Almost every single person on Earth lives with rats. Only 5 million people out of 8 billion live rat free. They are the Albertans. Alberta is the only significantly human-inhabited place on Earth that is rat free. It achieved this in the 1950s as rats invaded from the East, by introducing a rodent surveillance state, obliging every citizen of the province to report them and terminating any sightings with extreme prejudice. They laid 63,000 kg of arsenic across a 600-kilometre-long, 29-kilometre-wide Rat Control Zone along the province's Eastern border. Back then, rats were so unfamiliar in Alberta that officials distributed preserved rat corpses to teach people what the enemy looked like. One pest-control officer held public meetings at which he ate warfarin-soaked oatmeal to show it was safe. And it worked! They held rats off and numbers remained so low that the surveillance and eradication system could keep numbers at essentially zero for years, at extremely low costs – Alberta spends about 11 cents per resident on rat control measures, much less than neighbouring provinces that are infested. Today, Albertans have grown so unfamiliar with rats that they frequently mistake squirrels, gophers, and other small animals for them: of 875 reported sightings in 2025, only 47 turned out to be actual rats. Pet rats are banned, vehicles entering Alberta are checked, and sightings are responded to with overwhelming force. Could the rest of the world manage it? Probably not. The secret was to stop them before they could establish themselves. For the rest of us, we probably need gene drives. Read the story of how Alberta won the war on rats at Works in Progress now. worksinprogress.co/issue/alb…

📢 Call for submissions: Columbia Gender in the Global Economy Conference! For economists in any subfield working on the role of gender in the economy. 📍 Columbia University, NYC 🗓️ Oct 30, 2026 ⏰ Deadline: July 15, 2026 Assistant profs & postdocs especially encouraged 👇

I think the Ace Hotel Toronto might be the best architecture of the past five years It's architect, Shim-Sutcliffe, seems to mostly do single-family homes

is it really too cringe to add an "open to work" badge on LinkedIn? i need a job like ASAP

The US National Science Foundation (NSF) — a major funder of basic research — has restricted the flow of new research grants to a group of elite universities, Nature has learnt. go.nature.com/4uMeoxS

Happy 32nd birthday to Aymeric Laporte! 🩵