1) Wired But Tired
How can you be simultaneously tired yet wired – the paradoxical feeling of being physically exhausted but mentally unable to switch off? Blame your stone‑age brain.
Your “human stress response” evolved to respond to short-term immediate threats (such as a lion) – not to an overflowing email inbox.
When the brain detects threat, a region called the amygdala initiates the body’s classic fight-or-flight response. Stress hormones including adrenaline and cortisol are released. Heart rate increases, breathing quickens and attention sharpens. Energy is diverted away from long-term maintenance tasks towards immediate action.
The modern world makes it worse
Modern stressors are psychologically powerful but biologically peculiar. Unlike predators, they rarely resolve quickly. Emails continue arriving. Work follows us home through smartphones and laptops. Social media creates a constant stream of social comparison and low-level vigilance. Even leisure time has become strangely porous, interrupted by notifications, messages and often the expectation of permanent availability.
The result is that the parts of the brain responsible for keeping us alert can remain partially activated for long periods. This matters because sleep is not simply the absence of wakefulness. Falling asleep requires the brain to actively reduce alertness. A network of arousal centres in the brainstem, hypothalamus and forebrain normally keeps us awake and attentive during the day. To transition into sleep, these systems must quieten down.
Under long-term stress, however, the brain can become stuck in a state of hyperarousal. Even when the body is exhausted, the brain continues scanning, anticipating and rehearsing. From an evolutionary perspective, this makes a certain kind of sense. If the environment feels threatening or uncertain, being fully offline may not seem safe.
In addition, artificial light suppresses melatonin, the hormone that helps regulate sleep timing. Smartphones provide endless cognitive stimulation at exactly the point the brain should be winding down. Doomscrolling combines emotional arousal, uncertainty and novelty – three things human attention systems find almost impossible to ignore.
Then there is rumination: the repetitive mental replaying of worries and problems. Humans possess a remarkable ability to mentally simulate the future and revisit the past. This capacity helps us plan, learn and avoid danger. But it also means the brain can continue generating stress responses long after any immediate threat has disappeared.
There is a way out. Consistent routines, reduced evening stimulation, exercise, daylight exposure and limiting late-night screen use can all help reinforce the signals that night is a time for recovery rather than alertness.
2) Good News!! The Earth will (probably) NOT be swallowed by the Sun
In about 5 billion years, the Sun will run out of fuel, first expanding into a red giant and eventually becoming a white dwarf that will continue cooling for hundreds of billions of years.
Will the Earth be pulled into the expanding red sun and disappear forever? Or, though long since rendered uninhabitable, will it continue orbiting the white dwarf remnant of the Sun until the universe reaches its eventual heat death?
A red giant is a star that has exhausted the supply of hydrogen in its core and has begun thermonuclear fusion of hydrogen in a shell surrounding the core. They have radii tens to hundreds of times larger than that of the Sun. However, their outer envelope is lower in temperature, giving them a yellowish-orange hue.
Over its main sequence life, the star slowly fuses the hydrogen in the core into helium; its first life ends when nearly all the hydrogen in the core has been fused. For the Sun, this lifetime is approximately 10 billion years.
For the Sun and stars of less than about 2 M☉ the core will become dense enough that electron degeneracy pressure will prevent it from collapsing further. Once the core is degenerate, it will continue to heat until it reaches a temperature of roughly 10 million C, hot enough to begin fusing helium to carbon via the triple-alpha process. Once the degenerate core reaches this temperature, the entire core will begin helium fusion nearly simultaneously in a so-called “helium flash”.
As a red giant, the Sun will grow so large (over 200 times its present-day radius (~1.2 AU) that it will engulf Mercury, Venus, and ??likely”” Earth. It will lose 38% of its mass, then will contract down in size to form a white dwarf.
The sun’s enormous expansion will profoundly reshape Earth’s orbit through the interplay of two opposing effects. On one hand, the sun will lose a significant amount of mass through powerful stellar winds. As its gravitational pull weakens, Earth’s orbit will gradually drift outward. On the other hand, the planet’s increasing proximity to the sun’s extended gaseous envelope will produce drag, while tidal forces —the difference in gravitational pull exerted on the near and far sides of an object, which can gradually alter planetary orbits—will act as a brake on Earth’s motion.
Until now, scientists considered it overwhelmingly likely that these tidal effects would dominate. In that scenario, Earth would gradually lose orbital energy, spiral inward, and ultimately be engulfed by the expanding sun, where it would be completely vaporized.
The new study, based on improved models of tidal dissipation and stellar mass loss during the sun’s transition into a red giant, points to a different conclusion. According to the researchers, tidal dissipation —the process that drains orbital energy and gradually causes elliptical orbits, such as Earth’s, to become more circular—would be less effective than previous models suggested.
Observations of the red giant L2 Puppis, located about 209 light-years from Earth, indicate that the sun could lose enough mass for this effect to outweigh the influence of tidal forces.
If so, Earth’s orbit would gradually move outward, significantly increasing its chances of surviving the red giant phase.
Earth’s ultimate fate remains far from certain. The behavior of stellar winds and the complex thermal pulses that occur during the final stages of a star’s evolution involve many variables that are difficult to predict with precision. If the sun ultimately loses less mass than the new model estimates, tidal forces could still prevail, pulling Earth inward and leading to its destruction.
While Earth’s future remains an open question, the outlook for the rest of the solar system is much clearer. As the sun expands, Mercury and Venus will be completely engulfed by its outer layers, disappearing forever under the combined effects of intense heat and tidal forces. The outer planets, however, will follow a different path.
Mars, although it will experience a dramatic rise in temperature that vaporizes its permanent ice reserves, will migrate to a more distant orbit and avoid physical destruction.
Farther out, the gas giants Jupiter and Saturn will see the orbits of their moons reshaped, while the increase in solar radiation could temporarily melt the icy crusts of moons such as Europa and Enceladus, creating oceans of liquid water on their surfaces.
3) Heat Waves (260707-New Scientist)
Heatwaves are getting more dangerous
Longer-lasting hot spells and high temperatures at night are making it harder to cope, leading to thousands more deaths from extreme heat.
A heatwave in May 2026 set monthly temperature records across Europe; a heatwave in June became the hottest ever observed in western Europe. Now, in July, yet another heatwave is developing. Just 50 years ago, the June heatwave would have been virtually impossible. But global warming is making heatwaves more frequent, longer and more intense.
Worldwide, heat is the deadliest type of weather, killing more than a million people each year.
A) Hot seasons are starting earlier and getting longer
Strong heat stress (≥32°C) is occurring over a longer period each year in the northern hemisphere
In North America, heat stress periods lasting more than 180 days are more than 3 times more frequent than they were in the 1970s. Europe is already deep into the shift. Heat stress spells lasting two weeks to a month are now 3.37 times more common than they were in the 1970s
B) Heat stress at night is getting more severe.
Nights when the minimum temperature stays above 20°C are known as tropical nights. Since the mid-20th century, the percentage of tropical nights with moderate or severe heat stress has risen sharply. Strong heat stress almost never occurred at night before 1998. But now, nighttime temperatures in western Europe and other places are increasing at of global warming as a whole.
A drop in body temperature triggers sleep. If the environment is too hot, it is harder to fall asleep, as well as to enter a state of deep sleep. And loss of sleep over several nights in a row can hinder reaction time and boost anxiety and stress.
The frequency of a heat stress day followed by a tropical night of at least 20°C has increased 73% in Europe since the 1970s. These are called “compound events” because the body isn’t able to cool down and recover at night, compounding the heat stress.
C) Europe’s hottest summer saw more than 60,000 heat-related deaths
Countries in the south of Europe had the highest rates of heat-related mortality during the record-breaking summer of 2022
D) Periods of extreme heat are lasting longer
Compared with the 1970s, recent years have seen more frequent runs of consecutive heat-stress days and tropical nights, extending the periods when bodies get little respite.
E) Trees can help cities beat the heat
Street trees are among the cheapest defences against extreme heat.