A third U.S. judge has ruled that the federal government has the right to tell you that you need to buy health insurance. In his opinion, Judge Norman Moon of the Federal District Court in Lynchburg, Virginia, laid out a strikingly simple and powerful rationale for a mandate:
“Nearly everyone will require health care services at some point in their lifetimes, and it is not always possible to predict when one will be afflicted by illness or injury and require care.…
“Far from ‘inactivity,’ by choosing to forgo insurance, Plaintiffs are making an economic decision to try to pay for health care services later, out of pocket, rather than now, through the purchase of insurance. As Congress found, the total incidence of these economic decisions has a substantial impact on the national market for health care by collectively shifting billions of dollars on to other market participants and driving up the prices of insurance policies.”
One almost wishes that we had heard something like that pithy and understandable from those pushing health-care reform last year. Read the full 54-page decision, here (PDF).
Federal judges in Michigan and California have also ruled that the law is constitutional, but two more legal challenges remain, and they are before judges who, unlike the three above, were not appointed by Democrats. The White House thinks the chances are slim that either judge will uphold the law. This will all be decided, probably next year, in the Supreme Court.
Every day, the sun shines more energy on the world than we could ever need. Yet the moment it sets, that power supply disappears—a limitation that challenges green energy sources like solar to keep the lights on after dark.
Scientists at the University of California, Santa Barbara, now say they can “bottle the sun.” They have developed a new molecule that could free solar power from the constraints of bulky batteries. The tiny structure twists open and closed, allowing sunlight to be stored and later released as heat.
Photo credit: Canva
Molecule absorbs light and releases heat
The major challenge of solar energy has been storage. Massive battery systems, which are inefficient at storing energy over long periods, have posed a costly problem. Researchers reported in Science that they looked to DNA chains to recreate a molecule that changes shape when exposed to sunlight.
The team of scientists created a synthetic structure that stores and releases energy reversibly. The new material captures sunlight, stores it in chemical bonds for extended periods, and then releases it as heat when needed.
The molecule acts like a mechanical spring, twisting into a high-energy shape when exposed to sunlight. Even after long periods, it can untwist into its relaxed state, releasing energy as heat.
“With solar panels, you need an additional battery system to store the energy,” study co-author Benjamin Baker, a doctoral student, told Futurity. “With molecular solar thermal energy storage, the material itself is able to store that energy from sunlight.”
Photo credit: Canva
Moving toward green energy
Around the world, the shift to clean energy isn’t slowing down. Over the next five years, global renewable energy capacity is expected to double, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). As global energy demand rises, so does the urgency to expand clean energy. The Center for Climate and Energy Solutions found that 32% of electricity was generated from renewables in 2024. Wind and solar are the fastest-growing energy sources in the United States.
Solar energy has seen massive expansion in Asia, Europe, and emerging markets. It’s driven by global demand, not just wealthy nations. In 2025, more than 30 countries installed record levels of solar in a single year.
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The need for efficient energy storage
Solar energy output can fluctuate dramatically. Sunny days may generate around 45%, compared to roughly 10% on cloudy days. Storage capacity must scale to meet demand. A 2025 study in the International Journal of Energy Studies reports that solar growth is outpacing our ability to store it.
There is a growing demand for new and emerging ways to capture and store renewable energy. Systems that store energy as heat, such as hydrogen and thermal-hydro storage, are in high demand. Efforts to develop more efficient and reliable battery solutions remain a key focus of research.
Life on Earth has always depended on the sun. When it comes to energy, science is working toward a future that doesn’t fade into the night. These emerging technologies are bringing renewable energy storage from the promise of tomorrow into the reality of today.
Living on a farm often means dealing with the beauty of nature, but for Stuart Baldwin, a livestock farmer in Haydock, it also meant dealing with the mess left behind by others. Baldwin says about 25 times a year his land is targeted by “fly-tippers,” people who illegally dump trash on private property. As the Manchester Evening News reported, the situation recently reached a breaking point when Baldwin discovered a staggering 421 tires scattered across his fields.
Instead of just cleaning up the mess and footing the bill, Baldwin decided to check the CCTV cameras he had recently installed. The footage clearly showed a van arriving at the property and unloading the massive haul of rubber.
Baldwin didn’t immediately call the authorities or retaliate. In a move that reflects a very grounded sense of fairness, he tracked the man down and gave him a chance to make it right. He offered the man a few days to return and clear the field himself.
When the deadline passed and the tires remained, Baldwin decided that if the man wouldn’t come to the tires, the tires would go to the man. Utilizing a truck from his family’s recycling business, Baldwin and a group of volunteers loaded every single one of the 421 tires and drove them straight to the address associated with the van. As The Daily Mail reported, they carefully unloaded the entire pile into the man’s front garden, ensuring no property was damaged in the process.
This wasn’t just about a “petty” dispute. Illegal dumping is a massive problem that places a heavy financial and emotional burden on farmers. According to official government data from the UK, authorities dealt with over 1.2 million fly-tipping incidents in the last year alone. Baldwin’s daughter, Megan, told reporters that the family simply wanted to prove a point about respect and accountability. They wanted to show that a farmer’s land is a livelihood, not a convenient trash can.
The community response has been overwhelmingly supportive. Baldwin noted that people have even approached him on the street to thank him for standing up for the neighborhood. While he joked that the culprit was likely feeling “deflated” after the delivery, the message was serious. By returning the waste to its source, Baldwin turned a frustrating violation of his property into a legendary lesson in personal responsibility.
This article originally appeared earlier this year.
The finding, published in the journal Alzheimer’s & Dementia, is part of nearly two decades of research on the Tsimané and their sister population the Mosetén, communities who have been recorded as having some of the lowest rates of heart disease, brain atrophy, and cognitive decline ever measured in science. A subsequent study from the University of Southern California and Chapman University, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, used CT scans on 1,165 Tsimané and Mosetén adults to measure how their brains age compared to populations in the US and Europe. The answer was striking: their brains age significantly more slowly.
The researchers’ explanation centers on what they call a “sweet spot” — a balance between physical exertion and food availability that most people in industrialized countries have drifted far from. “The lives of our pre-industrial ancestors were punctuated by limited food availability,” said Dr. Andrei Irimia, an assistant professor at USC’s Leonard Davis School of Gerontology and co-author of the study. “Humans historically spent a lot of time exercising out of necessity to find food, and their brain aging profiles reflected this lifestyle.”
The Tsimané people of Bolivia posing for a photograph. Photo credit: Canva
The Tsimané are highly active not because they exercise in any structured sense but because their daily lives demand it. They fish, hunt, farm with hand tools, and forage, averaging around 17,000 steps a day. Their diet is heavy on carbohydrates — plantains, cassava, rice, and corn make up roughly 70% of what they eat, with fats and protein splitting the remaining 30%. It is not a low-carb or protein-heavy regimen. It is, essentially, the diet of people who burn what they consume. CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta, who visited a Tsimané village in 2018 for his series “Chasing Life,” noted that they also sleep around nine hours a night and practice what might be called intermittent fasting — not by choice, but by necessity during lean seasons.
The research also included the Mosetén, who share the Tsimané’s ancestral history and subsistence lifestyle but have more access to modern technology, medicine, and infrastructure. Their brain health outcomes fell between the Tsimané and industrialized populations, better than Americans and Europeans, but not as strong as the Tsimané. Researchers describe this gradient as especially revealing because it suggests a continuum rather than a binary, and that even partial movement toward a more active, less calorically abundant lifestyle appears to have measurable effects on how the brain ages.
“During our evolutionary past, more food and less effort spent getting it resulted in improved health,” said Hillard Kaplan, a professor of health economics and anthropology at Chapman University who has studied the Tsimané for nearly 20 years. “With industrialization, those traits lead us to overshoot the mark.”
The researchers are careful to note that the Tsimané lifestyle is not simply transferable. Their longevity in absolute terms is lower than Americans’ because of deaths from trauma, infection, and complications in childbirth, hazards of living without a healthcare system. The point of the research is not that modern medicine is unnecessary but that the environments it’s embedded in may be undermining the brain health it’s trying to protect.
“This ideal set of conditions for disease prevention prompts us to consider whether our industrialized lifestyles increase our risk of disease,” Irimia said.
This article originally appeared earlier this year.
