Free newsletter with fact-based optimistic news about technology, science, and human progress with the angry optimist, Mathias Sundin. If you are not a subscriber, become one here.

🔋 If you make it there, you make it anywhere

No other publication has followed the project for so long, so closely.

What Jonas Birgersson is building in Lund is called EnergyNet, which is part of the Energy Society. A new power grid built on the same logic as the internet. That is, many small grids connected into one large one, with batteries as the lubricant.

Long-time readers of Warp News have been able to follow the project from the start.

I have written about it several times, and all the articles are here.

That is why it is so much fun that another, slightly larger, publication has noticed the energy transformation smoldering in southern Sweden. In fact, it is the world's biggest daily newspaper, The New York Times, that is writing (free guest link) about it:

"This week, Mr. Birgersson spoke about the project at Climate Week in New York. But experts around the world have already taken notice. Kingsmill Bond, a director of Ember, a global energy think tank in London, called Mr. Birgersson's project 'an idea whose time has come.'"

I wasn't in New York last week, but I was in Lund. There I spoke with two of the people working on the project, Jonas Bohlin and Staffan Ekholm. Staffan worked with Birgersson, or Birger as they call him, back in the 90s. Back then, on the rise of the internet. They showed me how EnergyNet is already starting to become a network like the internet, where different players can build things.

A report will follow in a couple of weeks or so.

No PS article

Since I'm in the middle of switching platforms for Warp News, I haven't written a Premium Supporter article this week. But the news is below as usual.

Mathias Sundin
The Angry Optimist

💡 Fact-based optimistic news of the week

🍷 Americans' drinking remains at the lowest level since 1939

54 percent of Americans say they drink alcohol, matching last year's low and the lowest figure since measurements began in 1939. The share who say they sometimes drink too much has fallen to 13 percent, compared with 35 percent in 1989.

Read more on Warp News

🧠 Meningitis deaths among young children have fallen by two thirds since 1990

Since 2015 alone, the meningitis mortality rate has dropped by 25.4 percent, and it is falling in every age group. Vaccines against the bacteria that cause the disease account for a large part of the decline.

Read more on Warp News

📉 Suicides in the EU have fallen by almost 15 percent in ten years

The suicide rate in the EU fell from 12.2 to 10.4 per 100,000 residents between 2013 and 2023. The rate continued to decline between 2022 and 2023, from 10.6 to 10.4 per 100,000. The EU is investing more than €1.2 billion in mental health.

Read more on Warp News

🛩️ Self-flying plane crosses the US without the pilot needing to step in

An aircraft equipped with Joby Aviation's autonomy technology flew more than 3,100 miles across the United States without the pilot on board needing to intervene at any point. The aircraft handled taxiing, takeoff, navigation and landing on its own throughout the journey.

Read more on Warp News

💥 Driverless cars crash 68 percent less than human drivers

Waymo's driverless robotaxis were involved in 68 percent fewer crashes and 81 percent fewer injury crashes than human drivers, an independent study from IIHS shows. Automatic emergency braking that recognizes pedestrians cuts pedestrian crashes by 27 percent and rear-end crashes by 50 percent.

Read more on Warp News

🧒 Children developed better as air got cleaner, 20-year study shows

Children in New York scored higher on tests of memory, problem-solving and language as air pollution declined. Levels of fine particles and nitrogen dioxide in the city halved between 1998 and 2016.

Read more on Warp News

✉️ Get a dose of fact-based, free, optimism once a week

Every week, we send out a free newsletter with fact-based, optimistic news about technology, science, and human progress.

If you're not a subscriber yet, you are welcome to become one!

If you like this newsletter, please forward it to a friend and ask them to subscribe. It's free and arrives once a week.

🎤 Talk on AI

Let me help your organization level up on AI.

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Free newsletter with fact-based optimistic news about technology, science, and human progress with the angry optimist, Mathias Sundin. If you are not a subscriber, become one here.

🥈 First to be second out of the gate

I have a strange ability. When a new technology appears, I’m not among the very first users. I’m not one of the tech geeks who work their way through all the problems and growing pains. But as soon as the technology moves beyond that stage, I somehow stumble across it.

It has happened again and again. I didn’t use GPT-3, the model that came before ChatGPT. You needed a special login and it was a bit cumbersome. That was enough to stop me, even though I knew GPT-3 existed. But as soon as it was released as ChatGPT and all you needed was a chat box, I was there among the very first.

I’m never first out of the gate, but I’m almost always the first to be second out of the gate.

I’m not an early adopter of technology. I’m an early adopter of working technology.

The users who are there first are important. They help iron out the technology’s early problems and create its first market. But when it’s time to reach the rest of us, they risk being too geeky for us to understand them. There are exceptions who manage to be early geeks while still explaining things to mere mortals, like Joakim Jardenberg. Or they have already moved on to the next technology.

When you do what I do, being the first to be second out of the gate is a very good position to be in. What I’m really watching is a transition: from technology for enthusiasts to technology for ambitious everyday users.

And right now, we are at exactly that kind of moment.

When OpenAI released ChatGPT-6 Astra, we went from powerful but cumbersome technology to technology that is very powerful and much easier to use.

That’s what I write about in this week’s article.

Mathias Sundin
The Angry Optimist

💻 The biggest AI leap since ChatGPT launched

I rarely write about new AI models, but ChatGPT Astra gives those of us who are ordinary AI users several powerful and genuinely useful new capabilities.

Read on Warp News

💡 Fact-based optimistic news of the week

🥬 Fully automated farm in Norway cuts food waste with lettuce that lasts 12 weeks

No human touches the lettuce in the facility outside Oslo, from sowing to the finished package in the store. Shelf life increases from 2 to 4 weeks to 12 weeks, which reduces waste in stores. The growing takes place indoors year-round, without pesticides and without imports.

Read more on Warp News

🚇 Delhi's subway has grown past New York's and cost less than one of New York's tunnels

In March, Delhi's subway became longer than New York's, at a total cost of roughly $10 billion, less than New York spent to build a 3.5-mile tunnel. The system is 33 percent solar-powered, captures brake energy in batteries, and 99.9 percent of its trains ran on time last year.

Read more on Warp News

💉 Ebola spread is slowing and vaccines are on the way

The spread of Ebola is declining in most of the affected provinces in Congo, according to the WHO. A large Phase 3 trial of Ebola vaccines is expected to start within the next few weeks. Frontline workers will be offered a vaccine in a separate study that starts within days.

Read more on Warp News

🌱 Galápagos plant that was down to six individuals is recovering

In 2007, only six Galápagos snapdragon plants remained. Today, 28 adult plants grow at two sites on Isabela island. In 2024, the plant returned to Caleta Tagus, where the only known specimen was collected in 1962.

Read more on Warp News

🏭 India's coal power has stopped growing for the first time in more than 50 years

India is using more electricity than ever, and demand grew by 7 percent over two years. Yet the country is not producing more electricity from coal. Clean energy met the entire increase. India is the world's third-largest emitter of carbon dioxide.

Read more on Warp News

💣 Cambodia cleared mines from an area 13 times the size of Manhattan in six months

The Cambodian Mine Action Centre cleared 75,132 hectares of land contaminated by landmines in the first half of the year, reaching 82% of its annual target. The number of people killed or injured by mines has fallen from more than 4,000 a year in the 1990s to fewer than 100 a year.

Read more on Warp News

✉️ Get a dose of fact-based, free, optimism once a week

Every week, we send out a free newsletter with fact-based, optimistic news about technology, science, and human progress.

If you're not a subscriber yet, you are welcome to become one!

If you like this newsletter, please forward it to a friend and ask them to subscribe. It's free and arrives once a week.

🎤 Talk on AI

Let me help your organization level up on AI.

Read more at mathiassundin.org.

Free newsletter with fact-based optimistic news about technology, science, and human progress with the angry optimist, Mathias Sundin. If you are not a subscriber, become one here.

😶‍🌫️ Into the fog

First, I have to apologize for this newsletter arriving a day later than usual.

I wish I could blame AI, the government or Amtrak, but unfortunately the only one to blame is me. I had a brain fart. I've been traveling and giving talks the past few days, and for some reason I thought the newsletter was finished and scheduled. It wasn't.

Anyway, here it is.

At least I managed to publish an article on Tuesday about the pessimism fog.

Right now the media is full of the dangers of AI. Unfortunately not the real problems (which of course exist), but the fantasy of humanity's extinction.

This kind of panic creates a fog where it's easy to get lost. You no longer see a technology's positive qualities and the solutions it offers.

When I compare other news outlets' AI coverage with Warp News, the difference is striking. With us, you read about cars so good at driving themselves that they don't need a steering wheel (and are well on their way to becoming considerably safer than human-driven cars), AI that solved one of mathematics' hardest problems, AI that has created about one million new jobs in the US so far, and AI that is good at seeing through disinformation.

But right now, much of this disappears in the pessimism fog. The phenomenon isn't new, and that's what I write about in this week's article.

Mathias Sundin
The Angry Optimist

🌫️ The pessimism fog is thick right now

The doomsday drums are beating again, and the Nobel laureate who winged it with total confidence.

Read on Warp News

💡 Fact-based optimistic news of the week

⚰️ Homicides per capita have fallen 14 percent since 2015

The global homicide rate dropped from 5.9 to 5.1 victims per 100,000 people between 2015 and 2024. In the ten years before 2015, the figure held steady at around 6 victims per 100,000 people. If the decline continues at the same pace, the rate will reach 4.5 victims per 100,000 people by 2030.

Read more on Warp News

🐟 20,000 salmon return to the Klamath after the dams came down

In August 2024, excavation crews breached the last of four dams on the Klamath River in far northern California. For the first time in over a century, salmon could swim past the sites where the dams had stood. Chinook have recolonized close to 90 percent of their former range in the river system.

Read more on Warp News

🧮 AI agents solved one of mathematics' hardest problems in 88 hours

10,000 AI agents found a solution to the Navier-Stokes problem, which mathematicians have worked on for decades. The problem is one of six Millennium Problems each carrying a prize of $1 million. If the result is confirmed, it is the first time AI has solved a major open problem in mathematics.

Read more on Warp News

📊 AI has created a million new jobs in the US

AI has so far created around one million new jobs in the US, roughly five times more than the approximately 200,000 layoffs linked to the technology. Several occupations singled out as particularly exposed are growing instead. The number of paralegals rose by about 11 percent between 2023 and 2025.

Read more on Warp News

🕵️ AI chatbots saw through Russian and Chinese disinformation in three out of four cases

Six chatbots and four search engines got 30 questions built on false claims spread by Russia, China and Iran. The chatbots debunked the claims on average about three times out of four. The chatbots failed less often than search engine results at challenging the false information.

Read more on Warp News

🚕 Tesla's taxi without a steering wheel or pedals is now running in Austin

Unlike competitors Waymo and Zoox, which combine cameras with radar and lidar, Tesla builds the entire system on cameras. The company has 45 Cybercabs registered with the Texas motor vehicle authority and a total of 256 robotaxis operating without safety drivers across six cities.

Read more on Warp News

✉️ Get a dose of fact-based, free, optimism once a week

Every week, we send out a free newsletter with fact-based, optimistic news about technology, science, and human progress.

If you're not a subscriber yet, you are welcome to become one!

If you like this newsletter, please forward it to a friend and ask them to subscribe. It's free and arrives once a week.

🎤 Talk on AI

Let me help your organization level up on AI.

Read more at mathiassundin.org.

Free newsletter with fact-based optimistic news about technology, science, and human progress with the angry optimist, Mathias Sundin. If you are not a subscriber, become one here.

⚖️ This is how unbalanced the news media is

Last week I presented the beta version of The News Scale, which assesses whether a headline and lead paragraph is positive, neutral or negative.

It has now been running for almost a month and has assessed around 8,500 news items, from 24 news outlets in 15 countries. Even though the results are highly preliminary, there is indeed a lot that is interesting to read from them.

The imbalance is large. 66 percent are negative, 20 percent neutral and 14 percent positive.

Not particularly surprising, but one observation is that the negative balance is constant. Every single measurement day, weekday or holiday, no matter what happens, there are four to five times as many negative news items as positive ones.

Every headline and lead paragraph is rated on a scale from -2 (very negative) to +2 (very positive). On the five-point scale, 23 percent of the headlines were rated very negative, but only 1.7 percent very positive.

Of the 8,451 different news headlines, only 85 were about progress. For example a scientific advance, reduced poverty or a measurable improvement in society. Progress made up one percent of the news.

There are a lot more interesting results. I have written an article about it: ⚖️ This is what the News Scale says about the (im)balance in news media

There you will see, among other things, which of these 24 news outlets is the most negative and the most positive.

Mathias Sundin
The Angry Optimist

⚖️ This is what the News Scale says about the (im)balance in news media

8,500 headlines and leads from 24 news outlets in 15 countries have been assessed on how positive, negative or neutral they are.

Read on Warp News

💡 Fact-based optimistic news of the week

🌏 Global greenhouse gas emissions have almost stopped growing

Emissions rose 0.2 percent compared with the first half of 2025. Between 2015 and 2023, they grew by an average of 1.1 percent per year. China and the United States, the world's two largest emitters, saw their emissions fall by 0.3 and 0.4 percent respectively.

Read more on Warp News

🚗 Electric car sales rise again and set records in 50 countries

Electric car sales rose 4 percent in the second quarter of 2026 compared with the same quarter last year, while total global car sales fell by around 5 percent in the first half of the year.

Read more on Warp News

🌳 Amazon deforestation lowest in 13 years

Deforestation fell 36 percent from the previous year and was 55.6 percent below the average of the past ten years. That is according to new satellite data from Brazil's National Institute for Space Research, INPE. The decline has continued since 2023.

Read more on Warp News

🥵 Texas handled record electricity demand in the heat thanks to solar and batteries

High temperatures pushed electricity demand in Texas to record levels in late July. The old record was broken two days in a row. Still they did not need to ask residents to conserve electricity. Such calls have otherwise been common during the hottest months in recent years.

Read more on Warp News

💸 Africa's own payment system reaches 28 countries: transfers in seconds instead of days and billions in saved fees

Payments between African countries have previously taken days and gone through US dollars and banks in New York. With PAPSS, the money moves in seconds, in local currencies. The detour via the dollar is estimated to cost around 5 billion dollars a year in avoidable exchange fees.

Read more on Warp News

📉 Emissions from deforestation and land use have fallen 32 percent since the 2000s

Until 1999, emissions held steady at around 6.6 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide per year. Between 2015 and 2024 they averaged 5 billion tonnes, and in 2025 they fell to 4.1 billion tonnes. The main reasons are that permanent deforestation has decreased and that new forest absorbs carbon dioxide.

Read more on Warp News

✉️ Get a dose of fact-based, free, optimism once a week

Every week, we send out a free newsletter with fact-based, optimistic news about technology, science, and human progress.

If you're not a subscriber yet, you are welcome to become one!

If you like this newsletter, please forward it to a friend and ask them to subscribe. It's free and arrives once a week.

🎤 Talk on AI

Let me help your organization level up on AI.

Read more at mathiassundin.org.

Free newsletter with fact-based optimistic news about technology, science, and human progress with the angry optimist, Mathias Sundin. If you are not a subscriber, become one here.

⚖️ The News Scale measures the imbalance in the news media

One of the things I knocked together over the summer is The News Scale.

As a subscriber, you already know that Warp News exists to contribute to a better balance between negative and positive news in the feed.

But how unbalanced are the news media?

That is exactly what the News Scale looks at. Every day for three weeks it has evaluated headlines and leads from 26 news outlets in 15 countries, more than 7,600 in total.

That the tilt toward negative news is large surprises no one.

But there is actually an interesting thing to note about the selection of news compared with the tone of the news.

This is a beta version that I hope to improve going forward.

There is one thing you as a reader can help with. Right now an AI does the assessment of headline and lead, something large language models have proven to be very good at. But you are also welcome to go to the site and rate five news items on a scale from very negative to very positive. That way we can compare with the AI's answers and improve the assessment over time.

How the News Scale is built and how it works, I write about here. If you want to go straight to the results and help rate news, the News Scale is here.

Mathias Sundin
The Angry Optimist

🏆 This week's Premium Supporter article

⚖️ The News Scale (which measures how balanced the news media are)

That the news media are one long doomscroll makes us all a little dumb. But how unbalanced are they? I have built a news scale.

Read on Warp News

💡 Fact-based optimistic news of the week

🏊‍♀️ 50 years ago no one dared dip a toe in the Detroit River, now people fish, paddle and swim there

Friends of the Detroit River is now launching the 14th and final priority habitat restoration project in the Detroit River. Thirteen are already complete. Every spring, millions of fish move up through the river to spawn.

Read more on Warp News

🔥 The world has never burned this little since measurements began

Wildfires in Europe and North America are more extensive than before. At the same time, the global figures show a different picture. During the first half of 2026, global emissions from fires were the lowest ever measured, according to the European climate center Copernicus.

Read more on Warp News

📉 HIV infections and AIDS deaths at lowest level in over 30 years

Seven countries have reduced new infections by almost 80 percent since 2010. New prevention medicines offer protection close to that of a vaccine.

Read more on Warp News

🚗 Transport emissions are falling in Australia, thanks to EVs

Australia's transport emissions fell for the second consecutive year outside the pandemic, driven by growing EV sales and lower petrol consumption. The country's total greenhouse gas emissions dropped 2.1 percent in 2025 and are now 24.5 percent below 2005 levels.

Read more on Warp News

☀️ Solar replaces coal as the world's largest source of electricity within six years

Solar overtakes coal as the world's largest source of electricity generation within six years, according to research firm BloombergNEF. Solar is the cheapest source of new electricity generation. Coal costs almost twice as much.

Read more on Warp News

🌊 After decades of drought, groundwater south of the Sahara has risen by 13 feet

The Sahel is the semi-arid belt south of the Sahara, stretching around 500 miles wide from Senegal in the west to Ethiopia in the east. More than 150 million people live there. In the 1970s and 1980s the region was hit by severe drought. Now the area has more water than it has had for decades.

Read more on Warp News

✉️ Get a dose of fact-based, free, optimism once a week

Every week, we send out a free newsletter with fact-based, optimistic news about technology, science, and human progress.

If you're not a subscriber yet, you are welcome to become one!

If you like this newsletter, please forward it to a friend and ask them to subscribe. It's free and arrives once a week.

🎤 Talk on AI

Let me help your organization level up on AI.

Read more at mathiassundin.org.

Free newsletter with fact-based optimistic news about technology, science, and human progress with the angry optimist, Mathias Sundin. If you are not a subscriber, become one here.

🦾 AI isn't just wow anymore

Since ChatGPT was released, I've gotten used to saying or feeling "wow, this is magic!" almost every week.

Mixed with a facepalm when AI does something obviously stupid or claims something completely wrong.

Both categories are still around, but in recent months AI has also started handling perfectly ordinary and often tedious everyday tasks.

That's wow too, really, but it's crowded out by a feeling of relief. Not having to spend time on brain-dead work.

In my case, it has also helped me with a fear that has constantly nagged at me.

I write about that in this week's Premium Supporter piece (open and free for everyone to read).

Mathias Sundin
The Angry Optimist

🏆 This week's Premium Supporter article

🦾 AI is finally starting to help with grunt work (and my biggest fear)

There's a fear that constantly nags at the back of my mind. It makes me check and double-check, compulsively, and it never helps. Then one day it was gone.

Read on Warp News

💡 Fact-based optimistic news of the week

💉 937 billion dollars in vaccine costs have saved 154 million lives and 15,000 billion dollars

That means every dollar invested has returned 16.06 dollars, and in low-income countries the return is even higher: 23.63 dollars per dollar invested.

Read more on Warp News

🌌 The universe is now being filmed for ten years, and everyone gets access to the footage

The Vera Rubin Observatory is now photographing the entire southern sky and making all the data openly available. During a single test run, it discovered over 11,000 previously unknown asteroids, 33 of them near Earth.

Read more on Warp News

🦝 The numbat was nearly extinct, now it is no longer classified as endangered

The numbat was close to extinction. By the late 1970s, only around 300 individuals remained. After more than 40 years of conservation work, the population has grown to between 2,000 and 3,000 individuals. The IUCN has now moved the species from the endangered category to near threatened.

Read more on Warp News

👦 American teenagers are drinking, smoking, and fighting less and less

An American teenager today is about half as likely to die as a teenager in 1990.

Read more on Warp News

🚑 261,000 Americans have their medical debt erased thanks to nonprofit

A total of $550 million in medical debt has been paid off through a donation. Every $10 donated removes an average of $1,000 in debt. The organization behind the effort has erased more than $40 billion in all 50 states so far.

Read more on Warp News

👮 Largest drop in violent crime and murder in the US since 1937

Violent crime in the US fell by 9.3 percent in 2025, according to preliminary FBI figures. Murder fell by 18.1 percent and robbery by 18.5 percent.

Read more on Warp News

✉️ Get a dose of fact-based, free, optimism once a week

Every week, we send out a free newsletter with fact-based, optimistic news about technology, science, and human progress.

If you're not a subscriber yet, you are welcome to become one!

If you like this newsletter, please forward it to a friend and ask them to subscribe. It's free and arrives once a week.

🎤 Talk on AI

Let me help your organization level up on AI.

Read more at mathiassundin.org.

Free newsletter with fact-based optimistic news about technology, science, and human progress with the angry optimist, Mathias Sundin. If you are not a subscriber, become one here.

🔨 I'm all thumbs, but I'm building houses

I'm not particularly handy, but this summer I've built several houses.

That's how it feels.

It's not houses I've built, but programs on my computer. Even though I know as little about programming as I do about carpentry.

On vacation I got the idea to build a game for myself. First I made it in Lovable, which turned out unexpectedly well. First I made it in Lovable, which turned out unexpectedly well, but with some limitations. So I moved on to heavier stuff: the coding tools in ChatGPT and Claude.

I tried them last winter, but was scared off by the hassle and the need to work in a terminal window. It felt like I was sitting at my dad's computer in 1985.

But now they had the same look as ChatGPT and Claude themselves, and were much more user-friendly for those of us who don't sit in the dark in a hoodie all night.

So I rebuilt the game and it turned out even better. After that it just went poof, and my computer is now filling up with programs both useful and useless.

That's why it feels like all thumbs-me can suddenly build houses.

And the really cool thing is that you and everyone else can do it too. All we need are ideas and to describe them in our own language.

Maybe you think you lack such ideas? You don't.
Or that it seems hard? It isn't.

That's what I write about in this week's Premium Supporter article (open to everyone).

Mathias Sundin
The Angry Optimist

🔨 I can't do carpentry, but suddenly I can build houses

I've built an entire cottage village! And you can too.

Read on Warp News

💡 Fact-based optimistic news of the week

📜 Text charred in the Vesuvius eruption of 79 AD, read in full 2,000 years later

Researchers have read a complete scroll from Herculaneum. The scrolls were carbonised by the heat and are so fragile they cannot be physically unrolled without being destroyed. Instead, high-resolution scans and computational techniques are used to virtually unwrap the scrolls.

Read more on Warp News

💡 Light is 16,000 times cheaper than in the 14th century

One million lumen-hours cost around £34,000 in the early 14th century. By 2023, the same amount of light cost £2.15. The price drop amounts to a 16,000-fold decline, measured in constant prices. New lamps, new fuels, and expanded electricity grids made the development possible.

Read more on Warp News

🚭 Tobacco use in India has halved in twenty years

At the turn of the millennium, about one in five adult Indians smoked. That share has roughly halved since then. Almost half of all adults used some form of tobacco at the time. That figure has also roughly halved. The decline applies to both men and women, unlike the trend in some other countries.

Read more on Warp News

🚗 Electric car sales in Latin America have gone from near zero to rapid growth

Five years ago, almost no one in Latin America bought an electric car. In Colombia, electric cars now account for 10 percent of new car sales. In Mexico, the share rose from 2 to 7 percent in a single year.

Read more on Warp News

🛩️ The world's largest electric hybrid aircraft has flown for the first time – the electricity cost five dollars

Heart Aerospace has flown the X1 demonstrator, the largest battery-electric aircraft ever and as large as a regional airliner. The electricity for the flight cost about $5. The X1 is the forerunner of the 30-seat ES-30.

Read more on Warp News

📊 Payroll data from millions of Americans: no rise in unemployment due to AI

Since generative AI reached widespread use, many have warned that the technology would wipe out jobs on a large scale. Researchers at Stanford have analyzed payroll records for millions of Americans. Employment has grown by about 6% since late 2022, including in the occupations most exposed to AI.

Read more on Warp News

✉️ Get a dose of fact-based, free, optimism once a week

Every week, we send out a free newsletter with fact-based, optimistic news about technology, science, and human progress.

If you're not a subscriber yet, you are welcome to become one!

If you like this newsletter, please forward it to a friend and ask them to subscribe. It's free and arrives once a week.

🎤 Talk on AI

Let me help your organization level up on AI.

Read more at mathiassundin.org.

Free newsletter with fact-based optimistic news about technology, science, and human progress with the angry optimist, Mathias Sundin. If you are not a subscriber, become one here.

⏩ The summer is over – let's get going!

I spent a week in Poland with my son, brother, and mother. There we traveled through our family's history. My grandfather was from Poland. I've written about him before.

I've also been digging deep into AI and didactics. That is, the study of how teaching is designed so that people learn, and how AI can be used in it and affects it. More on that to come.

Now the summer is over and we're back to news every day and the newsletter every week.

Mathias Sundin
The Angry Optimist

💡 Fact-based optimistic news of the week

🌾 Indian scientists have bred rice that handles both flood and drought

India has bred two rice varieties for opposite water problems. One yields nearly 50 percent more in flood years with no penalty in normal years. The other yields up to 35 percent more in dry conditions and grows in dry soil, without flooded paddies. The poorest farmers gain the most.

Read more on Warp News

🐚 Laos pushes back parasitic disease to below one percent

In the worst-affected areas of Laos, the share of people infected with the snail-borne parasitic disease schistosomiasis has dropped to below one percent, down from over 40 percent in some areas in 2003.

Read more on Warp News

🪨 New method halves the cost of extracting lithium from rock

Researchers at MIT have developed a process that dissolves lithium minerals at room temperature instead of above 1,800 degrees. The method is estimated to cost half as much as today's extraction of lithium from hard rock. The process recycles its own chemicals, bringing waste close to zero.

Read more on Warp News

🛫 Autonomous system designed to fly itself from takeoff to touchdown

Merlin's autonomous flight system is built to handle the entire flight, from takeoff to touchdown, and can reduce crew workload. The technology is designed to fly several types of large aircraft, including commercial jets and military transport planes.

Read more on Warp News

✂️ New CRISPR method seeks out and destroys cancer cells

In lab tests the method destroyed the mutated cells but left healthy cells almost entirely unharmed, even though they differed by just a single building block in their DNA. The technique is programmable, which means a new mutation only requires researchers to create a new guide RNA.

Read more on Warp News

🚧 Researchers build material atom by atom, long considered impossible

Researchers have placed individual carbon units at exact locations on a silicon surface and built structures atom by atom, something dismissed for decades as unworkable. In most attempts the carbon landed correctly, with an accuracy of up to 97 percent.

Read more on Warp News

🧬 The bluebuck went extinct in 1799, now it is being de-extincted

The bluebuck was the first large African mammal driven to extinction by humans in modern times. The company Colossal Biosciences is now working to bring the species back using genetic technology. The work is building methods that can also help other threatened antelope species.

Read more on Warp News

✉️ Get a dose of fact-based, free, optimism once a week

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📰 An unacceptable failure

It would be so easy for news media to be more balanced.

Perhaps the very lowest-hanging fruit is press releases and articles from international bodies and universities.

Like this week, when we write about how deaths from intestinal infections have dropped by two-thirds since 1990.

I didn't dig this out of some database myself. It's CIDRAP (Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy) that wrote an accessible article about a new research study.

And it's no trivial matter either. The number of deaths per year has fallen by almost two and a half million people.

Why isn't this news in EVERY single news outlet?

I can't find it at CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post, or The Guardian. Nor can I find it at the BBC, Reuters, AP, NPR, NBC, ABC, CBS, USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, Bloomberg, Al Jazeera, or The Economist.

This imbalance makes us all a little dumber.

We get a skewed perception of reality and make worse decisions.

And it would be so easy for the news media to at least get a little better.

Mathias Sundin
The Angry Optimist

💡 Fact-based optimistic news of the week

📉 Deaths from intestinal infections have fallen by two-thirds since 1990, from 3.7 to 1.3 million

The rotavirus vaccine, introduced globally in 2006, is up to 98 percent effective against severe illness in infants in high-income countries. The share of deaths affecting children under five fell from 53 percent in 1990 to 30 percent in 2023.

Read more on Warp News

🛰️ A satellite read its own images, could keep watch on Earth in real time

A satellite identified what it was looking for on its own, without analysts on the ground. It was the first time an AI that both understands language and reads images was used in space. The technology can reduce the amount of raw data that analysts have to sift through today.

Read more on Warp News

🔬 Most of what's inside the cell is invisible, a new laser method could change that

Today's cryo-electron microscopes reveal only about 10% of human proteins, and less than 1% inside living cells. A new technique sharply improves image contrast using a laser 100 million times brighter than the Sun's surface. Researchers estimate over 50% of the cell's proteins could become visible.

Read more on Warp News

📉 Child marriage and intimate partner violence continue to decline in India

The share of girls married off as children has fallen to 20.1 percent. The share of women subjected to violence by their partner has dropped to 22.3 percent. Intimate partner violence has decreased by nearly seven percentage points since the previous survey.

Read more on Warp News

🏍️ Electric motorcycles accelerate in Africa

Industry leader Spiro has delivered more than 100,000 electric motorcycles and built over 2,500 battery swapping stations. In Kenya, electric motorcycles now account for at least 16 percent of all motorcycle sales.

Read more on Warp News

💵 Labor poverty in Mexico falls to 30.7 percent

The share of Mexico's population whose labor income is not enough to cover the food fell to 30.7 percent in the first quarter of 2026. The decline was 3.2 percentage points compared with the same period in 2025. The drop is seen both in rural areas and in cities.

Read more on Warp News

🪪 Millions in Benin now have an official identity, opening access to school and banking

In 2017, about 20% of Benin's population had no official papers. Now, nearly 99% of Benin's population is registered in a biometric ID system. An official identity provides access to school, a bank account, credit, and a business of one's own.

Read more on Warp News

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📚 What are you reading this summer?

As is tradition, I'm sharing my summer reading tips. Among them a book about a fifty-year-old and one about superintelligence.

What are you reading this summer? Would love to know!

Mathias Sundin
The Angry Optimist

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📚 The angry optimist's summer reading tips

A handful of books that will hopefully make your summer better.

Read more on Warp News

💡 Fact-based optimistic news of the week

⛽ Petrol cars have vanished from China's ten best-selling vehicles

In May, all of China's ten best-selling cars were electric vehicles or plug-in hybrids. Petrol cars have completely vanished from the list. Sales of new petrol cars in China have fallen by 41.8 percent compared with a year earlier.

Read more on Warp News

📉 Australia's gas use has peaked and is now declining

Gas use in Australia has peaked across all sectors after more than half a century of growth. Gas for electricity generation has fallen 11 percent since 2014, and residential gas use peaked in 2020.

Read more on Warp News

☀️ Solar overtakes gas in Asia

Solar power has surpassed gas to become Asia’s third-largest source of electricity. Solar generation in Asia has nearly quadrupled since 2020, reaching 1,727 terawatt hours over the twelve months to April 2026.

Read more on Warp News

🦏 Satellites track animals from space to detect poachers in real time

When a poacher approaches, the animals flee in patterns that can be recognized, and tags on the animals pass the signal on so rangers can intervene. By 2027, six receivers in orbit will be able to receive data on animal movements in real time across the entire planet.

Read more on Warp News

🇺🇳 The number of refugees in the world fell last year for the first time in a decade

The global number of refugees dropped by 3 percent during 2025 to 41.6 million. A total of 14.7 million displaced people returned to their home or origin areas during the year. Nearly 46,000 stateless people gained citizenship across 24 countries.

Read more on Warp News

🌊 Chad's capital weathered record water levels without major damage

N'Djamena sits where the Chari and Logone rivers meet, leaving it highly exposed to flooding. During the 2024 rainy season the city protected 1.5 million residents even as rivers hit record levels, after clearing 217 miles of drainage and deploying 12 mobile pumps.

Read more on Warp News

🤑 New research: Freer economies grew without harming the environment

A study of 49 economic liberalizations shows that GDP per person rose 16 percent within ten years. Total greenhouse gas emissions did not increase, and deaths from air pollution declined. After the year 2000, emissions fell both per person and per dollar of economic output.

Read more on Warp News

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🇪🇺 A major opportunity for Europe

Jonas Birgersson’s EnergyNet is the power grid’s equivalent of the internet. Built on the same architecture, with thousands of small networks instead of one large one.

Once built out, it could give us an abundance of cheap and clean electricity, while also providing a very robust system.

It has, admittedly, been clear for a long time that the EU needs to get its act together, increase growth, strengthen its defense capabilities, and improve its competitiveness. A couple of years ago, the Draghi report forcefully argued that regulation had gone too far.

Since Donald Trump returned to the White House, it has become urgent.

EnergyNet can be built all over the world, but the EU has one advantage: the area has already been deregulated — unlike almost the entire rest of the world.

A few years ago, a ban was removed, making it legal to run electricity cables between properties and thereby share energy.

This gives the EU the opportunity to become the first in the world with EnergyNet. The EU would get the world’s lowest energy costs and the world’s most robust power grid, which can be filled with as much solar, wind, and batteries as we want.

For the third time, I have written a longer update on what is happening in the world-unique Project Energy Society.

In short, things are moving fast. Two connected properties are becoming ten, and in seven other locations in Sweden, plans are underway to build EnergyNet.

I also write about a force that — much like in Star Wars — is there in the background, almost invisible, but increasingly shaping our present and future.

Mathias Sundin
The Angry Optimist

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🔋 Part 3: Towards the energy society – Energy Valley and the power of power electronics

It's an ordinary Thursday in an ordinary conference room. But something unique is taking shape there. With the help of a power few people know about, but one that helps you better understand the future.

Read more on Warp News

💡 Fact-based optimistic news of the week

🚰 The share of polluted drinking water in the US has been cut in half

The share of readings in American drinking water that exceeded health limits fell by half between 2003 and 2019. A new study has mapped 266 million readings of 1,250 different pollutants and shows how investments in water systems lower pollution levels.

Read more on Warp News

🤖 Amazon's new warehouse robot understands plain language

Employees can give the robot instructions the same way they would talk to a colleague. The robot is part of a €10 billion investment to expand Amazon's operations in Europe, a move expected to create 25,000 new jobs.

Read more on Warp News

🔊 Midjourney is building a body scanner that maps the entire body in 60 seconds

A full-body scan with today's MRI takes 60 to 90 minutes. Midjourney's new machine aims to do the same thing in under 60 seconds. The scanner uses a ring of half a million tiny elements that send ultrasound through the body from every direction. The result is a 3D map of the body.

Read more on Warp News

📉 Data centers have lowered Americans' electricity bills

Data centers have lowered Americans' electricity bills. A study shows average prices fell between 2015 and 2024. The reason is that the power system's large fixed costs are spread across more kilowatt-hours when demand rises.

Read more on Warp News

🎗️ No young women died of cervical cancer in England over the past five years

A cross all age groups HPV vaccination is linked to around 200 fewer cervical cancer deaths in England. Among vaccinated women aged 20 to 29, the risk of dying from cervical cancer is estimated to have fallen by at least 81 percent.

Read more on Warp News

🤧 Discovery could lead to drugs against the common cold

Researchers have for the first time determined the structure of the protein 2C as it binds to RNA. The protein is found in rhinovirus, the most common cause of the common cold. The new structure gives researchers more to work from when they design drugs that can inhibit the virus.

Read more on Warp News

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🐳 It works

Until 2010, the world’s mangrove forests were shrinking. This was mainly due to deforestation and conversion to aquaculture, such as shrimp farms, but also other agriculture, as well as buildings and infrastructure.

But in 2010, that changed. Since then, mangrove forests have grown and are now almost back to where they were in the mid-1980s.

A group of researchers reached this conclusion after studying satellite images from the mid-1980s to the early 2020s.

What is the recipe for success?

The researchers do not go into detail, but they mention restoration, protection, and conservation.

I have written news for Warp News for over six years. Quite a large number of those stories have been about how we have managed to reverse a negative trend for animals or nature.

One of my first news stories was about how the blue whale had made a comeback.

Other animal species that have recovered include bison, North American predators, turtles, beavers, and tigers.

Reduced deforestation is another recurring theme, seen in Europe, Sweden, and the Amazon.

These are just a few examples. Scroll through our categories nature, environment, deforestation, and animal species, and you will see.

A recurring theme in these stories is that conservation efforts have helped. When people actively work to stop decline, protect species, and make recovery easier.

These efforts work! They make a difference!

Of course, many problems remain when it comes to animals and nature, and not all curves are pointing in the right direction. But we know from lots of successful examples that it is possible to turn them around.

🏖️ Summer schedule

The newsletter is now switching to its summer schedule. That means it will be sent every other week, instead of every week.

Mathias Sundin
The Angry Optimist

🏆 This week's Premium Supporter article

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🚀 SpaceX and the new Silk Road of space

Have investors gone crazy, or what are they hoping to get out of buying SpaceX shares at an astronomical valuation?

Read more on Warp News

💡 Fact-based optimistic news of the week

🌳 Mangrove forests declined until 2010, but have grown substantially since

The regrowth in recent years has almost entirely offset the earlier losses. The total area is now only 0.5 percent smaller than in the 1980s. After decades of decline, the area of mangrove forests shifted from net loss to net gain around 2010.

Read more on Warp News

🛫 More and more Africans are traveling within Africa - the fastest tourism growth in the world

Economic growth and rising prosperity in Africa are enabling more and more Africans to travel within their own continent. The number of tourists visiting African countries grew by almost 8 percent last year, the fastest growth in the world.

Read more on Warp News

📉 Australia's power prices fall after record battery rollout

Batteries' share of the electricity grid on Australia's east coast rose from around 3 percent to nearly 10% in one year. From July 2026, power prices will fall, and households could save up to 10%.

Read more on Warp News

🌏 Globally a record number of people are satisfied with the freedom to shape their lives

82% of adults across 138 countries are satisfied with their freedom to choose what they do with their lives, up from 71% two decades ago. The largest gains are in the Balkans, the Caucasus, and Eastern and Central Europe, where the share of satisfied adults has risen from 49% in 2009 to 82% in 2025.

Read more on Warp News

☀️ Solar overtakes coal in US electricity production for the first time

Solar power supplied 12.8 percent of US electricity in May 2026, while coal fell to 12.2 percent. Solar produced 45.5 TWh during the month, 17 percent more than in May 2025. Over five years, solar's share has more than doubled.

Read more on Warp News

🧫 First human treated with method designed to make aged cells behave young again

A treatment that switches on three genes is designed to make old cells behave like young ones. The aim is to regenerate damaged nerve cells in the optic nerve and treat a form of glaucoma. In animal studies, the method has restored vision in mice, with no serious side effects.

Read more on Warp News

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🎨 Like I said

Ever since shortly after ChatGPT was released, I have been going on about how AI unlocks human creativity and potential. It even became an entire book.

Recently, Erik Uppenberg reached out to me with exactly that kind of example.

"I never thought I would make my own comics again," he wrote.

It was easy to believe him, considering he had taken a 34-year break.

Erik created comics as a teenager, but he struggled to motivate himself to do the foundational training required to become truly good at drawing. Sitting down to sketch or do life drawing never appealed to him.

The goal was always the finished comic panel, not the exercises needed to get there. As a result, he often got stuck before the comics were actually made.

Instead, he found another path into the world of comics. He took over the fanzine Seriechock and began writing about comics rather than creating them himself.

But in the spring of 2024, something changed.

When Erik attended a course on AI, he realized that the obstacles that had previously stood in his way were no longer as significant.

Suddenly, both the tools and the desire to return to making comics were there, after a break of 34 years.

So now he has released Välart issue number 6. You can read more about his work and buy it through his Facebook page. (With AI's help, he could also create a nice website and a simple ordering system... just saying =)

That does not mean you can simply push a button and get a good comic. He has put in hundreds of hours of work, not least to make the visual style consistent throughout the entire publication. And of course there is also a story to tell, dialogue to write, and then the comic has to be printed, sold, and distributed.

But with AI, he was able to get past a barrier that had limited his potential.

A new world order

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about how this is our chance to help shape what the next world and world order will look like, now that the old one is beginning to come apart.

Here are my thoughts on what the guiding principle of the next world order should be: 🗺️ A small proposal for a new world order

Mathias Sundin
The Angry Optimist

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🗺️ A small proposal for a new world order

The modern world is based on the nation state. The next step is to base it on human beings.

Read more on Warp News

💡 Fact-based optimistic news of the week

🫘 Injectable mini livers could become an alternative to transplantation

Researchers at MIT have developed mini livers that can be injected into the body and take over functions from a failing liver. The technology could help patients who are currently not healthy enough for a transplant.

Read more on Warp News

👕 Filter captures 97% of microfibres from the wash

Washing machines release large amounts of microfibres that end up in waterways and oceans. A filter fitted to the washing machine collects the fibres before they reach the drain. The filter captures 97 percent of microfibres and is now sold in more than 30 European markets and the UK.

Read more on Warp News

☢️ Microreactor went from idea to chain reaction in under a year

American nuclear power has long been marked by delays, where a single reactor design could take a decade to test. Antares' microreactor Mark-0 started a stable nuclear reaction in under twelve months. That made them the first private company to take an advanced reactor there within the program.

Read more on Warp News

🦾 AI has designed an entirely new kind of vaccine for the first time

Ordinary vaccines target a current strain of a virus and quickly become outdated when it mutates. The new method instead makes it possible to design a vaccine that protects against an entire virus family at once.This means the vaccine can provide protection even against future mutations.

Read more on Warp News

🧠 Several advances are changing the fight against Alzheimer's

For the first time, simple blood tests can show whether a person has Alzheimer's disease. Two drugs that slow the progression of the disease have been approved by the FDA. The number of patients researchers can screen for clinical trials has risen from a couple per day to several hundred.

Read more on Warp News

🧮 AI solves a math problem that had remained unsolved for 80 years

OpenAI's AI model solved the so-called unit distance problem. The problem was posed by the mathematician Paul Erdős around 80 years ago and had remained unsolved ever since. Several prominent mathematicians confirm that the solution is on par with work produced by humans.

Read more on Warp News

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🎗️ Are we winning the war on cancer?

Using the body’s own defenses against cancer—immunotherapy—was a major medical breakthrough and was rightly awarded the Nobel Prize in 2018.

Today, there are more than 2,500 drugs and programs in development or use based on cancer immunotherapy.

More and more mortality curves for different cancers are starting to look like this one for stomach cancer.

Now another weapon is arriving: cancer vaccines.

A cancer vaccine teaches the immune system to recognize cancer cells. Tumors carry distinctive markers on their surface that set them apart from healthy cells. The vaccine presents these markers to the immune system, enabling it to identify and attack those specific cells.

Another type of vaccine aims to prevent cancer in people with a high inherited risk of developing the disease.

You can read more in this week’s article: Cancer vaccines are coming.

Combine this with what I wrote a few weeks ago about GLP-1 drugs, which not only help people lose weight but also appear to improve health across multiple areas, including reducing the risk of certain cancers.

Taken together, there is a growing body of evidence suggesting that we may be winning the war on cancer—gradually transforming it from one of the leading causes of death into a much smaller threat.

Mathias Sundin
The Angry Optimist

💡 Fact-based optimistic news of the week

🧤 Residue from lab gloves has inflated microplastic counts in the environment

Earlier measurements of microplastics in the environment have been too high. The cause is residue from common lab gloves that was counted as plastic. Now researchers have developed a way to separate glove residue from actual microplastics.

Read more on Warp News

🦾 AI text online has not increased factual errors

The researchers found no statistical link between more AI text and more factual errors online. Fears that writing styles, source links, and meaningful content would deteriorate were not confirmed in the measurements either.

Read more on Warp News

🤑 Swedes have become three times wealthier and also more equal in the 21st century

Median wealth rose by nearly 400 percent between 1999 and 2020. The richest 10 percent reduced their share of total wealth from 67 to 57 percent. The share of adults with no net wealth fell from 21 to 16 percent.

Read more on Warp News

🧬 A single gene-therapy dose could replace daily cholesterol medication

A single dose of the gene therapy VERVE-102, given as an infusion, lowered harmful cholesterol as much as today's medications do with repeated treatment. At the highest dose, harmful cholesterol fell by an average of 62 percent.

Read more on Warp News

🤖 The AI that solves unsolved problems now works on healthcare, power grids, and industry

A year ago, Warp News reported on AlphaEvolve, an AI system from Google DeepMind that finds new algorithms in mathematics and computer science. Now Google has reported what the system has accomplished over the past year, in everything from genomics to power grids and data processing.

Read more on Warp News

🎗️ Now cancer vaccines are coming

The immune system can now be used to treat several types of cancer, and more than 2,500 immunotherapies are in development. Cancer vaccines have also started to show results in clinical trials, against melanoma, pancreatic cancer, and brain tumors, among others.

Read more on Warp News

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🌐 Present at the Re-creation

One sentence in the final chapter stayed with me.

It was about a completely different time, but it was highly relevant to our time as well.

It was written by Dean Acheson in his autobiography Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department.

He worked at the U.S. State Department under President Roosevelt and later served as President Truman’s secretary of state.

Acheson would become one of the chief architects of the new world order. The UN, the IMF, the World Bank, NATO and much else took shape during his time.

When he looked back in the book, he wrote:

“Everyone who served in those years had the opportunity to give more than a sample of their best.”

They were ordinary people working in an extraordinary time, which both required them to perform at their full capacity and gave them the opportunity to do so.

Now we see how the world order that was built then is being torn down.

At such a time, it is easy to lose hope.

But this is our extraordinary time.

That is what I write about in this week’s Premium Supporter article, open to everyone: 🌐 Present at the Re-creation

Mathias Sundin
The Angry Optimist

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🌐 Present at the Re-creation

Extraordinary times require extraordinary efforts from ordinary people.

Read more on Warp News

💡 Fact-based optimistic news of the week

💊 GLP-1 drugs, such as Ozempic, linked to lower risk of cancer progression

Among women with breast cancer, more than 95 percent of GLP-1 users were alive after five years, compared to 89.5 percent of non-users. Women who had taken a GLP-1 drug had about 25 percent lower risk of receiving a breast cancer diagnosis.

Read more on Warp News

🛰️ AI and satellite imagery help journalists map illegal mines in the Amazon

Machine learning analyzes satellite images covering more than 123 million acres of rainforest and identifies mining pits and airstrips. Venezuelan journalist Joseph Poliszuk has identified 3,718 gold mining sites. Some of the mines were located within protected indigenous lands.

Read more on Warp News

🚰 Machine pulls water from the air - can produce 4,000 liters per day

Startup Atoco is preparing production of a machine that extracts water directly from the air using nanocrystalline materials. The container-sized prototype can produce up to 1,057 gallons of water per day and be installed at data centers, hospitals, and other critical infrastructure.

Read more on Warp News

🦟 Malaria vaccine has reduced child mortality by 13% in three African countries

A study confirms that the RTS,S vaccine has reduced overall child mortality by 13 percent in Ghana, Kenya and Malawi. The effect was achieved even though only 71 percent of children received three doses and 40 percent received the fourth dose.

Read more on Warp News

📚 More nine-year-olds are reading books daily

39 percent of 9-year-olds read books or newspapers daily, the highest share since the measurements began in 2012. Daily reading is increasing among children aged 9 to 11 compared with the previous measurement in 2022.

Read more on Warp News

🌡️ Research committee that provides input to the IPCC drops the worst climate scenarios

The research committee ScenarioMIP, which develops the climate scenarios that form the basis for the IPCC's reports, has officially classified the previous worst-case scenarios RCP8.5, SSP5-8.5 and SSP3-7.0 as implausible.

Read more on Warp News

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🧇 Moved to Brussels

A personal update: I have moved to Belgium.

For the past two and a half weeks, my family and I have been living just outside Brussels. My wife has got a job down here, so Teddy and I are, of course, coming along. Two years to start with, and then we’ll see.

We have wanted to live abroad for a long time, so now that it is finally happening, it feels very exciting.

Warp News and the rest of my work will continue as usual.

Right now, I am actually in Kiruna with the Swedish Space Agency, and tomorrow and on Friday I will be giving talks in Stockholm.

📖 New edition of the book

The first edition of The Fifth Acceleration/Den femte accelerationen has sold out, so a new one has now been printed.

It is not yet available in any language other than Swedish, but we have now started contacting foreign publishers to see if there is interest.

If you would like to read the book in English or another language, you are very welcome to register your interest on the book’s website. It helps us get it published in other languages if foreign publishers can see that there are potential book buyers.

It takes about 11 seconds to do on the book’s website and is, of course, not binding, but you will receive an offer when the book is published in your language.

There you can also read more about the book and both read and listen to an excerpt.

Mathias Sundin
The Angry Optimist

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📉 WeightWatchers filed for bankruptcy because people lost too much weight

WeightWatchers did not fail because people stopped wanting to lose weight. It failed because they did lose weight, but in a different way. A way that points to a coming health revolution.

Read more on Warp News

💡 Fact-based optimistic news of the week

☢️ Forty years after the disaster, Chernobyl teems with wildlife

Forty years after the accident at the nuclear power plant, the area around Chernobyl remains too dangerous for human habitation. But the wildlife has moved back in. Przewalski's horses, wolves, bears, lynx, moose, and red deer roam freely in the Chernobyl zone.

Read more on Warp News

🛰️ Coffee companies launch satellite program to map deforestation

Several major coffee companies and coffee traders have joined forces to map coffee farms and deforestation using satellite imagery and AI models. The initiative will protect millions of smallholder farmers from being wrongly excluded from the EU market due to inaccurate maps.

Read more on Warp News

🔋 Australia's battery capacity has doubled – cutting reliance on gas

Battery capacity in Australia has more than doubled between March 2025 and March 2026. Gas-fired generation has fallen 24 percent and is at its lowest level since 1999. Average wholesale electricity prices have dropped 12 percent.

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⚡ Cement has been produced entirely with electricity – significant potential to cut CO2 emissions

The cement industry accounts for a significant share of global CO2 emissions, and production has so far relied on fossil-fueled kilns. SaltX and Holcim have produced cement in a fully electrified process, without fossil fuels in the heating stages. The cement produced meets industrial standard.

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🏜️ New method turns desert into arable land in three years instead of a hundred

Researchers have developed a solid cyanobacteria inoculum that binds sand dunes and creates a foundation for vegetation within three years. The method achieves a survival rate of over 60 percent and shortens the formation of biological soil crusts from 15 years to one or two years.

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🧲 Researchers have shrunk giant magnets to the size of a palm

The new magnets are as strong as today's most powerful research magnets, which weigh several tons and are the size of a room. The magnets draw less electricity than an LED bulb, compared to the power consumption of several thousand households for traditional magnets of the same strength.

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👍 One prompt = one second in the microwave

Myths are spreading about AI and energy. The claim that AI is energy-intensive has gained widespread traction.

I have previously described, both here and in my book, how wrong this is.

Now more facts have emerged that confirm exactly that — AI is not energy-intensive.

In Hannah Ritchie's overview, I found a useful rule of thumb for describing how much energy AI uses.

Because a fundamental problem is that we don't know how much energy we use on almost anything, and therefore we have no way of judging what is a lot or a little.

The rule of thumb is this:
One prompt = one second in the microwave

Heating something in a 1000-watt microwave for one second uses just as much (or as little) electricity as a simple question or instruction to ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, or any of the other AI models.

If you heat food for two minutes in the microwave, that corresponds to 120 prompts, which in turn corresponds to hours of AI chatting.

Mathias Sundin
The Angry Optimist

💡 Fact-based optimistic news of the week

💶 Solar power has saved Europe more than €100 million per day since March

Solar energy has saved Europe more than €100 million per day since 1 March, totaling more than €3 billion. Wind and solar power have reduced electricity prices by an average of 24% between 2023 and 2025. If gas prices remain high, total savings in 2026 could reach €67.5 billion.

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👩‍💻 Open source helps reach millions of unvaccinated children

Many countries have long collected vaccination data on paper or in Excel, causing delays and gaps. Now the University of Oslo and Gavi have built digital systems in 40 low- and middle-income countries. The result: hundreds of thousands of children vaccinated – in Mozambique and Kenya alone.

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🔋 Sodium-ion batteries ready for mass market - cheaper and more durable than lithium-ion batteries

Sodium-ion batteries are cheaper and more durable than lithium-ion batteries, but have not been possible to manufacture at scale until now. CATL says the manufacturing challenges are solved. The cells handle more than 15,000 cycles, and sodium is 1,000 times more abundant than lithium.

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⚰️ Deaths from indoor air pollution have fallen by 1.5 million since 1990

The annual number of premature deaths from indoor air pollution has dropped from around 4.5 million to just under 3 million per year. The decline is driven by more people gaining access to cleaner cooking fuels. Asia accounts for the largest reduction, with deaths cut roughly in half.

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⚡ Finland has cut power sector emissions by 80 percent in a decade

Finland's emissions from electricity generation fell from nearly 15 million tonnes to around 3 million tonnes per year between 2016 and 2025. Nuclear and wind power together account for 64.5 percent of generation. The last coal plant was shut down in April 2025.

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🤰 Teenage pregnancy rates have fallen sharply across the world

Globally, the number of births among teenage girls has fallen by over one-third since 2000. In Central and South Asia, the figure has dropped by over three-quarters during the same period. The decline is seen across all regions of the world, according to data from the UN.

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👍 New rule of thumb for AI energy use: One prompt = one second in the microwave

A simple AI query uses about 0.3 watt-hours of electricity. A microwave at around 1,000 watts uses about 0.28 watt-hours per second. So a simple AI query corresponds to roughly one second in the microwave.

Read more on Warp News

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🤦‍♀️ Afraid of what makes us safer

A few weeks ago, the AI company Anthropic announced that they had created a new AI model called Mythos.

What Mythos can do is detect (and patch) security vulnerabilities in software. And it seems to be better at this than anything else currently available. For example, it found 271 vulnerabilities in the web browser Firefox.

Vulnerabilities that have now been fixed. It is harder to hack Firefox.

It is reported that Mythos has already found and fixed thousands of vulnerabilities in software. Our digital lives are becoming safer.

One might think that this is a good thing. But no!

Swedish Radio: New AI model sparks panic: “Cyber Armageddon”
Security News: The AI model Mythos raises concerns – expert on the risks
NYT: Anthropic’s New A.I. Model Sets Off Global Alarms
The Week: The fear over Anthropic’s new AI model Mythos

So we have a tool that makes the internet SAFER, and all the reporting is about how Mythos COULD make the internet less safe IF malicious actors used it.
But they don’t!

Mythos is being used to make the internet safer. De facto, it is used for that. Not “could be used,” but is used. Mythos is making the internet safer RIGHT NOW.

And all we are doing is panicking about an imagined alternative reality where the opposite is true.

What are people doing?

Mathias Sundin
The Angry Optimist

💡 Fact-based optimistic news of the week

💡 Renewable electricity overtook coal as the world's largest power source in 2025

Solar and wind accounted for 99% of the growth in global electricity demand during 2025. Solar energy grew by 636 TWh – more electricity than all LNG exports through the Strait of Hormuz can produce. For the first time, coal power accounts for less than a third of the world's electricity generation.

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📚 AI deciphers handwriting and makes 350,000 hidden books searchable – saves ten years of work

Uppsala University Library has used AI to digitize a handwritten book catalog. The work corresponds to more than ten years of manual labor and has been completed in a much shorter time. The material is now easier to find and use for researchers and the general public.

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🚰 Desalinated seawater could ease pressure on the Colorado River

San Diego is negotiating with Arizona and Nevada to sell water from North America's largest desalination plant. The agreement could supply roughly 500,000 people with drinking water annually. San Diego has reduced its water imports from 95 percent to 10 percent over three decades.

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🐴 World's only surviving wild horse species back from the brink of extinction

The Przewalski's horse was declared extinct in the wild during the 1970s and has been reintroduced through a conservation program launched in 1985. Przewalski's horse is the world's only surviving wild horse species and has an evolutionary history of 60 million years.

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💵 Study: Every generation has had higher income than the previous one

Every generation over the past six decades has had higher income than the previous one. American millennials aged 36–40 had a median household income 20 percent higher than Generation X. The increase happened without more work hours – earlier generations' growth was partly driven by increased work.

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🦾 Medra builds autonomous lab, robots controlled with everyday language

Medra has raised $52 million to build a 38,000-square-foot autonomous robot lab in the Bay Area. Scientists can direct the robots with everyday language, much like writing to ChatGPT. The robots work around the clock on drug research for partners such as Genentech and Addition Therapeutics.

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🚗 Electric vehicles outclass fossil fuel cars – sweep all categories at the 2026 World Car Awards

Consumers rank affordability, efficiency, quality, and safety as the most important factors in a car in 2026, areas where electric vehicles perform strongly. The BMW iX3 Neue Klasse won both Electric Vehicle of the Year and the Car of the Year award.

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🏗️ Less and less productive

When I was in Seattle last year to give a talk on AI at the Nordic Museum, I met Jonas Jonsson.

He had a very Swedish name, but was clearly most comfortable speaking English. So I assumed his family had emigrated to the US, but when I asked where he lived, he answered Stockholm, Sweden.

I couldn’t quite make sense of it.

Back in Stockholm, he got in touch after reading my book and wanted to talk about AI. We did—but I also became interested in a problem he had set out to tackle.

Jonas works in real estate, and he told me that the construction industry has been becoming less productive for decades. Each year, you get slightly less built for the same amount of money.

Most other industries are moving in the opposite direction, becoming more efficient.

I’ve interviewed Jonas about this and visited one of his construction sites to understand how he plans to crack this problem—so we can get cheaper and better housing in less time.

It turns out he has a background that makes him particularly well suited for exactly that. And I also got to the bottom of the small mystery about his language.

Mathias Sundin
The Angry Optimist

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🏗️ The tech builder set to solve the construction industry’s century-old problem

The construction industry has for a long time become less productive each year. We get less housing for the money. That is the problem that Jonas Jonsson and his company ByggVesta are now setting out to solve.

Read on Warp News

💡 Fact-based optimistic news of the week

💉 New vaccine reduced Lyme disease cases by 70 percent in clinical trial

Pharmaceutical companies Pfizer and Valneva report that their Lyme disease vaccine LB6V reduced the number of disease cases by around 70 percent compared with placebo. It would become the first approved Lyme disease vaccine for humans in nearly three decades.

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🚧 The world's first geothermal plant with 10 to 100 times higher output per well is now being built

Project Obsidian will be the world's first geothermal power plant to extract energy from rock at 300 to 500 degrees Celsius. The millimeter wave drilling technique allows drilling to reach depths and temperatures that conventional drills cannot handle.

Read more on Warp News

🗳️ Democracy strengthened or did not deteriorate in three quarters of the world's countries during 2025

Nearly three quarters of the world's countries received higher or unchanged scores in the 2025 democracy index. Latin America and the Caribbean broke a nine-year decline and improved their results. The global index rose by 0.02 points, one of the largest increases since 2012.

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🌳 Rainforest wildlife returns to abandoned farmland within 30 years

A study from Ecuador shows that biodiversity in tropical rainforest recovers to more than 90 percent of its original level within three decades. Three-quarters of the animal and plant species typical of untouched primary forest return to abandoned agricultural land during the same period.

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📈 Simon Abundance Index 2026: Access to basic commodities has increased by more than 500 percent since 1980

The Simon Abundance Index (SAI) measures the relationship between population and resource abundance. It rose from 100 in 1980 to 636.4 in 2025, an increase of 536.4 percent. While the world's population grew by 85 percent, personal resource abundance increased by 244 percent.

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🧫 Bacteria swim using a tiny electric motor that spins several hundred times per second

Researchers have now mapped every part of the flagellar motor that bacteria use to swim, after more than 50 years of research. The motor spins several hundred revolutions per second and is powered by protons streaming into the cell at more than 2,000 per second.

Read more on Warp News

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🎥 Amaze, amaze, amaze

Science fiction is often dystopian—and that can be part of its appeal. I love the Mad Max films, for example.

But it gets a bit tiring when humanity has always destroyed nature, used up all natural resources, been consumed by greed, and is now forced to live in rain, fog, and neon light.

Often with incredibly advanced technology, yet still a collapsed civilization.

Maybe that’s why I neither read nor watch that much science fiction.
With a few exceptions. Among them the Star Trek series, which start from a humanity that has developed into something better.

And then there’s Andy Weir, who wrote the best science fiction book I’ve read: Project Hail Mary.

It’s now also a global hit in theaters, starring Ryan Gosling—and a living rock.

This week, I’m writing about why I hope Hollywood learns from books and films like The Martian and Project Hail Mary, where slightly reluctant but incredibly resourceful humans take the lead.

Removed a news item

Last week, I published a news piece with a questionable headline and lead about researchers finding a method to make solar cells more efficient. Taken together, the headline and lead could be interpreted as producing more energy than was put in, which isn’t possible.

I later changed both the headline and the lead, but even though the story was based on solid research and what appears to be a genuine breakthrough, the article didn’t quite communicate it in a way that avoided confusion. So I’ve removed it.

Thanks to those of you who pointed out the issue.

Mathias Sundin
The Angry Optimist

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🍿 Amaze, amaze, amaze: Will Hollywood understand now?

In Hollywood, the future is always dystopian. Dark, rainy, and filled with neon lights. That’s where the money is, they believe. But one film now shows that isn’t true.

Read on Warp News

💡 Fact-based optimistic news of the week

🧬 From 13% to 88%: This many survive pancreatic cancer thanks to new vaccine

Pancreatic cancer is one of the deadliest cancers. Fewer than 13 percent of those diagnosed survive more than five years. But after receiving a new mRNA vaccine, nearly 90 percent are still alive six years later.

Read more on Warp News

🦾 Startups that learned to use AI correctly generated 1.9 times higher revenue

Startups that learned how other companies had reorganized their operations around AI found 44 percent more use cases for the technology. The startups that received this information had 1.9 times higher revenue and were 18 percent more likely to acquire paying customers.

Read more on Warp News

😶‍🌫️ The risk of developing dementia at any given age has dropped sharply

The share of older people with dementia at any given age has fallen by two-thirds over 40 years. An 85-year-old in 2024 has one-third the risk of having dementia compared to an 85-year-old in 1984.

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🪱 Hookworm vaccine reduces infection in trial – could help millions with anemia

Hookworm infects more than 100 million people and is a major cause of iron-deficiency anemia, particularly in children and pregnant women. A phase 2 trial shows that a vaccine candidate substantially reduces the intensity of infection.

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📉 Overdose deaths in the US have dropped 35 percent from the 2023 peak

The number of overdose deaths in the US is estimated to have fallen by 35 percent from the peak year of 2023 to 2025. The purity of seized fentanyl powder was cut in half between August 2023 and the end of 2024. A coordinated counter-narcotics strategy has choked off the supply of fentanyl.

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🤰 Maternal mortality declining – new data and methods show measurable results

Globally, maternal mortality has decreased by 40 percent since 2000, according to estimates from the UN Maternal Mortality Estimation Inter-Agency Group. A sepsis prevention program at 59 hospitals in Malawi and Uganda reduced infection-related maternal mortality by 32 percent.

Read more on Warp News

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