Environment

A Cambridge device eats plastic bottles and spits out clean fuel

Sunlight, a spray coating, and a very good idea.

The world's biggest environmental headaches boil down to two things: too much waste and not enough clean energy. As Erik Barnes reports, researchers at the University of Cambridge just built something that takes a swing at both at once, using nothing more exotic than sunlight.

The device is almost suspiciously simple. They sprayed a light-absorbing material onto a glass panel, added a catalyst layer, floated the whole thing in solution, and set it out in the sun. It then pulled hydrogen out of sliced-up plastic bottles. It did the same trick with plant waste, which means your old water bottle and your leftover cellulose could both become fuel for the trucks, ships, and airplanes that are hungry for it.

There's a catch, of course, and a question of whether a one-square-meter panel can grow up to save the world.

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And what did we learn?

Yesterday, we shared important information about the real dangers of our current heat wave and mistakes you may be making to make things worse.

How do GOOD readers beat the heat? In an unsurprising and very American result, over 60% of you crank the AC. Delightfully, second place goes to people just complaining their way to winter. I’m a bit of both, myself.

• Cranking the AC, naturally (60.8%)

• Jumping into the nearest body of water (14.2%)

• Mainlining ice water and cold showers (8.3%)

• Grinning, bearing it, complaining loudly (16.7%)

Reader J. M. Power, fittingly for their name, cranks the AC but clarified. “Well, setting it to 77/78. Don’t want to overload the grid!“

Environment

Your cat isn't just hunting mice

Two decades of research turned up a menu no one expected.

You already know your cat treats the local bird population like a drive-thru. What you might not know is how far down the food chain that appetite actually goes. In this story by biologists Christopher A. Lepczyk, Daniel Rubinoff, and Jean E. Fantle-Lepczyk, decades of digging through 533 studies revealed that free-ranging cats have eaten nearly 2,100 different species worldwide, and the ones grabbing headlines aren't the usual feathered suspects.

Cats, as it happens, aren't picky. (Well, not about what they hunt. My cats turn their nose up at all but the expensive cat food!) They'll chase down available prey for sport, no hunger required. The question of what that whiskered predator on your couch is quietly picking off outside is only now coming into focus, thanks to some clever new DNA-based science.

Health

The psychedelic that could rewrite postpartum care

Nearly 1 in 5 new moms struggle. The FDA just fast-tracked something new.

Nearly 1 in 5 women will battle depression or anxiety during pregnancy or in the year after giving birth, and left untreated, the ripple effects reach the baby too, touching everything from early bonding to a child's risk of the same conditions years later. The existing toolkit, mostly SSRIs and one FDA-approved drug, helps, but not fast, and not for everyone.

Enter luvesilocin, a newly named psychedelic that behaves like the active ingredient in psilocybin mushrooms. In this piece for GOOD, obstetrician-gynecologist Camille Hoffman writes as a site investigator on the drug's Phase 2 trial, and the numbers she's watching are the kind that make researchers sit up: 77% of postpartum women who received a full dose saw significant improvement, and most had no symptoms of postpartum depression just seven days after a single session.

The FDA granted it breakthrough therapy status in February, the designation reserved for treatments that look like they could genuinely change the game.

On July 8, 1497, Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama pointed four small ships south out of Lisbon and sailed toward a place no European had ever reached by water. The goal was India, and specifically the spice trade that had made Venice and a chain of Middle Eastern middlemen fabulously rich. Everyone wanted pepper. Nobody had figured out how to sail there and cut out the markup.

Da Gama's route was borderline reckless. Instead of hugging the African coast, he swung far out into the open Atlantic in a giant loop, betting on wind patterns that were basically educated guesswork at the time. The gamble worked. He rounded the Cape of Good Hope and reached Calicut in May 1498, roughly ten months and many, many miles later.

The ripple effects were enormous, and not always pretty. That single voyage rerouted centuries of global trade, made Portugal a superpower, and quietly rewrote which cities got rich and which got bypassed.

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