💡 Warp News #324
☢️ Chernobyl teems with wildlife. 🛰️ Coffee companies launch satellite program to map deforestation. 🧲 Researchers have shrunk giant magnets to the size of a palm.
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Free newsletter with fact-based optimistic news about technology, science, and human progress with the angry optimist, Mathias Sundin. If you are not a subscriber, become one here.
🧇 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
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📉 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.
💡 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.
🛰️ 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.
🔋 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.
⚡ 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.
🏜️ 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.
🧲 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.
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