Diana Baptista

As people around the world swelter in rising heat hitting new highs, spare a thought for those living in city centers - where research has found that temperatures can be considerably higher than in nearby green spaces or surrounding rural areas.

This phenomenon is known as the urban heat island (UHI) effect - where dense clusters of concrete buildings and infrastructure such as roads absorb, retain and radiate more heat than green areas, leading to temperatures that are often several degrees hotter.

As the United States endures record temperatures, people working in tough conditions from farms to construction sites have little respite from the heat - and are often unable or afraid to take breaks despite the risks to their health and even their lives.

Extreme heat is the top weather-related killer in the nation - yet protections for workers are widely lacking, according to advocates who say that failing to ensure people can take breaks for water or shade will lead to more severe illness, and deaths.

Lawmakers in Latin America are carving out new rights for the human brain in response to advances in neurotechnology that make scanning, analyzing and selling mental data ever more possible.

Last month, the Chilean Supreme Court issued a unanimous decision ordering Emotiv, a U.S. producer of a commercial brain scanning tool, to erase the data it had collected on a former Chilean senator, Guido Girardi.

For decades, drug traffickers carried their cash in suitcases to dodge banking controls, and the police. Today, many are also using virtual cryptocurrency wallets installed on their cellphones.

When the U.S. Justice Department announced charges in April against four sons of jailed Mexican drug lord Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán, the indictment said they had used "untraceable cryptocurrency" to launder the profits of their U.S. fentanyl smuggling operation.

More than a quarter of menstruating women and girls around the world - some 500 million people - struggle to manage their periods, often because they cannot afford sanitary pads, according to the World Bank.

Concern about "period poverty" has fueled campaigns globally calling for the end of the so-called tampon tax, which refers to consumption levies such as value-added tax (VAT) that most countries charge on items such as sanitary pads, tampons, panty liners and menstrual cups.

The world is watching and the playing field is far from level - welcome to the 2023 Women's World Cup, where players work just as hard, but earn less and win smaller prizes than the men.

That inequality - women face a 75% gender pay gap at the World Cup alone - is propelling elite players to form unions and make a collective push for parity where persuasion has failed.

Dozens of crypto enthusiasts streamed into co-working spaces in Mexico City this week for the global launch of Worldcoin, hoping to have their irises scanned with a biometric verification device in exchange for cryptocurrency.

Mexico City is one of 35 cities in 20 countries where Worldcoin is pushing its ambitious project to create a unique "digital passport" called World ID, which would help distinguish humans from bots online.

For Indigenous leader Zenivaldo Bezerra, listening to the "enchanted" - ancestral spirits - required waiting until the dead of night for absolute silence in his rural community in northeastern Brazil.

But a quiet night has become rare for the Pankararu, a group of about 7,500 Indigenous people in Pernambuco state, because of the hum from 52 wind turbines built on the surrounding savannah without their consent.

When Costa Rican lawmakers wanted to draw attention to the need to regulate artificial intelligence, they asked ChatGPT to write a new law to do it for them.

The members of Congress told the chatbot to "think like a lawyer" and draft a bill according to the constitution. They then sent the resulting text verbatim to the legislature.

When Chilean university professor Diego Martínez asked his 50 students if they had used ChatGPT to help with an engineering assignment, he was surprised to find that every one of them had.

The popular AI chatbot can generate coherent prose, including essays, stories, summaries, legal text, and even poetry about virtually any subject in response to users' questions and is designed to mimic a human conversation.