guyana Chronicle

Also, Guyana’s ‘waiting homes’ now allow rural women to stay near delivery wards before labour. Six of these hospital-based homes have been built so far. They’re popular. More are in the works. Newsroom.gy

US clean energy goes on a blitz to beat policy deadline. US clean energy developers announced 54 utility-scale solar, wind and battery projects in the first quarter of 2026, representing more than $18 billion in planned investment and over 12 GW of new capacity. That is nearly double the number announced in all of 2025, as companies rush to qualify before federal tax rules tighten. The flipside: 38 projects were also cancelled, wiping out nearly $13 billion in investment. Electrek

Ok ok, that’s actually a bit of a mixed bag. So let’s end with a lightning round of undiluted good news from the United States:

• Florida is closing Alligator Alcatraz.

• New York has put a one-year moratorium on data centres.

• Minnesota just became the first state to ban prediction markets.

• Massachusetts school lunch participation has risen by 22% and breakfast by 27% since the state made school meals free for all students in 2023.

• Vermont is the first state to ban paraquat, a pesticide linked to Alzheimer’s.

• Texas is directing US$1.4 billion in federal funding toward rural healthcare.

• Also in Texas (by far the country’s largest energy market), clean energy has overtaken fossil fuels.

• Virginia becomes the first southern state to pass paid family and medical leave.

• Virginia has also banned the sale and manufacture of certain semi-automatic firearms, joining 11 other states.

• Oklahoma becomes the 17th state to ban child marriage. There has been a sea change regarding the issue in the US over the past decade.

• Since 2019, 26 states have enacted menopause laws, which run the gamut from mandating insurance coverage for treatments to workplace accommodations.

• National suicide rates decrease across most racial groups and youth.

• Why overdose deaths in the US are falling (it’s not because of the war on drugs).

Read more

The restoration of the Klamath is one of our favourite conservation stories of the decade - both for its scale, and its symbolism. We first heard about it in 2020 and have shared many, many updates on its progress in this newsletter. In 2024, after a generational campaign, the largest dam removal project in U.S. history was completed. Three days later, the salmon returned.

This week on the podcast we got a chance to sit down with someone who was right at the centre: Amy Bowers Cordalis, attorney, activist and member of the Yurok Tribe, who helped lead the fight (and got to blow up one of the dams on her birthday). From why she can’t sleep when the salmon run, to how joy helps in her advocacy, this is a conversation about what repair truly means for nature, communities and our collective future - and about what comes after the victory.

You can listen here, wherever you get your podcasts.

Or check out the full conversation on Youtube.

This week’s top stories

Hungary proposes an eight year limit for prime ministers. A week after coming in to office, Péter Magyar’s administration submitted a constitutional amendment that would cap prime ministers at eight years in office, barring ex-PM Viktor Orbán from returning after 20 years in power. The package also opens the door to dissolving the controversial sovereignty protection office, widely accused of silencing opposition voices, and reclaiming public assets moved into Orbán-linked foundations. The Guardian

The past year has brought us three Alzheimer’s breakthroughs. For 30 years, Alzheimer’s research has had one song, “Amyloid plaques are bad.” Billions of dollars, two FDA-approved drugs (lecanemab and donanemab), and yet Alzheimer’s patients have only gotten slightly less worse, a little bit slower. But within the last 12 months, three separate teams have said: what if we tried literally anything else.

Indiana University went for an enzyme called IDOL. Everyone assumed it mattered in the brain’s immune cells because that’s where most of it gets made. Wrong floor. Knock out IDOL in neurons and plaques drop, APOE (the gene variant that’s basically a lit fuse for late-onset Alzheimer’s) drops, and the receptors that keep neurons talking to each other go up.

Barcelona, Sichuan and London ignored the neuron, and went for the plumbing instead. The blood-brain barrier has a protein called LRP1 whose job is grabbing amyloid and shoving it into the bloodstream — except in Alzheimer’s, LRP1 jams. They built nanoparticles that act like a reset button. Three injections, and an elderly mouse came out behaviourally indistinguishable from a healthy one.

Bordeaux, Moncton and Inserm went one floor deeper. Forget the neurons, forget the plumbing, look at the power supply. Mitochondria — the engines inside every neuron — start failing before cells die. So the team built an artificial receptor that revs them back up, and memory came back.

Caveat: Mice. It’s always mice. But it looks like the amyloid plaque monopoly might finally be over.

Wind and solar just generated more electricity on Earth than fossil gas. In April 2026, wind and sunshine supplied 22% of the world’s electricity compared with fossil gas at 20%. Reuters

Gus here: I got dragged into the muck with the usual suspects when I posted this graph on Substack notes, but managed to get my shots in. I should know better than to argue with strangers on the internet, but sometimes you just can’t help it?

India is industrialising with wind and sun, not coal. India’s solar capacity is growing by 40% a year and is expected to double again by 2030. Coal still supplies around 70% of power, and weak grids mean a lot of solar is now wasted, but the direction is historic: the world’s most populous country is trying to industrialise with wind and solar at a scale no major economy has ever attempted. Yale Environment 360

“But what about all the coal plants India and China are building?” Global coal capacity rose 3.5% in 2025, yet coal-fired generation fell 0.6%, according to Global Energy Monitor’s latest report. In China and India, especially, new coal plants are being built, but wind, solar and batteries are more than meeting new demand, cutting actual coal use. Why build new coal plants then? Inertia, mostly. Most of the new coal capacity in India and China was commissioned years ago, before the market dynamics around renewables changed. So new coal plants are coming online, but they’re running as backup, not baseload, idle most of the time but fired up on demand to maintain grid stability.

Namibia gets funding to conserve 24% of its country. Namibia has a long conservation history; at independence it wrote environmental protection into its constitution. It passed a law establishing the right of local people to organise themselves into conservancies in 1996. What it hasn’t had is money: there’s a difference between a conservancy run by locals on a shoestring and the same thing but with a nice endowment to preserve it through instability. Now the international community and the government are finally stepping up, with the “Namibia For Life” initiative securing $63 million to permanently conserve more than 24% of the country. WWF / Bloomberg

“As Namibians, we have done things that no one in this world has done before. We have secured wildlife species that went extinct in other countries. They live outside protected areas and can roam freely in their natural habitats. It’s a victory for us to see conservancies putting more land aside for conservation. These are all ordinary people, cattle herders who have walked the talk of community-based natural resource management and want to take the next step.”

New medical treatments are reaching more people, across more diseases. No mice. Check out this list of medical news from just the last few weeks.

• In San Francisco, researchers are preparing the first human trial of in utero gene therapy, starting with a rare lysosomal storage disorder.

• In colon cancer, adding immunotherapy to standard treatments halved the risk of recurrence or death for patients with a specific early-stage form of the disease.

• For skin cancer, a new vaccine trained patients’ immune systems to recognise their own tumours, cutting the risk of spreading or death by 59% after five years.

• For heart disease, a trial of a gene-editing treatment dramatically lowered cholesterol levels, perhaps permanently, after just one infusion.

• For age-related diseases a team from Texas developed a nasal spray that dramatically reduced brain inflammation, restored the brain’s cellular power plants and significantly improved memory.

• For type 2 diabetes, the US FDA recently approved the first long-acting insulin, turning a daily burden into a weekly one.

• WHO and Gilead will donate almost 403,000 vials of AmBisome for visceral leishmaniasis, a parasitic disease that is usually fatal without treatment.

• Moxidectin, a better treatment for river blindness, has been rescued by non-profit funders after the pharmaceutical industry walked away.

• A $140 million fund has been launched to make a vaccine for Strep A, which kills an estimated 639,000 people a year, a toll comparable to HIV/AIDS and malaria.

The largest ever private sector school meals commitment will feed 366,000 children across East Africa. The World Food Programme and two Danish foundations just launched an $80.85 million programme across Uganda, Kenya and Ethiopia. Over five years, the partnership aims to feed 366,000 children and create stable markets for 57,500 smallholder farmers.

British beavers stop underground station flooding. Love this story. Until two years ago, West London’s Greenford Tube station used to flood whenever it rained heavily. Then the Ealing Beaver Project got a licence to resettle a family of five beavers in Paradise Fields, a former golf course turned urban-forested park near the Greenford Tube station. After the beavers felled a few trees and built a dam to make a pond from the golf course creek, flooding stopped at the tube station, and new species started moving in. The council has now scrapped its expensive plans for a reservoir and levee. NPR

To block illegal bottom trawlers, Cambodia is building concrete towers. It’s very clever: three-tonne underwater concrete towers disable trawl nets while creating shelter and nursery space for fish. An NGO has now deployed 1,250 of these ‘Fishery Productivity Structures’ across its southern coast, protecting more than 200 km² of habitat. Early monitoring found fish abundance six times higher at protected sites than control areas. Oceanographic

2026 will probably see the lowest US murder rate ever recorded.

”Yes, it’s late May and there are still more than seven full months remaining in 2026, but there has been enough data collected on this year to say that this year will likely set a new record for lowest murder rate ever recorded by the FBI when their Crime in the Nation report comes out sometime next summer or fall.”
Jeff Asher

Read more

Meet Amy Bowers Cordalis - attorney, activist and member of the Yurok Tribe - who helped lead one of the most significant river restoration efforts in modern history. Amy shares the story behind America’s largest dam removal project: from growing up alongside the Klamath River and witnessing the devastating 2002 salmon die-off, to becoming the first General Counsel for the Yurok Tribe and helping navigate a long fight against political, legal and corporate interests that many believed was impossible to win.

This isn’t just a conversation about dams or conservation. It’s about what comes after victory - and what repair truly means for ecosystems, communities, culture and our collective future.

In this episode:

• How Amy blew up a dam on her birthday

• Why salmon returned to the Klamath River in just three days

• The cultural and spiritual connection between the Yurok people, the river and salmon

• What the 2002 mass death of 70,000 salmon meant for Indigenous communities

• How grief and anger led Amy to law school and environmental advocacy

• Warren Buffett - and why his team ended up on the banks of the Klamath River

• The surprising economics of dam removal and river restoration

• Finding the joy in advocacy

• What the Klamath story teaches us about hope, persistence and ability of nature and communities to heal

Timestamps:

00:54 - Introduction to the Klamath River story

02:26 - Meet Amy Bowers Cordalis

03:59 - The Yurok's relationship with the Klamath and the salmon

07:05 - The turning point in 2002 

10:59 - How Amy's great-grandmother told her to take action

12:53 -  80,000 salmon died, no media showed up 

13:38 - What a decades-long battle felt like on the inside?

15:13 -  When Warren Buffet's team came out to the Klamath

19:02 -  Midpoint reflections

20:43 - How the Klamath restoration changes the story of environmental activism

22:55 - Why restoration and economics can go hand in hand

23:49 - What it's like to blow up a dam, on your birthday

25:04 - How the elders have responded to the Klamath flowing again

27:32 - How salon beat scientific predication and returned after three days

29:23 - The myth of the lone hero

32:11 - Other river restoration projects happening in America

34:26 - What comes after victory? Healing.

38:21 - What the Klamath story tells us about what's possible

40:22 - Final reflections

Want to dive deeper?

👉 Find out more about Amy and her book 'The Water Remembers'
👉 Amy's non-profit Ridges to Riffles

About Fix The News:
Fix The News is a solutions-focused media platform sharing stories from the frontlines of progress - exploring what’s working in the world and the people making it happen.

Subscribe & follow:
If you enjoyed this episode, follow the podcast and leave a review - it helps more people find these stories.

Production credits:
Hosted by Angus Hervey and Amy Davoren-Rose
Produced by Fix The News
Audio production: Anthony Badolato, Hear That!

 This episode was produced in Australia on the lands of the Gadigal, Wurundjeri and Woi Wurrung peoples.

This week’s top stories

Energy forecasts from 12 months ago are being shredded by the growth of solar and the Iran war. BloombergNEF says solar is now on track to become the world’s largest source of electricity by 2032, several years earlier than it predicted just 12 months ago. These forecasts are always a bit of a thumbsuck — the error is what matters here: once again, solar and batteries are outrunning even the most optimistic assumptions from forecasters. Bloomberg / Renew Economy

Africa moves closer to making its own vaccines. Africa CDC and Aspen Pharma are discussing a long-term supply framework for African-made vaccines, while Gavi is proposing $189M in new incentives to tackle market bottlenecks and buy up to 70 million doses from startup manufacturers on the continent. During COVID-19, Africa produced just 0.1% of global vaccines despite having 20% of the world’s population. Reuters / Gavi

Tunisia has eliminated trachoma as a public health problem. It becomes the 31st country globally, and the 14th in the Eastern Mediterranean region, to achieve this goal. Trachoma affected at least 50% of Tunisia’s population in the early to mid-20th century, but the government has spent decades prioritising eye-health and implementing the WHO-recommended SAFE strategy. WHO

White-tailed eagles are returning to southern England after 240 years. Britain’s largest bird of prey is continuing its comeback in England, with conservationists approved to release up to 20 more white-tailed eagles in Exmoor over the next three years. Since the reintroduction began on the Isle of Wight in 2019, 45 young birds have been released, four breeding pairs have established territories, and six chicks have now been born in the wild for the first time since the 18th century. Forestry England

The Gambia has cut malaria cases by 46% in a single year. Cases fell from 108,090 in 2024 to 58,283 in 2025, thanks to a package of interventions that included the distribution of 1.2 million next-generation insecticide-treated nets and malaria chemoprevention for 127,578 children during the rainy season. Expanded rapid testing, community access to antimalarials and the imminent arrival of vaccines have put a 2030 elimination target into play. The Voice

As China’s car market races away from oil (internal-combustion vehicle sales fell by 37% year-on-year in April 2026), it’s worth noting the country’s electrification push has already made the air much cleaner. A new study in Nature shows the transition has cut PM2.5 concentrations by 23.8% and carbon monoxide by 30.7% across 150 cities, preventing an estimated 262,000 deaths. The air is only going to get cleaner: new energy vehicles now have a 61.4% market share, and nine of the ten top-selling models last month were plug-ins.

Papua New Guinea will protect 200,000 km² of its waters, an area roughly the size of the United Kingdom. The proposed Western Manus Marine Protected Area will become the largest no-take reserve in this part of the Pacific Ocean, safeguarding coral reefs, grey reef sharks, dolphins and seabirds. National Geographic Society

☝️ The best part of this is that the MPA boundary was drawn by the animals themselves. Scientists tracked grey reef sharks moving between shallow and deep habitats to define where protection was needed most. Conservation shaped by biology, not by bureaucracy. ‌‍​‍​‍‌‍‌​‍‌‍‍‌‌‍‌‌‍‍‌‌‍‍​‍​‍​‍‍​‍​‍‌​‌‍​‌‌‍‍‌‍‍‌‌‌​‌‍‌​‍‍‌‍‍‌‌‍​‍​‍​‍​​‍​‍‌‍‍​‌​‍‌‍‌‌‌‍‌‍​‍​‍​‍‍​‍​‍‌‍‍​‌‌​‌‌​‌​​‌​​‍‍​‍​‍‌‍‍‌‍‌‌‌‌‌​​‍‌‌‍​‌‍‌‌​​‍‍‌‍‍‌‍​‌‌‌​‌‍‍‌‌‍‌‍‍‌‍​‌‌‍​‌‍‌‌‍‌‌‌‍‌‍‌‌​‍‌‍​‌‌​​‌‍‍​‌‍‍‌‌‍​​‍‍‌‍‌​‍‌‍‌​‍‌‍‍‌‌‍‍‌‌​‌‍‌‌‌‍‍‌‌​​‍‌‍‌‌‌‍‌​‌‍‍‌‌‌​​‍‌‍‌‌‍‌‍‌​‌‍‌‌​‌‌​​‌​‍‌‍‌‌‌​‌‍‌‌‌‍‍‌‌​‌‍​‌‌‌​‌‍‍‌‌‍‌‍‍​‍‌‍‍‌‌‍‌​​‌‌‍​​‌​​​‌‍​​‌​​​​​​‍​​‍‌​‍‌​​‌‍​​​‍​‍‌​‌​​​​‌‍‌​‌‍‌‍​‍‌​‍‌‌‍‌​​‍‌​​​​‍‌​‌‌​‌​​‍‌​‌​​​‌‍‌‌​‌‌​‌‌​​​​‍​‌‍‌​​​‌​‍‌‌​‌‍‌‌​​‌‍‌‌​‌‌‍‍‌‍‌‌‌‌‌​‌‌‌‍​‌‌​‍‌‌​‌‍‍‌‌‍​‌‍​‌‍‌‌​‍‌​​‌‍​‌‌‌​‌‍‍​​‌‌‍‌‌‍‌‌‌​‌​‌‍​‌‌‍‌‌‍‌‌‌​​‍‌‍‌‍‌​‌‍‌​‍‌‌​‌‌‌​​‍‌‌‌‍‍‌‍‌‌‌‍‌​‍‌‌​​‌​‌​​‍‌‌​​‌​‌​​‍‌‌​​‍​​‍​‌​‌​‌‍‌‍​​‌‌‍‌​​​‍​‌​​‍​‌‍‌‍​‌​‌​‌‍‌​​‍‌‌​​‍​​‍​‍‌‌​‌‌‌​‌​​‍‍‌‍​‌‍‍​‌‍‍‌‌‍​‌‍‌​‌​‍‌‍‌‌‌‍‍​‍‌‌​‌‌‌​​‍‌‌‌‍‍‌‍‌‌‌‍‌​‍‌‌​​‌​‌​​‍‌‌​​‌​‌​​‍‌‌​​‍​​‍​​​‍‌‌‍​‌‍‌‍‌‍‌‌​‌‍​‌​​‌​‌​​​​​​​‍‌​‍‌‌​​‍​​‍​‍‌‌​‌‌‌​‌​​‍‍‌‌​‌‍‌‌‌‍​‌‌​​‌‍​‍‌‍​‌‌​‌‍‌‌‌‌‌‌‌​‍‌‍​​‌‌‍‍​‌‌​‌‌​‌​​‌​​‍‌‌​​‌​​‌​‍‌‌​​‍‌​‌‍​‍‌‌​​‍‌​‌‍‌‍‍‌‍‌‌‌‌‌​​‍‌‌‍​‌‍‌‌​​‍‍‌‍‍‌‍​‌‌‌​‌‍‍‌‌‍‌‍‍‌‍​‌‌‍​‌‍‌‌‍‌‌‌‍‌‍‌‌​‍‌‍​‌‌​​‌‍‍​‌‍‍‌‌‍​​‍‍‌‍‌​‍‌‍‌​‍‌‍‌‍‍‌‌‍‌​​‌‌‍​​‌​​​‌‍​​‌​​​​​​‍​​‍‌​‍‌​​‌‍​​​‍​‍‌​‌​​​​‌‍‌​‌‍‌‍​‍‌​‍‌‌‍‌​​‍‌​​​​‍‌​‌‌​‌​​‍‌​‌​​​‌‍‌‌​‌‌​‌‌​​​​‍​‌‍‌​​​‌​‍‌‍‌‌​‌‍‌‌​​‌‍‌‌​‌‌‍‍‌‍‌‌‌‌‌​‌‌‌‍​‌‌​‍‌‌​‌‍‍‌‌‍​‌‍​‌‍‌‌​‍‌‍‌​​‌‍​‌‌‌​‌‍‍​​‌‌‍‌‌‍‌‌‌​‌​‌‍​‌‌‍‌‌‍‌‌‌​​‍‌‍‌‍‌​‌‍‌​‍‌‌​‌‌‌​​‍‌‌‌‍‍‌‍‌‌‌‍‌​‍‌‌​​‌​‌​​‍‌‌​​‌​‌​​‍‌‌​​‍​​‍​‌​‌​‌‍‌‍​​‌‌‍‌​​​‍​‌​​‍​‌‍‌‍​‌​‌​‌‍‌​​‍‌‌​​‍​​‍​‍‌‌​‌‌‌​‌​​‍‍‌‍​‌‍‍​‌‍‍‌‌‍​‌‍‌​‌​‍‌‍‌‌‌‍‍​‍‌‌​‌‌‌​​‍‌‌‌‍‍‌‍‌‌‌‍‌​‍‌‌​​‌​‌​​‍‌‌​​‌​‌​​‍‌‌​​‍​​‍​​​‍‌‌‍​‌‍‌‍‌‍‌‌​‌‍​‌​​‌​‌​​​​​​​‍‌​‍‌‌​​‍​​‍​‍‌‌​‌‌‌​‌​​‍‍‌‌​‌‍‌‌‌‍​‌‌​​‍‌‍‌​​‌‍‌‌‌​‍‌​‌​​‌‍‌‌‌‍​‌‌​‌‍‍‌‌‌‍‌‍‌‌​‌‌​​‌‌‌‌‍​‍‌‍​‌‍‍‌‌​‌‍‍​‌‍‌‌‌‍‌​​‍​‍‌‌

We’ll share the map as soon as it becomes available. When Gus posted this on Linkedin he got this reply from Dr Frank Giffin from the CTI‑CFF, a six‑country partnership (including Papua New Guinea) focused on marine conservation, sustainable fisheries and food security in the Coral Triangle. They’re the folks responsible for maintaining regional records on MPAs.

A cheap eye scanner invented in India may help protect unborn babies. Remidio’s handheld camera, built in India and cleared by the FDA in December 2025, can capture retinal images in under a minute and is already used for diabetic-retinopathy screening in 40 countries. The Gates Foundation recently spotlighted its potential to flag gestational diabetes, hypertension and anaemia, all conditions linked to stillbirth. Around two million babies are stillborn every year (funny how the pro-life folks never seem to mention this as a problem worth solving?).

AI mapping tools are transforming rainforest investigations. Environmental journalists are using satellite imagery and machine-learning to expose illegal activities across the Amazon. One investigation mapped 3,718 illegal gold-mining sites in Venezuela, including inside protected Indigenous territories. The technology now allows continent-wide monitoring for the Amazon and Congo basins, allowing reporters to track environmental destruction remotely in regions too dangerous or inaccessible for field reporting. Nieman Lab

27 years after their existence was confirmed, Brazil has begun demarcating land for one of the Amazon’s most vulnerable uncontacted peoples. The Pardo River Kawahiva Indigenous territory covers 4,100 km². This demarcation will give the nomadic hunter-gatherer community better protection against farming expansion, land grabs and illegal logging and mining. Full recognition still requires a presidential signature and stronger enforcement from Brazil’s Indigenous affairs agency, but encouragingly, the territory has already recorded two years without deforestation. The Guardian

Electric trucking is moving faster than almost anyone realises. Battery-only models now account for roughly 11% of heavy long-distance truck sales and 20% of smaller truck sales in China. The economics are everything here: Bloomberg says electric trucks beat diesel wherever fuel costs more than four times electricity. Since diesel trucks and buses burn about as much fuel as all cars and motorcycles combined, the impact on oil demand is going to start getting really interesting.

10 million of the 60 million people in the world who live with hepatitis C are in Pakistan (thank unsafe blood transfusions and injections). Now Pakistan has launched a national hepatitis C elimination programme with free screening and treatment. Read that again — elimination —not prevention — this is ambitious. The programme aims to test 50% of the eligible population and treat five million people by 2027, all entirely free of charge. Pakistan Today

After two decades, Florida has completed a major Everglades restoration project that re-establishes natural water flow across 222.6 km² of drained wetlands in Picayune Strand. Crews plugged canals, removed elevated roads, and restored the slow “sheet flow” that once defined the River of Grass. Scientists are already documenting returning wetland plants, marsh mammals and endangered bats. Yale 360

More of the United States’ rivers were reconnected last year than at any other time in history. Over 100 dams came down across 30 states in 2025, reconnecting nearly 7,900 km of waterways for fish, flood safety and cleaner rivers. NYT

West Africa is turning 15 national grids into a regional power system, making electricity cheaper, cleaner and more reliable across borders. More than 4,000 km of high-voltage lines now connect the West African Power Pool, enabling utilities to trade electricity across borders, while upgrades have brought service to over three million people in Burkina Faso, Guinea, Liberia, Senegal, Sierra Leone and The Gambia. World Bank

Scientists found a giant squid without ever seeing one — and they did it by reading DNA floating in seawater. Off the coast of Western Australia, a team scooped up over 1,000 water samples from depths as deep as 4.5 km and analysed the tiny bits of genetic material that sea creatures shed as they swim. The result: 226 species, including the legendary Architeuthis dux (eyes the size of a large pizza, body longer than a school bus), Cuvier’s beaked whale, and a faceless cusk eel. Some of the species don’t match anything in the books yet. Curtin University

The United States’ biggest renewable project is already decarbonising the grid. SunZia, the largest renewable energy project ever built in the US, has begun sending wind power from New Mexico to California via an 885 km transmission line. The impact is already visible: in the month after SunZia came online, California wind generation rose 37% and gas generation fell 35%. That is what new transmission is supposed to do: move cheap clean power from where it is abundant to where it can displace fossil fuels.

A Short History of Saving the World

We’re equal parts nervous and excited to introduce you to our new history podcast, with rogue historian and one of our favourite science fiction writers, Ada Palmer.

Every generation thinks it’s living through the end of the world. Truth is, we’ve been here before. Part conversation, part historical detective work, this series revisits the moments where everything was supposed to collapse, but didn’t.

Join Ada and a slightly overwhelmed Gus as they embark on a whistle stop tour through information revolutions, pandemics, battles for freedom, censorship — and discover the surprising ways societies continue to adapt and endure through the ages.

You can subscribe here, wherever you listen to your podcasts.

A Short History of Saving the World

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Three years ago we launched our podcast with a simple question and some dodgy microphones. These days the microphones are much better, we have a lot more questions, and a problem we never anticipated.

In May 2023, we had just finished our Humankind project, a series profiling 100 people quietly doing extraordinary things in the world. When it ended, we were left with a question we couldn’t shake:

What drives a person to devote their life to cleaning up the ocean, fixing global hunger, protecting chimpanzees, or unlocking a cure for a rare disease? How do ordinary people end up doing extraordinary things?

Starting a podcast gave us an excuse to speak to those people in person. Our first season was an enthusiastic mess, figuring things out as we went. We knew in our heads what we wanted, but had absolutely no idea how to make it.

We learned though. Four seasons later we’ve had more than 70 conversations with extraordinary guests like Boyan Slat, Shabana Basij-Rasikh, Steven Pinker, and Kris Tompkins. Experimented. Failed spectacularly (and landed up making our own original audio documentary series). Kept going.

And somehow along the way, one podcast has become four.

Announcing the Fix The News Network

A collection of podcasts exploring progress, possibility and the forces shaping our future. Alongside our newsletter, you’ll now be able to find all our audio content in one place, and on YouTube, with long-form interviews, weekly news roundups, history series and video episodes.

Check it out at podcast.fixthenews.com or by simply clicking on the podcast tab on our website ☝️. You can also search for and subscribe to any of these wherever you normally listen to your podcasts (Apple, Spotify, Amazon etc).

Here they are.

Not sure where to begin?

• Want a seven minute antidote to doomscrolling? Start with NewsFix.

• Love deep-dive conversations with amazing people? Try the Fix The News Podcast.

• History nerd? A Short History of Saving the World.

• Looking for an audio documentary with world-changing stakes? A Shot at History.

Why now?

We’re launching this network at a moment when the media landscape is changing - fast. Attention is fragmented. Trust is harder to win. Many people are quietly stepping back from the news altogether; not because they don’t care, but because staying informed feels exhausting.

At the same time, the ways we consume information are shifting. More people are listening while they walk, watching while they cook, and turning to podcasts and longer conversations to make sense of a complicated world.

We’re excited to join the experiment. To meet people in different places and formats, while staying anchored to the same questions that have shaped Fix The News from the beginning:

What’s going right in the world? And… how does progress actually happen?

We’re slowly creating more video too, in an effort to find new ways of telling stories beyond the newsletter. Here are our first two episodes from this season of Fix The News.

We didn’t do this alone

A huge thank you to Anthony Badolato from HearThat! - our audio engineer, the voice behind NewsFix and the person responsible for the sonic identity across the network. Anthony has spent months helping shape not only how these shows sound, but how they feel. We couldn’t have done any of this without him.

And to Sasha Simon, who created our new visual identity for the podcast network and our Youtube channel. Her work genuinely blew us away. Sasha somehow solved the impossible challenge of giving each show its own personality - while keeping them connected to a shared editorial vision. The result feels thoughtful, distinctive and unmistakably ours.

Independent media is rarely glamorous. It’s late night edits, frantic WhatsApp chats, audio tweaks, too much coffee and a lot of conversations that begin with: “What if we…”

We’re so grateful to everyone who helped bring this next chapter to life.

Let us know what you think!