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This year is projected to be the hottest on record. The latest United Nations estimates indicate that, without radical and immediate action, we are headed toward an increasingly unlivable planet with an increase of up to 3.1 degrees Celsius by the end of the century. Solving the climate crisis requires urgent, global cooperation.

But the yearly global climate meeting (called the Conference of the Parties, or COP) held in November in the petrostate of Azerbaijan upheld the status quo, at best. The current economic system that underpins that status quo is rooted in the extraction of natural resources and exploitation of cheap or unpaid labor, often done by women and marginalized communities. This system therefore drives the climate crisis while perpetuating inequalities based on gender, race and class. It prioritizes the interests of corporations, governments, and elites in positions of power and wealth, while destroying the natural environment that poor and marginalized people depend on the most.

We need a different tack to move the needle. As gender-equality researchers at the U.N., we see growing evidence that women, girls and gender-diverse people are bearing the brunt of climate change. And that raises a question: What if we approached climate from a feminist perspective?

Feminism offers an analysis of how inequalities structure our world and therefore drive the climate crisis, among other global concerns. We believe that it provides a vision of a better climate future, and a practical approach for moving towards it. That sound future is not just about ending fossil fuel–based economies—though that is urgent and necessary—but a more fundamental transformation of our economic and political systems.

Women worldwide have unequal access to economic resources, such as jobs, bank accounts, land, and technology. This means that when weather patterns change, disrupting infrastructure and public services, they are less able to adapt, recover, and rebuild. As a result, their livelihoods and economic security are particularly at risk. U.N. Women’s latest research finds that, globally, climate change may push up to 158 million more women and girls into poverty, and 236 million more women and girls into food insecurity, by 2050 under a worst-case scenario. In addition to income poverty, women and girls face rising time poverty. As water, fuel and nutritious food are harder to come by and the health care needs of family members increase, women and girls have to spend more time on unpaid care work. This reduces the time they have to do paid work, go to school or take care of themselves.

This toxic combination of time and income poverty has far-reaching, long-term consequences. After years of slow progress in reducing rates of child marriage, for example, this practice is on the rise again in places experiencing environmental stress, as families struggle financially and see early marriage as a form of security for their girls. In drought-prone areas, girls are increasingly likely to drop out of school, as families cannot afford fees and need their girls to contribute to household work, stunting their opportunities for life.

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• Lithium-ion batteries are the backbone of mobile devices and electric cars, but lithium can be costly and explosive.

• Proton batteries—which rely on more abundant materials—have been touted as a good replacement, and a new anode material could help overcome some of their shortcomings, such as limited voltage range.

• This new material can last 3,500 cycles of recharging, maintain high capacity, and operate in colder weather, but scientists still need to improve manufacturing costs and cathode performance before proton batteries can go mainstream.

.Lithium-ion batteries are the top dogs of the battery world. This 50-year-old technology forms the electronic backbone of billions of mobile devices around the world, and is the current frontrunner for powering the world’s electric-vehicle future. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t competition.

When it comes to storing renewable energy, for example, other concepts like iron-air batteries (which use oxidation to store energy) could potentially be better options than the more expensive and explosive lithium. And more options are being explored all the time. For instance, the idea of proton batteries—which use protons split from water which then bond with a carbon electrode—is starting to grow in popularity. This is good news, seeing as proton batteries don’t require rare elements such as lithium. And now, scientists at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) Sydney want to make them mainstream.

“There are many benefits to proton batteries,” Sicheng Wu, a Ph.D candidate at UNSW Sydney, said in a press statement. “But the current electrode materials used for proton batteries, some of which are made from organic materials, and others from metals, are heavy,” and still cost quite a lot.

In addition to this cost, the few carbon electrodes that do exist have a limited voltage range, and both of these shortcomings currently make proton batteries unfit to be true lithium-ion replacements. However, UNSW Sydney scientists have developed a new carbon electrode called tetraamino-benzoquinone (TABQ) to fix the problem. The team first started with a small molecule called Tetrachloro-benzoquinone (TCBQ), which doesn’t have a high enough redox potential to be a cathode or a low enough potential to be an anode.

So, Wu’s team replaced the four chloro- groups in the molecule with amino- groups (hence the name change), and found that the resulting lower potential both made TABQ a great anode candidate and improved the material’s ability to store protons. While still paired with a TCBQ cathode, the all-organic battery could sustain 3,500 cycles of fully recharging, maintain high capacity, and perform well in cold conditions—a helpful side effect, as we’ll need battery farms, especially in the colder, darker parts of the world, and lithium loses efficiency when it gets too cold.

Oh, and another bonus: they don’t explode.

“The electrolyte in a lithium-ion battery is made of lithium salt, a solvent which is flammable and therefore is a big concern,” Chuan Zhao, a professor at UNSW Sydney, said in a press statement. “In our case, we have both electrodes made of organic molecules, and in between we have the water solution, making our prototype battery lightweight, safe, and affordable.”

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Joy to the world!

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Yolanda Adams – Gospel like you never heard!

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 Yolanda Adams – In the mist of it all.mp3

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When I was 17 I was nearly killed when a fight broke out after a high school football game and someone fired a gun. A stray bullet struck my throat, tearing through my trachea and damaging my carotid artery.

This near-death experience deeply traumatized my entire family. Yet my parents couldn’t focus solely on my survival and healing. In the hospital, they were overwhelmed by a labyrinth of paperwork, billing inquiries, and questions about insurance coverage. Even after I was discharged, the challenges continued. Instead of focusing on my recovery, we spent our energy addressing delayed approvals for follow-up care, denied access to physical therapy, and endless requests to clarify reimbursements.

Our health insurance system made a catastrophic time for me and my parents needlessly worse. Now, as a trauma surgeon, I have seen how pervasive such

struggles are. And with the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, long-simmering and widespread anger about the harm that health insurers have caused seems to be reaching a boiling point. After decades of public outcry over health care policies that prioritize profits over people—policies that deny lifesaving treatments, cause bankruptcy over uncovered medical treatments, and leave entire communities behind—the demand for reform is growing too loud to ignore. For too many, health insurance is a brick wall—a bureaucratic gatekeeper that creates barriers instead of providing solutions.

We cannot justify his killing; so how do we channel our collective grief and frustration into meaningful change? How do we build a health care system that offers healing, not harm—a system that values human life over corporate gain? It will take courage, accountability, and a willingness to reimagine a system where patients are seen as people, not as financial transactions.

The average annual cost of health care in the U.S. is estimated at a staggering $15,074 per person. We purchase health insurance, either on the open market or through our employer, with the expectation that if we need to see a doctor or undergo treatment, our insurance will cover most—if not all—of the expenses. Yet nearly two-thirds of U.S. bankruptcies are tied to obscenely high medical expenses, even among people who have insurance. Around 41 percent of Americans carry medical debt, highlighting the system’s profound failure to provide financial security when it’s needed most.

On top of these ruinous costs—which patients rarely know up front and have little time to understand during medical emergencies—insurers also decide whether they will pay for care, regardless of whether a patient’s doctor says such care is necessary. The delay of care through bureaucratic hurdles like prior authorizations and denied claims are carefully designed to force people and their doctors to fight their way through outdated systems like fax machines and endless phone trees to ask for appeals or reconsideration of denied treatments or examinations. All too often the mental effort and excessive time required to navigate claims, denials, and appeals wears people down, leading them to simply give up on getting the coverage they are owed. This isn’t just inefficiency; it’s a predatory failure of empathy for people during their most vulnerable moments. And it perversely exacerbates anxiety and depression for the sick person and their caregivers alike, compounding the very challenges the system is meant to address.

I’ve spent countless nights fighting to save lives in operating rooms. I’ve witnessed how gun violence intersects with healthcare inequities, leaving families to confront not only grief but insurmountable medical bills. Survivors often endure years of physical and financial pain as they battle not only their injuries but also insurance denials for necessary care. I know firsthand what my patients go through. Every step of my own recovery felt like a negotiation—not just for my health but for access to the care I needed. At times, I questioned whether I was viewed as a patient or a cost to be managed. These frustrations extended to my family, who bore the emotional and logistical burden of dealing with appeals and authorizations while supporting my recovery.

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Yet recent progress has arguably been more about style than substance. Advancements in AI have undoubtedly made robots easier to train, but they have yet to enable them to truly sense their surroundings, “think” of what to do next, and carry out those decisions in the way some viral videos might imply. In many of these demonstrations (including Tesla’s), when a robot is pouring a drink or wiping down a counter, it is not acting autonomously, even if it appears to be. Instead, it is being controlled remotely by human operators, a technique roboticists refer to as teleoperation. The futuristic looks of such humanoids, which usually borrow from dystopian Hollywood sci-fi tropes like screens for faces, sharp eyes, and towering, metallic forms, suggest the robots are more capable than they often are.

“I’m worried that we’re at peak hype,” says Leila Takayama, a robotics expert and vice president of design and human­-robot interaction at the warehouse robotics company Robust AI. “There’s a bit of an arms war—or humanoids war—between all the big tech companies to flex and show that they can do more and they can do better.” As a result, she says, any roboticist not working on a humanoid has to answer to investors as to why. “We have to talk about them now, and we didn’t have to a year ago,” Takayama told me.

Shariq Hashme, a former employee of both OpenAI and Scale AI, entered his robotics firm Prosper into this arms race in 2021. The company is developing a humanoid robot it calls Alfie to perform domestic tasks in homes, hospitals, and hotels. Prosper hopes to manufacture and sell Alfies for approximately $10,000 to $15,000 each. 

“Why are we enamored with this idea of building a replica of ourselves?”

Guy Hoffman, associate professor, Cornell University

In conceiving the design for Alfie, Hashme identified trustworthiness as the factor that should trump all other considerations, and the top challenge that needs to be overcome to see humanoids benefit society. Hashme believes one essential tactic to get people to put their trust in Alfie is to build a detailed character from the ground up—something humanlike but not too human. 

This is about more than just Alfie’s appearance. Hashme and his colleagues are envisioning the way the robot moves and signals what he’ll do next; imagining desires and flaws that shape his approach to tasks; and crafting an internal code of ethics that governs the instructions he will and will not accept from his owners. 

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