Stop saying they shot the wrong guy. There is no right guy. www.nytimes.com/2026/07/14/u...

Hear me out: Ice Road Truckers, but it's captains trying to steer 160 tons of ammonia through a drying river 5 feet 3 inches deep

the climate crisis is creating whole new beats

I've said it before but New Scientist's picture desk is unparalleled. www.newscientist.com/article/2533...

GET HEARING AIDS ❤️ stop worrying if they're cool they're like glasses just get them and wear them this one's for the dads out there (except my dad, he's cool and wears his aids)

Thinking about how many vulnerable Brits are going to die of heat-related complications because their landlord has zero incentive to install cooling systems. (Certainly no legal one, since MPs recently voted that landlords shouldn't have to ensure homes they rent are fit for human habitation)

August in southern Europe is a sleep deprivation marathon where you end the month with 50 IQ points fewer than you started. North Europe's work culture - always on, always productive - will not survive the climate crisis.

Last week the wildfire below that left my house smelling like a BBQ, I saw two more on the weekend and three yesterday 😬 Memry'd of that quote about the climate crisis getting closer and closer until you can see it out your window www.theguardian.com/world/2026/j...

every AI midwit: my son, born six months ago at 3.5kg, is now 9 kg. were he able to feed himself, we could see a closed-loop recursive self-growth effect, resulting in a 300 million kg baby within the decade humanity desperately needs a strategy to navigate the existential risks of babies

Serious question: does the UK have the energy capacity (let alone the household incomes) for a climate that is hot enough to need AC? Will winter fuel allowance need to be paired with a summer one?

No money for bread? Eat cake!

Satire as a genre is dead

Always jarring to see other people’s “hyper frugality” describe your normal life (to wit: packed lunches, roommates, no expensive clothes) www.bbc.com/news/article...

The winning entry in the 2012 Future of Money design fiction competition was a concept just like this: an online, crowdsourced crime market. Which goes to show the value of art as a tool for understanding the world chyp.com/2013/11/25/e...

This is an example of frictional pricing - basically making it inconvenient to pay less - and if there's one good thing about AI it's that more and more people will realise they can get an agent to make the call, negating it as a strategy

Tiny 3D-printed diving suits allow cockroaches to walk underwater for up to 3 hours with no ill effects, which could enable a cyborg insect swarm to explore disaster zones and perhaps even Mars

can someone explain why the white noise of having fans on makes me hallucinate sounds coming from another room? It’s like someone‘s flicking through TV channels in there

Tesco is extending its Kids Eat Free scheme to 7 days a week over the summer, where children get a free meal with an adult purchase, but honestly, this detail about how small the adult purchase can be broke my heart.

Everyone knows him for triffids, but Wyndham’s The Trouble With Lichen - about a miraculous longevity medicine, exploitation, sustainability and smashing the patriarchy - is the book we need to have to hand these days.

blows my mind that the main reason the London underground is hot is due to the accumulated heat from 100 years of brake pads

Para-sol (literally “for sun”), while umbrella from the diminutive Latin umbra (little shadow). Although more sensibly perhaps in Spain the wet one is paraguas (for-rain) while the sun version is sombrilla (diminutive sub-umbra, under shadow - which also gives English the word “sombre”.)

As per @wired.com's policy, we've made this article free for all to read because it is primarily based on reporting from public records requests

While I agree that relying on AI for critical thinking risks baking in existing biases/values, which is obviously bad, I'd caution that relying on humans isn't inherently better. This is why the humanities are so important: all power structures/decisionmaking must be examined and critiqued.

As a pale guiri living in Spain, my top tip for hot weather is: Do Less. A North European work ethic is not compatible with a South European climate. (This is esp. hard for Brits, who are hardwired by a lifetime of permagrey weather to think Sunshine = Go Outside And Make The Most Of It)

It's probably time European journalists wrapped their heads around Heat Index (temp + relative humidity). In high humidity, sweating is less efficient, making heat worse, e.g.: Experiencing 35°C in London UK (70% RH) is more dangerous than 50°C in Phoenix Arizona (15% RH)

AI chatbots agree with users 49% more often than humans do — even when users are being deceptive or harmful. A new Science paper shows this "sycophancy" isn't a quirk. It's a design choice, and it has real consequences. 1/5

deeply affected to learn that the word "genie" comes from the Latin 𝘨𝘦𝘯𝘪𝘶𝘴 and not the Arabic 𝘥𝘫𝘪𝘯𝘯, but there's no undoing it now

anyway it's 30°C in here and I'm already running the AC because, inexplicably, homes in Spain don't have any insulation in the ceiling or walls (which makes my split system about as efficient as a single hose Penguin unit...)

A good deep dive into AC choices, and Michael is right that 1) AC is Good, Actually and B) single hose should be banned from a national energy mgmt perspective (though despite their reputation, these units are economically sensible choice for anyone who only needs to run AC 2 weeks a year)

Editors - this week is going to be a brutal one in terms of heat, for much of Europe. I'm available for stories on subjects such as climate change, how heat affects people's health, interventions like passive or active cooling, and other methods of coping. Get in touch.

“For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of her penis.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

This is akin to cleromancy: divining someone’s virtue through a randomised draw. May as well make teen refugees roll dice to prove they have the right to claim asylum. Seems this AI exists so authorities can avoid accountability for life or death decisions www.lighthousereports.com/investigatio...

this treadmill has seen more pilgrims than the Camino de Santiago!

very relatable because my country has also lurched to the right with disastrous consequences

Midjourney announces plan for 50,000 full body ultrasound scanners by 2031 (which aren't real or approved), makes absurd claim scans can "avoid 30% of all deaths and 50% of all healthcare costs". Embarrassing to see tech press (Engadget, Verge, Gizmodo) uncritically repeating such absolute nonsense

The future is bright 🐠 All #fiction #writers are invited to submit their work to The Protopian Prize writing contest. Submissions are open now until July 31st. Read more about the contest rules and prizes here: protopianprize.com/how-to-enter 🌐 #writingcontest #writer #storytelling

25 years as an adult and I've still never had to solve a quadratic equation. Why did the Boomers insist we learn this at school? What scenario did they think we'd encounter to warrant this urgency?

all else aside, if you think you're useless because there's now a machine that can generate confident-sounding, vacuous word salad with no underlying thought, you are Telling On Yourself

this is such a funny decision, like creating a separate "women's marathon" the day after a woman beats all the men in your regular marathon www.bbc.com/news/article...

If you live in a large city you've probably not noticed, but go anywhere rural today and look up, and you'll see a constant procession of satellites overhead, running in every direction

AI generated stories, aka the Elias Thorne literary universe www.404media.co/elias-thorne...

Want to share some thoughts. I know the rioting in Belfast has had lots of coverage. But I still think more needs to be said. This was so incredibly shocking. *people burned out of their homes because of the colour of their skin*.

Do the whales know it is there? 🥺 Do they feel the chill of long dead when they swim over it? www.bbc.com/news/article...

Sometimes I worry about Hormuz but then I remember my entire adult life as a Millennial has been one long string of unprecedented global crises

work with the best 👇

I have a theory that Millennials are vexed by video because they conceptualise the web as reference library whose purpose is rapid information recall, even though it has long since moved on to being an entertainment space whose purpose is filling the hours

Not commenting directly. Relatedly, I analysed the Sport for its first year as a daily. It ran a disproportionate amount of lurid sex crime coverage (of younger victims). Often with sexy photos. Positioned to promote vast numbers of chat lines and adult products www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Offering ✨ 𝑒𝓍𝓅𝑜𝓈𝓊𝓇𝑒 ✨ instead of payment, and then getting mad that people are submitting robot-written articles, is a heck of a take

it's so weird to me that the UK govt thought the mere possibility of seeing nude humans on Imgur was so dangerous it had to be banned, but industries with clear social harm get a "Careful now!" sticker on the door and are allowed to remain in business ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯ www.theguardian.com/society/2026...