That GPS on Your Phone? Thank the Space Economy
The “global space economy” refers to pretty much everything having to do with human progress through space, including exploration, research, management, and use. It also generates hundreds of billions of dollars every year.
You may not have heard the term “global space economy,” but you’ve probably heard of at least two of the big players: Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. As founders of Blue Origin and SpaceX, their companies are estimated to be worth $100 billion and $1.8 trillion, respectively. If you took 1.8 trillion standard dollar bills end-to-end, it would stretch 100 million miles — more than the distance from the Earth to the Sun! Imagine walking to the Sun on a bridge made of money! You couldn’t, because of all of the “zero gravity.” Your feet would also get very tired. There’s also no oxygen. But we know all of this because of how much we’ve studied space!
So why spend so much time and money on the space industry, which has expanded massively in the last few decades? Don’t only a few select astronauts go to space? Shouldn’t we be focusing on Earth? Well, what we learn in space has a big impact on what we do on the ground. Our findings from space show up as the GPS on our phones, in ships navigating the oceans, even as farmers using satellite photography to plan their crops.
There’s no sign of slowing down on the space front — the UK is focusing on small satellites, America is hoping to put astronauts back on the moon by 2028, and China is planning its own lunar landing by 2030. These explorations could provide valuable minerals, insight to getting past the Moon (like to Mars), and open up space tourism opportunities.
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It’s officially the “Beijing International Automotive Exhibition,” but its friends call it “Auto China,” and it’s now the largest car show in the world. Nearly 1000 companies flock to the exhibits taking up more than 380,000 square meters, or over 50 football fields! Or 1,246,719 feet and 50 soccer fields, if you’re from America! Or 9,329,989 beep-boop-zoinks and 50 astro-space-ball fields if you’re a Martian from outer space! Any way you spin it, this car show is a big deal, and there were two standout trends.
The first was electric vehicles. There’s always been an issue with charging, as makers have tried to maximize how far cars can travel on single charge while minimizing how long that charge takes. Now, a company called BYD claims to have an ultra-fast charging system that can provide 400 km of range with only 5 minutes of charging. What’s more, it’s designed to operate under extreme weather conditions. Since batteries are usually sensitive to high or low temperatures, addressing this is a major step in making electric vehicles as reliable as gas cars.
The other big topic was also fully autonomous, or self-driving cars. The company Geely developed a self-driving car built specifically for ride-hailing, so there’s no steering wheel or driver’s seat. That means you can pick your nose without fear of the driver judging you! Xpeng’s driverless car uses a combination of lasers, radar, and cameras to build a real time picture of the road, but we hope it works just as well in the clouds, because they may be extending this technology into flying cars as early as next year. It’s a bird! It’s a plane! No, it’s just my Uber! That’s one way to beat traffic.
Cholesterol is tricky — your body needs the waxy substance to build cells and make hormones, but there’s a bad type of cholesterol called “LDL” (low-density lipoprotein). Too much LDL can put people at risk for heart attacks or stroke, so controlling cholesterol levels can be life-saving.
Luckily, a new gene editing therapy called VERVE-102 may be able to help with high cholesterol. There’s a trial running now that’s small but mighty, involving only 35 patients, all of whom have either inherited high cholesterol or have had a heart attack at a young age. They continued their regular medication but added this new gene editing therapy to their treatment.
Not only did results show levels of bad cholesterol reduced by up to 62%, but the level continued to remain low after a year, suggesting that patients may only need one treatment to feel the effects of this treatment for the rest of their lives. Is it magic? Close! It’s science!
The idea behind the gene editing plays off of the liver’s role. It’s supposed to clear bad cholesterol from the blood and stop it from clogging up vessels, unless a protein called PCSK9 gets in the way. PCSK9! It even kind of sounds like “pesky”! The new medicine edits PCSK9’s gene, so that it stays out of the way and the liver can do its job.
Chemotherapy works. It also takes a serious toll — on energy, on the immune system, on everyday quality of life. For decades, that trade-off has been treated as unavoidable. A new drug being used to treat ovarian cancer suggests it might not have to be.
The treatment works by attaching a chemotherapy drug to an antibody — a protein the body uses naturally to identify and target specific cells. When the drug enters the body, the antibodies seek out cancer cells specifically, binding to them and leaving healthy tissue alone. Once inside the cancer cell, the antibody breaks down and releases the chemotherapy drug, destroying the cancer from within. The rest of the body barely notices.
For patients like Patricia Hill, the difference has been significant. After multiple rounds of conventional chemotherapy in the 3 years since her ovarian cancer diagnosis, she describes finally feeling well enough to socialize and enjoy daily life again. That shift — from surviving treatment to actually living alongside it — is what researchers have spent decades working toward.
The drug is still being studied, but early results point in two directions that matter: better quality of life during treatment, and the possibility of longer survival afterward. Those two things don't always come together in cancer research. When they do, it tends to mean something genuinely new is happening.
What happens when a zoo animal gets sick? For most of the history of zoos, that question had an answer most visitors never saw. Now, one of the world's oldest zoological societies is building a facility designed to change that — and what they're planning goes well beyond routine checkups.
The Zoological Society of London is constructing a new wildlife health center that will allow visitors to observe animals receiving medical care firsthand. Some of what they'll see will be routine — weight checks, dental exams, the kind of maintenance that keeps zoo populations healthy. But onlookers may also get a window into surgical procedures, and in some cases, postmortems. It's an unusually transparent approach for an institution that has traditionally kept its medical operations behind closed doors.
Not everyone is convinced. Critics argue the center is more about capitalizing on public curiosity than genuinely benefiting the animals in its care — that making medicine into a spectator sport serves the zoo's revenue more than its residents.
ZSL pushes back on that framing. The center is designed to be more than an exhibit. It's intended to function as a global training resource for wildlife vets, a hub where expertise in animal medicine can be developed and shared across institutions worldwide. The argument is that visibility and conservation aren't in conflict — that showing people what it actually takes to keep wild animals healthy is exactly the kind of thing that builds the public understanding zoos increasingly depend on to justify their existence.
The deeper question the center raises isn't really about one zoo or one building. It's about what zoos are actually for — and whether letting people watch is a compromise of that mission or an extension of it.
It’s officially the “Beijing International Automotive Exhibition,” but its friends call it “Auto China,” and it’s now the largest car show in the world. Nearly 1000 companies flock to the exhibits taking up more than 380,000 square meters, or over 50 football fields! Or 1,246,719 feet and 50 soccer fields, if you’re from America! Or 9,329,989 beep-boop-zoinks and 50 astro-space-ball fields if you’re a Martian from outer space! Any way you spin it, this car show is a big deal, and there were two standout trends.
The first was electric vehicles. There’s always been an issue with charging, as makers have tried to maximize how far cars can travel on single charge while minimizing how long that charge takes. Now, a company called BYD claims to have an ultra-fast charging system that can provide 400 km of range with only 5 minutes of charging. What’s more, it’s designed to operate under extreme weather conditions. Since batteries are usually sensitive to high or low temperatures, addressing this is a major step in making electric vehicles as reliable as gas cars.
The other big topic was also fully autonomous, or self-driving cars. The company Geely developed a self-driving car built specifically for ride-hailing, so there’s no steering wheel or driver’s seat. That means you can pick your nose without fear of the driver judging you! Xpeng’s driverless car uses a combination of lasers, radar, and cameras to build a real time picture of the road, but we hope it works just as well in the clouds, because they may be extending this technology into flying cars as early as next year. It’s a bird! It’s a plane! No, it’s just my Uber! That’s one way to beat traffic.
Cholesterol is tricky — your body needs the waxy substance to build cells and make hormones, but there’s a bad type of cholesterol called “LDL” (low-density lipoprotein). Too much LDL can put people at risk for heart attacks or stroke, so controlling cholesterol levels can be life-saving.
Luckily, a new gene editing therapy called VERVE-102 may be able to help with high cholesterol. There’s a trial running now that’s small but mighty, involving only 35 patients, all of whom have either inherited high cholesterol or have had a heart attack at a young age. They continued their regular medication but added this new gene editing therapy to their treatment.
Not only did results show levels of bad cholesterol reduced by up to 62%, but the level continued to remain low after a year, suggesting that patients may only need one treatment to feel the effects of this treatment for the rest of their lives. Is it magic? Close! It’s science!
The idea behind the gene editing plays off of the liver’s role. It’s supposed to clear bad cholesterol from the blood and stop it from clogging up vessels, unless a protein called PCSK9 gets in the way. PCSK9! It even kind of sounds like “pesky”! The new medicine edits PCSK9’s gene, so that it stays out of the way and the liver can do its job.
Chemotherapy works. It also takes a serious toll — on energy, on the immune system, on everyday quality of life. For decades, that trade-off has been treated as unavoidable. A new drug being used to treat ovarian cancer suggests it might not have to be.
The treatment works by attaching a chemotherapy drug to an antibody — a protein the body uses naturally to identify and target specific cells. When the drug enters the body, the antibodies seek out cancer cells specifically, binding to them and leaving healthy tissue alone. Once inside the cancer cell, the antibody breaks down and releases the chemotherapy drug, destroying the cancer from within. The rest of the body barely notices.
For patients like Patricia Hill, the difference has been significant. After multiple rounds of conventional chemotherapy in the 3 years since her ovarian cancer diagnosis, she describes finally feeling well enough to socialize and enjoy daily life again. That shift — from surviving treatment to actually living alongside it — is what researchers have spent decades working toward.
The drug is still being studied, but early results point in two directions that matter: better quality of life during treatment, and the possibility of longer survival afterward. Those two things don't always come together in cancer research. When they do, it tends to mean something genuinely new is happening.
What happens when a zoo animal gets sick? For most of the history of zoos, that question had an answer most visitors never saw. Now, one of the world's oldest zoological societies is building a facility designed to change that — and what they're planning goes well beyond routine checkups.
The Zoological Society of London is constructing a new wildlife health center that will allow visitors to observe animals receiving medical care firsthand. Some of what they'll see will be routine — weight checks, dental exams, the kind of maintenance that keeps zoo populations healthy. But onlookers may also get a window into surgical procedures, and in some cases, postmortems. It's an unusually transparent approach for an institution that has traditionally kept its medical operations behind closed doors.
Not everyone is convinced. Critics argue the center is more about capitalizing on public curiosity than genuinely benefiting the animals in its care — that making medicine into a spectator sport serves the zoo's revenue more than its residents.
ZSL pushes back on that framing. The center is designed to be more than an exhibit. It's intended to function as a global training resource for wildlife vets, a hub where expertise in animal medicine can be developed and shared across institutions worldwide. The argument is that visibility and conservation aren't in conflict — that showing people what it actually takes to keep wild animals healthy is exactly the kind of thing that builds the public understanding zoos increasingly depend on to justify their existence.
The deeper question the center raises isn't really about one zoo or one building. It's about what zoos are actually for — and whether letting people watch is a compromise of that mission or an extension of it.