What is life, actually?

Plug-in solar panels are cheap, easy, and threatening enough to utility companies that they’re doing everything they can to keep lawmakers from letting you have one. (NPR)

Meanwhile, Alabama is so mad about a Meta solar farm it’s considering banning utility-scale solar statewide. (HEATMAP)

🌏 Bangladesh is slowly building smarter, more climate-resilient homes, but innovation is up against stubborn tradition, undertrained builders, and the deeply held belief that heavier bricks somehow equal safety. (Mongabay)

🌎 The clean energy revolution in China isn’t changing anytime soon, as the country makes over 90% of the world’s solar panels, 83% of its batteries, and nearly three-quarters of wind tech. (Canary Media)

Parkinson’s hits men and women differently, with women feeling more pain and falls, while men face more memory loss and impulsive behavior. (The Conversation)

Birth control pills were classified as a carcinogen by the WHO (25 years ago), but the nuance of social media has conveniently skipped that the pill also reduces the risk of certain cancers, and shares its classification with sunlight. (The 19th)

We’ve been playing whack-a-mole with toxic chemicals for decades (ban one and manufacturers swap in a nearly identical cousin), so scientists are pushing to evaluate entire chemical families at once. (Mongabay)

UK cancer death rates have hit a historic low, thanks to decades of screening, vaccines, and better treatments, although a handful of cancers like skin and liver are bucking the trend. (The Conversation)

The SAVE America Act wants to solve the “problem” of non-citizen voting (which is already illegal and very rare) by requiring passport-level documentation that roughly half of Americans don’t have. (The 19th)

David Ellison is poised to take over CNN after Netflix walked away from the Warner Bros deal, and combined with MAGA-aligned ownership of CBS, the Post, Fox, X, and Facebook, it’s time to fund independent alternatives (The Message Box)

Decades of deregulation, financialization, and corporate dark patterns have destroyed the social trust that make markets work, and we’re all paying a hidden tax in the form of anxiety, fake reviews, and ghost jobs. (Your Brain on Money)

Baltimore organizers are building block-by-block ICE watch networks, training hundreds of residents, sharing Know Your Rights materials, and using encrypted communication (Baltimore Beat)

We could cut global plastic pollution by 98% without banning a single plastic bag, and the secret is boring, unglamorous waste collection infrastructure in low-income countries. (Our World in Data)

School nutrition directors are caught between RFK’s “real food” rhetoric and the reality that they get $4.60 per meal to cover food, staff, and overhead, and mandating more meat means less money for everything else. (Civil Eats)

A six-foot sewer pipe collapsed beneath the DC suburbs, unleashing one of the worst raw sewage spills in US history into the Potomac, and the utility’s official response was essentially “we did nothing wrong.” (The Atlantic)

Those pricey at-home gut microbiome tests may be telling you more about which company processed your sample than what’s actually living in your gut. (Nature)

🌎 Conservationists in Ukraine’s Danube Delta are reintroducing lost species to Europe’s largest wetland, even amid war reshaping the landscape. (Transitions)

River otters vanished from much of the Great Lakes by the 1980s, but decades of reintroduction efforts, cleaner water, and restored wetlands have brought them back. (Rewilding)

Elephants don’t just live in time, but remember, grieve, hold grudges, and pass down decades of wisdom through matriarchs. Recognizing this rich inner temporal life could fundamentally reshape how we think about conservation. (Mongabay)

Climate change could strip 43 million Americans of the chance to see their state bird, a small but vivid example of how warming erodes everyday encounters with nature that make us care about protecting it in the first place. (The Revelator)

Education workers across the spectrum describe a profession being hollowed out from both ends: students using AI to skip the learning, and administrators using AI to skip the teaching. (Blood In The Machine)

Meta is killing Instagram’s end-to-end encryption, blaming low adoption for a feature it deliberately buried behind four taps and never advertised. (Platformer)

AI job loss research keeps predicting which white-collar professions are doomed while ignoring that the most popular uses of AI are generating porn and flooding the internet with slop, destroying the livelihoods of creators and artists in ways no tidy labor market chart could ever capture. (404 Media)

🌍 Eleven African countries have spent over $2 billion on Chinese-built AI surveillance systems. (Rest of World)