Source: TheEpoch Times, Louise Chambers
Photo: Courtesy of Anja Nordvålen via Eveline Lunde

Disclaimer: This article was published in 2023. Some information may no longer be current.

A former design student from Norway gave up city life for a remote Arctic island after a boat trip rocked her outlook, and she’s never looked back, despite the huge adjustment.

Originally a city-dweller from Asker, Norway, 31-year-old Eveline Lunde has lived in an apartment in the small town of Longyearbyen, the northernmost town on Earth, on Spitsbergen Island in Norway’s Svalbard Archipelago for the past four years.

Just 800 miles (1,287 kilometers) from the North Pole, Lunde has grown used to permafrost, the northern lights, snowmobiles, the midnight sun, and a thriving polar bear population—a far cry from life at design school in Oslo.

“While studying … I discovered a newfound passion for outdoor life,” Lunde told The Epoch Times. “I moved to northern Norway after completing my bachelor’s degree to pursue a one-year study program on outdoor activities. During my time there, I got to know a group of guys who lived on a sailing boat, with their sights set on reaching Svalbard during the summer.”

When one sailor dropped out of the trip at the last minute, Lunde took his place. She had never seen Svalbard before but after spending six weeks exploring its many Arctic wonders, Eveline was smitten. Returning to Oslo, she grieved the loss.

“I soon realized that I had undergone a transformation,” she said. “The fast-paced city life no longer held the same appeal for me. Svalbard had left an indelible mark on me, prompting me to make the life-changing decision to relocate there.”

The Svalbard archipelago consists of several islands in the Arctic Ocean. The official discovery of Svalbard dates back to 1596, according to World History Encyclopedia, and became Norwegian territory through the Svalbard Treaty (originally the Spitsbergen Treaty) of 1920.

Most of its human residents live on Spitsbergen, and the main island has some unusual features, said Lunde, who works in tourism.

“Due to the permafrost, trees do not grow here,” she said. “Additionally, the harsh climate limits the diversity of animal life. However, the animals that do inhabit this region have adapted remarkably well to the conditions. It’s quite normal to see reindeer and polar foxes roaming around in Longyearbyen. During the summer, we are also visited by numerous geese.”

A town of around 2,300 people, Longyearbyen is also home to a “significant” polar bear population numbering several hundred. The bears are monitored and protected. Nonetheless, residents are required to carry a flare gun as a deterrent, and a rifle as a last resort, when venturing out on hikes or longer journeys.

Lunde said: “It is strictly prohibited to kill a polar bear, except in cases of self-defense. In the event of a polar bear being killed, a thorough investigation would be conducted, treating it with the same seriousness as if it were a human fatality.”

Innumerable natural wonders make life on the Arctic archipelago a magical, if challenging, experience.

“Experiencing the extremes of the polar night and the midnight sun evokes a mix of emotions within me,” Lunde said. “It’s both challenging and awe-inspiring. I appreciate the unique and distinct seasons that Svalbard offers. However, maintaining a sense of routine and staying positive are essential to cope with these conditions.”

During the phenomenon of the “midnight sun,” lasting from April to August, it can be a struggle to sleep with sunlight streaming in through the windows. But during the “polar night,” from October to February, the island experiences total darkness 24 hours a day.

To avoid depression, Lunde prioritizes routine, staying active, and maintaining a social life with the island’s close-knit community at local pubs, cafes, and high-end restaurants. She even hikes through the winter, with a headlamp and spikes on her shoes for the snow-covered icecaps.

Sunlight aside, the weather in Svalbard goes through rapid changes and frequent harsh conditions.

“During the winter, we often face intense storms,” said Lunde, reflecting, “[W]hat I find amusing is that we’ve become accustomed to such weather and continue with our daily routines unaffected, whereas, on the mainland, similar weather would lead to widespread shutdowns and be considered a serious threat. In Svalbard, it’s just another typical day, where wearing goggles for the walk to work is part of our regular routine.”

The Longyearbyen road network covers only about 27 miles (43 kilometers), and cars don’t cut it in winter. Instead, residents drive snowmobiles or dog sleds. In summer they use boats to access cabins and other settlements on the island.

There is one small emergency hospital in Spitsbergen for minor ailments only. Pregnant women are not permitted to give birth on the island and must relocate to the mainland around one month before their due date. Anyone who requires ongoing care or is unable to take care of themselves is not allowed to live on the archipelago at all.

Yet, the challenges of Arctic life amplify the “stunning beauty of Svalbard on those perfect days” by contrast, Lunde said. Locals enjoy hiking, skiing, dog sledding, and snowmobiling year-round, and even the occasional concert, art exhibit, and theater show. Not to mention, they have the world’s greatest light show, the Aurora Borealis, in permanent residence overhead.

The population of Svalbard comprises a diverse mix of people, not only Norwegians. The archipelago at large used to be a hotspot for whaling and trapping but has since moved through coal mining into tourism and Arctic exploration, research, and education.

Lunde cannot speak highly enough of her chosen home.

“As a local, I wholeheartedly recommend visiting this extraordinary place,” she said. “The opportunity to witness the pristine Arctic landscapes, encounter majestic wildlife, and immerse oneself in the unique culture and warmth of the community is truly unmatched.”

Louise Chambers is a writer, born and raised in London, England. She covers inspiring news and human interest stories.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/bright/the-northernmost-town-on-earth-woman-tells-of-her-unusual-life-on-an-island-800-miles-from-the-north-pole

Source: Fast Company, Elissaveta M. Brandon
Photo: KPF, Brooklyn Public Library, NY Daily News Archive/Getty Images

Nearly 90% of goods move through New York City by truck. KPF has a better idea.

Every day, New Yorkers receive a staggering 2.3 million packages at their doorstop. Nearly 90% of those goods snake through the city on trucks that cause traffic congestion and pollute the air on the way. To address the problem, global architecture firm KPF is asking an ambitious question: What if New York were designed for the perfect delivery?

The answer, which is outlined in the firm’s latest book, Connective Urbanism—New York, features towering distribution hubs, drones, and a hyperconnected logistics network that encompasses the city’s rails and waterways. KPF presents its solution as a provocative speculation designed to start a dialogue about the city’s delivery problem, but it’s more grounded in reality than it seems. “We didn’t want to have speculations that were just dreams,” says Bruce Fisher, head of KPF Urban and a coauthor of the book.

In a place as dense as New York City—both in terms of population and building stock—good logistics are everything. As Fisher writes in the book: “A city’s economic potential is tied to its logistic efficiency.”

Highways centralized transport. Can it be diversified?

There once was a time when most goods arrived in New York City via trains and freight ships. Before the Holland Tunnel opened in 1927, nearly all domestic freight destined for New York terminated in New Jersey, then crossed the river on cargo ferries or “carfloats” outfitted with rail tracks.

By the 1950s, propelled by the Interstate Highway System, trains gave way to trucks on improved roads, while freight shifted to shipping containers that required larger open spaces in New Jersey. The city shifted to trucks, too, and its distribution infrastructure changed with it.

Now KPF wants to diversify the way goods move throughout the city beyond trucking. The architects envision a distribution network that utilizes New York’s existing freight rail lines, its extensive coastline, and its abundant navigable waterways.

Goods would arrive in the city via a combination of trains and ships sailing into regional ports like Red Hook, in Brooklyn, or Elizabeth, in New Jersey.

Then, they would make their way into strategically located distribution hubs, where automated cranes and robots would collect the cargo and distribute it to logistic centers scattered around the city. From there, goods would be delivered using a variety of micromobility options like electric bikes, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones.

Some freight deliveries are already being rerouted to waterways

If the architects’ proposal evokes a scene out of a sci-fi movie, that’s because it requires the kind of infrastructure that so far we’ve only imagined materializing in the future. But Fisher says every idea in the book is based on real-life examples.

For decades, the New York Department of Sanitation has used the city’s waterways to transport trash and recycling from six strategically located facilities to landfills outside the city. Most recently, in December 2025, the New York Department of Transportation (NYC DOT) launched its Blue Highways program, which aims to remove a significant portion of freight deliveries off crowded streets and onto the city’s 520 miles of navigable waterways.

Essentially, it redesigns the city’s package distribution system. Through the program, which is now in a pilot phase, the city will transport 300 to 400 small household parcels per day from a ferry onto five electric pedal-assist cargo bikes, which will complete the final delivery phase. It’s currently being tested in a designated delivery area within Manhattan. If the pilot is successful, the city plans to expand the program.

“Waterways are the new highways in New York City,” said Ydanis Rodriguez, NYC DOT commissioner, in a press release at the time. “New York’s waterways built this city—now they’re helping us create a cleaner, safer, and smarter way to deliver the goods New Yorkers rely on.”

In its efforts to reduce truck traffic and curb congestion, NYC DOT has also launched a pilot “Microhubs” program with dedicated spaces for truck operators to transfer deliveries onto more sustainable modes of transportation, like e-cargo bikes, handcarts, and electric sprinter vans, for last-mile deliveries.

Old distribution hubs may provide new ideas for the present

For now, these pilots are small in scale and scope, and none of them extend past the boundaries of Manhattan. To scale the operations into the outer boroughs, the city would likely need to build distribution hubs and logistic centers like the ones in KPF’s proposal.

In its speculation, KPF proposes a cylindrical building akin to the Marina City towers in Chicago. The building, which would be ideally located near a port or train station, features a continuous ramp for EVs and delivery robots, docking stations for UAVs, and a rooftop launchpad for large cargo drones.

The idea for such integrated buildings isn’t all that new. In the 1930s, New York City’s Starrett–Lehigh Building served as a “drive-in building”: Railcars came directly into the ground floor and their freight was transferred to trucks, which were then lifted in special elevators onto designated floors with loading bays. This allowed goods to be loaded, stored, repackaged, and redistributed without using curbside space.

Today, the Starrett-Lehigh has been transformed into a modern office building. But new buildings are emerging to help cities improve freight logistics.

In April 2025, a multistory industrial development opened in Long Island City, Queens. Spanning 1 million square feet across six stories, Borden Industrial sports concrete ramps that trucks can use to load and unload on upper levels. The building appears focused on truck logistics, but as Fisher points out, it’s also located near active rail yards, and it borders Newtown Creek, a major industrial waterway for barges and freight.

One could imagine that if enough buildings like Borden Industrial opened in strategic locations across New York City, KPF’s vision would quickly enter the realm of reality. And as cities around the world rush to meet their zero-emission goals, many are already experimenting with alternative delivery solutions.

For a decade now, Franprix, a large supermarket chain in France, has transported goods by barge to its 300 Parisian stores. And this year, new electric cargo barges stocked with e-cargo bikes are set to deliver regular mail to Paris suburbs.

Stateside, Peachtree Corners, a small city northeast of Atlanta, has become a test bed for a curious experiment in the shape of a 1-mile underground tube network that delivers sandwiches and small packages between suburban microhubs. Drone deliveries are also growing increasingly popular, with companies like Amazon and Walmart leading the charge in the U.S.

These experiments show that the pieces are already in place in many cities around the world, and New York wouldn’t be pioneering something radical—it would be joining a growing movement. But in the end, it will all come down to political will and private investment.

“Someone has to be the real defender of [these models], pushing them forward,” Fisher says. “Until there’s an overall regulatory system that allows for it, it can’t really happen.”

The preferred-rate deadline for Fast Company’s Best Workplaces for Innovators Awards is Friday, February 20, at 11:59 p.m. PT. Apply today.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Elissaveta Brandon is a design writer based in Brooklyn. Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Wired, CityLab, Conde Nast Traveler, and many others More

https://www.fastcompany.com/91472473/architects-big-vision-to-fix-nyc-delivery-system

Source: Fast Company, Elissaveta M. Brandon
Photo: Here and Now Agency

Most fire-resistant buildings look like fortified bunkers. Malibu High School was designed to make kids feel safe, not under threat.

When the Los Angeles wildfires swept through the city earlier this year, experts flocked to the internet to dissect the anatomy of a fire-resistant building. Many of them ended up describing bunker-like architecture with boxy buildings, sparse landscape, and lots of concrete. A new building in Malibu offers a more nuanced approach.

Malibu High School, which opened in August, is located in an area that Cal Fire (the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection) recently designated as a very high fire hazard severity zone. This means that the school, which has replaced a nondescript building from the 1950s, had to comply with stringent fire safety regulations.

The new school, which was designed by local firms Koning Eizenberg Architecture and NAC Architecture, is distributed across two connected buildings. It was constructed entirely of noncombustible materials like concrete shear walls and floors, steel columns and beams, and fire-rated glass. It is surrounded by a newly built fire road to allow easy firetruck access, and drought-resistant landscaping. Still, it looks less like a fortified concrete bunker, and more like the kind of airy, low-lying buildings you might find elsewhere in Malibu.

“The messages the building sends about your safety is much more like a community center,” says Nathan Bishop, lead designer and principal at Koning Eizenberg. “It’s about making it feel like a social place to hang out and just be.”

A balanced approach to fire-resistant architecture

Malibu High School, part of the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District, is nestled between the Pacific Ocean and the Santa Monica Mountains. It is located near a ring of coastal shrubs that is notoriously flammable but is also protected by the California Coastal Act as Environmentally Sensitive Habitat Area (ESHA.)

In 2018, the area was hit by the Woolsey Fire, which destroyed over 1,600 structures, and burned nearly 97,000 acres in Ventura and Los Angeles counties. The former high school building, which stood on the same site, narrowly survived, but according to Bishop, the “shared memory” of Woolsey was present in everyone’s mind. “There are still teachers who haven’t replaced their houses because they burned down,” he said.

It’s no surprise, then, that fire resiliency was part of the architects’ mandate from the very beginning, when they won an RFP to redesign the school in 2019. The challenge was ensuring the school didn’t look like a bunker.

To lighten the visible footprint of the building, the architects positioned solar panels over a canopy so they could cast shadows on the building’s glazed facade. This helped reduce solar gain while allowing the building to have more glass to balance the concrete. The panels, which remain quite visible, help the building achieve its net-zero goals, but they also help communicate the value of sustainability to students.

The team used textured concrete that makes the building feel like it is part of the hillside, and copper panels that add some color and texture. They also implemented a dedicated air filtration system for wildfire events. “[The school] is fortified and strong, but not in a defensive way,” says Bishop, noting the school can now serve as a community wildfire shelter.

The open design ensured the building feels like it belongs on the rugged hillside of Malibu. The surrounding drought-resistant landscape, by San Diego-based Spurlock Landscape Architects, further anchors the school with a coastal landscape that doubles as a fuel modification zone. This is meant to reduce the risk of wildfire by thinning or replacing combustible vegetation.

The landscape architects used California-native plants like aloe vera and agave interspersed with locally sourced rock mulch. They laid out the plants so they would grow from low succulents closer to the building to larger canopies on the outer perimeter. Since many buildings catch fire from what is closest to them, the areas nearest to the building are mostly hardscape. (The January 2025 wildfires didn’t reach as far north as the high school, which was therefore spared.)

Rethinking the American high school

By the time Koning Eizenberg Architecture and NAC Architecture got involved in 2020, Malibu High School had been seeing enrollment issues for years. (The school enrolled about 440 students in 2021, compared to nearly 1,000 in 2017.)

To compete with nearby private schools, where enrollment issues haven’t been as stark, the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District wanted to rethink not just the building but also the way high schoolers studied inside it.

Instead of organizing the school by academic departments, the high school follows a more distributed model where “everything is everywhere,” as Bishop puts it. Science labs abut art studios and teacher rooms are scattered around the campus instead of concentrated in a single building. The distributed model allowed the architects to abolish the archetypal silos that have become high school movie tropes—science geeks hang out here; jocks hang out there—and foster more encounters between different disciplines.

“There is something about rethinking the story of the American high school, and the social fabric of the American high school,” says Bishop.

Before they moved into the new building, high schoolers shared the old building with local middle schoolers, where they studied in nondescript classrooms. Now, each classroom is adjacent to an outdoor space, creating a “fuzzy edge that lets the life of the building spill out,” says Bishop. Students in marine biology class go down to the beach to collect samples. Those in pottery class bring their wheels into the courtyard. Meanwhile, the preserved ESHA acts as a learning lab, where students can learn about ecology.

Instead of cutting off the building from its surroundings, the architects carefully integrated it within the landscape, proof that students can learn from nature instead of turning their back on it.

The extended deadline for Fast Company’s World Changing Ideas Awards is Friday, December 19, at 11:59 p.m. PT. Apply today.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Elissaveta Brandon is a design writer based in Brooklyn. Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Wired, CityLab, Conde Nast Traveler, and many others.

Source: MSN, BrieAnna J. Frank, USA TODAY
Photo: U.S. Customs and Border Protection proposed new rules that may require selfies and social media history from foreign visitors traveling to the U.S. (© Getty Images)

Applicants for certain visas will have their online presence reviewed as part of a new State Department policy that went into effect on Dec. 15.

The policy expands previous online review requirements, which applied to foreign students and exchange visitors, to include all H-1B applicants, who work in specialty occupations and are seeking temporary entry to the United States, as well as their dependents.

The State Department announced the new policy in early December, saying applicants are “instructed to adjust the privacy settings on all of their social media profiles to ‘public’” to facilitate the review.

“The Trump Administration is focused on protecting our nation and our citizens by upholding the highest standards of national security and public safety through our visa process,” a State Department spokesperson told USA TODAY. “A U.S. visa is a privilege, not a right.”

The change comes months after President Donald Trump introduced a $100,000 annual application fee for H-1B visas.

Courts have historically affirmed that First Amendment rights are applicable to people lawfully within U.S. borders, even if they aren’t American citizens. That includes a district judge’s September ruling against the Trump administration over its efforts to deport noncitizen student protesters over their pro-Palestine speech.

“No one’s freedom of speech is unlimited, of course, but these limits are the same for both citizens and non-citizens alike,” the judge wrote in the ruling, which the administration vowed to appeal.

The government far more discretion when it comes to making speech-based visa decisions about foreigners physically outside of the country.

Here’s what to know about the new policy and its First Amendment implications:

What online content would disqualify an applicant?

The department “uses all available information in visa screening and vetting to identify visa applicants who are inadmissible to the United States, including those who pose a threat to U.S. national security or public safety,” the announcement said.

The public announcement did not provide details on what officials would be specifically looking for in the reviews or what types of content would be deemed disqualifying.

Reuters previously reported that H-1B application reviews will consider a person’s participation in “censorship,” including work in disinformation, content moderation and fact-checking, to be potentially disqualifying, according to a State Department cable obtained by the news organization.

“If you uncover evidence an applicant was responsible for, or complicit in, censorship or attempted censorship of protected expression in the United States, you should pursue a finding that the applicant is ineligible,” the cable said, according to Reuters.

Why was this policy created?

The new policy was announced around the same time as U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services paused immigration applications from 19 countries deemed by the administration to be high-risk.

The agency’s Dec. 2 memo specifically referenced a foiled Election Day terrorist attack in 2024 and the shooting of two National Guard members patrolling Washington in late November.

Another Afghan man was arrested in connection with the Washington shooting, which killed 20-year-old West Virginia National Guard member Sarah Beckstrom. The other victim in the attack, 24-year-old U.S. Air Force Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe, was “slowly healing” as of early December.

“In light of identified concerns and the threat to the American people, USCIS has determined that a comprehensive re-review, potential interview and re-interview of all aliens from high-risk countries of concern who entered the United States on or after Jan. 20, 2021, is necessary,” the memo said.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection on Dec. 9 proposed a rule that would impose new biometric requirements and increased data collection for foreign tourists.

Why are some concerned about the policy?

Some experts said the lack of public information about what the online presence reviews would specifically entail have left immigration attorneys unsure how to advise their clients.

The expanded requirements could cause a “big interruption” for American businesses wanting to hire foreign workers whose application processes are being delayed by the more thorough reviews, immigration attorney Matthew Maiona said.

Many visa applicants have already received communication delaying their appointments by several months, he said.

He noted, though, that consulates and embassies have a right to review applicants’ backgrounds and make determinations about potential threats.

But there are also “gray areas,” and the lack of specifics has left attorneys “scrambling” to figure out how to advise their clients, Kate Angustia, supervisory policy and practice counsel at the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said.

It’s unclear, for example, if the administration would reject an H-1B applicant’s request because their child posted “Free Palestine” on social media, she said.

“We don’t know the scope of the problem, but the fact that anybody’s free speech could be abridged is problematic and is something we don’t support,” Angustia said.

Why do some support the policy?

But others challenged the notion that the policy presents free speech challenges.

“Nobody who is not a citizen of the United States has an inherent right to come to the United States,” said Ira Mehlman, media director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which seeks to reduce overall immigration. “We can make decisions based on any number of considerations.”

He noted the policy is not based on immutable characteristics like race or religion, adding that the U.S. Supreme Court has given the president “broad latitude” to define what constitutes a national security threat.

Community member Ana waves an American-Mexican flag in a show of support for detainees near federal agents blocking protestors during an ICE immigration raid at a nearby licensed cannabis farm on July 10, 2025 near Camarillo, California. Ana said she knows some of those detained and their families. Protestors stood off with federal agents for hours outside the farm in the farmworker community in Ventura County. A Los Angeles federal judge is set to rule Friday on a temporary restraining order which would restrict area immigration enforcement operations.

Mehlman made a distinction between mere policy disagreement and “overtly anti-American kind of rhetoric,” saying that the latter can be disqualifying because being granted an American visa is a “privilege, not a right,” echoing language used by the State Department in announcing the new policy.

“There have always been ideological exclusions,” Mehlman said. “We don’t admit Nazis to the country, even if Microsoft wants to hire them.”

BrieAnna Frank is a First Amendment reporter at USA TODAY. Reach her at bjfrank@usatoday.com.

USA TODAY’s coverage of First Amendment issues is funded through a collaboration between the Freedom Forum and Journalism Funding Partners. Funders do not provide editorial input.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: New visa rules require social media reviews. What it means for free speech

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/new-visa-rules-require-social-media-reviews-what-it-means-for-free-speech

Source: Science Focus
Photo: A NASA engineer checks six flight-ready segments of the JWST’s primary mirror, a third of the final total. (Photo: NASA/JPL)

We asked the world’s foremost minds to highlight some of the game-changing scientific breakthroughs shaping our world since the year 2000

As the 21st century gathers pace, it’s clear we’re living through a golden age of scientific discovery. From rewiring our understanding of the Universe to reshaping the tools of everyday life, breakthroughs once thought impossible are now shaping the world around us.

To reflect on the progress so far, we asked some of the world’s leading thinkers to spotlight the groundbreaking scientific breakthroughs that have transformed our world since the turn of the millennium.

1. Dream engineering

Until the turn of the last century, psychologists often argued that dreaming was a meaningless experience best confined to the fringes of science. But the 21st century has witnessed a surge of scientific interest in our nocturnal adventures and produced a steady stream of articles exploring the psychology of dreaming.

Some of this work has explored how dreaming can help people process negative emotions and prepare them for challenging events in the real world. Another strand of research has explored the link between dreams and creativity, and has shown that our dreaming minds often come up with new and innovative solutions to pressing problems.

There’s also work that has looked at the social side of dreaming, with psychologists arguing that discussing a dream with others is an effective way of forming and maintaining caring relationships.

Other scientists have taken a different approach and developed techniques that allow them to communicate with people experiencing a lucid dream.

Finally, there’s dream engineering, wherein researchers use smells, sounds and suggestions to manipulate our dreaming minds.

For years, trying to convince scientists to take dreams seriously was a nightmare. Now the tide has turned and we’re starting to uncover the many ways in which dreaming makes a vital contribution to our waking lives.

2. A new type of stem cell

Before 2006, if researchers wanted to work with human embryonic stem cells, they had to work with human embryos. This was ethically charged territory – the embryos were leftovers from fertility treatments and were destroyed in the process.

Then Prof Shinya Yamanaka from Kyoto University devised a way to make embryonic stem cells without using embryos.

By adding a handful of genes into cultured skin cells and nurturing them with certain nutrients, adult cells could be reprogrammed to become ‘induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells.’

‘Pluripotent’ means that these lab-made stem cells can turn – or ‘differentiate’ – into many other types of cells, including heart cells and neurons.

Now researchers can take cells from an adult animal, turn them into iPS cells and then turn them into the specialised cells of their choice. iPS cells are now routinely used to help test new drugs and therapies, but perhaps their most exciting use is in the field of regenerative medicine.

Imagine a patient with heart disease. Now imagine taking some of their skin cells and using iPS technology to create a pool of healthy heart cells.

The replacement tissue could then be transplanted into the patient’s heart to repair it, and because the cells are the patient’s own, there would be no danger of the tissue being rejected.

The same method could be applied to other conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease and kidney failure, raising the prospect of cures for currently incurable diseases.

Such brilliant, versatile cells… It’s no wonder that Yamanaka received a Nobel Prize in 2012 for his work in their discovery.

3. Global heating

Only by looking into the past can we get an inkling of the seriousness of today’s climate predicament.

The terrifying reality is that the global average temperature rise, which is now teetering on the edge of the 1.5°C dangerous climate breakdown guardrail, is occurring 50 times faster than when the world warmed after the Ice Age.

That was 56 million years ago, during the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM).

The episode of rapid heating saw dead, oxygen-depleted oceans and sea levels 50m higher than they are now. And the global temperature today is ramping-up at least ten times faster than during the PETM.

We’re in the middle of a unique climate experiment, continually pumping out 40 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide every year, and hoping that it’ll be fine. I can tell you now, it won’t be.

4. Attribution analysis

In a nutshell, attribution analysis seeks to determine the extent to which global heating has influenced a particular extreme weather event, such as increasing its intensity or raising its likelihood.

It involves running two computer simulations. One assumes today’s artificially heated climate, the other assumes a pre-industrial climate with all the human influences removed.

Comparison reveals whether global heating had an effect and, if so, what it was. The first-ever attribution analysis determined that the 2003 European heatwave (which claimed 70,000 lives and saw temperatures breach the 37°C/98°F mark for the first time in the UK) was made twice as likely by global heating.

Attribution analysis sheds light on the growing impact global heating is having on our weather patterns, while also loudly undermining the climate deniers – a win all round.

5. mRNA vaccines

The use of mRNA for various medical applications has been in development for decades. It wasn’t until the COVID-19 pandemic that the impact of the technology was first felt, however.

mRNA vaccines allow for the development of vaccines far more quickly than was previously possible – two months for COVID-19 compared to the previous record of four years.

It’s estimated that the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines saved nearly 20 million lives in their first year of use.

In the coming years, we’ll likely have a range of new mRNA vaccines for other viruses that change regularly, like the flu, as well as for viruses that haven’t responded well to previous vaccine technology, like HIV.

6. The Human Genome Project

In 1990, scientists began to sequence the human genome. It took until 2022 to produce a complete sequence.

This achievement has profoundly changed biomedical science, allowing for research and technology that wouldn’t be possible otherwise, like using CRISPR to modify genetic diseases.

We’re just starting to feel the impact of this achievement on medical practice. By knowing our genome, it’s possible to find changes in genes that are associated with, or even cause, various diseases.

This increases our understanding of those diseases, as well as our ability to diagnose and treat them.

7. Solving the ‘einstein’ problem

I believe the most important mathematical breakthrough this century is the solution to the long-standing ‘einstein’ (one-stone) problem.

The einstein problem asks whether there is a shape that can tile an infinitely large horizontal surface so that the pattern never repeats.

Brilliant minds had searched for decades for such shapes. Then in 2022, David Smith, a retired print technician and amateur maths enthusiast, began working with software and cardboard cut-outs at his home in Bridlington, Yorkshire.

Smith had worked for years on tiling patterns and had a strong intuition his shape, nicknamed the ‘hat’, would both tile the surface and never repeat.

He didn’t have the mathematical tools to prove his hunch, however, so he turned to the community of tiling enthusiasts and got help from Prof Craig Kaplan at the University of Waterloo, Canada; Prof Chaim Goodman-Strauss from the University of Arkansas; and software engineer Dr Joseph Myers from Cambridge.

Together they came up with computer-based and analytic proofs for a whole family of shapes, and their preprint study was greeted with international acclaim in March 2023 – even though the ‘hat’ occasionally needed to be flipped over to successfully tile the plane.

But no sooner had the preprint of their work been released, than David came up with the ‘spectre’ – a chiral aperiodic monotile, which didn’t need flipping.

Even more impressive, the ‘spectre’ was a member of a larger class of such tiles that allows the straight edges to be wavy.

Again, his colleagues proved the truth of his intuition. This was a beautiful achievement, led by an extraordinary mathematical hobbyist.

8. The cure for HIV

There was a time when HIV was a death sentence. Then anti-retroviral drugs came along and prospects improved. More and more people became able to live with the disease, but a cure still seemed like a distant dream.

Then in 2007, an HIV-positive man called Timothy Ray Brown received a bone marrow transplant for his leukaemia. Chemotherapy had failed and Brown was running out of options.

His doctor, Dr Gero Hütter, thought that the treatment might be able to cure his cancer, but he also realised that if he could find a donor who was genetically resistant to HIV, there was a chance that the same treatment might also cure his HIV.

Some people are naturally HIV-resistant. They carry a mutation in a gene called CCR5, which codes for a receptor protein that HIV uses to enter host cells.

After scouring the register, Hütter found a donor who not only matched Brown’s immune profile, but also carried two copies of the mutated gene.

The transplant went ahead and a few years later, researchers could find no trace of HIV in Brown’s body. Brown came off his anti-retroviral meds and went on to live the rest of his life HIV-free.

He was the first person to be cured of HIV.

Since then, at least six more people with cancer have been cured of HIV using bone marrow transplants.

The treatment, however, is brutal, with risks so great that it’s unlikely ever to become a routine procedure, but it has taught researchers a great deal about HIV and given hope to the world that a cure for HIV will, one day, be possible.

9. Transformers and large language models

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been in the news for more than a decade, largely because one key AI technology – neural networks – finally started to work at scale.

The new AI era was heralded by the advent of ‘deep learning’ around 2005, driven by cheap computer power and plentiful data for ‘training’ neural nets.

The field exploded and we began to see a host of impressive applications. AI hit the headlines.

And then, something unexpected happened. In 2017, a Google team published a scientific paper describing a new architecture for organising neural nets – the so-called ‘transformer architecture.’

The transformer architecture is a neural network architecture for token prediction: taking as input a sequence of tokens (words) and then predicting the next token (word) to appear.

They’re trained by feeding them ordinary human text, and given a ‘prompt’ (for example: ‘a summary of Winston Churchill’s life’). They’ll then try to predict the word most likely to appear next. They do this one word at a time, but the process can be repeated over and over.

It wasn’t obvious in 2017 that transformers would be so… transformative. To realise their full power, you had to be prepared to build them on an unprecedented scale, throw mind-boggling quantities of training data at them and train them with AI supercomputers running for months.

Google didn’t make that bet; it was a little-known organisation called OpenAI, supported by Microsoft. And it paid off, spectacularly.

The first real hint that we were entering a new era was the release of GPT-3 in June 2020. Those with access to OpenAI’s new program seemed genuinely startled by how capable it was.

Just as remarkable for AI researchers was its emergent capabilities: the ability to do things that it wasn’t designed to do.

Questions, like the famous Turing Test, which had been of strictly philosophical interest previously, suddenly became practical experimental questions.

The unprecedented success of Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT took Silicon Valley by surprise and now the world’s richest companies are pivoting to try to embed this remarkable new technology everywhere, in the hope that they’ll find the killer application.

For all their success, LLMs aren’t the end of the road for AI; the dream of a helpful household robot that can clear your dinner table and load the dishwasher still seems frustratingly distant.

But the technology is astonishing nonetheless. We’re living at a remarkable time in technological history: our history will be divided into pre-GPT and post-GPT.

10. HPV vaccine

At the turn of the century, scientists knew that cervical cancer was caused by Human Papillomavirus (HPV). Of over 200 known HPV strains, two high-risk types – 16 and 18 – are responsible for over 70 per cent of cervical cancer cases.

While the UK’s cervical screening programme, launched in the 1960s, successfully reduced cervical cancer rates, a huge shift came with the introduction of the HPV vaccine.

The vaccine became part of the UK’s national programme in 2008. Today, it’s licensed in over 100 countries and offered to both girls and boys to prevent HPV-related diseases, including multiple cancers and genital warts.

In the 15 years since its introduction, the vaccine has provided excellent protection against HPV and has delivered remarkable results – an estimated 90-per-cent reduction in cervical cancer rates among women aged 20–30.

The next frontier is achieving the elimination of cervical cancer – something once thought achievable only for infectious diseases – through widespread HPV vaccination and robust screening programmes.

11. Digital contraception

Non-hormonal digital contraception has revolutionised family planning by combining data-driven insights and user-friendly technology.

Apps like Natural Cycles and Clue empower women to track their menstrual cycles and use the data to prevent or achieve pregnancy, offering a convenient and accessible alternative to traditional contraceptives.

These apps utilise algorithms that analyse patterns in body temperature, ovulation cycles and other physiological markers, providing users with real-time predictions of the fertility window in their cycle.

This innovation marks a turning point in women’s health. In 2018, Natural Cycles became the first digital contraceptive to achieve US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulation, elevating the app to a regulated medical intervention.

Natural Cycles reports that the algorithm behind its app has a 93-per-cent success rate, the same as the contraceptive pill. MG

12. Tissue engineering

Going to the dentist and having a synthetic resin filling is fine, but it’s not as good as a real tooth. But what if we could grow real teeth in the lab from a person’s own stem cells and implant them back into their mouth?

This sounds like science fiction, but tissue engineering is a breakthrough technology that’s already being used to grow human tissue, through ‘scaffold technology’. Scaffolds are porous materials that support stem cells as they divide and grow into new tissues.

Artificial ears, trachea (windpipes) and bone have been grown this way and successfully implanted into human patients. Because the implanted tissues are grown from a patient’s own cells, there are no problems with immune rejection.

Artificial kidneys, knee cartilage and even hearts are also being grown this way, although these are still confined to lab experiments. No one can yet put a limit on this new technology, but the successful regrowing of teeth is on the horizon.

13. Self-repairing materials

A modern smartphone contains half the elements in the periodic table and yet only has a lifespan of two to three years, on average. To save the massive amounts of energy we’re wasting on continually producing (and even recycling) phones and everything else that fills our lives, we need to find a new way of making products that last longer.

This is where the breakthrough technology of self-repairing materials comes in. Imagine a smartphone that can repair itself overnight when you plug it in.

Many different types of this technology are already on the market. Self-healing paints have room temperature fluidity, allowing them to flow back into cracks and fill the fissure when they form.

Self-repairing concrete for bridges and self-repairing asphalt for roads have already been deployed this century. Self-repairing electronics are coming to help us build a sustainable future.

14. Universal programmable chemical robots

What if any chemical reaction could be performed through code? This is what has become possible with the ground-breaking advancement known as chemical computation, or ‘chemputation’.

Chemputation combines automation, computation and modular hardware to transform chemical synthesis into a programmable, universal process. At its core is the ‘chemputer’ – a revolutionary platform capable of executing any feasible chemical synthesis.

It uses a concept known as ‘chempiling’, which translates chemical synthesis pathways into executable hardware configurations – basically acting as a chemical Turing machine. This process digitalises chemistry, increasing efficiency, accelerating research and reducing the risk of human error.

The integration of artificial intelligence into automated synthesis takes this innovation further, enhancing decision-making at every step of the process, from molecule design to reaction execution.

Because of this, chemputation is unlocking immense potential in drug discovery, material science and more.

15. Dark matter

The majority of the Universe is unseen, composed of two entities called dark matter and dark energy, and physics is currently unable to explain the origin of either.

Over the last 25 years, evidence for the existence of dark matter has become more compelling. Using gravitational effects to deduce where and how much of it there is, we’ve created maps that reveal a pervasive and invisible web.

The patterns seen in these maps, in the cosmic microwave background and in the distribution of galaxies, almost match our expectations for a dark Universe. But while 25 years of looking up has increased astronomers’ confidence, experimentation tells a different story.

After CERN’s 2012 detection of the Higgs boson, there were high hopes that the theoretical ‘lightest supersymmetric particle’ and favourite candidate for dark matter, would be discovered next.

Sadly, the elusive dark matter particle has yet to be found. The lack of detection means that we know what it’s not, even if we don’t yet know what it is. Scientists are working to build the most advanced detector yet, potentially in the UK.

Combined with upgrades at CERN and upcoming observations from the Euclid telescope and Vera Rubin Observatory, the hope is very much alive that it won’t be another 25 years before we understand the dark matter side of the Universe.

16. The Higgs boson particle

If we were to compare the most important discoveries in physics in the first quarter of the 21st century with those of the same period in the 20th, we might feel quite disheartened by the recent paucity of fundamental advances.

Maybe this is because we have largely uncovered the basic laws of the Universe.

It’s certainly hard to deny that those first two or three decades of the previous century were a golden age of physics, from the quantum revolution to Einstein’s two theories of relativity, to the structure of the atom with Ernest Rutherford.

But the theories and experimental discoveries over the past hundred years have still been remarkable, leading to deep insight into the fundamental building blocks of matter, potentially getting us closer to completing the jigsaw puzzle of reality.

One piece of the puzzle that had been missing ever since it was first proposed in the 1960s by Prof Peter Higgs (and others), was the Higgs boson. The particle was proposed as a manifestation of the Higgs field and the Higgs mechanism, explaining how elementary particles acquire mass.

Then, on 4 July 2012, experimental teams working with two giant particle detectors, ATLAS and CMS, at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, announced they had finally observed the Higgs.

It was a landmark achievement in particle physics and a testament to technological innovation in ‘big science’, international collaboration and the human pursuit of knowledge.

It commanded global attention and captivated the wider public.

One might, of course, argue that the discovery of the Higgs wasn’t as profound as, say, the accelerating expansion of the Universe in 1998 (which therefore just misses out on this list), because physicists expected to find the Higgs. But it confirmed a critical component of the Standard Model of particle physics.

The Standard Model is an amalgamation of two separate quantum theories – the electroweak theory and quantum chromodynamics – which together describe the properties of all the known elementary particles and the forces acting between them.

Yet the Standard Model can’t be the final word because it doesn’t include gravity, doesn’t explain dark matter or dark energy, or where all the antimatter that should have been created at the Big Bang has gone.

Fifteen months after the discovery of the Higgs, in October 2013, the Physics Nobel Prize was awarded jointly to Prof François Englert and Prof Peter Higgs, “for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles…”

It was awarded not for the experimental confirmation of the Higgs’ existence, but for the original theoretical prediction half a century earlier.

17. The James Webb Space Telescope

Launched aboard an Ariane-5 rocket on Christmas Day 2021, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is nothing short of a technological marvel. Augmenting and improving on the role established by the Hubble Space Telescope, the JWST is designed for infrared astronomy in the wavelength range of 0.6-28.5 microns.

The JWST targets many important areas of astronomy and cosmology, from studying the first stars and initial galaxy formation, to spotting exoplanets and analysing their atmospheres.

A technologically and financially ambitious project, it hit many snags along the way to final deployment. The JWST’s large primary mirror was too large to be carried inside the rocket’s payload bay, for one.

The problem was solved by designing the mirror so that it could fold up for transit and open like the petals of a flower at its destination. That destination needed to be far from any bright radiation sources, such as Earth and the Moon, for JWST’s extremely sensitive infrared detectors to work.

Consequently, its base observation site is located 1.5 million kilometres from Earth, on the opposite side to the Sun. Fortunately, upon its arrival, JWST deployed without incident, which is just as well, because being so distant, there’s little we could have done to fix any problems.

In December 2022, JWST discovered the most distant, and therefore earliest, galaxies ever observed.

A galaxy survey project called JWST’s Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey looked at an area where Hubble had recorded 10,000 galaxies, and detected a mind-blowing 100,000 galaxies in the same patch of sky.

It’s not just unfathomably distant objects that have had the JWST treatment, though. Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune have all come under JWST’s scrutiny, and spectacular new details about each world have been revealed as a result.

As time goes on, JWST continues to break new ground and its observations are challenging existing theories about object evolution, posing many more questions along the way.

18. Exoplanets

It makes the night sky far more interesting if we think of every star as being at the centre of a system of planets, like in our Solar System. Of special interest is the possibility that many of those planets are like Earth: the same size and at a distance to their parent star that allows water to exist. Could there be life on them?

Though they were officially discovered in about 1995, most of what we know about exoplanets has come in the last few years.

We’ve now detected over 5,000 of them, mainly with the ‘transit method.’ This is where you don’t actually detect any light from the planets, but the effects on the brightness of a parent star when a planet passes in front of it.

The most successful way we’ve carried out the transit method is by looking through the Kepler Space Telescope. Though the telescope has revealed a lot, it doesn’t tell us about what the surfaces of these planets are like.

For that, you’ve got to detect some light reflected from the planet. That’s much harder and, so far, has only been done for really big planets, not Earth-sized ones. The challenge for the coming 25 years is going to be detecting the light from the Earth-like planets orbiting nearby stars.

The James Webb Space Telescope may do some of this, but a giant ground-based telescope – the Extremely Large Telescope – is being built by a consortium of European countries in Chile. Its mirror is 39m (128ft) across, so it could collect a lot more light from faint objects than the Webb telescope, which is ‘only’ 6.6m (21ft) across.

There’s so much this new area of study could show us. I think if I were talking to a young person embarking on an astronomical career, I would advise focusing on exoplanets. The field is clearly going to be expanding and full of a high rate of discoveries in the coming decades.

19. Gravitational waves

Gravitational waves are significant for two reasons. Firstly, they’re an important physical phenomenon that tells us about the nature of gravity, confirming a further consequence of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. Secondly, detecting them has been an amazing technical achievement.

The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) was a huge technical challenge because the expected amplitude of these waves is very small and must be detected at a vast distance. The effect you’re looking for is like the thickness of a hair at the distance of a nearby star. Quite amazing.

Many of us thought that LIGO wouldn’t find anything. Or, if it did, events would be fantastically rare, the instruments only being sensitive enough to detect collisions once a century or so.

But LIGO has been more successful than any of us expected, detecting a pair of black holes about 50 times the mass of the Sun crashing together within a short time of being switched on.

It was amazingly exciting and it’s now detecting about one or two such events a week. It’s worth celebrating for the hundreds of people who were involved with the set-up of these instruments.

The gravitational waves that LIGO observes are a short pulse of radiation of about 100 cycles per second, which is roughly the orbital period of two 50 solar-mass black holes when they merge together.

But there are far bigger black holes in the centres of galaxies with masses millions of times higher than LIGO can detect. Mergers of these are much rarer, but can be detectable out to greater distances.

The radiation produced, however, is at a much lower frequency. This has to be detected by instruments that, instead of having mirrors a few kilometres apart, has mirrors a few million kilometres apart.

20. Psychedelic therapy

After much deliberation and campaigning from various interested parties, 2024 saw the United States Food and Drug Administration opt not to approve official use of MDMA-assisted therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder, citing insufficient evidence of the drug’s (commonly known as ecstasy) efficacy.

Despite this setback, it’s important to appreciate what a substantial breakthrough it is that we’ve even got to this point. While the benefits of psychedelics have a long history, the previous high-watermark of realising their potential therapeutic applications was in the 1950s and 1960s, when LSD use was widespread.

Unfortunately, a combination of LSD’s association with counterculture and President Richard Nixon’s ‘War on Drugs’, resulted in LSD – and psychedelics in general – falling victim to the brutal backlash. Their use was suppressed, both recreationally and in research contexts, for decades.

The loosening of the restrictions on research into psychedelics in the 21st century has produced potent and fast-acting treatments for depression, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorders, addiction and even sexual disorders.

It’s still early days for psychedelic therapies. Much of the research remains small-scale and short term, political and ideological barriers remain, and a mainstream rollout of psychedelic therapy would require significant investment.

Even so, especially with the relative stagnation in ‘traditional’ pharmacological interventions for mental health issues, this growing reassessment of the safety, potency and benefits of psychedelics could prove world-changing.

21. Single-cell genomics

The human body is made up of almost 40 trillion cells and conventional wisdom suggests these are divided into about 200 cell types. Before the advent of single-cell genomics, our technologies studied cells in bulk, providing an average readout for thousands of cells without resolution of the individual cell identities.

In the human body, as in all multicellular organisms, there are different cell types within the same tissue that have distinct roles: muscle tissue contains subtypes of muscle cells, but also blood vessels, neurons, immune cells and more.

Without understanding this complexity, it’s impossible to determine how subpopulations of cells in different organs relate to each other and how they might be altered by disease.

In cancer, the DNA of a single cell mutates to allow it to multiply without control, leading to the formation of tumours. The tumour cells then interact with other cells in the microenvironment leading to the spread of the cancer.

Single-cell genomics has the power to resolve the individual cell types and cell states, revealing the pathways that promote tumour growth, allowing for the development of targeted therapy.

Another example is Crohn’s disease, where the comparison of healthy and diseased tissue at the single-cell level revealed the reason for a lack of response to therapy in some patients.

During the pandemic, single-cell genomics was used to determine which cells are susceptible to infection and later studies determined which organs are most affected and why. These are just a few of the applications of single-cell genomics and the list is expanding all the time.

More than 3,000 scientists around the globe are making a Human Cell Atlas (HCA) to provide a complete single-cell map of all the organs of the human body. This initiative has already led to a paradigm shift in the understanding of the function of normal cells and forms the basis for the understanding of the mechanisms leading to diseases.

The progress being made is leading to better diagnosis and treatment.

It has been less than a decade since single-cell analysis was developed and only six years since the HCA was launched. The next decade of single-cell genomics promises to be an even more exciting one.

22. CT scanning

A little over a century ago, palaeontologists in New York cut open the skull of a Tyrannosaurus rex, so they could see inside its brain cavity. It was a bold thing to do, as they had to destroy some of the priceless fossil. But they decided it was worth it, as it was the only way they could try to understand how this most iconic of dinosaurian beasts sensed its world.

Fast-forward to the turn of the millennium, when new technology rendered these destructive fossil surgeries obsolete.

In 2000, Prof Christopher Brochu published a scintillating study on the brain, intelligence and senses of T. rex. He didn’t use a saw; he used X-rays. Brochu put a fossil T. rex skull into a computed tomography (CT) scanner.

As the skull was the size of a bathtub, he needed to persuade engineers at Boeing to give him access to the machines they used to scan aeroplane engines to look for imperfections. Although huge, the scanner worked like one a doctor would use at a hospital, using a series of X-rays to build a three-dimensional digital model of the stuff inside the skull.

It revealed that T. rex had a big brain with enormous olfactory bulbs, which graced this iconic predator with a sharp sense of smell. Brochu’s study wasn’t the first CT scan of a fossil, but it made worldwide headlines and sparked a torrent of new research.

Suddenly everyone was putting their fossils in CT scanners. Today the procedure is so routine that many palaeontologists have scanners in their labs.

We use them for so many things: to identify hidden bits of fossils still encased in rock, or describe the microtexture and growth marks inside bones to understand how ancient organisms grew and metabolised. They can also help to make digital models that we can subject to computer simulations, testing how dinosaurs fed and moved.

To me, CT scanning is the biggest breakthrough in palaeontology over the last 25 years.

23. NASA’s Curiosity Rover

In the kind of PR masterpiece we’ve come to expect from NASA, they didn’t play down the difficulty of landing their Curiosity rover on Mars. Instead, they called it their “seven minutes of terror” and explained that in those 420 seconds, it had to go from a speed of close to 21,000km/h (13,000mph) to zero in order to land safely on the planet’s surface.

When they achieved that, the mission’s place in history was all but secured, especially since they had used an innovative ‘sky crane’ landing system, which guided the rover to a much more precise landing than any previous planetary mission.

Then came the science.

Since 2012, Curiosity has made ground-breaking discoveries on Mars that help paint a more detailed picture of the planet’s past environment, its previous habitability and even its present ability to support life.

It found chemicals and minerals in Gale Crater that indicated the past presence of liquid water, clearly a pre-requisite for life. It then found various organic molecules that serve as the building blocks for life and can be used as food by microbial organisms.

While they don’t prove that life existed on the planet, they at least show that the correct molecules were present.

But perhaps the rover’s most tantalising discovery has been the detection of a seasonal release of methane from beneath the planet’s surface. Every Martian summer, the gas has welled up from Gale Crater.

While water-rock interactions could be responsible, scientists can’t rule out biological activity. The next generation of Mars rovers, such as ESA’s Rosalind Franklin will carry subsurface drills to investigate further.

Put together, Curiosity’s longevity and its extraordinary scientific results significantly enhance our understanding of Mars, paving the way for future human missions and the search for extraterrestrial life.

To seal its place in 21st-century culture, Curiosity also took a selfie.

24. NASA’s DART mission

This entry made one of the biggest impacts both figuratively and literally. On 26 September 2022, NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission smashed into the asteroid Dimorphos.

The collision destroyed the spacecraft completely and shifted the orbit of the asteroid – all on purpose. DART was a ground-breaking test of our ability to alter the orbit of a small asteroid, should we detect one on a collision course with Earth – and it succeeded spectacularly.

For the first time in history, humankind changed the trajectory of a celestial object and in so doing, proved a method for averting a natural disaster.

The asteroid in question was the smaller component of a double asteroid. The larger of the two is called Didymos. Originally discovered in 1996, Didymos is a chunk of rock with dimensions of roughly 851 x 848 x 620m (2,792 x 2,782 x 2,034ft).

Its companion, eventually named Dimorphos, was confirmed in 2003. With a dimension of just 177 x 174 x 116m (580 x 570 x 38ft), it was the perfect test subject for the mission.

Being locked into orbit around Didymos meant that the amount by which it had been moved would show up in a change of the time it took to circle the larger asteroid.

Before the impact, Dimorphos took just under 12 hours to orbit Didymos. After the impact, this time had decreased by just over half an hour, showcasing a viable method for deflecting potentially hazardous asteroids from Earth.

DART’s accomplishments extend beyond planetary defence, though.

The mission has provided critical data on asteroid composition and impact mechanics, not to mention celestial navigation by hitting a 100m-wide (328ft) target at speeds of kilometres per second while having travelled millions of kilometres from Earth.

25. SpaceX’s reusable rockets

For decades, the biggest roadblock to the exploration and utilisation of space has been the cost of launching objects and people into space.

The enormous Saturn V, used to transport astronauts to the Moon in the 1960s and 1970s, achieved a cost of around $5,000 (about £3,950) per kilogram lofted into space, but since the 1990s, smaller disposable rockets have only managed to achieve costs of around $10,000 (approx £7,900) per kilogram.

SpaceX has blown that figure out of the water and is currently in the process of revolutionising spaceflight. The game changer was the introduction of the Falcon 9 reusable rocket in 2015.

With a first stage booster that could return to Earth and land upright, the cost of launching people, supplies and technology into space started to tumble.

The reusability enabled more frequent launches, again expanding the range of commercial and scientific opportunities that space could offer. For example, it has made SpaceX’s Starlink project viable. This endeavour aims to fly thousands of smaller satellites in low-Earth orbit to provide unbreakable global internet coverage.

With Falcon 9, the cost of reaching orbit is around $2,000 (£1,500) per kilogram. The giant Starship rocket that SpaceX is now test-flying is estimated to slash the cost to an extraordinary $200 (£158) per kilogram.

SpaceX’s achievements have reshaped the global aerospace industry and mark a pivotal step toward humankind permanently extending its presence throughout the Solar System. But such progress doesn’t come without a cost.

The ability to launch so much into space threatens to dramatically increase the amount of space debris, which imperils working satellites and interferes with astronomical observations of the night sky.

Hence the innovation that these rockets allow must be understood in relation to the ‘environmental damage’ that it could bring to Earth’s orbits and the night sky in general.

Nevertheless, SpaceX has brought us to a true watershed, not just in science but human history.

https://www.sciencefocus.com/future-technology/experts-pick-the-25-most-significant-breakthroughs-of-the-21st-century?utm_source=recommendedreads.com

Source: Big Think, Bianca Giacobone and Guido G. Beduschi
Photo: Brussels Royal Library/Public Domain/Wikimedia Commons

“What’s happening now has, in fact, been happening since the very invention of language and writing.”

Key Takeaways

In 2011, Johns Hopkins acquired the Bibliotheca Fictiva — the world’s largest collection of literary forgeries — to study how fabricated texts have shaped history.

The archive shows how misinformation long predates the internet, from forged papal decrees to fake Shakespearean annotations.

The question now is whether our ability to detect deception can evolve as fast as the tools that create it.

In 2011, Earle Havens, Director of the Virginia Fox Stern Center for the History of the Book in the Renaissance at Johns Hopkins, had a mission: He needed to convince his university to buy “an enormous collection of fake stuff.” The collection, known as Bibliotheca Fictiva, comprised over 1,200 literary forgeries spanning centuries, languages, and countries — beautifully bound manuscripts carrying black ink annotations allegedly penned by Shakespeare; works written by Sicilian tyrants, Roman poets, and Etruscan prophets; poems by famous priests and theologians — all of them in part or entirely fabricated.

It was an unusual task for a scholar dedicated to studying the truth, but Havens was adamant. “We have never before needed a collection like this more than we need it right now,” he told the Dean of Libraries at the time. The internet and the increasing popularity of social media were changing how information was written, disseminated, and consumed, giving rise to the phenomenon of fake news as we now know it. In such a “crazy, rapid-fire information world,” the collection of ancient lies and misrepresentations of facts contained in the Bibliotheca Fictiva could offer guidance on how to navigate the moment, demonstrating that “what’s happening now has, in fact, been happening since the very invention of language and writing,” Havens said.

His pitch was successful. Johns Hopkins University acquired the collection for an undisclosed amount and housed it in the wainscoted library room of the Evergreen Museum and Library, a 19th-century mansion in Baltimore.

The sellers were Arthur and Janet Freeman, a couple of book merchants who made their name in the tight-knit world of antiquarian booksellers by collecting fascinating literary forgeries. Their venture started in 1961, when Arthur Freeman, then a graduate student of Elizabethan drama at Harvard University, began acquiring sources on John Payne Collier. Collier, a well-respected 19th-century scholar, had caused a ruckus among his contemporaries when he claimed to have found thousands of annotations to a copy of Shakespeare’s Second Folio, which he said had been penned by a contemporary of Shakespeare — but was in fact forged by Collier himself.

In the decades that followed, Freeman, who died in 2025, assembled a vast array of literary fakes, collecting books whose content is deceiving in nature. These included poetry purported to have been written by Martin Luther, who was not much of a poet, or reports of Pope Joan, a woman who, in the Middle Ages, disguised herself as a man and was elected Pope, only to be caught out when she suddenly gave birth in the middle of a procession in Rome. The latter myth was perpetuated for centuries and was not firmly debunked until the 17th century.

Since Johns Hopkins acquired the collection, Havens and other professors have been using these works to teach students about media literacy and misinformation. This is a relatively recent development in academia, where scholars have mostly snubbed the history of forgery. “Over time, a light bulb has gone off in this information environment, and people are going back to the past to learn things about disinformation and fakery that are keenly relevant today,” Havens said. “And it’s kind of comforting to know that this isn’t simply a phenomenon of the current digital social media environment.”

One of the most important things students can learn from the collection is not so much the ability to recognize whether the content of a text is true or not, but rather that writing is often created with an intention behind it. Chinyere Ihim, a liberal arts graduate student at Johns Hopkins, where she attended Havens’ summer seminar, said this gave “more lucidity and clarity” to her approach to consuming news and information.

“It shifted my focus from ‘Is it true?’ to ‘Who created this? Who benefits from this, and why? What are they trying to do? What are they trying to exploit?’” she said. “When I hear a piece of news that seems suspicious, I ask myself, ‘What fear, what desire, what cultural anxiety is this story exploiting?’ There’s always a reason for it.”

For instance, the reason behind the “Donation of Constantine,” possibly the most relevant forgery in the history of Western culture, is obvious. The eighth-century fake edict claimed that the Roman Emperor Constantine had gifted the Western part of the Roman Empire to the Pope, and it was used for centuries by the papacy to support its claims of political authority — until the decree was debunked in 1440 by the humanist scholar Lorenzo Valla.

For Ihim, reading ancient travelogues with fabricated accounts of journeys to distant lands, inhabited by people who were described as “curiosities or savages,” made her realize how powerful and potentially harmful narratives can be. “These fictional stories became the blueprint for the transatlantic slave trade,” she said. “Imagination actually became a reality, which is a scary thing.”

Granted, the information environment has changed radically since the times of the Donation of Constantine or travelogues, and it’s now undergoing a couple of especially tumultuous decades. Kirsten Eddy, a senior researcher at Pew Research Center who specializes in news and information habits, notes that the internet and social media have changed people’s attitudes toward information.

“People are exposed to more information from more sources than ever before,” Eddy said. “It’s not only difficult for people to know what to trust, but they also feel increasing fatigue with or even avoidance of the news.” In the U.S., public trust in major institutions and news media has steadily fallen in the 21st century, with trust in national news organizations declining in particular over the past decade, according to the Pew Research Center.

The proliferation of generative AI is likely to worsen this moment of doubt. A recent report from the fact-checking website NewsGuard found over 1,200 websites producing unreliable AI-generated news “with little to no human oversight.” “People’s confidence in their own abilities to identify fake information or AI-generated information is not broad,” Eddy said.

Generative AI does have the potential to shake “the foundations of how text is created,” and decrease “our trust in the written word,” in general, as Thomas Hellström, who leads the intelligent robotics group at Umeå University in Sweden, theorized in a recent paper.

Still, another way to view it is that AI is the latest tool in humanity’s long history of shaping and distorting narratives. Damien Charlotin, a researcher at HEC Paris and Sciences Po, where he studies large language models, law, and disinformation, notes that, in the legal context, there are cases of AI creating fake legal cases used to support legal arguments.

“But in the legal domain, playing fast and loose with authorities, cooking and pasting strings of citations, fudging and bashing arguments in bad faith has always happened,” he said. “What changes is that, because there is this new tool that can create things that do not even exist, we can now more easily spot sloppy, bad lawyers.”

But the bad lawyers, with their bad arguments, were there before AI, too, much like the human tendency to lie, fake, and forge texts was there before we coined the term “fake news,” as the Bibliotheca Fictiva attests.

In 2024, Havens and Christopher Celenza, Dean of Johns Hopkins’ Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, hosted a virtual seminar on the history of misinformation.

“The scale and speed of the change in media that we are undergoing is unprecedented in human history,” the university wrote in a description of the seminar. “Nevertheless, people in the past have faced moments of crisis — moments when writing seemed unreliable, when the format of written information changed, and when new publication formats forced reevaluations of the nature of truth.”

In these precarious moments, it’s worth remembering that humanity’s track record in overcoming them is promising. Accumulated expertise, of the type found in libraries, universities, government agencies, and scientific institutions, tends to come out on the winning side. The question today is whether that expertise can keep pace with the speed and scale of deception — and to what extent the public will keep stride, too.

“There’ll be crazy theories, there’ll be people who propound conspiracies, there’ll be mistakes,” Celenza said. “But hopefully, over time, if we can stick together, we’ll realize that aggregated expertise is still something we should be fighting for.”

https://bigthink.com/high-culture/the-worlds-largest-library-of-lies-has-good-news-about-fake-news

Source: Fast Company, Chris Stokel-Walker
Photo: Chesnot/Getty Images

What happens when key infrastructure providers are too good at their jobs? Everyone relies on them—with catastrophic consequences when they fail.

U.K. banks and government tech systems going down. University students in Australia struggling to complete their coursework. Homes across Europe losing access to their Ring doorbells.

While you were sleeping, large parts of the Amazon Web Services (AWS)-based internet went offline around the world.

According to the AWS outage monitor, the problem stemmed from a misconfiguration of Domain Name System (DNS) resolution within the company’s cloud infrastructure. The problem was remedied within three hours of being encountered—by people unable to log onto Roblox or search the web with Perplexity.

But the outage highlights just how much the web’s day-to-day functionality relies on the the existence of too few companies. AWS controls around a third of the market; Microsoft, through its Azure cloud service, and Google hold around another third. They are some of a handful of companies that dominate the market—and do so because of their ordinary success and smooth running of cloud infrastructure services.

That success, some argue, has translated to overly concentrated control by a small number of companies of key bits of the web’s infrastructure, which was always meant to be distributed and with many points of failure. “The main reason for this issue is that all these big companies have relied on just one service—AWS—without planning for redundancy,” says Nishanth Sastry, director of research at the University of Surrey’s department of computer science.

It means that in the rare event of an outage from those key infrastructure providers, we see catastrophic consequences across different sectors, from gaming to government.

“Once again, we are experiencing how the concentration in the computing industry, in this case in cloud computing, can crash major parts of our internet, all at once,” says Corinne Cath-Speth, an expert on cloud computing and head of digital at human rights organization ARTICLE 19. “The infrastructure underpinning democratic discourse, independent journalism, and secure communications cannot be dependent on a handful of companies.”

Even those that do have multiple eggs in multiple metaphorical baskets were affected. Signal, the secure messaging app which rents cloud infrastructure from AWS, Google and Microsoft Azure, faced outages because of AWS’s issues. Amazon did not immediately respond to Fast Company’s request for comment.

That urgency needs to go to the top of governments, nevermind businesses, reckons Amandine LePape, chief operating officer and cofounder of Element, which provides secure communications to governments. “Centralized systems may offer convenience and scale, but they also create single points of failure,” she says. “True resilience comes from decentralisation and self-hosting.”

That needs to be considered for the future—similar outages of AWS have occurred in 2020, 2021, and 2023—because it’s likely to happen again.

“Governments and other organizations must rethink their infrastructure strategies now,” says LePape, “or risk being next in line when the cloud goes dark, especially when it comes to their communications.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Chris Stokel-Walker is a contributing writer at Fast Company who focuses on the tech sector and its impact on our daily lives—online and offline. He has explored how the WordPress drama has implications for the wider web, how AI web crawlers are pushing sites offline, as well as stories about ordinary people doing incredible things, such as the German teen who set up a MySpace clone with more than a million users.

https://www.fastcompany.com/91425078/aws-outage-amazon-google-concentration

Source: Fast Company, Jeff Haden
Photo: Volodymyr Kryshtal/Getty Images

Five minutes imagining your ‘best self’ will make you more optimistic—and research shows optimistic people live a lot longer.

Your interest in longevity may be entrepreneurial; after all, people who want to live longer, healthier lives are a huge market. Or maybe, if you hope to be wealthy, there’s what Warren Buffett called the Methuselah technique: a long life and a high rate of return.

More likely, though, your interest in longevity is personal. We all hope to live a longer, healthier life.

The problem is, the recommendation bar for living a longer life can seem impossibly high. One study found you need between 150 and 300 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity to “mitigate” the risk of death associated with sitting. Another study found you need to jog five days a week for 30 to 40 minutes for your body to have the “age progression” of someone nine years younger.

Fortunately, there’s an easier way to add years to your lifespan. Two studies, one that spanned 10 years and the other 30 years, found that “high optimism” was linked to 11 to 15% longer lifespans, even after taking into account factors like health and socioeconomic status.

Among psychosocial factors that appear to be potential health assets (e.g., social integration), optimism has some of the strongest and most consistent associations with a wide range of health outcomes, including reduced risk of cardiovascular events, lung function decline, and premature mortality.

Investigators have speculated that optimism may facilitate healthier bio-behavioral processes, and ultimately longevity, because optimism directly contributes to how goals are translated into behaviors.

That’s a lot, so let’s break it down. “Social integration” directly correlates with living longer.

A clinical review of nearly 150 studies published in PLOS Medicine found that people with strong social ties had a 50% better chance of survival, regardless of age, sex, health status, and cause of death, than those with weaker ties. Make and keep a few close friends, you’ll likely live longer.

Yet optimism also directly correlates with living longer, since optimistic people tend to behave differently: While everyone has goals, people who fall on the less optimistic end of the spectrum are much less likely to try to achieve their goals. Why start a journey that feels impossible?

On the flip side, the researchers say “optimism directly contributes to how goals are translated into behaviors.” When the journey seems possible, starting feels much easier.

Sounds good. But still.

Knowing you should be more optimistic, if only to extend your lifespan, is different from actually becoming more optimistic. There isn’t a “more optimistic” switch you can flip.

Or maybe there is. Research shows that approximately 25% of our optimism set-point is genetic.

That means 75% of your level of optimism can be shaped and learned.

For example, participants in a study published in Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry who spent five minutes a day for two weeks imagining their “best possible self”—in terms of professional, relationship, and personal goals—experienced significant increases in optimism.

If visualization isn’t your thing (it isn’t mine), try another approach. If, as Jim Rohn says, we are the average of the five people we spend the most time with, simply spend more time with optimistic people. They’ll be more encouraging. They’ll be more supportive. Their enthusiasm will naturally rub off on you. (Plus, you’ll reap the social integration longevity benefits.)

If spending time in groups isn’t your thing (it kind of isn’t mine), then take a step back and think about your mindset. Generally speaking, people fall into two camps:

People with a fixed mindset believe that intelligence, ability, and skill are inborn and relatively fixed; that they are what they were born with. Someone with a fixed mindset might say, “I didn’t handle that well. I’m not cut out to be a leader.”
People with a growth mindset believe that intelligence, ability, and skill can be developed through effort; that we are what we work to become. Someone with a growth mindset might say, “I didn’t handle that well, but next time I’ll make sure I’m more prepared.”
People who embrace a growth mindset believe success is based on effort and application, not innate talent.

Think about a challenge you overcame. A goal you achieved. A time when you doubted yourself, but still persevered. You’ve done it once.

You can do it again.

That, in effect, is a growth mindset. Embrace it.

Not only will you be more successful, you’ll be more likely to live longer, too.

Can’t beat that.

This article originally appeared on Fast Company’s sister publication, Inc.

Inc. is the voice of the American entrepreneur. We inspire, inform, and document the most fascinating people in business: the risk-takers, the innovators, and the ultra-driven go-getters who represent the most dynamic force in the American economy.

https://www.fastcompany.com/91418876/optimistic-people-live-longer-successful

Source: The Guardian, Philip Oltermann
Photo: Antoine Cosse

Between 2022 and 2023, as many as 170 rare and valuable editions of Russian classics were stolen from libraries across Europe. Were the thieves merely low-level opportunists, or were bigger forces at work?

On 16 October 2023, a young man and woman sat down in the back row of the second-floor reading room of the university library of Warsaw, Poland. Their reading cards carried the names Sylvena Hildegard and Marko Oravec. On the desk in front of them were eight books with yellowing pages that they had ordered up from the library’s closed-storage 19th-century collection: rare editions of classic works of poetry, drama and fiction by two greats of the Russian canon, Alexander Pushkin and Nikolai Gogol. They studied the books closely, taking photographs on their phones and measurements with rulers.

When the duo did not return from a cigarette break and the invigilators checked their desk, they found that five of the eight books had gone. One of the missing Pushkin works was a narrative poem about the adventures of two outlaws, The Robber Brothers. It was as if the thieves had wanted to send a message.

In the days that followed, a more thorough investigation of the library’s stocks revealed that a further 74 books of Russian literature had been stolen in the weeks, or even months, leading up to the final swoop. The thieves had managed to avoid detection by replacing the books they had stolen with what one newspaper described as “high-quality facsimiles” of the originals. They did not have to worry about causing a scene when they left the building. Most books in the Warsaw library have been fitted with a magnetic strip that raises an alarm at the exit unless deactivated. But older books went without this, as an expert had advised that the glue on the magnetic strip could damage the paper.

The books’ disappearance made headline news in Poland. “It was like gouging out the crown jewels,” said Hieronim Grala, a former diplomat who helped the university assess the damage. Established in 1817, in a period when Poland was ruled by the Russian tsar, the library collection has been shaped by complex historic ties to Russia. “Those books were given to Poland at very significant historical moments,” said Bartosz Jandy, the Polish chief prosecutor who was tasked with investigating the thefts. “The fact that they are a testimony to Russian imperialism doesn’t mean they don’t belong to our heritage.”

The Warsaw book heist was not an isolated incident but one of the final stops on an unprecedented grand tour of bibliophilic crime, which snaked its way from north-east to south-west Europe between spring 2022 and winter 2023. As many as 170 rare Russian books, valued at more than £2.5m, vanished from the shelves of the National Library of Latvia in Riga, two university libraries in Estonia, Vilnius University Library in Lithuania, the National Library of Finland in Helsinki, the National Library of the Czech Republic in Prague, Bibliothèque Diderot in Lyon, the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the University Library of Languages and Civilisations in Paris, the Bibliothèque de Genève in Switzerland, the State Library in Berlin and the Bavarian State Library in Munich. “In terms of scale and sophistication, we have never dealt with anything like this before,” said Laura Bellen of Estonia’s southern district court, one of the first public prosecutors to investigate these thefts. “Libraries just aren’t used to thinking of themselves as targets for major crime.”

The thieves’ tactics in each of these cities were broadly the same: two people would use fake identities to order up rare Russian books from the stacks. If they were being watched closely, one would distract the librarians while the other walked out with the books. Their cover stories varied, and they were not always the same two people. In Warsaw they posed as Slovakians, in Helsinki as Poles. In Riga, they claimed to be Ukrainian refugees who wanted to research Russian history. In Paris they were Bulgarians studying “democracy in Russian literature of the 19th century”.

As early as the spring of 2022, authorities had begun to suspect that these were not isolated crimes. In December that year, police in Latvia arrested a man whose DNA had been found on books left behind during the theft at the National Library in Riga eight months earlier. The suspect owned library cards from Munich, Vilnius, Paris, Kyiv and Vienna, as well as a collection of library stamps and tools for restoring printed matter, such as a set of needles and spools of thread. Burly and balding, with salt-and-pepper stubble, the man was identified by his passport as Beqa Tsirekidze, a 46-year-old Georgian citizen. Investigators discovered he had a background in antiques dealing and a criminal record for theft. His DNA also matched that found at the scene of the April 2022 book thefts in neighbouring Estonia, where he was extradited and put on trial.

Tsirekidze’s arrest was far from the end of the story. During two trials in Tartu and Tallinn in the first half of 2024, he remained tight-lipped about whether anyone had commissioned him to steal books, even though this would have alleviated his sentence. He was given a compound sentence of three and a half years in prison. “I would say it’s rather likely that there is some kind of other force that made him carry out these thefts,” said Bellen. “But we don’t have any evidence of who that may be.”

To solve the continent-spanning riddle of the Pushkin heists, a moment of pan-European cooperation was required. In March 2024, the EU crime-fighting agency Eurojust set up a joint investigative team consisting of police from France, Lithuania, Poland and Switzerland. Georgia, which is not formally a member state of the cross-border crime agency but only an “operational partner country”, was invited to join, too.

These countries were unified in their determination to crack the crimes, but their working theories weren’t necessarily the same. Were all the thefts masterminded by the same set of people, or were authorities looking at rival gangs, competing with each other for the same prized titles? Above all, there was the uneasy fact of the thefts’ timing. The crimes began two months after Putin had announced the full-scale invasion of Ukraine with a speech that evoked the “culture and values, experience and traditions of our ancestors”. In the aftermath, relations between Russia and the European Union had reached new levels of hostility. Was this a bunch of small-time criminals making use of lax security, or were investigators looking at something bigger, a state-sponsored Russian exercise in recouping cultural heritage that had been scattered across the continent? “In my opinion,” said Jandy, the Polish prosecutor, “it’s impossible that a group of thieves initiated this action without the involvement of a state.”

The common denominator in all the thefts was the work of Alexander Pushkin, the early 19th-century Romantic poet and playwright. Outside Russia, Pushkin is mainly known for two works that inspired operas by Tchaikovsky: Eugene Onegin and The Queen of Spades. He is otherwise little read. “The problem with Pushkin is that he was mostly a poet, and poetry is very difficult to translate,” says Pierre-Yves Guillemet, a London-based bookseller who specialises in Russian literature.

In Russia, on the other hand, Pushkin is regarded as a foundational figure. Over the past two centuries, his ambiguous politics have enabled very different regimes to embrace him. “He was definitely a great patriot, and like nearly his entire aristocratic class, he was a monarchist,” says Andrew Kahn, a professor of Russian literature at the University of Oxford. Yet there was rebellion in Pushkin’s writing, too. In his youth he wrote a poem, Dagger, which celebrated regicide, and he was personal friends with some of the key players in the failed 1825 coup d’etat against the Russian empire.

In 1937, Stalin chose to mark the centenary of Pushkin’s death with statues, commemorative exhibitions and plays, and new multilingual anniversary editions of his books. It was, in part, a calculated move to create a unifying figure that the multi-ethnic empire could rally around. Later, in the twilight years of the Soviet Union, dissident writers such as Andrei Sinyavsky tried to wrestle Pushkin back from the hands of the communists, emphasising his sensuality and eroticism over his ideological leanings.

In the 21st century, however, the Russian state has chosen to emphasise his most jingoistic works. Pushkin supported the violent suppression of the November uprising of 1830-31, in which Poles, Lithuanians, Belarusians and Ukrainians revolted against the Russian empire. His poem about the revolt, To the Slanderers of Russia, suggested that the choice for the Slavic peoples was either to merge their streams “into the Russian sea” or simply to “dry up”. In November 2022, Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, released a video of himself reciting To the Slanderers of Russia, interspersed with images of US president Joe Biden and the European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen. Earlier that year, as Russian troops advanced into Ukrainian territory, they put up placards with Pushkin’s portrait in towns they captured.

Ukrainians who grew up on Russian culture in the post-Soviet era have come to see the veneration of Pushkin as propaganda, and a smokescreen for war crimes. “The world is still so sentimental about Russia’s great cultural heritage,” says Oleksandr Mykhed, a Ukrainian writer and literary scholar. “It makes it so easy for Russians to say: we will kill you and then we will ask for sorrow and forgiveness, and then we will kill another people in another country, but what can you do, our soul is just a mystery.”

One of the striking things about the thefts was how straightforward many were. The first “heist” was barely worthy of the name. Between 24 March and 8 April 2022, Beqa Tsirekidze was able to borrow 10 volumes of rare books from the Tallinn University Academic Library, including an 1834 edition of Pushkin’s The History of Pugachev. The only criminal energy required was resisting the urge to return them.

In April 2022, Tsirekidze and an accomplice visited the National Library in Riga, Latvia. They were able to order an 1829 edition of Pushkin’s Poltava – worth an estimated €10,000 – to the library’s unsupervised main storage reading room, alongside two other valuable works. To prevent theft, most academic libraries in Europe rely on trackable tags that are typically glued on the inside of a book’s back cover. In Riga, the thieves merely found a quiet corner, scraped off the tags, put the books under their sweaters and walked out.

What about the supposed “high quality” of the forgeries some of the thieves left behind? Nick Wilding, a British-born Renaissance historian who is also one of the world’s leading specialists in print forgeries, is sceptical about that description. In 2012, Wilding gained international fame for de-authenticating a copy of Galileo’s Sidereus Nuncius, a treatise that includes the first printed depiction of the moon as seen through a telescope. Its forger, Italian librarian Marino Massimo de Caro, had taken great care: he had made his own paper, then artificially aged it by steaming it in sulphuric acid on a low heat. The only things that aroused Wilding’s suspicion about the book’s authenticity were a minor irregularity in the library stamp and a typographic impossibility. By De Caro’s own account, it took him over a year to make his master forgery.

By contrast, Wilding reckons that most of the Pushkin and Gogol facsimiles could have easily been made in a day. Photos of a facsimile of one 1802 book show a stark contrast between the pristine paper colour of the title page and the yellowed pages of the rest of the book. To trick overworked librarians at the checkout desk, Wilding believes that the thieves merely copied and pasted a facsimile of a work’s title page into a less valuable 19th-century book, possibly a second edition of the same work. At Tartu University in Estonia, librarians found that Pushkin and Gogol books were forged by simply stuffing pages from 19th-century German books into the original leather or paper bindings. “It’s pretty amateur,” he told me. “I’m not sure forgery is even the right word, they are so bad.”

All this left investigators with one central question: were these thefts really the work of a team of criminal masterminds, or just a bunch of chancers grabbing cultural treasures that were there for the taking?

After Estonia and Latvia, the thefts moved further north to Finland in spring 2023, and on to Lithuania in May. Then they hit France. In July 2023, 10 books were stolen from the Diderot Library in Lyon, including an early copy of Pushkin’s Boris Godunov worth an estimated €70,000.

In Paris, a librarian named Aglaé Achechova noted this development with alarm. Achechova is head of the Russian collection at Paris’s University Library of Languages and Civilisations (Bulac) and in July 2023, she sent an email to her French colleagues. “As a former curator of 18th-19th century books in the Pushkin memorial museum in St Petersburg, I am convinced that this was a commissioned theft,” she wrote. The thieves who stole these books, Achechova believed, must have been hired by a wealthy collector. She warned her colleagues that the collection at their university might be next.

Until the Pushkins started to vanish across Europe, the most spectacular book crime of recent times was the so-called “Feltham heist” of 2017, when a gang of Romanians abseiled into a warehouse near Heathrow airport to steal 200 rare books valued at more than £2.5m. Because the gang left behind a considerable number of books, the thieves were initially thought to have been working from a master list provided by a book collector. But by the time of their 2020 trial, this theory had been discarded. “The suspects stole as many books as they could carry, and there was no obvious thought put into selecting one book over another, other than [taking] the ones with ornate fonts,” DI Andy Durham, the lead investigator in the case, told me. The thieves appeared to have struggled to offload their goods, eventually burying their entire haul under the floorboards of a house in the Romanian countryside.

Achechova believes the Pushkin thefts were different and that there really was a rogue collector or knowledgable dealer behind them. What convinced her, she said in her email to colleagues, was that all the books that had been stolen up to that point were “legendary items for any serious Russian-speaking bibliophile”.

From a collector’s point of view, what makes the stolen Pushkins so alluring is less the ideology contained within their covers than the fact that they were published before the author’s death at the age of 37. (In an echo of his verse novel Eugene Onegin, Pushkin died in a duel with a French officer rumoured to have had an affair with his wife.) The two other authors whose books were second and third on the list of stolen works in 2022 and 2023 were Mikhail Lermontov and Gogol, who lived until just 26 and 42 respectively. Tolstoy, by contrast, died aged 82. “It’s the same logic you have with rock stars: the younger they die, the more valuable they become,” says Guillemet, the bookseller.

In the late 2010s, so-called “lifetime editions” of Pushkin sold for remarkable sums. In 2018, an 1829 edition of the narrative poem Poltava went for £32,500 – more than double its estimate – at an auction at Sotheby’s in London. In 2019, a first edition of Eugene Onegin, estimated at £120,000, fetched £467,250 at Christie’s. In the wake of Russia’s “special military operation” in Ukraine, the biggest auction houses in western Europe have stopped working with buyers and sellers in Russia, which has throttled the supply of rare books and further driven up the prices of works that are available.

In her email to colleagues, Achechova attached a list of the rarest Pushkin books in Bulac’s own collection. “In a way, we began to wait for the criminals to arrive,” she told me. They did not have to wait long. Three months later, on 9 October 2023, two men claiming to be Bulgarian nationals registered at Bulac and ordered precisely the titles highlighted on Achechova’s list.

Unlike at previous libraries, the men found they were only able to look at the Pushkins under the eyes of watchful staff. That evening, Bulac’s management contacted Paris police, but the thieves made their move before the authorities could act. Overnight, they broke one of the street-facing windows with an iron bar and entered the reading room they had visited during the day. Finding that the most valuable books had been locked away in the basement, the thieves left the premises with only a few handfuls of worthless pamphlets. Worse still, in entering through the broken window they had injured themselves and provided detectives with further evidence: the next morning, police found bloodstains on one of the wall racks and on the yellow carpet.

A week after the botched attempt in Paris, the final Pushkin thefts in Warsaw took place. And the following month, in November 2023, librarians at the Bavarian State Library in Munich discovered that they, too, had been targeted. Two books by Nikolai Gogol, published during his lifetime, had vanished and been replaced with facsimiles. What was notable about the theft was that the two books were volumes two and three of a four-volume collected works of the writer. The thieves had ordered up and inspected all four volumes but decided to steal only two, further hardening the impression they were ticking off a list.

That November, eight months after Eurojust’s joint investigative committee had been formed, it notched up its first success. Mikheil Zamtaradze, a Georgian citizen who had been identified as a suspect in connection with the thefts in Paris and Vilnius, was arrested at Brussels airport and extradited to Lithuania on a European arrest warrant. On 24 April 2024, four further Georgian nationals were arrested in Georgia, followed by a fifth suspect on 16 May.

During the interrogation of the suspects in Tbilisi, the investigators achieved a breakthrough. In custody, one suspect confessed that she was one of the pair who had stolen the books in Warsaw. Finally, it seemed, investigators had a source who could shed light on the inner workings of the Pushkin heists.

On 21 October 2024, the woman identified on her Warsaw university reading pass as “Sylvena Hildegard” appeared in front of a judge in Tbilisi. Her real name was Ana Gogoladze. The courtroom was packed with spectators, friends and members of her family, and the 23-year-old woman, who had dyed red hair, initially appeared nervous. As she described how she had gone about stealing the books, her voice became calmer.

A month before the Warsaw theft, Gogoladze had received a message from her husband, Mate Tsirekidze – the son of Beqa Tsirekidze, the man convicted earlier that year for book thefts in Latvia and Estonia. Gogoladze and Mate had married a few years earlier and become parents, but at the time that Mate contacted her on Telegram, they were on bad terms. She was raising their child as a single mother in Tbilisi, while he was mostly working abroad as a builder. His message contained an unusual proposal: Mate asked if she would accompany him to Poland to steal rare books. Since she needed the money, she begrudgingly agreed.

In Tbilisi, Mate’s sister handed them fake IDs and their plane tickets to Warsaw. On arrival, they checked into a guesthouse, and the next day they registered at the library under their fake names. Gogoladze, who has no university education and reads only basic Russian, did not bring any expertise to the job. She told the court that she had only recognised Nikolai Gogol’s name on one of the book’s covers because it reminded her of her own. After the theft, the couple threw away their fake IDs and travelled by taxi to another Polish city whose name Gogoladze could not recall, before moving on to Vienna, where they handed the stolen books to a contact and flew back to Tbilisi.

Far from resolving all the questions swirling around the thefts, Gogoladze’s testimony had thrown up numerous new puzzles. If she and Mate had stolen only five books, who took the other 74 books missing from Warsaw? And then there was the fact that when Gogoladze and her husband returned to Tbilisi, her sister-in-law handed them back the five books they had stolen and told them that they were worthless: they were replicas that had already been forged by someone else. It was a crushing blow for Gogoladze. Instead of receiving a handsome reward, she was reimbursed only for her travel expenses. By the end of the year, she and Mate had split up again, this time for good. (In February 2025, Mate, Gogoladze and three other defendants were found guilty of stealing Russian books from libraries in eight EU countries. All were sentenced to several years in prison, with Gogoladze receiving a suspended sentence.)

Rather than a coordinated effort by a single gang, Gogoladze’s testimony suggested an alternative possibility: the Pushkin thefts as a Marx Brothers-style farce, in which competing gangs swapped real books with fakes at dizzying speed. According to several sources involved in Eurojust’s joint investigative committee, there was significant disagreement among the national crime agencies looking into the thefts. The Georgian prosecutor was convinced that some of the books that Gogoladze had taken in Warsaw were real, and that her sister-in-law had simply lied to her in order to swindle her out of a reward. The Polish side was not so sure. They believed that the young couple had indeed stolen worthless facsimiles, possibly as a carefully planned attempt to cover the tracks of an earlier heist.

Conflicts over what may seem like minor details pointed to a broader debate: the more sophisticated the operation, the more plausible the theory that the Russian state had played a role in its facilitation. Prosecutors from EU states became increasingly frustrated with the narrowness of the charges brought by the public prosecutor in Tbilisi – one source told me that more suspects allegedly involved with the thefts should have been charged – as well as the glacial pace of court proceedings, which were slowed down by high-profile trials of pro-European protesters taking place at the same time. Georgia, one prosecutor from a European country told me, was “scared of doing anything that could worsen its relationship with Russia”.

The lack of a breakthrough was also testing everyone’s patience. Fourteen months into the investigation, the National Library of the Netherlands belatedly reported that six rare Pushkins had also been stolen in March 2023 from its premises in The Hague, not far from Eurojust’s headquarters. Instead of zeroing in on a mastermind, there was a sense that the scale of the crime they were uncovering was ever-expanding.

It was not until April of 2025 that the picture began to become clearer. Mikheil Zamtaradze, the man arrested at Brussels airport in November 2023, appeared in front of a court in Vilnius, Lithuania. He was accused of stealing 17 books, worth more than €600,000, from the city’s university library in May 2023. Zamtaradze, a thick-set 50-year-old Georgian with a high forehead and a chinstrap beard, did not deny stealing the books. He did, however, present the theft as a crime of opportunity. He told the judge he earned an income by buying and then selling old items, and that he had visited the Lithuanian capital with the intention to buy books, not to steal them.

Evidence presented in court painted a different picture. From library staff, the judge heard how Zamtaradze had charmed them and how he had moved piles of books between different rooms to confuse the supervisors. Information obtained by French investigators also showcased Zamtaradze’s ingenuity: when visiting the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris later the same year he did so with what appeared to be a broken arm, hiding stolen pages inside his sling. He created basic forgeries by printing copies of the title pages in his hotel room with a colour inkjet printer – so cheap that he threw it away when the cartridge ran out. GPS data from his iPhone showed that Zamtaradze had spent much of 2022 and 2023 jetting across the European continent, visiting not just Lithuania but Poland, Germany, France, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Estonia and Ukraine – a remarkable itinerary for a father of five who claimed to be unemployed and on benefits.

Zamtaradze presented himself as a lone wolf. In cases where there was a proven personal connection to other suspects, he claimed not to have been in touch with them for years. But booking receipts and CCTV footage showed Zamtaradze had often stayed in the same hotels – sometimes the same hotel rooms – as the other Georgian suspects he claimed to have not been in touch with. One of these, a 45-year-old used car salesman called Robert Tsaturov, was a former acquaintance from military service years, though messages extracted from his phone suggest their relationship wasn’t exactly one of equals. “You’re pissing me off,” Zamtaradze admonished his former comrade in one message; “You’re a good kid,” he praised him in another. “Are you [expletive] blind or just pretending,” reads the transcript of a voice message dated 4 August 2023.

One particularly damning exchange fell into the hands of France’s art police unit because Zamtaradze had typed it into his phone right underneath a CCTV camera on the terrace of the François-Mitterrand site of the Bibliothéque nationale de France on 25 October 2023 while on a cigarette break. In it, Zamtaradze appears to be directing Tsaturov to swap out a book with a forgery inside a library: “Act cool and everything will be fine,” he wrote. “No one is following you, it’s just your inner fear. The most important thing is the discreet exchange, everything else is irrelevant.”

In June 2025, Zamtaradze was found guilty and sentenced to three years and four months in prison in Lithuania. By the end of the trial, the judge concluded that the accused had not acted alone but operated within “an organised group whose members, having divided roles among themselves, sought to carry out a premeditated plan to steal books and exchange them”. Mikheil Zamtaradze and Beqa Tsirekidze had been the group’s brains, while a host of relatives and old acquaintances acted out their scheme. Within this group, there appeared to have been a degree of coordination but also an element of competition and mutual deception. When interrogated by Polish investigators after the Vilnius trial, Zamtaradze claimed it was he who had stolen the books from the Warsaw library, pipping Mate Tsirekidze and Ana Gogoladze to the post and leaving them to steal worthless forgeries.

One larger question remained: on whose orders were the Georgians acting? On this, Zamtaradze was surprisingly forthcoming, though his story sometimes strained credulity. While in Vilnius, he said, he had received a phone call – apparently out of the blue – from a man saved in his phone as “Maxim”. He described the man as a Russian collector and dealer of rare books to whom he had sold antiques in the past. On the phone, Maxim allegedly expressed an interest in old books by Pushkin, and Zamtaradze had sent him photos of the most valuable Pushkins in the Vilnius library. A week later, Maxim sent Zamtaradze 12 forgeries of the same titles via a coach from Minsk, Belarus. These were of considerably higher quality than the amateurish copies that Zamtaradze had manufactured in his hotel room. Zamtaradze claimed that he entered the library, swapped the originals for the fakes, and placed the originals in a parcel on a coach back to Minsk. In return, he claimed to have received cryptocurrency worth $30,000.

In court, Zamtaradze gave his buyer’s full name as “Maxim Tsitrin”, though no person with that name is known to operate in the Russian rare books trade. There is, however, a Russian book dealer named Maxim Tsipris, who is executive director of Moscow-based online bookstore Staraya Kniga (“Old Book”). In a 2019 interview, Tsipris described “lifetime editions by classic authors” as the “most interesting” items on his shelves. In a phone call, Tsipris confirmed he had received my email outlining the story Zamtaradze had told the court, but failed to take up his right of reply.

Whether Tsipris is the buyer of the stolen books is not known – some inside observers of the Russian book trade suggest he is too small a player to orchestrate such a large crime, and speculate that Zamtaradze may have been trying to frame him. It is also possible that there were many different buyers. According to the internet history on his iPhone, Zamtaradze searched for a Russian auction house that specialises in books, Litfund. Its director is Sergey Burmistrov, a bibliophile with impressive contacts in high office: he has previously offered expert consultancy to the Russian ministry of culture and used to run a magazine for book collectors, having been appointed to the role by Mikhail Seslavinsky, the head of the federal agency for press and mass media. After its foundation in 2014, Litfund quickly became a market leader and now operates from offices in Moscow, St Petersburg and Krasnoyarsk. In July 2023, Litfund set a new Russian record for the sale of antique books, when a copy of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin went under the hammer for 26m rubles (£233,000).

Librarians in Warsaw believe that just a few months before this record sale, Litfund also auctioned off Pushkins that had been freshly stolen from their shelves. Checking this claim is not easy, mainly because information about the content of these suspect lots has been scrubbed from the internet. Litfund’s website says the relevant lots have been “moved, deleted or may never have existed”. There is similarly no record of these lots on Bidspirit, an Israel-based web portal that tracks international auction sales. But a snapshot of the catalogue of the sale archived on Wayback Machine shows that on 22 December 2022, Litfund’s St Petersburg house did fetch 12m rubles (£107,000) for “one of the rarest editions” of Pushkin’s poems, which carried a Warsaw University Library stamp on its front page.

When I contacted Burmistrov via email to ask whether Litfund had sold stolen editions of Pushkin, he told me: “We do not sell any books that carry on their pages any stamps or marks indicating their belonging to any existing state libraries, and our experts are very careful about it; we work in accordance with existing Russian laws.” Yet on 20 April 2023, Litfund sold another edition of Pushkin’s poems, this one for 2.6m rubles (£23,000). And a screenshot of the picture in Litfund’s catalogue, taken by Warsaw librarians before it was scrubbed from the web, once again shows a Warsaw University Library stamp on the first page, as well as imperfections that the librarians say were distinct to the copy held by them. Burmistrov did not respond when I put these allegations to him in an email.

Even if these books were indeed sold through Litfund, this does not prove that the auction house commissioned their theft. Meanwhile, the idea that the Kremlin coordinated the repatriation of valuable cultural heritage remains extremely speculative. The apparent unwillingness of Russian authorities or private companies such as Litfund to aid in the European investigation, however, suggests they are at the very least comfortable with the current outcome. Of the approximately 170 books that have gone missing, none of the originals have been recovered. “I don’t have any hope we will get them back in the near future,” said Jandy, the Polish prosecutor. “That would need cooperation with Russia, and while we’re almost at war that’s impossible.”

In an article for the Russian edition of Forbes magazine published in 2024, Burmistrov waved off the allegation that the Pushkin thefts could be traced to Russia or were even part of “a special operation to export Russian books from Europe”. But his article strikes a bullish note. European libraries did not do as much to protect these valuable literary works as their Russian counterparts, he claimed – a result of a lack of interest in Russian culture, owing to geopolitical tensions. That common criminals were able get their hands on lifetime-edition Pushkins in the first place, Burmistrov seemed to imply, was above all a sign of European weakness.

This piece was amended on 7 October 2025 to replace an image which incorrectly identified a fake volume of Pushkin poetry. It was a fake by a different author. Also, an earlier version referred to the National Institute of Languages and Civilisations in Paris instead of the University Library of Languages and Civilisations.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/oct/07/the-pushkin-job-unmasking-the-thieves-behind-an-international-rare-books-heist

Source: Fast Company, Chris Morris
Photo: Freepi

Elon Musk, Mark Cuban, Mark Zuckerberg, and other tech billionaires are building private towns and compounds,
Having $1 billion isn’t enough these days. To be seen among the richest of the rich, you now need your own private sanctuary.

For some, that means a sprawling compound. Increasingly, though, members of tech’s 1% are incorporating their own towns, giving them the power to set rules, issue building permits, and even influence education. Some of these modern-day land grabs are already functioning; others are still in the works.

Either way, the billionaire class is busy creating its own utopias. Here’s where things stand:

In May, residents along the Gulf Coast voted to incorporate Starbase (though it’s worth noting that nearly all of them were SpaceX employees). Previously called Boca Chica, the 1.5-square-mile zone elected Bobby Peden, a SpaceX vice president of 12 years, as mayor. He ran unopposed.

The vote stirred controversy. The South Texas Environmental Justice Network opposed the plan. The group wrote in a press release in May: “Boca Chica Beach is meant for the people, not Elon Musk to control. For generations, residents have visited Boca Chica Beach for fishing, swimming, recreation, and the Carrizo/Comecrudo Tribe has spiritual ties to the beach. They should be able to keep access.”

Musk also controls Snailbrook, an unincorporated town near Bastrop, about 350 miles north of Starbase. The area includes a SpaceX site that produces Starlink receiver technology, sits just 13 miles from Tesla’s Gigafactory, and features housing and a Montessori school that opened last year.

In 2021, Cuban purchased Mustang, Texas (population: 23). The 77-acre town, an hour south of Dallas, was founded in 1973 as an oasis for alcohol sales in a dry county. The former Shark Tank star told CNN he has no immediate plans beyond basic cleanup. “It’s how I typically deal with undeveloped land,” he said. “It sits there until an idea hits me.

California Forever

This project isn’t tied to a single billionaire, but a collective. In 2017, venture capitalist Michael Moritz spearheaded a plan for a new city in Solano County, California, about 60 miles northeast of San Francisco. Backers included Marc Andreessen, Chris Dixon, Reid Hoffman, Stripe’s Patrick and John Collison, and Laurene Powell Jobs. Together, they spent $800 million on 60,000 acres.

The plan proved unpopular. In November, California Forever withdrew its ballot measure to bypass zoning restrictions. (The land is not zoned for residential use.) It pivoted last month, unveiling Solano Foundry, a 2,100-acre project the founders say could become the “nation’s largest, most strategically located, and best designed advanced manufacturing park.”

The group also envisions a walkable community with 150,000-plus homes. A Bay Area Council Economic Institute study released this week projected 517,000 permanent jobs and $4 billion in annual tax revenue if the revised plan goes forward.

Larry Ellison

Ellison doesn’t own a town, but he owns virtually all of one of the Hawaiian Islands. In 2012, he bought 98% of Lanai for about $300 million. He also owns the island’s two Four Seasons hotels, most commercial properties, and serves as landlord to most residents. Lanai has become a retreat for the wealthy, hosting visitors from Elon Musk to Tom Cruise to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Peter Thiel

Thiel doesn’t own a city, per se, but he is part of a collective backing Praxis, a proposed “startup city” that is currently eyeing Greenland for its base of operations. Other investors include Thiel’s PayPal cofounder Ken Howery and Andreessen. The plan for Praxis is similar to California Forever. Founders hope to create a Libertarian-minded city that has minimal corporate regulation and focuses on AI and other emerging technologies. So far, however, no notable progress has been made on the project.

Mark Zuckerberg

Zuckerberg owns a 2,300-acre compound on the Hawaiian island of Kauai. He’s investing $270 million into Ko‘olau Ranch, which will include a 5,000-square-foot underground bunker. Located on the island’s North Shore, the property is also said to have its own energy and food supplies, Wired reports.

While it’s not technically its own city, it will house more than a dozen buildings boasting upwards of 30 bedrooms and 30 bathrooms. There will be two mansions spanning 57,000 square feet, with elevators, offices, conference rooms, and an industrial kitchen. Those will be joined by a tunnel, which branches off into the underground bunker, which has a living space and a mechanical room as well as an escape hatch. Zuckerberg has posted on Instagram about the compound, saying he plans to raise Wagyu and Angus cattle.

Bill Gates

In 2017, Gates announced plans for Belmont, a “smart city” on 234 square miles near Phoenix. Designed to house 180,000 people, it promised autonomous vehicles and high-speed networks. There haven’t been any recent updates on the status of the Arizona development, however, and the project is considered dead in the water (well, desert) at this point.

https://www.fastcompany.com/91392989/tech-billionaires-are-building-their-own-private-cities-heres-whos-doing-it-and-where