Category: Current
Pretend play apes: the study that changed what it means to be human
Pretend play apes. That sentence would have been scientifically controversial five years ago. It is now the conclusion of a peer-reviewed study published in the journal Science in February 2026. Researchers at Johns Hopkins University and the University of St Andrews set up a tea party with empty cups, an empty pitcher, and a bonobo…
Are fireflies disappearing? what the science actually says
Are fireflies disappearing? The short answer is yes, in many places, measurably and quietly, for reasons that have everything to do with how humans have reorganised the night. The longer answer is more interesting than the viral version of this story, which has been circulating in various forms since 2024 and tends to announce that…
Why costa rica has no army and what 77 years without one actually looks like
The question of why Costa Rica has no army is worth asking this week more than most. The world is currently spending $2.4 trillion a year on defence. That is the highest figure ever recorded in human history, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. Governments across Europe and Asia are revising their military…
Rainbow sea slug: the most beautiful warning sign in british waters
Rainbow sea slug is one of the most visually extraordinary creatures living in British waters, and almost nobody knows it exists. It is 3 centimetres long. Its body is translucent white, covered in vivid orange and yellow spots, fringed with feathery plumes that catch light like something made of stained glass. Its scientific name is…
Adult ADHD : are we disordered, or just paying attention to the wrong things?
Adult ADHD has become one of the defining medical conversations of the 2020s. A 2024 meta-analysis in The Lancet Psychiatry puts the global figure at 366.3 million adults. In the US alone, 15.5 million have been diagnosed, roughly half of them in adulthood rather than childhood. Online searches for ADHD grew by 270 percent across…
Proto-Writing stone age: the 40,000-year-old marks that rewrote history
Proto-writing Stone Age artifacts are forcing a rewrite of one of humanity’s oldest assumptions. A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on February 24, 2026 analysed more than 3,000 geometric signs carved into 260 objects from cave sites in the Swabian Jura, a mountain range in southwestern Germany. The objects…
Hustle culture is dead. what killed it?
Hustle culture had a good run. For roughly a decade, the grind was the gospel. Wake up at 5am. Optimise every hour. Sleep when you are dead. Your LinkedIn profile was your altar. Your productivity system was your prayer. The corner office was the promised land. Then something shifted. Not quietly. Loudly, measurably, and with…
Attention economy news cycle: when apple’s big week met the world’s worst one
Attention economy news cycle reached a kind of peak absurdity this week. On Monday morning, Tim Cook posted a short video to his social media accounts. Colourful Apple logo. The hashtag #AppleLaunch. A teaser for what he called a big week ahead, with at least five new products rolling out across three days, culminating in…
Indian creek island: why the world’s richest men are all moving to one place
Indian Creek Island is a 300-acre strip of man-made land in Biscayne Bay, Miami. It has 41 homes. Its own government. Its own police force that patrols by land and by sea. A single guarded bridge to the mainland, where visitors show ID and may have their vehicles inspected before being allowed through. Yesterday, Mark…
Polycrisis: what happens to the human mind when everything goes wrong at once
Polycrisis is not a new word. It is a new reality. It describes what is happening right now, this week, today. Multiple large-scale crises arriving simultaneously, each one serious enough to dominate the news cycle on its own, each one amplifying the others, none of them resolving while the next one lands. Here is what…
