On Our "Virtual Route 66" With Month-End Thoughts On A Vision of the Future

As April draws to a close, our Team pulled together some of the latest happenings on a Vision of the future, courtesy Knowledge, BBC Earth, Google/Breakup (the Information): Crypto Briefing ((Re Crypto) as we look forward to the continued privilege to serve:    Xiong’an Railway Station. China Daily China’s “city of the future” About 75 miles south of Beijing lies what Xi Jinping calls “the city of the future”, says Long Ling in the London Review of Books. It’s called Xiong’an New Area, a name combining the characters meaning “majestic, male, heroic” and “stability, safety, wellbeing”. It’s being built entirely from scratch – next to a freshwater lake that smells a little too much of fish and chemicals – and is designed to eventually accommodate five million people. The scale is “exceptional even by Chinese standards”: construction costs have already exceeded £86bn, and the 4,251 buildings completed or under construction cover only a fraction of the planned site. More than 37,000 people have moved in, many of them “returnees” whose houses were demolished to make way for the project. Xi wants Xiong’an to serve as an ultra-clean, ultra-ordered twin city for Beijing – one without what he calls “urban diseases”. As you would expect, the city is not short of surveillance. Traffic patterns, water and electricity consumption, phone and internet usage, citizens’ daily movements – everything is “collected and monitored”. All this information is compiled in the city’s central data facility, a large complex capped by a giant arch that gets lit up every evening, “making it look like a portal to a different world”. Locals call it the “Eye of Xiong’an”. The idea, of course, is that all this makes people safe. Locals tell the story of an 80-year-old woman who lived alone. When the system spotted that she wasn’t using any water, electricity or gas, someone went round to check up on her and discovered she couldn’t get out of bed because of a sudden illness. “With this eye of wisdom,” says one worker, “everyone will be looked after.” The lab at the top of the world Scientists are trying to leave behind little trace in the world's northernmost lab. Credit: Iain Rudkin Field research on the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard has helped provide vital clues to long-term temperature changes, as well as produce accurate weather forecasts for the far north. One research station in Ny-Ålesund has released a weather balloon to measure atmospheric conditions every day for the last 30 years. Its researchers say mitigating their own environmental impacts in the fast-changing region is a high priority. Read Beth Timmins' story here. ‌

CLIMATE CONVERSATION  The polar bears on a Russian 'ghost' island Dmitry Kokh's iconic photos quickly went viral. Credit: Dmitry Kokh Sophie Hardach, London  Russian wildlife photographer Dmitry Kokh was on a sailing trip to Russia's extreme northeast when a sudden storm forced him and his fellow travellers to take shelter at the rocky shore of a fog-shrouded island called Kolyuchin. ‌ To their surprise, they spotted more than a dozen polar bears roaming around the now uninhabited island and its abandoned buildings – remnants of a Soviet-era weather station. ‌ "Of course, we wanted to take some pictures," says Kokh. "We tried to land on the island but it was impossible, it was too dangerous, because it's very small and polar bears were roaming all around." ‌ Instead, he used a drone – spending hours watching the bears until he got the perfect shot of an empty building. "I realised there could be a perfect image with one bear looking out of the window, and another one coming out of the door," he says. "I started to spend time and wait for this moment, and after a while, they really did it." ‌ The resulting photos won him the prestigious Wildlife Photographer of the Year award and went viral. People even got tattoos of the bears, Kokh says, showing me pictures during our video interview. But why were the polar bears, who usually live on sea ice, in the weather station in the first place? ‌ In fact, polar bears are known to wander into abandoned buildings out of curiosity, Tom Smith, a globally renowned bear expert, tells me. So seeing them roaming around the island didn't strike him as unusual as such.

Polar bears are increasingly drawn to human settlements in search of food. Credit: Dmitry Kokh Conflict with humans Still, as the sea ice shrinks due to global warming, polar bears are spending more and more time on land. And that's a problem for several reasons. ‌ One is that polar bears can't survive permanently on land, wide-ranging research shows, because they have evolved to live mostly on sea ice, where they can catch fatty seals. They need this high-fat diet of marine mammals to thrive. If they had to be on land constantly, says Smith, "as a species, they would die". ‌ In addition, feeding on rubbish dumps near towns and villages brings the bears closer to humans – raising the risk of bear-human conflict. Smith and other researchers have suggested various solutions to keep bears and humans safe – read more about them in my story below. ‌ Kokh sees a hopeful side to his photos of the polar bears in abandoned buildings: they could be interpreted as a symbol of the resilience of nature, he says. And, after taking the photos, he and his fellow travellers continued with their journey to more well-known polar bear spots – and did eventually find some on the sea ice too.

 

Google’s Breakup More Likely After Second Antitrust Loss

By Catherine Perloff

 

Powell’s got inflation on blast and just axed any hope for a May rate cut, while Trump’s tariffs are shaking up global markets.

Bitcoin dipped 1.5% during Powell’s speech but bounced back in 24 hours—classic BTC move.

Meanwhile, JPMorgan says gold’s stealing the safe-haven crown, with ETF inflows pouring in while Bitcoin’s left sidelined.

But wait—Powell’s suddenly Team Crypto, hyping stablecoins and hinting at looser bank rules. Even Gensler’s catching feels, saying

And in a plot twist nobody saw coming, ex-SEC chair Gensler’s basically waving a Bitcoin flag, claiming Bitcoin’s here to stay.