Photos of recent events

Modern marketing aims to sell not just goods or services, but deep emotions: a sense of belonging, nostalgia, patron status, and a romantic escape from reality. When standard discounts and bland advertising stop working, brands — and even whole governments — turn to the human heart. With this approach, value is defined by emotional connection, so the best purchase bonus is a clear conscience and status. Here are several examples of how emotion-driven marketing has rewritten the financial rules.

Dinosaur skeletons have become the hottest asset class for the super‑rich. What once interested only paleontologists now sells at Christie's and Sotheby's for tens of millions of dollars. For tech magnates, hedge‑fund managers, and Hollywood stars, a Mesozoic predator fossil has become the ultimate status symbol, eclipsing supercars, sports franchises, and Fabergé eggs. Paleontology has turned into a profitable market in which ancient bones are viewed as an inflation hedge and as exceptionally rare art objects.

In 2026, urban living quality has faced significant tectonic shifts. The annual ranking by the Economist Intelligence Unit, which assesses 173 major cities worldwide, has revealed new trends in the balance of comfort and stability. While European capitals and quiet coastal cities maintain their lead thanks to developed infrastructure, Middle Eastern hubs have started to lose ground due to regional instability. Meanwhile, Asia is showing strong progress

The end of August 2025 became a point of no return for China's property sector. The once‑mighty Evergrande developer was delisted from the Hong Kong exchange. The event sealed the collapse of the world's largest real estate market. What for years fueled China's economic miracle and accounted for a quarter of national GDP has turned into a colossal debt dead end. The crisis has spilled beyond a single industry, crippling the entire Chinese economy and leaving behind eerie ghost cities.

The rise of artificial intelligence has sparked a new trend in housing: capsule futurism, emerging in Tokyo, Seoul, and Hong Kong. Younger generations, including Zoomers and Alphas, are voluntarily retreating into tiny smart "nests" measuring 3 to 5 square meters. This choice reflects a preference for digital comfort rather than enforced poverty, as individuals trade the chaos of real-world interactions for predictable coziness, surrounded not by people but by caring algorithms, large screens, and neon solitude

With the rise of social media, traditional social elevators have given way to algorithms, and the Internet has completely erased geographic and class boundaries. Today, individuality is a person's main asset, and global fame can descend on someone in just a few hours. Instant recognition by millions can exhilarate, break lives, destroy business models, and create a new kind of idol whose images can rack up millions of views in a matter of hours.

People have always sought to mark boundaries to protect their space. Sometimes, the everyday impulse to fence off land evolved into something else entirely—titanic constructions stretching thousands of kilometers across deserts, steppes, and mountains. These vast artificial barriers radically reshape natural landscapes, transform fragile planetary ecosystems, and even influence cloud formation. These effects are clearly visible in satellite imagery from space.

At a technology summit in New York, Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton unveiled a grim prophecy. Humanity is creating a new type of thinking creature. These digital entities will inevitably surpass our minds. But how to train them to perform tasks and also to care about morality? The race for technology could produce a superintelligence that is intrinsically unfriendly to its creator. We stand on the threshold of a strange new world where creations slip out of control and penetrate every sphere of life — from religion and medicine to the governance of the global Internet.

SpaceX's move onto Wall Street put Elon Musk's space plans back in the headlines. The world's richest person is focused on large‑scale settlement of the Solar System and development of near‑Earth infrastructure, and SpaceX currently controls roughly 90% of the global market. Space has ceased to be an arena of exclusive state vanity and has become the most promising economic sector of the 21st century. The era of romantic stargazing has given way to pragmatic calculations by venture funds and multinational corporations.

At the GTC Taipei conference, tech giant Nvidia officially announced the dawn of a new technological era—the "big bang" of physical artificial intelligence. AI is moving beyond virtual dialogue windows to gain a physical presence, enabling it to directly interact with the material world. We are witnessing a future where digital intelligence becomes the driving force of our physical reality

Money is perhaps humanity's most ingenious and strangest invention. Its basis is not physical utility but the collective psychology of trust. Over millennia, the concept of value has undergone astonishing twists, gradually shedding its material shell. Money has evolved from a medium of exchange into pure information. The history of finance is the story of how people learned to trust phantom symbols, digitizing the very essence of human labor and time.

In the pursuit of progress, humanity has long relied on chemistry, silicon, and heavy engineering. But the world is undergoing a quiet revolution — a "biohacking of reality." Scientists, tech giants, and municipal services are rediscovering the potential of living nature, often in completely unexpected ways. Indeed, evolution has produced perfect mechanisms over millions of years that solve complicated problems more efficiently than any supercomputer. Biological methods are becoming a leading trend in the smart management of our civilisation.