Comment on Syria: Hit Him Hard

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As trust in mainstream media fades, influencers are acting like the next generation’s news anchors. Two-thirds of them are men. “News influencers” are social media translators, conveying the day’s biggest stories via TikTok commentary or Instagram graphic. They also happen to be overwhelmingly male.

British scaleup Tokamak Energy has secured $125mn as it looks to harness fusion — the same clean, virtually limitless energy source that powers the Sun and stars.  Tokamak spun out from the UK’s Atomic Energy Authority in 2009. As its name suggests, the company is building a tokamak reactor, the most common kind of fusion design, first pioneered in the 1960s.

For the past few months, Meta has been sending recipes to a Dutch scaleup called VSParticle (VSP). These are not food recipes — they’re AI-generated instructions for how to make new nanoporous materials that could potentially supercharge the green transition.  VSP has so far taken 525 of these recipes and synthesised them into nanomaterials called electrocatalysts.

Dawn Aerospace has flown its rocket-powered aircraft past the speed of sound, the latest milestone on its path to its first commercial flights. During the test, which took place on New Zealand’s South Island, the startup’s Mk-II Aurora aircraft reached Mach 1.1 and an altitude of 25 kilometres. Dawn said this marks the first time a civil aircraft has flown supersonic since Concorde.  The feat comes after Aurora hit Mach 0.92 in August, which, at the time, was three times the speed and five times the height of its previous test conducted in 2023.

Two years ago, the minds behind Testing for All — a Covid-era at-home testing service — launched a new startup. But instead of those dreaded antigen tests that make you feel like you’re trying to tickle your brain with a cotton swab, the company delivers something much more comforting: a trained nurse or doctor.  The London-based venture is called Heim Health.