A new month is on the doorstep, so it’s time for a look back at the stories that caught our editors’ attention over the past four weeks! From concrete data that suggests people are feeling safer and more optimistic than ever to renewables overtaking coal as the planet’s main source of energy, there’s a lot to get excited about in today’s edition.
The new Basic Income for the Arts scheme aims to support the arts and encourage creative practice by giving a payment of €325 a week to artists and creative arts workers. There are 2,000 spots available, with applications set to open in September 2026.
Despite geopolitical conflicts and wars, more and more people around the world are feeling safe in their everyday lives. Gallup’s Global Safety Report 2025 reports the highest level of people feeling safe since the survey began.
Ask people how the world is doing, and you’ll mostly hear a negative approach. Ask them about their own lives, however, and the story changes: despite broad pessimism about global progress, most people believe their personal situations will improve in the future, according to new data.
In a historic first, renewable energy outperformed coal as the world’s leading source of electricity in the first six months of 2025. Although electricity demand is growing around the world, the growth in wind and solar was so strong that it met 100% of the extra demand.
A new study has found that solar energy is so cheap, it costs as little as €0.023 to produce one unit of power in the sunniest countries. Even in the UK, which sits 50 degrees north of the equator and is infamous for its grey weather, solar was still by far the cheapest option for large-scale energy generation.
TotalEnergies, which this month said it aimed to “ramp up production of gas”, was found on Thursday to have probably misled consumers with claims about its climate policies. The case, brought by NGOs including Greenpeace France and Friends of the Earth France, is the first time the country’s greenwashing laws have been applied to a fossil fuel company.
The state will stop receiving electricity from the Intermountain Power Plant in Central Utah, meaning its reliance on coal as a source of power will essentially be over.
Offering compensation to companies that close by 2031, Poland joins 20 other EU countries in banning fur farming. The country is the world’s second-largest fur producer and kills around 3 million animals per year.
Results are in of a massive, long-term study on the new advice of the last decade that parents feed small amounts of peanuts to babies to prevent severe peanut allergies. They indicate that peanut allergies have plummeted, with 60,000 fewer children affected than would otherwise have been.
ADA-SCID is a genetic childhood illness that severely weakens the immune system and facilitates all kinds of deadly infections, such as pneumonia, meningitis, and chickenpox. The treatment involves extracting blood stem cells from the patient’s blood or bone marrow, before a healthy copy of the defective gene is introduced into the cells and reinserted to the body.
Researchers in Bonn, Germany, have developed augmented glasses that work with a tiny implanted eye chip. In trial, these helped 80% of patients with age-related, late-stage macular degeneration make meaningful improvements in vision. One patient said she was now able to do crosswords and read prescriptions.
Ultrasounds have long been used to help doctors see inside the human body, often to create sonograms during pregnancy. However, a new approach to this tech is helping fight cancer: by concentrating ultrasound waves onto a small area of a tumour to destroy it.
This particular type of thermal energy storage, in which tanks of ice sustain a network of cold-water pipes keeping rooms at cooler temperatures, is being added to buildings across the US. The method reduces electricity usage and lowers the overall strain on the energy grid.
From wind corridors that channel cool air down into from meadows and orchards outside city limits in Stuttgart to buildings in Singapore designed and orientated to creatively let cool breezes travel though. BBC journalists from People Fixing the World visit cities that are finding solutions to urban heat using wind.
An age-old construction method is finding new fans in India’s modern cities. Architects are reimagining traditional materials like mud plaster, sal wood, bamboo, and lime for contemporary apartment buildings, which can keep buildings about 10°C to 15°C cooler than outside temperatures.
A new type of wood that claims to have up to 10 times the strength-to-weight ratio of steel, while also being up to six times lighter, is now commercially available on US markets. It is impervious to fungi and insects and, when compared to steel manufacturing, the carbon emissions are 90% lower.
From 14-feet kayaks and boutique furniture to designer handbags and heels, plastics and leathers are gradually being replaced by mycelium: the eco-friendly fungi infiltrating global supply chains. Even NASA is interested in developing a mycotexture programme for Mars and lunar habitation.
Moldova, like many post-Soviet nations, inherited a system heavily reliant on institutional child care. Prior to 2000, the country had over 27,000 children living in orphanages. Today, this number has dropped to just 700, and the goal is to have none by 2027.
An open prison where prisoners care for animals and vineyards while earning a standard wage, Gorgona Island is a stark contrast to other Italian prisons. There is mutual trust between prisoners and guards, freedom of movement in the day, a chance to learn a skill, and a very low rate of recidivism.
Thousands of years of migration have left Marseille, France, diverse and tolerant. Now a new movement of ‘restaurants solidaire’ is giving a hand up to those with less to spend. Some partner with charities to offer meals for as low as €1; others operate on the honour system to give a deep discount to those who need one.
The bi-monthly Mental Health Is Real Wealth group is just one of the few Black male-founded safe spaces for men to fully let their guard down. According to data, suicide is the third leading cause of death for Black male adolescents and young adults, and Black boys and men make up an overwhelming majority of suicides within the Black population.
Data suggests that men are less likely than women to seek medical help, resulting in men often dying younger and facing higher risks of conditions like heart disease, suicide, and certain cancers. Across Australia, a growing number of grassroots initiatives are meeting men where they are – in barbershops, on the football field, and within local communities – to start conversations about health.
Bluemind Foundation, an NGO working across Cameroon, Ivory Coast and Togo, has plugged into the hairdresser-client relationship through its Heal by Hair initiative. More than 400 hairdressers have been trained in the last two years to act as therapeutic first responders or “mental health ambassadors”, reaching more than 100,000 women.
Adding to the previously established science that finding purpose in life helps one live longer, researchers at University of California Davis conducted a huge study with results indicating that such feeling of purpose also protects the brain from dementia.
The Parents Circle has an unpleasant requirement for membership: that your child has been killed in the Israel-Palestine conflict. Founded in 1995, it now includes 800 parents. With the credibility that comes from their own suffering, they stage “dialogue meetings” at schools and colleges in which parents from each side tell their personal stories and explain why they reject revenge.
