Hannah Ritchie at By the Numbers:

The numbers were quite staggering. So staggering in fact, that I doubted myself. I ran the calculations many times, convinced I’d accidentally added a zero somewhere. I asked Pablo to also come up with an estimate, without telling him how I got to my numbers. As it turns out, we took slightly different approaches, but landed somewhere similar. We wrote up all of our assumptions and methodology if you’re interested.

If we put solar panels on those 32 million hectares of biofuel land, we could generate around 32,000 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity. Incidentally, that’s the same amount of electricity as the world consumes in a year.

So we could keep the biofuels, which amount to around 1,400 TWh of energy, and meet around 4% of global transport demand. Or we could use it for solar and produce enough electricity to meet the world’s current electricity demand.

More here.

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David Austin Walsh at the Boston Review:

Zohran Mamdani is now the mayor of New York City. Amid the chaos unleashed by Trump in the first weeks of 2026, it can be easy to lose sight of the truly seismic shift in politics his mayoralty represents.

To recap: an obscure, thirty-four-year-old state assemblyman and member of the Democratic Socialists of America, who a year ago could barely fill a seminar room at New York University, beat both incumbent mayor Eric Adams and former governor Andrew Cuomo by running on an unapologetically progressive ticket, critical of ICE and Israel as much as rents being too damn high. India Walton came close to a similar upset in Buffalo four years ago, but this time the socialists prevailed. In his inaugural address on New Year’s Day, sworn in by Bernie Sanders and quoting Fiorello La Guardia, Mamdani spoke of building a city “‘far greater and more beautiful’ for the hungry and the poor.” Handing out free tickets to a theater festival earlier this month, he spoke of his vision of a city “where we make it possible for working people to afford lives of joy, of art, of rest, of expression.” When’s the last time you heard a politician talk like this?

More here.

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Laurie Stone in The Paris Review:

What are we ever really fighting for? The answer is love. Love in the movies, and on the streets, and in our heads—instead of the dead people we are seeing right now. Existence is a contagion of love. That’s why you have to fast-forward through a bunch of scenes in Reds, where men are giving speeches to other men in English and Russian with those faces of certainty—not hope, but certainty—that they are right and have it all figured out.

You know those men. You’ve been to those meetings with the guy in the front—it could be a faculty meeting—the guy jabbing his finger, not like Mick Jagger in a dance routine, more like Moses holding a tablet. Those guys who love the sound of their voice more than they love love. Everyone has been to one of those meetings, or hundreds of them, wondering how they were still breathing with all the air sucked out of the room.

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Sneha Khedkar in The Scientist:

The mammalian gut is a dynamic environment, wherein shifts in the local environment can lead to disease. Despite the importance of monitoring biochemical parameters in the gut, the most commonly used tools are invasive endoscopic methods, which provide information at only one point in time. To overcome this, Carolina Tropini, a microbiologist at the University of British Columbia, and her team engineered gut bacteria that would dim their fluorescence under disease conditions. Their system, described in Cell, offers biosensors that can continuously and non-invasively monitor gut osmolarity in mice, highlighting the utility of the microbiome as a tool to track gut health.¹

Intestinal factors such as pH, salt balance, and oxygen levels mold the gut environment, with any alterations leading to illnesses. “Understanding these gut changes is essential for advancing our diagnostic and treatment strategies for gut health,” said Tropini in a statement. “For that, we need highly sensitive measurements as those changes occur, including before symptoms appear.”

More here.

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Theme for English B.

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Jazz Monroe at Pitchfork:

The story of “Human Behaviour” as we know it begins in 1993, when Björk swanned into London in a fluffy white mohair jacket. She was 27 and ready for adventure, so utterly international she could barely eat anything but curries, still high on her late-’80s supply of rave awakenings at all-nighters by DJs with names like Mixmaster Morris.

Björk saw through the idiot elements of British culture but decided to love it anyway, most of all its charismatic mavericks and prankster producers and the anything-goes musicians she took on tour under the banner of Immigrants United. Her creative soulmates were 808 State’s Graham Massey and Debut producer Nellee Hooper, whom she had found “too good taste, too expensive-sounding” for her industrial-techno soul, before he quelled her sophistiphobia by showing how rave and hip-hop beats might coexist with her voice in the plastic paradise of ’90s pop. “Human Behaviour” was Björk’s formal debut, the salvo of an album so buccaneering and multivalent it could have been called Polygenic. Originally written in her sardonic teens, the song and its lyrics fit the perspective of an outsider arriving in a big city: A child (or in some tellings, an animal) utters conspiratorial warnings to a confidante, marvelling at the oddballs of adultkind.

more here.

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Beatrice Radden Keefe at the NYRB:

Another bout of Gothic fever in the early twentieth century revolved less around a style than around a restless Gothic energy, an overwrought Gothic sensibility. In 1921 the German art historian Hermann Schmitz remarked that calling something Gothic had become the highest form of praise: a dancer on Berlin’s Kurfürstendamm might be complimented for the Gothic line of her movements, an Expressionist painting for its Gothic feeling. Schmitz bemoaned this misappropriation of the “most glorious legacy of the pious and pure spirit of our forefathers.” Seen as German by Germans and as French by the French, the Gothic was revered by those yearning for a lost age of faith and unity as well as by avant-gardes in search of the new.

Over the past year, the exhibition “Gothic Modern” brought together medieval, Renaissance, and modern works to explore how European artists of different stripes engaged with the Gothic between 1875 and 1925. This is a Gothic that was never exactly defined and flexible enough to include works in a vaguely dark and frightful mode as well as those by the German Renaissance masters Lucas Cranach the Elder, Albrecht Dürer, and Hans Holbein the Younger. The traveling show presented medieval and Renaissance sculptures, woodcuts, engravings, and paintings alongside artworks by Käthe Kollwitz, Edvard Munch, Max Beckmann, and many others.

more here.

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Shia Levitt at Reasons to be Cheerful:

Bhalla picked up the mantle from his predecessor Mayor Dawn Zimmer, launching a five year analysis of Hoboken’s crash data to learn contributing factors and vulnerabilities that could be used to help shape reforms.

That analysis showed that, between 2014 to 2018, 40 percent of the accidents causing serious injuries or death in Hoboken involved bikers or pedestrians, even though people walking and bicycling were only involved in eight percent of all crashes. Given that most bicycle and pedestrian crashes (88 percent) happened in intersection crosswalks, those became a major priority.

Central to Hoboken’s early strategy was a focus on vulnerable road users, such as seniors and kids, which meant prioritizing street redesign near schools, parks and senior centers.

More here.

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Sean Carroll at Preposterous Universe:

Evolution with natural selection involves an intricate mix of the random and the driven. Mutations are essentially random, while selection pressures work to prefer certain outcomes over others. There is tremendous divergence of species over time, but also repeated convergence to forms and mechanisms that are unmistakably useful. We see this clearly in eyes and fins, but the basic pattern also holds for brains and forms of social organization. I talk with philosopher Rachell Powell about what these ideas mean for humans, other terrestrial species, and also for forms of life we have not yet encountered.

More here.

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Jon Brodkin at Ars Technica:

The Trump White House yesterday posted a manipulated photo of Nekima Levy Armstrong, a Minnesota civil rights attorney who was arrested after protesting in a church where a pastor is allegedly also an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) official.

Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem posted what seems to be the original photo of Armstrong being led away by an officer yesterday morning. A half hour later, the official White House X account posted an altered version in which Armstrong’s face was manipulated to make it appear that she was crying.

“The White House shared an AI-edited photo of Nekima, depicting her in tears and scared when, in actuality, she was poised, determined, and unafraid,” NAACP President and CEO Derrick Johnson said yesterday.

Reader-added context on X said, “This photo has been digitally altered to make Nekima Levy Armstrong appear to be in distress. The Director of DHS herself posted the unedited photo in an earlier announcement.” White House Deputy Communications Director Kaelan Dorr defended the post after criticism of the image manipulation.

More here.

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Michael Shermer in The Washington Post:

On Jan. 13, Vermont legislator Troy Headrick (I) proposed creating a state task force that would get to the bottom of “unidentified anomalous phenomena,” or UAPs, that appeared to be buzzing about U.S. military air bases. Days later, Helen McCaw, a former senior analyst in financial security at the Bank of England, urged the bank’s governor to prepare for possible financial collapse should the White House disclose the existence of alien intelligence.

I have been following and writing about UFO phenomena and the people who believe they represent alien visitation since the 1990s, and until recently the topic was always largely treated by the public and media as fringe and beneath serious consideration. That began to change in 2017, when The New York Times published a front-page story about the Pentagon having established the secret Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program to learn what was really going on with all these sightings, many of which happened over military facilities.

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From The Scientist:

AI Will Accelerate the Regulatory Pipeline

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the European Medicines Agency have been moving—thoughtfully but decisively—toward a more aligned, forward-looking set of rules that do more than protect the public: They create room for responsible progress. With the EU AI Act coming into effect in the first half of 2026 and the FDA beginning to deploy generative AI tools to support and accelerate regulatory review, there will be a new regulatory position: guidance that is faster, more data-driven, and anchored in transparency, explainability, and continuous performance monitoring.

Regulators appear to be increasingly prepared to let AI handle routine, low-risk research tasks with minimal friction, while keeping firm human control over decisions that directly shape safety, ethics, and public trust. That is the right hierarchy. If they stay on this course, international coordination and iterative learning between agencies will not just keep up with AI, they will shape it. The result is substantial: more efficient drug development, lower costs, and more timely, representative access to better therapies. The challenge, which we cannot underestimate, is to ensure that the governance, safeguards, and ethical commitments evolve as quickly as the technology they aim to oversee.

More here.

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Dream Variations

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Graeme Wearden and Heather Stewart in The Guardian:

Kristalina Georgieva told delegates in Davos that the IMF’s own research suggested there would be a big transformation of demand for skills, as the technology becomes increasingly widespread.

“We expect over the next years, in advanced economies, 60% of jobs to be affected by AI, either enhanced or eliminated or transformed – 40% globally,” she said. “This is like a tsunami hitting the labour market.”

She suggested that in advanced economies, one in 10 jobs had already been “enhanced” by AI, tending to boost these workers’ pay, with knock-on benefits for the local economy.

By contrast, Georgieva warned that AI would wipe out many roles traditionally taken up by younger workers.

More here.

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Andrew Miller at Asterisk:

Picture a fall afternoon in Austin, Texas. The city is experiencing a sudden rainstorm, common there in October. Along a wet and darkened city street drive two robotaxis. Each has passengers. Neither has a driver.

Both cars drive themselves, but they perceive the world very differently.

One robotaxi is a Waymo. From its roof, a mounted lidar rig spins continuously, sending out laser pulses that bounce back from the road, the storefronts, and other vehicles, while radar signals emanate from its bumpers and side panels. The Waymo uses these sensors to generate a detailed 3D model of its surroundings, detecting pedestrians and cars that human drivers might struggle to see.

In the next lane is a Tesla Cybercab, operating in unsupervised full self-driving mode. It has no lidar and no radar, just eight cameras housed in pockets of glass. The car processes these video feeds through a neural network, identifying objects, estimating their dimensions, and planning its path accordingly.

More here.

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From Equator:

I must begin with a condition rather than a confession: my safety, anonymity and physical survival come first. In Iran, where words can still wound the body, this text is written cautiously, stripped of names and coordinates – anything that could invite harm. What follows is not testimony in the juridical sense, nor reportage. It is a personal record: fragile, partial, and deliberately inward. This is not about who I am in an administrative sense, but about where I stand.

I am a young man in Tehran. I come from an upper-middle-class family, one that has long been politically aware and historically engaged. Politics, literature and debate were not abstractions when I was growing up; they were part of the household atmosphere. I studied literature and political science, and over the years I’ve worked in and around writing, translation and what might loosely be called intellectual labour.

At the same time, I’ve been wary of becoming a detached, insulated intellectual – someone who speaks about society without being inside of it. I’ve made a conscious effort to stay in contact with everyday life: with the bazaar, ordinary economic anxieties, people whose political language is not theoretical but practical, immediate and raw.

More here.

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