Welcome to the week.
Before we begin, some business: Our podcast, The Most Important Question, is in the middle of our series with Run For Something candidates. The episode that dropped today is with Brittany Newton, who is running for NC House District 46. Listen here to learn about the young, progressive candidates out there ready to change the world, and get inspired to run yourself!
Speaking of things that might inspire you to run for office, let’s get to the news:
This Week
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Run to unite your community
There are a lot of folks in rural America that can say, "No candidate's ever come and knocked on my door."
So today, I'm going to introduce you to the one who knocks, my new best friend, Brittany Newton. You folks have said very clearly that you would like more examples of fight and progress you can actually see, touch, and feel, and talk to, and feel like someone is listening to you.
And so in these conversations, in partnership with our best friends at Run For Something, we're giving you the people you asked for. Because that's exactly who Brittany is. She's a vet, she's a mom, a future representative who will actually, and this might shock you, represent her constituents, her neighbors in North Carolina.
📖 Prefer to read? Get the transcript here.
▶ Or watch the full episode on YouTube.
⚡️ Climate change:
🌎 Every major forecast model agrees that this year’s El Niño is going to be the strongest ever, by a huge margin. (The Climate Brink)
🌎 Saudi Aramco is dropping millions on FIFA sponsorships and global sports, in an attempt to win goodwill while they plan to pump oil forever. (Climate Colored Goggles)
Next time someone tells you Canada’s wildfires are really about “not raking the forests” or whatever, send them this. The data is clear: it’s temperature not tree management driving the burn. (The Climate Brink)
🌎 France is trucking emergency AC units into hospitals right now, as drought, wildfire, and heat are hitting Europe all at once, and the grid is groaning under the weight of it. (Bloomberg)
🦠 Health & Bio:
Turns out the fix for the boys’ mental health crisis isn’t some breakthrough app or curriculum, but a 150-year-old club that’s been nailing it the whole time by fostering real friendships and belonging. (STAT)
🌎 Gutting USAID has already killed hundreds of thousands of people worldwide, and the real toll is headed into the millions. A heavy read, but important. (The New Yorker)
Yeah so, child marriage is still legal in most of the US, but Congressional Democrats just introduced a bill giving states a playbook to end it. (The 19th)
With wildfire smoke making air in the Midwest and Northeast some of the worst on the planet right now, and a lettuce-linked diarrhea outbreak still spreading, public health just can’t catch a break. (Your Local Epidemiologist)
💦 Food & Water:
🌎 Nearly 400 coffee farmers in the Ecuadorian Amazon got ahead of the curve, using satellite monitoring and traceability to prove their beans are deforestation-free, and now they’re getting paid more for it. (Mongabay)
The largest cyclospora outbreak in US history is still spreading, and a big part of the problem is that nobody in the federal government is coordinating a response fast enough. (Your Local Epidemiologist)
Right in the middle of that same outbreak, the USDA is shutting down the exact lab that researches this parasite, and food-safety experts are, understandably, not thrilled with the timing. (Bloomberg)
🌎 AI data centers are guzzling energy and water, and a lot of them are getting built on Indigenous land without anyone asking first, but Indigenous leaders are now demanding a seat at the table. (Mongabay)
👩💻 Beep Boop:
🌎 When twin earthquakes killed thousands in Venezuela and the government response failed, ordinary developers stepped in by building missing-persons finders and aid-coordination sites with AI in a matter of hours. (Rest of World)
🌏 Beijing is putting guardrails on AI companion apps, part mental health concern, part “please stop dating chatbots and start having kids.” (The Wall Street Journal)
Meta pulled its Muse Image generator within 72 hours of launch, and for good reason, because while AI can flag content as “explicit”, it has no idea what consent is. (Rest of World)
License plate cameras aren’t just reading plates. Police are using Flock’s AI to search for specific people by vague descriptions, like clothing or race. (404 Media)
Last week’s most popular Action Step was using Mozilla Monitor to remove your data from data broker websites.
👉 NEW: Find every action recommended in It’s Called Science. right here.
🌎 = Global news/action steps
Some good but surprising news!
Where the wild things are walled out
This week, Syris Valentine writes about what happens when you try to wall out migration, a biological imperative that species from salmon to jaguars to humans rely on for survival.
While border walls claim to stop human migration, they are devastatingly effective at blocking wildlife. And as climate change forces both animals and people to move further in search of resources, those walls will determine who survives and who doesn’t.
▶ Watch Life Finds A Way on YouTube.
Loom holding the Sacred Timeline together goes nuclear in Season 2 of Loki. Credit: Marvel Studios.
Multiverse madness
Today, many popular science fiction and fantasy shows incorporate some concept of a multiverse. These include Netflix's The Witcher, which is based on a book series set in a world filled with monsters that arrived on the scene when a bunch of universes experienced a calamitous collision, HBO's His Dark Materials, also based on a book series featuring parallel universes, and Star Trek, which features a recurring "mirror universe" from which evil versions of the show's characters occasionally stumble into our reality.
In short, the multiverse is everywhere, and while that can make for some dizzying plotlines, modern audiences don't appear too put off by the many basic questions and logical conundrums raised by characters traveling from one universe to another or swapping places with their clones from a different dimension.
It would take an entire book to address all those issues, but there's one fundamental question I wanted to revisit today: Do scientists think we really could be living in a multiverse?
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