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Two years ago, Molly Kelley found out that a close family friend had used a nudification website to make nonconsensual deepfake images of her and dozens of other women.
About 80 women in Minnesota were affected by the same person. When she tried to figure out what legal recourse she had, she found almost none.
The images were stored only on the manâs computer, so laws banning dissemination didnât apply.
There was no indication of intent to share them, which ruled out the stateâs revenge porn statute.
None of the women were minors, so possessing the images wasnât a crime. No existing law allowed her to sue for restitution.
So she started making phone calls.
She educated lawmakers, gave testimony, and advocated for the better part of two years.
The result of that work passed the Minnesota Senate 65-0, and last week, Governor Tim Walz signed House File 1606, making the decision final.
In 2006, scientists at the University of Queensland developed Gardasil, a vaccine designed to prevent HPV infection.
Since HPV is the primary cause of cervical cancer, the fourth most common cancer in women worldwide, the vaccine was immediately significant.
Australia became the first country to launch a national vaccination program the following year.
Here are some highlights of the plan and results:
âĄď¸ The program has expanded considerably since then, including offering the vaccine to boys and removing the barriers to pelvic exams by offering women the option to collect their own samples for screening tests.
âĄď¸ Since records began in 1982, both incidence and mortality rates for cervical cancer in Australia have halved.
âĄď¸ The most recent data, from 2021, showed something that had never happened before: for the first time, there were no cervical cancer cases diagnosed in women under the age of 25.
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Though the work is far from over, Australiaâs approach has become a template.
In long-term studies where people had their cognitive ability tracked from youth into old age, one finding keeps standing out.
âOne of the most important factors explaining someoneâs cognitive ability at age 70 is their cognitive ability when they were 11,â researchers noted in a recent article in The Conversation.
Not lifestyle changes made in middle age.
Not retirement habits or brain training.
Eleven years old.
âPerhaps the time has come for dementia prevention to be thought of as a lifelong goal, rather than simply a focus for old age,â the researchers concluded.
The Big Catch-Up, a multi-year initiative backed by UNICEF, Gavi, and the World Health Organization, concluded program implementation at the end of March 2026.
Millions of children received vaccinations, and many were âzero-doseâ children.
They live in conflict zones, remote areas, or communities where health systems have never been reliable, or where vaccination services collapsed during the COVID-19 pandemic and were never rebuilt.
The campaign for the initiative launched in 2023 to address the halted or disrupted immunization services that stemmed from the COVID-19 pandemic.
The house in Gaza that sisters Tala and Farah Mousa were living in was bombed. So they looked at the rubble and started asking what it could become.
Their answer is Build Hope, Palestine (@buil.dhope ): a way to turn debris from damaged buildings into reusable blocks.
The plan is to teach 100 young people to make at least 200 blocks, then have those people teach others, reaching over 1,000 people as the method spreads.
Now the girls are up for The Earth Prize 2026, ran buy The Earth Foundation, for their innovative solution.
For most of its history, womenâs football has played in spaces that werenât built for it: menâs training grounds, borrowed pitches, stadiums designed for crowds three times the size. Brighton and Hove Albion (@officialbhafc ) is changing that.
The club has announced plans to build a 10,000-capacity stadium on a site adjacent to its Premier League ground, designed from the start around the needs of its womenâs team, its players, and its fans.
The stadium, estimated to cost between ÂŁ75 and ÂŁ80 million (approximately $95 to $100 million), is planned to open for the 2030-31 season at a site called Bennettâs Field, connected to the Amex Stadium via a bridge walkway.
It will include changing rooms, medical and recovery spaces built to elite female athlete standards, breastfeeding rooms, baby-changing areas, and buggy parks, all designed around the audience actually attending WSL matches.
Researchers published hopeful results from a trial involving ten patients with congenital deafness caused by mutations in a gene called OTOF.
Every patient showed measurable improvement.
One girl born without the ability to hear was having everyday conversations with her mother four months after a single injection into her inner ear. She was seven years old.
The treatment did not give her a hearing aid or implant. It gave her a gene she had been missing.
The Bahamas just joined the rank of a few countries in the world with the WHO certification for eliminating mother-to-child transmission of HIV.
Dr. Jarbas Barbosa, Director of the Pan American Health Organization, framed the Bahamasâ result as a starting point rather than an endpoint: âAs we look ahead, this milestone is not only a moment of national pride but also an opportunity to build on this success, advancing efforts to end HIV and other communicable diseases as public health threats across the Caribbean and the Americas.â
Retaining WHO certification requires ongoing surveillance and sustained coverage rates; the work does not stop at the announcement. Nonetheless, this is a huge public health win and an example of what good public health policy can do.
Getting a library card should be easy. For many children, it isnât.
The process can require documentation that not every family has: a fixed address, proof of residency, or a guardianâs signature. For students who are unhoused, in foster care, or undocumented, those requirements can make the library effectively inaccessible.
Chicago just decided to take the question off the table.
Whales in the Antarctic have bounced back. đ
Researchers conducting a survey near the South Orkney Islands this February recorded multiple groups of more than 100 feeding whales in a single day, scenes they described as âremarkable and breathtakingâ and comparable to accounts written by the first polar explorers more than a century ago.
Conservation efforts, especially the ban of commercial whaling in the 1980s, have helped these creatures repopulate.
Whether or not whale recovery continues depends on how well governments, scientists, NGOs, and the fishing industry collaborate.
Something shifted in the worldâs energy system in 2025, and the numbers are hard to argue with.
Data from Ember (@emberenergyresearch ), an energy think tank that tracks electricity output from 215 countries, shows that clean power generation grew 887 terawatt-hours in 2025. This exceeds the global demand growth of 849 terawatt-hours. The share of renewables in the global electricity mix crossed one-third for the first time, reaching 33.8 percent.
Clean energy can now keep pace with demand growth. Replacing the fossil fuel generation that already exists is a different, harder task, one that will take longer and will require this pace of deployment to hold for years.
Nonetheless, the 2025 numbers are a starting point that the world has not had before.
