💡 Warp News #324
☢️ Chernobyl teems with wildlife. 🛰️ Coffee companies launch satellite program to map deforestation. 🧲 Researchers have shrunk giant magnets to the size of a palm.
☢️ Forty years after the disaster, Chernobyl teems with wildlife
Forty years after the accident at the nuclear power plant, the area around Chernobyl remains too dangerous for human habitation. But the wildlife has moved back in. Przewalski's horses, wolves, bears, lynx, moose, and red deer roam freely in the Chernobyl zone.
📉 WeightWatchers filed for bankruptcy because people lost too much weight
WeightWatchers did not fail because people stopped wanting to lose weight. It failed because they did lose weight, but in a different way. A way that points to a coming health revolution.
🛰️ Coffee companies launch satellite program to map deforestation
Several major coffee companies and coffee traders have joined forces to map coffee farms and deforestation using satellite imagery and AI models. The initiative will protect millions of smallholder farmers from being wrongly excluded from the EU market due to inaccurate maps.
🔋 Australia's battery capacity has doubled – cutting reliance on gas
Battery capacity in Australia has more than doubled between March 2025 and March 2026. Gas-fired generation has fallen 24 percent and is at its lowest level since 1999. Average wholesale electricity prices have dropped 12 percent.
⚡ Cement has been produced entirely with electricity – significant potential to cut CO2 emissions
The cement industry accounts for a significant share of global CO2 emissions, and production has so far relied on fossil-fueled kilns. SaltX and Holcim have produced cement in a fully electrified process, without fossil fuels in the heating stages. The cement produced meets industrial standard.
🏜️ New method turns desert into arable land in three years instead of a hundred
Researchers have developed a solid cyanobacteria inoculum that binds sand dunes and creates a foundation for vegetation within three years. The method achieves a survival rate of over 60 percent and shortens the formation of biological soil crusts from 15 years to one or two years.
🧲 Researchers have shrunk giant magnets to the size of a palm
The new magnets are as strong as today's most powerful research magnets, which weigh several tons and are the size of a room. The magnets draw less electricity than an LED bulb, compared to the power consumption of several thousand households for traditional magnets of the same strength.
💡 Warp News #323
💶 Solar power has saved Europe more than €100 million per day. 👩💻 Open source helps reach millions of unvaccinated children. ⚰️ Deaths from indoor air pollution have fallen by 1.5 million.
🤰 Teenage pregnancy rates have fallen sharply across the world
Globally, the number of births among teenage girls has fallen by over one-third since 2000. In Central and South Asia, the figure has dropped by over three-quarters during the same period. The decline is seen across all regions of the world, according to data from the UN.
⚡ Finland has cut power sector emissions by 80 percent in a decade
Finland's emissions from electricity generation fell from nearly 15 million tonnes to around 3 million tonnes per year between 2016 and 2025. Nuclear and wind power together account for 64.5 percent of generation. The last coal plant was shut down in April 2025.
⚰️ Deaths from indoor air pollution have fallen by 1.5 million since 1990
The annual number of premature deaths from indoor air pollution has dropped from around 4.5 million to just under 3 million per year. The decline is driven by more people gaining access to cleaner cooking fuels. Asia accounts for the largest reduction, with deaths cut roughly in half.
🔋 Sodium-ion batteries ready for mass market - cheaper and more durable than lithium-ion batteries
Sodium-ion batteries are cheaper and more durable than lithium-ion batteries, but have not been possible to manufacture at scale until now. CATL says the manufacturing challenges are solved. The cells handle more than 15,000 cycles, and sodium is 1,000 times more abundant than lithium.
👩💻 Open source helps reach millions of unvaccinated children
Many countries have long collected vaccination data on paper or in Excel, causing delays and gaps. Now the University of Oslo and Gavi have built digital systems in 40 low- and middle-income countries. The result: hundreds of thousands of children vaccinated – in Mozambique and Kenya alone.
👍 New rule of thumb for AI energy use: One prompt = one second in the microwave
A simple AI query uses about 0.3 watt-hours of electricity. A microwave at around 1,000 watts uses about 0.28 watt-hours per second. So a simple AI query corresponds to roughly one second in the microwave.
📚 Top Reads
We're honored to present these top reads from world-class writers, who contribute to Warp News because they believe in our mission of spreading fact-based optimism all over the world.
🆙 Warp Levels - an idea to level up humanity
Humanity is doing the high jump without a bar. We have no goal. With Warp Levels, we determine what the next level for humanity should contain, so we can level up and make progress faster.
📚 Kevin Kelly: Focus on the biggest opportunities, not the biggest problems
We talk about some of the 450 advice in his new book, but also about his new project: Protopia - the hundred-year desirable future. And Kevin Kelly give advice for how Warp News should grow faster: "Wrap it around people and their dreams."
💡 A new mindset for humanity can impact billions of people now and in the future
If we succeed in giving humanity more optimism about the future, it will not only affect those living now but also all generations and billions of people who will live in the future.
💰 Wall Street legend: “Pessimists sound smart – optimists make money”
Jim O'Shaughnessy is a legendary investor on Wall Street. He shares what he thinks is the biggest opportunity for the future and explains how the world is going through a great reshuffle.
🔋 Northvolt and the benefit of understanding the future
The story of Peter Carlsson and Northvolt teaches us two lessons: You need to understand the future to see all the possibilities, and you must be a fact-based optimist to grab them.
💡 David Deutsch: Optimism, Pessimism and Cynicism
With so much progress in the world, how can pessimism still be widespread? It is because of cynicism, denying that “so-called-progress” is progress, argues David Deutsch, professor at Oxford University and one of the world's leading intellectuals on optimism.
