Science & technology
The wind in their sails
How two teams plan to smash the world sailing-speed record
Neither craft looks much like a sailing boat
The war underground
Israel hopes technology will help it fight in Hamas’s tunnels
The “Gaza Metro” presents a big headache for the IDF
Gut feelings
Microbiome treatments are taking off
Faecal transplants are just the start of a new sort of medicine
Be rich in good deeds
A new gonorrhoea drug was developed by a non-profit foundation
Antibiotics are not commercially attractive to pharmaceutical firms
Ground truths
Could AI help find valuable mineral deposits?
Computers have keener eyes than geologists
When the map becomes the territory
Lab-grown models of embryos increasingly resemble the real thing
Embryoids promise many benefits, but pose tricky ethical questions
A battery ReNaissance
Firms are exploring sodium batteries as an alternative to lithium
Unlike lithium, sodium is cheap and abundant
Listening to the jungle
AI can catalogue a forest’s inhabitants simply by listening
That could help check whether reforestation projects work as advertised
Two seats, no pilot
China approves the world’s first flying taxi
EHang could soon take passengers on pilotless joyrides over Guangzhou
The weather underground
What a Serbian cave tells you about the weather 2,500 years ago
Like ice cores, stalagmites preserve a long record of the climate
Unrolled at last
AI could help unearth a trove of lost classical texts
Computers could let archaeologists read hundreds of burnt scrolls from a Roman library
Sleep tight!
It’s not just Paris. Bedbugs are resurgent everywhere
Like bacteria, the insects are becoming resistant to the chemicals used to kill them