320: Aha! Lost Worlds. Mongolia 💚 Colombia. Tuberculosis 🛑✋. Uninterrupted toolmaking.
It’s a nice feeling when your brain suddenly comes up with an answer.
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This week’s top stories
Scientists have pinpointed how the brain generates ‘aha’ moments. Neuroscientists have identified a clear brain pattern behind the phenomenon of sudden insight, by scanning volunteers as they deciphered hidden images. Moments of recognition triggered a coordinated spike in the ventral occipitotemporal cortex, amygdala and hippocampus, creating a burst of emotion and salience that also strengthened long-term memory (did someone just say Eureka!?). Quanta
Deaths from the world’s deadliest infectious disease down by 29% since 2015. The latest WHO report shows TB mortality fell to 1.23 million in 2024, the lowest number ever recorded, and a 29% drop since 2015, with the African and European regions achieving reductions of 46% and 49% respectively. Over 100 countries have cut mortality by at least 20% since 2015, marking a quiet shift back to long-term progress after the setbacks of the pandemic. WHO
Diplomacy edges Congo and Sudan conflicts toward de-escalation. The world hasn’t been paying attention to the civil war in Sudan or the 30-year (!) conflict between the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Rwanda-backed rebels. Suffice to say, these wars are horrifying: the conflict between Sudan’s armed forces and rebel paramilitaries is notoriously brutal while the conflict in the DRC has killed 10 million people, more than the population of Hungary.
BUT there’s maybe, a chink of light? Congo and the Rwanda-backed M23 rebels have just signed a US-and-Qatar-mediated framework that sets the steps for a peace deal, while Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces have accepted a US-Arab proposal for a humanitarian ceasefire and have signalled openness to talks. CNN / Reuters
We know Donald Trump usually appears as a villain in this newsletter, but we’re pretty sure the peace deal he brokered between Rwanda and the DRC in June 2025 paved the way for the current talks between the DRC and M23.
On each side of the Atlantic, scientists are opening new fronts against cancer. In the United Kingdom, scientists are driving advances in prevention and ultra-early detection, from the first trials of cancer-stopping vaccines to blood tests that spot tumours way before scans do. In the United States, the breakthroughs are in precision treatment, with immunotherapies, CAR-T, targeted radiation and engineered viruses offering new hope for once-lethal cancers. The bigger picture is a convergence, as prevention, early detection and precision therapy meet in the middle, transforming cancer from a death sentence to a treatable condition. The Times / WSJ
Their optimism is palpable. In an increasingly polarised, fractious world, they bring hope of good news. What’s not curable today could be curable tomorrow, they think. “We are getting very close to defeating cancer once and for all.”
Egypt eliminates trachoma after more than 3,000 years. Egypt has become the seventh country in the Eastern Mediterranean region – and the 27th worldwide – to eliminate trachoma (the world’s leading infectious cause of blindness) as a public health problem, following a decade of mapping, surveillance and a nationwide implementation of the WHO’s elimination strategy. WHO
A story about impossible caves, lost worlds and how sometimes, people do the right thing. In 2009, a Vietnamese logger led British explorers to what turned out to be the world’s largest cave. Hang Sơn Đoòng is big enough to fly a Boeing 747 through, taller than the Great Pyramids of Giza, vast enough to have underground weather and its very own rainforest. The ‘discovery’ kicked off a frenzy: cue suggestions like “let’s build a 10-kilometre cable car into the depths to allow for mass tourism.” But environmental activists managed to convince local authorities to keep their heads, and now the area around Hang Sơn Đoòng is a conservation success story that’s protected not only the cave, but the Annamite region around it.
Why is this a big deal? Let’s talk about the Annamite.
In an era when Western scientists get excited about finding a new tubeworm, this place is home to at least 25 species found nowhere else in the world, including charismatic megafauna like the ‘recently discovered’ saola, an antelope-like bovine with straight sharp horns and a black-and-white patterned head so rare it’s known as the ‘Asian Unicorn.’ The area, variously called the ‘Amazon of Asia,’ the ‘Lost World’ and the ‘Noah’s Ark of Wildlife’ (the latter because it’s also provided refuge to many thought-to-be lost species, like the Roosevelt’s muntjac, a deer declared extinct in 1929) was an absolute goldmine for poachers; little-watched and less explored, its plants and animals were hunted for meat, medicine and, yes, to satisfy tourists who wanted to see new species. The fear, expressed in the 2013 book “Gold Rush In The Jungle,” was that the Annamite mountains would soon fall prey to empty forest syndrome.
Now the success of sustainable tourism in and around Hang Sơn Đoòng — including the re-training hundreds of local poachers as guides and porters — has led UNESCO to create a new transboundary World Heritage Site with Laos, extending protection across the Annamite range.
Oh, and Ho Khanh, the illegal logger who discovered the cave? He’s one of the tour guides.
The world is quietly winning on climate. “Five years ago, the most ambitious emission reduction plans laid out by governments would have resulted in about 3 degrees of warming by the end of the century. We’re now staring 2.3 degrees of warming — a still-disastrous change, but one that’s moving ever closer to the place well below 2 degrees where we need to be. The 2015 Paris Agreement, dismissed at the time as a “fraud” and “dangerous incrementalism,” is actually working. As solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicles and rechargeable batteries remake our power systems, the energy transition is on the brink of victory. Ignore the doomsayers who can’t see it.” Bloomberg 🎁
Colombia has declared its entire Amazon biome, 42% of its territory, a reserve for ‘renewable natural resources’ and will block 43 pending oil blocks and 286 mining requests, halting all new large-scale extraction. Let that sink in for a moment. Colombia just declared all its rainforests, almost half its territory, a reserve. Acting environment minister Irene Vélez used COP30 to urge neighbours to follow suit, framing the move as one of climate safety. Mongabay
… but who’s protecting those rainforests? While in theory it’s the government’s job, in practice, unarmed indigenous patrols have become the most effective forces protecting the Colombian Amazon. More than 50,000 guards now operate year-round where state forces cannot, and their unarmed, community-rooted patrols deter illegal extraction and safeguard isolated tribes. It’s not just Colombia that’s doing this: indigenous guards are coordinating across borders and training their counterparts in Peru and Ecuador. BBC
For over a century, Africa’s ‘meningitis belt’ stretching from Senegal to Ethiopia, has suffered deadly outbreaks every few years. Now, a breakthrough 13 years in the making could stop those outbreaks for good. Developed by the Serum Institute of India, the Men5CV vaccine protects against five major bacterial strains for just $3 a dose. It’s already rolling out in Niger and Nigeria, while Mali, Ghana, Burkina Faso, Chad and Togo all have plans to introduce it in the coming months. Telegraph
World’s seventh-largest coal fleet slated for phase-out. South Korea has joined the Powering Past Coal Alliance at COP30, pledging to stop building new coal plants and to retire 40 of its 61 existing units by 2040, with plans for the rest due next year. The move marks a major shift for one of the world’s largest coal users. Korea Times
Clean power growth is now covering all new global demand; and fossil fuels are falling in China and India. Solar and wind generated 635 TWh in the first nine months of this year, exceeding the 603 TWh rise in global electricity demand, and holding fossil generation flat for the year. China’s fossil generation fell 0.7% in the last 12 months compared to the previous period. India’s fossil generation declined by 2.5%. Why? Sunshine, wind, water and batteries. Ember
The number of people worldwide without official proof of identity has dropped to 800 million, down from over 1 billion in 2017. Access to digital IDs has improved too, with 400 million more people now covered than in 2021. Legal identity and digital identity determine who gets to participate in a modern economy and who gets shut out, so closing these gaps is one of the fastest ways to expand opportunity and reduce exclusion. World Bank
In Canada, the legalisation of recreational cannabis in 2018 has delivered one of the world’s clearest examples of how policy reform can cut crime. Police-reported drug offences are one third lower than in 2019, and cannabis-related arrests have collapsed by nearly 90% since 2014. What was once the driver of two-thirds of all drug crime now represents just 17%. Stratcann
Mongolia launches one of the world’s most ambitious land protection plans.
Mongolia has approved a 15-year, $200 million conservation deal that will expand protected areas to 30% of the country, adding 141,600 km² and improving management across existing reserves. The plan also supports sustainable grazing across a further 339,000 km², working with 200,000 herding families to reverse overgrazing and protect carbon-rich grasslands and peatlands. Backed by a new fund, the initiative marks a national pivot toward climate resilience and landscape restoration. Nature Conservancy
Site in Kenya reveals 300,000 years of uninterrupted toolmaking. Archaeologists uncovered nearly 1,300 stone tools spanning 2.44 to 2.75 million years, showing that early hominins taught and replicated the same techniques across roughly 10,000 generations. During this time period, the surrounding landscape shifted from lush, humid forests to arid desert shrubland and back again - and the hominins survived in part because of their toolmaking traditions. 404 Media
First new subsea habitat in 40 years prepares for deployment. A startup called Deep is about to install the world’s first new subsea habitat since the 1980s on the seabed of the Florida Keys. Pressurised to match its 50-metre depth, it lets four scientists live underwater for a week and dive for hours without repeated decompression (we swear we remember a Hardy Boys story along these lines?). The habitat will support reef surveys, archaeology and astronaut training, and serve as a test run for a larger 2027 habitat. MIT Technology Review
Earth’s largest modern meteorite crater discovered in Southern China. Geologists have confirmed that a 900-metre-wide depression near Zhaoqing is a Holocene impact crater, making it the largest young crater ever identified (about 200 impact craters have been found worldwide). Created roughly 11,700 years ago, the features in the quartz provide unambiguous evidence of an extraterrestrial strike while the granite rock has preserved the structure, despite erosion. Universe Today
The Misery Machine
If you feel like the world is getting more dangerous, more violent and more chaotic, that’s not an accident. News organisations have engineered that feeling, and the distortion is worse than you think.
A new analysis from the team at Our World in Data tracked every article published by the New York Times, Washington Post and Fox News in 2023, and compared their coverage to what Americans actually die from. What they found is obscene.
Heart disease and cancer together accounted for 56% of deaths in America. They received 7% of media coverage. Terrorism killed 16 people in the US that year. Sixteen. It got more attention than heart disease, cancer, stroke, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, kidney disease, and liver disease combined. In fact, terrorism received 18,000 times more coverage than its share of deaths, while homicides were overrepresented by a factor of 43.
The reason is obvious once you’re aware of it. Heart disease kills 2,000 Americans every single day, which means it isn’t news, because it isn’t new. Tomorrow’s headline is always identical to today’s. People who die from chronic conditions become numbers in reports that nobody reads. People who die in rare, violent events become stories, with faces and names, and we click on those stories, which tells news organisations to publish more of them.
Of course, this has been going on for a long time. William Randolph Hearst coined the phrase “if it bleeds, it leads” back in the 1890s, during the days of yellow journalism. What’s different now is that we all get our news on the black devil glass, all the time, as it happens, from everywhere - which is why we are drowning in an endless stream of alarm that makes the world feel far more dangerous than it actually is.
We’ve said this a hundred times before, but it’s always worth repeating: the world’s biggest news organisations aren’t reflecting the world. They are reflecting what’s dramatic, rare, and cheap enough to turn into a story. If you’re after an accurate picture of what’s getting worse, or what’s improving, you’ll need to look somewhere other than the news.
For paid subscribers this week:
How London’s murder rate collapsed to a 20-year low.
Albania, Italy and Lithuania push through historic reforms on safety, justice and mental health.
Scientists test a coral seeding breakthrough that could help save the Great Barrier Reef.
France’s birdlife starts to rebound after a pesticide ban many thought came too late.
China turns the Yangtze into the world’s first fully electrified shipping corridor.
Europe’s roads hit a tipping point as electric and hybrid cars overwhelm petrol.
Princeton unveils the most stable qubit ever built, a genuine leap for quantum computing.
A 9 million neuron virtual cortex shows whole-brain simulation is no longer science fiction.
Solving The Narrative Deficit
On the podcast this week we chat to Bryan Walsh, an editorial director at Vox, where he leads Future Perfect – an ambitious solutions journalism project that focuses on the policies and technologies that will make the future a better place. As a former foreign correspondent and climate writer for Time and the author of End Times: A Brief Guide to the End of the World, Bryan has spent more than two decades tracking humanity’s gravest threats. Today he is focused on highlighting under-reported progress that shows we still have room to bend the story in a better direction.
Topics discussed: the good news hiding behind everyday conveniences; George Washington’s candles as perspective; why the report card for humanity is incomplete; negativity bias, doomscrolling, and the allure of bad headlines; local crime statistics versus national fear of rising violence; how American political psychodrama dominates the global news feed; what AI overviews and chatbots are doing to online media traffic; the economics of journalism after print advertising and social media; Future Perfect’s origin story and focusing on what matters most; philanthropy, foreign aid cuts, and momentum in development gains; why solutions journalism can feel like eating your vegetables; the narrative deficit and hero deficit in progress reporting; pandemic vaccines as an under-appreciated scientific and moral triumph; hope as a life preserver rather than a prediction and creating a media ecosystem that rewards depth, nuance, and solutions.
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