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In 2024, Egypt completed its 1,155km stretch of the Cairo–Cape Town Highway, a 10,228km‑long road connecting 10 African countries – Egypt, Sudan, South Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Botswana and South Africa.   The imaginary of ‘Cape to Cairo’ is not new. In 1874, editor of the Daily Telegraph Edwin Arnold proposed a plan to connect the African continent by rail, a project that came to be known as the Cape to Cairo Railway project. Cecil Rhodes expressed his support for the project, seeing it as a means to connect the various ‘possessions’ of the British Empire across Africa, facilitating the movement of troops and natural resources. This railway project was never completed, and in 1970 was overlaid by a very different attempt at connecting the Cape to Cairo, as part of the Trans‑African Highway network. This 56,683km‑long system of highways – some dating from the colonial era, some built as part of the 1970s project, and some only recently built – aimed to create lines of connection across the African continent, from north to south as well as east to west.  Here, postcolonial state power invested in ‘moving the continent’s people and economies from past to future’, as architectural historians Kenny Cupers and Prita Meier write in their 2020 essay ‘Infrastructure between Statehood and Selfhood: The Trans‑African Highway’. The highways were to be built with the support of Kenya’s president Jomo Kenyatta, Ghana’s president Kwame Nkrumah and Ghana’s director of social welfare Robert Gardiner, as well as the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA). This project was part of a particular historical moment during which anticolonial ideas animated most of the African continent; alongside trade, this iteration of Cape to Cairo centred social and cultural connection between African peoples. But though largely socialist in ambition, the project nevertheless engaged modernist developmentalist logics that cemented capitalism.  Lead image: Over a century in the making, the final stretches of the Cairo–Cape Town Highway are being finished. Egypt completed the section within its borders last year and a section over the dry Merille River in Kenya was constructed in 2019. Credit: Allan Muturi / SOPA / ZUMA / Alamy. Above: The route from Cairo to Cape Town, outlined in red, belongs to the Trans‑African Highway network, which comprises nine routes, here in black The project failed to fully materialise at the time, but efforts to complete the Trans‑African Highway network have been revived in the last 20 years; large parts are now complete though some links remain unbuilt and many roads are unpaved or hazardous. The most recent attempts to realise this project coincide with a new continental free trade agreement, the agreement on African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), established in 2019, to increase trade within the continent. The contemporary manifestation of the Cairo–Cape Town Highway – also known as Trans‑African Highway (TAH) 4 – is marked by deepening neoliberal politics. Represented as an opportunity to boost trade and exports, connecting Egypt to African markets that the Egyptian government view as ‘untapped’, the project invokes notions of trade steeped in extraction, reflecting the neoliberal logic underpinning contemporary Egyptian governance; today, the country’s political project, led by Abdel Fattah El Sisi, is oriented towards Egyptian dominance and extraction in relation to the rest of the continent.  Through an allusion to markets ripe for extraction, this language brings to the fore historical forms of domination that have shaped the connections between Egypt and the rest of the continent; previous iterations of connection across the continent often reproduced forms of domination stretching from the north of the African continent to the south, including the Trans‑Saharan slave trade routes across Africa that ended in various North African and Middle Eastern territories. These networks, beginning in the 8th century and lasting until the 20th, produced racialised hierarchies across the continent, shaping North Africa into a comparably privileged space proximate to ‘Arabness’. This was a racialised division based on a civilisational narrative that saw Arabs as superior, but more importantly a political economic division resulting from the slave trade routes that produced huge profits for North Africa and the Middle East. In the contemporary moment, these racialised hierarchies are bound up in political economic dependency on the Arab Gulf states, who are themselves dependent on resource extraction, land grabbing and privatisation across the entire African continent.  ‘The Cairo–Cape Town Highway connects Egypt to African markets viewed as “untapped”, invoking notions steeped in extraction’ However, this imaginary conjured by the Cairo–Cape Town Highway is countered by a network of streets scattered across Africa that traces the web of Egyptian Pan‑African solidarity across the continent. In Lusaka in Zambia, you might find yourself on Nasser Road, as you might in Mwanza in Tanzania or Luanda in Angola. In Mombasa in Kenya, you might be driving down Abdel Nasser Road; in Kampala in Uganda, you might find yourself at Nasser Road University; and in Tunis in Tunisia, you might end up on Gamal Abdel Nasser Street. These street names are a reference to Gamal Abdel Nasser, Egypt’s first postcolonial leader and president between 1956 and 1970.  Read against the contemporary Cairo–Cape Town Highway, these place names signal a different form of connection that brings to life Egyptian Pan‑Africanism, when solidarity was the hegemonic force connecting the continent, coming up against the notion of a natural or timeless ‘great divide’ within Africa. From the memoirs of Egyptian officials who were posted around Africa as conduits of solidarity, to the broadcasts of Radio Cairo that were heard across the continent, to the various conferences attended by anticolonial movements and postcolonial states, Egypt’s orientation towards Pan‑Africanism, beginning in the early 20th century and lasting until the 1970s, was both material and ideological. Figures and movements forged webs of solidarity with their African comrades, imagining an Africa that was united through shared commitments to ending colonialism and capitalist extraction.  The route between Cape Town in South Africa and Cairo in Egypt has long occupied the colonial imaginary. In 1930, Margaret Belcher and Ellen Budgell made the journey, sponsored by car brand Morris and oil company Shell Credit: Fox Photos / Getty The pair made use of the road built by British colonisers in the 19th century, and which forms the basis for the current Cairo–Cape Town Highway. The road was preceded by the 1874 Cape to Cairo Railway project, which connected the colonies of the British Empire Credit: Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division This network of eponymous streets represents attempts to inscribe anticolonial power into the materiality of the city. Street‑naming practices are one way in which the past comes into the present, ‘weaving history into the geographic fabric of everyday life’, as geographer Derek Alderman wrote in his 2002 essay ‘Street Names as Memorial Arenas’. In this vein, the renaming of streets during decolonisation marked a practice of contesting the production of colonial space. In the newly postcolonial city, renaming was a way of ‘claiming the city back’, Alderman continues. While these changes may appear discursive, it is their embedding in material spaces, through signs and maps, that make the names come to life; place names become a part of the everyday through sharing addresses or giving directions. This quality makes them powerful; consciously or unconsciously, they form part of how the spaces of the city are navigated.  These are traces that were once part of a dominant historical narrative; yet when they are encountered in the present, during a different historical moment, they no longer act as expressions of power but instead conjure up a moment that has long passed. A street in Lusaka named after an Egyptian general made more sense 60 years ago than it does today, yet contextualising it recovers a marginalised history of Egyptian Pan‑Africanism.  Markers such as street names or monuments are simultaneously markers of anticolonial struggle as well as expressions of state power – part of an attempt, by political projects such as Nasser’s, to exert their own dominance over cities, towns and villages. That such traces are expressions of both anticolonial hopes and postcolonial state power produces a sense of tension within them. For instance, Nasser’s postcolonial project in Egypt was a contradictory one; it gave life to anticolonial hopes – for instance by breaking away from European capitalism and embracing anticolonial geopolitics – while crushing many parts of the left through repression, censorship and imprisonment. Traces of Nasser found today inscribe both anticolonial promises – those that came to life and those that did not – while reproducing postcolonial power that in most instances ended in dictatorship.  Recent efforts to complete the route build on those of the post‑independence era – work on a section north of Nairobi started in 1968 Credit: Associated Press / Alamy The Trans‑African Highway network was conceived in 1970 in the spirit of Pan‑Africanism At that time, the routes did not extend into South Africa, which was in the grip of apartheid. The Trans‑African Highway initiative was motivated by a desire to improve trade and centre cultural links across the continent – an ambition that was even celebrated on postage stamps There have been long‑standing debates about the erasure of the radical anticolonial spirit from the more conservative postcolonial states that emerged; the promises and hopes of anticolonialism, not least among them socialism and a world free of white supremacy, remain largely unrealised. Instead, by the 1970s neoliberalism emerged as a new hegemonic project. The contemporary instantiation of Cape to Cairo highlights just how pervasive neoliberal logics continue to be, despite multiple global financial crises and the 2011 Egyptian revolution demanding ‘bread, freedom, social justice’.  But the network of streets named after anticolonial figures and events across the world is testament to the immense power and promise of anticolonial revolution. Most of the 20th century was characterised by anticolonial struggle, decolonisation and postcolonial nation‑building, as nations across the global south gained independence from European empire and founded their own political projects. Anticolonial traces, present in street and place names, point to the possibility of solidarity as a means of reorienting colonial geographies. They are a reminder that there have been other imaginings of Cape to Cairo, and that things can be – and have been – otherwise. 2025-06-13 Kristina Rapacki Share

Image of the Archbishop of Canterbury's letters to the Bishop of Winchester on the subject of Ela Fitzpayne, from the register of John de Stratford. Reproduced with permission of Hampshire Archives and Hampshire County Council. (Image Credit: Register of John de Stratford. Reproduced with permission of Hampshire Archives and Hampshire County Council.)NewsletterSign up for our email newsletter for the latest science newsEspionage, sex, public humiliation, murder — these may sound like tropes straight out of Game of Thrones, but they’re actually all elements of a nearly 700-year-old cold case in England. After analyzing Medieval letters and records, a research team from the Cambridge University Institute of Criminology’s Medieval Murder Maps project may have found the killer of a priest. However, this priest may not have been so innocent. A new paper published in Criminal Law Forum takes a deeper look at this 14th-century cold case.Tracing a Medieval MurderThe Medieval Murder Maps project uses interactive maps of three English cities, London, Oxford, and York, during the Medieval period. Throughout the cities are the locations of various deaths and murders. Each location has a story associated with it, directly from written records and coroners' reports at the time. Some of these stories are full of intriguing twists and turns.The Cambridge research team analyzed over 100 murders from texts, translated from Latin, from that period, and used a coding method to separate the deaths into different categories, including time (day, week, month), motivation, weapon used, victim, and location. From this information, one of the deaths the team found most interesting was the murder of John Forde in 1337.A Medieval Lover to Murderer From the letters and texts the team analyzed, they pieced together the events that led up to Forde’s death. Forde was a priest living in London when he was murdered on a busy street. But what possible reason would someone have to want to murder a priest? The motive, according to the research team, was likely revenge. According to Manuel Eisner, one of the study’s authors, the murder may have been an act of revenge by noblewoman Ela Fitzpayne. According to the records, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Simon Mepham, had enacted penance on Fitzpayne after it was discovered that Forde had been her lover. A letter written by Archbishop Mepham accused Fitzpayne of adultery with Forde and possibly others. Her penance was to take a barefoot walk of shame across Salisbury Cathedral. Eisner also found a document that suggested Fitzpayne, her husband, and John Forde sent a gang to rob a church priory and took the livestock for ransom. It’s possible that during this time, Forde found himself in bed with Fitzpayne, before betraying her to the Archbishop Mepham. Commissioned Murder Possibly betrayed by her former lover and sentenced to walks of shame that were to take place once a year for seven years,  Fitzpayne would have none of it. On an early evening on a busy London street, near St. Paul’s Cathedral, three men attacked Forde. One slit his throat while the others stabbed him in the gut. Witnesses claim that the murderers were Fitzpayne’s brother and two of her former servants. “We are looking at a murder commissioned by a leading figure of the English aristocracy. It is planned and cold-blooded, with a family member and close associates carrying it out, all of which suggests a revenge motive,” said Eisner in a press release.Cold Case RevealedAccording to letters from Archbishop Mepham, Fitzpayne was led by the devil and a “spirit of pride.”“The archbishop imposed heavy, shameful public penance on Ela, which she seems not to have complied with, but may have sparked a thirst for vengeance,” said Eisner in a press release. “Not least as John Forde appears to have escaped punishment by the church.” When Archbishop Mepham died in 1333, Fitzpayne waited four years before enacting her revenge, and in 1337, Forde was killed. Article SourcesOur writers at Discovermagazine.com use peer-reviewed studies and high-quality sources for our articles, and our editors review for scientific accuracy and editorial standards. Review the sources used below for this article:A graduate of UW-Whitewater, Monica Cull wrote for several organizations, including one that focused on bees and the natural world, before coming to Discover Magazine. Her current work also appears on her travel blog and Common State Magazine. Her love of science came from watching PBS shows as a kid with her mom and spending too much time binging Doctor Who.1 free article leftWant More? Get unlimited access for as low as $1.99/monthSubscribeAlready a subscriber?Register or Log In1 free articleSubscribeWant more?Keep reading for as low as $1.99!SubscribeAlready a subscriber?Register or Log In

Deal  When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. Hisense U6 Smart Fire TVs are at their lowest prices ever Fiza Ali Neowin @Fiza_Aliii · May 31, 2025 14:48 EDT Ahead of Father's Day, Hisense is offering five variants of the U6 Series Smart Fire TV (2025 model) at their all-time low prices. The U6 Series offers a 4K UHD (3,840×2,160) resolution while its backlight system comprises approximately 1,000 mini-LEDs arranged in a Full Array Local Dimming configuration. Colour reproduction is achieved through QLED quantum-dot technology, enabling the display to render over one billion colours. Furthermore, the panel supports a wide colour gamut, which results in more accurate renditions of natural hues. A Total HDR Solution ensures compatibility with multiple HDR formats, including Dolby Vision IQ, HDR 10 + Adaptive, HDR 10, HDR 10 + Gaming, and HLG. At the core of the U6 Series is the Hi-View AI Engine, a chipset that handles advanced picture processing tasks. These include an AI-powered 4K Upscaler, AI Smooth Motion, and AI Sports Mode. Collectively, these features ensure that fine details are reproduced with greater clarity. For gaming, the TV offers Game Mode Pro, which supports a native 144Hz refresh rate and Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) ranging from 48Hz to 144Hz. An on-screen Game Bar allows users to toggle VRR settings, monitor input lag, and access gaming presets directly. Connectivity options include four HDMI ports (two HDMI 2.1 and two HDMI 2.0), one of which supports eARC via HDMI 1, two USB ports (one USB 3.0 and one USB 2.0), an Ethernet (LAN) port and an optical digital audio output. Moreover, wireless connectivity comprises Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.2. The U6 Series runs on the Fire TV platform with Alexa built in, granting access to a library of streaming apps and voice control functionality. Audio is enhanced by Dolby Atmos, and the unit features a 2.1-channel surround-sound configuration. Additional capabilities include noise-reduction processing, closed caption support, a sleep timer, and parental control functions. 55" Hisense U6 Series Mini-LED 4K Smart Fire TV: $528.99 (Amazon US) 34% off 65" Hisense U6 Series Mini-LED 4K Smart Fire TV: $698.99 (Amazon US) 30% off 75" Hisense U6 Series Mini-LED 4K Smart Fire TV: $898.99 (Amazon US) 31% off 85" Hisense U6 Series Mini-LED 4K Smart Fire TV: $1,299.99 (Amazon US) 35% off 100" Hisense U6 Series Mini-LED 4K Smart Fire TV: $2,599.99 (Amazon US) This Amazon deal is US-specific and not available in other regions unless specified. If you don't like it or want to look at more options, check out the Amazon US deals page here. Get Prime (SNAP), Prime Video, Audible Plus or Kindle / Music Unlimited. Free for 30 days. As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases. Tags Report a problem with article Follow @NeowinFeed

For a few months of the year, the Alaskan Arctic becomes flooded with birds. From shorebirds to waterfowl, these avians arrive in the spring to breed, nest, and raise their young, and to take advantage of the ample plants and prey (invertebrates and other animals) that thrive in Alaska’s short summers. They do it today, and they did it around 73 million years ago, too. Documenting the earliest evidence ever discovered of birds breeding and nesting in the Arctic, a new study in Science describes a collection of avian fossils and fossil fragments from around 73 million years ago. The collection comprises dozens of bones and teeth from adult and baby birds, and it shows that avians similar to modern shorebirds and waterfowl reproduced in the Arctic in the Cretaceous period, when dinosaurs still dominated the Alaskan terrain.“Birds have existed for 150 million years,” said Lauren Wilson, a study author and a student at Princeton University, who worked on the study while at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, according to a press release. “For half of the time they have existed, they have been nesting in the Arctic.”An Arctic NurseryA fossil fragment of a beak from a baby bird. (Image Credit: Photo by Pat Druckenmiller)Millions of birds travel to the Arctic, and they’ve been traveling there for millions of years. (In fact, some 250 species of birds migrate to Alaska for the spring and summer breeding and nesting seasons today.) But up until now, the earliest traces of birds reproducing in the Arctic dated back to around 47 million years ago, following the disappearance of the non-avian dinosaurs from the Arctic terrain. Now, the authors of the new study claim that birds and non-avian dinosaurs shared the Alaskan Arctic as far back as the Cretaceous period. Sifting bones and teeth from the sediment of Alaska’s Prince Creek Formation, the authors identified an assortment of Cretaceous fossils and fossil fragments, which resembled the remains of modern gulls, geese, ducks, and loons. That the specimens belonged to adult and baby birds suggests that these species were breeding, nesting, and raising their young in Alaska, more than 20 million years earlier than previously thought. “The Arctic is considered the nursery for modern birds,” said Pat Druckenmiller, another study author and a professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, according to a press release. “They have been doing this for 73 million years.”Finding Fossils, From Adult and Baby BirdsStudy authors Joe Keeney, Jim Baichtal, and Patrick Druckenmiller in Alaska. (Image Credit: Photo by Lauren Wilson) According to the authors, the bones and teeth of adult birds are often too fragile to survive in the fossil record, and those from baby birds are even more delicate. “Finding bird bones from the Cretaceous is already a very rare thing,” Wilson said in the release. “To find baby bird bones is almost unheard of. That is why these fossils are significant.” Though the majority of specimens that are taken from the Prince Creek Formation are large, the study authors opted to collect the smaller fossils and fossil fragments that most other studies miss. To do so, they inspected screened sediment with a microscope, which revealed their tiny finds. “We put Alaska on the map for fossil birds,” Druckenmiller said in the release. “It wasn’t on anyone’s radar.”Whether the find includes bones and teeth from the Neornithes — or the modern birds — is yet to be determined, though the authors stress that some of the fossils and fossil fragments feature skeletal and dental traits, such as fused leg bones and toothless jawbones, that are seen only in modern birds. “If they are part of the modern bird group, they would be the oldest such fossils ever found,” Druckenmiller said in the release. “But it would take us finding a partial or full skeleton to say for sure.”Article SourcesOur writers at Discovermagazine.com use peer-reviewed studies and high-quality sources for our articles, and our editors review for scientific accuracy and editorial standards. Review the sources used below for this article:Science. Arctic Bird Nesting Traces Back to the CretaceousSam Walters is a journalist covering archaeology, paleontology, ecology, and evolution for Discover, along with an assortment of other topics. Before joining the Discover team as an assistant editor in 2022, Sam studied journalism at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.

On the right bank of the Naviglio Grande, a canal that runs through Italy’s Lombardy region some 20 miles from Milan, the landscape alternates between industrial warehouses and cultivated fields. Along the historic waterway system which dates from the 12th century, there are a series of patrician residences, pleasure villas, and elegant rural farmhouses that still stand, along with what remains of their parks and gardens, side-by-side with more recent houses.The entrance gate of Villa Clari-Monzini, the oldest and largest of the villas on the right bank of the Naviglio canal, to which it was once connected via a tree-lined avenue that continued on the opposite side of the waterway to the nearby Piazza del Teatro. Arriving in Cassinetta di Lugagnano after traveling along the Naviglio bike path, one finds one of the richest towns in the region in terms of its architectural legacy. When the Barlaam family made that same journey, they couldn’t help but notice the Villa Clari-Monzini: “It was in very bad condition, but it was still beautiful and shortly thereafter it was renovated and divided into apartments. We decided to move there, to the main floor of the villa, far from the stress and hassles of the big city,” says Riccardo, Simone’s father. The younger Barlaam is a Paralympic swimming champion who won four gold medals between the recent games in Tokyo and Paris.Cosmos coffee table by Jeffrey Bernett (B&B Italia). Logo lamp, a Chinese checkers board by Joe, and Lawrence ottoman (all Armani/Casa). Simone Barlaam leans against a handcrafted crystal table in the living room of his home. Clothes by Armani. “I grew up here, among the frescoed walls and coffered ceilings of the large ballroom that has become our living room, and ever since I was a child I’ve always felt this house was welcoming. When we lived in Milan I might have dared to scribble on the walls—I was a creative kid—but here I was never tempted to do so,” says Simone, who returns here on weekends to recharge.In the living room, LC4 chaise longue by Le Corbusier (Cassina), handcrafted crystal table, Plywood chairs by Charles and Ray Eames (Vitra). Taraxacum 88 chandelier by Achille Castiglioni (Flos). “When the world shuts down, I find some quiet time to draw. It’s something I do for myself, which makes me feel similar to how I do when I’m in the water.”—Simone BarlaamLate at night, Barlaam invents his alternative heroes inspired by the art he is surrounded by and the Italian comic books by his side during childhood, from Diabolik to Zerocalcare. “When the world shuts down, I find some quiet time to draw. It’s something I do for myself, which makes me feel similar to how I do when I’m in the water when I’m training. It’s an isolation that makes me focus on my body, on lightness, on harmony; I always feel a bit awkward on dry land but in the water I become agile and graceful,” Barlaam says.Dozens and dozens of sheets of paper can be found in the family’s home, essential material for this self-taught drawing talent. Illustrations from the Italian children’s story “Road to Cortina” can also be found in the flat. “In high school I reproduced one of the frescoes in the villa. I recreated it in color, although I usually prefer to work in black and white.” It’s part of his effort to engage an ever-growing audience, and to recount his journey to the 2026 Winter Olympics.Snow, the family’s Samoyed. The kitchen is by Binova, with Corian countertop. Venetian terrazzo floor. In one of the rooms, a reclaimed wood door. Rondò armchair (Armani/Casa). Beside the fireplace, double Parentesi lamp by Achille Castiglioni and Pio Manzù (Flos). Outside, evening descends over the Lombardy countryside and the beautiful back garden. The floors inside of the 17th-century villa are now a light, uniform Venetian terrazzo that highlights the thresholds of doors with a slightly darker hue. (The villa once operated as a spinning mill which irreparably damaged its original floors.) The doors themselves were recovered from the middle of fields where they had been discarded, covered with several layers of varnish. They have now been cleaned and left unfinished, beyond a light wax treatment, giving them their original appearance.

May 23, 20253 min readNew Contacts Let You See Infrared Light—Even with Your Eyes ClosedStraight out of science fiction, these contact lenses convert infrared light into visible light that humans can seeBy Elizabeth Gibney & Nature magazine People who tested a new type of designer contact lens could see flashing infrared signals from a light source. Yuqian Ma, Yunuo Chen, Hang Zhao (CC BY SA)Humans have a new way of seeing infrared light, without the need for clunky night-vision goggles. Researchers have made the first contact lenses to convey infrared vision — and the devices work even when people have their eyes closed.The team behind the invention, led by scientists at the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) in Hefei, gave the lenses their power by infusing them with nanoparticles that convert near-infrared light in the 800–1,600-nanometre range into shorter-wavelength, visible light that humans can see, in the 400–700-nanometre range. The researchers estimate that the lenses cost around US$200 per pair to make.The technology, which was detailed in Cell on 22 May, “is incredibly cool, just like something out of a science-fiction movie”, says Xiaomin Li, a chemist at Fudan University in Shanghai, China. It opens up “new possibilities for understanding the world around us”, he adds.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.Pros and consNear-infrared light sits just outside the range of wavelengths that humans can normally detect. Some animals can sense infrared light, although probably not well enough to form images.Night-vision goggles enable humans to see infrared radiation, but they are bulky and require a power source to work. The new lenses avoid these limitations while also offering richer, multi-coloured infrared images that night-vision goggles, which operate on a monochrome green scale, typically do not.However, the lenses do have their own shortcomings. Because the embedded nanoparticles scatter light, the images the lenses create are blurry. The team partially corrected this by putting the technology into glasses with additional lenses that redirect the light. Moreover, unlike night-vision goggles, which amplify light to detect low-level infrared signals, the lenses allow users to see only intense infrared signals, such as those emitted by light-emitting diodes (LEDs).For these reasons, some critics don’t think the lenses will prove useful. “I cannot think of any application that would not be fundamentally simpler with infrared goggles,” says Glen Jeffery, a neuroscientist at University College London who specializes in eye health. “Evolution has avoided this for a good reason.”Nevertheless, the authors think that their lenses can be further optimized and foresee several possible uses for the invention. For instance, wearers would be able to read anti-counterfeit marks that emit infrared wavelengths but are otherwise invisible to the human eye, says co-author Yuqian Ma, a neuroscientist at the USTC.Li, who was not involved in the work, offers another possibility: the lenses might be worn by doctors conducting near-infrared fluorescence surgery, to directly detect and remove cancerous lesions “without relying on bulky traditional equipment”.‘An exhilarating moment’To create the contact lenses, the scientists built on previous research in which they gave mice infrared vision by injecting nanoparticles into the animals’ retinas. This time, they took a less invasive approach and added nanoparticles made of rare-earth metals including ytterbium and erbium to a soup of polymer building blocks to form the soft lenses, and then tested them for safety.The main challenge, Ma says, was to pack enough nanoparticles into the lenses to convert sufficient infrared light into detectable visible light, while not otherwise altering the lenses’ optical properties, including their transparency.Tests in mice showed that animals wearing the lenses tended to choose a dark box that was considered ‘safe’ over one lit up by infrared light, whereas mice without the lenses showed no preference for either box. Humans wearing the lenses could see flickering infrared light from an LED well enough to both pick up Morse code signals and sense which direction the signals were coming from. The lenses’ performance even improved when participants closed their eyes, because near-infrared light easily penetrates the eyelids, whereas visible light, which could have interfered with image formation, does so to a lesser degree.“Witnessing people wearing contact lenses and successfully seeing infrared flashes was undoubtedly an exhilarating moment,” Ma says.The team now plans to find ways to cram more nanoparticles into the lenses and hopes to develop particles that can convert light with higher efficiency, to improve the technology’s sensitivity. “We have overcome the physiological limitations of human vision, as if opening a brand-new window onto the world,” Ma says.This article is reproduced with permission and was first published on May 22, 2025.

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. For nearly 60 years, California has enjoyed the ability to set its own standards governing air pollution from automobiles, as long as they’re more stringent than the federal government’s. This rule, written into the Clean Air Act, was meant to recognize the state’s long-standing leadership in regulating air emissions.The US Senate undermined that authority on Thursday when it voted 51-44 to revoke a waiver the Environmental Protection Agency approved allowing the Golden State to implement and enforce a de facto ban on the sale of gasoline-powered cars by 2035. The Senate also rescinded waivers allowing California to set stricter emissions standards for new diesel trucks and mandating the adoption of zero-emission trucks.Environmental groups quickly decried the votes, saying that California’s standards are essential to protecting public health and achieving nationwide emissions reduction targets. The rules are seen as a sort of national benchmark since automakers don’t create separate product lines: one for California and another for everyone else. A provision in the Clean Air Act also allows other states to adopt the Golden State’s standards; 16 states and the District of Columbia have adopted many of the rules established by the California Air Resources Board.“These standards are vital in protecting people from the vehicle pollution which causes asthma attacks and other serious health problems,” Dan Lashof, a senior fellow at the nonprofit World Resources Institute, said in a statement.On a wonkier level, however, legal and policy experts objected to the way senators rescinded California’s waiver: They used the 1996 Congressional Review Act, or CRA, a law enacted to allow Congress to overturn some federal actions with a simple majority rather than the usual 60 votes. Two government watchdogs said the act did not apply to the state’s waiver.“Republicans twisted the Senate’s own rules,” Joanna Slaney, vice president for political and government affairs at the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund, said in a statement. UCLA law professor Ann Carlson warned in a blog post ahead of the vote that Congress “may be opening up a Pandora’s box it can’t close” and that “there will be no limit on using the CRA to overturn all kinds of actions that the act doesn’t cover.”At the heart of the controversy is whether the air pollution waiver that the EPA granted to California last year qualifies as a “rule” under the CRA. Both the Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan oversight agency, and the Senate parliamentarian, a nonpartisan appointee tasked with interpreting congressional rules and procedures, issued advisory opinions earlier this year saying that it doesn’t. Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) appeared to agree with this interpretation: A one-pager on a bill he proposed to repeal California’s waiver said that the exemptions “cannot be reviewed under the Congressional Review Act because the waiver granted by EPA is not a rule as that term is defined in the CRA.” Party leaders don’t usually contravene the parliamentarian’s guidance. If they do, they run the risk of their opponents doing the same when they are in power. “Republicans should tread carefully today,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, a Democrat from New York, told NPR on Thursday. Sen. Alex Padilla (D-CA) said in a statement that “radical Republicans” had “gone nuclear on the Senate rule book.”“It won’t be long before Democrats are back in the driver’s seat again,” Padilla added. “When that happens, all bets will be off. Every agency action that Democrats don’t like — whether it’s a rule or not — will be fair game, from mining permits and fossil fuel projects to foreign affairs and tax policies.” Dan Farber, a professor at UC Berkeley Law, told Grist that the Senate’s capricious interpretation of the CRA means it could be used to rescind waivers from the Department of Health and Human Services allowing states to modify Medicaid requirements or broadcasting licenses issued by the Federal Communications Commission. The act could also be used to revoke pollution permits that the EPA grants to states.He clarified, however, that the Senate only nullified specific waivers in California affecting the sale of gasoline-powered cars. It did not repeal provisions in the Clean Air Act that allow the EPA to issue new waivers, as long as they’re not “substantially the same” as the rescinded ones. “I think that California still has the power to put forward, and EPA has the power to approve, different emissions regulations in the future,” Farber said. “Changing the deadlines by a few years could be enough.” California’s current standards require 35 percent of new cars sold within the state to be zero-emissions by 2026, ratcheting up to 100 percent of new sales by 2035. President Donald Trump revoked California’s waiver allowing such regulations in 2019 during his first term, but that move was challenged in court and the waiver was restored by Joe Biden’s administration.Although automakers have previously backed California’s air pollution standards, industry groups cheered the vote on Thursday. John Bozzella, president and CEO of the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, a trade group, said in a statement that the Senate deserved “enormous credit.” “The fact is these EV sales mandates were never achievable,” he said. “Automakers warned federal and state policymakers that reaching these EV sales targets would take a miracle, especially in the coming years when the mandates get exponentially tougher.”California Attorney General Rob Bonta objected to the Senate vote and vowed to challenge it in court. “Reducing emissions is essential to the prosperity, health, and well-being of California and its families,” he said in a statement. Gov. Gavin Newsom said undoing his state’s air pollution rules risked “ced[ing] American car-industry dominance to China.” See More:

May 23, 20255 min readThe Creepy Calculus of Measuring Death RiskMeet micromorts and microlives, statistical units that help mathematicians to calculate riskBy Manon Bischoff edited by Daisy Yuhas M-SUR/Alamy Stock PhotoPeople are generally bad at assessing probabilities. That’s why we have irrational fears and why we overestimate our odds of winning the lottery.Whenever I have to travel by plane, for example, my palms sweat, my heart races and my thoughts take a gloomy turn. I should be much more worried when I get on my bike in Darmstadt, Germany, where I live. Statistically, I’m in much greater danger on the road than in the air. Yet my bike commute doesn’t cause me any stress at all.Recently, a friend told me about a concept within decision theory that is supposed to help people get a better sense of hazards and risks. In 1980 electrical engineer Ronald Arthur Howard coined the micromort unit to quantify life-threatening danger.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.One micromort corresponds to a one-in-a-million chance of dying during a certain activity. Do you want to run a marathon? The risk is seven micromorts. Are you going under general anesthesia? That’s 10 micromorts. To arrive at these figures, you first need detailed statistics. How many people engaged in these activities and died in the process? And the results depend heavily on the group of people being studied (their age, gender, and so on), as well as the geographic location.Better Living through StatisticsSurprisingly, the history of statistics doesn’t go back very far. In the 17th century, British demographer John Graunt pioneered mortality statistics by analyzing records of deaths and baptisms. But it would take another 200 years for society to recognize the social benefits of these approaches.Today the utility of this mathematical subfield is undisputed. Insurance companies and banks use statistics to carry out risk assessments. Statistical surveys make it possible to investigate psychological and sociological phenomena. Physical research would be unthinkable without statistics.Thanks to Howard and the micromort, the risks in our everyday lives can also be estimated with the help of statistics. By examining the proportion of people who die while undertaking a particular activity, he was able to create a general mortality risk for those activities.But more recently, mathematician David Spiegelhalter noticed something missing in Howard’s analysis: the micromort unit merely indicates how likely it is that a very specific action will kill us. This may make sense for a one-off activity such as climbing a mountain. But for long-term habits, such as regularly eating fast food, the measure is of only limited use.For example, smoking a cigarette causes just 0.21 micromort and would therefore be significantly less risky than getting out of bed in the morning at the age of 45 (which results in six micromorts). Smoking, however, has long-lasting negative consequences for the body that getting up in the morning does not. The long-term risk is therefore not recorded.So Spiegelhalter introduced the “microlife” measure to take into account the long-term effects of different activities. This quantifies how much life you lose on average by carrying out an activity. Each microlife that is lost reduces your life expectancy by half an hour. Two hours of watching TV each day might cost one microlife, for instance.One of the most significant differences between micromorts and microlives is that one of the two types of units compounds over time, and the other does not. If I survive my morning bike ride to the Darmstadt train station, my micromort count for that ride drops back to zero. The next day I start the journey again with the same risk.It’s different with microlife data: if I smoke a cigarette and then a second one an hour later, the time I’ve lost adds up. And of course, the mere ticking of the clock also shortens my available years of life. Every day 48 microlives are lost.But unlike micromorts, I can regain microlives. For example, a 20-minute walk provides me with around two microlives—that is, an extra hour of life expectancy. And eating a healthy diet with fruits and vegetables could gain you four microlives daily.Reality CheckAll these facts and figures are entertaining to read about and can make for interesting conversation starters—“Hey, did you know that this beer shortens your life by about 15 minutes?”—at least with the right crowd. But how do you calculate the microlives you lose as a result of an action?First, you have to compare the life expectancy of different people. For example: How does the life expectancy of smokers and nonsmokers differ? By taking this difference and dividing it by the average number of cigarettes smoked, we can calculate the average amount of time that each cigarette robs us of.This result is clearly inexact. The difference in life expectancy will also depend on factors such as a person’s gender, place of residence and age. These data can still be captured, but when it comes to general lifestyle factors, things get complicated. For example, studies show that many smokers generally have an unhealthier lifestyle and exercise less.Such correlations cannot always be calculated and accounted for. When it comes to smoking, however, there have been long-term studies that followed many people, some of whom stopped smoking at some point in their life, over several decades.These data make it easier to isolate the effect that smoking has on a person’s life expectancy. Such research suggests that a single cigarette is likely to rob a person of slightly less than the originally calculated 15 minutes of life if they have the other lifestyle habits of a nonsmoker. So should we be consulting statistics at the start of every day to maximize our lifespan? Perhaps we should be studying these analyses to engage in activities with as few micromorts as possible and try to gain, rather than lose, microlives?Not exactly. Micromorts and microlives can help you better assess risks. But you shouldn’t attach too much importance to them. After all, our world is complex. You may gain back two microlives during a walk, but you could also get in an unlucky accident along the way and be hit by a car. Ultimately, micromorts and microlives are just too simple a tool to evaluate the full range of consequences associated with an action. Exercise can improve your state of mind, which has a positive effect not only on your quality of life but also on your lifespan.That said, it can still be a source of comfort to turn to statistics—particularly when we want to understand if our fear is rational or not. For my part, I will try to remind myself of how few micromorts are associated with flying. Maybe that will help.This article originally appeared in Spektrum der Wissenschaft and was reproduced with permission.

May 22, 20253 min readHow Much Ultraprocessed Food Do You Eat? Blood and Urine Record ItA new study suggests blood and urine samples could provide an objective measure of diets and help unravel their connections to diseaseBy Smriti Mallapaty & Nature magazine Diets rich in industrially manufactured food have been associated with several health conditions. monticelllo/Getty ImagesMolecules in urine and blood can reveal how much of a person’s diet comes from ultra-processed foods, according to a study published in PLOS Medicine today. The paper suggests that these measurements provide an objective way to track consumption of ultra-processed food — and would be useful for investigating links to diseases such as diabetes and cancer.Ultra-processed foods are industrially manufactured and often contain ingredients, such as additives and emulsifiers, that are not typically found in home-cooked food. From sweetened yogurts to factory-made bread and packaged snacks, “it’s a really wide range of foods”, says study co-author Erikka Loftfield, an epidemiologist at the US National Cancer Institute in Rockville, Maryland.Studies have linked high consumption of ultra-processed food to an increased risk of obesity, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and some types of cancer. But these investigations have typically relied on asking individuals to remember what they have eaten, which can be unreliable.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.Studies have also shown the potential of studying the products of metabolism excreted in the blood and urine, but only for a small number of such metabolites. Loftfield and her colleagues have now expanded that analysis to include more than 1,000 metabolites, which are produced when the body converts food into energy.“This work is important,” says Oliver Robinson, a molecular epidemiologist at Imperial College London. “There’s a lot of measurement error in traditional assessment methods for diet.”Diet scoringLoftfield and her colleagues studied samples collected from 718 healthy individuals aged 50–74 in 2012–13. The participants’ urine and blood samples had been collected twice, six months apart. The participants had also been asked — up to six times during the one-year study period — to record everything they had consumed the day before. Loftfield’s team labelled each food item, from the bun in a burger to the cheese slice, meat patty and ketchup, either ultra-processed or not.The researchers then used a machine-learning technique to give each participant a score for how much of their daily energy intake came from ultra-processed foods, says Loftfield. They found that, on average, ultra-processed food accounted for 50% of the participants’ energy intake, but the range varied between individuals — from 12% to 82%. Individuals who consumed the most ultra-processed foods generally got more of their energy from carbohydrates, added sugars and saturated fats — and less from proteins and fibre — than did those who consumed lower levels of ultra-processed foods.The researchers then analysed the participants’ blood and urine samples, looking for metabolites that were more common in the people whose diets contained lots of ultra-processed food.Samples from people with diets rich in ultra-processed foods were more likely to contain a metabolite linked to an increased risk of type-2 diabetes — and some of these people’s urine samples contained a molecule produced by certain food packaging. They also contained fewer metabolites derived from fresh fruits and vegetables.Randomized studyTo test whether the metabolite scoring could be used to predict the presence of a lot of ultra-processed food in a person’s diet, the researchers used data from a randomized controlled diet study of 20 individuals aged 18–50 conducted between 2018 and 2020. Half of the participants were asked to eat a diet rich in ultra-processed food for two weeks, then a diet containing no ultra-processed food for two weeks; the rest ate the same diets in the opposite order. Loftfield and her colleagues found they were able to distinguish between the two diets by looking at the metabolites in the participants’ urine and blood samples.Loftfield wants to test the method on populations with more varied diets, and on younger people, who tend to eat more ultra-processed foods. She hopes to use the tool to improve studies of the link between ultra-processed food and cancer.Robinson wonders whether the tool could be used to address big unanswered questions, including what it is about ultra-processed food that is bad for you. It is difficult to distinguish between the metabolic signatures of a diet rich in ultra-processed food and of one that is unhealthy because it is high in salt, sugar and saturated fats, he says.Understanding this difference could help companies to improve their products. “We’re sort of trapped in this industrial food-production system where we all eat ultra-processed food, and it’s quite hard for most people to go back to fresh food, because our food systems are now set up like this,” adds Robinson.This article is reproduced with permission and was first published on May 20, 2025.