On Monday, October 4, Facebook, Whatsapp, and Instagram experienced a prolonged outage. The five hour outage resulted in share prices dropping by 4.8%, decreasing Zuckerberg’s wealth by $5.9 billion. His current wealth is now $117 billion, making him the world’s sixth richest person, according to Forbes.

On Friday, September 24, China’s central bank, one of its most powerful institutions, continued its crackdown on crypto-currency as it released a ban on all transactions and mining. China is one of the biggest markets for cryptocurrencies, and the price of Bitcoin fell by more than $2000 after the announcement.

Two scientists have received the 2021 Nobel Prize in Medicine for their discoveries of molecular receptors that detect temperature and touch. Nearly two decades ago, David Julius, a physiologist at the University of California, San Francisco, used capsaicin, the ‘spicy’ compound found in chili peppers, to figure out how the nervous system responds to and registers changes in body temperature. His team searched for a certain gene that induces this response, finally locating it after scouring millions of DNA fragments. Simultaneously, in 2002, Ardem Patapoutian, a scientist at Scripps Research in La Jolla, California, independently discovered another receptor that responds to low temperatures. The discovery of these receptors cascaded into the identification of numerous other receptors for temperature change. 

When German chancellor Angela Merkel announced her intention to not run in the 2021 election two years ago, everyone knew it would be a defining event that would shape not only Germany's future, but the entirety of Europe’s.