📱 Smart tools in the fight against grooming
When children are groomed online, it often starts out innocently and doesn't hint at sex at all. That makes it hard to catch with automatic filters that search for individual words or sentences.
After the summer, a subscriber to this newsletter reached out to me. She felt there was a much more optimistic story here, one that wasn't showing up in other media.
What's needed are tools that can understand context and underlying meaning. Exactly the kind of thing AI can handle, with the right training.
She put me in touch with Gabriel Sabadin, who is a co-founder of Tuteliq. A company that has built a smart AI tool that's good at seeing through innocent conversations and spotting grooming attempts. Here you'll find my interview with him.
Good news from Serbia
Serbia delivered a positive election result when Aleksandar Vučić was defeated. During his years in power, he has weakened democracy in Serbia, restricted media freedom and helped create a society where corruption and abuse of power have been allowed to flourish.
In the election, he lost to a new political movement, the Student List. One that organizes itself in a new way, without a traditional party leader, and uses open student plenums and direct-democracy meetings to make decisions.
Vladan Lausevic writes about this in a guest column for The Angry Optimist.
Mathias Sundin
Angry Optimist
🛡️ The predator sounds like a friend — now AI is learning to tell the difference
Grooming often starts with a friendly question that is hard for ordinary filters to detect.
🇷🇸 Serbia's students are testing new democratic methods
A student movement that began with protests after the Novi Sad disaster that killed 16 people has won the election in Serbia.
The student movement was organized without a traditional party leader and used open student assemblies and direct democracy meetings to make decisions.
The methods later spread beyond the universities through local citizens' assemblies, where residents discuss problems and possible solutions.
The Student List won 53 percent of the vote. Serbia's Republic Electoral Commission says the list will get 141 of the 250 seats in parliament.
💡 Fact-based optimistic news of the week
🔭 Nine-billion-year-old signal could help explain dark energy
Just 94 nights of measurements were enough. The telescope has almost seven years of data.
CHIME captured the radio signal from hydrogen dating back to when the universe was about five billion years old, using only its own data.
The method costs a fraction of galaxy surveys in visible light and can be used to test theories of dark energy.
The signal held up after more than a year of tests and also showed up when the researchers split the data into two separate halves.
Read more on The Angry Optimist
🐘 Razor wire that cut elephants on North Bengal tea estates has fallen by 74 percent
Eight elephant corridors, the elephants' routes between forests, were measured in 2019 and 2026.
Razor wire along the elephant routes through North Bengal's tea estates shrank from about 135 kilometers (about 84 miles) to 35 kilometers (about 22 miles).
The total length of fencing in the same landscape fell from just over 290 kilometers (just over 180 miles) to just over 100 kilometers (just over 60 miles).
A new Elephant-Friendly Tea Estate Charter covers open routes, hazardous fencing and safer power lines.
Read more on The Angry Optimist
🖥️ Data center heat is stored in bedrock until winter
The energy used for construction was paid back in just over a year.
Epic Systems has drilled about 6,100 wells, 90 to 240 meters (about 300 to 800 feet) deep, that heat and cool about 40 buildings.
Summer heat from a 3.5-megawatt data center is stored in the bedrock and heats offices, hot water and walkways in winter.
In Bonn, a heat storage system in the groundwater has supplied 60 to 80 percent of the winter heat to offices, a hotel and a data center since 2009.
Read more on The Angry Optimist
🇱🇻 27 percent fewer alcohol deaths in Latvia
More than 60 deaths averted in five months in the EU's heaviest-drinking country.
Deaths from causes wholly attributable to alcohol, such as alcohol poisoning and alcohol-associated liver disease, fell by 27 percent.
Stores may only sell alcohol between 10 a.m. and 8 p.m., until 6 p.m. on Sundays, and online orders are delivered no sooner than six hours later.
Latvia also banned price advertising for alcohol, multi-unit discounts, and sales at slot machines and gambling tables.
Read more on The Angry Optimist
🫀 Untapped ECG data from sleep studies predicts heart disease
An AI model needs only one ECG lead instead of the usual twelve.
The higher the score the model gave, the higher the risk of atrial fibrillation, heart failure and death, even after adjusting for age, sex, BMI, diabetes and sleep apnea.
The risk of atrial fibrillation was up to 2.7 times as high for each one standard deviation increase in the score.
With the model's score, predictions of atrial fibrillation, heart failure and death were better than with known risk factors alone.
Read more on The Angry Optimist
🇿🇦 Rhino poaching has fallen nearly 80 percent in South African park
More than 1,000 rhinos had their horns sawed off. In January, not a single one was killed.
Poachers killed 307 rhinos in Hluhluwe-iMfolozi in 2023, 198 in 2024, 63 in 2025 and 32 so far this year.
Across South Africa, the number of rhinos killed fell from 499 in 2023 to 352 in 2025.
Across the province of KwaZulu-Natal, the number of rhinos killed dropped from 325 in 2023 to 97 in 2025.
Read more on The Angry Optimist
🎗️ Survival has tripled for liver cancer and one type of leukemia
Many people with chronic myeloid leukemia now live as long as other people.
For chronic myeloid leukemia, the five-year survival rate in the US has risen from 22 percent in the mid-1970s to 71 percent for those diagnosed between 2016 and 2022.
For multiple myeloma, the five-year survival rate has doubled since the mid-1990s, from 32 to 64 percent, as new immunotherapies have been developed.
The five-year survival rate for liver cancer has tripled over the same period, from 7 to 22 percent.
Read more on The Angry Optimist
🌍 Global life expectancy nearly back to pre-COVID level
Deaths from HIV and AIDS have fallen by 62 percent since 2000.
Global life expectancy was 73.3 years in 2023, just a tenth of a year below the 2019 level.
COVID-19 killed about 900,000 people in 2023, compared with 9.4 million in 2021.
In low-income countries, communicable diseases caused less than half of all deaths in 2023 for the first time.
Read more on The Angry Optimist
🤰 Maternal mortality more than halved from Morocco to Pakistan
With 20 million births a year, that means about 6,000 fewer maternal deaths.
In WHO's Eastern Mediterranean Region, maternal mortality fell from 191 to 160 deaths per 100,000 live births between 2020 and 2025.
Since 2000, maternal mortality in the region has declined by 56 percent, from 378 to 167 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2023.
In Somalia, cholera deaths fell by 93 percent after vaccination and community engagement.
Read more on The Angry Optimist
🌳 Deforestation in Ethiopia has fallen by 70 percent in ten years
In Abijata-Shalla National Park, the lakes are rising and the fish have come back.
Ethiopia has planted more than 47 billion seedlings since 2019 and aims for 50 billion by 2030.
A study that followed more than 44,500 seedlings in southern Ethiopia shows that about 80 percent survived.
Forests covered 23.6 percent of the country in 2023, up from 17.2 percent in 2019, according to government figures.
Read more on The Angry Optimist
💊 The better the studies, the weaker the link between acetaminophen and autism
Many earlier reviews counted the same studies several times.
When the researchers included only primary studies with a low risk of bias, the increased risk of autism fell from 17 to 5 percent.
In a Swedish study of almost 2.5 million children, the link to autism and ADHD disappeared when siblings were compared with each other.
The researchers judge that acetaminophen is still an appropriate first-line treatment during pregnancy when needed.
Read more on The Angry Optimist
🇪🇺 EU emissions fell 2 percent after last year's increase
Oil use in industry and buildings fell 10.8 percent while production barely changed.
Emissions from coal were the lowest for any first half since the data series began in 2010.
Finland cut its emissions by 11.8 percent, even though electricity use rose.
Electric cars made up 20.7 percent of all new cars in the EU, up from 15.6 percent the year before.
Read more on The Angry Optimist
🧬 AI-designed proteins get a watermark without losing their function
Even an AI-designed virus that attacks bacteria worked with the mark.
Marked and unmarked proteins bound just as strongly to three different targets, including part of the spike protein on the virus behind COVID-19.
With the watermark, DNA manufacturers can approve orders from known AI systems faster and spend their time on suspicious sequences.
According to DeepMind, this is the first time watermarked proteins have been shown to work biologically.
Read more on The Angry Optimist
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