The Week Unwrapped podcast: Social epilepsy, hydrogen and a retail boom

Why are retail sales growing? Should social media companies clamp down on flashing images? And why are German railways turning to hydrogen?

Sterling notes and credit cards
(Image credit: SpaceX)

Olly Mann and The Week delve behind the headlines and debate what really matters from the past seven days.

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––To get six free issues of The Week magazine and a moleskine notebook visit theweek.co.uk/offer and enter promo code: POD25–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

In this week’s episode, we discuss:

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Sales boom

Although you wouldn’t know it from reading the gloomy headlines, retail sales in the UK are higher now than they were before the pandemic. Home and garden stores in particular have benefited from the surge in spending, which seems to be the result of a lot of people cooped up with little else to spend their money on. Perhaps even more surprisingly, the majority of people have been saving more too.

Seeing the light

In the next few weeks TikTok will be introducing a new feature that will let people with epilepsy automatically skip videos that might trigger seizures. They’re the first social platform to respond to a call last year for more to be done to protect people who are vulnerable to flashing lights - a condition believed to affect 18,000 people in the UK.

Hydrogen trains

Germany has announced plans to build a hydrogen-powered train which has a top speed of 100mph and can go for up to 370 miles in between refuelling. The goal is to replace all 1,300 remaining diesel trains on non-electrified lines with these zero-emissions locomotives. It marks something of a comeback for hydrogen, which was once held up as the fuel of the future but has recently lost out to battery power in the motoring market.

You can subscribe to The Week Unwrapped on the Global Player, Spotify, Apple podcasts, SoundCloud or wherever you get you get your podcasts

To continue reading this article...
Continue reading this article and get limited website access each month.
Get unlimited website access, exclusive newsletters plus much more.
Cancel or pause at any time.
Already a subscriber to The Week?
Not sure which email you used for your subscription? Contact us