• The European-Japanese spacecraft BepiColombo will enter orbit around Mercury on November 21.

• In December, the spacecraft will split in two, with a European part that maps the surface and a Japanese part that studies the magnetic field and the thin atmosphere.

• The instruments work after the journey, and a laser that had not been used for eight years fired more than 700,000 pulses in a test.

The BepiColombo spacecraft has almost reached Mercury. On November 21, it will enter orbit around the planet. The mission is led by the European Space Agency, ESA, and the Japanese space agency, JAXA. It is Europe's and Japan's first mission to Mercury and the first to send two spacecraft there.

Heading toward the sun is downhill

Mercury is the planet closest to the sun. On average, Earth is ten times closer to Mercury than to Jupiter. Still, the journey has taken eight years.

The reason is that a spacecraft traveling inward toward the sun speeds up the whole way. It would arrive far too fast for the small planet's gravity to capture it. Braking with rocket engines would take so much fuel that the spacecraft would be too heavy to launch. The journey takes more energy than a trip to Pluto, according to Space.com.

Instead, BepiColombo has slowed down by flying past planets. With each pass, the spacecraft hands over a little of its kinetic energy to the planet. During the journey, the spacecraft also had electric thrusters, powered by solar panels, that slowed it down for months at a time.

The idea comes from an Italian mathematician

The technique is based on calculations by the Italian mathematician and engineer Giuseppe "Bepi" Colombo at the University of Padua. In 1970, he proposed that NASA's Mariner 10 probe fly past Venus so that it could pass Mercury three times instead of once. That gave researchers twice as much data about Mercury as they had expected. The spacecraft is named after him.

Mariner 10 reached Mercury in 147 days, but only flew past. Entering orbit requires much more braking. So far, only one spacecraft has orbited Mercury: NASA's MESSENGER, between 2011 and 2015.

Nine flybys

BepiColombo was launched on an Ariane 5 rocket from French Guiana in October 2018. Since then, the spacecraft has flown past Earth once, Venus twice and Mercury six times. On the last pass, in January 2025, it was just under 300 kilometers (about 185 miles) above Mercury's surface. In total, the spacecraft has traveled almost 10 billion kilometers (about 6.2 billion miles), according to the French space agency CNES.

In spring 2024, the electric thrusters got too little power and could not run at full thrust. The engineers worked out a new trajectory that needed less thrust. It moved the arrival from December 2025 to November 2026.

The arrival takes half a year

In early September, the spacecraft released the European transfer module that had provided power and propulsion during the journey. At that point, it was more than 200 million kilometers (about 124 million miles) from Earth. Bruno Sousa, ESA's head of operations definition and engineering, said that in practice a new mission began that day. The operations manager, Elsa Montagnon, has described the arrival as six months of continuous work.

The spacecraft has already made its first planned course correction after the separation. The thrusters fired for 8 minutes and 42 seconds and changed the speed by 11.4 meters per second (about 37 feet per second).

When Mercury's gravity captures the spacecraft, it will first enter a wide orbit, where one lap takes 60 hours. Then come 16 maneuvers that lower and reshape the orbit step by step.

Two spacecraft in different orbits

In December, BepiColombo splits in two. The Japanese spacecraft Mio will be released into an elongated orbit over the planet's poles. At its closest, it comes within 590 kilometers (about 370 miles) of Mercury, and at its farthest it is 11,640 kilometers (about 7,230 miles) away. It needs 9.3 hours for one orbit. Mio will study the planet's weak magnetic field, its thin atmosphere and how the planet is affected by the solar wind.

The European spacecraft MPO continues to lower its orbit and in March 2027 reaches an orbit between 480 and 1,500 kilometers (about 300 and 930 miles) above the surface. It has eleven instruments and will map the terrain and the minerals in the planet's crust. It will also find out whether the planet's interior is molten and test Einstein's general theory of relativity. Together, the two spacecraft carry 16 instruments, and the science phase begins in April 2027.

The instruments work after the journey

In mid-September, all the instruments on MPO were switched on at the same time for the first time since the separation. The first analyses show that they work. The laser altimeter BELA, which will measure heights and depths on the planet's surface, fired more than 700,000 pulses over 21.5 hours. The laser had not been used in eight years.

The MERTIS instrument, which measures heat radiation from the surface, collected about one gigabit of data during a 22-hour test. It has lost almost no sensitivity since it was calibrated on Earth in 2013. Both instruments are led by the German Aerospace Center, DLR, together with the universities of Bern and Münster. The camera system SIMBIO-SYS activated all three optical channels and took its first image in space.

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• The variety is a cross between the old French potato Institut de Beauvais and a breeding line from Cornell University.

• Each fall, the researchers selected plants based on appearance, starch, resilience and yield, and in the end chefs judged the flavor.

• According to chef Dan Barber, the variety gives high yields in organic farming.

The American seed company Row 7 has started selling a new potato variety called Poulette. It is organic and is said to taste like roast chicken when it is baked or roasted in the oven. The potato contains no chicken, broth or seasoning. The flavor comes from the variety itself.

Row 7 describes the flavor as savory, nutty and roasted. The texture is creamy but also a little mealy. According to chef Dan Barber, who helps run Row 7 and the Michelin-starred restaurant Blue Hill at Stone Barns, the name more or less picked itself after the first tasting. Everyone around the table reacted the same way. Barber tells Food & Wine that the potato has a savory depth he has never tasted in a potato. He also says that no one on the team knows why it tastes like chicken.

It started with a conversation in 2013

The idea was born in 2013 at a seed conference at Stone Barns in New York State. There, the French chef Michel Bras talked with Walter De Jong, a professor of plant breeding at Cornell University. Bras told him about his favorite potato, Institut de Beauvais. It is an old French variety from the 1800s that his mother had grown. Today it is mostly grown on a small scale.

De Jong managed to track down the variety. In early 2014, his group crossed it with a breeding line from Cornell. The first seeds were planted in 2015 at the university's research farm at Mount Pleasant, near Ithaca. Cornell has bred potatoes for 160 years and has developed more than 50 varieties.

Flavor was the final test

Every fall, the researchers walked the fields and chose which plants would continue for another year. They judged appearance, starch content, defects in the tubers, resistance to disease and pests, whether the potato matured on time and how much it yielded. Flavor was the final test. It was judged by Barber's chefs.

The whole process took just over ten years. Row 7 also has a network of more than 150 chefs and farmers who trial new varieties across the United States. Poulette was tested there for several years, to see where the variety grows best.

Poulette is not genetically modified. It comes from conventional crossing and selection in the field. Other breeders use genetic engineering, as when researchers in Uganda gave a potato full protection against late blight.

Sold in about 60 stores

The seed potatoes were grown organically in New York State. The potatoes are then grown by two organic farms, Red Hill Farms in Pennsylvania and Norwich Meadows Farm in New York. They are sold in about 60 Whole Foods Market stores in New York, Connecticut and New Jersey. A bag costs $6, and the potato is in stores from September to March.

According to Barber, the variety gives high yields for organic farmers. He says it works well for mashed potatoes and for aligot, a French dish in which potatoes are stirred together with cheese. The first time, he recommends baking or roasting the potato simply, so that the flavor comes through.

Bred for flavor

Barber argues that many modern varieties, such as Idaho Russet, have been selected for yield, even size and long shelf life in stores, but not for flavor. The old varieties that many people value today were once new varieties that someone selected. Row 7 wants to carry on that tradition together with breeders and chefs. According to Barber, breeding that starts with the seed opens the door to many flavors that have barely been explored.

Row 7 was founded in 2018 by Barber, plant breeder Michael Mazourek and seedsman Matthew Goldfarb. The company's earlier varieties include Sweet Garleek, a cross between garlic and leek. Earlier this year, Whole Foods began selling three of the company's vegetables in cans: beets, tomatoes and Sweet Garleek.

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• Power from solar, wind and nuclear grew more than twice as much as electricity demand.

• Oil use in transport fell 9 percent, and half of the new heavy trucks sold in September were electric.

• Emissions have been flat or falling for more than two years, since March 2024.

China's CO2 emissions fell 3.1 percent in the third quarter of 2026 compared with the same period a year earlier. It is the largest quarterly drop since the Covid lockdowns in 2022.

The figures come from an analysis that Lauri Myllyvirta, lead analyst at the research organization Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA), did for Carbon Brief. He bases the calculations on official figures and commercial data.

Both coal and oil use fell

Coal use fell 3 percent and oil use 4 percent during the quarter. Over the first three quarters of the year, emissions are about 0.5 percent lower than the year before, according to the estimate.

China accounts for about a third of the world's CO2 emissions. The country is therefore one of the reasons global fossil fuel CO2 emissions are projected to fall by about 0.4 percent in 2026, according to the Global Carbon Project.

Clean power grew twice as much as demand

Power generation from solar, wind and nuclear rose by 110 terawatt-hours compared with the same quarter of 2025. This means that clean power grew more than twice as much as electricity demand. The increase equals Germany's total power generation over the same three months.

As a result, coal power generation fell 3.3 percent. Less solar and wind power also went to waste than the year before. In addition, electricity demand grew more slowly, partly because the weather was unusually mild during the quarter.

China is still building new coal power plants at a near-record pace. But when more plants share less coal power generation, the number of hours each plant runs goes down. Running hours are falling faster than coal power generation, and this is eroding the plants' profits. Myllyvirta estimates that clean power will grow more than total energy demand in 2026, so that fossil fuel use keeps falling.

Electric vehicles replace oil

Oil use in transport fell 9 percent. In September, 67 percent of the new passenger cars sold in China were electric cars or plug-in hybrids, a record. The same month, half of all new heavy trucks were electric.

The electricity used by China's electric vehicles rose 53 percent. That is faster than the number of electric vehicles grew. According to Myllyvirta, this suggests that the electric vehicles already on the road are being driven more, in place of vehicles that run on gasoline or diesel. The crisis in the Strait of Hormuz after the war in Iran also continued to push down oil demand.

We have previously written that, for the first time, gasoline cars account for less than half of the world's car sales.

Cement, steel and chemicals

Emissions from cement and steel kept falling, as construction in China shrank at a faster pace. Growth in the coal-to-chemicals industry, where coal is used as a raw material for chemicals, continued to slow. High coal prices made that business less profitable.

The economy also grew more slowly, but growth is still within the government's target. That reduces the pressure for new stimulus. The stimulus the government has announced covers, among other things, the power grid and transport, where policies already favor low- and zero-emission solutions.

Two years without a rise

Measured as a rolling 12-month total, China's emissions have been flat or falling since March 2024, or for more than two years. In the third quarter of 2025, emissions were unchanged from the year before.

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• Emissions from oil are projected to fall by 1.9 percent, the most of any fuel.

• China, the US, the EU and Japan are all projected to cut their emissions in 2026.

• Solar and wind power are estimated to avoid 4.6 billion metric tons of CO2 in 2026, compared with 0.28 billion metric tons in 2010.

Global fossil fuel CO2 emissions are projected to fall by 0.4 percent in 2026, to 38.2 billion metric tons. That is the preliminary projection in the Global Carbon Budget 2026 from the Global Carbon Project. The year before, emissions rose by 1.2 percent and reached a new record.

The report is produced every year by more than 140 scientists from institutions including the University of Exeter, the University of East Anglia, CICERO in Oslo, LMU Munich and more than 90 others. This is the 21st edition. It is available as a preprint in the scientific journal Earth System Science Data and is now being reviewed by other scientists. The figure for 2026 is an estimate. The researchers say the change will be somewhere between a decrease of 1.5 percent and an increase of 0.6 percent.

Less oil and more solar and wind

The largest decrease comes from oil. Emissions from oil are projected to fall by 1.9 percent and emissions from natural gas by 0.3 percent. Emissions from coal are projected to rise by 0.6 percent.

The researchers point to three explanations. Solar and wind power have replaced some of the fossil fuels that would otherwise have been needed to meet growing energy demand. Electric vehicles have reduced demand for oil. The war in Iran has also pushed up the price of oil, and that has reduced demand too. Together, solar, wind and electric vehicles cover about two-thirds of the increase in energy demand.

Pierre Friedlingstein at the University of Exeter, who led the study, says the decrease is partly driven by geopolitical shocks. He says the long-term answer is to build out clean energy quickly.

Falling in China, the US and the EU

Emissions are projected to fall in China, the US, the EU and Japan. China accounts for 32 percent of global fossil CO2 emissions, and its emissions are projected to fall by 0.9 percent. Oil use has dropped sharply and renewable electricity generation has grown strongly, while emissions from coal are projected to rise by 0.3 percent. Half of the global emissions avoided by renewable energy and electric vehicles are in China.

In the third quarter of 2026, China's emissions fell by 3.1 percent compared with the year before, the largest drop since Covid. This comes from an analysis for Carbon Brief by Lauri Myllyvirta at CREA.

US emissions are projected to fall by 1.3 percent, mainly because coal use is coming down after a peak in 2025. That year, high gas prices and cold weather pushed up the use of coal. EU emissions are projected to fall by 1.5 percent. In the first half of 2026, the EU's fossil CO2 emissions fell by 2 percent, according to CREA, as we have previously reported.

Japan's emissions are projected to fall by 1 percent. In the rest of the world, they are projected to fall by 0.7 percent, mainly through lower oil use, likely because of higher prices and supply constraints. Emissions from international aviation and shipping are each projected to fall by about 1 percent. In India, emissions are projected to rise by 4.4 percent.

Clean energy is replacing more and more fossil fuels

Solar and wind power are estimated to avoid 4.6 billion metric tons of CO2 in 2026. In 2010 the figure was 0.28 billion metric tons, and in 2025 it was 4.1 billion metric tons. Of the emissions avoided by solar, wind and electric vehicles in 2025, solar and wind accounted for about 95 percent.

About 10 percent of the world's car fleet was electrified in 2025, or 6 percent if hybrids that cannot be plugged in are left out. We have previously written that gasoline cars made up less than 50 percent of global car sales for the first time in the first half of 2026.

40 countries cut their emissions while their economies grew between 2016 and 2025. In the ten years before that, there were 22. Today, those 40 countries account for 26 percent of global fossil CO2 emissions. Counting from 2019 to 2025, 59 countries have cut their emissions while their economies have grown.

Corinne Le Quéré, a professor at the University of East Anglia, led an analysis of this trend in the journal Nature Climate Change. She says clean technologies are making a real difference and that countries on every continent are cutting their emissions while their economies grow.

Emissions growth has slowed in all regions, including China, India and other emerging economies. Total CO2 emissions grew by 0.3 percent per year over the past decade, compared with 1.7 percent per year in the decade before. Climate TRACE sees the same thing. According to its figures, which we have reported on, global greenhouse gas emissions rose by 0.2 percent in the first half of 2026.

Forests and land

Emissions from deforestation and other land-use change have fallen. Between 2016 and 2025 they averaged 4.9 billion metric tons per year, compared with 6.2 billion metric tons in the decade before. In 2026 they are projected to rise to 5.1 billion metric tons, because of peat fires and forest degradation in Southeast Asia. These are linked to drier weather during the El Niño weather pattern.

New forests absorb about half of the emissions from forests that are cut down for good. China, the EU and the US have the largest uptake from new forests, a combined 0.8 billion metric tons per year. In 2025, plants and soil once again absorbed as much CO2 as they did before the El Niño of 2023 and 2024.

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• Researcher Christopher Heckscher saw between eight and a dozen fireflies flashing the species' pattern in a meadow in Delaware.

• The meadow had been allowed to grow naturally, with shrubs, brush and low vegetation, which is uncommon.

• The firefly is one of 14 of the conservation organization Re:wild's most wanted lost species that have been found since 2017.

In June, researcher Christopher Heckscher walked across a meadow in Brandywine Creek State Park in the US state of Delaware. There he saw a flash pattern that did not match any firefly he knew of in the area. It was the firefly Pyractomena similis, also called the similar firefly. No one had documented the species since 1983.

Heckscher is an entomologist and ecologist at Delaware State University. According to the conservation organization Re:wild, he was sure which species it was as soon as he saw the pattern.

The flash pattern gave the species away

The males attract females with short, amber pulses of light. Usually 10 to 20 pulses come in quick succession. Then there is a short pause before the next series begins.

Heckscher saw between eight and a dozen fireflies flashing that way. He examined one of them under a microscope. It had features in its genitalia that are found only in this species. In July, the find was confirmed.

The species used to live in parts of the eastern and southern United States. It has never been studied in depth, and scientists know little about how it lives. One thing they do know is that it thrives in fields and meadows near water. Re:wild has listed it as one of its most wanted lost species. Earlier searches in Georgia and North Carolina turned up nothing.

A meadow allowed to grow naturally

In May and June 2026, Heckscher surveyed three sites in Delaware and Maryland. He found none at Fair Hill in Maryland or in White Clay Creek State Park in Delaware. The find came on the last evening, in Brandywine Creek State Park.

The meadow there is mature, with shrubs, brush and plenty of low vegetation. It has been allowed to grow naturally. According to Heckscher, meadows like this are uncommon, because meadows are often mowed or used for grazing livestock. He believes this particular habitat was what the firefly needed.

In the same meadow, he also saw the firefly Photuris quadrifulgans. He thinks more lost fireflies that thrive in the same habitat may live there.

The park contains four of the 34 nature preserves managed by DNREC, the state's environmental agency. According to Chris Bennett of the agency's Division of Parks and Recreation, the find shows why the state protects open space and habitat for animals and plants.

Also seen in Virginia

The same year, the species was seen at one more site. Back in May, Aljoscha Nern found a firefly of the species in Ashburn, Virginia, outside Washington, D.C. He reported the find on iNaturalist, a platform where the public shares what they see in nature. That find was also confirmed under a microscope in July.

28 species are considered lost

The US and Canada have 178 described species of fireflies. Of these, 28, or about 16 percent, are considered lost. None of them has a confirmed report from the past ten years. That is the finding of a review in the Journal of Lost Species by nine researchers, Heckscher among them. The study also describes 12 firefly species that have been rediscovered.

According to Candace Fallon of the Xerces Society, a conservation organization, these species have probably been overlooked rather than disappeared. Anna Walker of the New Mexico BioPark Society says they are usually considered lost because no one has looked for them.

Re:wild runs the Search for Lost Species, the world's largest search for species that have not been documented in at least ten years. Since 2017, 14 of the most wanted species have been found. They include Wallace's giant bee in Indonesia and Attenborough's long-beaked echidna. The firefly from Delaware is one of them.

This is not the first time a species thought to be gone has turned up again. Last year, we wrote about a coral near the Galápagos Islands that had not been seen since 2000. Researchers found more than 250 colonies.

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• The share of US marriages in which both spouses earn about the same rose from 11 percent in 1972 to 29 percent in 2022.

• The share in which the wife is the primary or sole breadwinner rose from 5 to 16 percent over the same period.

• In egalitarian marriages, wives earned 97 percent of what their husbands earned in 2022, up from 89 percent in 1972.

In 29 percent of marriages in the US, the husband and wife earned about the same in 2022. In 1972, the share was 11 percent. This comes from an analysis by Pew Research Center of data from the US Census Bureau.

The researchers sorted opposite-sex married couples by how much each spouse contributes to the couple's combined earnings from work. A marriage counts as egalitarian when both spouses earn between 40 and 60 percent of the income.

Fewer husbands are sole breadwinners

In 1972, the husband was the primary or sole breadwinner in 85 percent of marriages. In 2022, that was true of 55 percent.

The biggest change came during the first two decades. The share of marriages in which only the husband had earnings fell from 49 percent in 1972 to 23 percent in 1992. It has stayed at about the same level since then. The share in which the husband earned the most but the wife also had earnings fell from 42 percent in 1992 to 31 percent in 2022.

At the same time, more wives have become breadwinners. In 1972, the wife was the primary or sole breadwinner in 5 percent of marriages. In 2022, the share was 16 percent. The wife was the sole breadwinner in 6 percent of marriages, compared with 2 percent 50 years earlier.

Together with the egalitarian marriages, this means that the wife earned about as much as the husband, or more, in nearly half of all marriages in 2022.

Almost the same pay

In the egalitarian marriages, pay was almost equal in 2022. The median earnings of wives were $60,000 a year, and those of husbands were $62,000. So wives earned 97 percent of what their husbands earned. In 1972, the figure was 89 percent.

Two incomes lift households

Marriages with two incomes had a median income of about $135,000 to $145,000 in 2022, adjusted for household size. Marriages with one income were at around $75,000.

Only 1 percent of marriages with two incomes were below the poverty line. Among couples in which only the husband or only the wife had an income, the shares were 7 and 9 percent, respectively.

Incomes in the US have also risen for all income groups since 1979, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO).

Work and education behind the change

In the first decades, the change was tied to more and more married women going to work, according to Pew. Education also plays a role. Among adults ages 25 and older, a larger share of women than men have a four-year college degree, according to Pew. When the wife has more education than the husband, she is more likely to earn more, Richard Fry, a researcher at Pew, told CNBC.

In 2022, the wife had more education than the husband in 24 percent of marriages, up from 19 percent in 1972. In those marriages, the wife was the breadwinner in 25 percent of cases.

Ruth Thomas of the pay data company Payscale told CNBC that women are having fewer children and having them later in life. This has likely helped push their earnings up.

Pew also asked 5,152 American adults how they view work and family. 77 percent said that children are better off when both parents focus equally on their job and their home.

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• Four drought-tolerant maize varieties gave between 13 and 38 percent higher yields than a variety that is not drought-tolerant.

• For the drought-tolerant varieties, the largest microdose gave about 12 percent more maize than the recommended fertilizer rate, with 54 percent less nitrogen.

• Maize sown early gave a 10 percent higher yield than maize sown at the usual time.

Researchers at Université de Parakou in Benin have tested how drought-tolerant maize performs when it is sown at different times and given small doses of fertilizer right next to the plant. The results are published in the journal PLOS One.

Maize is one of the most important crops south of the Sahara. It accounts for half of the cereal production in the region and for 30 percent of the daily calorie intake, according to the study.

How the trial worked

The trial was carried out in 2018 and 2019 at a research station in the village of Ina in northern Benin. The area gets 900 to 1,300 millimeters (about 35 to 51 inches) of rain a year, during a rainy season from May to October. The maize got only rainwater.

The researchers sowed at three times: early in June, at the normal time in early July, and late at the end of July. They compared five maize varieties. Four were drought-tolerant and one was drought-sensitive. They also tested five ways of fertilizing: no fertilizer at all, three different microdoses and the recommended fertilizer rate.

With microdosing, a small amount of fertilizer is placed in the soil near each planting hole. Each planting hole, with two plants, got a few grams of urea and phosphate fertilizer, five centimeters (2 inches) from the hole. The largest microdose equaled 35 kilograms of nitrogen and 8 kilograms of phosphorus per hectare (about 31 and 7 pounds per acre). The recommended rate was 76 kilograms of nitrogen and 13 kilograms of phosphorus (about 68 and 12 pounds per acre).

Less fertilizer gave more maize

All fertilizer treatments raised the yield sharply compared with no fertilizer at all. The smallest microdose gave a 153 percent higher yield. The largest microdose gave a 247 percent higher yield, and the recommended rate 221 percent.

According to the researchers, the largest microdose gave about 12 percent more maize than the full rate in the drought-tolerant varieties. At the same time, it used 54 percent less nitrogen and 38 percent less phosphorus. The middle microdose gave 93 percent of the yield from the recommended rate, with 67 percent less nitrogen.

The fertilizer was also used more efficiently. With the largest microdose, each kilogram of nitrogen gave 84 kilograms of maize. With the recommended rate, each kilogram of nitrogen gave 36 kilograms of maize.

An earlier study by the same research group showed that the largest microdose gave the best return relative to what the fertilizer cost.

Drought-tolerant varieties gave larger yields

All four drought-tolerant varieties gave higher yields than the variety that is not drought-tolerant. The best was TZE-Y, with a 38 percent higher yield. It was followed by TZEE-W with 30 percent, 2008 Syn with 27 percent and 2000 Syn with 13 percent. The drought-tolerant varieties also produced 30 to 54 percent more biomass.

The drought-tolerant varieties yielded at most 2.7 to 3.3 metric tons per hectare (about 2,400 to 2,900 pounds per acre), all with the largest microdose. The variety that is not drought-tolerant reached at most 2.6 metric tons per hectare (about 2,300 pounds per acre), and it needed the full fertilizer rate to do so.

Drought-tolerant varieties are being developed for more crops. In India, researchers have developed rice varieties that can handle both drought and flooding.

Early sowing gave more

Maize sown early gave a 10 percent higher yield than maize sown at the normal time. Late sowing gave 10 percent less. According to the researchers, the difference is probably partly due to how the rain was spread over the season. In 2018, the early-sown fields got 678 millimeters (26.7 inches) of rain during the season, compared with 418 millimeters (16.5 inches) for the late-sown fields.

The highest average yield in the trial was 3.51 metric tons per hectare (about 3,100 pounds per acre). It came from TZE-Y with the largest microdose and early sowing.

The study was carried out by Mouiz Yessoufou, Pierre Tovihoudji, Sissou Zakari and Irénikatché Akponikpè at the HydroModE Lab at Université de Parakou. It was funded by the Africa Climate Leadership Program.

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🎙️ Back as a podcast

A few years ago we did the week's news as a podcast too, but when we had to scale things back, there just wasn't time for it. Now it's back!

Back then it was me reading the news, now it's WALL-Y.

We'll put out a news podcast once a week, on Wednesdays at 1 p.m. Central European Time.

Going forward, I'll also read my own pieces aloud and publish them in the same place. Aiming to start that next week.

Find it wherever you get your podcasts, like Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Part 4 on the energy society

I've followed Jonas Birgersson and his extremely ambitious EnergyNet project from the start and kept you updated along the way. This time it wasn't Birgersson I met in Lund, but two of his colleagues.

One of them was with him on the crazy internet ride back in the '90s and has now returned to his side. You'll find Part 4 here.

Also glad I got a small homage to Patrick Stewart into the piece. He played Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek and went more boldly than anyone where no one had gone before. Patrick Stewart died on October 28.

Mathias Sundin
Angry Optimist

🔋 Part 4: Towards the energy society – a new crew comes aboard

Energize!

Read on The Angry Optimist

💡 Fact-based optimistic news of the week

🩻 AI spots pancreatic cancer on scans that look normal

Today, more than 85 percent of cases are not found until the cancer has spread.

• The AI found 73 percent of the cancer cases on scans that had been judged normal, compared with 39 percent for radiologists.

• On scans taken more than two years before diagnosis, the AI found 68 percent of the cases, compared with 23 percent for the doctors.

• The results held on scans from several hospitals and different scanners, and the AI gave the same answer on repeat scans in 90 to 92 percent of cases.

Read more on The Angry Optimist

🧪 Fat cells destroy themselves after new injection

Rats given the injection regained less weight when the weight-loss drug was stopped.

• Visceral fat, which surrounds the organs, decreased by 12 percent four weeks after the last injection, while it increased by almost 6 percent with placebo.

• Eight to twelve weeks after treatment, the difference from the placebo group was 22 percentage points.

• No serious side effects were reported, and the most common ones were temporary pain, swelling and redness at the injection site.

Read more on The Angry Optimist

🇮🇹 Murders in Italy have fallen by 83 percent since 1991

Only 19 murders in Italy were counted as mafia killings in 2024. None were in the north.

• The number of murders in Italy fell from 1,916 in 1991 to 327 in 2024.

• When the mafia murdered judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino in 1992, the state had already begun building up special anti-mafia police and prosecutors.

• In 2023, Italy had one of the lowest homicide rates in the EU, 0.4 per 100,000 people compared with an average of almost 0.7.

Read more on The Angry Optimist

🌳 Thirsty trees in Berlin get water from 12,000 neighbors

An app that feels like a game.

• The app Gieß den Kiez shows more than 960,000 trees in Berlin and calculates how much water each tree needs.

• About 12,000 people have signed up to water trees alongside the city's maintenance crews.

• On the day Berlin set its heat record, at 39.9°C (103.8°F), volunteers poured around 8,000 liters (about 2,100 gallons) of water on the city's trees.

Read more on The Angry Optimist

🔋 Germany is building 91 percent more battery storage than last year

More than half a million new batteries went into operation in the first nine months of the year.

• Germany built 8.2 gigawatt-hours of new battery capacity from January to September 2026, 91 percent more than in the same period of 2025.

• More than half a million new battery systems went into operation, 303,000 of them in ordinary homes.

• The capacity of large-scale battery parks more than quadrupled, from 0.9 to 3.8 gigawatt-hours.

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👁️ Cholesterol medication linked to 15 percent lower risk of glaucoma

The risk of laser treatment for glaucoma was 60 percent lower with statins.

• People who took statins had a 15 percent lower risk of developing the most common form of glaucoma.

• Among people who already had glaucoma, the risk of minimally invasive eye surgery was 55 percent lower in those who took statins.

• After ten years, the risk of both the disease and more intensive treatment was still lower in those who took statins.

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💰 Extreme poverty in Indonesia more than halved in two years

Overall poverty also fell, to 8.07 percent, the lowest in ten years.

• In March 2024, 3.56 million Indonesians lived in extreme poverty, so the number has more than halved in two years.

• Poverty measured by Indonesia's own poverty line also fell, to 8.07 percent in March 2026, the lowest level in ten years.

• The state has supported 26.8 million poor families, and 44,200 children from the poorest homes attend the Sekolah Rakyat school program.

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🐈 Cats eat cultivated mouse meat as readily as chicken

The cultivated meat produces 92 percent fewer emissions than beef byproducts.

• In an independent test with 40 cats, 20 chose the cultivated treat first and 20 chose the chicken treat.

• 17 cats ate more of the cultivated treat and 19 ate more of the chicken treat, a difference that is not statistically significant.

• BioCraft can sell its cultivated meat as an ingredient in pet food in the EU, after registering with Austrian authorities.

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🔭 Webb finds the most distant ring galaxy yet

A ring galaxy can form when a smaller galaxy plunges straight through a larger one.

• The Webb space telescope shows the galaxy GS18660 as it looked 2.1 billion years after the Big Bang, which makes it the most distant known ring galaxy.

• The galaxy forms new stars equal to about 100 solar masses per year, mainly in the ring and in the core.

• A small neighboring galaxy, which is moving away at 425 kilometers per second (about 264 miles per second) and is connected by a bridge of gas, is likely the one that created the ring.

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🚗 US car thefts fall for the third year in a row

The risk of having your car stolen has dropped by almost 40 percent in two years.

• In the first half of 2026, 268,415 vehicles were stolen in the US, 21 percent fewer than in the same period in 2025.

• All 50 states had fewer thefts than the year before.

• In 2025, 659,880 vehicles were stolen, 23 percent fewer than in 2024 and the lowest level in several decades.

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🇨🇴 Colombia's peace agreement holds after ten years

Former guerrilla fighters have started more than 300 cooperatives, not 25 as planned.

• About 85 percent of FARC's former fighters are still in the program for reintegration into civilian life.

• The peace agreement planned for about 25 cooperatives, but the former fighters have started more than 300.

• The cooperatives work in farming, textiles, brewing, construction and tourism, among other fields.

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💉 Drug combination led to 23 percent weight loss in type 2 diabetes

The added drug mimics a satiety hormone. The highest dose cut weight by 24.5 kilograms.

• Over 48 weeks, people with type 2 diabetes lost an average of 23.3 percent of their body weight on the highest dose, compared with 14.8 percent on tirzepatide alone.

• All four dose combinations led to weight loss of between 13.2 and 23.3 percent, while the placebo group lost 3 percent.

• Lilly will start phase 3 studies of the combination before the end of 2026, with both drugs in a single product.

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🏞️ Toxic algal blooms nearly gone from the Klamath River

The dams stored heat like a battery and released warm water in the fall.

• The toxic algal blooms that often led to warnings against touching the water have nearly disappeared from the Klamath River.

• Oxygen levels in the water have risen since four dams were removed in 2024.

• In the first year after the removal, the river warmed in the spring and cooled in the fall about three weeks earlier than when the dams were there.

Read more on The Angry Optimist

📱 Large study: Screen time is not linked to problems in most children

Unlike many earlier studies, this one factored in the relationship with parents.

• At ages 5 and 10, there was no link between children's total screen time and emotional, behavioral or social problems.

• Fifteen-year-olds who used social media and messaging one to two hours a day had about 40 percent lower risk of problems than those who used them less than an hour.

• The researchers conclude that advice focused only on how long children use screens likely has limited effect on how they develop.

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• The AI found 73 percent of the cancer cases on scans that had been judged normal, compared with 39 percent for radiologists.

• On scans taken more than two years before diagnosis, the AI found 68 percent of the cases, compared with 23 percent for the doctors.

• The results held on scans from several hospitals and different scanners, and the AI gave the same answer on repeat scans in 90 to 92 percent of cases.

Pancreatic cancer can be visible on a CT scan before a doctor sees it. An AI model from Mayo Clinic in the US found signs of the cancer on scans that radiologists had judged to be normal. The scans the AI flagged were typically taken 475 days, or about 16 months, before the patients were diagnosed.

The model is called REDMOD. The study is by researchers at Mayo Clinic, MD Anderson Cancer Center in Texas and the University of Washington. It is published in the medical journal Gut.

The cancer is often found too late

Pancreatic cancer has low survival rates, mainly because it is detected late. More than 85 percent of patients are diagnosed only after the cancer has spread, according to the US National Cancer Institute. Fewer than 15 percent are alive five years after diagnosis. The early changes show up faintly or not at all on ordinary scans.

The researchers point to calculations showing that survival more than doubles if the share of cases found while the cancer is still localized rises from 10 to 50 percent. The goal is to find the cancer at the very earliest stage, when treatment has the best chance of working.

In lung cancer, the share of cases caught early in the US has nearly doubled in 20 years, partly thanks to CT screening. When the cancer is found early, nearly two in three lung cancer patients are alive five years later.

Nearly twice as many cases

The researchers trained the AI on scans from 969 patients. Of these, 156 later developed pancreatic cancer, while 813 stayed healthy. The model was then tested on 493 new patients, of whom 63 later developed cancer. For each patient with cancer there were about seven healthy ones, so that the test resembles a situation where the disease is rare.

All the scans of the patients who later developed cancer had been judged normal. They were taken between three months and about three years before diagnosis.

In the test, REDMOD found 73 percent of the cancer cases. Two abdominal radiologists read the same scans without knowing which patients later became ill. They found 39 percent. On scans taken more than two years before diagnosis, the AI found 68 percent of the cases, compared with 23 percent for the doctors.

The AI also judged most of the healthy patients correctly. In a separate group of 539 patients from several hospitals, it classified just over 81 percent as cancer-free. In a public database from the US National Institutes of Health, with 80 people, the share was 87.5 percent.

Patterns the eye cannot see

REDMOD reads the texture of the pancreas. It measures hundreds of details in the tissue patterns on ordinary abdominal CT scans, which are often taken for entirely different reasons. In the end, the model uses 40 features. About 90 percent of them come from a technique that uses filters to bring out patterns at different scales. They gave better accuracy than unfiltered patterns.

The AI finds and outlines the pancreas on the scan by itself. This removes a time-consuming step in which different people may draw the borders of the organ in different ways.

According to Ajit Goenka, a radiologist at Mayo Clinic and the study's senior author, the cancer starts to develop 10 to 15 years before diagnosis. The earliest signals cannot be seen with the naked eye, but the AI can measure them. He sees the tool as support for radiologists, not as a replacement.

The next step is the AI-PACED study. In it, doctors will use the AI in the care of patients at elevated risk. According to the researchers, the AI needs to be tested especially in people with new-onset diabetes or unexplained weight loss.

The same answer over time

The scans in the study came from several hospitals and from CT scanners made by different manufacturers. The results held across the entire dataset.

Some patients had several scans taken a few months apart. For them, REDMOD gave the same answer in 90 to 92 percent of cases.

The research is funded by sources that include the US National Institutes of Health and Mayo Clinic's cancer center.

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• Visceral fat, which surrounds the organs, decreased by 12 percent four weeks after the last injection, while it increased by almost 6 percent with placebo.

• Eight to twelve weeks after treatment, the difference from the placebo group was 22 percentage points.

• No serious side effects were reported, and the most common ones were temporary pain, swelling and redness at the injection site.

The fat cells break themselves down

The drug is called CBL-514 and is injected into belly fat. It makes the fat cells undergo apoptosis, a form of programmed cell death in which the cell breaks itself down. Other cells are left untouched.

The company behind the drug is Caliway Biopharmaceuticals from Taiwan. CBL-514 was first developed to treat lipomas, benign fatty lumps under the skin. The new results were presented at the annual meeting of the EASD, the European Association for the Study of Diabetes, in Milan.

Recruitment for the first of two phase 3 trials has already begun. These trials will test the injection against placebo for reducing belly fat without surgery.

The fat around the organs

There are two kinds of belly fat. Subcutaneous fat lies just under the skin and can be pinched. The inner belly fat, also called visceral fat, lies deep inside the abdomen and surrounds the internal organs. It drives insulin resistance, type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular diseases such as heart attack and stroke.

Liposuction and tummy tucks only reach subcutaneous fat and are more invasive, according to the researchers. Professor Timothy Garvey at the University of Alabama at Birmingham believes patients will appreciate a flatter stomach. But for health, what counts is weight loss, less visceral fat, lower blood pressure and improved cholesterol levels, he says.

How the study was done

Garvey and Yu-Fang Ling at Caliway analyzed MRI scans from some of the participants in two phase 2 trials, CBL-0204 and CBL-0205. The group consisted of 41 people. Twenty-three received CBL-514 and 18 received placebo. The participants had a BMI between 22 and 30.

They received injections in the lower abdomen every three weeks for up to twelve weeks, with up to 600 milligrams of CBL-514. The number of injections depended on how thick the fat layer was. The number went down as the fat shrank. Treatment ended when the fat layer was thin enough.

Visceral fat decreased

At the start, the CBL-514 group had an average of 564 milliliters (about 19 fluid ounces) of visceral fat and the placebo group 660 milliliters (about 22 fluid ounces). Four weeks after the last injection, visceral fat had decreased by 12.01 percent in the group that received the drug. In the placebo group, it had increased by 5.68 percent. The difference was 17.7 percentage points.

Eight to twelve weeks after the last injection, the CBL-514 group was still 10.45 percent below its starting level. The placebo group was then 11.76 percent above. The difference had grown to 22.2 percentage points. The researchers conclude that CBL-514 significantly reduced visceral fat compared with placebo.

The injection also reduces subcutaneous fat. In the phase 2 trials, 69.6 percent of those who received CBL-514 had lost at least 150 milliliters (about 5 fluid ounces) of subcutaneous fat after eight weeks. No one in the placebo group reached that level. In the larger CBL-0205 trial, with 173 participants in the U.S. and Canada, subcutaneous belly fat decreased by an average of 22.4 percent four weeks after the last treatment, according to Caliway. In the placebo group, it increased by 1.8 percent.

Less weight regain in rats

In animal studies, CBL-514 reduced body weight and both subcutaneous and visceral fat. Combined with tirzepatide, a GLP-1-type weight-loss drug, the injection led to greater weight loss than tirzepatide alone.

Rats given both drugs also regained less weight when tirzepatide was stopped. Many people regain weight when they stop taking GLP-1 drugs. The researchers' idea is that fewer fat cells mean fat cannot build up again as quickly. So far, this has only been shown in animals. A new phase 2 trial with about 120 adults in the U.S. will test the combination in humans.

Mild side effects

CBL-514 was generally well tolerated. The side effects were mainly mild to moderate reactions at the injection site, such as pain, swelling and redness. They went away on their own. No serious side effects were reported.

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This is part 4 of the series Towards the energy society. Earlier parts: part 1, part 2 and part 3. My latest interview with Jonas Birgersson, “Energy on wheels,” is on The Angry Optimist and YouTube. All our articles about the energy society are on the Energy Society page.

In Sweden, Jonas Birgersson is best known as the leading internet pioneer of the '90s, with unicorn startups like Bredbandsbolaget and Framfab. Staffan Ekholm was there back then too and has plenty of stories from those crazy days. Now he has returned to Birgersson's side to help bring about yet another revolution.

Since early 2022, I've been following Jonas Birgersson's work on the energy society, or EnergyNet, as it's usually called these days. Back then it was an idea about building a new power grid on the same principles as the internet. Now it's being built for real and involves more and more people.

On my latest visit to Lund, I met two of them: Jonas Bohlin and Staffan Ekholm himself.

The first journey with Birgersson

In the second half of the 1990s, there was a full-blown internet boom. Lots of people understood that this internet thing was going to be big, company valuations shot through the roof and fortunes worth billions were made almost overnight.

At the time, Staffan Ekholm worked at Swedish telecom company Telia, which ran the web portal Passagen. They hired Jonas Birgersson as a consultant, and he and Ekholm hit it off.

When Birgersson started the consulting firm Framtidsfabriken (or Framfab, as it came to be known), Ekholm became one of the first employees and a part-owner.

It was, as I said, a wild ride.

Ekholm was responsible for Framfab's biggest clients, including Volvo. For the Swedish carmaker, they built the world's first online car configurator, through a pilot project in Belgium.

Two days after the launch, Staffan Ekholm was called in to see Volvo's head of Europe. It was the spring of 1998.

“I want this. What will it take?” the boss said. He wanted it in all of Europe before the end of the summer.

That was about 20 countries. Hundreds of thousands of parts had to be matched to the right names in the databases. Staffan Ekholm didn't think it was even possible during Volvo's vacation period.

“I didn't ask if it was possible,” the boss said. “I asked what it would cost.”

Staffan Ekholm had to put together a quote. About ten days later, a fax arrived at the office in Gothenburg. It was an order for three million dollars. That was a lot of money for an internet project in 1998.

Framfab went public, and in one year its value went from just about 200 million dollars to more than 4.5 billion dollars. But then the financial internet bubble burst, the clients got cold feet and Framfab had to cut back on both staff and operations. They never went bankrupt, and eventually became part of a large global consulting firm.

But by then, Staffan Ekholm had long since left.

After a couple of CEO jobs at internet companies, he was drawn to the climate transition, and green business models in particular.

The second journey with Birgersson

A while ago, he started hearing more and more that Jonas Birgersson had something new going on in Lund. He got curious, went there and saw something familiar there.

A delegation of researchers from Germany and Denmark was there. They had basically arrived at the same solution, but still had another seven years of research ahead of them to get there. Then they heard on the Volts podcast that there was someone in Lund who had already built a pilot. So they came on a site visit.

Staffan Ekholm was there all day and listened to, among others, Max Collins and Mats Alaküla, professor of electrical engineering at LTH. Birger barely said a word that day. Everyone else talked about his project and about their own research.

“I've seen exactly this happen before. Thirty years ago, with broadband,” says Staffan Ekholm.

He could tell the researchers saw how big this was. Ekholm said right away that he wanted in.

A bit of what's happened since last time

After we've been talking for a while, Ekholm and Jonas Bohlin pull out a computer and show me something fascinating that takes me a couple of days to wrap my head around. But before we get to that, here's a quick update on what's happened since I last wrote an update in the spring:

• 14 neighborhoods and cities want to join, twice as many as last time. Among them are Gotland, Uppsala, Eskilstuna, Örebro and Malmö.

• The first routers were built in the office. ViaEuropa put the very first ones together themselves. Since then, they've started working with a company in Lund that specializes in assembling power electronics. That company will manufacture the routers.

• The expansion in Lund continues. 278 households in the Spjället and Pottugnen properties. The first buildings could go live as early as this year, but some roof trusses needed replacing. So solar panels will have to wait on some roofs, while parts of the system can still run this year. In the Ärtan property, with 90 apartments, construction will start after the new year.

• An open-source simulator. Max Collins at LTH has built a tool that lets anyone simulate EnergyNet on their own properties, with thousands of runs where sun, temperature and weather vary. The idea is that nobody has to take ViaEuropa's numbers on trust. They can do the math themselves.

• Two new scientific papers have been published. How EnergyNet handles disruptions. They simulated how buildings can share electricity when something in the grid breaks down. In the model, all 278 apartments in a block in Lund kept their power even when a connection to the larger grid or a link between the buildings was knocked out. How EnergyNet can be expanded. The authors propose that neighborhoods and campuses coordinate solar panels and batteries in local grids, and that electric vehicles can move electricity between them. The idea is that more electricity can then be produced and used locally, so the larger grid needs less expansion.

• An application to the EU Innovation Fund is being prepared in Lund. The fund wants to take technologies that have reached a certain maturity and move them a few steps further, so they can be scaled up across the EU. The application aims to bring EnergyNet to more than 11,000 apartments. The decision to apply is up to Lund Municipality and the municipal housing company LKF.

Of course, a whole lot more has happened, but those are a few highlights.

A storm is coming

Okay then, back to the conference room in Lund, where Jonas Bohlin has opened his laptop and is switching on emergency mode in one of the properties (in demo mode, of course; no properties or animals were harmed during the demonstration).

Let's imagine that a severe storm is on its way and will hit in a few hours, and that major disruptions and possible power outages are expected.

The property owner then activates emergency mode, which means the batteries are charged to full. If the grid then goes down, the system automatically manages the power based on targets for how long different functions should stay powered, and limits what the electricity can be used for. For example, you'll be able to cook and keep the fridge and freezer running, but not fire up the sauna or run the dryer, and the heat might be turned down in all or part of the building.

That lets the property get by on its own in island mode, even if the grid goes down. In the demonstration, it's ten buildings with 278 households, owned by the municipal housing company LKF. They can then keep the power on for between 48 and 72 hours, despite the outage.

Even without emergency mode, the properties can hold out for quite a while. In normal operation, the system automatically sets priorities when the power goes out, and LKF's properties then have electricity for around 10 to 12 hours without the residents' power being limited at all.

If the storm turns out worse than feared and the outage lasts longer than expected, you can shut off or cut back power use in the property even further.

A hassle for the residents, of course, but a whole lot better than being completely without power for a long time.

This isn't possible in properties without EnergyNet, and it gives property owners new options, not just in a storm or a crisis. It opens up new ways to optimize energy use.

The whole idea of EnergyNet, after all, is to internetify the power grid. So this isn't just about being able to control a grid in one property, but about connecting many small grids into one big one. That's why entire residential areas, or a whole city, can be put into emergency mode and pitch in together to keep the most important functions running.

Make it so

Jonas Bohlin clicks eagerly through the menus. He's excited. I get it. Not only are the features good and cool, he's helping create something new that I think will be standard within a few decades.

There are dystopian stories about the future, he says, where resources run short and people are forced to fight over them. But there is also another possibility, where technology makes energy so available that scarcity no longer has to dictate how society develops.

“One is the Star Wars model and the other is the Star Trek model. And this is the Star Trek future we're building.”

Bohlin is a tech entrepreneur and product developer. He co-founded Assently, which developed solutions for digital signing and identification. He later became head of product at Position Green, where among other things he worked on developing the company's sustainability platform and its push into AI.

Since late 2022, he has also been involved in EnergyNet. At first on the side of his regular job, but last summer he went all in and joined ViaEuropa as head of product.

More than just another brick in the wall

The product that Jonas Bohlin and the others are developing is actually even bigger than “just” controlling the electricity in buildings. It's called Brikks and it has a long history.

In 1998, Jonas Birgersson launched the world's first modern broadband network. In Lund, of course. Everything he does happens in Lund. It was a fiber network straight into people's homes. A year later, an open structure was added, where several service providers could compete freely.

This open model has since become the global standard. Instead of one operator building a network and locking the customers into it, the customers can switch.

That required a system, which was named Brikks. It handled everything that happened in the network. Customers had to be able to choose an internet provider, order services and change subscriptions. The operator had to be able to activate connections, monitor the network, deal with faults and handle billing.

Today, Brikks is used in more than 150 broadband networks in a number of countries.

Because Brikks has been developed nonstop since the late 1990s, the system has piled up an enormous amount of functionality and experience from real-world operation.

But why would an old system for broadband operators matter for the energy system of the future?

Because EnergyNet needs almost exactly the same thing.

EnergyNet is built on three basic parts:

• The first is the Energy Protocol (EP), an open standard that lets different devices communicate about energy.

• The second is energy routers, which use power electronics to control how electricity moves between different parts of the grid.

• The third is EnergyNet operators, who coordinate and run the local energy grids.

And an operator like that needs software.

Someone has to keep track of all the connected buildings, solar panels, batteries, chargers and other energy resources. Someone has to monitor the grid, deal with faults, steer energy flows and make sure the right party gets paid when energy is delivered.

This is where Brikks comes in.

Instead of building a whole new operating system for EnergyNet, ViaEuropa has started using the software that has already been developed and tested in the broadband industry for almost three decades.

The same system that used to handle communication over fiber will now be able to handle electricity too.

It's a logical step. Both the internet and EnergyNet are built on the idea that lots of different players and resources should be able to connect through open standards, without everyone having to use the same supplier.

Not just running the power grid, but the whole city

But when they started adding the energy system to Brikks, they discovered something bigger.

If a property owner can log in and see both their fiber network and their power grid in the same system, why stop there?

Why not add heating, cooling, ventilation, door locks and the other systems in a building too?

That's what they now call Brikks Urban OS.

Just like with the internet, we'll then be able to build applications on the system, much like apps for smartphones. One developer could create a service that optimizes energy use in apartment buildings, another one that coordinates electric car charging and a third that improves preparedness for power outages.

They shouldn't have to build a separate technical integration with every property owner or every brand of batteries, chargers and other equipment.

So EnergyNet isn't starting from scratch on the software side. It builds on a system that has been developed over almost the entire modern history of the internet, and that has already solved many of the administrative and technical problems that come up when several players have to share a common infrastructure.

In the 1990s, the big idea was to separate the fiber network from the services delivered through it. That made it possible for several internet providers to compete over the same cables.

Now Birgersson, Bohlin, Ekholm and their colleagues are trying to apply the same principle to energy, and eventually to more parts of our buildings and cities.

So the most interesting thing about Brikks Urban OS might not be any single feature.

It's the chance to do for cities what operating systems and open standards have done for computers and the internet: create a common foundation that makes it easier for others to develop services, compete and find solutions to problems that no single supplier can foresee.

Energize

In the TV series Star Trek: The Next Generation, Captain Picard leads the starship Enterprise and its crew on voyages of discovery across the galaxy.

The series is set in a future where humanity has overcome much of the scarcity on Earth and explores new worlds together with other civilizations.

TNG, as it's known for short, aired from 1987 to 1994. Just under thirty years later, the story picked up again in the series Picard.

I know the symbolism is laid on pretty thick by now, but ever since my first conversation with Captain Birger, the parallel to the '90s and the internet revolution has been obvious. It's not just that EnergyNet is built on the same logic. Birgersson also has plenty of scars from the lessons he learned back then. But what he and his crew are aiming for now is even bigger. Back then they built on something others had created. Now they are creating the very foundation of the network, which others will then build on. That takes both old and new crew members.

In the second-to-last episode of the TV series Picard, the TNG gang gets back together for a new mission. The reason is that someone has sabotaged the transporters. Those are the devices that can move people directly from one place to another by breaking them down in one spot and putting them back together in another, and that are activated when someone says “energize.”

They gather on the bridge of the Enterprise and take their positions. Picard sits down in the captain's chair, gives his instructions and finishes with his classic order:

“Engage!”

Mathias Sundin
Angry Optimist

• The number of murders in Italy fell from 1,916 in 1991 to 327 in 2024.

• When the mafia murdered judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino in 1992, the state had already begun building up special anti-mafia police and prosecutors.

• In 2023, Italy had one of the lowest homicide rates in the EU, 0.4 per 100,000 people compared with an average of almost 0.7.

From 1,916 to 327 murders

In 1991, 1,916 people were murdered in Italy. That equaled 3.4 murders per 100,000 people. This is according to an analysis by Mariarosaria Zamboi, a researcher at the Italian research institute Eurispes. It is based on figures from the Italian statistics agency Istat and the EU statistics office Eurostat.

Since then, the number has fallen year after year. There were 1,461 murders in 1992, 1,065 in 1993 and 746 in 2000. In 2024, the number was 327. That is a drop of more than 80 percent since 1991.

From 2020 to 2024, the number was just over 300 murders a year, below 0.6 per 100,000 people. In the late 1800s, nearly 2,000 people were murdered each year in Italy, or 5.9 per 100,000 people.

According to Our World in Data, Italy had one of the highest homicide rates in Europe in the early 1990s.

The mafia was behind a large share of the murders

In 1991, 37.5 percent of all murders in Italy were linked to the mafia. From 1988 to 1992, the mafia was behind about a third of the murders, according to the news agency AGI. From 2013 to 2017, the share had fallen to 9.1 percent.

In 2024, 21 people were killed in connection with organized crime, according to Istat. Of these, 19 were counted as mafia killings. In 2022 and 2023, the average was 24.5 a year. In northern Italy, there were no such killings at all in 2024.

The state responded to mafia violence

In 1991 and 1992, the state got new tools against the mafia. A special anti-mafia police unit was set up. At the same time, the country got a national anti-mafia prosecutor's office and special prosecutors' offices around the country. In 1992, the mafia murdered judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino in two attacks in Sicily.

The state also protected people who testified against the mafia. Jailed mafia bosses were held under a special regime, known as 41-bis, which cut off their contact with the outside world.

According to Eurispes, the decline is largely linked to a drop in mafia violence. This is due both to the state's crackdown and to the mafia having fewer internal wars and becoming less willing to use open violence. A study of the years 1980 to 2014 found that homicide rates more than halved in the regions where the mafia had its strongest hold.

The decline shows up mainly among men. Between 1992 and 2018, the homicide rate among men fell from 4 to 0.7 per 100,000. In Calabria, the homicide rate among men fell by 62.8 percent between the periods 2010 to 2012 and 2016 to 2018, from 5.23 to 1.95 per 100,000.

Southern Italy has caught up

In 2018, the homicide rate in southern Italy was 0.83 per 100,000 people, compared with 0.43 in the rest of the country. According to Eurostat figures for 2023, the gap has almost disappeared. Northern Italy averaged 0.38, central Italy 0.43 and southern Italy 0.46.

Sicily had 0.38 murders per 100,000 people and Calabria 0.39. That is lower than in Piedmont, Emilia-Romagna, Veneto, Tuscany and Lazio. Campania, where Naples is located, had 0.20.

Among the lowest in the EU

Italy had 0.4 murders per 100,000 people in 2023, according to Eurostat's age-standardized figures. The EU average was almost 0.7. Together with Germany and Malta, Italy was in the group with the lowest level. Sweden, Estonia and Luxembourg had 1.1, Lithuania 1.5 and Latvia 1.7.

Italy's homicide rate has also fallen faster than the EU's. From 2013 to 2015, Italy averaged 0.58 murders per 100,000 people. From 2021 to 2023, it was 0.40. That is a drop of 31 percent. The EU average fell by 19 percent over the same period.

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WALL-Y is an AI bot created in Claude. A human selects the news, WALL-Y writes the text and a human checks the results before publishing.

• The app Gieß den Kiez shows more than 960,000 trees in Berlin and calculates how much water each tree needs.

• About 12,000 people have signed up to water trees alongside the city's maintenance crews.

• On the day Berlin set its heat record, at 39.9°C (103.8°F), volunteers poured around 8,000 liters (about 2,100 gallons) of water on the city's trees.

In Berlin, residents can see on a map which trees in their neighborhood are thirsty. The app is called Gieß den Kiez, which roughly means "water the neighborhood" in German. It shows more than 960,000 street and park trees in the city.

About 12,000 people have signed up as volunteers, according to The Guardian. They water trees with their own watering cans, alongside maintenance crews from the city's districts. During heat waves, the crews cannot keep up on their own.

How the app works

Each tree appears as a dot on the map. The app calculates its water needs based on the tree's species, its age and how much rain has fallen in the past 30 days. The rainfall data comes from the German Weather Service, DWD, and is updated every day. Trees that need water appear in orange or red.

Young trees are flagged for more frequent watering, because they lack deep roots. Older trees can get much of their water from groundwater. The district parks departments water trees up to about five years old. Trees between five and ten years old therefore need extra attention.

Users can adopt a tree, log when and how much they watered, and see when someone else last did. The map also shows where the public water pumps are.

Over two million liters

The app was built by CityLAB Berlin, which is run by Technologiestiftung Berlin and funded by the Berlin Senate Chancellery. It launched in 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic shut down society.

In March 2026, the platform had more than 4,100 active users and up to 8,580 adopted trees, according to CityLAB's summary. Since the start, volunteers have logged more than 2.2 million liters (about 580,000 gallons) of water. The busiest year was the first year of the pandemic, with nearly half a million liters (about 130,000 gallons).

In the summer of 2026, Berlin set a new heat record of 39.9°C (103.8°F), measured at Tempelhof. The previous record was 38.9°C (102°F), from 2015. That day, volunteers poured around 8,000 liters (about 2,100 gallons) of water on the city's trees.

Like a pet

Project lead Anna Mehrländer tells The Guardian that she has been surprised by how much Berliners care about the trees. For many, it is like looking after a pet, she says. According to Mehrländer, the app gave people a reason to go outside and meet their neighbors during the pandemic.

Amanda Gläser-Bligh lives in the Charlottenburg district. Outside her apartment stands an eight-year-old linden tree that she has named Linda. During the warm months, she carries about 20 liters (about 5 gallons) of water to it every week. She thinks it is fun, almost like a computer game. She has also noticed that many passersby did not know they were allowed to water the trees.

Free code for other cities

The code is open source and free to use under the MIT license. Any city with an open register of its trees can build its own version, and CityLAB helps with the adaptation.

Leipzig was first, with Leipzig Gießt in 2021. Magdeburg followed in 2023, and Potsdam also has its own version. In Paris, two council members in the 17th arrondissement, Paul Hatte and Alix Bougeret, created the app Arbogeste after a visit to CityLAB in Berlin. It is based on Paris's open data on the city's trees and on weather data from the French weather service.

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• Germany built 8.2 gigawatt-hours of new battery capacity from January to September 2026, 91 percent more than in the same period of 2025.

• More than half a million new battery systems went into operation, 303,000 of them in ordinary homes.

• The capacity of large-scale battery parks more than quadrupled, from 0.9 to 3.8 gigawatt-hours.

Germany put more than half a million new battery systems into operation in the first nine months of 2026. Together they can store 8.2 gigawatt-hours of electricity. That is 91 percent more capacity than in the same period of 2025. This is according to an analysis by the industry association BSW-Solar. It is based on the German register of electricity installations, which is run by the Federal Network Agency (Bundesnetzagentur).

One gigawatt-hour is one million kilowatt-hours. The new capacity roughly equals the electricity demand of Munich for almost half a day, the news agency dpa writes.

Capacity grew faster than the number of systems

The number of new battery systems rose by just over a fifth. So capacity grew much more than the number of systems. This is because more and more large batteries are being built.

By mid-October, 493,000 new batteries had been registered for the period. BSW-Solar expects the figure to reach about 534,000 once all late registrations are in. For all of 2026, the association expects well over 10 gigawatt-hours of new capacity.

Battery parks overtook home batteries

The largest increase came from the large batteries in the power grid, with an output of more than one megawatt. The number of new battery parks of this kind rose from 63 to 220. Their capacity rose from 0.9 to 3.8 gigawatt-hours, more than a fourfold increase. They now account for about half of all new storage capacity and have thus overtaken home batteries.

Home batteries of 5 to 20 kilowatt-hours also increased. A total of 303,000 new home batteries were installed, compared with 261,000 in the same period the year before. Their capacity grew by 20 percent to 3.2 gigawatt-hours.

Batteries at businesses, between 20 and 1,000 kilowatt-hours, grew by 67 percent to 0.7 gigawatt-hours. In this group, 17,000 systems were installed. The smallest batteries, up to 5 kilowatt-hours, grew by 33 percent to 0.5 gigawatt-hours, spread across 172,000 systems.

More solar power in the same grid

A study by the research institute Fraunhofer IEE, done together with BSW-Solar, shows that batteries at transformer substations can free up unused capacity in the power grid. Under the conditions studied, this would make it possible to as much as double the number of solar panels in the local grids.

BSW-Solar has put forward 15 proposals to pick up the pace even more. One is to make it easier to build batteries together with solar and wind farms. Another is for grid operators to procure batteries at transformer substations. A third would allow surplus solar power to be stored when the grid is overloaded, instead of the solar farms being shut down.

Batteries can save billions

Carsten Körnig, managing director of BSW-Solar, says that batteries have become a driver of growth and a way to make the energy transition more efficient. According to him, they can save billions in costs. In Australia too, power prices have fallen after a record rollout of batteries.

Fraunhofer IEE has calculated what more storage would have meant for Germany. With 80 gigawatt-hours more batteries in 2025, consumers and the federal budget could have saved almost 4 billion euros, according to the calculation.

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• People who took statins had a 15 percent lower risk of developing the most common form of glaucoma.

• Among people who already had glaucoma, the risk of minimally invasive eye surgery was 55 percent lower in those who took statins.

• After ten years, the risk of both the disease and more intensive treatment was still lower in those who took statins.

People who take statins have a lower risk of developing glaucoma. That is the finding of a large study in the scientific journal British Journal of Ophthalmology. Among those who already have the disease, statins were linked to fewer people needing surgery or laser treatment.

Statins are drugs that lower cholesterol in the blood. They are prescribed to a very large number of people. Earlier studies have suggested that statins may also prevent or slow the death of nerve cells. How they affect glaucoma, however, has been unclear.

Glaucoma is a disease in which the optic nerve suffers permanent damage. It is one of the most common causes of blindness that cannot be reversed. The disease is treated with eye drops, pills, laser or surgery.

More than 420,000 people compared

The study was carried out by researchers at UC San Diego, the University of South Florida and the University of Southern California. They used the TriNetX database. It gathers medical records from 115 healthcare organizations and covers about 165 million people worldwide.

The researchers compared 210,701 people over the age of 40 who had taken statins with an equal number who had not. The groups were matched so that they resembled each other. Everyone had been seen by an eye doctor for a follow-up visit.

It is an observational study. It shows a link, but it cannot on its own show that the statins cause the lower risk. According to the researchers, the results add to the evidence that statins can protect nerves.

Robert Weinreb is a professor of ophthalmology at UC San Diego and directs the university's Hamilton Glaucoma Center. He is the senior author of the study. According to him, the link could matter for a very large number of people if it is confirmed in more studies.

Fifteen percent lower risk

After five years, 4,771 people in the statin group had been diagnosed with open-angle glaucoma. It is the most common form of glaucoma. That corresponds to 2.3 percent of the group. In the group without statins, the number was 5,491, or 2.6 percent.

Statin users had a 15 percent lower risk of developing the disease. After ten years, the risk was still 10 percent lower.

Fewer surgeries and laser treatments

In a second analysis, the researchers studied people who already had glaucoma. They compared 29,598 people who took statins with an equal number who did not. The researchers measured how often treatment had to be stepped up to something more intensive.

After five years, the risk of a laser treatment that lowers pressure in the eye was 60 percent lower among those who took statins. The risk of minimally invasive surgery that lowers pressure in the eye was 55 percent lower. The risk of traditional surgery was 36 percent lower. The risk of needing eye drops that lower the pressure was 11 percent lower.

The links remained after ten years. At that point, the risk of the laser treatment was 51 percent lower, the risk of minimally invasive surgery 46 percent lower and the risk of traditional surgery 32 percent lower. The risk of needing eye drops was 12 percent lower.

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• In March 2024, 3.56 million Indonesians lived in extreme poverty, so the number has more than halved in two years.

• Poverty measured by Indonesia's own poverty line also fell, to 8.07 percent in March 2026, the lowest level in ten years.

• The state has supported 26.8 million poor families, and 44,200 children from the poorest homes attend the Sekolah Rakyat school program.

From 2.8 to 1.7 million

The number of Indonesians living in extreme poverty has fallen from 2.8 million in September 2024 to 1.7 million in March 2026. That means 1.1 million people have moved out of extreme poverty. In March 2026, the share was 0.6 percent of the population.

The figures come from Statistics Indonesia (BPS). Abdul Muhaimin Iskandar, who coordinates the government's work against poverty, presented them when his ministry reported on what the government has done in its first two years.

A drop in every survey

BPS measures poverty twice a year, in March and September. In March 2024, 3.56 million Indonesians lived in extreme poverty, or 1.26 percent of the population. In September 2024, the number was 2.78 million, and in March 2025 it was 2.38 million, according to that survey. By September 2025, the number had fallen to 2.2 million.

From March 2024 to March 2026, the number of people in extreme poverty has thus more than halved.

BPS counts a person as extremely poor if their spending is less than $2.15 a day. The amount is adjusted for differences in price levels between countries, known as purchasing power parity, and is based on a line developed by the World Bank. In Indonesian currency, that was equal to about 10,900 rupiah per person per day in 2025.

The data comes from a large household survey. In the 2025 survey, 345,000 households took part in 514 regencies and cities across the country's 38 provinces.

Overall poverty is also falling

Poverty measured by Indonesia's own poverty line has also fallen. In March 2026, 8.07 percent of the population, or 22.93 million people, lived below the line. That was 920,000 fewer than a year earlier, when the share was 8.47 percent. In March 2026, the line was 669,235 rupiah per person per month.

According to Databoks, this is the lowest level in ten years, in both number and share.

Support, jobs and schools

The government works under a 2025 presidential instruction to speed up poverty reduction. A total of 46 ministries and agencies take part, with 156 targets for different programs. In all, 88 regencies and cities, along with 16,550 villages and urban wards, have been designated as priority areas.

The goal is that no Indonesian will live in extreme poverty by the end of 2026. We have previously written about how the Indian state of Kerala has eliminated extreme poverty.

Over the two years, 26.8 million poor families have received support from the state, according to the ministry. A total of 3.25 million small business owners have gained access to low-cost loans. The National Nutrition Agency, Badan Gizi Nasional, has given work to 1.3 million poor people, and 148,000 new businesses have started supplying it.

The ministry works on the principle that aid should be temporary, while self-reliance should be lasting. A shared database of household finances is used to direct support to the right people and connect them with programs for work and entrepreneurship.

Today, 44,200 children from the poorest families attend the school program Sekolah Rakyat (People's School). Their parents receive training so they can support themselves. Muhaimin Iskandar said the children's health and motivation have improved.

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• In an independent test with 40 cats, 20 chose the cultivated treat first and 20 chose the chicken treat.

• 17 cats ate more of the cultivated treat and 19 ate more of the chicken treat, a difference that is not statistically significant.

• BioCraft can sell its cultivated meat as an ingredient in pet food in the EU, after registering with Austrian authorities.

BioCraft Pet Nutrition is an Austrian-American company that makes cultivated meat for pets. The company has tested its new lickable cat treat against Applaws Chicken Creamy Lickable Treat, one of the leading products among lickable cat treats.

Equal numbers chose each treat first

The test was carried out by the German market research firm Regionales-Produkt-Panel, RPP, which has tested pet food for more than 50 years. A total of 40 cats took part in their own homes, while RPP staff watched. Each cat got 30 grams (about 1 ounce) of each treat in two identical bowls placed side by side. The position of the bowls was switched between households, so that cats that tend to pick a certain side would not affect the result.

The result was close. 17 cats ate more of BioCraft's treat, 19 ate more of the chicken treat and 4 ate equal amounts of both. According to RPP, the difference is not statistically significant. For their first bite, 20 cats chose the cultivated treat and 20 chose the chicken treat.

BioCraft's founder and CEO Shannon Falconer says the company deliberately chose to compare against a treat that cats already like. According to her, the result shows that the treat can compete on taste, not just on safety and sustainability.

Mouse cells in tanks

The treat is based on meat from mouse cells. The production itself is similar to making yogurt. The cells grow in tanks and are fed a mix of sugars, amino acids, vitamins and minerals. What remains is a biomass that needs no further processing. BioCraft mixes it with other ingredients that are already approved for pet food and that do not come from animals.

The same basic idea, growing animal cells in a nutrient solution, is used for cultivated meat for humans. Back in 2021, we wrote about the Israeli company Future Meat opening the world's first factory for cultivated meat.

An independent analysis of more than 100 nutrients showed that the ingredient contains about the same amounts of taurine, lysine, methionine and tryptophan as the meat slurry used in pet food. The ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 is better than in chicken slurry.

According to a calculation by the climate company ClimatePartner, made together with BioCraft, each kilogram (2.2 pounds) of the ingredient produces emissions equal to 1.73 kilograms (3.8 pounds) of carbon dioxide. For beef byproducts, the figure is 21.28 kilograms (46.9 pounds). That is 92 percent less.

From poor taste tests to a tie

The first taste tests with the ingredient did not go well. According to Falconer, the company chose not to mask the taste with common flavor enhancers. Instead, it tracked down the cause of the bad taste and removed it. Then it added components that bring out the ingredient's own flavor.

BioCraft uses generative AI in this work. The models analyze data from taste tests with both humans and cats and suggest new experiments. According to the company, the method can also be used for dry food, wet food and toppers.

Pet food makers can sell the treat as is under their own brand, or build more products on it. That way, they do not have to develop a recipe with the cultivated ingredient themselves.

Other companies are also testing cultivated meat on cats. In an earlier test, cats left significantly fewer scraps of BeneMeat's cultivated meat than of regular chicken.

Can be sold in the EU

Austrian authorities have registered BioCraft under the EU's rules for animal byproducts. This means the company can sell its cultivated mouse meat as an ingredient in pet food in the EU.

BioCraft sells the ingredient for about $4.40 to $5.50 per kilogram (about $2 to $2.50 per pound), a price the company says is on par with premium conventional meat. The company works with the pet food makers Partner in Pet Food and Prefera Petfood.

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• The Webb space telescope shows the galaxy GS18660 as it looked 2.1 billion years after the Big Bang, which makes it the most distant known ring galaxy.

• The galaxy forms new stars equal to about 100 solar masses per year, mainly in the ring and in the core.

• A small neighboring galaxy, which is moving away at 425 kilometers per second (about 264 miles per second) and is connected by a bridge of gas, is likely the one that created the ring.

The ring only showed up with Webb

The Webb space telescope has found the most distant known ring galaxy. It is called GS18660. The light that reaches us shows the galaxy as it looked 2.1 billion years after the Big Bang. The previous record holder, found in 2020, is closer to us.

Webb has already looked even further back in time. Among other things, the telescope has found two black holes that merged when the universe was 740 million years old.

The study is published in Astronomy & Astrophysics. The first author is Michele Perna, a researcher at the Centro de Astrobiología in Spain. The work is part of the Webb program GA-NIFS, which studies how galaxies grow.

The researchers were not looking for a ring. They chose the galaxy because it looked stretched out in older images from the Hubble space telescope. The ring was not clearly visible there. It only appeared when Webb's NIRSpec spectrograph was pointed at the galaxy. With the instrument, the researchers could study the galaxy's shape, how the hot gas moves, what the gas is made of and when the stars formed.

A ring full of young stars

The ring has a radius of about 3.5 kiloparsecs, roughly 11,000 light-years. Together, the stars in the galaxy weigh about 17 billion times as much as the sun.

GS18660 forms new stars equal to about 100 solar masses per year. Star formation takes place mainly along the ring and in the core. The ring alone forms several times more stars per year than the Cartwheel Galaxy, a well-known ring galaxy that lies much closer to us.

Between 10 and 20 percent of the stellar mass in the ring formed during the last few tens of millions of years. The gas in the ring is also moving outward at about 200 kilometers per second (about 124 miles per second). That fits with a wave spreading out from the center of the galaxy.

Traces of a collision

A ring of this kind usually forms when a small galaxy plunges straight through the center of a larger, disk-shaped galaxy. This sends a wave of dense gas outward, much like ripples in a pond. Where the gas is squeezed together, new stars form.

Near GS18660 there is a small neighboring galaxy. It is moving away from the large galaxy at about 425 kilometers per second (about 264 miles per second). A bridge of gas connects the two. The stars in GS18660 weigh about 100 times as much as the stars in the neighbor. The neighbor also sits roughly where an intruder would be expected after passing straight through the disk.

Based on the neighbor's speed and distance, the researchers estimate that the collision happened 17 to 42 million years earlier. That fits with the age of the youngest stars in the ring.

Michele Perna tells Live Science that a collision is the researchers' leading explanation. It is the combination of several clues that points that way: the neighbor, the gas bridge and the shape of the ring. The galaxy also has a structure that resembles a bar, and such bars can gather gas into rings. The researchers cannot yet fully rule out that explanation.

Rings are rare

In our part of the universe, only about one in 10,000 galaxies is a ring galaxy formed by a collision. Among distant galaxies, it has been hard to confirm the few candidates that have been found.

The find suggests that head-on collisions that create rings may have been more common in the early universe. If the collision is confirmed, estimates of how common such galaxies were back then will need to be revised, according to Perna.

Christopher Conselice is a professor of extragalactic astronomy at the University of Manchester and was not involved in the study. He describes the system as very unusual. He also finds it convincing that the galaxy has been through a collision or merger.

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• In the first half of 2026, 268,415 vehicles were stolen in the US, 21 percent fewer than in the same period in 2025.

• All 50 states had fewer thefts than the year before.

• In 2025, 659,880 vehicles were stolen, 23 percent fewer than in 2024 and the lowest level in several decades.

Fewer thefts in every state

In the first six months of the year, 268,415 stolen vehicles were reported to police in the US. That is 21 percent fewer than in the same period in 2025. The figures come from NICB, the National Insurance Crime Bureau, which works against insurance fraud and vehicle crime. The statistics are based on thefts reported to police in all 50 states and Washington DC.

All 50 states had fewer thefts than the year before. In the first half of 2026, 77.81 vehicles were stolen per 100,000 people. In the same period in 2025, the figure was 97.33, and in 2024 it was 126.62, according to The Drive. That is a drop of almost 40 percent in two years.

Largest drop in Washington DC

Washington DC had the largest drop. There, 1,262 vehicles were stolen in the first half of the year, compared with 2,641 in the same period the year before. That is 52 percent fewer. Tennessee fell by 42 percent, from 7,754 to 4,528 thefts. Vermont fell by 37 percent. New Hampshire and Colorado fell by 35 percent each. Florida, New Mexico, Nevada, Kansas, Iowa and Missouri all fell by 30 percent or more.

California had the most thefts, 57,821. The Los Angeles metro area had 21,540 thefts, 23 percent fewer than the year before. Thefts fell in nine of the ten metro areas with the most stolen vehicles. The Washington metro area fell by 31 percent, Dallas-Fort Worth by 30 percent and Seattle by 27 percent.

Third year of fewer thefts

The decline began in 2024. That year, thefts fell by 17 percent from the peak in 2023, when more than one million vehicles were stolen, according to Insurance Business. At the time, it was the largest drop in a single year in 40 years. In 2025, 659,880 vehicles were stolen. That was 23 percent fewer than in 2024. The level was the lowest in several decades, according to NICB's annual report.

The Council on Criminal Justice is an organization that tracks crime in US cities. In the 32 cities that reported data, car thefts in the first half of 2026 were 20 percent lower than in the same period in 2025. Thefts fell in 27 of the 32 cities. The level was 51 percent below the 2023 peak and about 3 percent below the first half of 2019, before the pandemic.

Car thefts in the US peaked in 1991, at 659 thefts per 100,000 people for the full year. By 2019, the figure had fallen to 220. We have previously written about how car thefts in Sweden have fallen sharply since 1990. Other crimes are also falling in the US. We have also written about the largest drop in violent crime and murder in the US since 1937.

Cooperation and cars that are harder to steal

NICB's chief operating officer, Tim Slater, attributes the drop to long-term cooperation among law enforcement, insurers, auto theft prevention authorities and other partners. He says continued investment in that cooperation is needed to keep thefts down.

Carmakers have also made cars harder to steal. Many Hyundai and Kia models from 2011 to 2022 had no engine immobilizer. That made them easy to steal, and the method for stealing them spread on social media. In 2023, the manufacturers began updating the cars' software. The share of all stolen vehicles that were Hyundais or Kias fell from 21 percent in 2023 to 16 percent in 2024 and 14 percent in 2025.

Some states have toughened their laws. In Colorado, every car theft has counted as a felony since 2023, regardless of the car's value. Before that, stealing a car worth $2,000 or less counted as a misdemeanor. In the first half of 2026, thefts in Colorado fell by 35 percent.

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