Keyword – Television & radio
Trefwoorden – Documentary, Dinosaurs, Evolution, Factual TV, Television, Television & radio, Culture, NBC
Title – ‘Life has always managed to crawl through’: docuseries takes us back to mass extinction events | Documentary | The Guardian
Author – https://www.theguardian.com/profile/vivian-ho
Link – ‘Life has always managed to crawl through’: docuseries takes us back to mass extinction events | Documentary | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-06-11T09:00:18.000Z
Category – Culture
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2026/jun/11/surviving-earth-docuseries-mass-extinction

A lmost three decades have passed since producer Tim Haines reimagined natural history with Walking with Dinosaurs , using CGI and animatronics to bring to life the beasts that roamed these lands millions of years ago.

With his latest project, Haines is applying that same visual magic to look even further into the past. Surviving Earth, a docuseries premiering on Thursday on NBC , explores eight mass extinction events going back 450m years through the lives – and eventual annihilation – of the creatures that preceded or existed alongside the dinosaurs.

But what is essentially a series on death is actually a series on life, or really, the resilience of it – “how life bounced back” from the volcanic eruptions, flooding and drought that have repeatedly wiped out nearly all lifeforms, Haines told the Guardian.

“The biggest message of the show is that the Earth is an incredibly changeable place and life has evolved on it, which means that life has evolved to cope with change,” Haines said. “No matter what the Earth has tried to do, life has always managed to crawl through it and come out the other side stronger.”

Haines worked with more than 300 scientists to breathe life into the creatures in Surviving Earth, consulting with paleontologists and paleoclimatologists from around the world over the course of three and a half years. While CGI technology and the visual details of CGI animation are better now than they were in 1999, when Walking with Dinosaurs premiered on the BBC, the process of putting the series together was not too different, Haines said. A paleo artist designed the animals while film crews determined the locations to shoot the backgrounds, some of which, like a forest in Chile with monkey puzzle trees, Haines had used in Walking with Dinosaurs. The tech team then built landscapes based on the background shots and detailed models of the animals off of the paleo artist’s designs before animating the creatures and compositing everything together.

There will always be some level of debate over what the fossils and paleological discoveries of past centuries tell us about prehistoric life – what these animals looked like, how they moved and what they ate – and because no one alive has witnessed these animals, their renderings will always be “what the scientists think is the best guess”, Haines said. “We never know when we’re right, but we know when we’re wrong.”

For example, the gorgonopsians of the first episode are reptilian apex predators who are also the early distant relatives of mammals. “They’re kind of half mammal, half reptile, and we had a huge discussion about whether there should be any hair on them,” Haines said. “I really wanted them to have whiskers.” Haines was ultimately overruled by a scientist who described them as the “really” early distant relatives of mammals and in the first episode, they appear similar to modern-day Komodo dragons.

With any nature program, showrunners have to find a way to endear to the human audience to animals that cannot verbally communicate with them, but stopping just short of anthropomorphization. “We want you to emotionally connect to their stories, but we don’t want to start calling them Eric and Sonia,” Haines said. An added challenge that Haines faces this time around is that while the least paleontologically inclined layperson is somewhat familiar with dinosaurs, it is unlikely that they have even heard of the creatures featured in Surviving Earth.

But a good narrative can cross any barrier. “The storytelling we’re using is universal,” Haines said. “It is parents and babies, it is fathers and mothers, predators and prey … they are creatures living their lives, and what natural history shows you is that you can get some very rich stories out of that.”

The first episode ends by addressing the prehistoric mastodon in the room – that given the current climate crisis, it’s easy to imagine we’re in the midst of an imminent extinction event as well. To borrow a phrase from another blockbuster franchise about prehistoric creatures, Surviving Earth’s overall message of optimism is that life finds a way. That message feels a bit more daunting when you realize that this does not mean you and your species will survive. Scientists estimate that something like 99.9% of all species that have ever lived are now extinct and humans could go the same way too.

But as narrator Josh Goodman points out in the first episode, over scenes of cars, cities and modern life, today’s levels of carbon dioxide, the primary driver of mass extinctions, are not high when compared with the history of life on Earth – which means that human beings aren’t the only species to have caused the climate crisis. “Other types of life have changed the Earth as well,” Haines said. “As a form of life, we’re not the first ones to change the climate, but we are the first ones who know we’re doing it.”

The concern lies in the speed at which humans are driving the climate crisis. But as the first species to be aware of such, Haines said, humans also have the unique opportunity to be the first species to stop the damage and find a way to make the Earth continue to be inhabitable for them.

“The program isn’t here to lecture anyone or tell anyone what to do, but it’s blindingly obvious that if the Earth changes, you have to acknowledge that and change with it as much as you can,” Haines said. “And if you’re responsible for changing it, you’d be wise to try and reduce the amount you change it by.”

Surviving Earth begins on NBC on 11 June with dates in the UK and Australia to be announced

Keyword – Society
Trefwoorden – Autism, Stem cells, Robert F Kennedy Jr, Children’s health, Medical research, Health policy, Health, Children, Science, US news
Title – Autistic children injected with unapproved stem cell treatments supported by RFK Jr | Autism | The Guardian
Author – https://www.theguardian.com/profile/edpilkington
Link – Autistic children injected with unapproved stem cell treatments supported by RFK Jr | Autism | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-06-12T11:00:45.000Z
Category – News
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/society/2026/jun/12/autism-stem-cell-infusions-rfk-jr

Autistic children as young as 18 months old are being injected with human stem cells derived from umbilical cords in unapproved, unproven and potentially harmful “treatments” that scientists warn are proliferating across the US under the active encouragement of the US health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr .

Clinics in Florida, Texas and other states are selling what they bill as “regenerative medicine” to families with autistic children who have intensive care needs. Parents who have taken their children through the process talked to the Guardian about their hopes and fears for a therapy that appears to be gaining ground in the US.

The procedure, which can involve the child being sedated with ketamine before receiving intravenous doses of millions of stem cells, costs up to $20,000 each treatment. Families are often advised to return for regular top-ups.

Profoundly stressed parents are being wooed to the clinics with promises that a high-dose infusion of umbilical cord stem cells can lead to dramatic improvements in their children’s ability to speak, socialise, or avoid aggressive or self-harming behaviour. Yet there is no scientific evidence that the procedure works – the most comprehensive clinical trial staged so far, a placebo experiment conducted by Duke University , found insignificant benefits for most of the 180 children tested.

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) directly cautions parents that if they are being offered stem cell treatments outside an approved clinical trial, “you are likely being deceived and offered a product illegally”.

Though the Duke trial found minimal safety concerns with properly administered stem cell infusions, authorities continue to highlight the potential risks of under-regulated therapies.

The FDA warned in 2021 that it had received reports of complications following applications of umbilical cord stem cells and other related unapproved products leading to “blindness, tumor formation, infections and more”.

In his 16 months as the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services within the Trump administration, Kennedy has undercut established scientific endeavors. He has fired thousands of federal health officials, dismissed longstanding scientific advisers , defunded $31m in autism-related research and attempted to shrink the recommended list of childhood vaccinations.

At the same time, largely unnoticed, he has given his backing to alternative health providers moving to fill the gap. Kennedy appeared by video link at the first two annual summits held in San Diego by Autism Health , a leading advocate of stem cell infusions for autistic kids.

At the summit last year, he told the audience that “your issue is no longer on the fringe”. At this year’s gathering in April, he promised to “create opportunities that extend across a lifetime” and to work with the stem cell providers “to drive solutions together”.

Those providers included Mike Chan, a Malaysian physician who presented the San Diego summit with a protocol that he practices from his clinic in Bangkok. It involves injecting autistic children in the buttocks with high doses of stem cells extracted from slaughtered sheep and rabbits.

“Man himself is an animal, the most intelligent animal. There are hundreds of drugs from animals,” Chan told the Guardian in an email exchange.

Kennedy described the organiser of the San Diego summit, Tracy Slepcevic, as a “good friend”. In January, the health secretary appointed her to his remodelled Autism Coordinating Committee, which guides federally funded autism research.

Slepcevic is the mother of an autistic son and a proponent of alternative therapies for autism including stem cell infusions. She will be appearing alongside Eric Trump and Del Bigtree, the influential anti-vaxxer who was communications director of Kennedy’s 2024 presidential campaign, on stage at the Christian nationalist ReAwaken America reunion in Tulsa next week.

Slepcevic unveiled at the San Diego summit a new experiment that involves injecting 120 autistic children with umbilical cord stem cells. The effort will begin next month in partnership with a major clinic in Tijuana in Mexico, a country which has historically taken a looser approach to stem cell regulation than the US.

Slepcevic has not responded to a request for comment from the Guardian.

Ed Clay, a former MMA fighter who founded the Cellular Performance Institute (CPI) in Tijuana, told the Guardian that the clinical trial would be free to families and would be fully licensed under the Mexican federal health authority, Cofepris.

He said he had devised the exercise as a clinical trial with expert neurologists and paediatricians serving as investigators in the full-service hospital his company runs in Mexico, with the CPI investing about $2m to conduct it.

His team includes, he said, “21 PhD scientists and 42 medical doctors, including PhDs from institutions such as Harvard, Yale, MIT and Stanford”.

Clay said the clinical trial could be imported at later stages to Nashville and other US sites under full FDA licensing if early results in Mexico were promising.

While the CPI prides itself at using state-of-the-art medical technology, other stem cell providers now moving into autism treatment do not hold such standards. Clay said: “I would say our biggest competitor right now for CPI is the scammer and the many fly-by-night clinics operating in this space.”

Kennedy has said that he does not want to see a “wild west” of alternative therapies developing in the US. Yet in the same breath, he conceded that opening up the country to such providers will lead to “charlatans and people who have bad results, but ultimately you can’t prevent that”. The Guardian has contacted the US health department and the FDA but did not receive a reply.

Among the newly emboldened raft of stem cell providers targeting autistic kids is Better Stem, a Miami-based company run by Greice Murphy. She describes herself as an entrepreneur whose other ventures include the suggestively named “Biatch”, a range of “artfully crafted tequilas made for the woman’s palate”, and a Miami stem cell clinic offering infusions to address hair loss and erectile dysfunction. The Guardian contacted Murphy for comment, but she did not respond prior to publication.

Two months ago, she moved into the business of offering umbilical cord stem cell infusions for autistic children. Families are charged $300 for an initial consultation, followed by up to $15,000 per infusion.

Better Stem claims to be the first company in the US offering “legal, compliant access” to stem cell therapies under the “right-to-try” law signed by Donald Trump in 2018 during his first presidency. The clinic tells prospective clients that the legislation allows patients with a debilitating condition that has no cure, such as autism, to be treated with unapproved drugs.

In fact, the Right to Try Act is specifically limited to patients who are terminally ill and have been diagnosed with a “life-threatening disease or condition”. Autism does not fall under that definition.

“Technically speaking, the federal Right to Try Act covers terminal diseases and is not applicable to non life-threatening conditions even if they have no cure,” said Jeff Cohen, an expert in health law at the Florida Healthcare Law Firm.

Among the families who are being drawn to stem cell therapies are Taylor and her four-year-old son, Ollie, from Utah. At the end of this month, they will travel to Florida for an infusion of umbilical stem cells for Ollie, who is non-speaking and has been diagnosed with autism with high support needs.

The procedure will cost Taylor $12,500, which she has raised largely through donations from family and friends. She told the Guardian that her heart’s wish was that people would come to understand “the weight these children carry in a world that was not designed to help them thrive”.

She has had family members chide her for seeking alternative therapies, which they have described as “a little bit crazy”.

Her view, though, is that “I have to at least try. For those who pass judgment, I hope they come to understand the lengths we must go, simply because no one else will.”

Keyword – Film
Trefwoorden – Horror films, Film, Film industry, Culture
Title – Obsessed with Obsession: how a low-budget horror changed the game in Hollywood | Horror films | The Guardian
Author – https://www.theguardian.com/profile/jesse-hassenger
Link – Obsessed with Obsession: how a low-budget horror changed the game in Hollywood | Horror films | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-06-12T14:00:42.000Z
Category – Culture
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/film/2026/jun/12/obsession-horror-film-hollywood

T his week, the independently produced horror movie Obsession , which cost either $750,000 or $15m depending on whether you count its actual budget or acquisition cost for its studio, officially passed the latest Star Wars movie at the box office (the film has so far made over $165m in the US alone).

It’s not a coincidence that this happened on a weekday. Obsession’s box office power lies not just in its astonishing weekend-to-weekend strength (including the virtually unheard-of trajectory of increasing grosses on its second and third weekends) but in its powerhouse weekday grosses. This past week, as it approached the one-month mark in theaters, it was averaging over $4m on its weekdays. At the same point in the run of Avengers: Endgame, that movie – the biggest summer blockbuster of modern times – was pulling in half as much.

When all is said and done, Obsession will (probably) not make as much as Avengers: Endgame, though its return on investment is far more astronomical. But this intimate and occasionally gruesome horror movie about a meek twentysomething named Bear (Michael Johnston) who wishes for the devotion of his cool-girl crush Nikki (breakout performer Inde Navarrette) only to accidentally curse her with a form of unnerving possession, has the kind of cultural cachet needed to break through in a post-pandemic, post-superhero moviegoing landscape.

I saw this first-hand venturing out to see the movie a second time with a paying crowd on Thursday. Normally at a Times Square multiplex in Manhattan, the big Thursday-night draw would be a previewing blockbuster officially opening on Friday, like Steven Spielberg’s new film Disclosure Day; for a movie that’s already been out for a week or more, Thursday is typically its lowest-grossing day of the week. But the 300-seat auditorium used for a 7.30pm showing of Obsession was nearly full, just as similar shows across the city had been all week.

As a critic, I first saw Obsession in a small screening room, and though its creepiness, shocks, and mordant laughs played fine to an audience of a dozen or so journalists – I gave it a positive pre-release notice – the full audience experience felt different. Waves of laughter and murmurs of discomfort crested through the crowd, and though the movie’s particularly shadowy lighting made it difficult to see, I did catch plenty of viewers with their hands on their faces, aghast as Bear’s wish (and his passivity) causes Nikki (or, more accurately, her puppeted body) to become increasingly unhinged. Multiple pairs, seemingly couples, covered each other’s eyes in affectionate mutual quasi-agony. When the movie reached its grim-but-fair conclusion and rolled its credits, chatter quickly rose, overtaking the usual quiet shuffling toward the exit.

Outside the auditorium, I spoke with a few groups about their decision to come out on a Thursday night, temporarily aligning them more with all-hours obsessives like me rather than the typical moviegoer who might attend one every few months, if that. Some of them were indeed cinephiles, including a young woman who had already seen the film and organized a group of uninitiated friends to come check it out. As such, the group framed the specific weeknight outing as more of a convenience, an offshoot of trying to find a time that worked for everyone. That itself seems telling about the force of the film’s buzz: this was enough of an event to coordinate the schedules of half a dozen presumably busy twentysomethings. Clearly this wasn’t a normal occurrence; one of those friends hadn’t seen a movie in theaters since last year’s A24 comedy Friendship.

So what motivated everyone to make this specific trip happen, uniting AMC A-listers with once-a-year types? Almost everyone cited buzz about the film, both from real-life friends and online discourse. One guy specifically pointed to news about the movie delaying its streaming premiere indefinitely creating the impetus to not just wait for home viewing. At the same time, other forms of home viewing seemed to goose interest, too, as others mentioned TikTok clips, specifically of a scene where Nikki reacts to Bear lightly pressing her on a personal question during a date with an escalating, panicked “no, no, no, no, NO, NO, NOOO” (in a scene that has reportedly led fans to swarm the real location to recreate).

Another group of young women described their own range of reactions to Nikki’s wish-forced behavior: “At least I’ll never be that crazy,” followed by “am I that crazy?” and then “I feel like I’ve been that crazy.” Obviously part of the movie’s appeal is the social lens of watching this woman fly off the handle, though reactions like these, framing it as a degree of craziness, raise the question of whether viewers really think of Nikki as a prisoner within her own body, possessed by a force attempting to inhabit a devoted human relationship, or simply performing an outsized version of typical relationship possessiveness. That queasy mix of relatability and potential caricature probably only helps the movie transcend its horror roots and become more of a social conversation piece. One woman had heard certain details about the film beforehand – not necessarily spoilers, she clarified, but discussion points, especially about Bear and how sympathetic he was intended to be in the film. Watching the movie, she did notice laughter that she thought flirted with feeling inappropriate, like certain moments were landing more like dark comedy than they should have.

I don’t disagree; Obsession is clearly intended to have blackly funny moments, but a second viewing did underline just how same-y some of its scenes are in walking that line between abject horror and cruel-fate humor, as Bear reacts with the same frozen-body, stammering-language inability to control what he’s conjured. Yet in watching and talking to audience members, it became clearer how a relatively straightforward monkey’s-paw story, even one that flirts with repetition, contains enough grabby ambiguity to make the movie a decide-for-yourself must-see. Writer-director Curry Barker has even spoken about mixing different takes in an early, pre-wish scene, to intentionally muddy the question of whether Nikki returned Bear’s feelings before she loses control of her faculties.

Obsession’s success probably also speaks to the lack of movies attempting to replicate some form of the twentysomething experience – this was a young-skewing crowd even by Times Square standards – even in a heightened way. Consider that Obsession’s fellow surprise smash Backrooms , which has followed a more typical big-opening-big-drop trajectory, was directed by a 20-year-old, fueled by a highly online phenomenon, and yet is still about characters closer to middle age. Hollywood is forever chasing crowd-pleasing feel-great all-demographic experiences, and movies like Project Hail Mary prove that this can still be a lucrative market. But a movie like Obsession creates a rarer impulse: to go and watch even if it makes you want to look away.

Keyword – Life and style
Trefwoorden – Pets, Life and style
Title – Tell us: what’s the weirdest thing your pet has tried to eat? | Pets | The Guardian
Author – https://www.theguardian.com/profile/guardian-community-team
Link – Tell us: what’s the weirdest thing your pet has tried to eat? | Pets | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-06-05T13:41:26.000Z
Category – Lifestyle
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2026/jun/05/tell-us-whats-the-weirdest-thing-your-pet-has-tried-to-eat

Socks, trainers, sofas, cushions, the entire contents of your fridge – the list of things dogs will attempt to eat their way through is endless. And sometimes it gets weird. We want to hear from people who’ve witnessed their dog try to chew their way through the remarkable, the bizarre, the seemingly impossible – and lived to bark the tale! Pictures are a must.

If you’re having trouble using the form click here . Read terms of service here and privacy policy here .

Keyword – The Grid
Trefwoorden – The Grid
Title – The grid unlocked: how does a greener power network actually work? | The Grid | The Guardian
Author – Helena Pozniak
Link – The grid unlocked: how does a greener power network actually work? | The Grid | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-03-30T10:14:27.000Z
Category – Labs
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/the-grid/2026/mar/30/how-a-greener-electricity-grid-works

In the 20th century, the UK’s electricity grid was shaped by coal-fired power stations, clustered in the industrial heartlands. The once world-leading system was designed for a one-way energy flow from power plants to consumers – whose use of electricity was modest and predictable.

The shift to cleaner energy and growing electrification of all aspects of life means the grid of 70 years ago is no longer fit for purpose. With power generated from a wider and more disparate range of sources, significant investment and pioneering technology are required to deliver a grid that can match supply with ever-increasing demand.

“It’s way more complicated than energy in equals energy out,” says Robert Friel, member of the Institution of Engineering and Technology’s Sustainability and Net Zero Policy Centre. “We are trying to integrate tens of thousands of energy sources into a grid that was designed to take coal energy mostly from the Midlands and move it around the country. This is a complete transformation. We’ve got to build for the future.”

Increasing demand

For instance, most of the UK’s wind power is generated off Scotland and in the North Sea, where a single turn of a turbine at Dogger Bank wind farm generates enough electricity to power a home for two days . But transporting that electricity to London and the south-east, where demand is higher, requires an overhaul of national transmission and distribution networks to overcome bottlenecks after decades of little expansion.

By 2035, Ofgem forecasts that the UK’s renewable generation capacity will grow from 120GW in 2024 to 300GW, resulting from ambitious targets for wind and solar power, which should largely free the UK from volatile prices of imported fossil fuels.

But the new grid isn’t just about integrating more clean power; it is also about helping the system cope with huge increases in demand.

UK consumers will be using twice as much electricity by 2050, the Climate Change Committee predicts [pdf], as petrol cars and gas-powered heating systems are displaced by electric vehicles (EVs) and heat pumps. As well as transport and heating, households are using electricity more than ever for entertainment, communication and home working, with on average 13 electrical devices per household – although more efficient appliances help keep energy use lower. As reliance upon cloud-based services and artificial intelligence (AI) grows, datacentre usage is expected to more than double by 2030.

To help meet this soaring demand, record levels of investment in the UK’s transmission network were recently announced by Ofgem , the UK’s energy regulator, as part of its framework for ensuring the companies operating the UK’s energy networks have sufficient revenue to invest in and run them. Nicola Connelly, CEO of SP Energy Networks, which plans to invest almost £12bn to 2031 in delivering critical energy infrastructure, noted: “If the UK wants to deliver on its ambition to be a clean energy superpower and capitalise on its natural resources, then it needs the electricity grid to match demand. We are committed to delivering that at pace, combining unprecedented levels of investment with a focus on ensuring fair returns for consumers and investors.”

Changing consumer habits

There’s a cultural change afoot too, as customers move from being passive consumers of energy to generating their own and, in some cases, selling it back to the grid. Faced with the upfront costs of installing EV chargers and solar panels, many hope to reap the benefits.

Aggregators – companies that bring together smaller energy producers – will play an increasing role from a consumer perspective in selling and buying electricity at the best price.

Consumers are also getting smarter at using power when it’s cheaper, aided by growing levels of automation, which will affect demand, habits and usage down the line.

Technological innovation

To cope with increasing demand, technologies are being introduced to increase the capacity of existing infrastructure and reduce the amount of new power lines that are inevitably needed to transmit twice the electricity we use today.

Much of the new infrastructure planned will be offshore and under the sea – which wasn’t an engineering option back in the 1950s when the supergrid’s overhead transmission lines were conceived and built.

However, the infrastructure being built and upgraded needs to be smarter, flexible and more responsive to the flow of energy moving in different directions across the network, and increasingly automated. The continued use of AI will help improve management of supply and demand in real time.

“It’s possible that AI tools could see problems emerging in a system with thousands of generators in a way that a few control engineers just couldn’t,” says Friel.

Friel says there’s also scope to understand far more about household consumption and generation at a granular level and “how potentially thousands of domestic batteries and millions of electric cars will come together. Smart meters are part of [supplying this data] but we need more information to enable a digital system to emerge.”

As well as providing vital data, smart technology is helping give customers more flexibility, says Rozlyn Brennan, smart solutions director at ScottishPower. “Households are now often producers of energy as well as consumers, and smart technology is allowing people to choose when they use their energy, whether it’s smart EV charging, or saving money by using appliances out of peak times.”

Innovations are creeping in. SP Energy Networks, for example, has created a detailed “digital twin” of Britain’s electricity network. Using AI, it allows the modelling and testing of digital solutions to manage increased electricity demand on its real-life counterpart, helping to prevent outages and identify the most efficient way to operate the network.

Other emerging uses of AI include using it to enable individual PV panels on solar farms to dynamically adjust to different lighting conditions and accurately find the optimal operating point.

But to get the benefits of emerging technologies and modernise the grid, the UK needs to get going, says Friel – and this requires vision and commitment of the kind that inspired the first supergrid.

Its successor must be built to meet the needs of a cleaner, more digital and decentralised world. This isn’t just an engineering challenge but a social one, demanding collaboration between grid operators, policymakers and consumers to create a system that’s resilient, efficient and fit for the future. “We’ve come further than we might have imagined in the last 10 years, but we’ve still got a long way to go,” adds Friel. “Transforming the grid [will require] billions of pounds, but the danger is we don’t think big enough.”

Keyword – Art and design
Trefwoorden – David Hockney, Art and design, Culture, UK news, World news
Title – David Hockney – a life in pictures | David Hockney | The Guardian
Author –
Link – David Hockney – a life in pictures | David Hockney | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-06-12T10:18:42.000Z
Category – Culture
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2026/jun/12/david-hockney-a-life-in-pictures

Keyword – The Grid
Trefwoorden – The Grid
Title – How AI is transforming the electricity grid – and why robot dogs could have a role to play | The Grid | The Guardian
Author – https://www.theguardian.com/profile/rhymer-rigby
Link – How AI is transforming the electricity grid – and why robot dogs could have a role to play | The Grid | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-03-23T16:21:32.000Z
Category – Labs
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/the-grid/2026/mar/23/how-ai-is-transforming-the-electricity-grid

Artificial intelligence may have exploded in the public consciousness thanks to a new generation of attention-grabbing chatbots, but AI and machine learning have been with us for several years – and these more established models are already delivering significant returns.

Electricity grids and AI, for instance, are a match made in heaven. Grids are complicated, have vast numbers of inputs and outputs, require constant oversight and create huge quantities of data. Dealing with enormous numbers of variables and complex systems is one of the things AI does best – better, arguably, than pretending to be human.

Iberdrola, Europe’s largest utility company, which owns ScottishPower in the UK, has been using AI for more than 10 years to make predictions, optimise processes and detect patterns, which can be used to improve its operations. One example of this is providing customers with accurate estimates of outage times after incidents, via an app. Another is allowing engineers to plan ahead by telling them which grids or transformation centres will need partial replacements the following year, using myriad variables that predict possible issues based on historical data.

In a slightly more sci-fi vein, Avangrid, Iberdrola’s US subsidiary, announced last year that it had partnered with Levatas and Boston Dynamics to deploy a robot “dog” to improve substation inspections. The dog, nicknamed Spot, has sophisticated imaging and thermal technology and uses AI to detect damaged equipment. Automated inspections will take place more frequently and the result will be greater reliability for customers.

Maximising renewables output

But AI isn’t just about making grids more operationally efficient. It is also helping to make energy more clean. Renewable sources of energy such as wind and solar are by their nature variable, but AI can help operators maximise the electricity they produce, reduce wasted energy and limit the need for fossil fuels as back-up sources. “By predicting when and where energy will be needed, AI can help avoid outages and cut down on wasted power,” says Justin Bates, co-founder of ESGmark, an organisation that promotes and recognises environmental, social and governance standards in business.

For companies such as Iberdrola, this begins in the design phase. It might start with AI-driven models finding the optimum location of a wind turbine, based on years of meteorological data. It could then go into operations and maintenance. This may include using algorithms to predict maintenance issues before they occur, or anticipating wind or solar production for each hour of the day. Knowing what is being produced and where can help balance the grid, either by shifting energy around, by releasing stored energy (such as pumped hydro) or switching on back-up energy (which may come from fuels such as gas) where needed as a last resort.

Improved energy storage solutions

Back-up fossil fuel capacity should be needed less in the future thanks to more innovative and dependable renewable-energy storage solutions – and, again, AI is playing a crucial role in these. Last year, Iberdrola partnered with Multiverse Computing, a global leader in quantum computing solutions, to deliver a pilot project in northern Spain to optimise the installation of grid-scale batteries. Multiverse’s solution uses quantum and quantum-inspired algorithms to select the optimal number, type and locations of batteries on the network – thereby reducing the costs of adding batteries to the grid and improving network performance.

Similarly, as batteries become an increasingly important part of the grid, AI could help enlist the batteries in electric vehicles. The latter could potentially form a part of the grid’s battery capacity – the UK’s cars famously spend 96% of their time parked . AI could help balance these thousands of connections.

AI can also allow grids to do more with what they already have. “Innovative grid technologies, including those based on AI, allow us to transport more electricity through our existing electricity infrastructure, by improving our understanding of the real-time conditions of our increasingly complex electricity networks,” says Layla Sawyer, secretary general of CurrENT, which represents grid technology providers in Europe. “This includes the effect of weather conditions, dynamic energy production and consumption, and many other factors that impact grid operators.”

Keeping customers informed

At the other end of the energy supply network, AI can improve the way energy companies interact with their customers. This entails sharing information on topics ranging from outages to expected bills, but also helping customers to conserve energy. “AI can help energy companies to connect with customers in a more meaningful way, encouraging smarter energy use that benefits everyone and supports ESG principles by creating a fairer, cleaner energy system we can trust,” says Bates.

Finally, AI can even help wildlife. In the future, AI modelling will be able to analyse bird flight paths and recommend renewable sites that reduce ecological concerns, while Iberdrola’s existing AI power systems can detect birds and stop specific turbines if required.

It’s modelling like this that really encapsulates the benefits of AI to the grid. While the technology has already been used for a number of years to improve existing systems, in future, it will increasingly be embedded in the planning stage of large-scale infrastructure projects and integral to their operation. As Bates points out: “AI is helping to transform our energy grids, making them smarter, more reliable, and ready to handle cleaner energy.”

Keyword – Film
Trefwoorden – Film, Culture, Film industry, Business, Collecting, Celebrity, Diane Keaton
Title – Diane Keaton’s nail clippers for $960: what’s behind the new boom in celebrity estate auctions? | Film | The Guardian
Author – https://www.theguardian.com/profile/rupertneate
Link – Diane Keaton’s nail clippers for $960: what’s behind the new boom in celebrity estate auctions? | Film | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-06-12T06:00:37.000Z
Category – Culture
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/film/2026/jun/12/diane-keaton-dead-celebrity-auctions

F rom Diane Keaton’s bowler hats and polka dot scarfs, to Gene Hackman’s used paint brushes, to Terence Stamp’s love letters from Jean Shrimpton and even Matthew Perry’s black leather wallet (his credit cards and AAA membership card still inside), fans are being offered – at a price – increasingly personal items from the estates of dead celebrities.

The growing trend for auctions of deceased famous people’s personal items – which has boomed ever since the hugely popular Marilyn Monroe estate sale in 1999 – has even attracted its own portmanteau: “deleb” as in dead celebrity.

The first of no fewer than four auctions of Keaton’s professional and personal items went on sale at Bonhams in New York earlier this week with her original Annie Hall script selling for $394,000, way more than its $2,000 estimate.

Several of her trademark hats sold for thousands of dollars, including a black felt Neogranadine (modern day Colombia) cup hat that she wore in an Instagram video teaching fans how hats can be used to enhance their best features. It sold for $5,888, including buyer’s premium, many multiples of its $200-300 estimate. A box of six of her trademark brown polka dot scarfs – that was also estimated to sell for $200-300 – sold for $6,144. A “curated box” of safety pins and nail clippers went for $960. The first Keaton auction raised $1.2m, with 47 of the 50 lots selling for more than their estimate.

In total, Bonhams, in collaboration with celebrity specialist The Fine Art Group, will sell 787 of Keaton’s items. They range from original collages by Keaton and a Gucci sequin suit and beret worn to the Lacma charity gala in 2021, to personal and prosaic items including a “job lot” of her trademark black turtlenecks, a collection of kitchen chopping boards and dog food bowls.

Shane David Hall, director of Fine Art Group’s high-profile client division, says fans are increasingly keen to own celebrities’ personal items and not just items related to their professional lives like film scripts or art collections.

“Over the past 20 years the personal legacy market has really exploded,” he says. “People really feel a personal connection to celebrities and how they have influenced their own lives, and there is a real desire to own something of theirs to keep and deepen that connection.”

Hall says it is celebrities with cult followings, such as Keaton and Perry, that attract the most interest and where the interest is perhaps more focused on personal objects than professional items.

“There is a new generation of collectors with disposal income, and they are more aligned to celebrities and athletes than their parents,” Hall says. “With people like Diane Keaton, they really mean something to their fans, these are people that grew up with her films and her iconic wardrobe. Items of Diane’s are sentimental to them, there are pieces that fit in the trajectory of their own lives and remind them of significant moments in their own story. And of course they make great conversation topics, one could argue more so than an artwork by a famous artist.”

Hall says knowing that so many of Keaton’s items would resonate with fans led to such a large collection going up for sale. “We like to have some value points that are accessible so there is the opportunity for everyone no matter their budget.”

At the more affordable end was lot no 2216 of the second auction “Tailored & Timeless” – four pairs of her thick-rimmed prescription reading glasses which had an estimate of $200-300 (it sold for $2,176).

Bonhams, which also handled the auctions of the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Barbara Walters, Lauren Bacall and Hackman, says estate sales are an increasingly large part of its business with sales in that division up 185% last year, and up by an average of 28.5% every year since 2022.

“We sold Gene Hackman’s collection in 2025 and achieved more than $3m. Apart from Hackman’s fine art collection, we found that his three Golden Globes were among the most sought after lots, exceeding their presale expectations by up to 17-times and bringing in a collective total of more than $125,000,” says Anna Hicks, Bonhams’ head of private and iconic collections.

“Fans often place significant value on items associated with a public figure they care about, and as a result, those pieces frequently command a premium well beyond what similar items might achieve without the celebrity association.”

For example, Hicks says, every lot in the Library of Ruth Bader Ginsburg sold for above its estimate. Her heavily annotated copy of the 1957–58 Harvard Law Review – the year she became a member – sold for $100,312.

With so much potential profit at stake, securing the rights to celebrity estates has also become big business in itself. Specialist advisers, such as the Fine Art Group, and celebrity-focused auction houses, such as LA’s Julien’s Auctions and New York’s Heritage Auctions, are investing time and money getting to know celebrities and their families so that when the inevitable time comes their heirs are more likely to call on them.

“We’ve spent decades building up relationships with high profile families,” says Hall. “I would say we are the only firm that looks at the unique challenges of celebrities in this way. Other firms make the mistake of treating celebrities the same as any rich private client, but they’re not, they require significant hand-holding and a lot of personal connection.”

Martin Nolan, co-founder and executive director of Julien’s Auctions, says he first became aware of the potential profit in celebrity estates when his former boss at investment bank Merrill Lynch Martin Zweig bought Monroe’s “Happy Birthday Mr President” dress for a world record $1.27m in 1999.

“I thought he was crazy, and it made me think twice about his stock-picking,” Nolan says. “But when he died his widow entrusted us to sell his collection, and she told me she just wanted him to be proved right that the dress was worth that much. We sold it in 2016 for $4.81m to Ripley’s Believe It or Not! museum.”

Nolan says securing the rights to celebrities’ estates is “extremely competitive” and he spends years building relationships. “We’re the only auction house that specialises only in celebrities, while Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Bonhams dip in and out, we do this every day,” he says. “And celebrities talk to each other, and we have a good reputation in terms of preserving and celebrating their estates.”

Typically, he says, auction houses take 20% of the proceeds from the sale, “but it can get very competitive on price” he says, with some auction houses treating celebrity estates as “loss leaders” in return for the glamour that comes from association.

Nolan agrees that buyers of celebrity items are getting younger and younger, but says they cover all sorts of demographics and are from across the world. The most interesting thing he says about buyers is that “they are often celebrities themselves”.

“Celebrities are just like you or I, they have people that they look up to and admire and when they sadly pass they also want to have something to remember them by.”

This article was amended on 12 June 2026. An earlier version included Michael Caine in a list of dead celebrities whose estates have been auctioned off by Bonhams. While Caine’s possessions were sold by Bonhams in 2022, the actor is alive.

Keyword – World news
Trefwoorden – Albania, Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner, Environment, Conservation, Wildlife, Europe, World news
Title – ‘The birds will fly away’: can Albania’s flamingo revolution keep its wetlands free from Trumps and tourists? | Albania | The Guardian
Author – https://www.theguardian.com/profile/ajit-niranjan
Link – ‘The birds will fly away’: can Albania’s flamingo revolution keep its wetlands free from Trumps and tourists? | Albania | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-06-12T04:00:34.000Z
Category – News
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jun/12/albania-flamingos-wetlands-trump-tourists

If the real estate dreams of a billionaire political family come true, an island in one of Europe’s poorest countries will become a luxury hotel complex, sweeping up stretches of the wildlife-rich nature reserve that sits across the water.

No public consultation has taken place, but there are signs the idea is on the way to becoming reality. Albania has been rocked by nearly two weeks of fierce protests after fences and heavy machinery came to a sensitive wetland and preparatory work began on the tourism vision of Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner.

Domestic anger at the government’s corruption and global interest in the business dealings of the US president’s family have inflamed the unrest. But at its heart, the fight is driven by the same tension between environmental protection and short-term economic growth that is playing out across Europe .

The area’s status as a wildlife sanctuary was “something that amid all of this probably gets forgotten, but it’s what sparked the big outrage”, said Aleksandër Trajçe, the executive director of PPNEA, Albania’s largest conservation group. “If you want to see the Mediterranean as it used to be, before it was wrecked by tourism, this is one of the last – if not the last – spots where you would find it.”

Marshes, dunes, lagoons and salt pans stretch across the dynamic delta of the free-flowing Vjosa River, which was declared Europe’s first wild river national park in 2023. It sits on a major migratory corridor, hosting about 12% of the country’s wintering waterbirds, and is home to Eurasian otters, loggerhead sea turtles, bottlenose dolphins and Albanian water frogs. Flamingos add bright shocks of pink to striking blue shallows.

Unpublished conservation data shared with the Guardian shows 279 of the 2,529 species in the delta are internationally threatened. Aleko Miho, a biologist at the University of Tirana, who monitors the area with his students each year, said: “These are important habitats. It doesn’t matter who is behind it. What matters is the pressure it puts on a protected area.”

Machines have been seen in the Pishë Poro–Nartë protected area – which sits within the Vjosa-Narta protected landscape inside the delta – but it is unclear how much of the ecosystem would be affected by the proposed development.

The project has not received planning permission or an environmental impact assessment, and the Albanian government, which has welcomed the scheme, said the continuing works were for technical surveys and environmental measurements rather than construction.

“In the meantime, the bulldozers are really progressing,” said Trajçe. “They’re destroying the dunes. They’re opening new roads. The area has been fenced off … it’s really a wild west situation.”

Albania is among the poorest countries in Europe but boasts some of its wildest landscapes. The combination has drawn in holidaymakers seeking cheap getaways – a record 12 million tourists visited Albania in 2025 – but the government has also successfully enticed elites. In May, Ivanka Trump said she was “just captivated” when she swam up to Sazan Island and hiked barefoot to the top.

“It’s not even a business for me, despite the scale of it,” she told the podcast host David Senra about her plans to turn the area into a vast resort. “It feels like a challenge more than anything else: the culmination of all of my experience in real estate, all of my travel, a lot of reflection on how I want to live, how I think people increasingly are wanting to live, and trying to really build something that’s a tangible manifestation of that.”

But many fear that Albania’s tourism push has led the government to disregard nature protection. It redrew the borders of the protected area in 2022 to allow the construction of Vlora airport, which had hoped to see its first commercial flight this month but is still awaiting an operating permit. In 2024 it loosened conservation laws to allow the construction of five-star hotels even in protected areas.

Albania is under pressure to tighten its environmental laws to meet the requirements of the EU, which it hopes to join by 2030. On Tuesday the European Commission said it should refrain from actions that undermine its bid and urged it to “act without delay” in complying with environmental rules. The same day, 96 civil society organisations wrote to the Albanian parliament to demand they repeal the 2024 amendment to the environmental protection law, citing the risks it posed to joining the EU.

The office of Edi Rama, the prime minister, said the fencing of private property was the lawful right of its owner and disputed having reduced the size of the protected area to build the airport.

A spokesperson said projects should not be condemned before they existed. “No European country, including Albania, operates on the principle that development and environmental protection are mutually exclusive,” they said. “The challenge is not exclusion but balance.”

Affinity Partners, Kushner’s investment firm, referred a request for comment to a PR agency, which said Affinity was not involved in the project and “investors are involved in their personal capacity”. A spokesperson for the partners involved in the project said he could not comment on the scale because it was still in the planning phase.

Sazan Real Estate Development LLC, the developer, said it respected continuing public and institutional processes. Asher Abehsera, the chair, said: “Our focus remains on responsible stewardship, environmental enhancement, job creation and creating long-term value for local communities.”

Arup, a global engineering firm that consulted on the project, said its scope was to provide “technical advice on the initial masterplanning” but that it had completed its work last year and was no longer involved.

The Vjosa-Narta ecosystem is not as unspoiled by human activity as Ivanka Trump or some protesters claim. A defunct oil-fired power plant sits beside the lagoon, while the beaches are home to dozens of guest houses, restaurants and even a music festival. However, scientists say it has been spared much of the pollution that plagues other parts of Albania’s coast, as well as the overcrowding that characterises much of the Mediterranean.

The planes, cars and construction that come with a large resort would disturb a special ecosystem that is “relatively untouched” compared with other dunes and lagoons in the Mediterranean, said Miho. “The birds will fly away, for sure.”

Keyword – Sport
Trefwoorden – NFL, Kansas City Chiefs, New York Jets, Buffalo Bills, US sports, Sport, US crime, US news
Title – Former Super Bowl champion Darron Lee indicted on murder charge in death of girlfriend | NFL | The Guardian
Author – Agencies
Link – Former Super Bowl champion Darron Lee indicted on murder charge in death of girlfriend | NFL | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-06-11T22:36:21.000Z
Category – Sport
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2026/jun/11/darron-lee-indicted-murder-charge-nfl

Former NFL linebacker Darron Lee has been indicted on a murder charge in the death of his partner .

A grand jury in Hamilton County returned an indictment on Tuesday. Prosecutors dismissed a tampering with evidence charge to focus solely on the more serious allegation, the Hamilton county district attorney, Coty Wamp, said.

The state is pursuing a first-degree murder conviction, which carries a life sentence. The decision on whether to pursue the death penalty against the 31-year-old will be made in the coming weeks, Wamp said.

Lee is accused of killing Gabriella Perpetuo in February. A medical examiner listed the 29-year-old’s cause of death as multiple blunt force injuries, and the autopsy report listed 12 different injuries, including multiple hematomas, bone fractures and stab wounds.

At the time of Lee’s arrest, he was on probation in Franklin county, Ohio, and Alachua county, Florida, after he was charged in three separate alleged assaults involving another man, Lee’s mother and the mother of his child, court records showed.

Prosecutors accused Lee of asking ChatGPT how to get medical help without calling the police. He asked the AI assistant whether a fall could cause bruising to two eyes and “two stabby looking wounds”, according to evidence presented in court.

Lee remains in the Hamilton county jail without bond.

Lee was one of the best college players in the country during his time at Ohio State, and the Jets selected him with the 20th overall pick in the 2016 NFL draft. The Jets signed him to a four-year contract that included $7.9m guaranteed but he left the team in 2019 after disciplinary problems and poor play.

Lee was a part of the Kansas City Chiefs roster that won the Super Bowl in February 2020, although he did not play in the game itself. His final NFL appearance came in November 2020 for the Buffalo Bills.