AI hiring tools favour CVs written by the same model that screens them, Britain’s early nuclear lead collapsed, and scientists are recreating ancient smells. Plus bacteria that turn chemicals into electrical signals, wildflower strips cutting crop damage by around 60%, and Blitz damage that may still be lifting London’s GDP. [DVYio Newsletter](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/GSHtp5yz) Tech [Diagram of phones detecting an earthquake and sending data to a cloud server, which issues an alert to people nearby.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/xs97bqih) [Your phone’s accelerometer doubles as a seismometer, and Android alerts now cover 2.5 billion people](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/xs97bqih) Your smartphone has a motion sensor that normally rotates your screen. Google’s Android team realised that the same sensor can detect the ground shaking during an earthquake. With enough phones reporting at once, the system can triangulate where a quake started and how big it is. That is the core idea behind Android Earthquake Alerts. When a stationary phone picks up the first wave of a quake (a faster, less damaging wave called a P-wave), it sends a signal to Google's servers. The system cross-references signals from many phones at once to confirm something real is happening, then rushes out an alert before the slower, more destructive wave arrives. The goal is to buy people a few seconds: enough to get off a ladder, move away from a window, or take cover. The system has detected more than 18,000 earthquakes and sent 790 million alerts across 98 countries. Before it launched, around 250 million people had access to any kind of earthquake early warning. That number is now 2.5 billion. In a magnitude 6.7 quake in the Philippines in November 2023, the first alert went out 18.3 seconds after the earthquake began, giving some people up to 15 seconds of warning. The system's magnitude estimates have also improved sharply: the median error on a first estimate has dropped from 0.50 to 0.25 on the moment magnitude scale in three years. [A rectangular ceiling light glows softly above a window with plants below.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/QKpgsvK3) [Philips launches a ceiling panel that shifts from blue-rich daylight to warm evening light automatically](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/QKpgsvK3) Philips Skylight is a slim ceiling panel that the company says mimics the arc of a natural day: bright and blue-tinted in the morning to support alertness, then warmer by evening to help you wind down. It does this automatically, without you doing anything. The panel uses Signify's NatureConnect technology and comes with five preset scenes you can choose manually if you'd rather not leave it on auto. There's also a VitaUp variant with a built-in UV-B module, which Philips says is designed to support vitamin D production indoors (it is not a medical device, and Philips says it does not replace actual sunlight). All versions are IP44-rated, so they work in bathrooms too. It's launching across selected European markets from June 2026. Pricing has not been announced yet. [Infographic showing AI-written CVs being shortlisted 23% to 60% more often than human-written CVs when the same model screens them, with a partial fix reducing bias by over 50%.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/LnYtqNLt) [AI hiring tools favour CVs written by the same model](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/LnYtqNLt) Researchers from the University of Maryland and the National University of Singapore ran a controlled experiment with 2,245 CVs across 24 job types, holding content quality constant and varying only whether a human or AI wrote them. When the AI doing the screening was the same model that wrote the CV, candidates were 23% to 60% more likely to be shortlisted than equally qualified applicants with human-written CVs. Across the models tested, the researchers’ bias metric against human-written CVs ranged from 67% to 82%. The mechanism is called self-preference bias: large language models (LLMs) tend to favour text that stylistically resembles their own outputs. It's a bit like asking someone to judge an essay competition and slipping their own entry into the pile. They may not consciously recognise it, but something about the phrasing and rhythm nudges their score upward. The practical problem is that both sides of this interaction are already live. Screening AI is already used by employers. CV-writing AI is already common advice for job seekers. If both sides default to the same model, applicants who wrote their CV themselves, or used a different tool, may face a quiet structural penalty. The researchers found one partial fix: telling the screening model which AI it is before it evaluates reduced the bias by over 50% in testing. That only helps if employers disclose or control which model their screener uses. This Week I Learnt [Split image showing a man in a Navy uniform on the left and a vintage black-and-white photo of a large warship on the right.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/mHpfxFTW) [An 11-year-old watched Jaws, then spent years clearing a disgraced Navy captain’s name](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/mHpfxFTW) [In 1996, an 11-year-old in Pensacola watched Jaws with his dad and got stuck on a single scene: the monologue where shark hunter Quint describes surviving the sinking of the USS Indianapolis in 1945. Hunter Scott turned to his dad and asked if it was real. It was. Scott made the Indianapolis the subject of his school history fair project. His teacher suggested placing an ad in the NAS Pensacola base newspaper looking for survivors. One man replied with a full reunion list, names and addresses included. Scott wrote to every person on it, asking what their job was, where they were when the torpedoes hit, what they thought of their captain's court-martial. More than 40 survivors wrote back, sending photos, letters, and other documents. He also spoke with the Japanese commander who fired the torpedo that sank the ship. The picture that emerged was damning. Captain Charles McVay had been court-martialled for failing to evade the attack, but a declassified Navy document Scott turned up showed the ship had been sailing unescorted through a stretch of water where the Navy already knew three Japanese submarines were operating. McVay was never told. The Navy also received an SOS from the Indianapolis after she went down, but the sailor on watch had been drinking and passed out without acting on it. None of this came out at the court-martial. Scott brought his findings to Florida Congressman Joe Scarborough, which eventually led to a congressional resolution. President Clinton signed it in 2000, officially exonerating McVay. McVay himself had died decades earlier, but his son and extended family were alive to see it. Scott later became a Navy executive officer. He credits the survivors, and the letters they trusted an 11-year-old with, as the reason he joined.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/mHpfxFTW) Poll Which climate change effect do you expect to personally experience most? More extreme heatwaves Worse flooding or storms Higher food prices Water shortages Disrupted travel or commutes Forced to move home Last Week's Poll Which describes your relationship with side projects? Actively building one (or more) 43% Lots of ideas but haven't built anything 35% What's a side project? 22% Science [A tiny black photonic chip sits beside a coin and tweezers, showing the wafer’s small scale.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/X9LqXTTW) [NIST squeezed 10,000 photonic circuits onto a beer-coaster-sized wafer, each outputting a different colour of light](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/X9LqXTTW) Quantum computers and optical atomic clocks need lasers tuned to very specific colours of light. Rubidium atoms, used in many quantum systems, only respond to red light at 780 nanometres; strontium only responds to blue light at 461 nanometres. The lasers that produce those precise colours are currently large, expensive, and power-hungry, which helps explain why most quantum hardware never leaves specialist labs. Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have built a chip that changes that. By stacking two nonlinear materials, lithium niobate and tantalum pentoxide (tantala), onto a standard silicon wafer, the team produced fingernail-sized chips that can convert a single input laser into virtually any colour of light. Tantala is the key ingredient: it takes in one colour and outputs a wide spread across visible and infrared wavelengths. The trick was figuring out how to deposit it without heat, so it can be layered onto existing circuitry without damaging what's underneath. The result: around 10,000 photonic circuits, each outputting a different colour, fitted onto a wafer roughly the size of a beer coaster. The circuits are designed rather than built one-off, so a chip tailored to rubidium or strontium is a matter of layout, not a custom laser assembly. The chips aren't in production yet. NIST is working with Octave Photonics, a Colorado startup founded by former NIST researchers, to scale the fabrication up. But the architecture is now demonstrated, and the paper is in Nature. [Two researchers collect air from an Egyptian mummy display using a clear sampling bag and tubing.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/DJVzf9a7) [What ancient mummies, old battlefields, and crumbling libraries actually smelled like](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/DJVzf9a7) Researchers are extracting air from Egyptian sarcophagi, running it through a gas chromatograph and building chemical “recipes” detailed enough that a future chemist could recreate the smell from a journal article alone. The mummies, by the way, smell woody, spicy, and sweet rather than grim, because the embalming resins (frankincense, myrrh, conifer oil) are aromatic enough to survive thousands of years. The same approach is being used on places that no longer exist in their original form. The Odeuropa project reconstructed the smell of Amsterdam’s 17th-century canals and the Battle of Waterloo by searching archives for “nose witnesses”, people who described what they smelled at the time, then cross-referencing building materials, accounts of the dead, and records of what was burning. They also recreated the medieval Christian concept of Hell: sulphur, brimstone, and, according to one 16th-century sermon, a million dead dogs. When London’s St Paul’s Cathedral library was due for renovation, a team captured its scent before the work began. Seven volunteers described it using adjectives like woody, smoky, and vanilla, which were then matched to specific volatile compounds released by centuries of degrading paper. The result is a published chemical formula that a museum could use to recreate the smell of the room even if physical books no longer exist. It also turns out to be a diagnostic tool: paper that is decaying faster smells sweeter, while stable paper smells more like hay. [Researcher in a lab coat works beside a blue instrument rack with tubes, wires, and bottles attached.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/Ed57U8aA) [Two bacteria split a sensing job, and the result reads out as electricity](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/Ed57U8aA) Most bacterial sensors work by emitting light when they detect something, which is awkward anywhere that light is hard to measure reliably. Electricity is a much more useful signal, but the bacteria that naturally produce it are notoriously difficult to engineer for specific targets. A team from Rice University, Tufts, and Baylor College of Medicine split the problem in two. E. coli, which is easy to reprogram but produces no electricity, gets engineered to release a molecule called quinone whenever it encounters the target substance. A second bacterium, L. plantarum, can't create quinone itself, but when quinone turns up in its environment, it uses the molecule to generate an electrical signal that a standard current meter can read. Think of it like a relay race: one bacterium spots the thing, and the other fires the alarm. The researchers published four working demonstrations in Nature Biotechnology. The same basic design detected heavy metals in bayou water, an inflammation marker in artificial saliva, antimicrobial peptides in human stool samples, and an antibiotic in supermarket milk. Swapping in different E. coli variants pointed the system at different targets, the way you'd swap a Lego brick without rebuilding the whole structure. Most readings came back within a few hours, and some in under 20 minutes. The lab versions ran in large reactors, which wouldn't survive field use. Collaborators at Tufts solved that with a compact electronic disc about the size of a US quarter, paired with an off-the-shelf digital multimeter. A field-ready biosensor that detects, say, antibiotic residues in food or pollution in a river, and reads out on cheap hardware you can buy at any hardware shop, is a very different proposition from a lab instrument. [A black, tiered timber pavilion sits inside a rough stone enclosure among sparse trees and hills.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/2d6uWESL) [Interior of a charred-timber pavilion with rough stone walls and a bright opening to trees outside.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/2d6uWESL) [Interior of an octagonal timber pavilion with a central skylight and stone walls visible through the lower windows.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/2d6uWESL) [A charred-black timber pavilion sits inside a rough stone enclosure on a grassy hillside, with sparse trees around it.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/2d6uWESL) [A narrow corridor with charred timber walls and ceiling leads to a glass doorway, framed by rough stone walls and piles of rock at the entrance.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/2d6uWESL) [A narrow path between rough stone walls and a black charred-timber pavilion with a window reflecting the rocks.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/2d6uWESL) [Black charred-timber pavilion inside a low stone enclosure, viewed through bare trees in a rural landscape.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/2d6uWESL) [Pavilion El Durazno](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/2d6uWESL) [Argentina](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/2d6uWESL) Data [Bar chart showing estimated lifetime risk of dying from pregnancy-related causes for 15-year-old girls by country in 2023, led by Central African Republic and Chad at 4.2%.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/cCFrRZDQ) [At current rates, girls in Chad and Nigeria face about a 1 in 25 lifetime risk of dying from pregnancy or childbirth](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/cCFrRZDQ) [If current fertility and maternal death rates stayed fixed, a girl born today in Chad, the Central African Republic, or Nigeria would have roughly a 1 in 25 chance of eventually dying from pregnancy or childbirth. Across much of sub-Saharan Africa the odds are above 1 in 100. In Europe, they are below 1 in 1,000. Two things compound to produce the worst figures. These countries have some of the highest maternal death rates per pregnancy anywhere in the world, and women there also tend to have five or six children on average. Each pregnancy carries a significant risk, and that risk multiplies across a lifetime of pregnancies. The estimates come from UN and World Bank researchers who combined birth and mortality data with statistical models. That assumption matters: both fertility and maternal death rates are already falling in these countries, so the actual lifetime risk should be lower than this fixed-rate estimate. The gap between Chad and, say, Germany is not a small difference in degree. It is a gap between a routine life event carrying very low risk and that same event being one of the leading ways a woman might die.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/cCFrRZDQ) History [An old black-and-white print shows a night sky with a bright comet streaking across it above a riverside village, with a man standing at the right edge.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/zo3zKdJM) [It took more than 3,000 rocks falling on a French town to convince scientists meteorites came from space](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/zo3zKdJM) [On 26 April 1803, more than 3,000 rocks fell from the sky over the Norman town of L’Aigle, in front of enough witnesses that a physicist named Jean-Baptiste Biot could go door to door collecting testimony. His report, published shortly after, finally convinced the scientific community that meteorites come from space. The odd thing is how long it had taken. A physicist called Ernst Chladni had argued the case in print back in 1794, but his theory never quite stuck. Part of the problem was that he had never actually visited a fall site or spoken to anyone who had seen it happen. Eighteenth-century rationalists, already sceptical of folk stories about iron rocks raining from the sky (alongside reported showers of blood, milk, and wool), needed harder evidence. Biot gave them that. He visited the surrounding foundries and mines and confirmed that the L’Aigle stones matched nothing produced locally, but did match rock from an earlier fall at Barbotan in 1790. Then he worked through the witness accounts: people from different villages, different backgrounds, all describing the same event independently. Biot wrote that it would be absurd to suppose they had all conspired to invent it. His report read like a story but argued like a scientist, and it landed in popular media as well as academic circles. Within a few months of publication, the extraterrestrial origin of meteorites was accepted.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/zo3zKdJM) [Bar chart of UK nuclear capacity from 1970 to 2050, showing a peak above 12,000 MW in the 1990s and projected rises from Hinkley C and Sizewell C after 2030.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/Copbb7jq) [Britain had built more nuclear reactors than the US, USSR, and France combined by 1965, then fell behind](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/Copbb7jq) Britain was the world leader in nuclear power by the mid-1960s, with more reactors built than the US, USSR, and France combined. Calder Hall, switched on in 1956, was the first nuclear station anywhere to feed power into a national grid. Stations got planning approval in months and were generating electricity within four or five years of breaking ground. Alex Chalmers, writing in Works in Progress, argues that the usual explanation does not hold up: Britain did not simply choose the wrong reactor design in 1965. The clunky domestic reactors were eventually made to run efficiently once competent management took over in the 1990s, and even when Britain switched to proven American technology in the 1980s, the decline continued. The real explanation, Chalmers argues, is structural: a tight-knit group of engineers had been handed extraordinary authority and near-unlimited government backing, and when that arrangement broke down, the whole programme went with it. Today, Hinkley Point C, still unfinished, is expected to produce electricity at roughly six times the cost per unit of a modern South Korean plant or an early British reactor. It will have taken at least 13 years to build and has run £17 billion over budget. Britain’s last successfully completed reactor came online in 1995. Random [A concrete brutalist tower block rises sharply behind a row of traditional low-rise Victorian brick houses and a pub.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/R2TQLKQU) [Blitz damage may have made London richer by forcing denser post-war rebuilding](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/R2TQLKQU) [Gerard Dericks and Hans Koster ran the numbers on London office rents and Blitz bombing maps in 2018 and found something uncomfortable: London’s GDP today is probably 1 to 2 percentage points higher because of the destruction. Buildings flattened by German bombs were replaced with denser, taller structures that historic preservation rules would never have allowed otherwise. The Luftwaffe, accidentally, did what the planning system wouldn't. Matt Yglesias uses that as the launching pad for a wider argument about the UK economy. Labour productivity has grown at just 0.4% a year since the financial crisis. Taxes are at a 70-year high. Homes are shrinking over time, not because people want smaller homes, but because cost per square foot is astronomical and developers respond by building smaller. The UK as a whole has a housing squeeze comparable to New York City’s, and London is worse, with no equivalent of a cheap, fast-growing Dallas or Atlanta to absorb the overflow. The structural problem, the article argues, is that urban density (lots of people and businesses close together) is not just a housing preference; it is an economic multiplier. Dense cities tend to be more productive, because ideas, skills, and opportunities travel faster over shorter distances. Blocking that density doesn't preserve anything worth preserving. It just moves the cost somewhere less visible: into stagnant productivity and anaemic growth. Kwasi Kwarteng wrote an FT op-ed in 2022 lamenting exactly those symptoms, while serving as Chancellor in a government that had been in office for 12 years. The diagnosis had finally arrived; the cause of the illness hadn’t.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/R2TQLKQU) [A long strip of red and blue wildflowers grows through the center of a lush green wheat field on a farm.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/t6jtRFMd) [Wildflower strips through crop fields cut crop damage by around 60% in trials](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/t6jtRFMd) Pest control has a predator problem: the insects that eat crop pests already exist, but they often have nowhere to live. Ladybirds, lacewings, hoverflies, and parasitic wasps will happily eat aphids, caterpillars, and mites all summer, but a monoculture field gives them nothing to shelter in or feed from between meals. Planting wildflower strips through the middle of fields (not just around the edges, but running through the crop itself) turns visitors into residents. Controlled trials found leaf-beetle populations dropped 40 to 50%, and crop damage fell by around 60%, enough to push damage below the threshold where spraying was worth considering. The cost is seed and crop space. [A nuclear power plant with two cooling towers rises above farmland and trees, with steam drifting from one tower.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/T833hnFi) [French nuclear plants are ramping down because river water is too warm for cooling](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/T833hnFi) France's nuclear plants cool their reactors by drawing water from nearby rivers and returning it slightly warmer. That works fine most of the year, but French regulations set a maximum temperature for the water going back into the river (to protect river ecosystems), so when the river itself gets too hot, the plant has no room left and has to shut down. That's what happened on 22 June, when the Garonne River near the Golfech plant in southern France was forecast to hit 28°C. Other reactors, including one at Nogent-sur-Seine, have been ramped down since, with more expected to follow. During a similar heatwave in July 2025, at least 7 gigawatts of French nuclear capacity went offline, which is more than Ireland's entire grid. Nuclear gets most of the attention, but it's not the only casualty. Five UK gas plants have already cut a combined 2.5 gigawatts because of the heat, and European hydropower dropped 13% in the first five months of 2025 as rivers ran low. The core problem is that the same hot weather driving record electricity demand (people reaching for fans and air conditioning) is also hobbling the power plants trying to meet it. The International Energy Agency (IEA) projects that global cooling energy demand could double by 2050, so the pressure on grids in summer is only going to grow. [Web](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/t22wzVkm) · [Twitter](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/wQQbY59J) · [LinkedIn](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/GZMiiXQz)