From a bamboo gym in Bali to a house made from earth in Wiltshire, these projects show the beauty in sustainable design
With construction accounting for more than a third of global emissions, sustainable architecture is central to the world meeting its climate targets. The following five creations from around the world exemplify how “green” buildings can also be beautiful.
Children’s Village, Tocantins, Brazil
Continue reading...People around the world have contended with unprecedented weather events and their fatal effects caused by the climate catastrophe
After the world’s hottest summer since records began in 1850, the death toll from extreme weather in 2026 is already in the high tens of thousands. That is a conservative estimate and is certain to rise much higher.
As Cop31 continues and scientists warn that climate breakdown may be accelerating, the Guardian looks back at a year of droughts, fires and floods as a reminder that, unless the world takes urgent action to cut emissions, this disastrous year will be one of the best of the rest of our lives.
Continue reading...‘We have further to go,’ says Huw Pill after increase to 4% last month as Bank seeks to tackle rising inflation
The Bank of England will probably need to raise interest rates next month and again in early 2027 to combat rising inflation, its chief economist has said.
Signalling a sharp rise in mortgage payments for an estimated 2.3 million homeowners who will have to refinance their loans next year, Huw Pill said that while the decision to nudge interest rates from 3.75% to 4% earlier this month was a “significant step” towards getting monetary policy into a better place, “we have further to go”.
Continue reading...Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood reminded me of my dad’s decency and mischief. I laughed as I cried, and realised there’s no right way to go through the grieving process
I expected to break. But I felt nothing. I did not cry, nor struggle to sleep. I seldom thought of him. I felt only guilt about how little I felt. Ours was a complex relationship. As a teen, I often resented my dad, occasionally despised him. I expected the world and found disappointment. But, as I grew older, I understood that he had struggles of his own. I learned to appreciate his decency and humour, his ability to make everyone laugh with only a few words. I loved my dad, from the first time he held me to the last time I held him.
But still, as weeks turned into months, I struggled to grieve. Then, when my partner and I rearranged our bookshelves, I found the first edition of Under Milk Wood that my parents gave us on our wedding day. I turned the cover and saw the note: “And all the bells of the tills of the town shall ring for our wedding.” It was my mum’s writing, but my dad’s idea. The man loved literature and poetry and considered Dylan Thomas, along with his dad and the Welsh rugby full-back JPR Williams, one of the best man to ever occupy our world.
Continue reading...The first ever Eurovision Asia song contest takes place in Thailand on Saturday, and it won’t disappoint those hoping for some bizarre acts
The first ever Eurovision Asia is being held in Thailand on Saturday. The event is a more compact affair than the European version has become, and with only 11 countries competing, it isn’t a straightforward cultural import.
None of the entrants have gone near wacky Eurovision vibes such as having a singing turkey or banana-eating wolves. Restrictive attitudes to homosexuality in some of the countries where the show will be broadcast have also tempered the overt campness and LGBTQ+ representation with which Eurovision has come to be associated – there will certainly not be an equivalent of Olly Alexander getting sweaty in a grubby gym changing room.
Continue reading...Experts warn of risks of platforms hosting bets tied to US public health – including vaccine mandates and drug trials
The sign was pasted on a construction fence next to an elementary school in the Brooklyn borough of New York City. “Vaccines,” it proclaimed in bold capital letters against a blue star-spangled background – appearing, at first glance, to be like any other public health message on the importance of getting vaccinated.
But at the bottom of the sign, in smaller letters, it read: “Will any state end vaccine markets?” It was accompanied by the logo for Polymarket, an online prediction market where users can log in to wager on the outcomes of nearly any event – including, now, public health.
Continue reading...From diva-like behaviour to freebie requests that never result in a review, ‘entitled’ content creators are a growing blight on small-business owners. Now entrepreneurs are calling them out
Nicole Flanagin remembers exactly the moment an influencer came after her business. It was the early hours of a March morning and the cat cafe owner in Lenoir, North Carolina, got a message. “At 1.37,” she says, “a friend sent me the link to this girl’s TikTok.”
The 41-year-old was already having a bad 24 hours. A mother of four, Flanigan also works at a pet rescue shelter and had spent the previous day unsuccessfully fighting for a dog not to be put down. She got home exhausted and promptly conked out in bed. Then she woke up to the message.
Continue reading...Van Gogh and Cézanne paintings among magnificent collection stained by allegations of abduction and killing
Twelve rarely seen masterpieces glowing with life and beauty will go on sale at Sotheby’s in New York on Wednesday.
The collection, which resembles a miniature Courtauld gallery, includes Van Gogh’s towering chestnut tree, Monet’s shimmering vista of the Tuileries and Paul Cézanne’s Arlequin, a portrait of his son in a red and black diamond-patterned costume whose angularity pushes into abstraction and must have inspired Picasso’s Harlequins.
Continue reading...
Welcome back to the Abstract! These are the studies this week that watched movies, made sacrifices, got crafty, and aged backwards.
First, scientists learn how primates make meaning out of visuals by peeking into the brains of monkeys as they watch Despicable Me. Then: human sacrifice as climate “crisis rituals,” the fingerprints of prehistoric children, and the longevity secrets of ants.
As always, for more of my work, check out my book First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens, or subscribe to my personal newsletter The BeX Files.
Settling down to watch a film is often viewed as a way to relax and shut our brains off for a while. Our brains, however, beg to differ—they are as busy as ever when interpreting videos, according to a new study based on brainwaves of humans and primates as they watch movies and short clips.
To better understand how primate brains make meaning out of visual scenes, researchers studied eye movements and electroencephalogram (EEG) readings of neural activity in dozens of humans, as well as two macaques, as they watched videos.
“Primate vision relies on eye movements to sample the world, yet how the brain integrates high level meaning across these ‘snapshots’ remains a mystery,” said researchers led by Vinay Raghavan of the City College of New York. The new results hint that “visual processing is not a series of independent glimpses, but a continuous process,” the team said.
Human participants with EEG electrodes attached to their scalps (the “scalp movie dataset”) watched a selection of films including The Big Sick, The Peanut Butter Falcon, Whiplash, Room, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, The Tomorrow Man, Dom Hemingway, Life After Beth, Woodshock, and The Comedian.
“Participants were instructed to watch the movie as they would normally watch a movie,” the team said.
A different “intracranial dataset” included several human patients and two rhesus macaques, the latter of which had electrodes implanted inside their skulls. This group watched shorter videos, including 10-minute clips of Despicable Me in both English and Hungarian, a 4.3-minute clip of the short film The Present, and three 5-minute clips of documentaries featuring macaques.
Taken together, the datasets revealed that the brain responds to “semantic novelty”—meaning new semantic or conceptual information that crops up over the course of a video—which is measured through patterns of short-gaze “fixations.” The study also suggests that many brain regions beyond visual processing are involved in this ability to draw meaning from scenes.
“These results challenge traditional vision models that treat fixations as independent snapshots and highlight the importance of considering the temporal dynamics of eye movements and the predictive nature of visual processing,” the team concluded.
In addition to opening a new window into the mind, the study raises the irresistible yet unanswerable question of what macaques make of Minions. Alas, here we must confront the limitations of the knowable universe.
In other news…
When climate-related disasters struck ancient Peru, some cultures responded with mass human sacrifices to appeal to the cosmos. For example, at least 107 adult men were sacrificed in six closely-timed events at Huaca de la Luna around 550–600 CE, and more than 140 children and 200 juvenile camelids were sacrificed at the Huanchaquito-las Llamas site around 1450 CE.
These ritualized killings often coincided with flooding and freak weather related to the El Niño–Southern Oscillation, the natural climate phenomenon in the Pacific Ocean that cycles through a warm “El Niño” phase and a cooler “La Niña” phase. The Huaca de la Luna sacrifice, for instance, occurred during a so-called “mega-Niño.” This connection inspired researchers to determine if environmental conditions were also linked to interpersonal violence outside of these ceremonial “crisis rituals” that were organized by elites.
The team conducted a meta-analysis of the skeletal remains of 1,633 individuals that lived in Peru’s Lambayeque Valley over the course of 3,000 years before the arrival of Europeans. The remains presented “no strong evidence for an association between environmental factors and interpersonal violence” and suggested “that non-ritual violence in the Lambayeque Valley Complex was rare (1.6%),” according to the study.
The mass sacrifices reflect “the sometimes lethal relationships between human behavior, cultural norms, and the environment—and are frequently used as cautionary allegories regarding the ongoing climate crisis,” said authors Thomas Snyder of New York University and Haagen Klaus of George Mason University.
Time to add “prevention of ritualized human sacrifice” to the list of reasons to address climate change. Worth a shot?
The fingerprints of children who lived 15,000 years ago in the southern Levant are preserved on clay artifacts, a discovery that exposes “a rare direct testimony of inter-generational knowledge transmission in a hands-on apprenticeship,” according to a new study.
Archaeologists studied 154 clay figurines that were unearthed across three archaeological sites in Israel, including a subset depicting birds, a gazelle, and two human forms. Crafted by the Natufian culture, these artifacts represent “the earliest evidence of a figurative clay tradition in Southwest Asia where it marks an important step in the evolution of human technology,” said researchers led by Laurent Davin of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Because these people sculpted the artifacts by hand, fingerprints are occasionally spotted on the clay, revealing the contributions of children and adults. In some cases, a preserved “succession of gestures on the wet clay suggests that, during the modeling sequence, an adult passed on the figurine to a pre-pubescent child,” the team said. “Therefore, these artefacts could be interpreted as portable figurative mnemotechnic devices related to children’s learning of traditional beliefs and ethno-ornithological knowledge.”
It’s so evocative to see the preserved touch of a child who lived so long ago, capturing a moment of skill-building and, perhaps, play. While we don’t know exactly what these figurines meant to their crafters, their survival is a testament to human creativity and imagination.
We humans are used to a pretty standard life cycle: Birth, reproductive years, a decline in fertility, and an inevitable slide toward mortality. But a multi-decade study of ants reveals that some colonies operate as “superorganisms” that display increased reproduction and decreased mortality rate with age, reversing the course of normal senescence.
Researchers who gathered 34 years of data on 3,285 colonies of the western harvester ant (Pogonomyrmex occidentalis) discovered that these groups “display reverse aging,” according to their new study.
“We will show that colonies of P. occidentalis not only have extraordinary longevity, but that their pattern of aging differs dramatically from that of most insects,” said authors Blaine J. Cole and Diane C. Wiernasz of the University of Houston. “Colonies exhibit negative senescence—increased survival and reproduction with greater age.”
This finding does not mean that individual ants are aging in reverse; worker ants live and die normally in these colonies. However, the larger superorganism becomes an unusual “non-senescing form.” While the ants go marching one by one, the colony’s lifespan adds up to a larger sum.
Thanks for reading! See you next week.
ROME (ANP/RTR) - De Italiaanse autoriteit voor privacy- en databescherming heeft een boete oplegd van 805 miljoen euro aan Meta Platforms, het moederbedrijf van Facebook, WhatsApp en Instagram. Dat werd zaterdag gemeld.
Het Amerikaanse techconcern zou zonder toestemming te vragen of gebruikers te informeren toegang hebben gehad tot foto's en video's van Android-gebruikers.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
peaceful-jp-scenery has added a photo to the pool:
Enzoji temple, Sanmon gate
円蔵寺・山門
This temple gate is located partway up the stairs. A large pair of straw sandals was on display.
階段の途中にある山門です。大きなわらじが飾られていました。
Yanaizu-machi, Fukushima pref, Japan
Een kwestie waar al generatieslang over wordt getwist: Theo van Gogh of Ischa Meijer? Beetje gek alleen om zoveel aandacht te besteden aan plek twee. Er staat namelijk een meesterinterviewer onbetwist op één: Sven Kockelmann. Dat Van Gogh en Meijer niet in zijn enorme schaduw mogen staan (kan ook niet, ze zijn dood) bleek gisteravond toen de nieuwbakken kingmaker van DENK, Stephan van Baarle, voor het eerst in zijn leven een bar betrad. Dat hij niet weet hoe een interview werkt, laat staan hoe een meesterinterview werkt, is vrij sneu. Maar daar weet Sven Kockelmann wel raad mee, die gebruikt geen smerige trucjes zoals amateurinterviewers. Nee, Sven Kockelmann gooit zijn gewicht in de strijd en stelt de vraag gewoon nog een keer. En dan nóg een keer. En dan nog een paar keer. Maar daarna nog veel vaker nog een keer. Want nog een keer: Sven Kockelmann is een meesterinterviewer.
ozipital has added a photo to the pool:
Another of my favourite gorges along the Gibb River Road. Small and secluded and lovely before the throngs arrive to swim. Yes it's always great to get to these places early if you can! The Gibb might seem remote but there are people everywhere!
peaceful-jp-scenery posted a photo:
Enzoji temple
円蔵寺
By the bridge at the foot of the mountain, he is Fukutaro, the father of the Akabeko (red cow) family.
麓の橋の所、赤べこ親子の父、福太郎です。
Yanaizu-machi, Fukushima pref, Japan
