NewsFix

Welcome back to NewsFix - the other half of the news. I’m Anthony Badolato, and here’s what’s going right in the world:

A surprising twist in the offshore wind debate
A big win for biodiversity in Papua New Guinea
The simple fix transforming healthcare in Bangladesh
Why your tissues might one day come from the desert
And how a bottle of space dust could unlock the secrets of the universe

Our lead story this week provides a different angle on one of the more controversial parts of the clean-energy transition: offshore wind.

For years, there’s been fierce debate about what happens to marine life when you put enormous turbines into the ocean. But research off the coasts of Denmark and the UK is revealing that the answer isn’t as simple as anyone thought.

Because beneath some of those wind turbines, sea life is moving in.

Oysters, lobsters and fish are making their homes around turbine foundations, attracting larger animals like sharks, porpoises and seals.

Scientists call it the “artificial reef effect” – and now engineers are asking whether they can make it even better.

For example, off the coast of southern England, 75,000 specially designed “reef cubes”, made from low-carbon, plastic-free concrete, have been installed around a turbine at the Rampion wind farm.

Their textured surfaces and crevices create more places for marine life to shelter and feed. The cubes were designed by marine conservation technology company ARC Marine. Here’s co-founder Tom Birbeck.

“What we're going to end up with is this kind of dome-like disc around the turbine with all of these spaces integrated into it. What's interesting is that it's going to perform two functions. So, it's going to perform an engineering function for the turbine and for ramping offshore wind. But it's also going to perform a function for research and ecology.”

And there’s another unexpected benefit. Research around wind farms in the UK has found a significant drop in bottom trawling – one of the most damaging forms of commercial fishing.

Now, none of this erases the environmental impacts of offshore wind. But it does expand the picture. If engineers start designing infrastructure that actively creates more habitat and works for nature, that’s a step in the right direction.

Meanwhile, back on land, a tiny patch of the planet has just celebrated a major win.

Papua New Guinea’s Torricelli Mountains cover an area roughly the size of the city of Los Angeles but it contains an astonishing 4% of the world’s biodiversity. And now, it’s going to be protected. 266 clan leaders from 41 villages have just signed a legally binding conservation deed to put an end to commercial logging and mining, as well as the hunting of threatened species.

Here’s another story from a country you don’t hear much about. Bangladesh is the world’s eighth most populous country, and it’s just pulled off a surprisingly simple healthcare fix.

Four years ago, only 20% of patients being treated for high blood pressure had it under control. Then clinics switched from paper records to a free digital system that alerts patients when they’re overdue for a check-up. From that one small change, the number of people successfully managing their blood pressure has jumped from around 4,000 to more than 460,000 across nearly 700 clinics.

And, there’s also hope that one of the world’s longest-running conflicts may finally be coming to an end.

After more than 40 years of conflict, last week Türkiye’s parliament backed a law offering conditional pardons and legal protections to thousands of members of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party in return for full disarmament. This is a conflict that has killed tens of thousands of people across Türkiye, Iraq and Syria since 1984 - now, there’s a real possibility that it could finally be coming to an end.

Ok, let’s pick up the pace with this week’s Sparks of Progress.

Portugal’s second largest city, Porto, has made public transport free for all residents in a push to get more people out of their cars.

Bolivia has celebrated its first same-sex marriage, after a couple won a four-year legal battle.

Global greenhouse gas emissions may finally be flattening, with new satellite data showing emissions for 2026 are essentially unchanged from last year.

The Rapa Nui people of Easter Island are taking charge of one of the world’s largest Indigenous-managed marine reserves across 700,000 square kilometres of ocean thanks to new funding for patrols, research and enforcement.

And Kimberly-Clark may have found a more sustainable way to make tissues and toilet paper - a spiky desert plant called hesperaloe, that yields fibre stronger and softer than wood, with a fraction of the water and no felled trees.

And finally, a PhD student in Sydney has managed to make space dust … in a bottle.
Linda Losurdo fills glass tubes with a cocktail of gases, removes the air and then zaps them with 10,000 volts for about an hour. The result is a carbon-rich powder with the same infrared fingerprint as cosmic dust drifting between the stars.

So this means that instead of waiting for a meteorite to fall to earth or sending a spacecraft to collect samples, scientists can make their own versions in the lab and use their infrared fingerprints to work out what might be happening in distant stellar nurseries and dust clouds.

In other words, we can start exploring the mysteries of deep space… from a glass bottle right here, in Sydney.

That's a wrap for this week.

Make sure you check out the full edition at fixthenews.com to find out how AI is tackling some of mathematics' oldest problems, why a flamingo has become the symbol of Albania's biggest protest movement and our exclusive interview with Harvard geneticist Pardis Sabeti, who’s spent two decades building systems to catch pandemics before they spread.

I'm Anthony Badolato ... and that's your News Fixed.