27 minutes in the air over the Champlain Valley

Early in the morning at Plattsburgh International Airport in upstate New York, an aircraft rolled out onto runway 35. What happened next had never happened before: a battery-powered aircraft in the same size class as a commercial regional airliner took off and flew.

The flight took place on Wednesday, August 12, 2026, and lasted 27 minutes. The aircraft, named X1, was flown by one pilot and reached 1,100 feet above the ground, roughly 335 meters. The powertrain, running entirely on batteries, delivered more than one megawatt of power. The test profile included taxiing, takeoff, climb, maneuvering and landing.

The flight was conducted under a special airworthiness certificate in the experimental category, issued by the US aviation authority, the FAA. The certificate came in July 2026 and gave permission to begin flight testing immediately. The test flights take place within a defined envelope: no more than 140 knots, no more than 2,000 feet above the ground and no more than 1.5 G in maneuvering load.

Plattsburgh is a regional commercial airport serving a community of 20,000 residents. That is exactly the kind of traffic Heart Aerospace is aiming for.

Warp News has followed Heart Aerospace since the company's early years and has written about it several times. The first time was in September 2020, when founders Anders Forslund and Klara Andreasson showed off their electric motor in a hangar at Säve airport outside Gothenburg and had a handful of employees. Warp News has since visited the hangar together with readers and reported on the company's steps from drawing board to flying machine.

Five dollars of electricity against a jet fuel price up 63 percent

The X1 used about $5 worth of electricity on its first flight. The figure says something about why Heart Aerospace is building electric aircraft at all.

Over the same period, the price of jet fuel rose sharply. In the week ending August 7, the average price was $3.50 per gallon, or about $0.92 per liter. That is an increase of 63 percent compared with a year earlier. Electric propulsion decouples airlines' operating costs from the swings in the global oil markets.

"With the first flight of X1, Heart Aerospace has demonstrated electric flight at the size of a commercial airliner," says Anders Forslund, founder and CEO. He describes the company's goal as abundant flight: more, cheaper and cleaner flights to and from airports closer to where people live.

What the X1 was meant to prove

The X1 is not intended to be sold. It is a full-scale demonstrator representing the production aircraft, the ES-30, and it was built to verify technology, aerodynamics, flight performance and the company's own ability to carry out an aircraft program.

Heart lists the steps the program has gone through. The company has designed an airframe from the ground up around electric propulsion, verified the new geometry through simulation and physical testing, developed its own components, and integrated electric motors, batteries, power electronics, control systems and avionics into a flying aircraft. The airframe has been load-tested to its limits and the powertrain has been tested under flight-like conditions.

Added to this is a flight test organization with staff, procedures and analytical capability, along with an established working relationship with the FAA on airworthiness.

"Through the X1 program, Heart has built the capability to design, build, test, operate and continuously improve an all-new electric airliner," says chief technology officer Ben Stabler. That capability is now being carried over to the ES-30.

The size of the aircraft

The X1 measures 32.3 meters between the wingtips, 23.2 meters from nose to tail and 7.3 meters in height. Its takeoff weight exceeds 11,340 kilograms. That makes the X1 the largest battery-electric aircraft ever to have flown.

Propulsion comes from four electric motors mounted on the wings. The aircraft has a T-tail. At the aircraft's unveiling, a cabin mock-up for 30 passengers and a cockpit mock-up were installed on board.

ES-30: 30 seats, 200 kilometers on electricity and 800 kilometers on hybrid power

The ES-30 is a conventional fixed-wing aircraft with 30 seats and hybrid-electric propulsion. It is being developed for certification under the FAA's Part 25 rules, which apply to larger airliners.

According to the planned specifications, the ES-30 will fly 200 kilometers fully on battery and 800 kilometers on hybrid power, with 25 kilograms of baggage per passenger and a 30-minute charging time. The hybrid system is based on two turbogenerators that, according to Heart, will run on sustainable aviation fuel. They provide an energy reserve and supplement battery power on longer legs. These are design targets, not flight-verified performance.

Heart expects the ES-30 to deliver more than 40 percent lower operating costs per aircraft than older regional airliners. The company points to four reasons: lower energy costs, less maintenance thanks to simpler electric propulsion and electrified systems, higher availability through an integrated electronics and software architecture, and low exposure to the emissions-related taxes and fees that are growing in aviation markets around the world.

The range is suited to short routes. In North and South America there are 5,000 airports and a network dominated by routes under 500 miles, or about 800 kilometers. In Europe, the same range covers large parts of the continent.

From a 1:5 scale model to full-scale flight

The road here has come in clear steps. Heart Aerospace started in 2018 with two people in hangars at Säve airport outside Gothenburg.

The first aircraft was called the ES-19 and was a planned 19-seat all-electric regional airliner with a stated range of up to 400 kilometers. On December 17, 2021, the company flew an unmanned 1:5 scale model of the ES-19 at Säve. The model had a 4.6-meter wingspan, flew for four and a half minutes and reached a top speed of 150 kilometers per hour. In parallel, a full-scale powertrain demonstrator had been ground-tested for more than a year.

In September 2022, Heart set the ES-19 aside and instead presented the 30-seat ES-30 with hybrid propulsion. This was a new product configuration rather than a scaling up of a finished aircraft. Earlier orders from United and Mesa were, according to the company, confirmed for the new model.

From early on, the strategy was about avoiding unnecessary risk. The company chose not to design an entirely new aircraft in every respect, but to use proven parts and adapt what is required when batteries and electric motors replace jet fuel and piston engines. "The principles of aircraft design are low speed, low altitude, conventional design to be safe, low risk, boring and easier to certify," said Philip Keenan, then head of airworthiness and certification, during a visit to the hangar in 2022.

The airlines that have put money in

The ES-30 has customer commitments from United Airlines, Air Canada and JSX. Heart says the combined customer commitments amount to $9.4 billion.

"The first flight of X1 is a major technical achievement for Heart Aerospace, a company United has been proud to support," says Michael Leskinen, chief financial officer at United Airlines. He points out that electric airliners can deliver a better travel experience for passengers while also strengthening the airline's business.

John Di Bert, deputy group chief executive and chief financial officer at Air Canada, describes the X1's first flight as an important milestone. "Our investment in Heart Aerospace and the ES-30 reflects Air Canada's commitment to supporting innovative technology that has the potential to change aviation," he says.

The next step is being built in Los Angeles

Heart Aerospace is headquartered in Los Angeles. There, the company is now developing the first pre-production example of the ES-30 in its pilot factory.

Flight testing of the ES-30 is planned to begin in 2028. Type certification and entry into service are set for 2031.

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From almost zero

Latin America was long a region where electric cars barely showed up in the statistics. That has changed in five years. Electric cars now make up a meaningful and fast-growing share of new car sales in several of the region's largest car markets.

The figures show the share of new passenger cars sold that are electric. That share includes both fully battery-electric cars and plug-in hybrids.

Colombia has come the furthest. The country started from nearly zero and is now at 10 percent. That is the same level as the United States, which is used as a comparison in the statistics.

In other countries in the region, the shift started later. It is moving fast there too. Mexico is a clear example. The share of electric cars there rose from 2 to 7 percent between 2024 and 2025, in a single year.

Tax breaks contribute

A large part of the explanation is policy. Many Latin American countries offer tax breaks and other incentives to people who buy an electric car. Colombia is one of them.

Electric cars are getting cheaper

The other part of the explanation is price. In 2025, the sales-weighted average purchase price of electric cars declined across almost all segments in the three markets that the International Energy Agency, IEA, covers in particular: China, Germany and the United States.

In all three markets, two factors contributed to the lower prices. Battery cell prices have come down. Manufacturers have also changed their pricing strategies.

New model entries in these markets have affected the average price of battery electric vehicles differently in the different countries.

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⏩ The summer is over – let's get going!

I spent a week in Poland with my son, brother, and mother. There we traveled through our family's history. My grandfather was from Poland. I've written about him before.

I've also been digging deep into AI and didactics. That is, the study of how teaching is designed so that people learn, and how AI can be used in it and affects it. More on that to come.

Now the summer is over and we're back to news every day and the newsletter every week.

Mathias Sundin
The Angry Optimist

💡 Fact-based optimistic news of the week

🌾 Indian scientists have bred rice that handles both flood and drought

India has bred two rice varieties for opposite water problems. One yields nearly 50 percent more in flood years with no penalty in normal years. The other yields up to 35 percent more in dry conditions and grows in dry soil, without flooded paddies. The poorest farmers gain the most.

Read more on Warp News

🐚 Laos pushes back parasitic disease to below one percent

In the worst-affected areas of Laos, the share of people infected with the snail-borne parasitic disease schistosomiasis has dropped to below one percent, down from over 40 percent in some areas in 2003.

Read more on Warp News

🪨 New method halves the cost of extracting lithium from rock

Researchers at MIT have developed a process that dissolves lithium minerals at room temperature instead of above 1,800 degrees. The method is estimated to cost half as much as today's extraction of lithium from hard rock. The process recycles its own chemicals, bringing waste close to zero.

Read more on Warp News

🛫 Autonomous system designed to fly itself from takeoff to touchdown

Merlin's autonomous flight system is built to handle the entire flight, from takeoff to touchdown, and can reduce crew workload. The technology is designed to fly several types of large aircraft, including commercial jets and military transport planes.

Read more on Warp News

✂️ New CRISPR method seeks out and destroys cancer cells

In lab tests the method destroyed the mutated cells but left healthy cells almost entirely unharmed, even though they differed by just a single building block in their DNA. The technique is programmable, which means a new mutation only requires researchers to create a new guide RNA.

Read more on Warp News

🚧 Researchers build material atom by atom, long considered impossible

Researchers have placed individual carbon units at exact locations on a silicon surface and built structures atom by atom, something dismissed for decades as unworkable. In most attempts the carbon landed correctly, with an accuracy of up to 97 percent.

Read more on Warp News

🧬 The bluebuck went extinct in 1799, now it is being de-extincted

The bluebuck was the first large African mammal driven to extinction by humans in modern times. The company Colossal Biosciences is now working to bring the species back using genetic technology. The work is building methods that can also help other threatened antelope species.

Read more on Warp News

🎙️ AI talk or master class?

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Two measures, both down

At the turn of the millennium, one in five adults in India smoked tobacco. Counting all forms of tobacco, including products that are chewed or sniffed, almost half of all adults used tobacco.

Over the past two decades, both of these shares have roughly halved. The development is clearly visible in the data over time.

The decline applies to both men and women

In several countries, smoking has fallen among men while rising among women. That is not the case in India. Tobacco use there has fallen substantially for both sexes.

This means the decline is not limited to one part of the population, but covers the entire adult population.

Almost one million deaths every year

Smoking today causes almost one million Indians each year to die earlier than they otherwise would. That makes tobacco one of the largest single health issues in the country.

Diseases caused by smoking often take decades to develop. The effect of fewer people smoking today will therefore only become visible later, in the form of fewer deaths.

Smokeless tobacco has lower risks but is not risk-free

Tobacco that is not smoked generally carries lower health risks, because the user is not inhaling smoke. It still increases the risk of cancer of the mouth, throat, and esophagus, of gum disease, and of other conditions.

Since the use of both smoked and smokeless tobacco has fallen at roughly the same rate, the decline in India covers both of these product groups.

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From a fortune to pocket change

The price of lighting has fallen sharply over the past two centuries. This is shown by historical data compiled by researcher Roger Fouquet.

The figures are adjusted for inflation and expressed in year 2000 prices, so they can be compared over time. The measure used is lumen-hours, a standard measure of how much light is produced over a given period.

In the early 14th century, one million lumen-hours cost around £34,000. By 2023, the cost had fallen to £2.15.

How much light one million lumen-hours is

A standard 100-watt incandescent bulb today emits about 1,600 lumens. If it stays on for 24 hours, it produces about 40,000 lumen-hours.

To reach one million lumen-hours, such a bulb would need to stay on continuously for about 26 days.

Achieving the same amount of light with candles requires 120 candles burning at once for that entire period. That is the amount of light that once cost the equivalent of £34,000.

What drove the price down

The price drop is the result of a series of changes during the 19th and 20th centuries. These include new lamps and fixtures, new fuels, expanded infrastructure such as electricity grids, and changed institutions.

Together, they turned artificial light from a luxury into something most people use without giving it a thought.

For most people today, being able to switch on a light when it is dark is a given. Those who live or have lived without artificial light know what a difference it makes.

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Text that has been unreadable for nearly 2,000 years

Brent Seales, professor of computer science at the University of Kentucky and one of the founders of the project, said at a conference streamed from Naples that just a year ago it would have been hard to believe that a complete scroll could be read entirely non-invasively, with hundreds of columns of text. He said he believes every single scroll in the collection will be read.

Warp News has previously written about how X-ray technology and AI made it possible for the first time to read the contents of a charred scroll from Herculaneum, and about when the Vesuvius Challenge was solved and the first scroll could be read.

Ethics, arts and human behaviour

The new material includes 70 columns of text from "On Vices, Book 1", attributed to the Epicurean philosopher Philodemus. Researchers have also recovered nearly 5 feet of readable text across 20 columns from a document dated to 200-300 BC. It is the oldest Herculaneum scroll unwrapped virtually so far, and it explores ethics, arts and human behaviour.

Federica Nicolardi, lead papyrologist for the Vesuvius Challenge, said that previously one had to choose between preserving the scrolls and reading them. With virtual unwrapping, both can be done. She said progress is accelerating. In the past 24 hours, researchers unwrapped the full length of one scroll and produced about 140 new columns of text. Until recently, they were only uncovering about 10 percent of the columns.

Open data and a $1 million prize

So far, about 45 scrolls and fragments have been scanned. More than 600 unopened scrolls remain, and large parts of the villa where they were found have yet to be excavated, meaning more could still be discovered.

The Vesuvius Challenge has already awarded $1.8 million in prizes for work linked to the texts. All data, code and models are now being made available online, and $1 million is offered to the first person or team to read another scroll in full. Nat Friedman, a US technology executive and one of the project's founding sponsors, said the algorithms can be improved considerably and that the ink detection techniques can be advanced much further. He encouraged more computing experts to get involved.

WALL-Y
WALL-Y is an AI bot created in Claude. Learn more about WALL-Y and how we develop her. You can find her news here.
You can chat with WALL-Y GPT about this news article and fact-based optimism

⏩ The summer is over – let's get going!

I spent a week in Poland with my son, brother, and mother. There we traveled through our family's history. My grandfather was from Poland. I've written about him before.

I've also been digging deep into AI and didactics. That is, the study of how teaching is designed so that people learn, and how AI can be used in it and affects it. More on that to come.

Now the summer is over and we're back to news every day and the newsletter every week.

Mathias Sundin
The Angry Optimist

💡 Fact-based optimistic news of the week

🌾 Indian scientists have bred rice that handles both flood and drought

India has bred two rice varieties for opposite water problems. One yields nearly 50 percent more in flood years with no penalty in normal years. The other yields up to 35 percent more in dry conditions and grows in dry soil, without flooded paddies. The poorest farmers gain the most.

Read more on Warp News

🐚 Laos pushes back parasitic disease to below one percent

In the worst-affected areas of Laos, the share of people infected with the snail-borne parasitic disease schistosomiasis has dropped to below one percent, down from over 40 percent in some areas in 2003.

Read more on Warp News

🪨 New method halves the cost of extracting lithium from rock

Researchers at MIT have developed a process that dissolves lithium minerals at room temperature instead of above 1,800 degrees. The method is estimated to cost half as much as today's extraction of lithium from hard rock. The process recycles its own chemicals, bringing waste close to zero.

Read more on Warp News

🛫 Autonomous system designed to fly itself from takeoff to touchdown

Merlin's autonomous flight system is built to handle the entire flight, from takeoff to touchdown, and can reduce crew workload. The technology is designed to fly several types of large aircraft, including commercial jets and military transport planes.

Read more on Warp News

✂️ New CRISPR method seeks out and destroys cancer cells

In lab tests the method destroyed the mutated cells but left healthy cells almost entirely unharmed, even though they differed by just a single building block in their DNA. The technique is programmable, which means a new mutation only requires researchers to create a new guide RNA.

Read more on Warp News

🚧 Researchers build material atom by atom, long considered impossible

Researchers have placed individual carbon units at exact locations on a silicon surface and built structures atom by atom, something dismissed for decades as unworkable. In most attempts the carbon landed correctly, with an accuracy of up to 97 percent.

Read more on Warp News

🧬 The bluebuck went extinct in 1799, now it is being de-extincted

The bluebuck was the first large African mammal driven to extinction by humans in modern times. The company Colossal Biosciences is now working to bring the species back using genetic technology. The work is building methods that can also help other threatened antelope species.

Read more on Warp News

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A species that disappeared more than 200 years ago

The bluebuck was an antelope that lived on the coastal grasslands of South Africa. It was last seen in the wild in 1799. By then it was already the first large African mammal that humans had driven to extinction in recorded history. Hunting, colonial expansion, and rapid changes to the landscape all contributed to its loss.

The bluebuck was a mid-sized antelope. It stood up to nearly 4 feet at the shoulder and weighed between 265 and 441 pounds. It had a silvery gray coat with a bluish tone in sunlight, curved horns, and a lighter facial mask. Its closest living relatives are the roan and sable antelope.

Today only seven authenticated specimens remain, all of them in European museums in Berlin, Vienna, Stockholm, Paris, Leiden, Amsterdam, and London. None of them is complete. Most consist of parts of skins or isolated skulls.

The genetics are being mapped

Colossal Biosciences is now working to restore the species. The company published a first bluebuck genome in a scientific study in 2024. It showed that the species is closely related to the roan and sable antelope.

Researchers are now generating data from additional museum samples to understand the genetic diversity that existed before the species died out. They have also built reference genomes for the roan and sable antelope. By comparing the genomes, they are identifying which genes give the bluebuck its distinguishing traits, such as the gray coat and the facial mask.

The steps in the work

Colossal's researchers are among the first in the world to establish cell lines from antelopes. The cell lines will be used to edit the genome so that the bluebuck's traits are restored.

In parallel, assisted reproductive technology for antelopes is being developed, including ovum pick-up, in vitro fertilization, and embryo transfer. The final step is cloning through somatic cell nuclear transfer. In this process, a cell nucleus carrying the bluebuck's genetic variants is placed into an egg cell from an antelope, after which the embryo is transferred to a surrogate mother.

Benefits for other antelopes

The work is being carried out together with the organizations Endangered Wildlife Trust, Advanced Conservation Strategies, and Re:wild. More than 90 percent of the bluebuck's original grasslands have been lost to agriculture and development, which means that reintroduction also requires restoring the habitat.

The methods being developed can be applied to more species. Seven bovid species are currently critically endangered, and two more have gone extinct in recent times. The reproductive and genetic technology developed in the project could become a toolkit for strengthening vulnerable antelope populations in Africa.

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It is now possible to build material atom by atom on a silicon surface, with control over both where the atoms end up and how they bond together. The researchers placed carbon units at predetermined locations and then built further on them. The idea of making material by moving individual atoms one at a time has existed for about 40 years, but until now has existed almost only in theory. The work was carried out by the company CBN Nano Technologies in Ottawa, Canada.

An idea long seen as unworkable

The method is called mechanosynthesis and was described in theory back in the 1980s and 1990s. The central idea was a tool that places carbon units on a surface to build up structures step by step. Whether it would be possible to control chemical reactions so precisely at the atomic level was questioned early on. The chemist Richard Smalley argued that it was not possible, an objection that became known as the fat fingers and sticky fingers problem. The idea therefore stayed on the drawing board and in computer calculations for a long time. Among the authors of the new study are Ralph Merkle and Robert Freitas, two of the researchers who developed the original theory.

Carbon moved two atoms at a time

The researchers worked with carbon in the form of so-called C2 units, building blocks made of two carbon atoms. Each unit was moved from a molecule to a specific spot on the silicon surface. The molecule served both as a tool and as building material. When it was brought close to the surface, a chemical bond formed, and the carbon unit was left behind in the right place.

Instead of using heat, light, or electricity to drive the reaction, the atoms are pressed together purely mechanically. The experiments were done at 4 kelvin, near absolute zero.

Patterns and new structures

The researchers repeated the process and placed several carbon units side by side. They built patterns with two and three units in a row. In one attempt they placed nine C2 units, 18 carbon atoms in total, in the shape of an X.

They also built longer carbon chains. By joining carbon units together step by step, they created a structure with four carbon atoms, called IR-C4. That structure has not been made before. The method can therefore be used both to place carbon at specific locations and to create entirely new structures.

High accuracy

Each step was repeated between tens and more than a hundred times. For the simplest structure, the carbon landed correctly in 93 percent of attempts, 184 out of 197. For the next step the figure was 97 percent, and for the more advanced structures 92 and 84 percent respectively.

A total of 351 attempts were carried out. Errors were rare. In 3 percent of cases a hydrogen atom was pulled off the surface instead. In only a single case did a silicon atom come loose. The finished structures were stable and remained unchanged for days to weeks during the measurements.

The results give control over composition, bonding, and placement at the atomic level, and lay a foundation for building three-dimensional carbon structures on silicon and connecting them to electronics and quantum components at the molecular scale.

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A common mutation behind many cancers

Researchers have built a CRISPR system that finds and destroys cancer cells. The method targets a mutation in the p53 gene, which is damaged in roughly half of all cancers. The results are published in the journal Nature.

The study comes from Jennifer Doudna's Innovative Genomics Institute at UC Berkeley, together with researchers at UC San Francisco, Gladstone Institutes, the University of Utah and Utah State University.

The p53 gene normally works as a defense against cancer. It stops cells from turning into cancer cells. When p53 is mutated, it loses its function and the cancer can grow freely. The mutation is common across many cancer types. It is found in 70 to 90 percent of some of the most difficult cases, including ovarian cancer, pancreatic cancer and non-small cell lung cancer.

The role p53 plays has been known since the late 1980s. Despite that, no drug targeting p53 exists on the market. Researchers have tried for 35 years. One reason is that tumor suppressors lack the pockets where small drug molecules can attach.

CRISPR as a destroyer instead of a repairer

Most cancer drugs are inhibitors. They tamp down an overactive gene. But a mutated p53 has instead lost its function, and then that method does not work. First author Jingkun Zeng chose a different path. Instead of fixing the broken gene, he wanted to find and destroy the cells that carry it.

The method builds on how CRISPR works in nature. There, CRISPR systems are destroyers, not repairers. They protect microbes against viruses by cutting up the virus's genetic material. The researchers rebuilt a system called CRISPR-Cas12a2. It looks for the RNA signature that only a cell with the mutated gene produces. When the system recognizes the signature, the enzyme Cas12a2 activates. It cuts up all the genetic material inside that one cell. The cell dies, while healthy cells are left untouched.

Tells a healthy cell from a sick one by a single letter

The researchers tested the method in cultured mammalian cells containing both healthy and cancer cells. The system told the two apart and destroyed only the cells with the mutated RNA. The cells with the healthy variant were left almost entirely unharmed. The two cell types differed by a single changed building block in their DNA. That makes the method far more precise than chemotherapy and radiation, which kill all dividing cells, including healthy ones.

Programmable for new mutations

One advantage of the technique is that it is programmable. When a new mutation appears, researchers can create a new guide RNA to find it and test whether it works. That is faster than developing a small-molecule drug or an antibody treatment.

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Built for the entire flight

Merlin's system, called Merlin Pilot, is designed to operate from takeoff to touchdown. It is meant to manage the aircraft's systems, monitor the environment, and handle communications. The company says the technology can reduce crew workload during all phases of flight.

The system is intended to be compatible with several types of aircraft, including commercial jets from Airbus and Boeing as well as various military designs. On May 14, Merlin presented a version for commercial freight, Merlin Pilot for Commercial Cargo. The company says the technology can improve aviation safety by preventing accidents caused by human error. The system also enables a model in which a single pilot can sit alone in the cockpit of aircraft normally flown by two pilots.

The review is complete

Aerospace and defense company Merlin has completed a critical design review for its autonomous flight system for the C-130J transport aircraft. The review was conducted together with U.S. Special Operations Command, USSOCOM. According to the company, the review confirms that the system's design is finished and ready for the next step.

With the review complete, the program moves from design work to integration into the aircraft. A formal test campaign follows, including aircraft-level testing. The company describes the work as a step-by-step process from design to verification, through ground tests and later flight demonstrations.

Part of a larger contract

The review is part of a previously awarded contract between Merlin and USSOCOM. The contract's total ceiling value is more than 100 million dollars. Under the agreement, Merlin is developing its AI-powered autonomy technology onboard the C-130J. The company sees possible ways to expand the technology to other military platforms and to civil aviation.

Tests on several aircraft types

Merlin has tested its system during several hundred flights with various types of aircraft. In these projects, the company has equipped a Cessna Grand Caravan with autonomous technology, among others. A preliminary design review of the C-130J-specific system was completed in March.

Merlin was founded in 2021. On March 16, the company became publicly traded through a combination with Inflection Point Acquisition Corp IV. In connection with the deal, Merlin secured 200 million dollars. In April, an additional 80 million dollars in financing was added.

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Lithium from stone, not brine

Demand for lithium has risen quickly as lithium-ion batteries power more and more of our daily lives. Large deposits exist in the U.S., Europe, and Australia, but China dominates global refining. The biggest difficulty has been getting lithium out of hard rock in a usable form.

Today, lithium is extracted from hard rock by heating the rock to over 1,800 degrees and leaching out the lithium with chemicals. The rest of the rock is discarded. The process requires a lot of energy and produces a lot of waste, and is often more expensive than extracting lithium from brine.

A liquid that dissolves the rock

Researchers at MIT and several other institutions have developed a method that dissolves spodumene, the most common lithium-bearing mineral, at room temperature. They use a mixture of water and ammonium fluoride that dissolves the silica in the rock first. That is the hard step in extraction, and by reversing the order they can get out the other parts.

Spodumene consists mainly of lithium, aluminum, and silica. The researchers managed to separate all three parts in usable form. From the lithium they produced lithium fluoride, lithium hydroxide, and lithium carbonate, salts used to make batteries. The aluminum was separated using a high-temperature separation technique, and the silica through precipitation.

Every part of the rock is used

Instead of discarding the rest of the rock, each part is put to use. The aluminum is smelter-grade and the silica can be used as an additive in cement. The researchers tested the silica by casting cement cubes and measuring their strength using industrial methods. The lithium carbonate met the purity requirements for battery grade.

The chemicals that start the reaction, ammonium fluoride and water, can be recovered and reused. When the process produces ammonium fluoride, ammonia gas is released, which then precipitates the silica again and returns the starting material. That makes the process circular, and waste approaches zero.

Tested on rock from around the world

The researchers ran the method on 17 different sources of spodumene, showing that it works on rock from different parts of the world. The idea for the method came from a glass etching cream that dissolves the surface of glass. The active ingredient turned out to be ammonium fluoride.

The closed process is estimated to cost half as much as traditional extraction from hard rock, and can therefore compete with extraction from brine. The researchers expect that global lithium production needs to quadruple by 2040. A study describing the process has been published in Science. The researchers have already begun commercializing the technology through the MIT spinout Rock Zero.

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A disease spread by freshwater snails

Schistosomiasis is caused by a parasite spread through freshwater snails. The parasite's microscopic larvae live in the same water that people use daily, for washing, fishing, and transport. In Laos, the disease has long been a public health problem, especially in communities along the Mekong River. There, the share of infected people exceeded 40 percent in some areas in 2003.

The disease can cause symptoms such as an enlarged liver and bleeding during toilet visits. In severe cases, it leads to serious liver damage with complications that can be fatal.

Remaining in a single province

After decades of efforts, schistosomiasis now remains only in Champasack Province in southern Laos. About 120,000 people in 202 villages are estimated to be at risk. The share of infected people has dropped to below one percent in the high-risk areas, but thousands of people are still affected, above all children.

Treatment, water, and surveillance

The strategy is built on several parts. Mass treatment is carried out in all villages in the affected areas. A single-dose treatment is given each year and clears the parasite from infected people, which both provides relief and prevents continued spread. During 2024, over 95,000 people were treated.

The work also includes better water and sanitation, health education in both villages and schools, and disease surveillance. Experts from China's National Institute of Parasitic Diseases and the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute have strengthened surveillance and laboratory work, which is needed to detect cases and track progress.

Cooperation across borders

The effort is a partnership between the Lao Ministry of Health, the World Health Organization WHO, China's Global Development and South-South Cooperation Fund, and the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation. China and Switzerland have contributed 1.18 million dollars.

The Lao Ministry of Health is at the same time cooperating with the Cambodian Ministry of Health. They exchange data, lessons, and solutions and are taking on schistosomiasis on both sides of the Mekong.

The progress is built on work from healthcare workers, community leaders, health officials at local, provincial, and national levels, as well as political leaders and development partners. Earlier, the same work removed trachoma in 2017 and lymphatic filariasis in 2023. The number of malaria cases fell to 272 during 2025.

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📰 An unacceptable failure

It would be so easy for news media to be more balanced.

Perhaps the very lowest-hanging fruit is press releases and articles from international bodies and universities.

Like this week, when we write about how deaths from intestinal infections have dropped by two-thirds since 1990.

I didn't dig this out of some database myself. It's CIDRAP (Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy) that wrote an accessible article about a new research study.

And it's no trivial matter either. The number of deaths per year has fallen by almost two and a half million people.

Why isn't this news in EVERY single news outlet?

I can't find it at CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post, or The Guardian. Nor can I find it at the BBC, Reuters, AP, NPR, NBC, ABC, CBS, USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, Bloomberg, Al Jazeera, or The Economist.

This imbalance makes us all a little dumber.

We get a skewed perception of reality and make worse decisions.

And it would be so easy for the news media to at least get a little better.

Mathias Sundin
The Angry Optimist

💡 Fact-based optimistic news of the week

📉 Deaths from intestinal infections have fallen by two-thirds since 1990, from 3.7 to 1.3 million

The rotavirus vaccine, introduced globally in 2006, is up to 98 percent effective against severe illness in infants in high-income countries. The share of deaths affecting children under five fell from 53 percent in 1990 to 30 percent in 2023.

Read more on Warp News

🛰️ A satellite read its own images, could keep watch on Earth in real time

A satellite identified what it was looking for on its own, without analysts on the ground. It was the first time an AI that both understands language and reads images was used in space. The technology can reduce the amount of raw data that analysts have to sift through today.

Read more on Warp News

🔬 Most of what's inside the cell is invisible, a new laser method could change that

Today's cryo-electron microscopes reveal only about 10% of human proteins, and less than 1% inside living cells. A new technique sharply improves image contrast using a laser 100 million times brighter than the Sun's surface. Researchers estimate over 50% of the cell's proteins could become visible.

Read more on Warp News

📉 Child marriage and intimate partner violence continue to decline in India

The share of girls married off as children has fallen to 20.1 percent. The share of women subjected to violence by their partner has dropped to 22.3 percent. Intimate partner violence has decreased by nearly seven percentage points since the previous survey.

Read more on Warp News

🏍️ Electric motorcycles accelerate in Africa

Industry leader Spiro has delivered more than 100,000 electric motorcycles and built over 2,500 battery swapping stations. In Kenya, electric motorcycles now account for at least 16 percent of all motorcycle sales.

Read more on Warp News

💵 Labor poverty in Mexico falls to 30.7 percent

The share of Mexico's population whose labor income is not enough to cover the food fell to 30.7 percent in the first quarter of 2026. The decline was 3.2 percentage points compared with the same period in 2025. The drop is seen both in rural areas and in cities.

Read more on Warp News

🪪 Millions in Benin now have an official identity, opening access to school and banking

In 2017, about 20% of Benin's population had no official papers. Now, nearly 99% of Benin's population is registered in a biometric ID system. An official identity provides access to school, a bank account, credit, and a business of one's own.

Read more on Warp News

🎙️ AI talk or master class?

I'm giving a lot of talks and master classes on AI in several different countries. Happy to come to your organization.

Learn more at mathiassundin.org.

The rice that waits out the flood

Over the past twelve years India has developed nearly 3,000 climate-resilient crops. Two of them are rice varieties that solve opposite water problems: too much water and too little.

Ordinary rice dies if it stays underwater for more than a week. Researchers crossed a gene called SUB1 into the popular Swarna variety. The result, Swarna-Sub1, can stay submerged for two to three weeks.

When the water rises, the plant does not try to grow taller than the surface. Instead it powers down, saves its energy, and waits. When the water recedes, it continues growing where it left off.

In a study in the state of Odisha, researchers followed 128 villages over two growing seasons. During a flood year Swarna-Sub1 yielded about 45 percent more than ordinary rice after ten days of flooding. For each additional day underwater, yields rose by roughly 141 pounds per acre. On fields without flooding there was no difference between the varieties. The farmer loses nothing by switching.

Farmers dared to invest more

With a rice that withstands flooding, farmers no longer needed to hedge with cautious choices. Those who received Swarna-Sub1 cultivated about a quarter of an acre more land and used 54 pounds more fertilizer, an increase of 11 percent. More of them also took out agricultural loans, an increase of 36 percent.

At the same time, farmers stored less rice in reserve, about 330 pounds less out of a previous 3,770 pounds. They trusted that the harvest would hold.

Yields rose by 625 pounds per acre on average across both years, about 10 percent, even though the second year was not a flood year. Income rose by nearly 3,000 Indian rupees per acre, about 47 dollars.

Greatest benefit for the most vulnerable

The poorest farmers most often cultivate low-lying land that floods most easily. They were hit by nearly two more days of flooding than other farmers. If all farmers in the area had used Swarna-Sub1, yields would have risen by 40 percent among the most vulnerable groups, compared with 25 percent among the rest.

A rice for drought

The opposite problem is too little water. Here there is the DRR Dhan 44 variety, developed by the Indian Institute of Rice Research in Hyderabad through a collaboration between the research institute IRRI and India. It was released in 2014 for cultivation in the states of Uttarakhand, Haryana, and Bihar.

Drought tolerance is harder to build in than flood tolerance, because the trait is governed by many genes at once. DRR Dhan 44 solves the problem in a different way. It grows fast and finishes before the water runs out. It tolerates drought during the sensitive flowering stage and uses nutrients efficiently. It can be grown in dry soil, like wheat, without flooded paddies.

The variety yields more than several ordinary varieties. In comparisons it gave 25.4 percent more than the Sahbhagidhan variety and 31.1 percent more than Narendra 97. In Haryana it gave nearly 32 percent more than the Govind variety, and in Bihar nearly 35 percent more than the Prabhat and Rajendra Bhagvati varieties. It is also resistant to the fungal disease blast and tolerates bacterial diseases and pests.

In the state of Telangana, farmers harvested 8 tons per hectare during the 2015 growing season. The variety does well with sprinkler irrigation and few inputs.

In field trials in 2016, DRR Dhan 44 gave on average nearly 12 percent more than the ordinary MTU 1010 variety. In a single trial the difference was 25 percent. Demand for seed has risen, with orders increasing sevenfold between 2015 and 2018.

WALL-Y
WALL-Y is an AI bot created in Claude. Learn more about WALL-Y and how we develop her. You can find her news here.
You can chat with WALL-Y GPT about this news article and fact-based optimism

📰 An unacceptable failure

It would be so easy for news media to be more balanced.

Perhaps the very lowest-hanging fruit is press releases and articles from international bodies and universities.

Like this week, when we write about how deaths from intestinal infections have dropped by two-thirds since 1990.

I didn't dig this out of some database myself. It's CIDRAP (Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy) that wrote an accessible article about a new research study.

And it's no trivial matter either. The number of deaths per year has fallen by almost two and a half million people.

Why isn't this news in EVERY single news outlet?

I can't find it at CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post, or The Guardian. Nor can I find it at the BBC, Reuters, AP, NPR, NBC, ABC, CBS, USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, Bloomberg, Al Jazeera, or The Economist.

This imbalance makes us all a little dumber.

We get a skewed perception of reality and make worse decisions.

And it would be so easy for the news media to at least get a little better.

Mathias Sundin
The Angry Optimist

💡 Fact-based optimistic news of the week

📉 Deaths from intestinal infections have fallen by two-thirds since 1990, from 3.7 to 1.3 million

The rotavirus vaccine, introduced globally in 2006, is up to 98 percent effective against severe illness in infants in high-income countries. The share of deaths affecting children under five fell from 53 percent in 1990 to 30 percent in 2023.

Read more on Warp News

🛰️ A satellite read its own images, could keep watch on Earth in real time

A satellite identified what it was looking for on its own, without analysts on the ground. It was the first time an AI that both understands language and reads images was used in space. The technology can reduce the amount of raw data that analysts have to sift through today.

Read more on Warp News

🔬 Most of what's inside the cell is invisible, a new laser method could change that

Today's cryo-electron microscopes reveal only about 10% of human proteins, and less than 1% inside living cells. A new technique sharply improves image contrast using a laser 100 million times brighter than the Sun's surface. Researchers estimate over 50% of the cell's proteins could become visible.

Read more on Warp News

📉 Child marriage and intimate partner violence continue to decline in India

The share of girls married off as children has fallen to 20.1 percent. The share of women subjected to violence by their partner has dropped to 22.3 percent. Intimate partner violence has decreased by nearly seven percentage points since the previous survey.

Read more on Warp News

🏍️ Electric motorcycles accelerate in Africa

Industry leader Spiro has delivered more than 100,000 electric motorcycles and built over 2,500 battery swapping stations. In Kenya, electric motorcycles now account for at least 16 percent of all motorcycle sales.

Read more on Warp News

💵 Labor poverty in Mexico falls to 30.7 percent

The share of Mexico's population whose labor income is not enough to cover the food fell to 30.7 percent in the first quarter of 2026. The decline was 3.2 percentage points compared with the same period in 2025. The drop is seen both in rural areas and in cities.

Read more on Warp News

🪪 Millions in Benin now have an official identity, opening access to school and banking

In 2017, about 20% of Benin's population had no official papers. Now, nearly 99% of Benin's population is registered in a biometric ID system. An official identity provides access to school, a bank account, credit, and a business of one's own.

Read more on Warp News

✉️ Get a dose of fact-based, free, optimism once a week

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🎤 Talk on AI

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Why an identity matters so much

An official identity is a precondition for taking part in society. Without one, you cannot open a bank account, register a business, sit national exams, apply for jobs, or use mobile payments. Anyone without papers is shut out of both school and the formal economy.

In 2017, about 20 percent of Benin's population had no official papers. They had no birth certificate, no national ID, and no other documents. That meant one in five residents was cut off from basic services.

From one in five without papers to nearly everyone registered

In less than ten years, that has changed. Nearly 99 percent of the population is now registered in a biometric system. By the end of May 2025, more than 7.7 million people had a Personal Identification Number. More than 6.1 million certificates had been issued, entirely free of charge. In some cases the authorities created identity documents on the spot, with the help of two witnesses and a municipal officer.

The ID card opens doors

The reform is led by Benin's government through the "C'est Moi" card, which means "It's me." The card provides access to school, a bank account, credit, employment, and entrepreneurship. It makes it possible to sign formal employment contracts and register businesses, which in turn can create jobs for others.

Support from the World Bank

The reform is part of the regional WURI project, which aims to make identity a right for all. By providing access to jobs, credit, and entrepreneurship, the project ties into the World Bank's work on job creation and economic inclusion.

Aristide Adjinacou, Director General of the Agency for the Identification of Persons (ANIP), says everyone can now access public services, open an account, and own a mobile phone. He says the results rest on the country's own talent, the national ecosystem, and partners such as the WURI project.

WURI is financed by the World Bank with $273 million, of which $45 million goes to Benin. The project covers five other West African countries: Burkina Faso, Côte d'Ivoire, Guinea, Niger, and Togo.

The project also supports the government's safety net programs and a single social registry, which strengthens governance and planning.

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Incomes stretch further

Labor poverty measures whether income from work is enough to pay for the food basket, which corresponds to the so-called extreme poverty line by income. In the first quarter of 2026, the share stood at 30.7 percent of the population. A year earlier, the figure was 33.9 percent.

Behind the decline is an increase in real labor income per person. This allowed a larger share of the population to cover the cost of the food basket.

Decline in rural areas and cities

In rural areas, labor poverty fell from 48.0 percent of the rural population to 44.2 percent. That is a reduction of 3.8 percentage points.

In cities, the share dropped from 29.7 percent of the urban population to 26.9 percent, a decline of 2.8 percentage points. The reduction was therefore larger in rural areas, even though the level there remains higher than in cities.

Improvement against the close of 2025 as well

Compared with the fourth quarter of 2025, national labor poverty decreased by 1.6 percentage points, from 32.3 percent to 30.7 percent.

Quarter on quarter, the figure fell by 2.4 percentage points in rural areas and by 1.2 percentage points in cities.

Labor poverty is part of the analysis of multidimensional poverty, in the section on economic well-being. It focuses on the ability of labor income to cover the food basket.

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Electric motorcycles are becoming more common in several African countries. Tens of thousands are sold each year, and in Kenya they now account for at least 16 percent of total motorcycle sales. The sector has moved from early pilot projects to large-scale production and sales.

A large market to take over

There are more than 30 million gasoline-powered motorcycle taxis in several African countries. Operating and maintenance costs are high, because the vehicles are used hard and need frequent service. Riders earn little. When they switch to electric, the total cost of ownership drops noticeably.

Established financing systems for riders, combined with models where the battery is rented as a service, lower the barriers to going electric. Together, this has drawn more than 100 companies into the sector across the continent.

Spiro the largest on the continent

Spiro is the largest player. The company has delivered more than 100,000 electric motorcycles across several countries. It has built more than 2,500 battery swapping stations and carried out more than 30 million battery swaps to date.

Spiro has acquired Coexlion, a firm specializing in motorcycle engineering and design. The purchase is meant to strengthen Spiro's product development and its ability to manufacture more locally. Coexlion's 28 engineers have contributed to more than 25 motorcycle programs globally, including electric two-wheelers, chassis, battery systems, and industrial design. The team is based in India and the United Kingdom. Spiro already has a research and development center in Pune with more than 150 engineers and more than 30 of its own patents.

Roam launches a new generation

Roam, one of the early players in the sector, has launched the Roam Air Gen 3. The model has a new battery built to reduce theft, shorten charging times, and last longer for riders who cover high mileage.

The battery has GPS tracking and is water resistant to IP67 protection class. It charges at 2 kW, which Roam says is the fastest on the market. The battery meets the international AIS-156 safety standard.

Charging delivers more than one mile of range for less than two minutes of charging, meaning the battery charges from 20 to 80 percent in under 40 minutes. Riders thus face less downtime and have more time to earn money.

Roam tested durability by running over a Gen 3 battery with an 18-ton truck. After the test, the battery was retrieved and reinstalled in a motorcycle. It continued to work as normal.

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Fewer married off before the age of 18

India continues to reduce the number of child marriages. This is shown by new data from the National Family Health Survey NFHS-6, covering the period 2023–24. According to the survey, 20.1 percent of women in the 20 to 24 age group were married before they turned 18. In India, 18 is the legal age for women to marry.

The figure has fallen compared with the previous survey. In NFHS-5, which covered the years 2019 to 2021, the share stood at 23.3 percent. This means the share of girls married off as children has fallen by just over three percentage points between the two surveys.

Intimate partner violence is decreasing

The survey also shows that fewer women are subjected to violence by their partner. The share of married women who reported experiencing violence in their relationship has fallen to 22.3 percent. In the previous survey, the figure stood at 29.2 percent. That is a decline of nearly seven percentage points.

One of India's largest surveys

NFHS-6 is one of the most comprehensive surveys of its kind in India. It is based on data from around 679,000 households across 715 districts. The survey is carried out by India's Ministry of Health and tracks population, health, nutrition, and family conditions over time.

By comparing the results from NFHS-5 and NFHS-6, it is possible to see the direction of the trend. The latest survey for 2023–24 shows that the decline is holding for both child marriage and intimate partner violence.

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An old contrast problem

Inside every cell, tens of thousands of different types of proteins are at work. They ferry molecules, send signals, repair DNA, and decide whether a cell should divide or die. Most are too small to image with today's microscopes. Those that can be seen must be pulled out of the cell and studied in isolation, not in the crowded, dynamic environment where the processes of life take place.

The solution is called a laser phase plate. It builds on a principle that physicist Fritz Zernike described back in 1942, work that later earned him the Nobel Prize. By placing a small optical element in the path of the light, he could convert invisible differences in the light wave's phase into visible differences in brightness. In theory the same trick should work for electron microscopes, but any material placed in the electron beam gets damaged and ruins the image.

A laser instead of material

Holger Müller at UC Berkeley and his colleague Robert Glaeser proposed more than 15 years ago to replace the material with a powerful laser. To work, the laser must be extremely intense. The solution became a pair of mirrors that bounce the laser beam back and forth roughly 10,000 times. Each bounce amplifies the intensity until the light between the mirrors reaches about 100 million times the intensity of the surface of the Sun.

The mirrors must be polished to a surface roughness below one angstrom, roughly the diameter of a single atom, and aligned to a precision of one thousandth of a degree. The entire laser apparatus fits inside a device the size of an espresso cup, which sits within the microscope column.

Biohub also built a newer version with two crossed laser beams in an X-shape, called the xLPP. It distributes the laser power across two beams and suppresses a known artifact in which faint copies of objects otherwise obscure the biological signal.

The results in three studies

The researchers report their results in three scientific papers, published in Science, in Nature Communications, and as a preprint. The Berkeley team imaged the enzyme aldolase and then hemoglobin, the protein that carries oxygen in red blood cells. With the laser switched on, resolution improved by up to 44 percent. Blurry details became clearly visible.

At Biohub, a team imaged the protein apoferritin with the dual laser at 1.8 angstroms, near the theoretical limit of the technology. They also imaged frozen E. coli bacteria and showed that the laser raised contrast where conventional imaging falls short.

Proteins in their proper environment

The technology is combined with cryo-electron tomography, or cryo-ET, which builds three-dimensional reconstructions inside whole cells. Biohub's researchers have already imaged structures called lysosomes in disease states. Defects in lysosome function have been linked to dozens of rare diseases and to common neurodegenerative conditions, including Alzheimer's disease.

Biohub shares its tomography data freely with the research community through the CryoET Data Portal, which holds tens of thousands of annotated tomograms. In April the institute committed 500 million dollars over five years to generating new cellular data to train AI models, from molecule to whole organism, in both healthy and diseased states.

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The satellite interpreted questions in plain language

In April, the first test took place in which an Earth observation satellite found what it was looking for on its own. It happened aboard YAM-9, a craft built by the space company Loft Orbital. A software package developed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory pointed out areas of interest based on questions written in plain language.

Normally, satellites send large amounts of data down to analysts on Earth. There, machine learning or human eyes are used to interpret what the images show. In the test, the interpretation took place aboard the satellite instead.

The model classified images directly in orbit

The technology is based on Google DeepMind's model Gemma 3. It is what is called a vision-language model. A model like this can both understand text and read images. It reads a question written in plain language and then locates what is being asked for in an image. The model is built to run on limited hardware far from a data center.

The researchers asked the model to classify sensor data, for example where natural surroundings meet built-up areas, or to identify infrastructure around railway hubs. The model handled the tasks.

YAM-9 was launched in the fall of 2025 as a test craft for the company's space projects involving AI. On board is an Nvidia Jetson Orin AGX graphics card, one of the leading chips for computing in space.

The software was adapted for space

Juan Delfa Victoria, a technical leader in NASA JPL's AI group, led the development of the software package NAVI-Orbital. It served as the framework for Gemma 3. Even though the model is an off-the-shelf product, the engineers had to streamline the package to reduce the number of software libraries and the memory it required.

According to Loft, in the near term the technology can make space sensors more useful by sorting data already in orbit. That reduces the flood of raw data that analysts have to sift through today. In the longer term, the test is seen as proof that larger AI infrastructure can run in space.

According to Loft's head of AI, Paul Lasserre, a satellite with such a model can be given the task of keeping watch on an area and reporting when something changes, and the operator can carry on a back-and-forth dialogue with the satellite.

Loft currently operates twelve craft in orbit. To cover anywhere on Earth in real time would, according to Lasserre, require between 50 and 100 satellites of YAM-9's type.

The idea for the project came about when Delfa Victoria and JPL researcher Taran Cyriac John were thinking about digital assistants for astronauts on the Moon or Mars. The thought was that astronauts in pressurized suits cannot type on a keyboard, and that an interactive AI assistant could then help them.

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📚 What are you reading this summer?

As is tradition, I'm sharing my summer reading tips. Among them a book about a fifty-year-old and one about superintelligence.

What are you reading this summer? Would love to know!

Mathias Sundin
The Angry Optimist

🏆 This week's Premium Supporter article

📚 The angry optimist's summer reading tips

A handful of books that will hopefully make your summer better.

Read more on Warp News

💡 Fact-based optimistic news of the week

⛽ Petrol cars have vanished from China's ten best-selling vehicles

In May, all of China's ten best-selling cars were electric vehicles or plug-in hybrids. Petrol cars have completely vanished from the list. Sales of new petrol cars in China have fallen by 41.8 percent compared with a year earlier.

Read more on Warp News

📉 Australia's gas use has peaked and is now declining

Gas use in Australia has peaked across all sectors after more than half a century of growth. Gas for electricity generation has fallen 11 percent since 2014, and residential gas use peaked in 2020.

Read more on Warp News

☀️ Solar overtakes gas in Asia

Solar power has surpassed gas to become Asia’s third-largest source of electricity. Solar generation in Asia has nearly quadrupled since 2020, reaching 1,727 terawatt hours over the twelve months to April 2026.

Read more on Warp News

🦏 Satellites track animals from space to detect poachers in real time

When a poacher approaches, the animals flee in patterns that can be recognized, and tags on the animals pass the signal on so rangers can intervene. By 2027, six receivers in orbit will be able to receive data on animal movements in real time across the entire planet.

Read more on Warp News

🇺🇳 The number of refugees in the world fell last year for the first time in a decade

The global number of refugees dropped by 3 percent during 2025 to 41.6 million. A total of 14.7 million displaced people returned to their home or origin areas during the year. Nearly 46,000 stateless people gained citizenship across 24 countries.

Read more on Warp News

🌊 Chad's capital weathered record water levels without major damage

N'Djamena sits where the Chari and Logone rivers meet, leaving it highly exposed to flooding. During the 2024 rainy season the city protected 1.5 million residents even as rivers hit record levels, after clearing 217 miles of drainage and deploying 12 mobile pumps.

Read more on Warp News

🤑 New research: Freer economies grew without harming the environment

A study of 49 economic liberalizations shows that GDP per person rose 16 percent within ten years. Total greenhouse gas emissions did not increase, and deaths from air pollution declined. After the year 2000, emissions fell both per person and per dollar of economic output.

Read more on Warp News

🎙️ AI talk or master class?

I'm giving a lot of talks and master classes on AI in several different countries. Happy to come to your organization.

Learn more at mathiassundin.org.

Fewer deaths across the world

The number of deaths from infections that cause diarrhea and other intestinal illnesses has fallen sharply since 1990. This is shown in a study published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases.

The researchers used data from the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study (GBD) 2023 and examined mortality across 204 countries and territories during the period 1990 to 2023. The category included diarrheal diseases, typhoid and paratyphoid fever, invasive infections from non-typhoidal Salmonella bacteria, and other intestinal infections. They typically spread through contaminated food, contaminated water, or hands.

The global number of deaths fell from 3.69 million in 1990 to 1.27 million in 2023. The age-standardized mortality rate decreased over the same period from 74.1 per 100,000 population to 16.4 per 100,000. Diarrheal diseases accounted for the most deaths in 2023, at 1.11 million.

The rotavirus vaccine has a major effect

Rotavirus was the most common cause behind the deaths from diarrheal diseases, at 16.3 percent, followed by norovirus at 10.2 percent and Shigella at 9.3 percent.

The researchers explain the reduction through several overlapping preventive measures. Increased access to the rotavirus vaccine is one of them. The vaccine is up to 98 percent effective against severe illness in infants in high-income countries and was introduced globally in 2006. Other factors include increased access to oral rehydration salts, which quickly restore fluid balance during diarrhea, as well as clean drinking water, zinc treatment, and safer access to toilets.

Children are affected less and less

Mortality decreased across all age groups, but the reduction was largest among young children. In 1990, children under five made up roughly 53 percent of deaths from intestinal infections. By 2023, the share had fallen to 30 percent.

Among children under five, rotavirus was the cause behind 40.2 percent of deaths from diarrheal diseases, followed by Shigella at 24.0 percent and adenovirus at 23.4 percent.

More countries are reaching the target

Of the 204 countries and territories examined, 141 met the global target for mortality from diarrheal diseases among children under five in 2023. As of 2023, the rotavirus vaccine had been introduced in 123 countries.

The researchers point to several new initiatives. The rotavirus vaccine has begun to be used in Vietnam, Iran, and Somalia, among other countries. The World Bank has recently granted funding for a program to improve access to clean water, sanitation, and hygiene in eastern and southern Africa.

WALL-Y
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📚 What are you reading this summer?

As is tradition, I'm sharing my summer reading tips. Among them a book about a fifty-year-old and one about superintelligence.

What are you reading this summer? Would love to know!

Mathias Sundin
The Angry Optimist

🏆 This week's Premium Supporter article

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📚 The angry optimist's summer reading tips

A handful of books that will hopefully make your summer better.

Read more on Warp News

💡 Fact-based optimistic news of the week

⛽ Petrol cars have vanished from China's ten best-selling vehicles

In May, all of China's ten best-selling cars were electric vehicles or plug-in hybrids. Petrol cars have completely vanished from the list. Sales of new petrol cars in China have fallen by 41.8 percent compared with a year earlier.

Read more on Warp News

📉 Australia's gas use has peaked and is now declining

Gas use in Australia has peaked across all sectors after more than half a century of growth. Gas for electricity generation has fallen 11 percent since 2014, and residential gas use peaked in 2020.

Read more on Warp News

☀️ Solar overtakes gas in Asia

Solar power has surpassed gas to become Asia’s third-largest source of electricity. Solar generation in Asia has nearly quadrupled since 2020, reaching 1,727 terawatt hours over the twelve months to April 2026.

Read more on Warp News

🦏 Satellites track animals from space to detect poachers in real time

When a poacher approaches, the animals flee in patterns that can be recognized, and tags on the animals pass the signal on so rangers can intervene. By 2027, six receivers in orbit will be able to receive data on animal movements in real time across the entire planet.

Read more on Warp News

🇺🇳 The number of refugees in the world fell last year for the first time in a decade

The global number of refugees dropped by 3 percent during 2025 to 41.6 million. A total of 14.7 million displaced people returned to their home or origin areas during the year. Nearly 46,000 stateless people gained citizenship across 24 countries.

Read more on Warp News

🌊 Chad's capital weathered record water levels without major damage

N'Djamena sits where the Chari and Logone rivers meet, leaving it highly exposed to flooding. During the 2024 rainy season the city protected 1.5 million residents even as rivers hit record levels, after clearing 217 miles of drainage and deploying 12 mobile pumps.

Read more on Warp News

🤑 New research: Freer economies grew without harming the environment

A study of 49 economic liberalizations shows that GDP per person rose 16 percent within ten years. Total greenhouse gas emissions did not increase, and deaths from air pollution declined. After the year 2000, emissions fell both per person and per dollar of economic output.

Read more on Warp News

✉️ Get a dose of fact-based, free, optimism once a week

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Growth without environmental decline

Economists Vincent Geloso, Justin Callais, and Alicia Plemmons examined what happens to the environment when countries make their economies freer. The results are published in the journal Structural Change and Economic Dynamics.

The researchers studied 49 cases of large-scale liberalization between 1970 and 2015. By liberalization they mean policies that promote international trade, strengthen property rights, and reduce the tax and regulatory burden. To identify the countries, the researchers used large upward jumps in an index of economic freedom.

The countries that liberalized were compared with similar countries that did not. GDP per person rose 16 percent within ten years among the liberalizers. At the same time, the environment did not deteriorate.

Lower emissions and fewer deaths

Deaths from air pollution declined after the reforms. Total greenhouse gas emissions were not affected by liberalization. Emissions per dollar of economic output fell clearly and consistently.

Countries that liberalized after the year 2000 also showed lower emissions both per person and per dollar. The increase in total emissions appeared only in the period before 2000. After 2000, no such effect was seen.

The results held across two methods

The researchers used two methods. The first compares liberalizers with non-liberalizers. The second builds a constructed comparison country for the three largest liberalizers: Hungary, Peru, and the United Kingdom. Both methods produced the same pattern. The liberalizations either had no effect on carbon dioxide emissions or reduced them.

The researchers also examined the country that moved in the opposite direction during the period, Venezuela. There, emissions per dollar of economic output rose clearly, and no other environmental measures improved.

The explanation lies in the incentives

Behind the results are several forces that counteract the tendency for more economic activity to mean more emissions. As countries grow, they shift from industry to services, which produce lower emissions. Growth also requires firms to use less energy and fewer resources to create more value. And as people become better off, they are willing to pay more for a clean environment.

Secure property rights and open markets lead firms to take responsibility for the pollution they cause. Those who are harmed can seek compensation, which pressures firms to change in advance. Open markets also let prices show how scarce resources are, which drives frugality and new solutions.

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Preparation instead of crisis response

Chad's capital N'Djamena sits where the Chari and Logone rivers meet, which makes the city highly exposed to flooding. After the severe floods of 2022, a $13 million program was launched in early 2024 to prepare the city for a high-risk rainy season. The program is called PILIER and was supported by the World Bank.

In 2024, Chad was hit by the deadliest floods in the country in decades. 576 people died and 1.9 million were affected. N'Djamena still came through largely without damage.

Drainage, pumps, and trained teams

The city's 217-mile drainage system was cleared and repaired to improve water flow. The work was tracked with digital mapping and performance-based contracts, and safe disposal of sludge from the channels became a requirement.

Twelve high-capacity mobile pumps were purchased from abroad and positioned across the city. About 30 municipal technicians were trained so they can run the pumps themselves and carry out regular drills.

Support directly to households

Neighborhood groups received easy-to-use maps and support from local organizations. Emergency supplies were positioned in advance for families at risk of having to leave their homes. In total, 9,858 households received this support, equal to more than 60,000 people.

Jobs and continued funding

The program created more than 800 jobs in 2024, with similar numbers expected each year going forward. It also strengthened local administration and municipal services.

Following the results, Chad's finance minister allocated an additional $50 million in IDA financing to PILIER, to rebuild bridges across the country. A market vendor in the city says customers kept coming to the market despite the heavy rains, unlike previous years when sales used to drop at this time of year.

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Fewer people displaced worldwide

For the first time in a decade, the number of refugees in the world fell. This is shown in the UN refugee agency UNHCR's Global Trends report, presented in Geneva by High Commissioner Barham Salih. During 2025, the global number of refugees dropped by 3 percent to 41.6 million. Over the year, 5.4 million people fled to other countries to escape violence and persecution.

More returning home

A growing number of displaced people were able to return during the year. A total of 14.7 million returned to their home or origin areas, of which 4.4 million were refugees and 10.3 million were internally displaced. The largest increase was in Afghanistan, Sudan and Syria. The number of refugees who returned was the second highest since records began 60 years ago. At the same time, UNHCR noted that many returned under pressure and to precarious conditions.

During the year, nearly 46,000 stateless people also gained citizenship, across 24 countries.

A new goal for the coming decade

Barham Salih emphasized that humanitarian aid alone is no longer enough. Because 70 percent of refugees remain in exile for many years, and many live below the poverty line, he called for a new approach.

He presented a measurable goal: over the coming decade, to more than halve the number of refugees in long-term displacement who depend on humanitarian aid. The focus is on low- and middle-income countries, where most refugees are hosted. The effort will broaden opportunities for voluntary returns, humanitarian visas and relocation. It will also move refugees from aid dependency to self-reliance through access to education, healthcare, financial services and the labor market.

Background in figures

More than 70 percent of refugees came from Afghanistan, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, Ukraine and Venezuela. The countries that hosted the most were Colombia, Germany and Türkiye. The number of people who arrived through resettlement or sponsorship more than halved compared to the previous year, to 81,800 during 2025.

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The animals' panic reveals where the hunter is

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Germany are studying how animals react when humans approach. When a hunter appears, different species flee in patterns that can be recognized. Springbok bound away, zebras gallop, and wildebeest turn and run several hundred yards. Giraffes often stand still and watch from a distance, with their heads turned toward the threat.

To test the system, the team carried out simulated hunts at the Okambara reserve in Namibia during 2024. Over three days, the researchers fired about 30 volleys while a drone filmed the animals' flight from above. No animal was killed. The purpose was to teach an algorithm to recognize the panic patterns and send a warning to rangers.

Okambara is a flat reserve covering 65 square miles, about 100 miles from the capital, Windhoek. There, 5 percent of all large animals have been fitted with GPS tags that continuously record their position.

Tags small enough for butterflies to carry

The technology is based on small electronic tags that thousands of animals now carry. Some tags track not only position but also activity, heart rate, and body temperature. They also measure the surrounding temperature and air pressure.

Today's tags are small enough for birds and even butterflies to carry. A company in New Jersey has developed a chip the size of a grain of rice to track monarch butterflies during their migrations across North America. The tags are powered by supercapacitors, which are easy to recharge and last a long time.

This is a big difference from earlier technology. The first animal tag was used in 1970, when researchers fitted a 22-pound collar on an elk named Monique. Nearly four decades later, tags were still too heavy for 75 percent of all birds and mammals.

The technology has already freed animals in Kruger

The method has been tested in Kruger National Park in South Africa. There, tags have helped rangers find wild dogs caught in snares. Of the park's 400 wild dogs, about 80 have been freed.

The biggest goal is to protect Kruger's 3,000 rhinos. Over the past 15 years, more than 10,000 rhinos have been killed by poachers in South Africa. In 2025, 175 rhinos were killed in Kruger.

The park is the size of Israel, 7,523 square miles. It requires more than 30 receiver towers and far more tagged animals for the sentinel system to work. Kruger has deployed about 3,000 ear tags on 1,500 rhinos, antelopes, zebras, kudu, oryx, and elephants. The tags are placed on both ears so that an alert about a dead animal will not be false.

Six receivers in orbit

Martin Wikelski, who leads the Max Planck Institute, wants to tag 100,000 animals around the world by 2030. He calls the system the "Internet of Animals."

The first Icarus satellite was launched from Vandenberg in California on a Falcon 9 rocket. It is part of a fleet of small research satellites backed by the EU, worth 70 million euros. In May, a second system was launched, the microsatellite Raven. This summer, the system will begin receiving data from the animals' tags.

By mid-2027, Icarus is to have six receivers in orbit. This will make it possible to receive data on animal movements in real time across the entire planet. Wikelski compares the shift from ground-based receivers to satellites with the move from landlines to mobile phones. He sees the greatest benefit outside the reserves, in places like the Congo Basin and the Amazon, where animals with large ranges move between roads, farms, and settlements.

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Solar grows rapidly across Asia

Solar power has now overtaken gas as a source of electricity generation in Asia, according to a new analysis by Carbon Brief based on data from Ember.

Over the twelve months to April 2026, solar power generated 1,727 terawatt hours of electricity in Asia. Gas generated 1,711 terawatt hours during the same period. This makes solar the continent’s third-largest source of electricity after coal and hydropower.

Coal still accounts for around 52 percent of Asia’s electricity generation, while hydropower provides approximately 12 percent.

The development follows several years of rapid growth. Since 2020, annual solar generation has nearly quadrupled.

Asia at the center of global solar expansion

Asia accounts for around 60 percent of global solar growth since 2020, making the continent the main driver of worldwide solar deployment.

The trend also reflects changes in the global electricity mix. In April 2026, wind and solar power together generated more electricity than gas worldwide during a single month for the first time.

The main force behind Asia’s growth has been China. The country accounts for nearly three-quarters of the increase in the region’s solar output since 2020.

Record installations in 2025 brought China’s cumulative installed solar capacity to 1.2 terawatts by the end of the year.

China plays a central role

China also holds a dominant position in solar manufacturing. More than 80 percent of global solar manufacturing capacity is located in the country.

This has helped other Asian nations expand solar power through imports of low-cost solar panels.

During the energy crisis linked to the Iran war, Chinese solar exports to Asia increased sharply. In March 2026, exports reached 39 gigawatts, double previous levels and a new record.

Gas expansion loses momentum

At the same time, gas power has developed more slowly than many expected.

Many Asian countries depend on imported liquefied natural gas, LNG, to support gas-fired electricity generation. Supply disruptions and higher prices have affected expansion plans.

During 2022 and 2023, plans for around 81 gigawatts of new gas capacity in Asia were cancelled. Several LNG import terminals and pipelines in South Asia and South Korea have also been delayed or cancelled.

Global shortages of gas turbines have further postponed projects in Vietnam and the Philippines.

Between 2019 and 2024, Asia’s gas-power capacity increased by 22 percent. However, electricity generation from gas rose by only 6 percent during the same period. Many existing gas plants are not operating at high utilization rates because other energy sources are more competitive.

Solar reduces the need for gas

The expansion of clean energy has reduced the need for gas-fired generation in several countries.

Pakistan is highlighted as a notable example. The country’s rapid growth in rooftop solar installations has helped lower demand for gas-fired electricity.

Even in China, gas generation has become less competitive than coal and renewable energy due to supply constraints and high prices.

According to the International Energy Agency, IEA, the latest energy crisis has renewed concerns among gas-importing countries in Asia about the reliability and affordability of gas supplies. Many of these countries are also highly dependent on gas shipments passing through the Strait of Hormuz.

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A peak in every sector

Gas use in Australia has peaked and is now in structural decline. That is the finding of a new report from the think tank Grattan Institute. Large-scale use of gas took off in Australia in the 1960s. Now the trend is moving in the other direction.

Residential gas use peaked in 2020. Gas for electricity generation has fallen 11 percent since 2014. In manufacturing, gas use has been falling since the early 2000s. Exports of liquefied natural gas, LNG, likely peaked in 2022.

Alison Reeve leads the institute's energy and climate change program. She says there is only one way to go from a peak, and that is down.

Lower emissions and falling exports

According to the report, total carbon dioxide emissions from gas are expected to fall from today's 90 million tonnes to 64 million tonnes by 2050.

Modelling from the Australian Treasury last year shows that the value of the country's coal and gas exports will likely halve over the next five years. The reason is that global demand for fossil fuels is slowing.

The report also shows that the amount of gas needed as a backup for renewable electricity in the coming decades will likely be about half of what was burned during the 2010s.

Renewables take over

Australia's electricity grid is shifting to renewable energy. Gas has been identified as a backup for periods when solar and wind produce little electricity. Reeve says the need for gas as a backup is smaller than is often assumed.

The report recommends targeted measures for households, industry, and electricity generation. These include setting phaseout dates for gas use in homes.

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🇪🇺 A major opportunity for Europe

Jonas Birgersson’s EnergyNet is the power grid’s equivalent of the internet. Built on the same architecture, with thousands of small networks instead of one large one.

Once built out, it could give us an abundance of cheap and clean electricity, while also providing a very robust system.

It has, admittedly, been clear for a long time that the EU needs to get its act together, increase growth, strengthen its defense capabilities, and improve its competitiveness. A couple of years ago, the Draghi report forcefully argued that regulation had gone too far.

Since Donald Trump returned to the White House, it has become urgent.

EnergyNet can be built all over the world, but the EU has one advantage: the area has already been deregulated — unlike almost the entire rest of the world.

A few years ago, a ban was removed, making it legal to run electricity cables between properties and thereby share energy.

This gives the EU the opportunity to become the first in the world with EnergyNet. The EU would get the world’s lowest energy costs and the world’s most robust power grid, which can be filled with as much solar, wind, and batteries as we want.

For the third time, I have written a longer update on what is happening in the world-unique Project Energy Society.

In short, things are moving fast. Two connected properties are becoming ten, and in seven other locations in Sweden, plans are underway to build EnergyNet.

I also write about a force that — much like in Star Wars — is there in the background, almost invisible, but increasingly shaping our present and future.

🇺🇸 Happy Birthday to the United States of America!

A big congratulations to the U.S. on its 250th anniversary!

A country I love, but one my relationship with has recently been complicated.

But one thing is certain: my love for all the Americans I've gotten to know over the years remains unchanged.

Mathias Sundin
The Angry Optimist

🏆 This week's Premium Supporter article

Open and free for everyone thanks to the support of our paying members.

🔋 Part 3: Towards the energy society – Energy Valley and the power of power electronics

It's an ordinary Thursday in an ordinary conference room. But something unique is taking shape there. With the help of a power few people know about, but one that helps you better understand the future.

Read more on Warp News

💡 Fact-based optimistic news of the week

🚰 The share of polluted drinking water in the US has been cut in half

The share of readings in American drinking water that exceeded health limits fell by half between 2003 and 2019. A new study has mapped 266 million readings of 1,250 different pollutants and shows how investments in water systems lower pollution levels.

Read more on Warp News

🤖 Amazon's new warehouse robot understands plain language

Employees can give the robot instructions the same way they would talk to a colleague. The robot is part of a €10 billion investment to expand Amazon's operations in Europe, a move expected to create 25,000 new jobs.

Read more on Warp News

🔊 Midjourney is building a body scanner that maps the entire body in 60 seconds

A full-body scan with today's MRI takes 60 to 90 minutes. Midjourney's new machine aims to do the same thing in under 60 seconds. The scanner uses a ring of half a million tiny elements that send ultrasound through the body from every direction. The result is a 3D map of the body.

Read more on Warp News

📉 Data centers have lowered Americans' electricity bills

Data centers have lowered Americans' electricity bills. A study shows average prices fell between 2015 and 2024. The reason is that the power system's large fixed costs are spread across more kilowatt-hours when demand rises.

Read more on Warp News

🎗️ No young women died of cervical cancer in England over the past five years

A cross all age groups HPV vaccination is linked to around 200 fewer cervical cancer deaths in England. Among vaccinated women aged 20 to 29, the risk of dying from cervical cancer is estimated to have fallen by at least 81 percent.

Read more on Warp News

🤧 Discovery could lead to drugs against the common cold

Researchers have for the first time determined the structure of the protein 2C as it binds to RNA. The protein is found in rhinovirus, the most common cause of the common cold. The new structure gives researchers more to work from when they design drugs that can inhibit the virus.

Read more on Warp News

🎙️ AI talk or master class?

I'm giving a lot of talks and master classes on AI in several different countries. Happy to come to your organization.

Learn more at mathiassundin.org.

No petrol cars on the top list

In May, not a single pure petrol car remained among China's ten best-selling passenger cars. The list has been completely taken over by electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids. In January, seven petrol cars were still on the same list.

Geely's Xingyuan model has sold the most of all passenger cars in May. Tesla's Model Y came in second place.

Sales of petrol cars are falling fast

China has sold 497,000 new petrol cars on the domestic market in May. That is a decline of 41.8 percent compared with the same month the year before, according to figures from the auto industry association CAAM. In numbers, that means 357,000 fewer cars. Compared with April, sales have fallen by 3.5 percent.

During the first five months of the year, China has sold 3.2 million petrol cars on the domestic market. That is 1.24 million fewer than during the same period last year, a decline of 28 percent.

China's entire passenger car market reached 1.44 million cars sold in May, an increase of 8.2 percent compared with April. Petrol cars have thus fallen much faster than the market as a whole. Electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids are taking over their share.

Cui Dongshu, secretary-general of the auto industry association CPCA, states that the cost of owning a petrol car has continued to rise alongside high fuel prices. That has reduced the willingness to buy petrol cars.

Electric vehicles and exports are growing

Sales of electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids on the Chinese domestic market reached 1.05 million in May. That is an increase of 14.8 percent compared with April. Of these, 947,000 were passenger cars, an increase of 15.6 percent compared with the month before.

Exports have grown sharply. China exported 446,000 electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids in May, an increase of 110 percent compared with the year before. During January to May, 1.83 million such vehicles were exported, also an increase of 110 percent.

WALL-Y
WALL-Y is an AI bot created in Claude. Learn more about WALL-Y and how we develop her. You can find her news here.
You can chat with WALL-Y GPT about this news article and fact-based optimism

🇪🇺 A major opportunity for Europe

Jonas Birgersson’s EnergyNet is the power grid’s equivalent of the internet. Built on the same architecture, with thousands of small networks instead of one large one.

Once built out, it could give us an abundance of cheap and clean electricity, while also providing a very robust system.

It has, admittedly, been clear for a long time that the EU needs to get its act together, increase growth, strengthen its defense capabilities, and improve its competitiveness. A couple of years ago, the Draghi report forcefully argued that regulation had gone too far.

Since Donald Trump returned to the White House, it has become urgent.

EnergyNet can be built all over the world, but the EU has one advantage: the area has already been deregulated — unlike almost the entire rest of the world.

A few years ago, a ban was removed, making it legal to run electricity cables between properties and thereby share energy.

This gives the EU the opportunity to become the first in the world with EnergyNet. The EU would get the world’s lowest energy costs and the world’s most robust power grid, which can be filled with as much solar, wind, and batteries as we want.

For the third time, I have written a longer update on what is happening in the world-unique Project Energy Society.

In short, things are moving fast. Two connected properties are becoming ten, and in seven other locations in Sweden, plans are underway to build EnergyNet.

I also write about a force that — much like in Star Wars — is there in the background, almost invisible, but increasingly shaping our present and future.

Mathias Sundin
The Angry Optimist

🏆 This week's Premium Supporter article

Open and free for everyone thanks to the support of our paying members.

🔋 Part 3: Towards the energy society – Energy Valley and the power of power electronics

It's an ordinary Thursday in an ordinary conference room. But something unique is taking shape there. With the help of a power few people know about, but one that helps you better understand the future.

Read more on Warp News

💡 Fact-based optimistic news of the week

🚰 The share of polluted drinking water in the US has been cut in half

The share of readings in American drinking water that exceeded health limits fell by half between 2003 and 2019. A new study has mapped 266 million readings of 1,250 different pollutants and shows how investments in water systems lower pollution levels.

Read more on Warp News

🤖 Amazon's new warehouse robot understands plain language

Employees can give the robot instructions the same way they would talk to a colleague. The robot is part of a €10 billion investment to expand Amazon's operations in Europe, a move expected to create 25,000 new jobs.

Read more on Warp News

🔊 Midjourney is building a body scanner that maps the entire body in 60 seconds

A full-body scan with today's MRI takes 60 to 90 minutes. Midjourney's new machine aims to do the same thing in under 60 seconds. The scanner uses a ring of half a million tiny elements that send ultrasound through the body from every direction. The result is a 3D map of the body.

Read more on Warp News

📉 Data centers have lowered Americans' electricity bills

Data centers have lowered Americans' electricity bills. A study shows average prices fell between 2015 and 2024. The reason is that the power system's large fixed costs are spread across more kilowatt-hours when demand rises.

Read more on Warp News

🎗️ No young women died of cervical cancer in England over the past five years

A cross all age groups HPV vaccination is linked to around 200 fewer cervical cancer deaths in England. Among vaccinated women aged 20 to 29, the risk of dying from cervical cancer is estimated to have fallen by at least 81 percent.

Read more on Warp News

🤧 Discovery could lead to drugs against the common cold

Researchers have for the first time determined the structure of the protein 2C as it binds to RNA. The protein is found in rhinovirus, the most common cause of the common cold. The new structure gives researchers more to work from when they design drugs that can inhibit the virus.

Read more on Warp News

✉️ Get a dose of fact-based, free, optimism once a week

Every week, we send out a free newsletter with fact-based, optimistic news about technology, science, and human progress.

If you're not a subscriber yet, you are welcome to become one!

If you like this newsletter, please forward it to a friend and ask them to subscribe. It's free and arrives once a week.

🎤 Talk on AI

Let me help your organization level up on AI.

Read more at mathiassundin.org.

In 2025, greenhouse gas emissions from the EU's economy and households were estimated at 3.3 billion tonnes of CO2 equivalent. This covers all economic activity and all households. The level is 17.2 percent lower than in 2015.

At the same time, every EU country increased its gross domestic product over the ten-year period. The EU economy as a whole grew by 17.5 percent. Emissions and economic growth did not move together.

The figures come from early estimates for 2025. Eurostat is publishing them for the first time six months after the end of the reference year.

Between 2015 and 2025, greenhouse gas emissions fell in 23 of the EU's countries. The largest reductions were in Estonia at 41.7 percent, Finland at 30.7 percent and Germany at 27.3 percent.

The energy sector fell the most

Most sectors emitted fewer greenhouse gases in 2025 than in 2015. The energy sector, which supplies electricity, gas, steam and air conditioning, cut its emissions by 45.3 percent. Emissions from mining and quarrying fell by 33.3 percent.

Manufacturing cut its emissions by 16 percent. Household emissions fell by 14.7 percent and those from the services sector by 11.9 percent.

In agriculture, forestry and fishing, emissions fell by 5.9 percent. In water supply, sewerage, waste management and remediation, they fell by 2.6 percent.

WALL-Y
WALL-Y is an AI bot created in Claude. Learn more about WALL-Y and how we develop her. You can find her news here.
You can chat with WALL-Y GPT about this news article and fact-based optimism

by David Pogue

On April 1, 2026, Apple turned 50. David Pogue does an excellent job of telling the company's entire history.

Beyond the big picture, I particularly appreciated his account of the years when Steve Jobs wasn't at Apple. Since Jobs is so often the focus, it's easy to overlook the many years of Apple's life when he wasn't there.

The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence

by Sebastian Mallaby

Demis Hassabis is one of those people history will remember. He's only 49, yet already a Nobel laureate, founder of perhaps the most interesting AI company of our time, and on top of that the creator of one of my childhood favorite games, Theme Park.

Mallaby tells his story so far and his pursuit of the holy grail: superintelligence.

The Double Helix

by James Watson

Watson died recently. He grew stranger as the years went by, but he will always be the man who discovered the structure of DNA, together with Francis Crick. And he will always be the man who wrote a highly entertaining book about how it happened.

Technelegy

by Sasha Stiles

I rarely read poetry. Okay, never. But this I liked. Sasha Stiles is the poet who very early on began using AI to write poetry. Her goal is to reach, together with AI, a new level that she can't reach on her own, and that the AI can't reach either.

Mathias Sundin
Angry Optimist

A target for drugs against several viruses

Researchers at Stanford University and The Pirbright Institute, among others, have produced the first structure of the protein 2C bound to RNA. The protein is found in picornaviruses. Rhinovirus, the most common cause of the common cold, belongs to this group.

2C is needed for the virus to copy its genome. The protein is already a target for drugs that can work against several picornaviruses at once. Because the common cold virus is a picornavirus, and has the same protein with the same key parts, it is one of the viruses such a drug could target.

The researchers included human rhinovirus A in their analysis. The three amino acids that matter most for 2C to bind to RNA sit in the same structural position in the common cold virus as in the virus the researchers built their structure from.

A basis for drug development

Earlier proposals for drugs against 2C have been based on the structure of a single copy of the protein. That structure lacks the details that appear when six copies come together with RNA. The new structure gives researchers more to work from when they design small molecules or peptides that can inhibit the virus.

First image of the protein bound to RNA

The structure shows that six identical copies of the protein come together to form a ring. The ring is about 10 nanometers in diameter. A single strand of RNA runs through a central pore in the middle of the ring.

The researchers used cryo-electron microscopy. They analyzed 260,225 particles and reached a resolution of 3.05 Ångström, which makes it possible to see the individual parts of the protein. The study has been published as a preprint and has not yet been reviewed by other researchers.

Three amino acids determine the binding

The researchers identified three amino acids that matter most for the protein to bind to RNA: A188, L190 and K193. A fourth, H147, is needed for the protein's function.

The amino acid A188 lets the protein tell RNA apart from DNA. This is due to an oxygen atom that binds to a part found only in RNA. When the researchers swapped out the key amino acids, binding to RNA dropped. In experiments with foot-and-mouth disease virus and coxsackievirus B3, the virus then stopped replicating.

Viruses behind billions of infections

Picornaviruses cause at least 8 billion infections a year in humans. Symptoms range from upper respiratory infection to paralysis. Enterovirus D68 has been linked to acute flaccid myelitis in children, and EV-A71 has led to paralysis and death in children in several places around the world.

Among animals, foot-and-mouth disease virus causes large losses. The disease in livestock costs about 21 billion dollars globally. Respiratory infections from picornaviruses in the United States are estimated to cost about 40 billion dollars. There are few approved drugs against picornaviruses besides polio.

The same building parts in many virus families

The key amino acids are not found only in picornaviruses. The researchers searched for similar proteins across the entire order Picornavirales and found 497 hits in several virus families, including the family the norovirus belongs to. The norovirus has the protein NS3, which has many of the same parts that 2C uses to bind RNA.

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No deaths among the youngest

A study published in The Lancet analyzed cervical cancer mortality in England between 2001 and 2024. Researchers Peter Sasieni and Milena Falcaro at Queen Mary University of London looked at three age groups: 20 to 24, 25 to 29, and 30 to 34.

Among women aged 20 to 24, none died of cervical cancer between 2020 and 2024. In that group, around 88 to 90 percent had been vaccinated against HPV at ages 12 to 13. Based on death rates between 2000 and 2014, 23 deaths were expected during the period. This means mortality fell by 100 percent.

Large reductions across several age groups

The reduction is also visible in earlier groups. Among women aged 20 to 24, mortality was 80 percent lower during 2015 to 2019 compared with 2000 to 2014. Among women aged 25 to 29, mortality was 69 percent lower during 2020 to 2024.

The number of deaths fell clearly. Among women aged 25 to 29, the number dropped from 123 during 2010 to 2014 to 32 during 2020 to 2024. Among women aged 20 to 24, the number dropped from 27 to zero over the same period.

For vaccinated women, the researchers calculated how much the risk of dying fell. In a statistical model, the reduction came to 100 percent among women aged 20 to 24, with an uncertainty range of 81 to 100 percent. Among women aged 25 to 29, the reduction was also 100 percent, with a range of 89 to 100 percent. Among women aged 30 to 34, the reduction was estimated at 63 percent. In the oldest group, fewer had been vaccinated, and those who were vaccinated often received the vaccine as teenagers when they may already have been infected.

Nearly 200 fewer deaths

Up to the end of 2024, HPV vaccination in England is linked to around 200 fewer cervical cancer deaths. The researchers put the figure at about 199.6 deaths.

That figure covers all three age groups together and is counted across all the years since vaccinated women began reaching these ages. This is why it is higher than the 23 deaths expected in the youngest group alone during 2020 to 2024.

The vaccination program in England

England introduced a national HPV vaccination program in 2008 for girls aged 12 to 13. An additional effort during 2008 to 2010 offered the vaccine to girls aged 14 to 18. Since 2019, boys of the same age have been included as well. Before the covid pandemic, around 90 percent had received at least one dose.

Vaccination has also reduced the number of cervical cancer cases. In the groups covered by the vaccine, the number of cases fell by up to 87 percent.

The HPV vaccine is one of three parts of the WHO's strategy to eliminate cervical cancer. The vaccine is included in national programs in around 150 countries. Cervical cancer is globally the second most common form of cancer leading to death among women under 65.

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Many Americans worry that data centers will drive up their electricity bills. About 70 percent say they oppose data centers being built near them.

A study from researchers at the Electric Power Research Institute points in the opposite direction.

The researchers examined the relationship between data centers and electricity prices in the United States between 2015 and 2024. They find that data centers have lowered average electricity prices for households during the period.

Prices fell despite rising demand

For every 10 percent increase in data center capacity, average household electricity prices fell by about 0.4 percent. Between 2019 and 2024, the average household customer lived in a state where data center capacity grew by 160 percent. That lowered their electricity price by 6 percent. In the researchers' main model, a doubling of data center capacity produced 3.5 percent lower electricity prices for households, with household demand held constant.

To separate cause from random correlation, the researchers used a method based on the American interstate highway system from 1947. Fiber-optic cables often follow the highways, and data centers are built where there is fast access to fiber. In this way, the researchers could measure the data centers' own effect on prices.

Virginia has the most data centers in the United States. There they account for over 20 percent of electricity use. Despite that, electricity prices in the state rose about as much as the average. In California, prices rose by nearly 40 percent, but that was mainly due to costs linked to wildfires. States where electricity use increased generally had smaller price increases than the average.

How the lower prices arise

How can higher demand produce lower prices? The power system differs from other markets. The electricity price for customers is based largely on average costs, not just on the cost of the last unit produced. The system has high fixed costs.

When demand rises durably, the fixed costs are spread across more kilowatt-hours. The average cost per kilowatt-hour then falls. New electricity generation also often costs less than the older kind, because the technology has become cheaper. The researchers see the same pattern in the costs of transmitting and distributing electricity. Larger volumes give a lower cost per unit.

Households benefited most

The price-lowering effect mainly went to households. For commercial customers and industrial customers, the effect was considerably smaller. That suggests the efficiency gains in the power system mainly reached households.

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The meeting begins with a small culture clash.

It's a perfectly ordinary Thursday and we sit down in a perfectly ordinary conference room.

But there we're going to talk about something unique. Something found nowhere else in the world. Whose epicenter, right at that moment, is this perfectly ordinary conference room, in a mid-sized city in southern Sweden.

"Marc," says Jonas Birgersson and smiles. "Just a reminder about the different meeting cultures."

Marc's last name is Weiss, and he throws up his hands in a mea culpa.

"Oh right, sorry!" he laughs.

The conference room is at ViaEuropa in Lund, Sweden, and the meeting has – typically Swedish – begun with a round of the table so everyone gets to introduce themselves. We only made it as far as the first person, however, before Marc Weiss – typically American – started firing off a whole series of questions at her.

Weiss settles down for a moment, and when it's his turn, he introduces himself as a professor at UC Berkeley and CEO of Global Urban Development.

He's a heavyweight in urban development. Former adviser to Bill Clinton, has worked with Steve Jobs, and built the NoMa neighborhood in Washington DC. Among other things.

Weiss is in Lund because he's involved in Project Energy Society, or EnergyNet as it's mostly called. We're all sitting there together in the conference room because the project has gone from theory to practice.

Last year, just after Easter, Broadband Jesus was resurrected as Electricity Jesus when the first installation in Lund was inaugurated.

Two buildings had gotten solar panels and a battery, and were then connected with a freedom cable, so they could share electricity with each other.

Now, a year later, ten buildings are being connected in the same way in Lund. Over lunch with a couple of people on the project, they tell me they're busy designing EnergyNet for seven new neighborhoods and urban development projects around Sweden.

That's actually exactly why we've gathered in the conference room. Jägersro outside Malmö, best known for its horse-racing track, is set to become a new neighborhood for 4,000 residents. A representative for that project is with us, along with Markus Paulsson, a key person from the City of Lund.

Find someone who talks about you the way Jonas Birgersson talks about power electronics

Birgersson starts a PowerPoint presentation but soon jumps up out of his chair and ends up in front of the whiteboard.

There he talks passionately about... power electronics!

You know the meme:

The new version goes: Find someone who talks about you the way Jonas Birgersson talks about power electronics.

If you don't have the same feelings for power electronics as he does – or even know what it is – don't worry! Most people don't.

I didn't get it either until quite recently, but I now realize it's one of those things that's very useful to know about if you want to understand the future. It's one of those technologies that works in the background, but its development over the past few years has been dramatic.

You don't need to understand exactly what power electronics is, but rather what it does and why what's happening now will lead to major changes.

The current electricity grid is a water hose

Let's start with the current grid and the role of power electronics in it.

Think of the electricity grid as an enormous system of water hoses. In a few places, water is pumped into the hoses, and in lots of places you can get water by turning a tap. For water to come out of the tap, the pressure in the hose has to be high enough.

If millions of people suddenly open their taps at the same time, the pressure across the whole system drops. Then the producers have to respond immediately by pumping in more water. If they can't keep up with the sudden demand, the pressure collapses entirely and nobody gets water.

In the same way, electricity is "pumped" into the lines, where it has to be consumed the same microsecond it's produced, and if the frequency in the grid isn't stable, you get a power outage.

The problem is that the electricity grid is, for the most part, dumb as a rock. The grid is blind and can't communicate with the people using the electricity. If I set my electric car to start charging at one in the morning, the car can't tell the grid that at that point in time I'm going to need such-and-such an amount of electricity and politely ask: "Is that okay?"

Instead it just switches the charging on with no warning, and the grid has to make sure it delivers immediately.

Power electronics are the grid's sluice gates

In other words, what would be needed are smart, programmable sluice gates that can sense the pressure themselves and decide exactly how much should be let through at any given moment.

That's what power electronics is.

Power electronics controls and shapes the electricity itself, instead of passively letting it flow wherever the pressure happens to carry it.

Unfortunately, this technology barely exists in the current grid. The reason is that it's very expensive and is only used to move very large amounts of electricity over long distances. That requires enormous converter stations. They're full of advanced equipment – like power electronics – that can handle very high voltage and very large amounts of power.

There you can, to a greater degree, decide how much power should be sent through the connection. You can say: Send 500 megawatts this way. Or 1,000 megawatts that way. Or reduce the flow. Or reverse the direction.

That's why it's so useful when you want to connect two electrical systems without forcing them to dance in exactly the same rhythm.

But this only exists in a few places. Out in the hose system itself, where you and I live, there are no such intelligent sluice gates. There the grid is passive copper and iron, unable to measure, think, or make decisions.

Why don't we build power electronics in everywhere?

The problem, as I said, is the cost. A system like that costs millions of dollars and takes years to build. That's why production is low and the cost trend is poor.

The electric car affects more than vehicles

So why is Birgersson so passionate?

Because something has happened that changes the playing field: The electric car.

An electric car is, in practice, a big battery on wheels, surrounded by power electronics.

The charger is especially significant. An electric-car charger is based on the same basic principle as your phone charger, but handles roughly a thousand times higher power.

Because sales of electric cars have grown – and are growing – sharply, the use of the cars' power electronics has too. More production means we learn to make it faster, better, and cheaper.

This is called Wright's law. I've written about it several times before, but in short it's a rule of thumb that says that with every doubling of total production, the cost falls by about 20 percent.

If the product you make costs 1,000 dollars per unit when you've made 300 of them, then it drops to 800 dollars once you've made 600. And so on.

Power electronics has therefore dropped substantially in cost.

The power electronics in electric cars have, roughly speaking, become around 70 percent cheaper per car since the early electric-car phase. But because today's cars also have much higher power and better charging capability, the more relevant figure is per unit of capacity: There the cost drop looks to be around 80–85 percent.

That corresponds to a Wright's law effect of around 19 percent per doubling. Very close to the rule of thumb's 20 percent, in other words.

On top of that, yet another kind of law is at play here: Moore's law. That's a different rule of thumb, which in the case of power electronics says that power density doubles roughly every four years. This trend has been observed by researchers between 1970 and 2020.

That means a converter of a certain size that handles 100 watts today will handle 200 watts in four years, 400 watts in eight years, 800 watts in twelve years, and so on.

This kind of exponential growth makes the numbers very large very quickly. In the original Moore's law, the number of transistors per chip went from 2,300 in 1971 to over 58 billion, 50 years later.

Higher power density means the same small device can do more work, or that the same work can be done by a smaller device. That's good because smaller and lighter power components take up less space, require less material, and often less cooling.

It means that now it's possible, cost-wise, to build the intelligent sluice gates into the system that keep track of and regulate what's happening out in every part of the grid.

The grid is getting more and more expensive

So we just stick power electronics into the current grid and solve the problems? Unfortunately it isn't that simple.

The grid still suffers from the same one-directional logic, even if we made it smarter. Even if you place smart technology closer to the users, the equipment is forced to submit to a grid that is still governed hierarchically and demands strict real-time balancing for the entire system at once.

The current grid has yet another problem: It's massively over-dimensioned and very expensive.

The grid has to handle the very highest peaks in usage, like an extreme cold snap, which might happen once every ten years. There's only one way to do that: To have grids and cables that can handle all the electricity used then.

In the industry it's called "fit and forget." You build a heavily over-dimensioned line, and then you don't have to worry about it anymore. It handles the extreme cases, but the rest of the time this expensive infrastructure largely sits unused.

It's as if we were to triple the number of lanes on every road in order to handle the Easter traffic without delays.

On top of that, the grid components themselves, like power transformers, are getting more expensive and are delivered more slowly.

Naturally, this makes it very expensive to build and maintain the grids.

In other words, it's no surprise that somewhere between 50 and 100 billion dollars will need to be invested in the Swedish grid alone in the coming years. Grids in other countries face investments that are at least as large. Guess what happens to your grid fee then…

The problems can be solved, if we learn from the internet

Despite its cost, the architecture of the grid itself worked reasonably well in the past, when the roles were locked into a handful of large producers and millions of passive consumers.

A problem arises in today's society when consumers suddenly acquire their own "pumps" in the form of solar panels, and start pushing power back into the system when it's sunny, or create massive new drains in the form of fast-charging electric cars.

So Birgersson & co. don't intend to fix the old grid. Instead they're building a new, parallel grid. One that can manage on its own, but can also cooperate with the old grid.

EnergyNet borrows its architecture and its lessons from how the internet works.

The internet isn't one single gigantic network, but a network of smaller networks that communicate with each other through set rules. EnergyNet applies exactly this structure to electricity distribution. It divides the grid into local zones, for example a single building or a block, which can largely function independently, but also talk to and cooperate with the other networks.

This architecture is made possible by power electronics. Especially the energy router, which is an advanced power-electronic machine. In the old system you have a dumb main fuse as your only protection against the grid. Either it's open and the electricity rushes through, or the fuse blows and everything goes dark.

The energy router instead works as a smart, digital sluice gate between your home and the outer grid. It isn't just open or closed. It measures the situation on both sides, negotiates digitally about what should be sent, decides the direction, and lets through only the exact amount of power both sides have agreed on.

For electricity to be sent or received, a digital negotiation has to take place via a shared language, Energy Protocol.

The router simply asks the outer grid:

"I have a surplus of electricity from my solar panels — is there anyone to receive it right now?"

Only when the answer is yes does the sluice gate open. Then the right amount of electricity is sent, in the right direction, at the right time.

This makes it impossible for your house to accidentally disturb the frequency in the large grid, and equally impossible for a disturbance in the rest of the grid to automatically knock out your house.

An everyday version of the same principle already exists in USB. The charger for your computer or phone has a cord with a USB port on one end and a power plug on the other. When you put the plug into the wall socket, you don't have to choose yourself exactly how much electricity should be transferred. The charger and the computer negotiate automatically according to an open standard.

Energy Protocol does something similar, but on a completely different level: between houses, batteries, solar panels, chargers, and local grids.

From real time to near real time

The old grid is fragile because the electricity has to be produced in the exact same microsecond you flip the switch. EnergyNet removes this rigid demand for "strict real time" and instead works in "near real time." Just as the internet uses data buffers so you can stream a movie without it stuttering, EnergyNet uses local batteries as energy buffers. The electricity is packaged and routed based on need and availability.

This architecture changes how we look at power outages. In the old grid, the electricity is either on or off. Lit or dark. EnergyNet makes sure that if the outer grid goes down, your own network can immediately disconnect and live off its own local battery. Through software, the house's most important functions are then prioritized, for example communication, the fridge and freezer, or medical equipment, while the jacuzzi gets cold.

Cheaper and cheaper to build EnergyNet

So the new grid needs batteries. Fortunately, the rise of electric cars has also brought another major advance over the past ten years: cheap batteries.

The same Wright's law has done its job here too. Since 2010, the cost of a lithium-ion battery has fallen by 93 percent. And for a battery in a stationary energy storage system, by 83 percent over the past ten years.

That means it will become cheaper and cheaper over time to build EnergyNet.

If EnergyNet picks up speed, starts spreading across the world, and becomes really big, that will in itself drive down costs, through increased production of the key components.

If you plan for this from the start when building a new neighborhood, it's of course the cheapest option.

That's exactly the message in the conference room to the representative from Jägersro. Build this into the plan and you'll be able to offer your future residents lower energy costs, clean electricity, and on top of that a strong resilience against disturbances. It's of course easier to knock out a grid with a few central points than a network of thousands of grids with no central points.

Energy Valley

But Birgersson isn't content with that. He wants to show that EnergyNet can create positive side effects in the surrounding area.

Now he's left the board and returned to the presentation slides. One of them shows a satellite image of the western Skåne–Copenhagen area.

Scandinavian Bay Area, it says.

With a wink, naturally, to California's San Francisco Bay Area, where Silicon Valley is located.

That's one of the reasons Marc Weiss is in the room.

Because he was, in fact, involved in creating the Silicon Valley we know today.

The year was 1981. Ronald Reagan had just taken office as president in a gloomy America. The American economy was wrestling with both high inflation and high unemployment, the steel and auto industries were in free fall, and the nation faced seemingly insurmountable and intense competition from efficient, state-backed Japanese and German industry.

In San Francisco's Bay Area, however, another industry was taking shape. The official birthplace of Silicon Valley is the garage where Bill Hewlett and David Packard built their first products back in the 1930s.

The place got its name only later, after the silicon-using semiconductor industry established itself there in the 1960s.

In the early 1980s, the area had reached a critical mass of garage entrepreneurship, exciting companies like Intel and Apple, strong personalities like Steve Jobs, venture capital, and not least research at Stanford.

Even so, Silicon Valley's future as we know it today was not at all predetermined. Several seeds had been sown, but no one knew whether they would grow into the meadow of flowers we have today, or dry out.

California's governor at the time, Jerry Brown, saw an opportunity and in 1981 set up The California Commission on Industrial Innovation. Its two co-chairs were David Packard and Steve Jobs among many other heavyweight names.

In 1982 they presented their proposals in Winning Technologies: A New Industrial Strategy for California and the Nation.

You can summarize the commission's contribution like this:

First, it gave a language to the Silicon Valley model: Innovation as the result of the interplay between universities, capital, entrepreneurs, education, and public policy.

Second, it connected the state's leadership directly with the representatives of the tech sector, which made high technology a central part of California's economic strategy.

Third, it led to, or contributed to, concrete investments in technical education and computer literacy.

Because both the political world and other actors took the strategy to heart, it became exactly the right nourishment for all the seeds that had been sown around the bay.

The commission's deputy director, and one of the report's main authors, was Marc Weiss.

44 years later he's in Lund, ready to use all his knowledge to help create a new valley: Energy Valley.

Seeds have been sown here too.

Here you'll find Lund University's Faculty of Engineering with a power electronics lab.

One of their researchers, Max Collins, now works on the EnergyNet project. He has a background at the neutron accelerator being built in Lund, ESS. There he worked on a very advanced power converter that takes energy from the grid, stores and shapes it, and delivers high-voltage pulses to the klystrons at exactly the right time and with very high quality.

The City of Lund is fully engaged and very active in the project, where, as mentioned, Markus Paulsson has been a driving force from the very beginning. For example, the first EnergyNet was installed in the buildings of two municipal companies.

There are collaborations with both the Californian universities Stanford and UC Berkeley.

The university, municipality, and business community in Lund also have experience forming a successful cluster within biomedicine, which they can now translate to the energy field.

And of course they have the entrepreneur and visionary in Jonas Birgersson and the sharp colleagues and advisers he draws to himself.

He, too, has done this before, but back then it was the telephone network that got a kick in the nuts. He still carries some scars from that time, but those experiences are worth their weight in gold today.

Unique

In my research I can't find anyone in the entire world trying to create anything like EnergyNet. There are plenty of projects about making the current grid a bit smarter, and a few that build new microgrids on a small scale. But no one with the ambition to build an entirely new energy system, and the idea for how it should be done.

Personally, I'm convinced it's possible.

EnergyNet is an idea that is both revolutionary and completely self-evident. The architecture is already proven and the components are readily available and getting ever cheaper.

Nor does it require large financial outlays from taxpayers; instead property owners will be able to look at the numbers, see that it's profitable, and therefore make the investment.

The openness of the project — Energy Protocol is open source, for example — means it can quickly spread across the world, and anyone who wants to can get involved and even build their own grid.

One thing that is needed is political decisions that make it permitted to run electricity cables — the freedom cables — between properties. This is forbidden, or complicated, in large parts of the world.

But not, in fact, within the EU. The area was deregulated within the union a few years ago, and it became possible to create so-called energy communities.

That gives the EU both a head start and an enormous opportunity.

If EnergyNet is rolled out fastest and most widely in the EU, Europe will have the lowest energy costs in the world. It will also have by far the most robust grid in the world, one that can withstand natural disasters, terrorism, and war.

Of course, it also cuts the dependence on gas and oil from despicable dictatorships.

On top of that, it becomes an industry in itself that creates jobs and growth and attracts research, companies, and resources.

The center of that could become Lund, with a surrounding cluster — an Energy Valley — but all of Europe, and ultimately the whole world, will benefit.

Mathias Sundin
Angry Optimist

A new project from an AI company

Midjourney is best known for its AI program that creates images from text. Now the company is entering an entirely new field and presenting Midjourney Medical. The first product is a scanner that aims to map the entire body.

The company describes the goal as something as powerful as an MRI, but as everyday as a trip to the spa.

How the scanner works

You step onto a platform in a shallow pool of water. The platform slowly lowers you into the water, about 2 inches per second.

On the way down you pass through a ring made up of half a million small squares. Each square is roughly the size of a grain of sand. Each square can both send out ultrasound and pick up the echo that bounces back from the body.

Midjourney compares the squares to dolphins that use echolocation. Going through a scan then becomes like being surrounded by half a million tiny dolphins from every angle.

The sound waves change shape as they pass through different parts of the body, such as skin, fat, muscle, and bone. By reading how the waves change, a detailed image of the body's interior is built up. The image resembles an MRI, but the scan is meant to take under 60 seconds.

Collaboration and technology

The machine is being developed together with Butterfly Network, which makes handheld ultrasound devices. Midjourney signed a licensing agreement with Butterfly Network in November 2025 and gained exclusive rights to the company's ultrasound-on-chip technology.

The project is led by Ahmad Abbas, head of Midjourney's consumer hardware. He joined the company in late 2023 after working on the Vision Pro at Apple.

The scanner is placed in spas

Midjourney is building its scanners together with another new product, a spa. The first facility is set to open in San Francisco in 2027.

The spa will have hot tubs, saunas, cold plunges, and rooms with pools of golden light where the body is scanned. The idea is that it should be a place you want to visit even without the scan. The scan itself becomes a side effect, but over time the visitor accumulates a large amount of data about their health.

The plan going forward

Over the next twelve months, the company will fine-tune the technology and algorithms, run research trials, and develop a second generation of the hardware.

The next step is to get the machine's diagnostic capabilities approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the FDA. Midjourney is starting by providing detailed maps of body composition and submitting test results to the FDA on an ongoing basis for additional functions.

In 2028, the company wants to expand to more cities and launch a third generation of the machine with custom-built chips for better image quality.

The goal is to have more than 50,000 scanners worldwide by 2031, with capacity for a billion scans a month. That is enough to give a billion people a scan every month.

Midjourney writes that early imaging could allow the world to avoid 30 percent of all deaths and 50 percent of all healthcare costs.

Not medically tested

The device has not yet been tested or approved by any authority.

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The robot understands ordinary instructions

Amazon showed the new version of Proteus at its "Delivering the Future" event in London on Thursday. The biggest change is how employees communicate with the robot. Previously it required technical commands or a programming interface. Now workers can assign the robot tasks in plain spoken language.

Scott Dresser, vice president of Amazon Robotics, describes how the worker tells the robot what needs to be done. The robot then works out the priority, the route, and the timing on its own. He calls it an assistant for moving material.

Background and new uses

Amazon introduced Proteus in 2022 as the company's first fully autonomous mobile robot. It was built to work in dock areas and fulfillment centers. The robot can pull carts full of packages weighing nearly 882 pounds over long distances.

The new version can work across more parts of Amazon's facilities, anywhere items need to be moved. That includes transporting containers and working at delivery sites.

Part of a larger investment

The new Proteus robots will eventually join the more than one million robots already working across Amazon's network.

The robot is part of a €10 billion investment, equal to $11.6 billion, to expand and modernize Amazon's operations in Europe. The investment also includes the expansion of Vulcan, Amazon's first robot with a sense of touch.

As part of the investment, Amazon plans to grow its European fulfillment center workforce by 25,000 people in the coming years. The latest version of Proteus is currently being piloted in Amazon's labs and is planned for deployment in Europe in the first half of 2027.

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🐳 It works

Until 2010, the world’s mangrove forests were shrinking. This was mainly due to deforestation and conversion to aquaculture, such as shrimp farms, but also other agriculture, as well as buildings and infrastructure.

But in 2010, that changed. Since then, mangrove forests have grown and are now almost back to where they were in the mid-1980s.

A group of researchers reached this conclusion after studying satellite images from the mid-1980s to the early 2020s.

What is the recipe for success?

The researchers do not go into detail, but they mention restoration, protection, and conservation.

I have written news for Warp News for over six years. Quite a large number of those stories have been about how we have managed to reverse a negative trend for animals or nature.

One of my first news stories was about how the blue whale had made a comeback.

Other animal species that have recovered include bison, North American predators, turtles, beavers, and tigers.

Reduced deforestation is another recurring theme, seen in Europe, Sweden, and the Amazon.

These are just a few examples. Scroll through our categories nature, environment, deforestation, and animal species, and you will see.

A recurring theme in these stories is that conservation efforts have helped. When people actively work to stop decline, protect species, and make recovery easier.

These efforts work! They make a difference!

Of course, many problems remain when it comes to animals and nature, and not all curves are pointing in the right direction. But we know from lots of successful examples that it is possible to turn them around.

🏖️ Summer schedule

The newsletter is now switching to its summer schedule. That means it will be sent every other week, instead of every week.

A Premium Supporter article about Project Energy Society is coming next week, followed by some reading tips the week after. After that, the PS articles will take a break for a while.

Have a great summer!

Mathias Sundin
The Angry Optimist

🏆 This week's Premium Supporter article

Open and free for everyone thanks to the support of our paying members.

🚀 SpaceX and the new Silk Road of space

Have investors gone crazy, or what are they hoping to get out of buying SpaceX shares at an astronomical valuation?

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💡 Fact-based optimistic news of the week

🌳 Mangrove forests declined until 2010, but have grown substantially since

The regrowth in recent years has almost entirely offset the earlier losses. The total area is now only 0.5 percent smaller than in the 1980s. After decades of decline, the area of mangrove forests shifted from net loss to net gain around 2010.

Read more on Warp News

🛫 More and more Africans are traveling within Africa - the fastest tourism growth in the world

Economic growth and rising prosperity in Africa are enabling more and more Africans to travel within their own continent. The number of tourists visiting African countries grew by almost 8 percent last year, the fastest growth in the world.

Read more on Warp News

📉 Australia's power prices fall after record battery rollout

Batteries' share of the electricity grid on Australia's east coast rose from around 3 percent to nearly 10% in one year. From July 2026, power prices will fall, and households could save up to 10%.

Read more on Warp News

🌏 Globally a record number of people are satisfied with the freedom to shape their lives

82% of adults across 138 countries are satisfied with their freedom to choose what they do with their lives, up from 71% two decades ago. The largest gains are in the Balkans, the Caucasus, and Eastern and Central Europe, where the share of satisfied adults has risen from 49% in 2009 to 82% in 2025.

Read more on Warp News

☀️ Solar overtakes coal in US electricity production for the first time

Solar power supplied 12.8 percent of US electricity in May 2026, while coal fell to 12.2 percent. Solar produced 45.5 TWh during the month, 17 percent more than in May 2025. Over five years, solar's share has more than doubled.

Read more on Warp News

🧫 First human treated with method designed to make aged cells behave young again

A treatment that switches on three genes is designed to make old cells behave like young ones. The aim is to regenerate damaged nerve cells in the optic nerve and treat a form of glaucoma. In animal studies, the method has restored vision in mice, with no serious side effects.

Read more on Warp News

🎙️ AI talk or master class?

I'm giving a lot of talks and master classes on AI in several different countries. Happy to come to your organization.

Learn more at mathiassundin.org.

The most comprehensive mapping to date

A group of researchers has compiled the largest body of data on pollution in American drinking water ever used in research. Through Freedom of Information Act requests and collection from state agencies, they obtained 266 million readings. The material covers 1,250 different pollutants in 48 states over several decades.

The background is the Safe Drinking Water Act, introduced in 1974. Between 1970 and 2014, public and private sources spent around $2 trillion on clean drinking water. The law regulates 90 substances, while industry uses more than 42,000 chemicals. Nine out of ten American homes get their water from public water systems, and the country has about 150,000 such systems.

Pollution is declining

The results show that the share of readings exceeding current health standards fell by half between 2003 and 2019. Radionuclides and disinfection byproducts declined the fastest.

The researchers also examined 9,200 measures that water systems carried out with the help of subsidized Safe Drinking Water Act loans. The measures cut the share of readings violating health standards by nearly 10 percent. When they targeted a specific pollutant, the share of readings above the limit for that substance fell by 36 percent.

The researchers calculated the cost. For an average water system, it would cost $3.4 million a year to eliminate all readings above the health limits for regulated substances. That amounts to $46 per person per year.

Lower mortality among older adults

The researchers linked the water data to medical records for Americans over the age of 65. The first measures in a water system lowered mortality by half a percent compared with baseline levels. The effect on mortality came more slowly than the decline in pollution.

The measures also reduced the number of hospital admissions. Those that targeted disease-causing microorganisms reduced admissions linked to such infections. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, pathogens in drinking water cause 7 million illnesses and 600,000 emergency department visits each year.

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Four decades of satellite data

Researchers have built a global dataset of mangrove forests at 30-meter resolution. It is based on satellite images from Landsat and covers every year between 1984 and 2023. With the material, they could measure both how the area of the forests has changed and how dense the canopies are within the forests that remain.

Mangrove forests are coastal ecosystems. They serve as nurseries for the fish that many fisheries depend on. They also help regulate the climate, protect coastlines, and maintain biodiversity.

From loss to gain

In the past, mangrove forests declined rapidly because of deforestation and erosion of shorelines. Forest was also lost when areas were converted to farming shrimp, palms, and rice.

That trend has reversed. Losses have decreased sharply since the 1980s, while new mangrove has been added at an increasing rate. Around 2010, the global area shifted from net loss to net gain. Across the entire period from the 1980s to 2023, the area has changed by only 0.5 percent, with an uncertainty of 1.4 percentage points.

The main reason for the increase is that mangroves are naturally expanding seaward and colonizing newly formed tidal flats. Forest is also growing back in areas where it previously existed.

Denser canopies

Beyond changes in area, the researchers measured how dense the canopies grow. They found widespread degradation, meaning the canopies have thinned, and this degradation was more extensive than outright loss of area. It was strongly linked to tropical cyclones. The rate of degradation has, however, also slowed over time.

At the same time, the mangrove forests that remain continued to build denser canopies through natural growth. This has led to forest with dense canopy cover spreading.

The results show that mangrove forests, even though they are counted among the most threatened ecosystems, have the ability to recover from loss and degradation. The researchers point out that halting deforestation should be prioritized to meet the global targets for mangroves, since the regrowth largely occurs naturally.

WALL-Y
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🐳 It works

Until 2010, the world’s mangrove forests were shrinking. This was mainly due to deforestation and conversion to aquaculture, such as shrimp farms, but also other agriculture, as well as buildings and infrastructure.

But in 2010, that changed. Since then, mangrove forests have grown and are now almost back to where they were in the mid-1980s.

A group of researchers reached this conclusion after studying satellite images from the mid-1980s to the early 2020s.

What is the recipe for success?

The researchers do not go into detail, but they mention restoration, protection, and conservation.

I have written news for Warp News for over six years. Quite a large number of those stories have been about how we have managed to reverse a negative trend for animals or nature.

One of my first news stories was about how the blue whale had made a comeback.

Other animal species that have recovered include bison, North American predators, turtles, beavers, and tigers.

Reduced deforestation is another recurring theme, seen in Europe, Sweden, and the Amazon.

These are just a few examples. Scroll through our categories nature, environment, deforestation, and animal species, and you will see.

A recurring theme in these stories is that conservation efforts have helped. When people actively work to stop decline, protect species, and make recovery easier.

These efforts work! They make a difference!

Of course, many problems remain when it comes to animals and nature, and not all curves are pointing in the right direction. But we know from lots of successful examples that it is possible to turn them around.

🏖️ Summer schedule

The newsletter is now switching to its summer schedule. That means it will be sent every other week, instead of every week.

Mathias Sundin
The Angry Optimist

🏆 This week's Premium Supporter article

Open and free for everyone thanks to the support of our paying members.

🚀 SpaceX and the new Silk Road of space

Have investors gone crazy, or what are they hoping to get out of buying SpaceX shares at an astronomical valuation?

Read more on Warp News

💡 Fact-based optimistic news of the week

🌳 Mangrove forests declined until 2010, but have grown substantially since

The regrowth in recent years has almost entirely offset the earlier losses. The total area is now only 0.5 percent smaller than in the 1980s. After decades of decline, the area of mangrove forests shifted from net loss to net gain around 2010.

Read more on Warp News

🛫 More and more Africans are traveling within Africa - the fastest tourism growth in the world

Economic growth and rising prosperity in Africa are enabling more and more Africans to travel within their own continent. The number of tourists visiting African countries grew by almost 8 percent last year, the fastest growth in the world.

Read more on Warp News

📉 Australia's power prices fall after record battery rollout

Batteries' share of the electricity grid on Australia's east coast rose from around 3 percent to nearly 10% in one year. From July 2026, power prices will fall, and households could save up to 10%.

Read more on Warp News

🌏 Globally a record number of people are satisfied with the freedom to shape their lives

82% of adults across 138 countries are satisfied with their freedom to choose what they do with their lives, up from 71% two decades ago. The largest gains are in the Balkans, the Caucasus, and Eastern and Central Europe, where the share of satisfied adults has risen from 49% in 2009 to 82% in 2025.

Read more on Warp News

☀️ Solar overtakes coal in US electricity production for the first time

Solar power supplied 12.8 percent of US electricity in May 2026, while coal fell to 12.2 percent. Solar produced 45.5 TWh during the month, 17 percent more than in May 2025. Over five years, solar's share has more than doubled.

Read more on Warp News

🧫 First human treated with method designed to make aged cells behave young again

A treatment that switches on three genes is designed to make old cells behave like young ones. The aim is to regenerate damaged nerve cells in the optic nerve and treat a form of glaucoma. In animal studies, the method has restored vision in mice, with no serious side effects.

Read more on Warp News

✉️ Get a dose of fact-based, free, optimism once a week

Every week, we send out a free newsletter with fact-based, optimistic news about technology, science, and human progress.

If you're not a subscriber yet, you are welcome to become one!

If you like this newsletter, please forward it to a friend and ask them to subscribe. It's free and arrives once a week.

🎤 Talk on AI

Let me help your organization level up on AI.

Read more at mathiassundin.org.

Astronomical valuation

This isn't a stock analysis, but we have to start at that end. SpaceX's IPO is the largest ever. The company is being listed at a value of around 1,750 billion dollars.

However you turn it over, that's a very high valuation. A full 94 times revenue. Compare that with Apple, Google and Microsoft, which are valued at around 10 times revenue. The world's most highly valued company, Nvidia, clocks in at 24, and Tesla at 15 times. On top of that, SpaceX—unlike the others—is running at a loss.

What investors believe is that SpaceX is the start of a dramatic expansion of the space economy. They're hoping Elon Musk will be a kind of modern Marco Polo on the Silk Road of space.

The classic Silk Road, as we know, wasn't a single road but a network of routes traveled by caravans. The journeys were expensive and dangerous. When transport is expensive, only the most valuable goods travel. Spices, jade, gemstones, metals, fine crafts and, of course, silk. These were goods that could bear high transport costs, risks and long lead times because the value per kilo was so high. No one put together a caravan across Central Asia to transport gravel.

The space economy has worked in a similar way until now. Just 15–20 years ago it cost roughly $20,000 to launch one kilo into low Earth orbit. Back then every gram mattered. If you could shave 10 grams off the weight, you saved $200. Only the more important satellites, scientific instruments, defense systems and crewed space projects could justify the cost.

The expedition phase

That was the space economy's first phase: the expedition phase.

In the expedition phase there was still no real space trade. There were missions. Every launch was like a dangerous journey through the desert with precious cargo. If something failed, the cargo was lost. If the fuel ran out, the satellite was dead. If a component broke, there was no workshop nearby. Everything therefore had to be built as light, compact and reliable as possible. That made every kilo even more expensive.

Since then the cost has dropped sharply. SpaceX's customers now pay somewhere around 60–70 percent less per kilo. The main reason is the Falcon 9 rocket, which is largely reusable.

For SpaceX the cost is even lower. Probably around $1,000–1,500 per kilo, a reduction of over 90 percent.

That's why the company has been able to launch over 12,000 of its own Starlink satellites in recent years, of which a good 10,000 are still up there. That's more satellites than the rest of the world combined.

Starlink is space-based internet connectivity and SpaceX's largest source of revenue, about twice the size of the launch business itself. Starlink means that anywhere in the world you have access to internet at broadband speed. Even on airplanes. I tried it myself recently on an SAS flight to Kiruna. The broadband was as fast as the internet at home, and I could easily have held a video meeting from 10,000 meters up at 800 kilometers an hour.

But Falcon 9 is only the beginning of the cost reductions. Even though it has become a real workhorse, with several of them used more than 30 times each, the whole rocket isn't reused. To fix that problem, the company is developing Starship.

Like an airplane, the entire rocket will be reused, and they're doing everything they can to keep turnaround time as short as possible. That's why they came up with the wild idea of landing the booster part of the rocket in two mechanical arms on the very tower it had been launched from minutes earlier. Which, spectacularly enough, they managed to pull off a couple of years ago.

Starship is a giant rocket and will be able to carry at least 100 tons to orbit, compared with Falcon 9's roughly 20 tons.

If they succeed in reusing each Starship several times, the price per kilo will be pushed down toward around $100.

The caravan phase

With that we enter the space economy's second phase: the caravan phase.

In the caravan phase, space is still expensive, but no longer a place for one-off expeditions. The traffic becomes recurring.

Starlink is the first recurring caravan. Instead of a few large communication satellites in high orbits, thousands of satellites are launched into low Earth orbit. Each satellite is no longer a lone monument. It's part of a network. It can be replaced, upgraded and added to.

After that come more satellites. Many more. There are already satellites watching Earth, but nowhere near enough for us to have a constant picture of every single place. With future layers of satellites, we'll be able to know what's happening on Earth everywhere, every second.

Then new needs arise. Satellites, and everything else up there, need to be moved, serviced, refueled and removed. We'll get depots, service vehicles, tugs, refueling systems, inspection satellites and simple transfer points.

Slowly, a kind of space port begins to emerge.

The infrastructure phase

Then comes the next big cost threshold: $10 per kilo.

If Starship or successor systems push the cost down to there, the Silk Road of space changes fundamentally. This is the space economy's third phase: the infrastructure phase.

Rockets from Earth no longer need to deliver every cargo to exactly the right final orbit. They can deliver large amounts of mass to low Earth orbit. Like a harbor on Earth, space tugs take over and carry the cargo onward to geostationary orbit, lunar orbit, so-called Lagrange points or commercial stations.

The space port becomes a place where things don't just pass through, but are also built. Large antennas can be assembled there. Telescopes too big to launch in one piece can be put together in orbit. Communication platforms can get new modules. Data centers can be built up step by step. Space stations can grow as new parts are docked on. Solar power plants can be assembled from standardized panels.

As the cost of launching from Earth keeps falling, more and more things become profitable to have up there.

By now we're probably well into the future—we're talking several decades. But the main point is that as the cost of launching from Earth keeps falling, more and more things become profitable to have up there. That, in turn, drives further demand and the economy expands. When we reach a cost of $100, or even $10 per kilo to space, the space economy will become hundreds of times larger than it is today.

There will also be a great diversity of things that hold economic value in space, not just satellites.

Orbit or crash and burn?

Elon Musk has guided SpaceX through an almost unimaginably difficult journey so far. The company has transformed the space industry by routinely reusing rockets and has set off a steep drop in costs. Through Starlink, it has also shown a large and profitable space-based service. In doing so, it has demonstrated how a future space economy will emerge.

At the same time, Elon Musk himself has grown ever wilder, and more and more companies, conflicts and tweeting compete for his attention. He is the one who created SpaceX, and he is the one who can destroy it.

If that happens, the investors in the IPO will lose their money.

But the ball is rolling — or, to use a more fitting metaphor: the rocket has already reached the speed required to reach orbit. The space economy is underway, and it will become astronomically large.

And right now there is no other company even close to leading, and benefiting from, all of this as much as SpaceX.

Mathias Sundin
Angry Optimist

A growing middle class is traveling within the continent

The number of tourists visiting African countries grew by almost 8 percent over the past year. That is the fastest growth in the world, according to the United Nations World Tourism Organization. The increase is not driven only by visitors from Europe and Asia. A large share comes from a growing African middle class that is traveling within the continent for the first time. The most visible travelers are millennials and members of Generation Z.

Jillian Blackbeard, chief executive of the organization Africa's Eden, which works to promote African tourism, says that travel is increasingly seen as part of identity and everyday life rather than a luxury. African travelers are starting to view their own continent as worth exploring.

Fewer visa requirements and new flight routes

In the past, the conditions for leisure travel have been difficult. Most Africans still need visas to visit other African countries. Flight prices within Africa are among the highest in the world, and there are few direct flights.

Both of these obstacles have eased in recent years. Demand for air travel within Africa has grown, which allows airlines to create more routes. New airlines have started up. A journey from Accra in Ghana to Johannesburg, which previously went through London or Dubai, can now be made through Addis Ababa in Ethiopia, according to Omoniyi Kolade, chief executive of the payment company SeerBit.

Several countries, including Benin, Gambia, Kenya and Ghana, have scrapped visa requirements for holders of African passports.

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Rapid expansion

Over the past two years, Australia has built out large-scale energy storage faster per capita than any other country. In 2025, more new battery capacity came online than in the previous eight years combined. Between January 2025 and January 2026, batteries' share of the grid rose from around 3 percent to nearly 10 percent.

The country's combined capacity of batteries that are operational or about to come online is the second largest in the world, after China and the United States.

Lower prices

The effects are showing up on the electricity market. In the first quarter of 2026, the power that batteries fed into the east coast grid was more than three times greater than during the same period in 2025. The wholesale market price fell by 12 percent. Batteries set the price of electricity almost a third of the time.

From July 2026, Australia's benchmark power prices will begin to fall. Households could save up to 10.7 percent and small businesses up to 20.9 percent.

From ridicule to grid function

The expansion took off after an event in 2017. A severe storm knocked out the entire power grid in the state of South Australia. About six months later, the state government decided to build a large battery to solve the problem.

The Hornsdale battery had a capacity of 100 megawatts and was the largest in the world at the time. It was built at the initiative of Tesla CEO Elon Musk. Several leading politicians were skeptical and dismissed the project as a curiosity with no practical use for the grid.

Warp News has written earlier about the fight around batteries in Australia.

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🎨 Like I said

Ever since shortly after ChatGPT was released, I have been going on about how AI unlocks human creativity and potential. It even became an entire book.

Recently, Erik Uppenberg reached out to me with exactly that kind of example.

"I never thought I would make my own comics again," he wrote.

It was easy to believe him, considering he had taken a 34-year break.

Erik created comics as a teenager, but he struggled to motivate himself to do the foundational training required to become truly good at drawing. Sitting down to sketch or do life drawing never appealed to him.

The goal was always the finished comic panel, not the exercises needed to get there. As a result, he often got stuck before the comics were actually made.

Instead, he found another path into the world of comics. He took over the fanzine Seriechock and began writing about comics rather than creating them himself.

But in the spring of 2024, something changed.

When Erik attended a course on AI, he realized that the obstacles that had previously stood in his way were no longer as significant.

Suddenly, both the tools and the desire to return to making comics were there, after a break of 34 years.

So now he has released Välart issue number 6. You can read more about his work and buy it through his Facebook page. (With AI's help, he could also create a nice website and a simple ordering system... just saying =)

That does not mean you can simply push a button and get a good comic. He has put in hundreds of hours of work, not least to make the visual style consistent throughout the entire publication. And of course there is also a story to tell, dialogue to write, and then the comic has to be printed, sold, and distributed.

But with AI, he was able to get past a barrier that had limited his potential.

Mathias Sundin
The Angry Optimist

🏆 This week's Premium Supporter article

🗺️ A small proposal for a new world order

The modern world is based on the nation state. The next step is to base it on human beings.

Read more on Warp News

💡 Fact-based optimistic news of the week

🫘 Injectable mini livers could become an alternative to transplantation

Researchers at MIT have developed mini livers that can be injected into the body and take over functions from a failing liver. The technology could help patients who are currently not healthy enough for a transplant.

Read more on Warp News

👕 Filter captures 97% of microfibres from the wash

Washing machines release large amounts of microfibres that end up in waterways and oceans. A filter fitted to the washing machine collects the fibres before they reach the drain. The filter captures 97 percent of microfibres and is now sold in more than 30 European markets and the UK.

Read more on Warp News

☢️ Microreactor went from idea to chain reaction in under a year

American nuclear power has long been marked by delays, where a single reactor design could take a decade to test. Antares' microreactor Mark-0 started a stable nuclear reaction in under twelve months. That made them the first private company to take an advanced reactor there within the program.

Read more on Warp News

🦾 AI has designed an entirely new kind of vaccine for the first time

Ordinary vaccines target a current strain of a virus and quickly become outdated when it mutates. The new method instead makes it possible to design a vaccine that protects against an entire virus family at once.This means the vaccine can provide protection even against future mutations.

Read more on Warp News

🧠 Several advances are changing the fight against Alzheimer's

For the first time, simple blood tests can show whether a person has Alzheimer's disease. Two drugs that slow the progression of the disease have been approved by the FDA. The number of patients researchers can screen for clinical trials has risen from a couple per day to several hundred.

Read more on Warp News

🧮 AI solves a math problem that had remained unsolved for 80 years

OpenAI's AI model solved the so-called unit distance problem. The problem was posed by the mathematician Paul Erdős around 80 years ago and had remained unsolved ever since. Several prominent mathematicians confirm that the solution is on par with work produced by humans.

Read more on Warp News

🎙️ AI talk or master class?

I'm giving a lot of talks and master classes on AI in several different countries. Happy to come to your organization.

Learn more at mathiassundin.org.

The highest level on record

In 2025, 82 percent of adults across 138 countries said they were satisfied with their freedom to choose what they do with their lives, while 17 percent were dissatisfied. That is the highest level since Gallup began measuring, although the figure has stayed near 80 percent since 2017.

The share is well above the 71 percent recorded when the survey began two decades ago. The lowest level, 65 percent, was recorded in 2008 during the financial crisis.

What the survey measures

Gallup asks how satisfied people are with their personal, everyday freedom to choose what they do with their lives. That is different from political rights and institutions, which are measured in other ways. The figures therefore show how free people feel in their daily lives.

The biggest gains in the former Eastern Bloc

Between 2006 and 2025, the share of satisfied adults rose by double digits in 54 of the 108 countries measured in both years. Only eight countries saw declines of a similar size.

In 29 countries across the Balkans, the Caucasus, and Eastern and Central Europe, the increase has been the largest in the world. The median rose by 33 percentage points, from 49 percent in 2009 to 82 percent in 2025. The region is now in line with the global average, after having lagged well behind. Since 2017, at least half of adults in each of these 29 countries have been satisfied with their freedom.

The seven largest increases are all in this region: Kosovo by 54 percentage points, Albania by 42, Bosnia and Herzegovina by 39, Serbia by 38, Montenegro by 37, Georgia by 34, and Moldova by 34. Many of these countries previously placed major restrictions on people's freedom.

Freedom is linked to life satisfaction

The rise in satisfaction with personal freedom tracks a broader rise in life satisfaction in these countries. That is consistent with the World Happiness Report, which identifies freedom as one of six main drivers of people's wellbeing. The biggest global increases in how people rate their lives also come from this region.

The economy plays a role

Satisfaction with personal freedom is closely linked to how people view their own finances. In countries where many are satisfied with their freedom, few adults say they are finding it difficult or very difficult to get by on their incomes.

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New record for solar

In May 2026, solar power produced more electricity than coal in the US over a full month, for the first time since records began. This is shown by official data analysed by the energy think tank Ember. Solar accounted for 12.8 percent of electricity, the highest share ever recorded. Coal accounted for 12.2 percent, the fourth-lowest monthly share ever measured.

Solar power produced a total of 45.5 TWh in May, the highest figure on record. That is 17 percent more than in May 2025. The previous record was set in July last year. The record could be broken again during the summer months. Total solar output is usually highest in June or July. Its share of the electricity mix is often highest in April or May, because solar output is strong then while demand is lower, before cooling needs rise in summer.

During May, solar became the third-largest source of electricity in the US, behind gas and nuclear.

Coal continues to decline

Coal generation hit an all-time monthly low in April 2026, at 39.3 TWh. In May it rose slightly to 43.4 TWh, but remained 11 percent below the level in May 2025. The increase was outweighed by the growing solar output, which allowed solar to overtake coal.

Coal's share of US electricity generation has nearly halved in five years, from 19.7 percent in May 2021 to 12.2 percent in May 2026. Over the same period, solar's share has more than doubled, from 5.4 to 12.8 percent.

The second milestone this year

Solar overtaking coal follows another event in March. Then, renewable energy sources together produced more electricity than gas in the US, also for the first time. According to Ember, the two records show how the role of clean power is growing in the US electricity system, despite a policy environment that is challenging for clean energy projects.

According to Nicolas Fulghum, data analyst at Ember, US solar power continues to set new records. He describes how solar has gone from a small contributor to the third-largest and fastest-growing source of electricity in the US. He points out that markets from Texas to California are betting on solar to meet rising electricity demand.

WALL-Y
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Three genes switched on

The method works by switching on three genes that can partially reprogram old cells. The cells then begin to behave as if they were young again. The company Life Biosciences in Boston announced that it has treated its first participant. In the study, the genes are being tested as a treatment for a form of glaucoma.

Damaged nerve cells set to regenerate

The hope is that the proteins the genes produce will cause nerve cells in the optic nerve to regenerate. The optic nerve connects the eye to the brain and is damaged in glaucoma. These nerve cells cannot normally regenerate. The study is also testing whether the method is safe to use in humans.

Results from animal studies

In 2020, geneticist David Sinclair at Harvard Medical School and his colleagues reported that the three genes caused nerve cells to regenerate in mice with a damaged optic nerve. In older mice and in mice with glaucoma, vision was restored. Since then, Life Biosciences has tested the method in rodents and monkeys. According to the company's chief scientific officer, Sharon Rosenzweig-Lipson, no serious side effects have been seen.

The eye first

The eye is a suitable place to start testing the method. The risk of life-threatening side effects is lower with changes to the eye than to some other organs. That is according to Matt Kaeberlein, co-founder of the company Optispan in Seattle.

Why we age

One important reason we age is that the body loses information. David Sinclair compares the genome to the hardware in a computer and the epigenome to the software. The epigenome tells each cell what kind of cell it should be and what function it should have. Over time, the cells lose that information, which is why hair turns grey and wrinkles appear. Sinclair likens it to a scratched DVD that can be repaired if the scratches have not gone too far. His goal is to restore the entire epigenome, so that cells that have started doing the wrong things return to their original state. The method is based on the discovery that mature, specialised cells can be reprogrammed into immature cells. Japanese researcher Shinya Yamanaka showed this in 2006 and received the Nobel Prize in Medicine for the discovery in 2012. Warp News has written about Sinclair's research before.

The cells keep their function

The aim of partial reprogramming is to take aged cells back in time. The cells are to regain features of young cells, but not be taken so far back that they lose their specialised function. Life Biosciences uses three of the four genes that, in the laboratory, can reprogram adult cells into a stem-cell-like state.

WALL-Y
WALL-Y is an AI bot created in Claude. Learn more about WALL-Y and how we develop her. You can find her news here.
You can chat with WALL-Y GPT about this news article and fact-based optimism

🎨 Like I said

Ever since shortly after ChatGPT was released, I have been going on about how AI unlocks human creativity and potential. It even became an entire book.

Recently, Erik Uppenberg reached out to me with exactly that kind of example.

"I never thought I would make my own comics again," he wrote.

It was easy to believe him, considering he had taken a 34-year break.

Erik created comics as a teenager, but he struggled to motivate himself to do the foundational training required to become truly good at drawing. Sitting down to sketch or do life drawing never appealed to him.

The goal was always the finished comic panel, not the exercises needed to get there. As a result, he often got stuck before the comics were actually made.

Instead, he found another path into the world of comics. He took over the fanzine Seriechock and began writing about comics rather than creating them himself.

But in the spring of 2024, something changed.

When Erik attended a course on AI, he realized that the obstacles that had previously stood in his way were no longer as significant.

Suddenly, both the tools and the desire to return to making comics were there, after a break of 34 years.

So now he has released Välart issue number 6. You can read more about his work and buy it through his Facebook page. (With AI's help, he could also create a nice website and a simple ordering system... just saying =)

That does not mean you can simply push a button and get a good comic. He has put in hundreds of hours of work, not least to make the visual style consistent throughout the entire publication. And of course there is also a story to tell, dialogue to write, and then the comic has to be printed, sold, and distributed.

But with AI, he was able to get past a barrier that had limited his potential.

A new world order

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about how this is our chance to help shape what the next world and world order will look like, now that the old one is beginning to come apart.

Here are my thoughts on what the guiding principle of the next world order should be: 🗺️ A small proposal for a new world order

Mathias Sundin
The Angry Optimist

🏆 This week's Premium Supporter article

Open and free for everyone thanks to the support of our paying members.

🗺️ A small proposal for a new world order

The modern world is based on the nation state. The next step is to base it on human beings.

Read more on Warp News

💡 Fact-based optimistic news of the week

🫘 Injectable mini livers could become an alternative to transplantation

Researchers at MIT have developed mini livers that can be injected into the body and take over functions from a failing liver. The technology could help patients who are currently not healthy enough for a transplant.

Read more on Warp News

👕 Filter captures 97% of microfibres from the wash

Washing machines release large amounts of microfibres that end up in waterways and oceans. A filter fitted to the washing machine collects the fibres before they reach the drain. The filter captures 97 percent of microfibres and is now sold in more than 30 European markets and the UK.

Read more on Warp News

☢️ Microreactor went from idea to chain reaction in under a year

American nuclear power has long been marked by delays, where a single reactor design could take a decade to test. Antares' microreactor Mark-0 started a stable nuclear reaction in under twelve months. That made them the first private company to take an advanced reactor there within the program.

Read more on Warp News

🦾 AI has designed an entirely new kind of vaccine for the first time

Ordinary vaccines target a current strain of a virus and quickly become outdated when it mutates. The new method instead makes it possible to design a vaccine that protects against an entire virus family at once.This means the vaccine can provide protection even against future mutations.

Read more on Warp News

🧠 Several advances are changing the fight against Alzheimer's

For the first time, simple blood tests can show whether a person has Alzheimer's disease. Two drugs that slow the progression of the disease have been approved by the FDA. The number of patients researchers can screen for clinical trials has risen from a couple per day to several hundred.

Read more on Warp News

🧮 AI solves a math problem that had remained unsolved for 80 years

OpenAI's AI model solved the so-called unit distance problem. The problem was posed by the mathematician Paul Erdős around 80 years ago and had remained unsolved ever since. Several prominent mathematicians confirm that the solution is on par with work produced by humans.

Read more on Warp News

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A filter that cleans itself

Adam Root, founder of the company Matter Industries in Bristol, has developed a filter that captures microfibres from washing machines. The company states that the filter collects 97 percent of the fibres before they leave the machine.

Each wash cycle produces about one gram of fibre waste. To capture as much as possible, the filter's mesh needs to be very fine, which means it can clog easily. Root's filter therefore rinses itself clean after each wash so that the water can keep passing through. According to Root, it is this function that sets the filter apart from other similar solutions.

The filter captures not only plastic fibres but all types of textile fibres. Anja Brandon, director of plastics policy at the US organisation Ocean Conservancy, points out that other textiles also contain chemicals and colourants that affect the environment. The waste should be put in the bin, not flushed down the drain.

Microfibres are the most common microplastic

An estimated 69 percent of all clothing contains plastic textiles based on fossil fuels, such as polyester, nylon and acrylic. These materials shed billions of fibres into the environment. In the UK alone, household washing machines release between 6,000 and 87,000 tonnes of clothing fibre into rivers and oceans each year. In the US, the amounts are considerably larger due to a larger population, more frequent washes and more activewear.

Several studies show that microfibres are the most common type of microplastic in the environment. They are found in the air, in drinking water and in food, and they appear in tissue samples from a wide range of species. The fibres can make up more than 90 percent of the microplastic that marine animals ingest.

From a garage floor to a partnership with Bosch and Siemens

The experiment that led to the filter took shape on a wet garage floor a few years ago, with an investment of 250 pounds. Root connected a homemade microplastic filter to an old washing machine and showed that he could capture microfibres.

Root started out as a mechanical engineer and then worked on product innovation at Dyson. It was diving that made him see how extensive ocean pollution is. A grant from the Prince's Trust made it possible to build the first prototype, which earned him the Young Innovator of the Year award from Innovate UK and helped get the company started in 2018.

Since then, Matter Industries has raised 20 million dollars, employed 50 people and entered into a partnership with Bosch and Siemens. They manufacture units with the company's Regen filter technology. In 2025, Matter came second in the oceans category of the Earthshot Prize.

Filters in factories too

Matter will soon test the technology at an industrial scale in textile factories in Portugal, Egypt and Bangladesh. The factories produce several kilometres of fabric a day, which is washed and dyed in multiple rounds. The process generates large amounts of fibre waste. One factory that Matter examined produced 360 tonnes of waste per year, which is sometimes discharged directly into rivers.

Root wants to see the filters in municipal wastewater treatment plants in the long term, to capture as much microplastic as possible before it reaches the sea. He is also pushing for legislation that would require microfibre filters in all washing machines in the UK.

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I usually have the radio tuned to Sweden's public broadcaster, and my son, sitting in the back seat, sometimes asks about what he hears.

What is war? Who is the king? How old is the king? Where is China?

One day they were talking about the United Nations on the radio. So he asked:

"What is the UN?"

Once again, it made me think about how outdated the current world order is, and how it ought to be changed.

A fleeting thought twenty years in the making

The idea did not come completely out of nowhere.

My opposition to geopolitical realpolitik was what first drew me into politics more than twenty years ago. Instead, I wanted to see a pro-democracy foreign policy.

Realpolitik means that power and self-interest take precedence over human rights. It becomes an excuse to accept dictatorship, abuses, or betrayals of smaller actors because doing so is considered beneficial to one's own state and power.

The dictators behave worst, but even democracies have a tendency to become guided by realpolitik when it comes to foreign affairs.

Later, after being elected to the Swedish Parliament (with a seat on the Foreign Affairs Committee), I proposed the creation of an Alliance of Democracies (which absolutely nobody joined me in supporting). After leaving politics, I became involved with the Alliance of Democracies Foundation.

So for more than twenty years I have thought, read, debated, written, and voiced opinions about geopolitics, while reflecting on what kind of world order we should have.

Stronger tyrants gave us democracy

In 1648, after years of negotiations, the Peace of Westphalia ended the Thirty Years' War in Europe and established the modern principle of sovereignty. In other words, each country would decide for itself on its internal affairs: laws, politics, system of government, economy, and religion.

Previously, power in Europe had been overlapping and highly hierarchical, with the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor serving as supranational authorities capable of intervening in the affairs of local rulers.

The peace settlement established that each state and its ruler had exclusive authority over its own territory.

States recognized one another's borders and right to self-determination, creating an international system of formally equal states that, in principle, were not supposed to interfere in one another's internal affairs. This gave us the sovereign territorial state.

The kings and princes were delighted. At last they were king of their own castles!

But all good things come to an end.

By establishing fixed geographic borders and the principle that a central authority held exclusive power within them, the territorial state created a unified arena for politics.

To compete in this new system of rival states, rulers were forced to build strong military organizations, which in turn required bureaucracies capable of collecting taxes and maintaining order. This concentration of power led to royal absolutism, but it also created an effective state apparatus.

When the ideas of popular government spread, both in thought and in action, the people could take over this state apparatus and thereby govern the country themselves. In this way, more and more countries became democratic.

The problem with sovereign states

At the same time that the sovereign state enabled the rise of democracy, it also became the dictator's best friend. Since states were not supposed to interfere in the internal affairs of other states, tyrants were free to tyrannize as they pleased.

A person who murders, tortures, starves, and oppresses people at home is welcomed by the international community as "Mr. President," or people pretend that they are royalty. In 1932, the Al Saud family declared themselves royalty. In international contexts, such as the United Nations, their king is addressed as His Majesty King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud.

Immoral and ridiculous at the same time.

In the current world order, democracy and dictatorship are treated as equals because it is territory and nationhood that possess rights (despite all declarations of human rights). As a result, a democratically elected leader enjoys the same rights as an absolute ruler. Nor does the democrat have any right to interfere in the dictator's internal affairs.

After the Rwandan genocide in the 1990s—when someone really should have interfered in their internal affairs—this principle began to erode somewhat, but the fundamental idea remains in place today.

Human sovereignty

Instead of tying political power to a geographic territory, this new world order begins with the individual human being.

From the sovereignty of nations to the sovereignty of individuals.

Every human being is the fundamental political unit.

All people should possess a form of world citizenship that stands above citizenship in any nation.

Decisions affecting the world should not be made by national representatives of peoples, but directly by the people themselves.

(I am certainly not the first person to have this idea.)

I believe people would be more central if people themselves made the decisions directly. There would be less focus on national power interests and the immoral actions that often follow from them.

Global issues in particular suffer from competition between nations. It would be considerably better if all countries were democracies, but even then there would remain an inherent power problem.

Global issues must be handled better and should be decided directly by the many people affected by them.

Most importantly, however, we must establish the principle that every human being belongs to themselves. A person is human because they are human, not because they belong to a particular nation. A nation does not automatically have the right to govern me simply because I happened to be born there.

Even though many countries have democratized their systems of government, the underlying foundation still assumes that the individual is subordinate to the territory into which they were born.

When value instead begins from the premise that each person belongs to themselves, and that rights are attached to human existence itself rather than to a passport issued by a state, part of the space that states currently use to justify abuses disappears.

If a system instead rests on voluntarism, consent, and the right to choose one's own communities, then all institutions are forced to deliver genuine value in order to earn people's participation. They can no longer demand obedience simply by pointing to a border drawn on a map hundreds of years ago.

What happens to my country?

Perhaps you enjoy being American, Chinese, or Swedish. And who are we supposed to cheer for in the World Cup if countries disappear?

I do not believe geographic belonging or local cultures will disappear. It is deeply human to feel connected to the place where one lives and to the people who live there.

What will change is the power that nations possess, not whether you love or hate seeing Norway win all the gold medals at the Winter Olympics.

But how would it work?

Such a new principle naturally raises a million practical questions.

How would decisions be made?

Would billions of people have to vote all the time?

I am actually not worried about that.

We will find answers to all those questions. Human beings are good at that.

The transition from today's system will not happen through revolution or because governments voluntarily surrender their power. Instead, parallel systems will emerge that are so superior that they gradually outcompete nation-states as decision-makers.

But first we must establish a new foundational principle.

United humans

We can already see that the current world order is beginning to crack.

The way it is happening is not good, but we do need a new world order. The current one is immoral.

It is time to take the next step.

In principle, this means moving sovereignty one step further.

From a world order built on the sovereignty of nations to one built on the sovereignty of every individual.

Mathias Sundin
Angry Optimist

First private reactor of its kind in four decades

The Mark-0 microreactor has reached criticality at Idaho National Laboratory in the United States. This means the reactor's nuclear reaction became self-sustaining, which is the first step before a reactor can begin producing electricity. The company Antares is behind the reactor and thereby became the first private company to bring an advanced reactor to criticality within the Department of Energy's Reactor Pilot Program.

Mark-0 is the first privately developed American reactor of a type other than a light-water reactor to reach criticality in more than four decades. The test was carried out in partnership with the Department of Energy, Idaho National Laboratory, and the company BWX Technologies. The U.S. Army took part as a future end user of the technology, providing support for integration and observation.

From concept to criticality in under twelve months

Antares went from concept to a critical reactor in less than twelve months. The company had set the schedule as a non-negotiable requirement. According to Antares, American nuclear power has long been defined by delays and by companies that promised but did not deliver. The company had committed to criticality in 2026, electricity production in 2027, and power to military installations in 2028. Criticality is the first of these commitments to be met on the schedule that was set.

Fuel from a military program

Mark-0 uses the same nuclear fuel as Project Pele, a program to develop and demonstrate a transportable microreactor for military use. The fuel, of the TRISO type, was manufactured by BWX Technologies in the state of Virginia. The test contributes data that validates key reactor physics parameters for Antares' reactors and provides Project Pele with verification data. Engineers also gained direct insight into the physics of the reactor's core and into how its control drums behave.

The company behind the reactor

Antares was founded in 2023 and has received more than 140 million dollars in funding. The company develops compact microreactors for defense and space applications and operates facilities in Torrance, California; Idaho Falls, Idaho; and Aiken, South Carolina.

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A vaccine against an entire virus family

Ordinary vaccines are designed using a current strain of a virus. The Cambridge researchers took a different route. They took known genetic codes from a range of coronaviruses that had been recorded by surveillance programmes searching for potential viral threats.

These codes were analysed by an artificial intelligence. It then designed a so-called super-antigen. An antigen is the part of a vaccine that the immune system learns to attack. This super-antigen is intended to train the immune system so that it provides protection against an entire family of viruses at once, even if the viruses mutate or a new infection jumps from animals to people.

That is where the big difference lies. Instead of protecting against a single virus strain, the method can provide far broader protection. As a result, a vaccine can work even against future mutations of a virus, that is, variants that do not yet exist.

Professor Jonathan Heeney at the University of Cambridge explains that this is the first time an antigen designed by AI has been trialled in people. He says the aim is to make vaccines that protect us, not just from today's viruses, but from what could cause the next outbreak or disease. He describes it as a shift in how society prepares for pandemics.

Why it is needed

Vaccines teach the body to recognise an infection so that the chances of fighting it off increase. The problem is that some viruses are adept at changing their appearance by mutating. The vaccine then quickly becomes out of date. That is why vaccines against Covid and seasonal flu need to be updated regularly. According to Heeney, research is always behind, and the aim of the new method is instead to get ahead of the curve and protect against new outbreaks and pandemics.

Professor Saul Faust at the University of Southampton, who carried out part of the trials, says the AI design has potential. He points out that the technology is considerably better at developing vaccines against potential pandemics precisely when viruses are changing.

More vaccines on the way

The Cambridge team is already conducting animal research on a universal seasonal flu vaccine that would not need to be adapted every year, as well as a vaccine against the bird flu virus H5N1, in case the virus that is currently affecting bird populations were to become a human pandemic. They are also working on a vaccine against viral haemorrhagic fevers, which includes Ebola. The ongoing outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo is caused by a species for which no vaccine has yet been developed.

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🎗️ Are we winning the war on cancer?

Using the body’s own defenses against cancer—immunotherapy—was a major medical breakthrough and was rightly awarded the Nobel Prize in 2018.

Today, there are more than 2,500 drugs and programs in development or use based on cancer immunotherapy.

More and more mortality curves for different cancers are starting to look like this one for stomach cancer.

Now another weapon is arriving: cancer vaccines.

A cancer vaccine teaches the immune system to recognize cancer cells. Tumors carry distinctive markers on their surface that set them apart from healthy cells. The vaccine presents these markers to the immune system, enabling it to identify and attack those specific cells.

Another type of vaccine aims to prevent cancer in people with a high inherited risk of developing the disease.

You can read more in this week’s article: Cancer vaccines are coming.

Combine this with what I wrote a few weeks ago about GLP-1 drugs, which not only help people lose weight but also appear to improve health across multiple areas, including reducing the risk of certain cancers.

Taken together, there is a growing body of evidence suggesting that we may be winning the war on cancer—gradually transforming it from one of the leading causes of death into a much smaller threat.

Mathias Sundin
The Angry Optimist

💡 Fact-based optimistic news of the week

🧤 Residue from lab gloves has inflated microplastic counts in the environment

Earlier measurements of microplastics in the environment have been too high. The cause is residue from common lab gloves that was counted as plastic. Now researchers have developed a way to separate glove residue from actual microplastics.

Read more on Warp News

🦾 AI text online has not increased factual errors

The researchers found no statistical link between more AI text and more factual errors online. Fears that writing styles, source links, and meaningful content would deteriorate were not confirmed in the measurements either.

Read more on Warp News

🤑 Swedes have become three times wealthier and also more equal in the 21st century

Median wealth rose by nearly 400 percent between 1999 and 2020. The richest 10 percent reduced their share of total wealth from 67 to 57 percent. The share of adults with no net wealth fell from 21 to 16 percent.

Read more on Warp News

🧬 A single gene-therapy dose could replace daily cholesterol medication

A single dose of the gene therapy VERVE-102, given as an infusion, lowered harmful cholesterol as much as today's medications do with repeated treatment. At the highest dose, harmful cholesterol fell by an average of 62 percent.

Read more on Warp News

🤖 The AI that solves unsolved problems now works on healthcare, power grids, and industry

A year ago, Warp News reported on AlphaEvolve, an AI system from Google DeepMind that finds new algorithms in mathematics and computer science. Now Google has reported what the system has accomplished over the past year, in everything from genomics to power grids and data processing.

Read more on Warp News

🎗️ Now cancer vaccines are coming

The immune system can now be used to treat several types of cancer, and more than 2,500 immunotherapies are in development. Cancer vaccines have also started to show results in clinical trials, against melanoma, pancreatic cancer, and brain tumors, among others.

Read more on Warp News

🎙️ AI talk or master class?

I'm giving a lot of talks and master classes on AI in several different countries. Happy to come to your organization.

Learn more at mathiassundin.org.

Faster diagnosis with blood tests

Alzheimer's used to be diagnosed with a PET scan or a spinal tap. Both methods were expensive and time-consuming. Now there are simple blood tests that show whether a person has the disease.

The new blood tests have allowed more patients to take part in clinical trials. Researchers used to be able to screen one or two possible participants per day. Now they can screen several hundred. This means new treatments can arrive sooner.

The diagnostics keep improving. Today's tests show whether a person has Alzheimer's right now. Within one or two years, it may become possible to determine whether a person will develop the disease in the future.

Drugs that slow the disease

The FDA has approved the first two treatments proven to modestly slow the progression of the disease. Early data suggest the effect could be considerably greater if the treatment is given early in the progression.

Research is underway into next-generation treatments that could be twice as effective as the current ones. A clinical trial is examining whether the drug donanemab can delay the onset of the disease or prevent it altogether. Results are expected late this year or early next year.

AI as a co-researcher

Artificial intelligence is now being used in the research. The AI agents Biomni-AD and Parthenon, the winners of the Alzheimer's Insights AI Prize, act as co-researchers. They pull permissioned datasets on their own and detect patterns a human might miss.

AI also helps researchers write their own code. That lets them run statistical analyses and test more hypotheses faster. Many researchers do not have access to a biostatistician or a data scientist. Now more of them can run the numbers themselves, while the statistics experts can spend their time on the most promising hypotheses.

Large datasets are shared

Platforms such as the Global Research and Imaging Platform, GRIP, make data and AI agents available at scale. The Alzheimer's Disease Data Initiative now has more than 10,000 users from over 125 countries. The Global Neurodegeneration Proteomics Consortium holds more than 300 million unique protein measures for researchers to learn from.

The number of people in the US living with Alzheimer's has risen from 5.5 million in 2017 to an estimated 7.4 million today. Dementia costs the US more than $780 billion each year, of which more than $160 billion falls on the public health insurance programs Medicare and Medicaid.

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A problem from 1946

The unit distance problem is about points on a plane. Imagine placing a number of points on a sheet of paper. The question is how many pairs of points can lie exactly the same distance apart, a fixed distance known as a unit distance. The more such pairs you can produce, the better the arrangement.

The question was posed by the mathematician Paul Erdős in 1946 and is considered one of the most famous in combinatorial geometry. It is easy to state but hard to solve.

Some arrangements are easy to work out. A row of points on a line gives almost as many pairs as there are points. A square grid gives roughly twice as many. The previously best known arrangement, a rescaled grid, gave somewhat more pairs, but still only an increase that was marginally faster than the number of points.

Erdős assumed that no arrangement could give significantly more pairs than that. For decades, mathematicians believed he was right. The lower bound for the problem had remained essentially unchanged since his 1946 construction. Erdős himself put a cash prize on the problem, first 300 dollars and later 500 dollars.

How OpenAI's model solved it

OpenAI tested a model on a collection of Erdős problems to explore whether advanced models can contribute to research. The model was not built solely for mathematics, but is a general reasoning model. It was therefore not trained to search through proof strategies or aimed at this particular problem.

The model disproved Erdős's assumption. It constructed an infinite family of examples that yield more unit distance pairs than had previously been thought possible. The solution was not a proof of the assumption, but a disproof.

The central parts of the solution come from algebraic number theory, a field far removed from geometry. Erdős's original construction can be understood through the so-called Gaussian integers. The new solution replaces these with more complex generalizations that produce more point pairs. The argument uses tools such as infinite class field towers and Golod–Shafarevich theory. These concepts were known to number theorists, but it was unexpected that they had implications for geometric questions in the plane.

OpenAI's researchers were surprised when they read the solution. Mehtaab Sawhney, a mathematician at Columbia, said that at first he did not believe the result. The team searched for errors, had outsiders verify the work, and checked the solution using the company's AI coding tool. Will Sawin, a professor of mathematics at Princeton, has in a subsequent refinement shown how large the improvement is in measurable terms.

The model's documented chain of thought was long. Even an abridged version ran to more than 75,000 words, about as much as the first Harry Potter book. A former OpenAI researcher estimated that the work took less than 32 hours and cost around 1,000 dollars in computing power.

Mathematicians on the result

OpenAI presented the solution together with a companion paper written by external mathematicians. Noga Alon, a leading combinatorialist at Princeton, described the result as an achievement that solves a long-standing open problem. He noted that the correct answer came as a surprise and that the construction uses tools from algebraic number theory in a skillful way.

Tim Gowers, a professor at the Collège de France and a recipient of the Fields Medal, called the result a milestone in AI mathematics. The number theorist Arul Shankar said that today's AI models go beyond merely being aids for mathematicians. According to him, they can come up with their own ideas and then carry them through.

What it means for AI and mathematics

According to OpenAI, this is the first time a prominent open problem, central to a subfield of mathematics, has been solved by AI on its own. The result also shows how long and coherent the reasoning these systems can now manage.

Thomas Bloom wrote in the companion paper that the solution taught mathematicians something new about the problem. It shows that number-theoretic constructions have more to say about this type of question than was previously assumed. He expects that more number theorists will now examine other open problems in discrete geometry.

OpenAI points out that the same capabilities matter outside mathematics. A model that can hold together complex reasoning, connect ideas from disparate fields of knowledge, and produce results that withstand expert review is useful in biology, physics, materials science, engineering, and medicine as well. The company emphasizes that AI can search, suggest, and verify, while humans choose which problems matter and interpret the results.

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A shortage of donor organs

There are not enough donated organs to meet the demand among patients with chronic liver disease. Many people with liver failure also do not receive a transplant, because they are not healthy enough to withstand the surgery.

To help these patients, engineers at MIT have developed mini livers that can be injected into the body and take over the work of the diseased liver. The researchers call them satellite livers. The idea is that the cells can be added to the body while the diseased organ stays in place and provides booster function.

The study is published in the journal Cell Biomaterials. Sangeeta Bhatia is the senior author and Vardhman Kumar is the lead author.

How the technology works

The human liver performs about 500 essential functions. It regulates blood clotting, removes bacteria from the blood, and metabolizes drugs. Most of these functions are carried out by cells called hepatocytes.

The researchers inject the liver cells together with small spheres of hydrogel. The spheres help the cells stay together and connect to nearby blood vessels. The spheres have a property that makes them behave like a liquid when they are packed closely together. This means they can be injected through a syringe and regain their solid form inside the body.

The mixture also contains fibroblasts, supportive cells that help the hepatocytes survive and that promote the growth of new blood vessels into the tissue. The researchers inject the cell mixture using ultrasound and can then use ultrasound to monitor how well the implant stays in place over time.

Results in the mice

In the experiments, the mixture was injected into fatty tissue in the belly. Once the cells had settled in place, they formed a stable and compact structure. Over time, blood vessels began to grow into the area, which kept the injected hepatocytes healthy. The cells received nutrients directly and produced the proteins the researchers expected.

After the injection, the cells were functional and able to secrete proteins into the blood for eight weeks, which was the full length of the study. According to the researchers, this suggests that the method could work as a long-term treatment for liver disease.

The researchers see the technology both as an alternative to surgery and as a bridge to a transplant, where the grafts can provide support until a donor organ becomes available. With the current version of the technology, patients would likely need to take immunosuppressive drugs. The researchers are exploring the possibility of developing hepatocytes that can evade the immune system, or using the hydrogel spheres to deliver immunosuppressive drugs locally.

WALL-Y
WALL-Y is an AI bot created in Claude. Learn more about WALL-Y and how we develop her. You can find her news here.
You can chat with WALL-Y GPT about this news article and fact-based optimism

🎗️ Are we winning the war on cancer?

Using the body’s own defenses against cancer—immunotherapy—was a major medical breakthrough and was rightly awarded the Nobel Prize in 2018.

Today, there are more than 2,500 drugs and programs in development or use based on cancer immunotherapy.

More and more mortality curves for different cancers are starting to look like this one for stomach cancer.

Now another weapon is arriving: cancer vaccines.

A cancer vaccine teaches the immune system to recognize cancer cells. Tumors carry distinctive markers on their surface that set them apart from healthy cells. The vaccine presents these markers to the immune system, enabling it to identify and attack those specific cells.

Another type of vaccine aims to prevent cancer in people with a high inherited risk of developing the disease.

You can read more in this week’s article: Cancer vaccines are coming.

Combine this with what I wrote a few weeks ago about GLP-1 drugs, which not only help people lose weight but also appear to improve health across multiple areas, including reducing the risk of certain cancers.

Taken together, there is a growing body of evidence suggesting that we may be winning the war on cancer—gradually transforming it from one of the leading causes of death into a much smaller threat.

Mathias Sundin
The Angry Optimist

💡 Fact-based optimistic news of the week

🧤 Residue from lab gloves has inflated microplastic counts in the environment

Earlier measurements of microplastics in the environment have been too high. The cause is residue from common lab gloves that was counted as plastic. Now researchers have developed a way to separate glove residue from actual microplastics.

Read more on Warp News

🦾 AI text online has not increased factual errors

The researchers found no statistical link between more AI text and more factual errors online. Fears that writing styles, source links, and meaningful content would deteriorate were not confirmed in the measurements either.

Read more on Warp News

🤑 Swedes have become three times wealthier and also more equal in the 21st century

Median wealth rose by nearly 400 percent between 1999 and 2020. The richest 10 percent reduced their share of total wealth from 67 to 57 percent. The share of adults with no net wealth fell from 21 to 16 percent.

Read more on Warp News

🧬 A single gene-therapy dose could replace daily cholesterol medication

A single dose of the gene therapy VERVE-102, given as an infusion, lowered harmful cholesterol as much as today's medications do with repeated treatment. At the highest dose, harmful cholesterol fell by an average of 62 percent.

Read more on Warp News

🤖 The AI that solves unsolved problems now works on healthcare, power grids, and industry

A year ago, Warp News reported on AlphaEvolve, an AI system from Google DeepMind that finds new algorithms in mathematics and computer science. Now Google has reported what the system has accomplished over the past year, in everything from genomics to power grids and data processing.

Read more on Warp News

🎗️ Now cancer vaccines are coming

The immune system can now be used to treat several types of cancer, and more than 2,500 immunotherapies are in development. Cancer vaccines have also started to show results in clinical trials, against melanoma, pancreatic cancer, and brain tumors, among others.

Read more on Warp News

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A year ago, Warp News reported on AlphaEvolve, an AI system from Google DeepMind that finds new algorithms in mathematics and computer science. Now Google has reported what the system has accomplished over the past year, in everything from genomics to power grids and data processing.

Results in health and the environment

In genomics, AlphaEvolve was used to improve DeepConsensus, a model that corrects errors in DNA sequencing. Errors in variant detection dropped by 30 percent. This gives researchers at PacBio more accurate data at a lower cost.

In power grids, the system was applied to the AC Optimal Power Flow problem. The share of usable solutions that a trained model could find rose from 14 percent to over 88 percent. This reduces the need for costly post-processing steps.

In earth science, AlphaEvolve improved models that predict the risk of natural disasters. Accuracy increased by 5 percent, across more than 20 categories such as wildfires, floods, and tornadoes.

Mathematics and physics

On Google's quantum processor Willow, AlphaEvolve proposed quantum circuits with ten times lower error than previous methods. This made it possible to run complex molecular simulations.

The system has also worked with mathematicians such as Terence Tao at UCLA and helped solve what are known as Erdős problems. It has improved earlier bounds for the Traveling Salesman Problem and for Ramsey numbers.

Its own infrastructure and companies

AlphaEvolve has gone from testing to becoming a fixed part of Google's infrastructure. It has been used to design the next generation of Google's AI chips, the TPU. The system also found more efficient methods for cache handling in two days, work that previously took months. In the Spanner database, it reduced the amount of unnecessary writing to storage by 20 percent.

Several companies now use the technology. Klarna doubled the training speed of one of its largest models. FM Logistic improved its route planning by 10.4 percent and saves over 9,300 miles of driving distance per year. Schrödinger achieved roughly four times faster calculations in materials research and drug development.

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Gloves leave residue that resembles plastic

To reduce plastic pollution, researchers first need to know how much microplastic is in nature and where it comes from. The measurement relies on separating synthetic plastic from other substances. A team at the University of Michigan has shown that a common piece of lab equipment disrupted that measurement: disposable gloves.

During manufacturing, stearate salts are used to release the gloves from their molds. The residue stays on the glove. When the glove touches a surface, it transfers. Under the most common analysis methods, infrared light and Raman, the residue produces nearly the same signal as polyethylene microplastic. It is also just as small and has the same shape. The average size was 1.6 micrometers.

This caused the residue to be counted as microplastic. Researchers call these false positives. With the most common analysis method, dry contact with gloves produced on average about 2,000 false positives per square millimeter.

Seven gloves were tested

The team tested seven kinds of disposable gloves: three latex, three nitrile, and one nitrile cleanroom glove. Each glove was pressed against a surface with a force of 30 newtons, roughly the force needed to lift 6.6 pounds. The residue was then analyzed.

The difference between the gloves was large. The glove that left the most, a latex glove, gave over 7,000 residues per square millimeter. The cleanroom glove left the least, on average about 100 false positives per square millimeter.

The method separates plastic from residue

For data that is already contaminated, the researchers developed two ways to separate residue from plastic. For infrared measurements, the comparison is limited to the part of the spectrum where the difference between the substances is clearest. For Raman measurements, a statistical method called conformal prediction is used, which indicates when a measurement needs to be reviewed by hand.

Tested on environmental samples

The researchers applied the methods to a real dataset: 2,653 measurements of airborne particles collected at four locations in Michigan in the spring of 2023. The samples had been collected according to the field's recommendations, using nitrile gloves. In the infrared measurements, the method found all 14 cases of glove residue. The error mainly affects the smallest particles, below ten micrometers.

Free tools for researchers

The researchers are sharing their reference libraries of stearate salts for free. With them, other researchers can review their own measurements and subtract glove residue. They recommend that researchers avoid gloves when possible, and otherwise choose gloves that leave little residue.

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How the study was done

A new study measured how AI-generated text actually affects the content on the internet, not just what people believe about it.

To obtain a representative sample, the researchers drew web pages from the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. The pages were published between 2022 and 2025, spread across 33 months from August 2022 to May 2025. To determine whether a text was written by a human or AI, they used the detector Pangram v3, which was the most reliable of four tested tools.

They also asked 853 adults in the United States what they believed about six possible negative effects of AI text. The sample was representative in terms of age distribution, sex, and ethnicity.

Factual accuracy held up

A common fear is that the internet would fill up with incorrect information as AI text increases. In the survey, 75.1 percent of respondents leaned toward agreeing with that.

The measurement showed something else. There was no statistical link between the share of AI text and the share of incorrect statements (ρ = −0.19, p = 0.27). To check facts, the researchers had a language model pull out concrete claims from the pages. Then 50 people manually checked whether the claims were correct.

In the measurement, the curve does in fact lean toward fewer factual errors as AI text increases. But the correlation is not statistically significant, so the researchers’ conclusion is more cautious: they find no evidence that AI text has led to more factual errors on the internet.

Several fears did not show up in the data

Three other fears could not be confirmed either. That individual writing styles would disappear in favor of a uniform voice was believed by 83.0 percent, but the measurement showed no link (ρ = 0.24, p = 0.17). That articles stop linking to external sources was believed by 69.9 percent (ρ = −0.12, p = 0.48). That texts become longer but say less was believed by 60.7 percent (ρ = −0.02, p = 0.89). None of these links were found in the figures.

Two links were found in the measurements

Two of the six hypotheses were confirmed. AI pages had 33 percent higher similarity between ideas and perspectives than pages written by humans (0.0701 vs. 0.0526). AI pages also had 107 percent higher share of positive language (0.7042 vs. 0.3400).

Frequent users worry less

Those who use AI tools often were less likely to believe in the negative effects than those who rarely use them (76.2 percent vs. 88.3 percent). Those with a negative view of AI believed in the effects more than those with a positive or neutral view (91.3 percent vs. 71.1 percent).

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🌐 Present at the Re-creation

One sentence in the final chapter stayed with me.

It was about a completely different time, but it was highly relevant to our time as well.

It was written by Dean Acheson in his autobiography Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department.

He worked at the U.S. State Department under President Roosevelt and later served as President Truman’s secretary of state.

Acheson would become one of the chief architects of the new world order. The UN, the IMF, the World Bank, NATO and much else took shape during his time.

When he looked back in the book, he wrote:

“Everyone who served in those years had the opportunity to give more than a sample of their best.”

They were ordinary people working in an extraordinary time, which both required them to perform at their full capacity and gave them the opportunity to do so.

Now we see how the world order that was built then is being torn down.

At such a time, it is easy to lose hope.

But this is our extraordinary time.

That is what I write about in this week’s Premium Supporter article, open to everyone: 🌐 Present at the Re-creation

Mathias Sundin
The Angry Optimist

🏆 This week's Premium Supporter article

Open and free for everyone thanks to the support of our paying members.

🌐 Present at the Re-creation

Extraordinary times require extraordinary efforts from ordinary people.

Read more on Warp News

💡 Fact-based optimistic news of the week

💊 GLP-1 drugs, such as Ozempic, linked to lower risk of cancer progression

Among women with breast cancer, more than 95 percent of GLP-1 users were alive after five years, compared to 89.5 percent of non-users. Women who had taken a GLP-1 drug had about 25 percent lower risk of receiving a breast cancer diagnosis.

Read more on Warp News

🛰️ AI and satellite imagery help journalists map illegal mines in the Amazon

Machine learning analyzes satellite images covering more than 123 million acres of rainforest and identifies mining pits and airstrips. Venezuelan journalist Joseph Poliszuk has identified 3,718 gold mining sites. Some of the mines were located within protected indigenous lands.

Read more on Warp News

🚰 Machine pulls water from the air - can produce 4,000 liters per day

Startup Atoco is preparing production of a machine that extracts water directly from the air using nanocrystalline materials. The container-sized prototype can produce up to 1,057 gallons of water per day and be installed at data centers, hospitals, and other critical infrastructure.

Read more on Warp News

🦟 Malaria vaccine has reduced child mortality by 13% in three African countries

A study confirms that the RTS,S vaccine has reduced overall child mortality by 13 percent in Ghana, Kenya and Malawi. The effect was achieved even though only 71 percent of children received three doses and 40 percent received the fourth dose.

Read more on Warp News

📚 More nine-year-olds are reading books daily

39 percent of 9-year-olds read books or newspapers daily, the highest share since the measurements began in 2012. Daily reading is increasing among children aged 9 to 11 compared with the previous measurement in 2022.

Read more on Warp News

🌡️ Research committee that provides input to the IPCC drops the worst climate scenarios

The research committee ScenarioMIP, which develops the climate scenarios that form the basis for the IPCC's reports, has officially classified the previous worst-case scenarios RCP8.5, SSP5-8.5 and SSP3-7.0 as implausible.

Read more on Warp News

🎙️ AI talk or master class?

I'm giving a lot of talks and master classes on AI in several different countries. Happy to come to your organization.

Learn more at mathiassundin.org.

Median wealth grew fivefold

A new study maps how the wealth of Swedes developed between 1999 and 2020. The researchers built a new database covering the entire population. It combines tax data, property registers, ownership records for companies and shares, pension accounts, and debt records.

Wealth rose across the entire population. Average real net wealth per adult rose by roughly 200 percent. That means the average Swede was three times as wealthy in 2020 as in 1999.

Median wealth rose even more, by nearly 400 percent. The person in the middle of the distribution was thus five times as wealthy in 2020 as in 1999. Median wealth rose from around 24,000 euros in 1999 to around 120,000 euros in 2020. Relative growth was largest in the lower and middle parts of the distribution.

Economic inequality declined

The researchers measured economic inequality with the Gini coefficient. It is a measure that runs from 0 to 1. A value of 0 means everyone owns the same amount. A value of 1 means a single person owns everything. The lower the value, the more evenly wealth is distributed. In Sweden the Gini coefficient fell from 0.87 to 0.77.

The richest 10 percent of Swedes saw their share of total wealth fall from 67 to 57 percent. The richest 1 percent's share dropped from 31 to 26 percent. The poorest half of the population owned a negative share of wealth at the start of the period. By the end of the period that share had turned positive.

Occupational pensions evened things out

The researchers point to the spread of funded occupational pensions as the main reason economic inequality declined. Pensions' contribution to the Gini coefficient fell from about 0.25 in 1999 to 0.12 in 2020. For people in the lower part of the distribution, pension funds now make up the bulk of their assets.

Fewer people without assets

The share of adults with zero or negative net wealth fell from 21 to 16 percent. Those who still lack assets are largely young, and many are students or early in their working lives.

Younger generations wealthier than earlier ones

Later-born generations hold more net wealth than earlier generations did at the same age. This sets Sweden apart from the United States and the United Kingdom, where generational wealth growth has stalled. The researchers link the Swedish pattern to funded pensions and to broader participation in housing and financial markets.

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Today's treatment requires daily doses

A single dose of the gene therapy VERVE-102, given as an infusion into the blood, lowered the level of harmful cholesterol in patients with inherited high cholesterol or premature coronary artery disease. The reduction was as large as the one today's medications produce, but today's medications require repeated treatment. This is shown in a phase 1 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

For patients at high risk of cardiovascular disease, guidelines recommend keeping cholesterol low over a long period, sometimes for decades. Today this is managed with daily pills or regular injections.

Many stop the treatment. Between 30 and 50 percent of patients stop taking their medication within a year of starting. The reasons include side effects, costs, and difficulty getting care. Stopping treatment has been linked to worse outcomes for the heart.

Switches off a gene in the liver

VERVE-102 is designed to address exactly that problem. The treatment is a gene edit that switches off the PCSK9 gene in the liver.

PCSK9 is a protein made in the liver that controls how much LDL cholesterol is in the blood. LDL cholesterol, the harmful cholesterol, is the blood fat that can build up in artery walls and lead to cardiovascular disease. Twenty years ago, researchers discovered that people born with certain variants of the PCSK9 gene have low cholesterol levels throughout life and less often develop cardiovascular disease.

The treatment is based on base editing, a method that changes a single building block in the genome. The drug contains an mRNA and a guide RNA packaged in a lipid nanoparticle. The particle enters the liver's cells, where the editing takes place. The idea is that a single treatment should be enough.

Lower cholesterol at higher doses

In the study, 35 participants received one of six doses, from 0.3 to 1.0 milligrams per kilogram of body weight. The higher the dose, the greater the effect.

The PCSK9 protein fell by an average of 51 percent at the lowest dose and by 88 percent at the highest. LDL cholesterol fell by between 9 and 62 percent.

At the highest dose, LDL cholesterol dropped from 128 to 51 milligrams per deciliter, a reduction of 78 milligrams per deciliter. Today's PCSK9 inhibitors lower LDL cholesterol by about 40 to 60 percent, but they require repeated treatment. Here a single dose was enough.

The reduction held

The participants were followed for up to 18 months. Fifteen of them were followed for at least a year. The reduction in both PCSK9 and LDL cholesterol held throughout the entire follow-up period.

Because the gene edit takes place in the genome, the effect can be long-lasting. The liver's cells are replaced roughly every 200 to 300 days, and the results suggest that the edited gene remains even as the cells renew. At the same time, the researchers note that larger and longer studies are needed to determine whether the reduction holds over decades.

If the reduction at the highest dose holds for 20 years, the researchers estimate that the risk of cardiovascular disease could fall by more than 50 percent for most patients with high cholesterol.

No serious side effects linked to the drug

No dose-limiting toxic effects occurred, and no participant dropped out of the study. Seven participants (20 percent) had mild or moderate reactions related to the infusion. Three participants had a temporary and symptom-free rise in the liver enzyme alanine aminotransferase, which returned to normal within a few days.

One participant with a history of acid reflux developed pneumonia caused by aspiration, meaning stomach contents entering the airways. The site investigator assessed it as not linked to VERVE-102.

The study was conducted in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom and was funded by Verve Therapeutics, a wholly owned subsidiary of Eli Lilly. The participants were on average 52 years old. Twenty-nine of them (83 percent) had inherited high cholesterol.

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Fifteen years of immunotherapy

It has been fifteen years since the first clear proof that the immune system can be used to extend the lives of cancer patients. The field has grown quickly since then. Today there are more than 2,500 drugs and programs for cancer immunotherapy.

Immunotherapy works by strengthening the body's own immune system so that it attacks cancer cells. Today there are about eight different classes of immunotherapy that are approved or in development. Now one of the later steps is arriving: the vaccines.

Many ways to strengthen the immune system

Some drugs release the brakes that stop the immune system from attacking cancer cells, known as checkpoint inhibitors. These extended survival by anywhere from a couple of months to about a year and a half. The most widely used of them has more than 40 approved uses and is the best-selling cancer drug in the world. Several new checkpoint inhibitors are now being tested, often in combination with one another.

Another type is antibody drugs that carry a cell-killing agent directly into the cancer cell. More than 15 of these are approved, and over 300 are in development. A third type links a cancer cell to an immune cell. Nine such drugs are approved, and over 500 are on the way.

In cell therapy, immune cells are taken out of the patient, rebuilt, and given back. The first such treatment was approved in 2017 for blood cancer, and in 2024 a treatment was approved for melanoma. Recently, a new version using long-lived immune cells was given to eleven patients with blood cancer that had not responded to earlier treatment, with results in several of them.

How cancer vaccines work

A cancer vaccine teaches the immune system to recognize cancer cells. The tumor has specific markers on its surface that set it apart from healthy cells. The vaccine displays these markers so that the immune system learns to find and attack those particular cells.

The vaccines are often given together with an immune drug. The vaccine points out the target, and the drug makes sure the immune system is allowed to attack it. Most of the vaccines are made from the patient's own tumor and take about two months to produce.

Results in clinical trials

Between 2020 and 2025, several trials showed results. Patients with high-risk melanoma that had been surgically removed were given a vaccine together with an immune drug. They went longer without recurrence than those who received only the drug. The same vaccine is now being tested in larger trials for melanoma and lung cancer.

Patients with pancreatic cancer were given a vaccine after surgery. It produced a long-lasting immune response and later recurrence. In a form of brain tumor, a vaccine extended overall survival compared with earlier patient groups.

In a trial for metastatic melanoma, patients were given a vaccine together with an immune drug. The median time without the disease worsening was 25.5 months. In a trial for kidney cancer, patients were given a vaccine, and none of them had a recurrence over 42 months. In a form of late-stage leukemia, a vaccine doubled survival compared with earlier treatment.

Vaccines meant to prevent cancer

The other type of vaccine is meant to prevent cancer in people at high hereditary risk. A trial in people with a hereditary condition that raises the risk of cancer produced a strong immune response in 45 participants. Similar work is under way for people with hereditary mutations that raise the risk of breast cancer. Researchers have also produced early results for a vaccine meant to prevent pancreatic cancer.

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🌐 Present at the Re-creation

One sentence in the final chapter stayed with me.

It was about a completely different time, but it was highly relevant to our time as well.

It was written by Dean Acheson in his autobiography Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department.

He worked at the U.S. State Department under President Roosevelt and later served as President Truman’s secretary of state.

Acheson would become one of the chief architects of the new world order. The UN, the IMF, the World Bank, NATO and much else took shape during his time.

When he looked back in the book, he wrote:

“Everyone who served in those years had the opportunity to give more than a sample of their best.”

They were ordinary people working in an extraordinary time, which both required them to perform at their full capacity and gave them the opportunity to do so.

Now we see how the world order that was built then is being torn down.

At such a time, it is easy to lose hope.

But this is our extraordinary time.

That is what I write about in this week’s Premium Supporter article, open to everyone: 🌐 Present at the Re-creation

Mathias Sundin
The Angry Optimist

🏆 This week's Premium Supporter article

Open and free for everyone thanks to the support of our paying members.

🌐 Present at the Re-creation

Extraordinary times require extraordinary efforts from ordinary people.

Read more on Warp News

💡 Fact-based optimistic news of the week

💊 GLP-1 drugs, such as Ozempic, linked to lower risk of cancer progression

Among women with breast cancer, more than 95 percent of GLP-1 users were alive after five years, compared to 89.5 percent of non-users. Women who had taken a GLP-1 drug had about 25 percent lower risk of receiving a breast cancer diagnosis.

Read more on Warp News

🛰️ AI and satellite imagery help journalists map illegal mines in the Amazon

Machine learning analyzes satellite images covering more than 123 million acres of rainforest and identifies mining pits and airstrips. Venezuelan journalist Joseph Poliszuk has identified 3,718 gold mining sites. Some of the mines were located within protected indigenous lands.

Read more on Warp News

🚰 Machine pulls water from the air - can produce 4,000 liters per day

Startup Atoco is preparing production of a machine that extracts water directly from the air using nanocrystalline materials. The container-sized prototype can produce up to 1,057 gallons of water per day and be installed at data centers, hospitals, and other critical infrastructure.

Read more on Warp News

🦟 Malaria vaccine has reduced child mortality by 13% in three African countries

A study confirms that the RTS,S vaccine has reduced overall child mortality by 13 percent in Ghana, Kenya and Malawi. The effect was achieved even though only 71 percent of children received three doses and 40 percent received the fourth dose.

Read more on Warp News

📚 More nine-year-olds are reading books daily

39 percent of 9-year-olds read books or newspapers daily, the highest share since the measurements began in 2012. Daily reading is increasing among children aged 9 to 11 compared with the previous measurement in 2022.

Read more on Warp News

🌡️ Research committee that provides input to the IPCC drops the worst climate scenarios

The research committee ScenarioMIP, which develops the climate scenarios that form the basis for the IPCC's reports, has officially classified the previous worst-case scenarios RCP8.5, SSP5-8.5 and SSP3-7.0 as implausible.

Read more on Warp News

✉️ Get a dose of fact-based, free, optimism once a week

Every week, we send out a free newsletter with fact-based, optimistic news about technology, science, and human progress.

If you're not a subscriber yet, you are welcome to become one!

If you like this newsletter, please forward it to a friend and ask them to subscribe. It's free and arrives once a week.

🎤 Talk on AI

Let me help your organization level up on AI.

Read more at mathiassundin.org.

Four studies point in the same direction

Four new studies show that people taking GLP-1 drugs such as Novo Nordisk's Ozempic and Eli Lilly's Mounjaro may have better outcomes when it comes to cancer. The results include reduced tumor progression, lower mortality, and lower risk of developing breast cancer.

A study from the Cleveland Clinic Cancer Institute followed more than 10,000 patients with early-stage cancer who started taking GLP-1 drugs after their diagnosis. The researchers compared their disease progression with patients taking a different type of diabetes medication. Patients on GLP-1 drugs were less likely to see their cancer spread.

Lung cancer progression cut in half

Among lung cancer patients, the share who developed advanced disease fell from 22 percent to 10 percent among GLP-1 users. For breast cancer, the corresponding figures were 10 percent compared to 20 percent. Researchers also saw statistically significant reductions for colorectal and liver cancer.

Dr. Mark Orland, a resident at the Cleveland Clinic, will present the study at the American Society of Clinical Oncology's annual meeting later this month. He noted that it is important to quickly understand the drugs' possible anti-tumor effects, since millions of Americans use them.

Longer survival for breast cancer patients

An analysis from the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center of more than 137,000 breast cancer patients showed that more than 95 percent of GLP-1 users were alive after five years, compared to 89.5 percent of those who did not use the drugs.

A study from the University of Pennsylvania included nearly 95,000 women who underwent breast imaging. Those who had taken a GLP-1 drug had about 25 percent lower risk of receiving a breast cancer diagnosis. The result remained after the researchers accounted for age, weight, and other risk factors.

Dr. Jasmine Sukumar, a breast oncologist at UT MD Anderson, said that the researchers are seeing a signal across several different databases, which is interesting given that the studies have somewhat different designs.

Two possible explanations

Researchers do not yet know why the drugs may have this effect. One theory is that GLP-1 reduces cancer risk indirectly, through weight loss and improved metabolism — two factors that are each independently linked to lower cancer risk. Another theory is more direct: receptors for the GLP-1 hormone, which the drugs mimic, appear on the surface of some tumor cells. This opens the possibility that the drugs act on cancer biology itself.

GLP-1 drugs are already approved for lowering blood sugar, producing weight loss, and reducing the risk of heart attacks and strokes. They are also being tested for sleep apnea and addictive behaviors.

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The previous one had been upheld by European great powers, but after six years of war it lay in ruins, just as much as the countries themselves.

In this geopolitical power vacuum, the United States — a nation historically marked by deep suspicion of foreign alliances — was forced to fundamentally reassess its global role and finally take up the mantle as leader of the free world.

By the early 1950s, a new world order was in place.

The UN as a global forum to prevent new world wars through collective security and peaceful conflict resolution. The Bretton Woods system tied the dollar to gold and other currencies to the dollar, and created the IMF and the World Bank as economic pillars. The Marshall Plan provided American aid to Western Europe for reconstruction, political stability and to slow the appeal of communism. The Truman Doctrine became the United States’ policy for using economic and military means to stop communist expansion. After aggressive Soviet expansion in Eastern Europe, NATO was formed, the first peacetime alliance in U.S. history.

One person who was deeply involved in all of this was Dean Acheson. Wearing a mustache and tweed jackets, he became, first as assistant secretary of state under President Roosevelt and later as secretary of state under President Truman, one of the architects of the new world order.

In every part of this construction, Acheson played a key role, from formulating the basic idea behind the Marshall Plan and negotiating the NATO Treaty to helping drive the steps that led to the Truman Doctrine.

He gave his own view of these years in the nearly 800-page epic Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department, published in the late 1960s. The book became a bestseller, and Acheson won the Pulitzer Prize for it.

I finished reading it last week and was struck by a sentence in the final chapter:

"All who served in those years had an opportunity to give more than a sample of their best."

They were ordinary people working through extraordinary times. Those years were not easy; quite the opposite. They were difficult, dangerous, full of failures, crises and shattered hopes.

But also of successes and progress of enormous significance.

Precisely for that reason, everyone who took part then had the opportunity to use so much more of their ability than they would under normal circumstances. They gave all their energy, knowledge, intelligence, ingenuity, creativity and endurance.

Despite all the setbacks during those years, Acheson and others involved could look back on them with pride.

Extraordinary times require extraordinary efforts from ordinary people.

Present at the re-creation

Around us now, the world order that was largely established during the Acheson years is being torn down.

At such a time, it is easy to lose hope.

But this is our time.

We are the ordinary people of our time who will now get the chance to give more than a sample of our best.

Mathias Sundin
Angry Optimist

The technology that sees what is hidden from the ground

Satellite imagery has long been used by investigative journalists to examine conflict zones and remote areas. Now the images are being combined with machine learning that automates the analysis and makes it possible to examine vast areas. In environmental journalism, the technology is being used by South American reporters to map illegal mines, large-scale logging, and cattle ranching across the Amazon.

Joseph Poliszuk left Venezuela in 2018 after exposing corruption under President Nicolás Maduro. In exile, he began experimenting with satellite-based investigations. When illegal gold mining surged during the COVID-19 pandemic, he wanted to document the development, but manually going through images covering more than 123 million acres of rainforest was not feasible. With support from the Pulitzer Center's Rainforest Investigations Network fellowship and technical help from the nonprofit organization Earth Genome, he trained an AI model to recognize the scars of mining pits and the airstrips cut into the vegetation to transport minerals.

3,718 mines mapped in Venezuela

In January 2022, Poliszuk published his first article based on the model, in an El País series titled "Corredor Furtivo." He was able to identify 3,718 gold mining sites in the states of Amazonas and Bolívar. Some of the mines were located within protected indigenous lands and in Canaima National Park, home to the world's tallest waterfall, Angel Falls. By cross-referencing the maps with crime data from Venezuelan authorities, he could determine whether the mines were operated by Venezuelan syndicates, Colombian guerrilla groups, or Brazilian garimpeiros. The week after one of the articles was published, the Venezuelan military announced that it had bombed several illegal airstrips in the area.

That same year, Brazilian journalist Hyury Potter developed a similar project within the same fellowship program. He published several investigations in Intercept Brasil that identified hundreds of previously unreported airstrips in the Brazilian Amazon. The New York Times published its own investigation based on the same analysis, in collaboration with Potter and the Pulitzer Center.

Amazon Mining Watch covers nine countries

In 2022, the Pulitzer Center, Earth Genome, and the nonprofit organization Amazon Conservation launched the Amazon Mining Watch platform. It uses machine learning to map mining activity in all nine countries that make up the Amazon Basin. The first models were trained for specific tasks, but Earth Genome is now working with larger foundation models trained on satellite imagery, radar, land cover data, and elevation data.

According to Edward Boyda, physicist and co-founder of Earth Genome, such a model can be adapted with only a few examples from the user to recognize different objects on the Earth's surface.

A corresponding platform for Africa

The Pulitzer Center and Earth Genome are now partnering with the nonprofit organization Code for Africa to build Africa Mining Watch. The platform will map mining activity in the tropical belt, which includes the Congo Basin, the world's second-largest tropical rainforest. It launches publicly in July. On Earth Day in April, 25 journalists from across Africa took part in a seven-hour virtual mapathon to test the platform.

Earth Genome is also developing its own tool, Earth Index, where a journalist or researcher can select an area on the world map and mark examples of what they want to identify, after which the platform points out similar locations in the region. In its beta phase, Earth Index has been used to investigate illegal logging in Albania, commercial flower farms in Uganda, and palm oil production in Brazil.

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Nanocrystals capture water molecules

Atoco's prototype sits in a parking lot in Southern California and looks unremarkable until water starts flowing from a hose. Inside the machine are wires, tubes, and a container of light-colored material. The light-colored material consists of MOFs, metal-organic frameworks. These are nanocrystalline structures engineered at the atomic level to attract specific molecules, in this case H2O.

The machine silently collects water molecules from the surrounding air and stores them in the material's porous cavities, which function as microscopic water tanks. An ounce of MOF material can contain a surface area equivalent to a soccer field. The material is largely composed of common elements such as carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen, copper, and aluminum.

When the machine is ready to deliver the water, the material is heated so that the molecules are released. A condenser converts the water vapor into liquid, which flows out through a slender tube.

Two models for different needs

The shipping container-sized machine is set to go into production later this year and can be installed at data centers, hospitals, and other critical infrastructure. It would take about a dozen machines to supply a water-efficient data center in California.

There is also a model powered by sunlight that operates off the grid. It produces less water and is intended for communities where water currently has to be trucked in. In Ethiopia, such a machine could supply about eight households in a village.

Atoco expects to manufacture and sell 200 machines in 2027. The company says interest from potential buyers already exceeds the planned production capacity. The production model will be able to deliver water for a few cents per liter.

Clean water without contaminants

Because the MOF material only attracts H2O molecules, the water is free of PFAS, microplastics, and other contaminants often found in the water supply. This makes the technology attractive for data centers and semiconductor plants, which need pure water for cooling and manufacturing.

Competitor AirJoule Technologies, a joint venture with GE Vernova, plans to start production later this year of a MOF-based machine that can produce 2,000 liters per day.

The Nobel laureate behind the technology

Omar Yaghi, 61, a professor of chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, founded Atoco in 2021. He shared the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on MOFs. Yaghi grew up in Jordan as the son of Palestinian refugees in a one-room house he shared with nine siblings and the family's cows. The house had no electricity or running water, and his task as a child was to fill as many containers as he could find when the authorities delivered water to his village every other week.

According to Atoco, there is more water in the atmosphere than in all the world's lakes and rivers combined, and it is continuously being replenished.

WALL-Y
WALL-Y is an AI bot created in Claude. Learn more about WALL-Y and how we develop her. You can find her news here.
You can chat with WALL-Y GPT about this news article and fact-based optimism

🧇 Moved to Brussels

A personal update: I have moved from Sweden to Belgium.

For the past two and a half weeks, my family and I have been living just outside Brussels. My wife has got a job down here, so Teddy and I are, of course, coming along. Two years to start with, and then we’ll see.

We have wanted to live abroad for a long time, so now that it is finally happening, it feels very exciting.

Warp News and the rest of my work will continue as usual.

Right now, I am actually in Kiruna with the Swedish Space Agency, and tomorrow and on Friday I will be giving talks in Stockholm.

📖 New edition of the book

The first edition of The Fifth Acceleration/Den femte accelerationen has sold out, so a new one has now been printed.

It is not yet available in any language other than Swedish, but we have now started contacting foreign publishers to see if there is interest.

If you would like to read the book in English or another language, you are very welcome to register your interest on the book’s website. It helps us get it published in other languages if foreign publishers can see that there are potential book buyers.

It takes about 11 seconds to do on the book’s website and is, of course, not binding, but you will receive an offer when the book is published in your language.

There you can also read more about the book and both read and listen to an excerpt.

Mathias Sundin
The Angry Optimist

🏆 This week's Premium Supporter article

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📉 WeightWatchers filed for bankruptcy because people lost too much weight

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Read more on Warp News

🛰️ Coffee companies launch satellite program to map deforestation

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🔋 Australia's battery capacity has doubled – cutting reliance on gas

Battery capacity in Australia has more than doubled between March 2025 and March 2026. Gas-fired generation has fallen 24 percent and is at its lowest level since 1999. Average wholesale electricity prices have dropped 12 percent.

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⚡ Cement has been produced entirely with electricity – significant potential to cut CO2 emissions

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🏜️ New method turns desert into arable land in three years instead of a hundred

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🧲 Researchers have shrunk giant magnets to the size of a palm

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🎙️ AI talk or master class?

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The study covered 158 areas in three countries

The study followed 158 areas in Ghana, Kenya and Malawi. 79 areas introduced the vaccine in 2019, while 79 served as comparison areas and received the vaccine later. Surveillance was built on a network of more than 26,000 local reporters who informed researchers of child deaths, followed by home visits to confirm the details.

The areas were randomly assigned and the baseline was balanced. The use of other interventions, such as bed nets, routine vaccinations and care for fever, was similar in both groups throughout the four-year period. This means that the reduction in deaths, according to the researchers, can be attributed to the vaccine itself.

During the evaluation period, 1.29 million children received the first dose, 1.07 million received the third dose and 436,527 children received the fourth dose. The effect was equally large for girls and boys.

Effect even at moderate vaccination coverage

There had previously been concerns that the vaccine would need to be given in all four doses to work. The new results show that this is not the case. By the end of the evaluation, 71 percent of children had received three doses and 40 percent had received the fourth, and mortality nevertheless fell substantially.

Doctor Kate O'Brien at the World Health Organization WHO, co-author of the evaluation, says the results are solid evidence that malaria vaccines can change the trajectory of child mortality in Africa.

The results have direct relevance for the 25 African countries that have now added malaria vaccines to their childhood immunisation programmes. Many of these countries have a higher malaria burden than the pilot areas. According to WHO, the effect is likely to be as large or larger in these countries.

The vaccine does not crowd out other interventions

The study shows that the introduction of malaria vaccines did not displace other interventions for child health. The use of routine vaccinations and bed nets remained stable. A significant share of the children who did not sleep under insecticide-treated nets still received the malaria vaccine, which increased the proportion of children with access to at least one form of malaria protection.

The four-dose schedule also creates new contact points with the healthcare system. The authors note that these visits can be used to deliver other vaccines, vitamin A or bed nets at the same time.

In 2024, an estimated 438,000 children died of malaria in Africa. Most had not reached their fifth birthday. The pilot project was launched in 2019 in Ghana, Kenya and Malawi, which were the first countries in the world to offer RTS,S to their population. WHO recommended the vaccine for wider use in 2021.

WALL-Y
WALL-Y is an AI bot created in Claude. Learn more about WALL-Y and how we develop her. You can find her news here.
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The increase continues among the youngest

A report from the Swedish Media Authority, Ungar & medier 2025, shows that reading of books and newspapers is increasing among younger children. The shift in trend began in 2022 and has been reinforced in the latest measurement from 2024.

Among 9-year-olds, 39 percent now read books or newspapers daily. This is the highest share since the data collection began in 2012.

Reading of books and newspapers declined gradually from 2012 to 2020. In 2022, the trend reversed and daily reading increased in all age groups, though to varying degrees. In 2024, daily reading increased further among children between 9 and 11 years old. In the 12-and-up age group, the results are either at the same level as in 2022 or slightly lower. The earlier trend of declining daily reading has come to a halt.

Children are more satisfied with how much they read

Alongside the decline in reading between 2012 and 2020, the share of children and young people who themselves felt that they spend too little time reading books and newspapers increased. In the 9–12 age group, that trend reversed in 2022 at the same time as daily reading increased. This means that more children in the younger age group are both reading daily and are satisfied with how much they read.

AI chatbots are used for schoolwork

AI chatbots such as ChatGPT, Google Bard and Character.AI have been incorporated into the media routines of many young people. More than one in three young people aged 13–16 and more than one in two aged 17–18 use AI chatbots at least once a week.

When children and young people use AI chatbots, it is most often to get answers to questions of all kinds. Using them to summarize and write texts for school is also common. The utility-oriented use increases with age.

WALL-Y
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New generation of climate scenarios

The Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) is run by the World Climate Research Programme together with the World Meteorological Organization, the International Science Council, and UNESCO's Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission. Under CMIP, now in its seventh iteration, sits the subcommittee ScenarioMIP, which is responsible for developing the scenarios used by climate models. ScenarioMIP has now published seven new scenarios that will form the basis for the IPCC's Seventh Assessment Report (AR7) and much of the research it builds on.

In a paper by Van Vuuren et al., the authors write that the previous high emission levels in CMIP6, quantified by SSP5-8.5, have become implausible. They cite trends in the costs of renewable energy, the emergence of climate policy, and recent years' emission trends as reasons.

Large differences from previous scenarios

The new HIGH scenario reaches 71 gigatons of carbon dioxide per year from fossil fuels and industry by 2100. This compares with SSP5-8.5, which stood at 128 gigatons in 2100. None of the new CMIP7 scenarios come close to SSP5-8.5. HIGH also sits about 9 percent below SSP3-7.0 measured in cumulative emissions through 2100.

In terms of temperature, the new HIGH scenario is 0.9°C cooler than SSP5-8.5 in apples-to-apples comparisons, and 1.4°C cooler compared with the IPCC's AR6 values for SSP5-8.5. Compared with SSP3-7.0, HIGH is 0.2°C cooler.

Updated emissions data

Part of the change comes from the fact that historical emissions are now calibrated against 2023 data, compared with 2014 data used in AR6. The more moderate emission trajectories in recent years have led to lower projected end-of-century warming even for the old SSP scenarios when run through the updated climate model FaIR.

The IEA's scenarios are lower

The two main reference scenarios from the International Energy Agency's World Energy Outlook 2025, which extends to 2050, both sit below both the new MEDIUM scenario and the previous SSP2-4.5. The IEA's STEPS scenario, based on current and announced policies, shows emissions falling to under 30 gigatons of carbon dioxide per year by 2050 and leading to about 2.5°C of warming by 2100.

Scenarios that shape policy

The scenarios now classified as implausible have been widely used in policy work. National climate impact assessments in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Canada, Australia, Japan, and the Netherlands have used RCP8.5 or SSP5-8.5 as a reference. The Network for Greening the Financial System, used by more than 140 central banks, has applied scenarios calibrated against RCP8.5 in stress tests at institutions including the European Central Bank, the Bank of England, and the US Federal Reserve. The World Bank's Climate Change Knowledge Portal, which provides the basis for climate reports in more than 100 countries, has used SSP5-8.5 and SSP3-7.0 as defaults.

Nine years from research to confirmation

It has been known since 2017 that the upper-end climate scenarios have fundamental flaws. Nine years later, this has now been officially recognized by the committee responsible for the scenarios used in the IPCC's reports.

WALL-Y
WALL-Y is an AI bot created in Claude. Learn more about WALL-Y and how we develop her. You can find her news here.
You can chat with WALL-Y GPT about this news article and fact-based optimism

🧇 Moved to Brussels

A personal update: I have moved to Belgium.

For the past two and a half weeks, my family and I have been living just outside Brussels. My wife has got a job down here, so Teddy and I are, of course, coming along. Two years to start with, and then we’ll see.

We have wanted to live abroad for a long time, so now that it is finally happening, it feels very exciting.

Warp News and the rest of my work will continue as usual.

Right now, I am actually in Kiruna with the Swedish Space Agency, and tomorrow and on Friday I will be giving talks in Stockholm.

📖 New edition of the book

The first edition of The Fifth Acceleration/Den femte accelerationen has sold out, so a new one has now been printed.

It is not yet available in any language other than Swedish, but we have now started contacting foreign publishers to see if there is interest.

If you would like to read the book in English or another language, you are very welcome to register your interest on the book’s website. It helps us get it published in other languages if foreign publishers can see that there are potential book buyers.

It takes about 11 seconds to do on the book’s website and is, of course, not binding, but you will receive an offer when the book is published in your language.

There you can also read more about the book and both read and listen to an excerpt.

Mathias Sundin
The Angry Optimist

🏆 This week's Premium Supporter article

Open and free for everyone thanks to the support of our paying members.

📉 WeightWatchers filed for bankruptcy because people lost too much weight

WeightWatchers did not fail because people stopped wanting to lose weight. It failed because they did lose weight, but in a different way. A way that points to a coming health revolution.

Read more on Warp News

💡 Fact-based optimistic news of the week

☢️ Forty years after the disaster, Chernobyl teems with wildlife

Forty years after the accident at the nuclear power plant, the area around Chernobyl remains too dangerous for human habitation. But the wildlife has moved back in. Przewalski's horses, wolves, bears, lynx, moose, and red deer roam freely in the Chernobyl zone.

Read more on Warp News

🛰️ Coffee companies launch satellite program to map deforestation

Several major coffee companies and coffee traders have joined forces to map coffee farms and deforestation using satellite imagery and AI models. The initiative will protect millions of smallholder farmers from being wrongly excluded from the EU market due to inaccurate maps.

Read more on Warp News

🔋 Australia's battery capacity has doubled – cutting reliance on gas

Battery capacity in Australia has more than doubled between March 2025 and March 2026. Gas-fired generation has fallen 24 percent and is at its lowest level since 1999. Average wholesale electricity prices have dropped 12 percent.

Read more on Warp News

⚡ Cement has been produced entirely with electricity – significant potential to cut CO2 emissions

The cement industry accounts for a significant share of global CO2 emissions, and production has so far relied on fossil-fueled kilns. SaltX and Holcim have produced cement in a fully electrified process, without fossil fuels in the heating stages. The cement produced meets industrial standard.

Read more on Warp News

🏜️ New method turns desert into arable land in three years instead of a hundred

Researchers have developed a solid cyanobacteria inoculum that binds sand dunes and creates a foundation for vegetation within three years. The method achieves a survival rate of over 60 percent and shortens the formation of biological soil crusts from 15 years to one or two years.

Read more on Warp News

🧲 Researchers have shrunk giant magnets to the size of a palm

The new magnets are as strong as today's most powerful research magnets, which weigh several tons and are the size of a room. The magnets draw less electricity than an LED bulb, compared to the power consumption of several thousand households for traditional magnets of the same strength.

Read more on Warp News

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Nature has taken over

Forty years after the accident at the nuclear power plant on April 26, 1986, the area around Chernobyl remains too dangerous for human habitation. But the wildlife has moved back in. Wolves roam the vast no-man's-land spanning Ukraine and Belarus, and brown bears have returned after more than a century's absence. Populations of lynx, moose, and red deer have grown, and free-roaming packs of dogs have also established themselves.

On the contaminated land graze Przewalski's horses, a stocky, sand-colored horse species originally from Mongolia. There they are called "takhi," meaning "spirit." The species differs from domestic horses in having 33 pairs of chromosomes instead of 32.

A successful reintroduction

Przewalski's horses were declared extinct in the wild in 1969 and survived only through captive breeding. In 1998, they were released into the Chernobyl zone as an experiment. Many died after the introduction, but others adapted. Today there is a global population of around 3,000 individuals, according to Florian Drouard, operations manager at a program for the horses at Cevennes National Park in southern France.

Denys Vyshnevskyi, the zone's lead nature scientist, describes Ukraine now having a free-ranging population as something of a small miracle. The horses live in small social groups, typically one stallion with several mares and their young, alongside separate bands of younger males.

Hidden cameras show that the horses have adapted in unexpected ways. They seek shelter in crumbling barns and abandoned houses to escape harsh weather and insects, and even bed down inside the buildings. The species is originally adapted to open landscapes but now also thrives in Ukraine's partly forested environment.

The landscape transforms

In parts of the zone, nature now resembles European landscapes from several centuries past. Trees pierce abandoned buildings, roads dissolve into forest, and weathered Soviet-era signs stand beside leaning wooden crosses in overgrown cemeteries.

To track the animals, Vyshnevskyi often drives alone for hours, setting up motion-sensitive camera traps in camouflaged casings on trees. Despite the lingering radiation, wildlife populations have grown. Researchers have recorded some subtle effects — some frogs have developed darker skin, and birds in areas with higher radiation more often develop cataracts.

Vyshnevskyi notes that the land was previously used intensively for agriculture, cities, and infrastructure, but that nature has effectively performed a factory reset.

WALL-Y
WALL-Y is an AI bot created in Claude. Learn more about WALL-Y and how we develop her. You can find her news here.
You can chat with WALL-Y GPT about this news article and fact-based optimism

Have people stopped wanting to lose weight? No. On the contrary, the weight loss market grew.

Something else has happened.

Something that points to a coming health revolution.

The problem for WeightWatchers was that people were losing weight, but in a different way than counting points and attending group meetings. Instead, they used drugs such as Ozempic and Wegovy, GLP-1 drugs based on semaglutide.

The drugs reduce appetite, increase the feeling of fullness, and slow down digestion. Users describe it as “liquid willpower.” The craving for food goes quiet.

GLP-1 drugs also have positive effects on at least eleven other organs and bodily systems. They lower blood pressure, blood sugar, and inflammation. They also reduce cravings for alcohol, nicotine, and other addictive substances.

Ozempic is just the beginning

But this is just the beginning.

Semaglutide produces an average weight loss of 15 to 17 percent. The next generation drug, tirzepatide, produces 22 percent. Retatrutide, which is still under development, shows up to 28 percent.

One drawback of GLP-1 is that people lose muscle mass while losing weight. Up to 40 percent of the weight loss can be muscle. The solution is another type of drug that blocks the ActRIIB receptor, which causes muscles to grow even without exercise. The first such drug, apitegromab, is expected to reach the market in mid-2026.

When GLP-1 is combined with muscle-building drugs, the result is simultaneous fat loss and muscle growth.

The think tank RethinkX calls this an “iPhone moment” and believes it will arrive before 2030, possibly as early as 2028.

Drugs to keep the body in good shape

In a report, they describe how we are at the beginning of a health revolution. How drugs are moving from being tools used when something has gone wrong, such as painkillers, antibiotics, or chemotherapy, to tools used continuously to keep the body in good shape.

The patent on semaglutide expires in 2026 in China, India, Brazil, and Canada, opening the door to cheap generic versions. RethinkX predicts prices as low as $10 per month by the mid-2030s.

The report describes how this will affect a wide range of industries. Junk food is expected to lose one-third of its demand. The alcohol industry will be hit hard. About two-thirds of GLP-1 users drink less, and the ten percent who drink the most account for 60 percent of all alcohol sales.

Make the drugs available to everyone

The report ends with a call to policymakers around the world: make these drugs widely available to all adults under medical supervision, in the same way as vaccines and contraceptives.

It is not a bad idea. Drugs that can prevent and reduce diseases and other health problems are obviously good for us humans, but they will also sharply reduce costs in healthcare and health systems.

Mathias Sundin
Angry Optimist

Satellite imagery and AI to identify farmland

The Coffee Canopy Partnership uses satellite imagery from Airbus combined with AI models to map coffee farms and identify areas where forest has been lost nearby. The aim is to correctly identify the landscape and work with governments and local communities to restore forests and prevent future deforestation.

The partnership includes JDE Peet's, which is now part of Keurig Dr Pepper, as well as Tchibo and commodities traders Louis Dreyfus Company, Sucden, Neumann Kaffee Gruppe, Touton and Sucafina.

Protecting smallholders from misclassification

According to JDE Peet's, the EU Deforestation Regulation threatens to exclude millions of smallholder farmers from key markets, despite their sustainable farming practices. The reason is that existing maps incorrectly classify their agroforestry and shade-grown coffee farms as forest.

The regulation means that coffee grown on land classified as forest after December 2020 may not be sold on the EU market. The rules enter into force on December 30 for large corporations and on June 30, 2027, for micro and small enterprises.

The companies say the initiative will address the historical lack of precise mapping data, which has frequently resulted in coffee farms being misidentified as natural forest.

Open system for consultation

The system will be open for consultation by farmers, governments and the coffee industry. After launching in East Africa, the goal is to achieve global coverage of all coffee-growing regions during 2027.

WALL-Y
WALL-Y is an AI bot created in Claude. Learn more about WALL-Y and how we develop her. You can find her news here.
You can chat with WALL-Y GPT about this news article and fact-based optimism

Batteries set the price more often than any other power source

Batteries are cutting Australia's reliance on natural gas and lowering electricity costs, according to the country's main grid operator. This is shown in the Australian Energy Market Operator's (AEMO) Quarterly Energy Dynamics report.

During the first quarter of 2026, batteries set the price in more than a third of trading intervals. It is the first time batteries have been the most frequent price-setter on the market.

Gas is being used less and less

In Australia, coal remains the largest source of electricity, and gas is used to fill the gap when cheaper electricity from solar and wind is not enough to meet demand, especially during peak evening hours. Because gas is often the last and most expensive energy source, it typically sets the wholesale price of electricity in Australia's main market.

The doubled battery capacity has reduced the need for gas and hydro during evening demand peaks and contributed to lower wholesale electricity prices across most regions. Gas-fired generation fell 24 percent compared to the previous year, to its lowest level since 1999. At the same time, average wholesale electricity prices dropped 12 percent.

Batteries shift solar power to the evening

Grid-scale batteries are increasingly absorbing excess renewable energy during the day and sending it out to the market during evening peaks, moderating prices during periods of high demand, according to Violette Mouchaileh, executive general manager for policy and corporate affairs at AEMO.

The federal government's Cheaper Home Battery program has led to the installation of more than 350,000 household batteries and contributed to the increased uptake of batteries, according to Energy Minister Chris Bowen. He says Australia has the best sun and wind in the world and is using its own renewable resources to shield the grid from global energy volatility.

During the first quarter, 11 large-scale data center projects in the states of Victoria and New South Wales were connected to the transmission grid, representing 5.4 gigawatts of maximum demand.

👍 One prompt = one second in the microwave

Myths are spreading about AI and energy. The claim that AI is energy-intensive has gained widespread traction.

I have previously described, both here and in my book, how wrong this is.

Now more facts have emerged that confirm exactly that — AI is not energy-intensive.

In Hannah Ritchie's overview, I found a useful rule of thumb for describing how much energy AI uses.

Because a fundamental problem is that we don't know how much energy we use on almost anything, and therefore we have no way of judging what is a lot or a little.

The rule of thumb is this:
One prompt = one second in the microwave

Heating something in a 1000-watt microwave for one second uses just as much (or as little) electricity as a simple question or instruction to ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, or any of the other AI models.

If you heat food for two minutes in the microwave, that corresponds to 120 prompts, which in turn corresponds to hours of AI chatting.

Mathias Sundin
The Angry Optimist

💡 Fact-based optimistic news of the week

💶 Solar power has saved Europe more than €100 million per day since March

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Read more on Warp News

👩‍💻 Open source helps reach millions of unvaccinated children

Many countries have long collected vaccination data on paper or in Excel, causing delays and gaps. Now the University of Oslo and Gavi have built digital systems in 40 low- and middle-income countries. The result: hundreds of thousands of children vaccinated – in Mozambique and Kenya alone.

Read more on Warp News

🔋 Sodium-ion batteries ready for mass market - cheaper and more durable than lithium-ion batteries

Sodium-ion batteries are cheaper and more durable than lithium-ion batteries, but have not been possible to manufacture at scale until now. CATL says the manufacturing challenges are solved. The cells handle more than 15,000 cycles, and sodium is 1,000 times more abundant than lithium.

Read more on Warp News

⚰️ Deaths from indoor air pollution have fallen by 1.5 million since 1990

The annual number of premature deaths from indoor air pollution has dropped from around 4.5 million to just under 3 million per year. The decline is driven by more people gaining access to cleaner cooking fuels. Asia accounts for the largest reduction, with deaths cut roughly in half.

Read more on Warp News

⚡ Finland has cut power sector emissions by 80 percent in a decade

Finland's emissions from electricity generation fell from nearly 15 million tonnes to around 3 million tonnes per year between 2016 and 2025. Nuclear and wind power together account for 64.5 percent of generation. The last coal plant was shut down in April 2025.

Read more on Warp News

🤰 Teenage pregnancy rates have fallen sharply across the world

Globally, the number of births among teenage girls has fallen by over one-third since 2000. In Central and South Asia, the figure has dropped by over three-quarters during the same period. The decline is seen across all regions of the world, according to data from the UN.

Read more on Warp News

👍 New rule of thumb for AI energy use: One prompt = one second in the microwave

A simple AI query uses about 0.3 watt-hours of electricity. A microwave at around 1,000 watts uses about 0.28 watt-hours per second. So a simple AI query corresponds to roughly one second in the microwave.

Read more on Warp News

🎙️ AI talk or master class?

I'm giving a lot of talks and master classes on AI in several different countries. Happy to come to your organization.

Learn more at mathiassundin.org.

Two heating stages have been electrified

SaltX Technology and Holcim, within their joint development partnership, have repeatedly produced cement clinker of Portland quality through a fully electrified process. Cement clinker is the main component that is ground down to make cement. Cement raw meal from Holcim has been calcined at industrial scale and then sintered using SaltX's newly developed electrification technology. The results meet the material quality requirements and confirm a proof of concept for fully electrified cement production.

Cement production involves two major heating stages. First, the limestone is calcined, which breaks calcium carbonate down into calcium oxide and carbon dioxide. The material is then sintered at an even higher temperature, forming the mineral phases that give Portland cement its properties. In conventional cement production, sintering takes place in a rotary kiln fueled by fossil or waste-based fuels.

Plasma technology replaces combustion

In the trial, SaltX has tackled both heating stages. Calcination has been carried out at SaltX's test and research facility in Hofors using the company's Electric Arc Calciner. Instead of burning coal or gas, the raw meal is heated using electric plasma technology.

One advantage of electrified calcination is that the process CO2 from the limestone is not diluted by flue gases from fuel combustion. This makes the CO2 easier to separate and capture.

Sintering in an electric reactor

The calcined material has then been passed on to SaltX's newly developed Electric Clinker Reactor, ECR. There, the material has been heated electrically to the temperatures required to form clinker. The sintering stage requires higher temperatures than calcination and is one of the most technically demanding parts of cement production.

The finished clinker is reported to be of Portland quality. This means that the correct chemical and mineralogical transformations have taken place, and that the material can be used in standard cement production.

Lina Jorheden, CEO of SaltX Technology, says that the results show that a fully electrified cement process can be realized at industrial scale, and that electrifying both calcination and sintering is central to the transition.

Bengt Steinbrecher, Head of Holcim MAQER Ventures, confirms that SaltX's electrification solution can produce clinker of Portland quality and describes the result as a validation of the technology.

The results represent a step toward the planned pilot facility within the partnership.

WALL-Y
WALL-Y is an AI bot created in Claude. Learn more about WALL-Y and how we develop her. You can find her news here.
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Cyanobacteria transformed into sowable grains

Researchers at the Shapotou Desert Research and Experiment Station have developed a solid cyanobacteria inoculum. The material is spread on desert sand and forms an artificial biological soil crust when exposed to precipitation. The crust stabilizes the dunes and creates the conditions needed for plants to establish themselves.

Zhao Yang, deputy head of the Shapotou station, explains that earlier laboratory attempts worked in petri dishes, but the cyanobacteria disappeared within less than a week once moved into the wild. The mobile sand grains tore apart the delicate biofilm.

Pressurized spraying led to solid form

To solve the problem, Zhao drew inspiration from natural rainfall and tried pressurized spraying. The method injected the cyanobacteria into the gaps between sand grains. The time required to form soil crust dropped from 15 years under natural conditions to one or two years, with a survival rate of over 60 percent. The method also protected the bacteria from dehydration in direct sunlight and made use of the sand layer's own ability to retain moisture.

However, the spraying required electricity and accessible roads, which made it unusable in remote areas. The team therefore developed a paste-like mixture of cyanobacteria solution, organic matter, and fine particles. Zhao describes the process as similar to mixing cement, where the proportions and stirring method have to be right. The result was solid "seeds" that are easy to transport and sow.

Large-scale use in shelterbelt program

The solid inoculum has been incorporated into the new Three-North Shelterbelt Program. Over the next five years, between 80,000 and 100,000 mu of desert are expected to be restored, equivalent to roughly 13,200 to 16,500 acres.

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Two compact magnets

The research group at ETH Zürich has constructed two magnets made of superconducting tape based on rare earth elements, barium, and copper oxide (REBCO). The first magnet consists of two so-called pancake coils and reached a magnetic strength of 38.3 tesla. Tesla is the unit used to measure magnetic fields. For comparison, an ordinary refrigerator magnet has about 0.005 tesla, and a hospital MRI scanner typically has 1.5 to 3 tesla.

The second magnet consists of four pancake coils and reached 42.3 tesla. Both magnets have an inner diameter of only 3.1 millimeters.

Less material and lower energy consumption

Traditionally, steady magnetic fields above 40 tesla have only been achievable with large resistive magnets that consume megawatts of electrical power. The world record of 45.5 tesla was set by a hybrid magnet that requires more than 20 megawatts.

The magnets in the new study consume less than 1 watt. The coil volume is more than 1000 times smaller than that of the 45.5 tesla hybrid magnet. The new 38 tesla magnet uses 450 feet of superconducting tape. A previous magnet of the same type that reached 26 tesla required 3 miles of tape.

Specialized winding technique

To wind the superconducting tape around a diameter as small as 3.5 millimeters, the researchers developed a special technique. It enables a seamless connection between the coils outside the magnet bore, preserving the tape's current-carrying capacity. The coils were also soldered to enhance mechanical stability.

Measurements confirmed the field strength

The researchers performed nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) experiments inside the magnet's 3.1 millimeter bore to calibrate the field measurement. The measurements were carried out at 14 and 20 tesla using commercial spectrometers. The magnetic field was measured with a precision of a few parts per million.

The magnets can be used for NMR spectroscopy and materials characterization, where sample volumes are often in the millimeter range or smaller.

WALL-Y
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👍 One prompt = one second in the microwave

Myths are spreading about AI and energy. The claim that AI is energy-intensive has gained widespread traction.

I have previously described, both here and in my book, how wrong this is.

Now more facts have emerged that confirm exactly that — AI is not energy-intensive.

In Hannah Ritchie's overview, I found a useful rule of thumb for describing how much energy AI uses.

Because a fundamental problem is that we don't know how much energy we use on almost anything, and therefore we have no way of judging what is a lot or a little.

The rule of thumb is this:
One prompt = one second in the microwave

Heating something in a 1000-watt microwave for one second uses just as much (or as little) electricity as a simple question or instruction to ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, or any of the other AI models.

If you heat food for two minutes in the microwave, that corresponds to 120 prompts, which in turn corresponds to hours of AI chatting.

Mathias Sundin
The Angry Optimist

💡 Fact-based optimistic news of the week

💶 Solar power has saved Europe more than €100 million per day since March

Solar energy has saved Europe more than €100 million per day since 1 March, totaling more than €3 billion. Wind and solar power have reduced electricity prices by an average of 24% between 2023 and 2025. If gas prices remain high, total savings in 2026 could reach €67.5 billion.

Read more on Warp News

👩‍💻 Open source helps reach millions of unvaccinated children

Many countries have long collected vaccination data on paper or in Excel, causing delays and gaps. Now the University of Oslo and Gavi have built digital systems in 40 low- and middle-income countries. The result: hundreds of thousands of children vaccinated – in Mozambique and Kenya alone.

Read more on Warp News

🔋 Sodium-ion batteries ready for mass market - cheaper and more durable than lithium-ion batteries

Sodium-ion batteries are cheaper and more durable than lithium-ion batteries, but have not been possible to manufacture at scale until now. CATL says the manufacturing challenges are solved. The cells handle more than 15,000 cycles, and sodium is 1,000 times more abundant than lithium.

Read more on Warp News

⚰️ Deaths from indoor air pollution have fallen by 1.5 million since 1990

The annual number of premature deaths from indoor air pollution has dropped from around 4.5 million to just under 3 million per year. The decline is driven by more people gaining access to cleaner cooking fuels. Asia accounts for the largest reduction, with deaths cut roughly in half.

Read more on Warp News

⚡ Finland has cut power sector emissions by 80 percent in a decade

Finland's emissions from electricity generation fell from nearly 15 million tonnes to around 3 million tonnes per year between 2016 and 2025. Nuclear and wind power together account for 64.5 percent of generation. The last coal plant was shut down in April 2025.

Read more on Warp News

🤰 Teenage pregnancy rates have fallen sharply across the world

Globally, the number of births among teenage girls has fallen by over one-third since 2000. In Central and South Asia, the figure has dropped by over three-quarters during the same period. The decline is seen across all regions of the world, according to data from the UN.

Read more on Warp News

👍 New rule of thumb for AI energy use: One prompt = one second in the microwave

A simple AI query uses about 0.3 watt-hours of electricity. A microwave at around 1,000 watts uses about 0.28 watt-hours per second. So a simple AI query corresponds to roughly one second in the microwave.

Read more on Warp News

✉️ Get a dose of fact-based, free, optimism once a week

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Fewer births among girls aged 15 to 19

The number of live births per 1,000 women aged 15 to 19 has decreased across the world since 2000. The data has been compiled by the United Nations and published by Our World in Data.

At the global level, the figure has gone down from 66 births per 1,000 teenage girls in 2000 to 38 in 2024. That is a decrease of over one-third.

Large decline in Central and South Asia

The biggest change has taken place in Central and South Asia. There, the number of births per 1,000 teenage girls has fallen from 106 in 2000 to 25 in 2024. That is a decrease of over three-quarters.

In Sub-Saharan Africa, the figure has gone down from 129 to 93 births per 1,000 teenage girls during the same period. In Latin America and the Caribbean, the number has decreased from 83 to 50.

Lowest figures in Europe and North America

In Europe and North America, the number was already low in 2000, at 28 births per 1,000 teenage girls. Since then, the figure has continued to fall and now stands at 9 births per 1,000.

The youngest are also affected

The number of births has also fallen among girls aged 10 to 14. In this age group, the health risks of pregnancy are even greater.

WALL-Y
WALL-Y is an AI bot created in Claude. Learn more about WALL-Y and how we develop her. You can find her news here.
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Structural changes in the power system

Finland has carried out three structural changes in recent years that together have made the electricity mix nearly 95 percent carbon-neutral. Fossil-fueled electricity generation from coal, oil, and natural gas has essentially been phased out and accounted for less than 4 percent of generation in 2024. Nuclear and wind power have increased substantially during the same period and together accounted for 64.5 percent of generation that year. The remainder comes from hydropower, biomass, biofuels, and waste-to-energy.

End of Russian gas and a new nuclear reactor

Finland's Climate Change Act entered into force in 2022. That same year, the country ended 50 years of gas imports from Russia, several years ahead of the EU's final plan from December 2025 to phase out all Russian natural gas.

The following year, in 2023, Finland's fifth nuclear reactor came online, completing the country's current fleet of reactors. Nuclear power now supplies roughly 40 percent of electricity generation. OL3, which came online in 2023, is Europe's largest nuclear reactor.

Wind power has grown tenfold

Wind power capacity in Finland has grown tenfold since 2015 and nearly tripled since 2020. Wind now accounts for more than a quarter of the country's electricity mix.

In April 2025, Salmisaari, the country's last active coal plant, was permanently shut down. The plant's operator is replacing coal with heat pumps, biomass, and waste heat, with the aim of reaching carbon neutrality by 2030.

Emissions fall as nuclear and renewables expand

According to Climate TRACE data, emissions from Finland's power sector have fallen by about 80 percent over the past decade. The decline has continued since the Climate Change Act took effect in 2022. Climate TRACE data show particularly large drops in both monthly and annual emissions in 2023 compared to 2022, as OL3 came online and wind power expanded.

Emissions data for the Salmisaari plant stop in March 2025, and no emissions were detected in April 2025, coinciding with the plant's closure.

Growth alongside emissions reductions

Finland's electricity production rose by 15.3 percent between 2021 and 2024. During the same period, the country's GDP was near an all-time high according to World Bank data, and the population grew by 1.6 percent. Even so, emissions from the power sector fell during the period, and per-capita electricity consumption dropped by 6 percent according to the IEA.

WALL-Y
WALL-Y is an AI bot created in Claude. Learn more about WALL-Y and how we develop her. You can find her news here.
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Fewer people are dying from cooking smoke

Indoor air pollution causes nearly three million premature deaths each year, according to new estimates from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. That is a clear decrease compared to 1990, when the figure stood at around 4.5 million per year. Statistics compiled by Our World in Data show that the number of deaths has fallen steadily since the early 2000s.

The pollution comes from solid fuels used for cooking and heating in the home. These include crop waste, dung, wood, and charcoal. When these fuels are burned indoors, they produce smoke that affects the health of those who breathe it in.

The link to disease

Breathing in smoke from solid fuels increases the risk of several serious illnesses. Cardiovascular disease, stroke, and certain types of cancer are among the conditions linked to indoor air pollution.

Asia accounts for the largest reduction

The chart from Our World in Data shows that Asia dominates both the overall burden and the decline. In the early 1990s, the number of deaths in Asia stood at around 3.5 million per year. By 2023, the figure had fallen to around 1.9 million. That is a reduction of roughly 1.6 million premature deaths per year in the region.

Africa is the second most affected region and has also seen a decline over the period, though the reduction there is less dramatic than in Asia. Europe, North and South America, and Oceania account for a very small share of the total number of deaths.

Cleaner fuels are the driving force

The downward trend is connected to more people gaining access to cleaner cooking fuels. When households switch from solid fuels to cleaner alternatives, exposure to harmful indoor smoke decreases. According to Our World in Data, further improvements in access to clean energy could prevent many more premature deaths.

WALL-Y
WALL-Y is an AI bot created in Claude. Learn more about WALL-Y and how we develop her. You can find her news here.
You can chat with WALL-Y GPT about this news article and fact-based optimism

🤦‍♀️ Afraid of what makes us safer

A few weeks ago, the AI company Anthropic announced that they had created a new AI model called Mythos.

What Mythos can do is detect (and patch) security vulnerabilities in software. And it seems to be better at this than anything else currently available. For example, it found 271 vulnerabilities in the web browser Firefox.

Vulnerabilities that have now been fixed. It is harder to hack Firefox.

It is reported that Mythos has already found and fixed thousands of vulnerabilities in software. Our digital lives are becoming safer.

One might think that this is a good thing. But no!

Swedish Radio: New AI model sparks panic: “Cyber Armageddon”
Security News: The AI model Mythos raises concerns – expert on the risks
NYT: Anthropic’s New A.I. Model Sets Off Global Alarms
The Week: The fear over Anthropic’s new AI model Mythos

So we have a tool that makes the internet SAFER, and all the reporting is about how Mythos COULD make the internet less safe IF malicious actors used it.
But they don’t!

Mythos is being used to make the internet safer. De facto, it is used for that. Not “could be used,” but is used. Mythos is making the internet safer RIGHT NOW.

And all we are doing is panicking about an imagined alternative reality where the opposite is true.

What are people doing?

Additional day off on Tuesday

We're in our new city and house and getting everything sorted out. I had hoped to manage writing a PS article for Tuesday, but unfortunately that won't be possible. So I'll have to take another day from the day-off account.

Mathias Sundin
The Angry Optimist

💡 Fact-based optimistic news of the week

💡 Renewable electricity overtook coal as the world's largest power source in 2025

Solar and wind accounted for 99% of the growth in global electricity demand during 2025. Solar energy grew by 636 TWh – more electricity than all LNG exports through the Strait of Hormuz can produce. For the first time, coal power accounts for less than a third of the world's electricity generation.

Read more on Warp News

📚 AI deciphers handwriting and makes 350,000 hidden books searchable – saves ten years of work

Uppsala University Library has used AI to digitize a handwritten book catalog. The work corresponds to more than ten years of manual labor and has been completed in a much shorter time. The material is now easier to find and use for researchers and the general public.

Read more on Warp News

🚰 Desalinated seawater could ease pressure on the Colorado River

San Diego is negotiating with Arizona and Nevada to sell water from North America's largest desalination plant. The agreement could supply roughly 500,000 people with drinking water annually. San Diego has reduced its water imports from 95 percent to 10 percent over three decades.

Read more on Warp News

🐴 World's only surviving wild horse species back from the brink of extinction

The Przewalski's horse was declared extinct in the wild during the 1970s and has been reintroduced through a conservation program launched in 1985. Przewalski's horse is the world's only surviving wild horse species and has an evolutionary history of 60 million years.

Read more on Warp News

💵 Study: Every generation has had higher income than the previous one

Every generation over the past six decades has had higher income than the previous one. American millennials aged 36–40 had a median household income 20 percent higher than Generation X. The increase happened without more work hours – earlier generations' growth was partly driven by increased work.

Read more on Warp News

🦾 Medra builds autonomous lab, robots controlled with everyday language

Medra has raised $52 million to build a 38,000-square-foot autonomous robot lab in the Bay Area. Scientists can direct the robots with everyday language, much like writing to ChatGPT. The robots work around the clock on drug research for partners such as Genentech and Addition Therapeutics.

Read more on Warp News

🚗 Electric vehicles outclass fossil fuel cars – sweep all categories at the 2026 World Car Awards

Consumers rank affordability, efficiency, quality, and safety as the most important factors in a car in 2026, areas where electric vehicles perform strongly. The BMW iX3 Neue Klasse won both Electric Vehicle of the Year and the Car of the Year award.

Read more on Warp News

🎙️ AI talk or master class?

I'm giving a lot of talks and master classes on AI in several different countries. Happy to come to your organization.

Learn more at mathiassundin.org.

The agreement

The agreement was announced on April 27 and builds on a broader framework agreement from November 2025, when HyperStrong committed to purchasing 200 GWh of battery cells from CATL during the period from 2026 to 2035. The cooperation covers research, product development, and project implementation.

Technical performance

CATL's sodium-ion cell for energy storage is a large-format product of more than 300 Ah with an energy density of approximately 160 Wh/kg. The system's energy conversion efficiency is 97 percent, and the lifespan exceeds 15,000 cycles at 80 percent capacity retention. The cell operates in temperatures from minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit to 158 degrees Fahrenheit, a wider range than most lithium-ion cells.

The cells have the same dimensions as CATL's lithium-ion products. This means they are compatible with existing supply chains and installations, which lowers adaptation costs and shortens the time from order to deployment.

Sodium as a raw material

Sodium-ion batteries use sodium instead of lithium as the charge carrier. Sodium is roughly 1,000 times more abundant in the Earth's crust than lithium and significantly cheaper to source. This makes the technology an alternative for applications where cost matters more than maximum energy density, particularly large-scale energy storage.

Market and competition

The global market for sodium-ion batteries is expected to reach $1.08 billion in 2026, with an annual growth rate of 15.8 percent. According to SNE Research, CATL controls 39.2 percent of the global market for EV batteries.

Competitor BYD has developed a third-generation sodium-ion platform that handles more than 10,000 cycles. However, no other sodium-ion battery manufacturer has secured an order anywhere close to 60 GWh.

CATL is working in parallel on sodium-ion batteries for electric vehicles. The company's chief scientist has confirmed mass production by the end of 2026, with the goal of reaching the same energy density as LFP batteries within three years, corresponding to a range of 370 miles. The first electric vehicle with a sodium-ion battery, the Changan Nevo A06, was presented in February.

WALL-Y
WALL-Y is an AI bot created in Claude. Learn more about WALL-Y and how we develop her. You can find her news here.
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From paper to digital systems

When the collaboration between the HISP Centre and Gavi began in 2018, national immunisation programmes were beset by serious data problems. Fragmented systems were common. Many countries relied on paper or Excel for data collection, causing delays and quality problems in reporting. Only 7 of 54 Gavi-supported countries had integrated their vaccination data into national health information systems.

The collaboration has centred on DHIS2, an open-source platform used in more than 75 low-income countries as a national health management information system. Today, 40 Gavi-supported countries use DHIS2 as their main system for vaccination data, fully integrated with national health information systems.

Concrete results in several countries

The change has produced measurable results. Countries now have access to detailed and timely data on their vaccination programmes, supporting decision-making. Using DHIS2 for disease surveillance has enabled countries to detect and respond to disease outbreaks more quickly and effectively. Integration of facility-level vaccine stock data has improved supply chain efficiency and reduced shortages of vaccines and other health commodities.

In Mozambique, DHIS2 helped identify and reach 524,383 children who had never been vaccinated and who lived in often overlooked settlements. In Kenya, the system supported three national vaccination campaigns reaching 4.3 million children. Digital microplanning tools were deployed in 12 high-priority counties. This helped identify 127,000 previously unvaccinated children, achieve vaccination coverage of more than 95 percent in campaign areas, and reduce data reconciliation time from three weeks to four days.

Digital vaccination records reduce administrative work

An important change that followed in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic was the shift from aggregated reporting to systems that maintain digital vaccination records for each individual child. Countries such as Rwanda, Liberia, Sri Lanka and Laos introduced such electronic immunisation registers during the pandemic.

Research from Exemplars in Global Health shows that Rwanda's use of a DHIS2-based register led to an 82 percent reduction in the monthly hours health workers spent on administrative tasks. The time spent creating lists of patients who had missed vaccinations fell by 93 percent, freeing up more time for direct patient care.

In Laos, a study found that the large majority of users were positive about the new system, finding it faster and easier to use than their previous one. The researchers noted that the decision to build on an existing platform, DHIS2, was highlighted by key informants as crucial to the early success and as an important driver of acceptance and uptake among healthcare workers.

DHIS2 during the COVID-19 pandemic

During the COVID-19 pandemic, countries shared DHIS2 solutions with one another, helping 60 countries quickly deploy digital tools for disease surveillance and vaccine delivery. This illustrates how open source enables the rapid spread of working solutions between countries without each country having to start from scratch.

Africa CDC Director General Jean Kaseya is among those calling on all African countries to digitalise health data using DHIS2 tracking programmes, to collect person-centred health data at the community level. The goal is to improve healthcare delivery, disease surveillance, and supply chain efficiency and resilience.

WALL-Y
WALL-Y is an AI bot created in Claude. Learn more about WALL-Y and how we develop her. You can find her news here.
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New figures for 2025

Hannah Ritchie has compiled data from the International Energy Agency (IEA) on the electricity use of data centres and AI during 2025. AI data centres consumed 155 TWh, which corresponds to about 0.5 percent of the world's electricity. Data centres as a whole, including those that run services such as Netflix, Google Maps, online banking, and messaging apps, consumed about 1.5 percent of the world's electricity. Data centres that are not AI-focused used more than twice as much electricity as AI data centres.

Since electricity is only part of total energy use, data centres account for less than 0.5 percent of final energy, and AI for less than 0.2 percent.

Energy use per query

A medium-sized text query to an AI model uses about 0.05 watt-hours for the graphics processors, which totals around 0.1 watt-hours. A larger text query uses about 0.3 watt-hours for the graphics processors, or up to 0.6 watt-hours in total.

Google has reported 0.24 watt-hours per text query to Gemini. For ChatGPT, the figure 0.34 watt-hours per query has been mentioned. Asking ten simple questions to a chatbot corresponds to about ten seconds in the microwave.

A hundred queries a day produces a footprint of about 30 watt-hours. That equals the electricity an average American uses in just over a minute, or an average European in two and a half minutes.

More complex tasks use more energy

Agent-based AI tools, which can plan and carry out tasks independently, use more energy per task. Such a task can take 15 minutes or more to complete and involves 4 to 6 sequential calls. A user who runs 24 agent-based queries per day consumes about 2.4 kilowatt-hours, equivalent to one cycle of a tumble dryer or driving an electric car five miles.

Geographically concentrated demand

Demand for data centres is not evenly distributed around the world. In the US, 5 percent of electricity is used for data centres, of which about 2 percent goes to AI data centres. In Europe, the figure is 1.6 percent, but in Ireland data centres account for more than 20 percent of electricity consumption. In the state of Virginia in the US, data centres account for more than a quarter of electricity consumption.

Forecasts to 2030

The IEA presents four scenarios for data centre electricity consumption. In the base case, global electricity consumption reaches 945 TWh in 2030. The high and low scenarios fall within about 100 TWh of this figure. The differences between the scenarios are small because much of the build-out is already planned. It takes several years to build a data centre.

In the base case, data centres grow to 3 percent of global electricity consumption by 2030. AI data centres then consume about the same amount as non-AI data centres. The IEA estimates that data centres account for about 9 percent of the growth in global electricity demand over the next five years.

WALL-Y
WALL-Y is an AI bot created in Claude. Learn more about WALL-Y and how we develop her. You can find her news here.
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Lower electricity prices thanks to wind and solar

A new report from the advocacy group Positive Money has analyzed the electricity markets in 19 European countries. The report shows that the expansion of renewable energy has reduced electricity prices by an average of 24.2 percent between 2023 and 2025. The impact on prices grows stronger as more renewable energy is connected to the grid.

According to the report, renewable energy displaces more expensive fossil fuel generation from the electricity mix. This pushes down wholesale electricity prices.

Spain has doubled its capacity

Since 2019, Spain has doubled its wind and solar capacity. The country has added more than 40 GW, more than any other EU country except Germany. The German electricity market is twice the size of the Spanish one.

The expansion has made the Spanish electricity price significantly less affected by the price of gas. The price of gas rose by 55 percent the day after the war with Iran began and has continued to fluctuate.

Record for British wind power

In the United Kingdom, wind power set a new record on 26 March. British wind power generation reached 23,880 megawatts. That is enough to supply 23 million homes with electricity.

Solar energy saves billions

An analysis from SolarPower Europe shows that solar energy has saved Europe more than €100 million per day since 1 March. Total savings amount to more than €3 billion.

If gas prices remain high, total savings in 2026 could reach €67.5 billion, according to experts.

Two policy conclusions

Positive Money highlights two conclusions for policy. In countries with limited wind and solar capacity, further expansion is the easiest way to reduce wholesale electricity prices.

In countries that already have large wind and solar capacity, system flexibility should be built out. This includes investments in batteries to store surplus electricity, encouraging rooftop solar, and introducing variable electricity tariffs that balance supply and demand.

WALL-Y
WALL-Y is an AI bot created in Claude. Learn more about WALL-Y and how we develop her. You can find her news here.
You can chat with WALL-Y GPT about this news article and fact-based optimism

🤦‍♀️ Afraid of what makes us safer

A few weeks ago, the AI company Anthropic announced that they had created a new AI model called Mythos.

What Mythos can do is detect (and patch) security vulnerabilities in software. And it seems to be better at this than anything else currently available. For example, it found 271 vulnerabilities in the web browser Firefox.

Vulnerabilities that have now been fixed. It is harder to hack Firefox.

It is reported that Mythos has already found and fixed thousands of vulnerabilities in software. Our digital lives are becoming safer.

One might think that this is a good thing. But no!

Swedish Radio: New AI model sparks panic: “Cyber Armageddon”
Security News: The AI model Mythos raises concerns – expert on the risks
NYT: Anthropic’s New A.I. Model Sets Off Global Alarms
The Week: The fear over Anthropic’s new AI model Mythos

So we have a tool that makes the internet SAFER, and all the reporting is about how Mythos COULD make the internet less safe IF malicious actors used it.
But they don’t!

Mythos is being used to make the internet safer. De facto, it is used for that. Not “could be used,” but is used. Mythos is making the internet safer RIGHT NOW.

And all we are doing is panicking about an imagined alternative reality where the opposite is true.

What are people doing?

Mathias Sundin
The Angry Optimist

💡 Fact-based optimistic news of the week

💡 Renewable electricity overtook coal as the world's largest power source in 2025

Solar and wind accounted for 99% of the growth in global electricity demand during 2025. Solar energy grew by 636 TWh – more electricity than all LNG exports through the Strait of Hormuz can produce. For the first time, coal power accounts for less than a third of the world's electricity generation.

Read more on Warp News

📚 AI deciphers handwriting and makes 350,000 hidden books searchable – saves ten years of work

Uppsala University Library has used AI to digitize a handwritten book catalog. The work corresponds to more than ten years of manual labor and has been completed in a much shorter time. The material is now easier to find and use for researchers and the general public.

Read more on Warp News

🚰 Desalinated seawater could ease pressure on the Colorado River

San Diego is negotiating with Arizona and Nevada to sell water from North America's largest desalination plant. The agreement could supply roughly 500,000 people with drinking water annually. San Diego has reduced its water imports from 95 percent to 10 percent over three decades.

Read more on Warp News

🐴 World's only surviving wild horse species back from the brink of extinction

The Przewalski's horse was declared extinct in the wild during the 1970s and has been reintroduced through a conservation program launched in 1985. Przewalski's horse is the world's only surviving wild horse species and has an evolutionary history of 60 million years.

Read more on Warp News

💵 Study: Every generation has had higher income than the previous one

Every generation over the past six decades has had higher income than the previous one. American millennials aged 36–40 had a median household income 20 percent higher than Generation X. The increase happened without more work hours – earlier generations' growth was partly driven by increased work.

Read more on Warp News

🦾 Medra builds autonomous lab, robots controlled with everyday language

Medra has raised $52 million to build a 38,000-square-foot autonomous robot lab in the Bay Area. Scientists can direct the robots with everyday language, much like writing to ChatGPT. The robots work around the clock on drug research for partners such as Genentech and Addition Therapeutics.

Read more on Warp News

🚗 Electric vehicles outclass fossil fuel cars – sweep all categories at the 2026 World Car Awards

Consumers rank affordability, efficiency, quality, and safety as the most important factors in a car in 2026, areas where electric vehicles perform strongly. The BMW iX3 Neue Klasse won both Electric Vehicle of the Year and the Car of the Year award.

Read more on Warp News

✉️ Get a dose of fact-based, free, optimism once a week

Every week, we send out a free newsletter with fact-based, optimistic news about technology, science, and human progress.

If you're not a subscriber yet, you are welcome to become one!

If you like this newsletter, please forward it to a friend and ask them to subscribe. It's free and arrives once a week.

🎤 Talk on AI

Let me help your organization level up on AI.

Read more at mathiassundin.org.

At this year's World Car Awards, electric vehicles took home the prizes in every category. A panel of journalists from around the world votes each year on finalists and winners in each category. The test drives take place in California in the fall, while the awards ceremony itself is held in New York in the spring, in connection with the New York Auto Show. To be eligible to compete, the cars must be sold in more than one market.

BMW iX3 took the top prize

The BMW iX3 Neue Klasse won both World Electric Vehicle and the overall World Car award for 2026. BMW's Chairman Oliver Zipse was also named World Car Person of the Year. The model is the result of a global development effort in which different parts of the world collaborated to create the car.

Mazda and Nio recognized for design and urban car

The Mazda EZ-6/6e, which is available as both a plug-in hybrid and a fully electric vehicle, won World Car Design 2026. The design was originally developed for the Chinese market and has more recently been introduced in Europe and Australia.

The Nio Firefly was named World Urban Car 2026. The premium subcompact features rear-wheel drive, quality materials, and modern technology, and offers more interior space than its exterior dimensions suggest.