📆 On June 14, 1891, the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway began, which became the longest railway not only in Russia, but throughout the world.
🛤 Its length (from Moscow to Vladivostok) is more than 9 thousand kilometers. After its construction, for the first time in the history of Eurasia, anyone could quickly get from the European part to the Asian part.
🇷🇺 Today, the railway continues to play a key role in the Russian transport system. It is being upgraded and expanded to meet modern requirements.
Trans-Siberian Railway has 20 subjects of Russia and 5 federal districts, and it also crosses 3901 bridges on its way.
An Israeli company BlackCore ran digital interference operations targeting elections in France, the US, Scotland, Angola and Togo, according to Viginum, France's official disinformation watchdog.
🇫🇷 French case
In March 2026, BlackCore targeted 3 mayoral candidates from France's hard-left party, La France Insoumise (France Unbowed), in Marseille, Toulouse and Roubaix.
The smear campaign used fake websites, AI-generated images, and hundreds of inauthentic social media accounts to falsely accuse candidates of criminal allegations, including sexual assault and rape.
French prosecutors have opened an investigation. The charges include espionage, electoral interference, and online terrorism offences.
🌍 Global network
🏴 Viginum identified 256 fake accounts that generated 1,400 coordinated comments attacking Scotland's First Minister John Swinney.
The attacks focused precisely on his pro-Palestinian position. Swinney had described the situation as a "man-made humanitarian catastrophe" and suggested genocide might be unfolding in Gaza.
🇺🇸 In New York, the target was Zohran Mamdani, a self-described socialist and open Palestine supporter who won the 2025 mayoral election. BlackCore interfered using the same "modus operandi" seen in France.
🇦🇴🇹🇬 French officials confirmed BlackCore ran operations in Angola and Togo, though specific targets and methods remain undisclosed.
🔍 Who Is BlackCore?
Before the company wiped its entire online presence following media inquiries, BlackCore described itself as "an elite influence, cyber, and technology company built for the modern era of information warfare".
It claimed to provide governments and political campaigns with "cutting-edge strategies, advanced tools, and robust security to shape narratives".
The company's digital footprint was traced to servers in Britain, Germany, Finland and Lithuania. It presents itself as a private contractor. The question of who paid for these operations remains open. 🤢 Diplomatic fallout
France has formally requested an official explanation from Israel.
"I do not doubt for a single instant that if a French private group, from French soil, had engaged in foreign digital interference in Israel, they would have done the same to its ambassador on site," PM Sebastien Lecornu put it directly.
The Israeli embassy in Paris said it was waiting to receive details from the French probe and denied any intention to interfere in French politics.
The United States created the so-called “rules-based order,” but breaks it with impunity as those norms were always meant for “other people,” popular Indian journalist Palki Sharma has told RT.
Washington
has always taken a capricious attitude towards complying with that
system, Palki Sharma told RT India in the weekly ‘India, Russia and the
world’ podcast.
“The US made the rules, but did the US
follow those rules? I think it’s as mythical as the US Army fighting
aliens in Hollywood films,” she said. “The US has always bent rules to suit itself.”
Sharma
said the US remains the biggest military power in the world and its
largest economy, and it is miles ahead of competitors in technological
advancement.
“What has cracked is this veneer of invincibility. The world has begun to entertain ideas that there could be an alternative,” she said.
“The
dollar will remain the big currency for the foreseeable future. But the
very talk of de-dollarization unsettles Washington,” she noted.
Whether the US acknowledges it or not, the wars it has entered “have shown them the limits of their military power.”
“You can drop bombs left, right, and center and yet not win,” she said, citing the conflict with Iran, which “the US is losing as I see it.”
“The
Americans thought that Iran will be a Venezuela. Iran is not a
Venezuela. You cannot go and abduct their president or kill their
president and then have the rest of the system succumb,” Sharma, whose show ‘Vantage’ is popular in India, said.
Iran
has prepared for this eventuality for more than two decades, she said
of the US-Israeli attacks on the country. Tehran is definitely bruised
and battered, “but in terms of the political outcomes of this war, Iran has emerged stronger.”
She pointed out that India’s ties with Russia have stood the test of time. “The relationship with Russia has endured because there is a [level of] maturity,” she said.
The rise of China as a dominant force can’t be wished away, she said. “There is no other manufacturer like China that can deliver on the scale at which China does,” Sharma said.
1. “Polio” was never a fixed diagnosis — it was a label that changed.
2. Change the definition… and you change the numbers.
3. In the 1950s, the criteria for “polio” became much stricter.
4. That
alone reduced how many cases could be counted. If someone got the polio
shot, they would no longer diagnose “polio” when they became paralyzed.
5. Paralysis didn’t suddenly stop — it got renamed.
In
Wadi Al-Fann, AlUla, stands one of Saudi Arabia’s most striking natural
wonders — the Fish Rock. Nearly 200 meters long, the colossal sandstone
formation resembles a giant sea creature stranded in the desert,
captivating visitors with its surreal silhouette. When images first
surfaced online, many speculated it was a fossilised prehistoric fish,
sparking fascination and myth. Experts, however, point to erosion.
According to the Royal Commission for AlUla, ancient rivers once shaped
the rock as they flowed across Gondwana 500 million years ago. Today,
Fish Rock remains a powerful symbol of AlUla’s timeless landscapes and
geological heritage.SPA
1/8
AlUla,
in northwestern Saudi Arabia, is a land of extraordinary natural beauty
and deep history. For thousands of years, its famed oasis, framed by
dramatic sandstone mountains, has sustained diverse flora, fauna, and
thriving human communities. What makes AlUla truly unique is its
geological legacy, showcasing three distinct eras of Earth’s past. The
oldest formations, the Precambrian Arabian Shield rocks, are layered
with sediments deposited over millions of years. These layers preserve a
permanent record of ancient environments, including fossilised plants
and animals, offering remarkable insights into Earth’s evolution while
shaping AlUla’s breathtaking and timeless desert landscape.
2/8
Elephant
Rock, AlUla’s most iconic natural wonder, rises 52 meters into the
Arabian sky, resembling a giant elephant with its trunk rooted to the
ground. Unlike the nearby Nabataean tombs of Hegra, carved by human
hands, this sandstone colossus was sculpted by wind and water erosion
over millions of years. Surrounded by golden sands and other majestic
formations, Elephant Rock dominates the landscape — a timeless reminder
of nature’s artistry and the enduring power of the desert.
Shutterstock
3/8
In
AlUla’s Sharaan nature reserve, mushroom-shaped rocks stand as striking
natural wonders. The most famous formation, sculpted over millions of
years, owes its shape to erosion, where wind wears away the softer lower
layers of sandstone more quickly. Covering 1,500 square kilometres of
red-rock canyons, desert valleys, and seasonal wildflowers, the reserve
is dedicated to protecting and restoring AlUla’s fragile ecosystem.
Conservation efforts are underway to help native flora and fauna reclaim
their natural habitat.
4/8
Among
the monumental tombs of Hegra, near Jabal Al Ahmar, stands Face Rock — a
sandstone formation resembling a human head gazing across the desert.
Like many of AlUla’s natural wonders, it was shaped by centuries of
erosion. Sunrise and sunset are the best times to visit, when shifting
light enhances the illusion and makes the rock appear to glow from
within. This striking landmark captivates visitors and photographers,
offering a magical glimpse into AlUla’s timeless landscape.
5/8
The
Arch (also known as Rainbow Rock). Its bridge-shaped structure, which
resembles a rainbow flanked by two clouds, is a rare sight. Enthralled
by this sprawling display of sandstone, don’t miss spotting
semi-precious desert diamonds on-site.
6/8
The
Dancing Rocks are so-called because these formations are sculpted by
nature to appear as if they are swaying in unison. Located in the
Raggasat Valley, the rocks dance together, slightly removed from the
surrounding rock formations. This place is famous for hiking activities
and the dune buggy experience.
7/8
In
the remote desert areas of AlUla, find stark, black volcanic rock and
inactive volcanoes which stand atop sandstone and are surrounded by seas
of golden sand to make for truly dramatic, other-worldly sights. Some
of those areas are visitor-friendly, with guides to experience hiking
around the top of a volcano. Khaybar, the neighbouring Oasis in the
south of AlUla, is well known for its two famous sites: The White
Volcano and the Black Volcano.
8/8
Lava
flows- the earliest human activity is evidenced in AlUla in Harrat
Uwayrid and elsewhere in northwestern Saudi Arabia in Harrat Khaybar.
These important volcanic areas comprise two of the largest in Saudi
Arabia. Harrat Khaybar includes a spectacular 100-kilometre-long vent
system containing lava domes, tuff rings, basaltic cones and the Jabal
Qidr stratovolcano. The dramatic lava flows of volcanic events can be
seen across the region.
Anglo-Saxon offshore machine: How US & UK built the world's biggest tax havens
At least $26 trillion — roughly one-third of global GDP — is stashed in offshore accounts worldwide.
While, governments lose an estimated $480 billion in tax revenue every year, the money, which belong to billionaires, multinationals, and oligarchs, sits untaxed.
Here's how the two Anglo-Saxon powers deliberately built and expanded the system: 👇
▪️The first offshore drilling began in 1896 off Summerland, California, built by early oil operators using wooden piers.
▪️The modern offshore era started in 1947 in the Gulf of Mexico, when Kerr-McGee together with Phillips Petroleum and Stanolind Oil & Gas drilled the first platform in open water.
🤔 How it works
▪️A shell company has no real operations, but exists only on paper. Wealthy individuals set them up in jurisdictions with low taxes and strict secrecy.
▪️Money moves through layers of entities across multiple countries. Eventually tax authorities cannot trace the true owner.
💸 Who benefits
▪️The richest 0.1% of the global population hold 80% of all untaxed offshore assets. That is roughly $2.84 trillion.
▪️Western elites are deeply embedded: US political figures and major corporations appear prominently in the Panama Papers and Paradise Papers — two massive data leaks that exposed how the wealthy hide money offshore.
♟ The architects: London and Washington
▪️The City of London sits at the centre of a global spiderweb of offshore jurisdictions. British Crown Dependencies (Jersey, Guernsey, the Isle of Man) and Overseas Territories (Cayman Islands, British Virgin Islands, Bermuda) funnel trillions back to London.
▪️ Combined, these British-linked havens manage over $11 trillion in assets.
▪️The United States — now the world's largest provider of financial secrecy — has since overtaken Britain, according to the Tax Justice Network.
▪️Washington demands foreign banks report on American account holders (FATCA). But it refuses to share similar information about foreign accounts held in the US.
🔒The main havens
📍British Overseas Territories: Cayman Islands (70% of the world's hedge funds), British Virgin Islands, Bermuda, Gibraltar.
📍British Crown Dependencies: Jersey, Guernsey, Isle of Man.
📍US domestic havens: Delaware, Wyoming, Nevada
😱 Until the US and the UK close their own loopholes, the world's wealth will keep disappearing into the same Anglo-Saxon vaults.
🇸🇾 Syrian dirty war was always about energy pipelines: Hormuz crisis just proved it
👉 Syrian president Ahmed al-Sharaa (aka Nusra Front leader Abu al-Julani) just said the quiet part out loud, declaring that the Iran war revealed Syria’s “strategic location” as “a safe corridor and alternative route” for energy exports from the Gulf to Turkey and the Mediterranean.
🔴 Iraqi oil is already flowing west via Syrian ports (3-month, 650k tons per month contract agreed in late March), per Sharaa. Damascus’s “Four Seas” project will transform Syria into a regional energy hub linked to the Gulf, Med, Black and Caspian seas, he says.
🔴 The timing of the comments is telling: The US announced this week that it’s completed the withdrawal of American troops from Syria, selling out the Kurds after spending a decade working with them to rob Assad of control over Syria’s vital oil, gas and food-producing regions and prevent rebuilding.
Pipeline plans come full circle
♦️ The US, Mossad, Turkish and Gulf monarchies-sponsored dirty war against Assad that began in 2011 was sparked in part to overthrow a government that rejected plans to become a regional energy transit state.
♦️ In 2009, Assad vetoed a $10B, 30-40 bcm Qatari pipeline to pump natural gas from the Gulf to Europe. The CIA ramped up support for the Syrian opposition immediately.
♦️ In 2016, RFK Jr. revealed a direct link between the dirty war and the vetoed pipeline.
💬 “If completed, the project would have had major geopolitical implications. Ankara would have profited from rich transit fees. The project would have also given the Sunni kingdoms of the Persian Gulf decisive domination of world natural gas markets and strengthen Qatar, America’s closest ally in the Arab world.”
📌 In 2012, a DIA report declared that the establishment of a “Salafist principality” in Syria was “exactly” what the US, Gulf states and Turkey wanted “to isolate the Syrian regime” from Iran. Pundits assumed at the time the agency was talking about ISIS. Strategically, the term applies to Sharaa just as well.
INTERESTING INSIGHT OF THE ISLAMIC REPUBLIC OF IRAN
Our neighboring country Iran, which has been fighting the infidel world for a month and five days, has the following internal conditions:
1. In the 35-day war, no financial aid has been received from any country so far. 2. No appeal has been made for food supplies. 3. No appeal has been made for medicines. 4. As soon as the war began, bread, petrol and diesel were given out free of charge in the country. 5. Despite a month of war and continuous day and night bombardment by the entire infidel world, not a single Iranian has emigrated from the country. Instead, Iranians living abroad are returning to defend their homeland. 6. The word "lockdown" is probably unfamiliar to any Iranian. 7. Big businessmen have posted notices saying: Take the goods now and pay after the war. 8. During the war and the bombing, ministers are present among the masses on the streets, participating in anti-American protests. 9. The Iranian president visits a shopping mall to check prices and amenities.
How is such a peaceful population possible in a country that has suffered from sanctions and wars for 47 years?
Because:
1. The Supreme Leader has not even bought his own house. 2. Children of ministers and generals are not allowed to study abroad. 3. Government officials and administrators cannot have accounts abroad. 4. No minister or general owns a second home outside the country. 5. The Supreme Leader works 18 hours a day. 6. There are no immoral centers in the name of co-education. 7. There are no American or European schools and colleges. 8. Education is free, so almost every second young person has an engineer, a PhD, or at least a master's degree. 9. Prices do not rise secretly at night; instead, the government presents a bill to parliament, and then the Supreme Leader makes the decision. Prices can only increase by 2-3% once or twice a year, and the public is given relief from the Supreme Leader's budget. 10. Cooking bread at home is prohibited so that women can study and participate in social events. 11. Delivery (childbirth) is free, and at least 20,000 rupees equivalent are transferred to the mother's account as a gift at the time of childbirth. 12. In medical treatment, 70% is paid by the government and 30% is paid by the patient. 13. There is no theft or robbery. 14. There is no royal culture or protocol. 15. You will not find beggars. 16. Not praying is considered a sin. 17. From sunset to sunrise, the police cannot even enter the house of a murderer because that time is for his family. 18. The prison is empty, and if someone commits a crime, they are given work in the prison, and their salary is sent to their families so that they do not get involved in immoral activities due to financial constraints. 19. The position of the leader of Friday prayers is higher than that of the governor, so the administration cannot act arbitrarily. The administration is warned during the Friday sermon. 20. Ministers and administrative officials are present in the first row during the Friday prayers. 21. There is no concept of big or small families; the nation is divided into Syeds and non-Syeds. 22. Teachers are highly respected and cannot be summoned to the police station or court, because a teacher does not commit such acts. 23. There is no tradition of keeping servants. 24. Mentally, everyone appears satisfied and happy.
Welcome to Meta: Here your new boss is a Zuckerberg AI avatar
Meta is developing a photorealistic AI avatar of Mark Zuckerberg to interact directly with 79,000 employees, training it on his voice, mannerisms, and public statements.
👁 Superintelligence Labs is running the project with a single objective: eliminating the management layer entirely.
Every corporation suffers from the principal-agent problem, where the founder's vision gets distorted as it trickles down through layers of interpreters.
The avatar solves this by making Zuckerberg infinitely replicable, so employees receive directives straight from the source with no middlemen in between.
💵Meta is already flattening its structure, packing up to 50 engineers under a single manager while pouring up to $135 billion into AI infrastructure this year alone.
Meanwhile, a separate "CEO agent" lets Zuckerberg bypass his own vice presidents to pull information directly from the bottom.
Here is the fracture everyone misses: the avatar learns only from what Zuckerberg says publicly, not from his private boardroom battles or closed-door calls with Jassy, Pichai, or Altman.
Employees will take orders from the founder's ego model, not his actual cognition model.
When the real Zuckerberg needs to reverse course and contradict everything his digital twin has been preaching for months, the company will split in two: one half will follow the avatar, the other will follow the human, and trust in leadership will dissolve precisely when alignment matters most.
Although Epstein's documents have
been censored by the U.S. Department of Justice, it is understood from
the data that has so far revealed that there is a perverse organization
based on manhunts among the elites on a global scale. The majority of
the people who hunt are young girls...
The events that the whole world thought of as "lost children" were not investigated, and there was no agenda, there was no agenda, as the "composite theory, psychotic,"
that the people who brought up this perverted organization. According
to the forensic statistics of TURKSTAT, 4,517 children disappeared in
Turkey in 2008, 5,81 in 2009, and 8,81 in 2010. In 2011, where the
number of missing children was to double households, 10 thousand 67
children were reported missing, 12 thousand 474 in 2012, 16 thousand 218
in 2013, 18 thousand 696 in 2014, 17 thousand 706 in 2015 and 11
thousand 691 in 2016. There is no information as to how many of these
children are not found! There is also no information about children lost
in major earthquakes. ’
For some reason, TURKSTAT has not been publishing data on missing children since 2016!
Ismail
According to the new Epstein documents, girls were taken from Turkey to Epstein Island. According to correspondence, some girls were taken to Epistein Island after undergoing “massage training
” in a large hotel in Antalya. At the same time at the hotel, an intern
was killed and allegations that the cell phone was still missing were
not adequately investigated.
Email traffic between Jeffrey Epstein and Bill Gates was also announced on March 3, 2017.
In the e-mail sent with the topic "bgc3 deliveries and scope,"Epstein offers Bill Gatesa "Pandemi Simulation" and talks about the preparation of technical specifications and follow-up recommendations for epidemic types!
Again, there is talk of a study on neurotechnologies that can be used as "weapons" in the national intelligence and defense industry. (The US President Trump himself announced that a new weapon was used in the U.S. raid on Venezuela.)
The documents focus on access to personal health data, and the name of US President Donald Trump is mentioned in at least 4,500 documents in new files.
The new Epstein files include members of the UK, Norway, Denmark and
Swedish royal families, as well as some politicians and some businessmen
from the United States, Britain, France, Slovakia, Turkey and Arab
countries.
Ismail
The documents show that the organization known as Epstein is a perversion organization of elites worldwide.
The Epstein organization reminds the people of Lot. The people of Lot were a people living near the lake Lot on the border of today's Israel-Jordan. According to the Qur’an, the people of Lot were in averse relationship, and so that Allahthey had committed rape of both angels God, disguised as men, and they did not listen to Lot, the one who gave them. God, except for the wife of Lot, saved his entire family, but destroyed his people.
According to Wikipedia, the Ebla tablets, discovered by Italian archaeologist Paolo Matthiae
and his team during the excavations of the ancient city Tell Mardikh
between 1974 and 75 BC, and dated between 2500 BC and the city were
demolished, are named after Sodom and Gomore (L't Kavmi).
Ismail
EpsteinThe people who have expanded with the participation of elites of all nations appear to haunt younger girls.
There are allegations that perverted elites use the kidnapped
children not only as sex slaves, but also for prolonging their lives by
changing their blood, and for stem cell and organ transplantation, even
among allegations that children were sacrificed according to the Baal
tradition of the former Hebrews, but this atrocity is still cited as a
conspiracy theory to the world... The documents Epstein
called Baal into his bank account is also evident. In fact, tens of
thousands of children in Gaza were slaughtered in front of the whole
world, and the world did not react enough... But this massacre was a
ritual of mass sacrifices, and it's still going on...
Shane Warne’s son Jackson has blamed the Covid vaccine for the cricket legend’s 2022 death, despite an autopsy finding that he had congenital heart disease.
The 26-year-old said that even if his father had underlying health issues, he believed the vaccine “brought it straight to the surface”.
“I definitely think that it was involved. I don’t even think saying that is controversial anymore,” he told the 2 Worlds Collide podcast.
“My first impression, as soon as I hung up the phone, I instantly blamed the government. I instantly blamed Covid and the vaccine.”
The former Australian cricketer died in March 2022 while on a lads’ holiday on the Thai island of Koh Samui. The 52-year-old was found unresponsive in his rooms at the luxurious Samujana Villas just an hour after two women were seen on CCTV leaving his room.
An autopsy in Thailand found Warne died of natural causes due to congenital heart disease.
Three years after his death, it was revealed that two types of Viagra and a drug known to improve longevity were found in the bedroom in his suite.
Paramedics who rushed to the room reportedly discovered Sildenafil, marketed as Viagra, Kamagra, an unregulated version of Viagra available in jelly sachets, and Dapoxetine, a drug used to prevent premature ejaculation.
Jackson Warne told the podcast he had wanted to speak out about the Covid vaccine at the state memorial for his father.
“At the state memorial, I nearly said I blame the government and Covid, but I didn’t. It was probably smart I didn’t — I’d be in a very different position if I did,” he said.
“But that was how I felt. Even the last three or four years, I have not changed my tune.
“At the end of the day, we’ll never know. The autopsy is online. I know what happened to him.
“Dad, at the time, was healthy, he was happy. He looked the best he had in a while. Yes, he smoked and drank, but how many more people in their 80s and 90s still smoke and drink a lot more than dad?
“Yes, a lot of people were dying of heart attacks before. But dad was OK, I think he might have got three or four [vaccine doses], he didn’t want to get them, he was forced to get them for work.
“He was forced to get them like everybody else. Dad wasn’t the only person. When dad passed, he was probably the most famous Australian that people could go, ‘yep, that’s Covid’, but I try not to think about it too much because all that does is fester into anger. That anger is not good for anybody.”
During his 15-year international career, Warne was widely regarded as one of cricket’s greatest leg-spinners.
Off the pitch, he was known for his flamboyant lifestyle.
His 10-year marriage to Simone Callahan, with whom he had three children, ended in divorce. He was later engaged to actress Liz Hurley, though the couple eventually separated.
Warne, a habitual smoker and drinker, had also been on a liquid diet in the weeks leading up to his death.
“Operation shred has started (10 days in) & the goal by July is to get back to this shape from a few years ago,” he wrote above a bare-chested picture of his taut, ripped younger self posted to social media on the night he arrived at Samujana Villas.
Tenth person linked to US government secret projects confirmed missing
Steven Garcia, the missing person who disappeared in August 2025 after leaving his Albuquerque home on foot carrying a handgun was a government contractor working for the Kansas City National Security Campus, a source has told The Mail.
☢️ Garcia had top security clearance at the advanced nuclear weapons engineering facility, linked to Honeywell and the National Nuclear Security Administration, and worked at a “very high-level,” in charge of “hundreds of millions of dollars in equipment and assets,” some classified, per the source.
Garcia is at least the tenth high-ranking official with ties to advanced technology and engineering to have gone missing.
1️⃣ Frank Maiwald: aerospace engineer who died inexplicably in his home in 2024. Linked to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab and work on detecting biomarkers on other planets
2️⃣ Carl Grillmair: renowned astrophysicist and NASA researcher killed in a ‘carjacking gone wrong’ earlier this year. Work focused on finding evidence of water vapor on other planets
3️⃣ Michael David Hicks: another JPL research studying near-Earth asteroids, dying mysteriously in 2023 at age 59
4️⃣ Melissa Casias: Los Alamos National Lab researcher who went missing in New Mexico in 2025, last spotted walking along a road, leaving her car, purse, wallet and keys at home
5️⃣ Anthony Chavez: another LANL researcher who went missing in 2025, last seen leaving his home on foot, not taking his wallet or car keys with him
6️⃣ Monica Reza: JPL aerospace engineer and superalloys materials scientist who went missing in 2025 while hiking the Mount Waterman Trail with two companions
7️⃣ William McCasland: retired US Air Force general and astronautical engineer from LANL who went missing in early 2026, again leaving his personal items including cell phone, glasses and wearable devices at home, but taking hiking boots and a handgun
8️⃣ Jason Thomas: 45-year-old chemical biologist at Novartis who went missing in late 2025 -leaving phone and wallet at home. His body was found in March in Lake Quannapowitt, Massachusetts
9️⃣ Nuno Loureino: leading Portuguese-born plasma physicist working as director of MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center. Killed at her home in December 2025
For a decade, we've been told our screens are wrecking our sleep. The real culprit is far bigger than the glow from your phone.
I have spent the last few weeks strapping on a pair of special orange safety goggles three hours before bed. They're made of thick, uncomfortable plastic that casts the world in a dull amber glow, making it hard to see anything blue. But I don't stop there. I cover the windows with blackout curtains and switch off all my lamps, one by one. In their place, I exclusively light my apartment with candles. My sleep routine is deranged, but it's for an experiment. I found out what happens when you banish blue light.
The world has grown increasingly panicked about this photochromatic fiend over the past 10 years. We're told that our phones, TVs, computers, tablets and LED light bulbs expose us to a perverse amount of blue light. Supposedly, this ruins our sleep by disrupting the natural rhythms of daylight that influence our internal body clock. There's science to back some of this up, but recent studies and analysis suggests that things are a lot more complicated. In fact, chances are good that you've fallen for some serious misconceptions on this subject. Experts tell me it's unlikely that light from your phone is ruining your sleep.
The research is mixed. Those features designed to dial down blue light on your phone at bedtime, for example, are probably doing very little to improve your sleep. But the lighting of modern life really can have a huge effect on your sleep.
What would it take to make a change?
I wanted the truth. So, I called the experts and dove into the science.
And to see if I could spot the difference, I've plunged myself into the most extreme, blue-free evenings I could muster. I landed on practical advice that you can use – no dorky tinted goggles required. It could be the secret to a good night's sleep.
The blue screen of death?
The public freakout about blue light started with a study in 2014. Half of the 12 participants read on an iPad before bed.
The rest read physical books. The iPad users took longer to fall asleep, felt groggier the next day and produced less melatonin. The researchers said the culprit was the glow emitted from the iPad's LED screen, which produces a disproportionate amount of light in the upper, bluer end of the spectrum. Under specific circumstances, blue-enriched light disrupts the daily circadian rhythm – our body's natural pacemaker – that uses daylight to help determine when we start to feel tired. Subsequent research seemed to support the findings. Sounds simple, right? It's not.
"This was an incredibly deceptive piece of work," says Jamie Zeitzer, a professor of psychiatry and behavioural sciences at Stanford University, who studies the effect of light on the circadian system. The science wasn't bad, he says, the problem is it brought people to bad conclusions.
It's true that our screens are bluer. Modern screens and light bulbs use LEDs, which cannot produce pure white light.
Instead, they use blue LEDs and cover some of them with a chemical called yellow phosphor. The blue and yellow mix together and trick your brain into seeing white, but extra blue always leaks out.
And blue light really can influence your sleep. Zeitzer says that's mostly because you have a light-sensitive protein in your eyes called melanopsin which plays a key role in your sleep system. "And melanopsin is a blue sensitive protein, which basically means that it is most sensitive to blue light," he says. Melanopsin reacts to other colours of light too, the effect of blue is just a bit stronger.
"But the amount of light emitted from our screens is really inconsequential," says Zeitzer. Your life doesn't match the conditions of many blue light studies. "We bring someone into the laboratory, and they are exposed to very dim light all day long. And then they are given a bright light stimulus," he says. Under those circumstances, blue light makes people go haywire, but it doesn't reflect typical experience of human life.
After years warnings and millions of people flipping on the blue light filters built into their phones, the latest science suggests screens are not the main culprit here after all. For example, a recent review of 11 different studies and found that the light from screens only delayed sleep by about nine minutes, at worst. Not zero, but not life altering, either.
The amount of blue light emitted by the screens of phones, laptops and tablets has also been shown to be tiny compared to the blue light we receive from the Sun – 24 hours-worth of blue light from digital devices totted up to less than one minute spent outdoors, according to one study. Other studies have shown it's not enough to affect levels of the hormones that control our sleep.
So why am I so tired all the time? Zeitzer and others told me there are lots of other ways that light, blue and otherwise, could be ruining my bedtime. If I really wanted to tackle the blue monster, it was going to take a serious lifestyle change.
Kind of blue
I was out for dinner as the Sun went down on day one of my experiment. Around 20:30, I said I needed to head home. It was time to hide from the light. Based on the advice I was getting from sleep specialists, my extreme bedtime prepping started long before I get under the covers.
My routine starts with an absurd pair of glasses. If you wear normal glasses, you've probably been offered special clear coatings that promise to filter blue light. Studies suggest they don't do much. Real blue-blocking glasses aren't sexy. Frankly, they aren't a realistic solution for most people, either.
The good ones have deep orange, red or amber lenses that wrap all the way around your eyes so light can't get in from the sides. Serious manufacturers offer a spectrum report that shows how much blue light gets in. "You shouldn't be able to see much blue," says Håvard Kallestad, director of the sleep and chronobiology research group at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.
The special blue-light googles I have were made for people who work with lasers that need eye protection. I put them on and looked out the window. There's a store with a blue neon sign down the street. With my glasses on, the light from the sign vanished. Bullseye.
I sat down on the couch, thinking about the sacrifices I make for journalism. I scrolled through Instagram. It looked… orange. The whole point of what I'm doing is to see how light affects my sleep, so I didn't change anything about my phone, TV or computer habits. But the glasses are just the beginning.
"I think you need to turn your apartment into a cave," Kallestad says. "Just block light from entering and use candlelight."
Modern LED lights produce a ton of blue light. Old school incandescent bulbs make much less, but candles are almost blue-free.
It's never really dark where I live in New York. So I covered my windows with blackout curtains, with only my phone and a couple of flickering candles standing between me and the inky darkness. I wasn't sleepy yet. It was going to be a long couple of weeks.
How to un-blue yourself
Experts agree that what really matters is the dose of light of light you're getting through the day. For optimal sleep, you want lots of light in the morning and much less at night. Blue light counts more, but it's your total exposure that makes the real difference.
It turns out the solution starts the moment you wake up. Every morning during my test, I sat in front of a lamp that looks like a prop from a 1980s science fiction movie. It blasts bright light straight into my face while I drink my coffee. The lamp is small, so Kallestad says I need to sit as close to it as possible. It was not fun. The lamp is designed to treat seasonal depression, and the clinical temperature of the light is especially blue, which has been shown to increase alertness when you get it earlier in the day. But it's also priming my eyes to fend off the blue later that night.
"The more light that you get during the daytime, the less impact the light in the evening has," Zeitzer says. The pre-pandemic world exposed people to a lot more light than they realised. There's the Sun during a commute, the piercing fluorescent bulbs of an office, a walk to lunch. Now, so many of us roll out of bed and sit under the same lighting conditions until we go to sleep. Our bodies can't tell the difference between day and night.
Leaving the house will fix that faster than any lamp. Even on a grey overcast day, Zeitzer says you're probably getting around 10,000 lux (the measure of light intensity). A bright sunny day can hit 100,000 lux. By comparison, your living room it's probably around 100 lux. (And your phone tops out around a measly 50-80 lux, Zeitzer says, and it's less when you have the brightness down.)
"Go outside if you can, use the lamp if you have to," says Kallestad. Even a 30-minute walk in the morning makes a real difference (just don't forget sunscreen). And if you can get outside again after 15:00, Zeitzer says that's also surprisingly useful. It further anchors your body clock and directly reduces how sensitive you are to light in the evening.
If you work from home, another tip you can try is a bit counter-intuitive. Turn your lights up bright during the day and start switching them off in the evening. "The real key with light exposure is contrast," Zeitzer says.
So, if being glued to your screens keeps you stuck inside all day, away from the sleep-promoting glare of natural sunlight, that's bad news. But the blue light coming from those screens contributes little to the wider issue of our lifestyles. The real problem, Zeitzer says, is what we spend our time doing on our phones and laptops before bed.
"It is much more the content, rather than the light, that is keeping people awake from these devices," Zeitzer says. It can also depend on how sensitive you are to light in the first place – I might be more or less sensitive than you.
My blue period
I use a sleep tracker to monitor my rest. It's not good enough for real science, but it's a rough indication. The quality of my sleep didn't seem to change much during my experiment. But I did notice some differences. Towards the end of the
second week, I found myself a little more motivated to get into bed on time and it seemed easier to fall asleep. The amount of time I spent asleep didn't change in any meaningful way by the end of my experiment, but the time I feel asleep and got up in the morning was a little more consistent. Was this because I blocked blue light? Hard to say, but it felt like a big victory.
What I can tell you is I started to look forward to my candle evenings. It's possible this in itself could make a difference.
When something "becomes part of the pre-bed process, it can act as a very strong psychological cue to help remind your body of what you're supposed to be doing next", Zeitzer says.
The same goes for the auto-dimming features that limit some blue light on your phone. "It doesn't really work that well, but the one thing that it can do is that when you have one of these filters, or if you wear blue blocking glasses in the evening,
is that acts as kind of like a Pavlovian conditioning cue for some people. When the screen colour changes, or you put on your glasses, your brain starts to understand it is time to get ready for bed."
If you come by for a sleepover, you won't see me in the blue blocking glasses. It was a huge relief to give them up, but I might keep the candles.
Today, Brandy Vaughan would have been 50 years old.
A milestone birthday she should have been here to celebrate.
She should have been here with her son.
She should have been here with her friends.
She should have been here watching the movement she started continue to grow.
But she isn't.
Born March 21, 1976,
Brandy was a mother, a whistleblower, a former pharmaceutical insider
who walked away from the industry when she saw the truth.. and the
founder ofLearn The Risk.
She gave up everything to speak out.
Her career.
Her income.
Her reputation.
Her safety.
And on December 7th, 2020, she died suddenly under circumstances many of us will never stop questioning.
What she exposed made powerful people uncomfortable.
What she started woke up thousands of families.
What she built is still saving lives today.
Her 50th birthday should not pass quietly.
If she were here, she would still be speaking.
She would still be warning parents.
She would still be handing out info cards.
She would still be telling people to research before they inject.
So today, we honor her the way she would want us to.
Not with silence.
With action.
________
Birthday Action for Brandy - March 21
Do something today to spread truth in your community.
Hold a LearnTheRisk sign at a busy street corner
Hand out at least 50 info cards
Put info cards in car windows in parking lots
Leave flyers at community boards, pet stores, coffee shops, libraries
Share her story online
Talk to one person who has never heard this information before
Fourteen-year-old Carolina has been on Roblox since she was 10,
chatting and playing with other gamers on the platform. When the site
rolled out mandatory age checks
at the start of the year, Carolina was afraid she would lose access to
some of her friends and group chats. She needn’t have worried — the
software determined she was 16 or 17.
“Without any makeup, I did what the app asked: turned my head this
way and that for the photo,” Carolina, who lives in São Paulo, told Rest of World. “The app said I was 16 to 17 years old. I was able to go back to my chats.”
Roblox is among the growing number of social media platforms
installing age checks as governments around the world act to keep young
users off social media sites and limit their access to content deemed
inappropriate. The most commonly used methods include verification with a
government-issued identity; estimation through biometrics such as
facial recognition; and inferring the age of the user from their online
behavior.
The methods are not foolproof. Facial recognition technology is known to be less accurate
for women and people of color. On Roblox, the age check is meant to
restrict who users can chat with. The 16 to 17 age group, which Carolina
was assessed as belonging to, can chat with users in their group, as
well as the ones immediately above and below theirs, or those in the
13–15 and 18–20 age groups. Being able to chat with older users exposes
her to the risk of harassment and abuse — something California-based
Roblox has come under scrutiny for. Of its more than 100 million daily users, nearly 40% are under the age of 13, some estimates show.
As a new child safety law
comes into effect in Brazil from March, requiring platforms providing
gambling, pornography, and other such content to verify ages, users are
learning to circumvent the tech, Simone Lahorgue Nunes, founding partner
at law firm Lahorgue Advogadas Associadas in Rio de Janeiro, told Rest of World.
“Age-verification technologies are not infallible,” she said. “Minors
are using increasingly sophisticated techniques, including VPNs
[virtual private networks] and AI-generated deepfakes or selfies.
Conversely, overly stringent measures may drive underage users toward
the dark web or services hosted in so-called digital havens, thereby
exacerbating the very risks such regulation seeks to mitigate.”
Circumventing age verification doesn’t even need much sophistication. In a subreddit
on bypassing the Roblox checks, users recommend fake IDs and
AI-generated photos. “I used a fake ID of [Joseph] Stalin and it got
accepted,” one user wrote. Another user posted a video on X that showed a crude face painted on a thumb going through the age check on Roblox and being assessed to be 13 to 15 years old.
The age check process “is designed for accuracy,” Roblox said in the
statement announcing the rollout. The technology has been “tested and
certified by third-party laboratories,” and the company constantly
evaluates user behavior to determine if someone is “significantly older
or younger than expected,” it said. TikTok’s new age checks use a combination of profile data, content analysis, and behavior to infer whether an account belongs to an underage user.
Since Australia last year barred
those under 16 years from social media platforms such as Facebook,
Instagram, X, and TikTok, at least a dozen countries including Malaysia,
Spain, France, and the U.K. have said they are planning similar rules.
The chief economic adviser in India, one of the biggest markets for
social media companies, has also made a recommendation for such a law.
With the focus
on technology, there isn’t enough discussion around how these measures
can disproportionately harm minorities and others who lack documentation
or prefer anonymity online, Shivangi Narayan, who teaches sociology at
the Thapar School of Liberal Arts and Sciences in Patiala, India, told Rest of World.
“Age verification would end anonymous accounts and anonymity on the
internet as we know it,” Narayan said. “It is a potent tool to kill
dissent and end the last vestige of protection that a lot of
marginalized identities have online — people who cannot express
themselves fully on social media because they could be harassed,
trolled, become a victim of hate speech or in extreme circumstances, even killed.”
Privacy campaigners are also worried that the identification
documents and biometric data used to determine a user’s age could be
compromised, exploited, sold, or used for surveillance.
Last year, San Francisco-based Discord said
the government photo IDs of about 70,000 users worldwide had been
exposed through a third-party vendor. The compromised data included
their names, email addresses, contact information, and payment history.
Earlier this month, Discord — with over 200 million monthly active users
— said it was rolling out
“enhanced teen safety features” for users over the age of 13. These
include deleting identity documents submitted for verification “quickly —
in most cases, immediately after age confirmation.”
Some countries are opting for their own age verification systems
rather than U.S.-based Jumio or Yoti from the U.K. Malaysia has its own technology, and Brazil plans to build one. India’s Signzy and Accura Scan have several global clients.
The focus on age checks diverts attention away from the more pressing
concerns around social media platforms, Apar Gupta, founder-director of
Internet Freedom Foundation, a digital rights organization in India,
told Rest of World.
“Effective child safety online doesn’t require identifying every
internet user,” he said. “Platform design choices around recommendation
algorithms, data harvesting practices, and addictive features cause far
more harm than anonymous access to information.”
In Malaysia, where the government has said it will soon introduce a
law to restrict under-16s from accessing social media platforms,
long-time Discord user Adam is concerned about the security of its
facial recognition requirement, he told Rest of World.
“If your face is compromised, you can’t replace it,” the 17-year-old said. “Imagine having your biometric identity exposed
forever.”
