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This summary covers The Economist’s April 25th, 2026 Science & technology article listed in the contents as Grouse and chairlifts and published under the headline Last resorts.

The article turns a small Alpine conservation problem into a useful lesson about design. Black grouse have been flying into chair-lift cables at ski resorts for years, often fatally. Resorts tried to help by hanging warning markers from the cables. The trouble was that many of those markers were red, and new research suggests red is precisely the wrong signal for the birds.

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Clean power’s crisis dividend

The article argues that the new Gulf war has made clean energy look less like a climate preference and more like a security asset. The immediate temptation is to assume coal will be the main beneficiary of disrupted energy markets, especially in countries that have domestic coal but rely on imported liquefied natural gas. Coal is indeed getting a short-term lift. But The Economist’s sharper point is that the closure of the Strait of Hormuz strengthens the case for solar, wind and other renewables even more.

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This summary covers The Economist’s April 25th, 2026 Business article listed in the contents as Trumpian psychedelics and published under the headline Altered state.

The article argues that Donald Trump’s sudden embrace of psychedelic medicines could accelerate a promising field, but in a way that exposes a deeper problem in American drug policy. Psychedelics may help treat depression, PTSD, addiction and anxiety. The issue is not whether the field deserves attention. It does. The issue is whether treatments should be pushed forward because the evidence is strong, or because they have caught the eye of the president and his circle.

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This summary covers The Economist’s April 25th, 2026 International article listed in the contents as Military innovation in Ukraine and published under the headline Battlefield formation.

The article argues that Ukraine’s war effort has become a live laboratory for military technology. Drones, unmanned ground vehicles and AI-assisted systems are no longer peripheral experiments. They are increasingly central to how Ukraine supplies troops, strikes Russian forces, protects soldiers from exposure and compensates for being outmatched in manpower and traditional firepower.

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This summary covers The Economist’s April 25th, 2026 Finance & economics Buttonwood column listed in the contents as Too-stablecoins and published under the subtitle Why the stablecoin market is fizzling.

The article argues that stablecoins have not yet become the financial revolution their boosters promised. They are meant to be the sober part of crypto: digital tokens pegged to the dollar and backed by safe assets such as Treasury bills. That design should, in theory, make them useful for payments, attractive as a store of value in unstable economies and helpful to America by increasing demand for government debt.

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This summary covers The Economist’s April 25th, 2026 China column listed in the contents as Chaguan: Tech transfer and published under the headline The world wants Chinese tech.

The article argues that the politics of technology transfer have flipped. For decades, Western governments and companies worried that China was forcing, coaxing or stealing foreign know-how. Now many of them face the opposite problem: China has become strong enough in electric vehicles, batteries, robotics and other advanced industries that outsiders want Chinese knowledge, factories and production methods to move abroad.

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This summary covers The Economist’s April 25th, 2026 China article listed in the contents as Chinese satellites over the Middle East and published under the headline Offering alternatives.

The article argues that China’s rapidly improving commercial satellite industry is changing the politics of wartime intelligence. During the conflict involving Iran, Israel and America, Chinese satellite firms have released images of military sites, damaged infrastructure and deployed weapons at a moment when American providers have become more constrained. That has given China a way to help America’s adversaries indirectly while advertising a fast-maturing space industry.

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This summary covers The Economist’s April 25th, 2026 Science & technology article listed in the contents as Chernobyl, 40 years on and published under the headline A laboratory like no other.

The article argues that Chernobyl is no longer only a synonym for nuclear catastrophe. Forty years after reactor number four exploded, the site has become an unmatched field laboratory for understanding how radiation moves through water, soil, food, microbes, animals and human institutions. The disaster was real, deadly and politically consequential. Yet its long afterlife has produced a large body of practical knowledge about what nuclear accidents do, what they do not do, and how societies should respond when fear outruns evidence.

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This summary covers The Economist’s April 25th, 2026 International article listed in the contents as European defence tech and published under the headline Slow and unsteady.

The article argues that Europe has begun to understand the military importance of cheap, software-driven unmanned systems, but has not yet built the industrial machinery needed to produce them at wartime scale. Drones, autonomous submarines, unmanned ground vehicles and battlefield software are no longer speculative extras. They are becoming central to how modern armies detect, strike, supply and survive.

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This summary covers The Economist’s April 25th, 2026 Science & technology article listed in the contents as Crypto-jacking and published under the headline Whose mine is it anyway?.

The article argues that crypto-jacking has become a durable form of cybercrime because it turns other people’s computing infrastructure into a hidden energy subsidy. Mining cryptocurrencies can be expensive because it consumes large amounts of processing power and electricity. Criminals can cut that cost most brutally by forcing victims to provide both.