Oil steadied after a string of losses, with investors looking to US trade talk progress and low inventory levels.
Brent crude traded below $69 a barrel after four sessions of declines, with West Texas Intermediate above $65. US President Donald Trump said he would set tariffs of 15% to 50% ahead of an Aug. 1 deadline for trade talks. The 15% levy rate was set for Japan on Wednesday, while the European Union is progressing toward a similar agreement.
DPM/FM Senator Ishaq Dar on Wednesday met with Thailand’s Foreign Minister Maris Sangiampongsa on the sidelines of high-level events during Pakistan’s Presidency of the UN Security Council.
The two leaders expressed satisfaction at the positive momentum in bilateral ties, particularly in cultural and parliamentary exchanges, people-to-people contacts, trade, and tourism, a DPM’s Office news release said.
They agreed to broaden cooperation in a number of areas including food security, fisheries, defense, and regional connectivity.
FM Maris congratulated Pakistan on its UNSC Presidency, and appreciated its contributions to the Council’s work.
If you saw this white and grayish blob sitting on a leaf, what would you think it was?
If your first thought was “bird poop,” you’re actually not too far off. But if you look a little more closely, you might start to notice the “poop” looking almost … alive.
That’s because it’s actually a caterpillar — a bird poop caterpillar. Yes, that’s the actual name most people use to refer to eastern giant swallowtails when they’re in their larval phase.
Bird poop caterpillars’ resemblance to their namesake isn’t coincidental — it’s their goal to look as unappetizing as possible. Their coloring is an adaptation designed to make them fly under predators’ radars.
A few months ago, Tala Alleyne started noticing what looked like bird droppings on her backyard lemon plant. She didn’t understand why her local birds seemed to be obsessed with using that specific plant as their bathroom.
But as a butterfly and moth expert, Alleyne quickly pieced together that her plant had become home to a group of bird poop caterpillars. When eastern giant swallowtails are in their larval phase, their favorite things to eat are citrus leaves.
Over the next few weeks, Alleyne watched as the caterpillars continued munching away at her leaves and getting bigger and bigger every day.
“[As] they continue to grow, they’ll look less like a slimy piece of dud and even more like a dried up and even bigger piece of dud,” Alleyne said on Instagram.
Alleyne also got to observe the caterpillars’ second line of defense against predators. When the caterpillars feel threatened, they release a red, forked appendage that resembles a snake’s tongue called an osmeterium, designed to scare away whoever’s attacking them.
When the caterpillars started forming chrysalises, Alleyne knew they were almost ready to turn into their final forms. Alleyne watched in awe as a beautiful butterfly emerged from her case and spread her multicolor wings.
As adults, eastern giant swallowtails are between 5 and 6 inches long and are actually the largest butterflies in North America. It’s hard to believe that such a gorgeous butterfly could have come from such a humble caterpillar. But eastern giant swallowtails are a great reminder to never judge an insect by their larval phase.
Next time you see what looks like bird droppings on a citrus leaf, look a little closer. You might end up finding a butterfly in the making.
Tomorrow morning (24 July), the Security Council will convene for a briefing under the agenda item “Cooperation between the United Nations and regional and subregional organizations”, focusing on the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC). Mohammad Ishaq Dar, Pakistan’s Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Foreign Affairs, is expected to chair the meeting, which is one of the signature events of Pakistan’s July Council presidency. Briefings are expected from Assistant Secretary-General for the Middle East, Asia and the Pacific in the Departments of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs and Peace Operations (DPPA-DPO) Mohamed Khaled Khiari and OIC Assistant Secretary-General for Political Affairs Yousef bin Mohammed Al-Dubaie.
A presidential statement on UN-OIC cooperation initiated by Pakistan is expected to be adopted during the meeting.
Briefing
The OIC is an intergovernmental organisation established in 1969, which comprises 57 members from across the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas, including Council members Algeria, Guyana, Pakistan, Sierra Leone, and Somalia. The organisation serves as a platform for cooperation on political, economic, cultural, and social issues affecting countries with significant Muslim populations. (For background and more information, see the brief on UN-OIC cooperation in our July 2025 Monthly Forecast.)
Pakistan has circulated a concept note ahead of the meeting, outlining its key objectives. These are: to take stock of ongoing collaboration between the UN and the OIC; to explore avenues for strengthening cooperation in areas such as preventive diplomacy, dispute resolution, counter-terrorism, peacekeeping, and peacebuilding; and to promote dialogue as a means of fostering mutual respect and advancing shared goals for peace and security.
The concept note poses three questions to help guide the discussion at tomorrow’s meeting:
Negotiations on the Presidential Statement
The negotiations on the draft presidential statement appear to have been arduous. Pakistan circulated the initial draft of the text on 1 July and convened the only round of negotiations on 7 July. Following four subsequent revisions and two silence breaks, a fifth revised draft was placed under silence procedure last night (22 July) until noon today (23 July). Silence was not broken, and the statement is expected to be adopted tomorrow.
The agreed text of the draft presidential statement notes the interest of utilising the existing and potential capabilities of the OIC, including through encouraging its member countries to resolve differences peacefully through dialogue, reconciliation, consultation, negotiation, good offices, mediation, and judicial settlement of disputes. Among other issues, it recognises the importance of OIC interaction with the Peacebuilding Commission (PBC) in support of nationally owned peacebuilding efforts and commends OIC member states for their commitment to international peacekeeping and peacebuilding, including through the contribution of troops to UN peacekeeping operations.
It seems that Pakistan sought to use the presidential statement to enhance institutional cooperation between the UN and the OIC and to elevate this partnership to a level comparable to the UN’s engagement with other regional and sub-regional organisations, such as the African Union (AU). The initial draft built on the first presidential statement on UN-OIC cooperation, adopted on 28 October 2013, and drew on language from different Security Council products. These included texts relating to the UN’s cooperation with the AU, as well as presidential statements recognising the critical role of regional and sub-regional organisations in the prevention and resolution of conflict. However, unlike the 2013 presidential statement on UN-OIC cooperation, the draft text did not include any references to specific countries or regions, apparently due to Pakistan’s intention to avoid contentious issues and maintain a focus on institutional cooperation.
Council members are generally supportive of strengthening cooperation between the UN and regional and sub-regional organisations and of Pakistan’s efforts to strengthen the relationship with the OIC. However, there are underlying political differences among Council members on specific contexts affecting OIC members. These include diverging positions on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the OIC’s political backing for the Turkish Cypriot community. Regarding the latter issue, the European Union (EU) strongly supports the sovereignty, territorial integrity, and independence of the Republic of Cyprus and opposes recognition or assistance to what it considers a “secessionist entity”. (For more information on Council dynamics on the issue, see the brief on UN-OIC cooperation in our July 2025 Monthly Forecast.)
During the negotiations, some members apparently suggested that certain formulations in the initial draft text may have overstated the existing relationship between the UN and the OIC and advocated for language that in their view more accurately reflects the current scope and depth of engagement. Concerns were also raised about the inclusion of references drawn from other contexts, such as on the UN-AU cooperation, which some felt were not entirely applicable to the UN-OIC framework. In this regard, some members emphasised that the level of institutional development, operational engagement, and the nature of cooperation can vary significantly among regional and sub-regional organisations and should be acknowledged accordingly.
It appears that Pakistan addressed these reservations in the final version of the draft statement, allowing it to pass the silence procedure. The revised draft removed several divisive elements from the initial draft, including language emphasising that UN-OIC cooperation should evolve into a systematic, operational, and strategic partnership rooted in shared values. It also omitted text acknowledging the value of enhanced cooperation in areas such as peace and security, conflict prevention and mediation, humanitarian assistance, intercultural dialogue, and counter-terrorism. The initial draft had also recognised that the OIC is well positioned to understand the root causes of armed conflicts, based on its knowledge of relevant countries, and suggested that this could enhance its contributions to conflict prevention and resolution. This language apparently went through a few iterations but was ultimately removed from the final version of the draft presidential statement.
References were also toned down in some other instances. For instance, language recognising the importance of strengthening cooperation with the OIC was changed in the agreed draft of the presidential statement to recognising “the relevance of enhancing cooperation”. The initial draft also had a reference noting that the UN and OIC share common objectives in promoting and facilitating the resolution of conflicts, especially those affecting OIC member states. However, this reference was changed in the final draft of the presidential statement to note that the UN and regional and sub-regional organisations, including the OIC, “work in promoting and facilitating the resolution of conflicts”.
Another issue that required discussion during the negotiations related to reporting and follow-up provisions proposed by Pakistan. The initial draft text committed the Council to holding an annual briefing regarding its cooperation with the OIC. It also invited the UN Secretariat and the OIC to identify options to support the strengthening of relations between the two organisations, including through the joint formulation of a framework for enhanced partnership on peace and security. However, several Council members—including France, Greece, Slovenia, the UK, and the US—expressed reservations about the proposed language, which they apparently viewed as prescriptive. While at least one member suggested deleting this language, some advocated for a more flexible approach, proposing that briefings be held as necessary. Taking these concerns into account, the final version of the agreed presidential statement expresses the Council’s intention to hold regular briefings on UN-OIC cooperation, as appropriate. The language relating to identifying options for strengthening UN-OIC relations and jointly developing a framework for cooperation was also removed at the request of some members.
One of the key issues raised by some members, particularly Greece, was the need to reflect in the draft text that the work undertaken by the OIC, and its cooperation and coordination with the UN, should be consistent with the UN Charter and relevant Security Council resolutions. This position apparently constituted a red line for Greece and was supported by several other members, including Denmark, France, Panama, and the UK. It appears that Greece proposed including language explicitly stating that OIC resolutions should be fully aligned with Security Council resolutions; however, this suggestion was not taken on board by Pakistan. As a compromise, Greece put forward alternative language, incorporated into the agreed draft of the presidential statement, stressing that efforts undertaken by the OIC, in coordination with the UN across various thematic areas, should be consistent with the principles of the UN Charter and relevant Council resolutions.
Language relating to cooperation on technical assistance also appears to have required further deliberation. It seems that the initial draft text urged the UN Secretariat to provide support for technical assistance and capacity-building. However, some Council members—such as France, Greece, and the US–apparently opposed the inclusion of this language, with some citing concerns about potential budgetary implications. Pakistan revised the language to state that such cooperation would take place within existing resources, but this formulation was also not acceptable to some members. Ultimately, reference to technical assistance and capacity-building was removed from the final draft of the presidential statement.
BYLINE: Erin Woodward
This story was originally published by SLAC National Acceleratory Laboratory.
Newswise — It’s notoriously difficult to take the temperature of really hot things. Whether it’s the roiling plasma in our Sun, the extreme conditions at the core of planets or the crushing forces at play inside a fusion reactor, what scientists call “warm dense matter” can reach hundreds of thousands of degrees kelvin.
Knowing precisely how hot these materials are is crucial for researchers to fully understand such complex systems, but taking these measurements has been, until now, virtually impossible.
“We have good techniques for measuring density and pressure of these systems, but not temperature,” said Bob Nagler, staff scientist at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. “In these studies, the temperatures are always estimates with huge error bars, which really holds up our theoretical models. It’s been a decades-long problem.”
Now, for the first time, a team of researchers report in the journal Nature that they have directly measured the temperature of atoms in warm dense matter. While other methods rely on complex and hard-to-validate models, this new method directly measures the speed of atoms, and therefore the temperature of the system. Already, their innovative method is changing our understanding of the world: In an experimental debut, the team superheated solid gold far beyond the theoretical limit, unexpectedly overturning four decades of established theory.
Nagler and researchers at SLAC’s Matter in Extreme Conditions (MEC) instrument co-led this study with Tom White, associate professor of physics at University of Nevada, Reno. The group includes researchers from Queen’s University Belfast, the European XFEL (X-ray Free-Electron Laser), Columbia University, Princeton University, University of Oxford, University of California, Merced, and the University of Warwick, Coventry.
For nearly a decade, this team has worked to develop a method that circumvents the usual challenges of measuring extreme temperatures – specifically, the brief duration of the conditions that create those temperatures in the lab and the difficulty of calibrating how these complex systems affect other materials.
“Finally, we’ve directly and unambiguously taken a direct measurement, demonstrating a method that can be applied throughout the field,” White said.
At SLAC’s MEC instrument, the team used a laser to superheat a sample of gold. As heat flashed through the nanometer-thin sample, its atoms began to vibrate at a speed directly related to their rising temperature. The team then sent a pulse of ultrabright X-rays from the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) through the superheated sample. As they scattered off the vibrating atoms, the X-rays’ frequency shifted slightly, revealing the atoms’ speed and thus their temperature.
“The novel temperature measurement technique developed in this study demonstrates that LCLS is at the frontier of laser-heated matter research,” said Siegfried Glenzer, director of the High Energy Density Science division at SLAC and co-author on the paper. “LCLS, paired with these innovative techniques, play an important role in advancing high energy density science and transformative applications like inertial fusion.”
The team was thrilled to have successfully demonstrated this technique – and as they took a deeper look at the data, they discovered something even more exciting.
“We were surprised to find a much higher temperature in these superheated solids than we initially expected, which disproves a long-standing theory from the 1980s,” White said. “This wasn’t our original goal, but that’s what science is about – discovering new things you didn’t know existed.”
Every material has specific melting and boiling points, marking the transition from solid to liquid and liquid to gas, respectively. However, there are exceptions. For instance, when water is heated rapidly in very smooth containers – such as a glass of water in a microwave – it can become “superheated,” reaching temperatures above 212 degrees Fahrenheit (100 degrees Celsius) without actually boiling. This occurs because there are no rough surfaces or impurities to trigger bubble formation.
But this trick of nature comes with an increased risk: The further a system strays from its normal melting and boiling points, the more vulnerable it is to what scientists call a catastrophe – a sudden onset of melting or boiling triggered by slight environmental change. For example, water that has been superheated in a microwave will boil explosively when disturbed, potentially causing serious burns.
While some experiments have shown it is possible to bypass these intermediary limits by rapidly heating materials, “the entropy catastrophe was still viewed as the ultimate boundary,” White explained.
In their recent study, the team discovered that the gold had been superheated to an astonishing 19,000 kelvins (33,740 degrees Fahrenheit) – more than 14 times its melting point and well beyond the proposed entropy catastrophe limit – all while maintaining its solid crystalline structure.
“It’s important to clarify that we did not violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics,” White said with a chuckle. “What we demonstrated is that these catastrophes can be avoided if materials are heated extremely quickly – in our case, within trillionths of a second.”
The researchers believe that the rapid heating prevented the gold from expanding, enabling it to retain its solid state. The findings suggest that there may not be an upper limit for superheated materials, if heated quickly enough.
Nagler noted that researchers who study warm dense matter have likely been surpassing the entropy catastrophe limit for years without realizing it, due to the absence of a reliable method for directly measuring temperature.
“If our first experiment using this technique led to a major challenge to established science, I can’t wait to see what other discoveries lie ahead,” Nagler said.
As just one example, White and Nagler’s teams used this method again this summer to study the temperature of materials that have been shock-compressed to replicate the conditions deep inside planets.
Nagler is also eager to apply the new technique – which can pinpoint atom temperatures from 1,000 to 500,000 kelvins – to ongoing inertial fusion energy research at SLAC. “When a fusion fuel target implodes in a fusion reactor, the targets are in a warm dense state,” Nagler explained. “To design useful targets, we need to know at what temperatures they will undergo important state changes. Now, we finally have a way to make those measurements.”
This work was funded in part by the DOE National Nuclear Security Administration and Office of Science Fusion Energy Sciences. LCLS is a DOE Office of Science user facilities.
About SLAC
SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory explores how the universe works at the biggest, smallest and fastest scales and invents powerful tools used by researchers around the globe. As world leaders in ultrafast science and bold explorers of the physics of the universe, we forge new ground in understanding our origins and building a healthier and more sustainable future. Our discovery and innovation help develop new materials and chemical processes and open unprecedented views of the cosmos and life’s most delicate machinery. Building on more than 60 years of visionary research, we help shape the future by advancing areas such as quantum technology, scientific computing and the development of next-generation accelerators.
SLAC is operated by Stanford University for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science. The Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time.
The ZOMBIES 4: Dawn of the Vampires soundtrack takes a bite out of the Billboard charts, as the set debuts at No. 1 on the Kid Albums chart (dated July 26). It also bows at No. 3 on the Soundtracks chart, No. 16 on Independent Albums and at No. 90 on the overall Billboard 200.
ZOMBIES 4 made its Disney Channel debut on July 10 and reached the Disney+ streaming service on July 11. That same day, the ZOMBIES 4 soundtrack was released via streaming services and for purchase as a digital download album. (A physical release for the album on CD and/or vinyl has not been announced.)
In the tracking week ending July 17, the ZOMBIES 4 album earned nearly 12,500 equivalent album units in the United States, according to Luminate, with streaming activity accounting for most of the activity. The album tallied 15.17 million on-demand official streams for its songs – making it the third-most-streamed soundtrack of the week (behind KPop Demon Hunters and F1: The Album).
ZOMBIES 4 carries on the impressive track record of Disney’s Zombies film franchise on Billboard’s album charts. The first ZOMBIES soundtrack, released in 2018, reached No. 5 on Soundtracks, No. 1 (for 10 weeks) on Kid Albums and No. 55 on the Billboard 200.
ZOMBIES 2, from 2020, hit No. 2 on Soundtracks, No. 2 on Kid Albums and No. 44 on the Billboard 200. ZOMBIES 3 (2022) peaked at No. 3 on Soundtracks, No. 1 (for two weeks) on Kid Albums and No. 79 on the Billboard 200.
As part of recent efforts to assess the economic consequences of a second Trump administration (Gensler et al. 2025), Olarreaga and Santander (2025) ask: who pays for the US tariffs? A key question in the context of a trade war is whether the burden of tariffs falls on foreign exporters or domestic importers.
This question brings us back to the broader concept of the incidence of cost shocks in international trade. Such shocks can affect exporters’ production costs, trade costs, or exchange rates. A natural concern for policymakers is how much of these foreign shocks are passed through to import prices – in other words, what their incidence is on domestic importers.
In a recent paper (Fontaine et al. 2023), we examine the incidence of cost shocks in international trade using a firm-to-firm trade model with search frictions.
International trade is supported by a network of firm-to-firm relationships. Leveraging new data on these networks, trade economists have developed models that incorporate such relationships and have proven useful in understanding the vulnerability and resilience of trade flows. However, in many of these models, firms’ pricing strategies are so stylised that they cannot be used to study the incidence of cost shocks. A recent exception is the work by Alviarez et al. (2023), which examines price negotiations between a seller and a buyer with differing market power. In their framework, trade relationships are taken as given, and the pass-through of shocks depends on the relative bargaining power of the two parties. We take a different approach, assuming search frictions. Buyers meet new suppliers infrequently which provides a reduced-form way to capture the various obstacles that complicate the formation of trade relationships and has implications for prices and trade flows.
In our model, each buyer knows only a limited number of trading partners. The limited strength of competition within these restricted pools has consequences for the price they are offered. Over time, however, buyers encounter new potential suppliers. Meeting a new supplier creates an opportunity to switch if the newcomer is more competitive than the current supplier, or to push prices downward if the new supplier forces the buyer’s existing supplier to reduce its markup.
The model allows us to replicate several trade patterns observed in international trade networks. First, this approach implies significant heterogeneity in prices and markups across trade relationships. The price charged by a supplier depends on the buyer’s outside options, which varies with the buyer’s experience in its search process. A natural corollary is that markups vary within a supplier, across its downstream partners. Such variation in prices across firm-to-firm relationships is consistent with evidence presented in our earlier work (Fontaine et al. 2020).
Second, prices tend to decline within trade relationships, over time. The reason is straightforward: as the buyer continues to meet new potential suppliers, its outside options expand, putting downward pressure on the current supplier’s price. This pattern is consistent with evidence recovered from our data, as well as evidence in other studies (Heise 2024, Monarch and Schmidt-Eisenlohr 2023).
Armed with this rich framework, we can explore how search frictions shape the incidence of cost shocks. As a thought experiment, we consider a scenario in which costs rise in a particular country. All foreign suppliers from that country are affected by the shock, and we examine how this impacts buyers who were initially matched with these suppliers.
The model shows that the shock can impose very different burdens on different buyers. Some buyers are not affected – their supplier absorbs the shock as they can’t raise price due to competition pressures exerted by the buyer’s alternative potential suppliers. In other cases, the supplier can’t absorb the shock, and the buyer needs to switch to its second-best supplier and pay a higher price. Last, the supplier’s direct competitor within the buyer’s network is also affected by the shock, enabling the supplier to raise its price. Moreover, because buyers continue to meet potential suppliers after the shock, the prevalence of these situations evolves over time.
Ultimately, the incidence on buyers is an empirical question and depends on the size of the shock, the level of search frictions, and the relative competitiveness of suppliers. We use our model, along with detailed data on the exports of French firms to their EU buyers, to estimate search frictions across sectors and markets. We then simulate the incidence on EU buyers of a 10% cost shock affecting French suppliers.
One month after the shock, we find an average 3.6% increase in the import price paid by EU buyers who were matched with a French supplier at the time of the shock, corresponding to an incidence of 36% borne by the buyer. However, this average conceals significant heterogeneity across different dimensions.
In the average market, 25% of buyers experience an incidence of 100%, while 40% are left unaffected by the shock. More than 25% of buyers switch to another supplier, incurring an average 30% price increase. We further show that the incidence varies across markets with different levels of friction: in markets in which French suppliers benefit from relatively higher matching rates, buyers suffer a larger price increase. In our estimates, the average incidence is twice as large in markets with low versus high frictions. Finally, the total incidence on buyers decreases over time, as does the dispersion of incidence across markets. This convergence is driven by the gradual reconfiguration of buyers’ sourcing networks: as search frictions diminish, firms initially reliant on French suppliers broaden their options and increasingly switch to non-French alternatives.
In response to shocks to foreign suppliers, governments are often willing to support domestic firms relying on imported inputs.
The findings of our study suggest that targeting programmes to firms simply based on their interactions with affected suppliers might not be efficient. Some buyers will not suffer any cost increase, while others will bear the full burden. One option would be to target segments (products x destinations) where a higher incidence on buyers is expected – such as those facing greater search frictions. Another option is to provide buyers with assistance in diversifying away from their supplier ex post. Buyers who face a higher burden would be more likely to participate in these programmes, while those who do not would opt out.
Alviarez, V I, M Fioretti, A K Kikkawa and M Morlacco (2023), “Two sided market power in firm to firm trade”, NBER Working Paper No. 31253.
Fontaine, F, J Martin and I Mejean (2023), “Frictions and Adjustments in Firm‑to‑Firm Trade”, CEPR Discussion Paper No. 18110.
Gensler, G, S Johnson, U Panizza and B Weder di Mauro (2025), “The economic consequences of the second Trump administration: A preliminary assessment”, VoxEU.org, 18 June.
Heise, S (2024), “Firm to Firm relationships and the pass through of shocks: Theory and evidence”, The Review of Economics and Statistics, Advance online publication.
Olarreaga, M and S Santander (2025), “Who pays for US tariffs?”, in G Gensler, S Johnson, U Panizza and B Weder di Mauro (eds), The economic consequences of the second Trump administration: A preliminary assessment, CEPR press.
Monarch, R and T Schmidt‑Eisenlohr (2023), “Longevity and the value of trade relationships”, Journal of International Economics 145: 103842.
In 2021, Dubai-based entrepreneur Sarah Hamouda gave into her pregnancy cravings and, without knowing it, created a viral sensation.
When Dubai-based entrepreneur Sarah Hamouda was grappling with pregnancy cravings in 2021, she never imagined that she would also give birth to one of the most remarkable Emirati food-and-drink success stories in history. Dubai chocolate consists of a brick-like bar roughly the same thickness as a deck of cards, loaded with pistachio cream, tahini paste and crunchy knafeh (shredded filo pastry). The original was made by Hamouda’s Fix Dessert Chocolatier. At a relatively hefty AED68 (€16), not everyone could afford it, so cheaper alternatives to the unpatented indulgence began to proliferate, creating an entire Dubai-chocolate ecosystem.
Since then, makers from London-based chocolatiers Maison Samadi to Swiss heavyweight Lindt and German supermarket chain Lidl have come up with versions of Hamouda’s best-selling creation. Chocoart uae has launched knafeh pistachio chocolate and Chocovana Chocolaterie has taken batch orders for their pistachio-stuffed bars. Noon Minutes – Dubai’s express delivery service – has collaborated with luxury brand Vocca to make its own. Dubai Duty Free says that it sold $22m (€19m) worth of various brands of Dubai chocolate in the first quarter of 2025, equivalent to 1.2 million bars. The sweet that began as an experiment in Hamouda’s home hadn’t just gone viral – it had become ubiquitous.
What do you do when a product takes on a life of its own? Hamouda’s business partner and husband, Yezen Alani, admits feeling frustrated by copycat bars. Hamouda is more sanguine. “It’s incredibly flattering,” she tells Monocle. “It’s a testament to how influential Dubai’s appetite for creativity and innovation has become. It doesn’t annoy me. In fact, it makes me proud to have played a part in defining what Dubai chocolate means.”
Imitation bars often have little of the gooey indulgence of Fix’s original creation, mainly because these cheaper, mass-produced versions are designed to have a longer shelf life. Yet all of this activity has proved to be an inspiration for Fix.
“We’re exploring collaborations, expanding our flavours and looking into new ways in which people can experience us,” says Hamouda, hinting at plans for international expansion. She hasn’t forgotten where those first bars came from. “I think that people genuinely felt the creativity, care and authenticity behind it,” she says. “It wasn’t just another chocolate bar. Fix has become about much more than just chocolate.”
Ben Nowack is obsessed with energy. The 29-year-old Cape Cod-born has explored ideas such as damming the oceans to harness the tides, flattening mountains with gravity batteries and even latching onto the moon with a vast cable. In high school, he says, he built a kind of fusion reactor as a science project.
One of his ideas is now poised to take flight. The CEO of Los Angeles-based start-up Reflect Orbital plans to launch thousands of satellites into space, equipped with mirrors that can reflect sunlight to Earth. By 2030 the company expects to have enough satellites in orbit to provide solar farms with 200 watts of energy per square metre – equivalent to the midday sun on a clear day – during the evening hours of peak consumer demand. It also hopes to sell illumination to anyone who fancies an extra hit of sunlight, from concert and festival promoters to remote construction sites. “The range of applications for our service encompasses almost anything that an individual can do during daylight hours,” says Nowack.
The premise has its sceptics – Youtube astrophysicists relish taking pot shots at Reflect Orbital – but it has also attracted serious interest. The company recently landed $6.5m (€5.65m) in Series A funding, including investment from Silicon Valley heavy-hitters Sequoia Capital, and had an audience with Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the crown prince of Dubai, about the project.
There is an emerging global interest in what might become one of the US West Coast’s signature exports within this decade: bold, upstart energy businesses. Big Tech’s embrace of power-hungry artificial intelligence and cloud computing has generated voracious demand for electricity. Now there’s a gold-rush atmosphere among start-ups seeking to innovate clean energy sources, from mini-nuclear reactors to fusion power.
But Reflect Orbital is looking for ways to better harness humanity’s oldest source of energy. When Monocle visits the company’s lab in Hawthorne, a small city in Los Angeles County that’s home to a slew of aerospace start-ups, Nowack and his CTO, Tristan Semmelhack, are eager to show off their progress since founding the business in 2021. (First, however, your correspondent must show proof of US citizenship and agree not to photograph certain aspects of the satellite-making process in order to comply with laws around technology with national-security implications.)
As early as next spring, the company will launch a 100kg satellite packed into a box the size of a microwave. In space, the satellite will unfurl four triangular panels creating an 18-by-18-metre surface mounted to booms, attached like sails on a ship’s mast and position itself in orbit along the line separating daytime from night-time on Earth. Nowack and Semmelhack say that the system is reactive, allowing for precision angle changes within seconds as the Earth rotates. While this first satellite can only generate about four minutes of daylight over a 5km radius, the founders say that a ring of 18 satellites trained on the same location could illuminate one spot for an hour.
The technology sounds like sci-fi but it has precedents. In 1993, Russian satellite Znamya cast a 5km-wide beam the strength of a full moon onto a narrow stretch of Europe for a few hours. In April 2024, Nasa launched the ACS3, a spacecraft that successfully unfurled a solar sail, which reflected sunlight to generate propulsion.
The key difference between Reflect Orbital and its space-agency predecessors is that the team wants to turn a profit. The company’s 22-person crew, expected to grow fast this year ahead of the first launch, builds its own components and does much of the fabrication itself on a lean budget. The prototyping workshop is a tinkerer’s paradise of Milwaukee tools, Fiskars rotary blades and Scotch tape, and a sample reflecting sail is laid out in a brand-new “clean room”. Semmelhack, a laid-back New Yorker climber with shaggy blond hair and wearing a flannel shirt, brings out a palm-sized scrap of the ultra-thin sail material and lets it float in the air like a plastic bag.
Reflect Orbital’s do-it-yourself spirit is also evident in its car park, where the team shows off a homemade, 13-metre-long oven in which carbon fibres can be baked into booms. These coil like a tape measure, keep the reflective sail taut and weigh almost nothing.
Building the oven cost a mere $40,000 (€34,000) and took the team a month. “If we were Nasa, this would be a million-dollar device – and the project wouldn’t make any money,” says Semmelhack. “We don’t have a huge amount of capital or time, so we have to build stuff quickly and cheaply that works well enough for our purposes.”
One block away is SpaceX’s original headquarters and the tip of its first successfully recovered Falcon 9 booster can be seen peeking out from among the warehouses. Elon Musk moved SpaceX from California to Texas in 2024 but talent remains clustered in Hawthorne. “It’s very easy to get things built with machinists around every corner,” says Nowack. “If you need the perfect laser weld, the guy who did it for the SpaceX and Nasa missions is here.”
Nowack interned at the pioneering commercial space company and its monument, put on permanent display by Musk in 2016, is a visible reminder that proof of concept is vital in this industry if you want to be taken seriously. The clock is ticking on Reflect Orbital’s deadline to load up a rocket and deploy its first sail in the spring of 2026. Yet the commercial space industry has become astoundingly cheap by satellite-launching standards – just $6,500 (€5,500) per kilogramme, or eight times cheaper than it was on Nasa’s now-retired space shuttles – and this is presenting an opportunity for space start-ups such as Reflect Orbital that want to get their projects off the ground.
In order to deploy 100 satellites per rocket launch and reap what it believes could be billions of dollars in revenue, the company is banking on the cost of joining such launches continuing to decline. It is currently fine-tuning its design in a bid to get its satellite-production costs down from $2m (€1.7m) to less than $100,000 (€85,000) per unit.
Where that revenue will come from is still uncertain. But Reflect Orbital has its theories: municipalities seeking to save on street lighting, those engaged in search-and-rescue operations, construction firms operating in remote areas that want to extend the working day – and even Arctic villages hoping to make winters more bearable (bringing light to Russia’s Far North was one of Znamya’s goals).
Objections to the technology aren’t hard to imagine, not least the light pollution and its potential to disrupt the rhythms of flora and fauna. Never mind the complaints from neighbours who don’t want dawn and dusk extended. The company has had preliminary conversations with environmental groups concerned with the matter but the founders say that the light will be dispersed rather than a harsh spotlight and the technology will allow them to quickly point the satellites elsewhere. “Give us four minutes,” says Semmelhack. “If everyone hates it, we can turn it off.”
That might sound like a shaky business plan but there are more remote deployments of Reflect Orbital’s technology that make sense. Semmelhack imagines lighting up a pasture at the behest of a rancher or a ceremony for a sheikh. “We have the benefit of [working across] large areas of land that are controlled by very few people.”
Reflect Orbital started taking applications for its service last autumn and, according to the company, was flooded with 164,000 requests from 157 countries. The company is planning a 10-location “world tour” once the first satellites are aloft, imagining the kind of mass gatherings that a solar eclipse can attract. Sunlight on demand is a large-scale parlour trick that will generate hype. But what drives Reflect Orbital’s mission is the energy business and making the most out of solar panels, says its chief strategy officer, Ally Stone. “It’s a way to unlock value from an already financed, already operating solar asset.”
Reflect Orbital is one of many West Coast enterprises exploring new power-generation schemes as Big Tech pledges to stay true to its commitments to net-zero emissions. For years, data centres have been popping up along the hydropower-rich Columbia River Basin. But the current grid network is insufficient, says Julia DeWahl, a Los Angeles-based angel investor and co-founder of microreactor start-up Antares. “Forecasted energy demand is a step-function increase in growth largely driven by AI,” she says.
Every AI-powered Google search uses 10 times the energy of a traditional search. In response, its parent company Alphabet, alongside Amazon and Meta, have pledged to support efforts to triple nuclear-power production by 2050. Microsoft is resurrecting Three Mile Island, a Pennsylvania nuclear plant infamous for a 1979 meltdown. Meanwhile, there are entrepreneurs across North America working on small scalable nuclear reactors, such as the Bill Gates-backed Terrapower, which plans to be running in Wyoming by 2030. Elsewhere, in the Seattle area, start-up Helion is working on the world’s first fusion-power plant.
“After so many years of software start-ups, there’s a boom around building real things,” says DeWahl. The location of many of these companies is no accident. “There has always been so much innovation on the West Coast.”
Not every idea taken from a sci-fi novel will work but there’s smart money betting that Reflect Orbital can pull it off – with the potential for a considerable return on investment too. The founders expect public support for their solar spotlight, even if that might partly be tech-bro swagger. “If you zoom out and look at this with a bit of perspective,” says Semmelhack, “this is just so cool.”
Jaime Daez didn’t have much of a business plan when he started selling books: he just wanted to buy copies of Spanish architecture magazine El Croquis (and, if possible, at a discount). Daez had started reading the publication as a student at the University of Navarra in Pamplona; after returning home to the Philippines in 1994 he was keen to keep collecting issues. “Amazon was nonexistent back then,” he says. “One day I decided to send the publishers of El Croquis a fax, presenting myself as a possible distributor,” he says. To his surprise, the magazine’s team agreed to give him 60 per cent off the retail price if he ordered 100 copies. Two sheets of fax paper later, Daez was a fledgling magazine and book distributor.
Sitting in his office inside the Fully Booked shop in Manila’s Bonifacio Global City (BGC) neighbourhood, Daez tells Monocle that he started off more like a door-to-door salesman than a conventional distributor. “I would flick through the Yellow Pages, looking for architecture firms and interior-design agencies to sell to,” he says. “The bigger the font, the better, because that meant they probably had a bigger budget for buying books.” His approach was simple. He would call a company and then visit its offices in person, with the hefty copies of El Croquis in tow.
Four months into his improvised career, Daez secured an appointment with a renowned Filipino architecture firm. He arrived at its building only to discover that there was a power cut – a frequent occurrence in the country in the 1990s. The lifts were out of action and the firm’s office was all the way up on the 19th floor. So Daez trudged up the stairs, carrying more than 20kg of titles; half an hour later he was still only on the 10th floor. Huffing and puffing, he suddenly realised that, because of the blackout, the architecture firm’s office was probably closed. “I tucked the box of magazines in a corner and ran up to the 19th floor,” he says. “There was no one up there.”. For Daez, this moment was a turning point. “The incident made me ask myself, ‘Am I willing to put up with all of this?’” Despite the frustrating experience, he realised that he was.
Daez’s next step was to use half of his mother’s 30 sq m sweetshop to sell an expanded range of titles focusing on tropical, Asian and Mediterranean architecture. Sales were encouraging. Eventually he took over the entire shop, widening its selection to include business and children’s books, as well as fiction. In 1997, Daez opened his first official bookshop in Glorietta, a shopping centre in the Makati precinct (Fully Booked now occupies a bigger site in the same complex). This was followed by a series of openings across Manila.
Despite his swift success, that moment of clarity in the stuffy staircase as a 24-year-old continued to play an outsized role in Daez’s career. It steeled him as the Philippines’ publishing industry faced a succession of difficult challenges, from the 1997 Asian financial crisis to the rise of e-books. “Within the span of about three years in the late 2000s, the use of e-books increased by almost 10 times,” he says. “I remember thinking, ‘I might be out of business soon.’”
Despite the uncertainty, Daez went on to take his biggest business gamble: securing a 15-year land lease to build a four-storey bookshop in the then-underdeveloped BGC precinct. “The head of [shopping-centre chain] Ayala Malls asked me, ‘Jaime, are you sure? Don’t you want to be conservative and focus on two floors first?’” But Daez believed that having his own land parcel would anchor the business in stormy times; he also suspected that BGC would soon become the new city centre. So he went all in. His instincts proved correct: today, BGC is one of the Philippines’ leading central business and lifestyle districts, the port of call for all of the biggest brands. Here, Fully Booked BGC stands as a beacon for book lovers. It’s an attractive flagship shop with plenty of natural light, a big acrylic painting by US artist Mike Stilkey that uses discarded books as its canvas and whimsical paper sculptures of marine animals that hang from the ceiling.
By 2020, Fully Booked had 31 thriving bookshops across the city but lacked a strong online presence. This became a big problem when the coronavirus pandemic forced all of Fully Booked’s shops – which the authorities deemed as non-essential businesses – to close for two months. No one was permitted to enter. “Our online sales were only 1.5 per cent of our total revenue at the time,” says Daez. “It was a matter of survival. I told my managers to bring home their laptops and encode every single book for our online shop.” Despite the lockdown, his team upped its productivity and added 10,000 titles to the business’s website within four months.
This agile response to the crisis made all the difference and cemented Fully Booked’s position as the Philippines’ go-to bookshop chain. Its biggest competitor, National Book Store, seems to have shifted its focus towards textbooks and office supplies. “National Book Store used to be a temple of the written word,” says Ric Gindap, co-founder of rising Manila-based magazine shop Spruce Gallery. “But stepping inside today, you feel like you’re preparing for a third-grade science fair, rather than feeding your literary soul.” By contrast, Fully Booked has continued to diversify its selection of fiction titles, art books, graphic novels and more.
The company’s growth looks good on paper too. Since the pandemic, Fully Booked’s online business has grown by 2,400 per cent and 17 new shops were added during the same period. Its e-commerce operation has been such a success that it has caught the eye of US publishing giant Penguin Random House. “Its executive vice-president told me that we were its case study in Asia because no one had pivoted better and more quickly than we had,” says Daez.
The biggest endorsement came when Japanese bookshop Kinokuniya chose to team up with Fully Booked for its expansion into the Philippines in 2022. Together they opened a co-branded shop in the Mitsukoshi BGC shopping mall, with a selection of 20,000 Japanese books. The move has enabled Daez to tap into the growth of manga (and Japanese pop culture in general) in the Philippines. “Manga exploded during the coronavirus years and Japan is unsurprisingly the top destination visited by Filipinos,” he says. It’s a partnership that is blooming. In October, Daez will be opening another co-branded shop with Tokyo matcha café Wasachi in the upscale Rockwell neighbourhood.
Fully Booked has bucked the trend of bookshop closures because Daez has always found a way to evolve with the times. While books are the foundation of the business, Daez isn’t afraid to expand its offering. He recently set aside a section for “blind boxes” – sealed packages that each contain a randomly chosen product from a wider series, such as a key-ring doll. These might seem like a departure from books but Daez thinks of this hugely popular trend as a crossover. “Many of these blind-box characters originated from books,” he says. “People come in with the intention of buying one of these boxes but might also pick up a book along the way. We’re not selling something random, like Christmas lights.”
Daez is already plotting his next move: creating a suite of Fully Booked-branded merchandise. To him, the gold standard is New York bookshop The Strand, whose own branded wares are almost as well loved as the books on display. “Its shop sells so many variations of its own tote bags, T-shirts, socks and more,” says Daez.
It has been almost 30 years since that fateful fax but Daez’s zeal for what he does remains undiminished. “I put in more time working now than when I started the business,” he says. While his strategies continue to shift according to the market, there’s one constant: his love of books. “I’m a bit of a romantic when it comes to my business,” he says. “I believe that if you have passion for what you do, it can be felt in your stores.”
The CV
1994: Returns to Manila from Pamplona, Spain
1996: Starts distributing copies of El Croquis
1997: Opens his first full-fledged bookshop in Glorietta
2007: Opens the Fully Booked BGC flagship shop
2021: Fully Booked’s e-commerce business rapidly grows
2022: Inks partnership with Kinokuniya
2025: Fully Booked is on track to have 49 shops by the end of the year