The Strait of Hormuz is open, and nearly empty
Traffic through the disputed strait has fallen to a handful of ships a day even as Brent nears $79, a global study redraws dementia's risk map by country, and physicists reproduce a black hole's energy trick on a benchtop.
Iran declares Hormuz closed as a trickle of ships still crosses1
Iran's Persian Gulf Strait Authority warned on July 13 that vessels crossing the Strait of Hormuz outside its approved route would lose safe-passage guarantees, while US Central Command said freedom of navigation remained available and kept striking Iranian positions to hold it open. The arbiter is the traffic: the maritime-intelligence firm Windward counted six commercial crossings in one weekend twelve-hour window and nine in another, against a pre-war norm near 130 a day.
Why it matters: a waterway that carries about a fifth of the world's seaborne oil and gas does not need to be legally shut to do damage. A strait too dangerous to sail is closed in every way that prices energy, and the dispute over its status matters less than the empty water, which no communiqué can reopen.
Brent nears $79 as a Fed that will not cut offers no cushion1
Brent crude for September delivery traded near $78.82 a barrel on July 13, up more than 4% on the day and back to levels last seen in late June, as the Hormuz standoff revived the war-risk premium. The shock lands on a Federal Reserve that has stopped leaning toward relief: at its June meeting the central bank held its target range at 3.50–3.75% and, under Chair Kevin Warsh, struck forward guidance from its statement, with nine of eighteen officials now projecting at least one rate rise this year and the median forecast moving up to 3.8%.2
Why it matters: an oil spike usually meets a central bank ready to look through it or ease against the drag. This one meets a Fed whose own forecast has shifted toward higher rates, so the price of energy and the price of money are climbing at once, with households absorbing both.
UNESCO says aid to education fell 8% as donors retrench3
In its Counting the Loss report, UNESCO found that global aid to education fell 8% between 2023 and 2025, and aid to basic education 15%, after donors pulled back sharply in 2025: US foreign aid down 57%, the EU's 14%, Japan's 6%. Low- and middle-income countries are projected to lose 30% of their education aid by 2027, and the agency is pressing lenders to convert debt into school spending, a swap it says has worked in Peru, Egypt and Côte d'Ivoire.
Why it matters: education aid is slow to rebuild once cut, and the countries losing most, among them Nicaragua, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Mauritania and Honduras, have the least room to backfill it themselves. The retreat converts one year of budget politics in donor capitals into a cohort of children taught less.
Dementia's biggest risk factors differ sharply by country4
A USC-led study of more than 214,000 older adults across 14 countries, published in The Lancet Healthy Longevity and presented at the Alzheimer's Association International Conference in London on July 12, found that the modifiable risks behind dementia vary widely by place. Low education affects 85.6% of older adults in China but 12.0% in the United States; high body-mass index affects 44.9% of Americans against 13.3% of people in India. The factors still cluster in familiar pairs, cardiovascular risks together and behavioural ones together.
Why it matters: prevention advice is usually written as one global checklist. If the dominant risk is schooling in one country and body weight in another, an identical campaign will help in one place and miss in the next, so scarce prevention money should follow the local profile rather than a single average.
Physicists reproduce a black hole's energy trick on a benchtop5
Researchers at the CUNY Advanced Science Research Center reported in Nature that a stationary ring of electronic resonators can amplify radio waves by faking rotation: they modulate the ring's electrical properties in a timed sequence so incoming waves behave as if circling an object spinning faster than any motor could turn it. The waves draw energy from that synthetic rotation, reproducing the Penrose–Zel'dovich process by which a wave can steal energy from a spinning body, the mechanism Roger Penrose proposed in 1969 for extracting energy from a rotating black hole.
Why it matters: the effect had lived on chalkboards for half a century because nothing in a lab spins fast enough to show it. Building the rotation out of timing rather than motion turns an astrophysical thought experiment into a tunable device, with uses the authors see in wireless communication and quantum optics.
A 300-gram robot swims, then flaps out of the water into flight6
Engineers at MIT and EPFL described in Science a flapping-wing craft under 300 grams that swims at nearly a metre per second, then beats its wings to break the surface and fly off at about six metres per second, mimicking a diving bird. In tank and lake tests they found a 70-degree pitch angle gave the cleanest exit from water to air, and medium-sized wings the most reliable crossing.
Why it matters: water and air differ so much in density that machines are usually built for one alone. A single body that works in both could sample storm-tossed or contaminated water no boat should enter, then fly the readings home.
Sources
- Al Jazeera · Oil prices jump as US and Iran trade attacks over Strait of Hormuz
- investingLive · Warsh rewrites the Fed playbook as FOMC holds rates and signals hikes ahead
- UN News · UN spotlights education aid solution (UNESCO, Counting the Loss)
- EurekAlert (USC) · Dementia risk factors look different around the world, large USC study finds (The Lancet Healthy Longevity)
- Phys.org · Synthetic rotation brings black hole energy theory into lab, amplifying waves (Nature)
- MIT News · New flapping robot swims and flies like a diving bird (Science)