We were all having such a good time in Westeros at the start of the year thanks to A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms (well, unless you were Baelor Targaryen), and House of the Dragon is back to remind you that that’s the exception to the rule in Westeros, for the most part—and this time it’s not just Targaryens who are in for a rough one, but everyone under their rule.
HBO has released a new trailer for the return of House of the Dragon, as the civil war between the Greens and the Blacks gets even messier and bloodier. There are, of course, lots of dragons and big teases of the battles to come—but a lot of this trailer is also just undercut with the dread and doom of practically everyone involved realizing that there’s no way out of this darkness but through, and they’re going to have to ask a lot of themselves to make it through in one piece.
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Yes, gone are those fleeting hopes that Alicent and Rhaenyra might figure out some way to remember who they once were to each other from last season (although anyone who’s a fan of George R.R. Martin’s worldbuilding knows that was doomed to fail anyway), but really, no one is having a good time in Westeros this time. Even with Rhaenyra seemingly ascendant in her power—once again firmly backed by her husband, Daemon—is going through it. Alicent is starting to realize that perhaps none of her kids should’ve come within touching distance of the Iron Throne, as the battered and broken Aegon plans to bring his cruel brother Aemond down once and for all. And then there’s Criston Cole looking miserable and despaired, but that one isn’t too much of a bother considering how easy he is to hate.
House of the Dragon has just one more season beyond this to bring us to the Dance’s brutal end, so expect things to get much worse before they get better when the season 3 kicks off June 21
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Lego’s “Ideas” line—based on user-created and fan-backed design suggestions—is always in cycles of review, with plenty of sets confirmed but still in the long queue to actually get made. So it’s perhaps not too surprising that Lego’s latest review has only added a few more to that list… especially since the latest review period smashed a huge record for submitted ideas.
Today Lego confirmed the results of the second wave of 2025 submission reviews for Lego Ideas (of three overall for the year), the aftermath of the largest-ever review period for the line since it began as Lego CUUSOO in 2008. A whopping 146 candidates qualified for the review period after the platform and several ideas started going viral on social media during the submission process—more than doubling the last record for most candidates, at just 71, which came in 2023.
It’s a bit of a shock then, with so many ideas to review, Lego only decided to lock in 3 of the 146 to become official sets: An Edward Scissorhands display by Ideas user Castor-Troy, a National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation set by twrt0es, and a non-licensed pitch, inspired by the canal houses of Amsterdam, by Brickmaster_85. As always, the designs below will be tweaked in the process of becoming official sets, so don’t take these images as a guaranteed look at the final product.
© Lego
© Lego
© Lego
While those were the only 3 to make it out of this round of reviews, they weren’t the only sets confirmed this time. Lego also announced a fourth set, pulled from what the brick-maker calls the “Parking Lot”—a list of Ideas projects Lego was interested in potentially pursuing, but needed more time outside of the review period to do so. That set was Iyan ha‘s diorama based on the 1952 Ernest Hemingway novella, The Old Man and the Sea, which was actually added to the lot in just the prior wave of reviews from earlier in 2025. Replacing it in the lot from the latest round was a Lego art piece submitted by DallasBricks, inspired by the famous 1932 photograph known as “Lunch atop a Skyscraper”, depicting workers taking lunch during construction of the Empire State Building.
Knocking out 142 submissions in one fell swoop might seem like a lot, but it’s clear Lego can’t add too much to its backlog of confirmed Ideas sets as the review cycle keeps marching on. As of writing, there are still 13 sets (with another 3 kept in the Parking Lot) already confirmed before today’s additions, including sets inspired by Godzilla, ET, Power Rangers, and more.
The third and final set of submissions from 2025, 75 in total, will be reviewed to potentially become sets later this year (you can see the list of eligible candidates here), likely adding even more to the Ideas backlog. Are you excited for any of today’s confirmed sets? Let us know in the comments!
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The most expensive nuclear disaster in human history turned 40 on Sunday, but the consequences have been almost perversely benign for some of the region’s wildlife.
The full core meltdown at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in 1986—which led Soviet officials to wrap the failing nuclear reactor in a colossal sarcophagus of concrete and metal—took the lives of roughly 30 people in its immediate aftermath. Scientists now estimate the death toll between a conservative 4,000 and a stomach-churning 16,000 additional radiation-related deaths. To mitigate this bloodletting, roughly 1,081 square miles (2,800 square kilometers) of what is now Ukraine and another 838 square miles (2,170 sq km) of nearby Belarus were cordoned off into an impromptu radioecological preserve, which, despite the setting, continues to thrive.
Environmental scientist Jim Smith at the University of Portsmouth, who has studied this “Chernobyl exclusion zone” (CEZ) for over 30 years, told The Guardian last week that wildlife in this would-be radioactive wasteland has improved even as it’s become surrounded by war.
“Wolf populations are seven times higher than they were before the accident because there is less human pressure,” according to Smith, who noted that populations of elk, roe, deer, and rabbit have also flourished in the zone.
“The ecosystem in the exclusion zone is much better than it was before the accident,” Smith opined. “It’s been a very powerful demonstration of the relative impact of the world’s worst nuclear accident, which is not so big, and the impact of human habitation, which is devastating.”
Evolutionary biologists at Princeton discovered something unique about this gray wolf population, which likely helped these predators carve out their new niche in the exclusion zone: mutations that appear to make Chernobyl’s wolves more resistant to cancer.
The researchers catalogued genetic divergences between Chernobyl’s gray wolves and their peers, derived via RNA in blood samples taken from the wolves and related populations in Belarus and Yellowstone National Park.
The team, led by evolutionary biologist Shane Campbell-Staton, further tested the CEZ wolves’ outlier genes against human cancer data from The Cancer Genome Atlas, with a focus on ten types of tumors documented in both canines and humans. Their analysis, presented at the 2024 meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research, found 23 genes that were unusually prominent in Chernobyl’s wolves aligned with two or more of these tumor types. They also found evidence of neutrophil and macrophage immune cell activity, a known adaptive response to cancer.
“A wolf within the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone,” as Campbell-Staton told NPR at the time, “it may have to deal with pressures from cancer, but it doesn’t have to deal with pressures from, say, hunting.”
“And it may be that the release from that hunting pressure—that separation from humans—turns out to be a much better thing than having to deal with cancer, which is kind of messed up.”
Beyond the zone’s painful new role as a theater of war, with Russian drones damaging the nuclear plant’s new sarcophagus just last year, the CEZ has also become a site of conflict between ecological researchers as well.
Not all species in the zone have fared well across these past four decades. Research out of Turkey last year found that small birds, including barn swallows and great tits, have struggled to reproduce there due to “sperm abnormalities, oxidative stress and reduced antioxidant levels.” Chernobyl’s rodents, like the bank vole, have also shown evidence of radiation damage—even as larger, more charismatic megafauna have prospered.
Smith at Portsmouth argues that some long-abandoned land near the exclusion zone in Ukraine might, in fact, actually be ready for human agriculture with the right guardrails, including external gamma dose rate surveys and extensive mapping.
But, as he noted in the Journal of Environmental Radioactivity last September, changes like this would require “respect for the dignity and integrity of affected stakeholders, and a fair distribution of benefits,” tall orders potentially during an armed invasion.
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