2026

Image: World Green Building Council In Freiburg, south-west Germany, a city hall has been designed to do something unusual for a government building: produce more energy than it consumes. Completed in 2017, the city’s latest town hall combines high-performance solar panels with an energy-efficient design that sharply reduces the building’s demand for heating, cooling, ventilation…

According to estimates, 30% of temples in Japan may disappear by 2040. The cause of the event will not be some extravagant sci-fi catastrophe or a predicted public uprising but the decrease in religiosity. Against this backdrop, it seems monks in the country have turned to shake hands with AI and use it to turn…

Astronomers have found what is currently the fastest known star in the Milky Way, a faint star racing through the extreme environment around Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the centre of our galaxy. Called S301, the star reaches a staggering speed of about 15,500 miles per second, or 25,000 kilometres per second, which…