A bit of housekeeping, no standard edition next week, we’re heading into the backrooms 😱 to tinker with a bunch of administrative stuff. Also we have a new charity partner to introduce you to…
We’re giving A$20,000 to the Hogar de Ancianos Sagrado Corazón de Jesús, in Ambito, Ecuador. It’s a nursing home, run by the Dorothean Sisters, who currently look after around 75 residents. Most of their families cannot afford to provide care and 22 have no family at all. They were brought in by the council or police, or found abandoned in nearby villages on the streets. The government provides no support, and fees only just cover nursing staff wages, so the Home runs at a loss and relies on volunteer work from the Sisters.
That means a lot of improvising. The Sisters collect donated food from nearby markets, mend donated clothes late at night and keep going with donated appliances that barely work. There has been progress though. Their leaking roof is almost fully replaced and the damp bathrooms are being rebuilt so residents can shower sitting down.
Sister María José told us they will use this donation for some combination of:
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Part payment for solar panels and a heat pump for hot water on one floor.
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New freezers and fridges.
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New laundry machines for 75 residents’ washing.
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Fitting out the palliative care room for privacy at end of life.
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Finishing two rooftop rooms as sunny spaces for residents.
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A new bread oven.
The A$20,000 will help with some of this, but not all, so if you can top things up that would be amazing! You can donate directly through our website (100% goes directly to them), or contact Chris Wilson at the Pachamama Ecuador Foundation at chris@pachamama-ecuador.com.
Thank you to all of you who pay for this newsletter, you’re the reason this is possible. We’re so grateful.
Global meningitis is in retreat. Meningitis is one of the top ten infectious killers worldwide, causing an estimated 259,000 deaths in 2023. That’s down by a quarter compared to 2015 and by almost half since 2000, with the sharpest reductions coming in deaths among young children. The biggest gains have come in Africa’s “meningitis belt,” where countries like Sudan and Rwanda have cut death rates by more than 80% through wider vaccination and better surveillance.
A new wild cat species has been identified for the first time in over a century.
In 2017, Paola Nogales-Ascarrunz, a Bolivian biologist, got a call about a weird cat that a local man had taken home. The man had raised it as a pet for a year before realising this was no house cat. Nine years, one genome study and a lot of confused Brazilian guidebooks later, that cat now has a name, Leopardus tilcayo: the world’s first new feline species since 1923.
The reason it’s been so long is because the tilcayo was long assumed to be a tigrina, a small spotted cat described in 1775, and presumed to roam the whole continent. However genome comparisons found the tilcayo split from its relatives around 1.4 million years ago, roughly the same evolutionary gap as the one between lions and extinct cave lions.
Why does splitting a species matter for saving it? Because conservation status runs on head counts. “If you think it’s a single animal from southern Brazil all the way to Costa Rica, you’re going to find it’s not endangered,” says geneticist Eduardo Eizirik. “But if we find that it’s not a single thing, but actually five things, each of them must be assessed separately.” National Geographic
Your brain isn’t one organ, it’s two, stitched together in the womb 🤯. Stanford researchers found that the forebrain and midbrain (which handle language and reasoning) and the hindbrain (which runs breathing and heartbeat) grow from two entirely different progenitor cells. The same split shows up in chickens, zebrafish and acorn worms, a divide that has held for 550 million years of evolution. “Our research suggests that evolution took two existing neural systems and pushed them together spatially. Having the brain as one organ would probably be more efficient, but we rely on this primordial way to make the brain as two separate pieces.” Stanford Medicine
The world’s smallest CT scanner now fits in one hand. China’s Institute of High Energy Physics built the 6 kilogram Xtomo-Cube, more than three times lighter than the previous record holder, running on battery power and skipping the heavy radiation shielding regular scanners need. Its scanning resolution, about the width of a human hair, is enough for archaeologists to analyse a fossil in the field instead of hauling it to a lab. New Atlas
Archaeologists have found a Chimu royal tomb in Peru that centuries of looters somehow missed. Under the ruined citadel of Chan Chan, once the capital of the Chimu kingdom and the largest city in the pre-Columbian Americas, a Peruvian team cleared 40 centimetres of sand from a doorway before their flashlights found funerary bundles still undisturbed after 600 years. Inside the mausoleum, 38 bodies, some with red cinnabar pigment on the skull, alongside silver and copper jewellery, quartz beads and a wooden chest of textiles showing seabirds and monkeys. The tomb’s design suggests it was built to be reopened again and again, bodies carried out to be venerated in the city’s plazas before being returned. NYT
The United Nations sexual and reproductive health agency (UNFPA) has helped deliver 41.7 million safer births since 2008. They reached an estimated 4.7 million women across 44 countries in 2025 alone, training almost 900,000 midwives along the way. Maternal deaths in those countries have fallen 37% since 2010, faster than the global average. These people are among the world’s great unsung heroes. In Afghanistan for example, the UNFPA has funded more than 450 community-run Family Health Houses, and a safe-delivery app for midwives, covering everything from breech births to haemorrhage. ReliefWeb / RTBC
In Nigeria, a national initiative has cut maternal deaths by 17% in the country’s highest-burden areas, health minister Muhammad Ali Pate says, by renovating 435 health facilities, hiring over 15,000 community health workers and lifting primary healthcare visits from 10 million to 45 million a year. Nigeria accounts for roughly 29% of the world’s maternal deaths, more than any other country. Tribune Online
Norway has created its largest marine protected area, covering 1,848 km² of coral reefs, sponge gardens and fish nurseries. It lifts formally protected waters from 4.8% to 6% of Norway’s territory. The government drew the boundary around its salmon farms rather than through them: five sea-based sites and three land-based facilities stayed outside the line after industry pushback.
**The global population of greater one-horned rhinos has hit a record 4,075. **Kaziranga National Park in Assam, India, shelters more than 2,600 of them. Poaching, once the species’ biggest threat, has fallen 86% since 2016; India, Nepal and Indonesia all recorded zero rhino killings in 2025. That’s the third rhino comeback story we’ve reported this year, after white rhinos returning to Mozambique’s Zinave and black rhinos to Zimbabwe’s Matusadona. Sentinel Assam
Rwanda has connected 85.4% of households to electricity, up from 64.5% five years ago, state minister Armand Zingiro said at an energy conference this month. The country is targeting universal access by 2029. Taarifa
Vietnam has created a reserve for one of the world’s rarest primates. The Kim Bang Delacour’s Langur Species and Habitat Conservation Area covers 31.8km² of limestone karst, more than the 22km² Van Long Nature Reserve, where the species’ population has quadrupled from 50 to around 200 since 2001. Fewer than 300 Delacour’s langurs remain in the wild, which is why conservationists have been pushing for this new reserve for years. DTI News
China has finished phasing out ozone-depleting HCFCs from its solvent industry. It’s the last stage of a project running since 2016 that forced 53 enterprises to move to substitutes (a nationwide ban on HCFCs in cleaning agents took effect on 1 July 2026). Since accepting the Kigali Amendment in 2021, China has cut HFC-linked emissions by 759 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent — roughly equal to 13% of the United States’ annual greenhouse gas footprint, or the same as taking about 175 million average passenger cars off the road for a year. China Daily
China’s clean-air campaign has cut Beijing’s smog by 70% in a decade, and cut heavily polluted days from 58 a year to just one. The effort has prevented an estimated 680,000 premature deaths since 2020 and generated $715 billion in cumulative health benefits. The UN Environment Programme calls it the “Beijing Miracle” and officials from neighbouring countries are now visiting to study how it was done. Global Times / Pakistan Today
Cleaner air makes kids smarter (sound familiar?). A two-decade study of over 1,100 children in New York found that their memory and sensory skills improved fastest during the periods when local air pollution fell fastest. This shouldn’t come as a surprise; in Edition 351, we reported that children’s lungs in London are getting healthier thanks to its low emissions zone, and in Edition 344, that the city’s cleaner air has cut cardiovascular hospital admissions by 9.3%.
**Migrants sent almost twice as much money home last year as they did a decade ago. **A record $729 billion in remittances was sent to poorer countries in 2025, more than foreign aid and foreign direct investment combined. Roughly 220 million people abroad now support 1.1 billion relatives at home. IFAD
A donated spy satellite mirror is now hunting dark energy from orbit. NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launched on 30 August, built around a 2.4-metre mirror handed over by the National Reconnaissance Office. The $4.3 billion observatory’s camera covers 100 times Hubble’s field of view, surveying the sky 1,000 times faster to map dark matter, dark energy and exoplanets. It honours Nancy Grace Roman, NASA’s first chief astronomer. NASA
Self-driving cars are dramatically safer than human drivers, not just marginally. Waymo’s robotaxis have covered 220 million paid miles and post 92% fewer fatal or serious-injury crashes than human-driven cars. An independent July 2026 study by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety found Waymo vehicles involved in 68% fewer crashes overall, though the gap varied by city, 76% lower in Phoenix, just 35% in San Francisco. IEEE Spectrum / IIHS
☝️ Reminder: around 39,000 people die on US roads every year.
An aircraft just flew across a continent with nobody actually flying it. 99 years after Charles Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic, a converted Cessna Caravan has flown itself across North America, handling its own taxiing, take-offs, navigation and landings over a 4,988 km (3,100 mile) route, with a human on board only because regulations require it. TechCrunch
Our usual approach is to pull together a bunch of individual stories about the energy transition, and then let you come to your own conclusions. This week though, we thought we’d have a go at connecting the dots, and show you how some of the world’s leading energy analysts are thinking about the bigger picture.
That of course, is the job of those analysts. They’re trying to frame things a certain way, introduce concepts or craft narratives that make sense of the energy world, and if they’re really good, maybe influence decision-making. For most, that’s a pipedream, but every so often, one of their ideas makes it all the way to the top.
On Tuesday, the International Energy Agency published a 198-page report called Electrification. Its central principle can be traced back to 2009, when a Stanford engineer named Mark Jacobson co-wrote a piece for Scientific American arguing that the entire world could run on wind, water and sunlight.
For a decade, that was a pretty niche position, but in 2021, the Australian inventor Saul Griffith popularised it with his book Electrify, with an argument that fit on a bumper sticker: Plug in everything that can be plugged in, then clean up the grid behind it.
In September 2025 a small team, led by Kingsmill Bond at the UK-based think tank Ember, coined the term ‘electrotech’ and rebuilt the case for electrification around economics and security. Moving the energy system towards electrons, they said, wasn’t just about cutting emissions, it was about making energy cheaper and more geopolitically secure.
That was the kind of language finance ministries could understand, and it proved to be hugely influential. The IEA’s new report borrows many of the same concepts, and lists the benefits of electrification in the same order: energy security first, competitiveness second, and emissions third (think how different this is to the moral argument for taking climate action).
“Electrification offers many benefits at once: it strengthens energy security, supports economic development, improves affordability and lowers emissions.”
The IEA also put numbers some numbers behind it. Electricity supplies 23% of the world’s final energy today; the report models a world where it reaches 35% by 2035. Because electric machines are more efficient, electricity would be doing more than half of the world’s useful work by that point. Household energy bills fall by 15%, electrified transport avoids 1…
