Devils Hole Pupfish, Amargosa Valley, Nevada. Photo © Stone Nature Photography / Alamy
We ask a lot of some very small fish. Single species are relied on to save entire ecosystems. In December I tried to see the Devils Hole pupfish, which lives in a single cave just 22 metres long and 3.5 metres wide in the Amargosa Valley, Nevada. The species has been completely isolated since the end of the last Ice Age, between ten and twenty thousand years ago, when the great lake that filled Death Valley receded, fragmenting pupfish populations into separate ecological niches. Devils Hole is thought to be ‘the smallest habitat in the world containing the entire population of a vertebrate species’, and its pupfish may be the most inbred species in the world: any two individuals are on average 58 per cent genetically identical.
Robert Schumann’s teenage ambitions of virtuosity were undone by the onset of debilitating pain in his right hand. ‘It came to such a point that whenever I had to move my fourth finger, my whole body would twist convulsively,’ he wrote to a friend. Trying to make his fingers stronger he experimented with mechanical devices that probably banjaxed them irreparably. A new paper in Science Robotics reports a device that Schumann would have jumped at the chance to try: a robotic exoskeleton for the hand.
A standard English textbook in China asks students to compose a letter from someone called Li Hua to their British friend Allen, inviting him to a music festival. When the US ban on TikTok briefly came into effect earlier this month, nearly three million ‘TikTok refugees’ signed up to the Chinese app RedNote (Xiaohongshu). Many of them were asked by Chinese users if they’d received a letter from Li Hua.
The government’s support for Heathrow expansion is in keeping with the robotic incantations of economic growth that beam out of every press interview and policy announcement from Labour HQ. Forget the climate emergency. As the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, said when asked to choose between net zero and growth at Davos last week: ‘Well, if it’s the number one mission, it’s obviously the most important thing.’
Last week, a trove of leaked documents offered a glimpse into the role that large technology companies have played in Israel’s war on Gaza. Israel’s military campaigns across Palestine and neighbouring countries have long offered the raw material that tech firms needed to build their experiments in surveillance and algorithmic warfare to scale: kill-chain data. Yet the past fifteen months of war offered Silicon Valley an unparalleled opportunity to refine its products. It happened just in time for a new era of militarised AI.
A container ship heading to the Atlantic side of the Panama Canal, 27 January 2025. Photo © Daren Fentiman / ZUMA Press Wire
The declarations about Greenland and the Panama Canal are more than just another example of Trump’s trolling-as-policymaking. They are expressions of US imperial atavism.
On the first day of his second term as US president, Donald Trump described Gaza as a ‘phenomenal location on the sea’. Living in a tent close to the beach in southern Gaza, my friend Marwa has had her request for permission to travel to the north, to visit her elderly mother, denied three times for ‘security’ reasons. There has been no news of her cousin, who used to look after her mother, since he was taken by the Israeli army over a month ago.