レアジョブ英会話 Daily News Article Podcast

A gym that's free to join that makes you feel fitter and healthier and gives back to the community—sounds too good to be true. This is GoodGym, where volunteers run to community projects, socialize, and improve their surroundings at the same time.

Shoveling piles of compost and clearing weeds on a cold, damp January evening might not be most people’s idea of fun. But it’s smiles and chatter all around as a group of fitness enthusiasts put on their headlamps and get to work on the chores at a community garden in Battersea, South London.

The group is one of dozens run by GoodGym, an organization that encourages people to combine getting fit with meeting others and volunteering. GoodGym has over 26,000 members in 65 different locations across England, and most weeks there are meetups somewhere.

It began in 2007, when its founder, Ivo Gormley, started running to deliver the newspaper to an older person in his neighborhood. At the time, Gormley said he wasn’t doing any exercise and missed being part of a basketball team. “I just didn’t like that idea of going to a gym, going into a sweaty basement, and lifting things that don’t really need lifting. I thought I could do something more useful in my exercise,” he says.

Soon, he started organizing group sessions where volunteers would run together to help with community projects, big or small: the first group ran and ripped down outdated posters from his East London neighborhood.

Today, the group still organizes home visits so volunteers can help retirees with practical tasks like moving heavy furniture or lawn mowing. Many such sessions have no group run element, though participants are always encouraged to run, walk, or cycle to the tasks. Gormley says he wanted to make it as easy as possible for people to get fit and do good.

Monthly donations are welcome but voluntary, and there is no pressure to show up, though many make it their weekly workout. Recent sessions across London have seen groups clear sidewalks of discarded Christmas trees, pick plastic litter from the muddy banks of the Thames, plant fruit trees, and unload deliveries for food banks.

This article was provided by The Associated Press.

Digital content makers from across Africa gathered at the African Creators Summit, calling for content creation to be recognized as full-time work rather than a side hustle. Under the 2026 theme, “Building a Sustainable Ecosystem: Where Africa Trades Its SWAG,” more than 2,500 digital creators from 15 countries came together to examine how Africa can turn its cultural capital into income.

Participants focused on monetizing what they described as “SWAG,” an acronym for Sound, Walk, Attire, and Grubs, which they said form the cultural pillars behind the continent’s growing global influence. Speakers said the fast-growing creator economy now functions like a full business ecosystem, employing production crews and helping many creators pay bills and build long-term careers.

I feel like it's not something that you can just say, let me be doing this and also be doing content creation also. It's not possible, said Ibikunle ‘Frosh’ Akorede, a content creator. You have to put your whole mind, effort, you have to put everything into content creating. And if you look at it, anything that pays can be called a job.

Participants noted that while managing content across multiple platforms requires full commitment, some argue that the workload makes it difficult to combine creation with traditional 9-to-5 jobs.

David Adeleke, a media and intelligence executive, believes that the ecosystem is changing very fast. “I believe within the next few years, you're going to see more people who are doing this thing full-time as their main job. They will quit their 9 to 5s and focus on this because, again, this is like building a small business,” he said.

Discussions at the summit also focused on sustainability within the industry, with speakers highlighting different levels of creators and the challenges of moving into top-earning brackets. The African creator economy has grown rapidly in recent years, driven by social media, video streaming, and increased mobile phone use across the continent.

This article was provided by The Associated Press.

The Bank of Thailand has tightened regulations on online gold trading to curb the impact of fluctuating prices on the local currency. The new measures will not have a big impact on gold trading, which has become increasingly popular, but will improve the transparency of online platforms, the central bank's assistant governor, Pimpan Charoenkwan, said.

The regulations, which took effect this month, cap online gold transactions conducted in Thai baht at 50 million baht ($1.6 million) per user per day. Any transaction exceeding that limit requires approval from the authorities.

However, the rules do not apply to users who were already holding more than 50 million baht worth of gold in their accounts before the end of January. They are allowed to sell their holdings back to platform operators without seeking additional permission.

The regulations also do not apply to gold trades in foreign currencies or to physical gold transactions. Pimpan said gold traders are required to maintain some transaction records and regularly report those activities to the Bank of Thailand.

The international price of gold has more than doubled this year, and last January topped $5,000 per ounce for the first time. Gold prices in Thailand surged above 80,000 baht ($2,545) per baht-weight for the first time, before dropping sharply, highlighting the volatility that has raised concerns.

Baht-weight is the standard unit for measuring the weight and purity of gold in Thailand. It usually is 15.244 grams (about 0.54 ounces) for 23 karat gold bars and about 15.16 grams (0.53 ounces) for gold jewelry, but varies slightly depending on purity.

Thailand has never properly regulated gold trading, though it's a major investment method in the country, the Bank of Thailand's governor, Vithai Ratanakorn, said in a livestreamed speech to an economic seminar.

“Collecting gold is already a culture in Thailand, and these past few years the stock market has underperformed, so more people turned to gold trading,” he said.

This article was provided by The Associated Press.

A new high-resolution map of distant galaxies may help scientists understand a mysterious invisible substance that helps hold the universe together.

The ordinary matter all around us—stars, planets, and people—makes up just 5% of the universe. For decades, researchers have hoped to demystify what's known as dark matter, a material that comprises just over a quarter of our universe. Another equally mysterious force called dark energy makes up the rest.

Dark matter doesn't absorb or give off light, so scientists can't study it directly. But they can observe how its gravity warps and bends the star stuff around it—for example, the light from distant galaxies. By studying these distortions across large swathes of the universe, scientists can get closer to unmasking dark matter and its various hiding places.

The latest map, created with images from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, is the most detailed yet over such a large patch of sky. It has twice the resolution of previous attempts using the Hubble Space Telescope and captures hundreds of thousands of galaxies over the past 10 billion years.

“Now, we can see everything more clearly,” said study author Diana Scognamiglio with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The latest map, published in the journal Nature Astronomy, includes information on new galaxy clusters and the strands of dark matter that connect them. Piece by piece, these structures help form the skeleton of the universe. Scientists can study this map to see how dark matter has clumped up over billions of years.

Dark matter doesn't have much of an impact on your midday lunch order or your nightly bedtime ritual. But it silently passes through your body all the time and has shaped the universe.

As humans, we're naturally curious to know more about where we come from, and that story can't be told without dark matter, said astrophysicist Rutuparna Das with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

“Our home is the universe, and we want to understand what the nature of it is,” said Das, who was not involved with the new study.

This article was provided by The Associated Press.

Some blind and low-vision fans had unprecedented access to the Super Bowl thanks to a tactile device that tracks the ball, vibrates on key plays, and provides real-time audio. The NFL teamed up with OneCourt and Ticketmaster to pilot the game-enhancing experience 15 times during the regular season games hosted by the Seattle Seahawks, Jacksonville Jaguars, San Francisco 49ers, Atlanta Falcons, and Minnesota Vikings.

About 10 blind and low-vision fans had an opportunity to use the same technology at the Super Bowl in Santa Clara, California, where Seattle played the New England Patriots on February 8. With their hands on the device, they felt the location of the ball and heard what was happening throughout the game.

Scott Thornhill, the executive director of the American Council of the Blind, was among the fans at Levi's Stadium with a OneCourt tablet in the lap and Westwood One's broadcast piped into headphones.

It will allow me to engage and enjoy the game as close as possible as people who can see, Thornhill told The Associated Press. As someone who grew up playing sports before I lost my vision, I'm getting a big part of my life back that I've been missing. To attend a game and not have to wait for someone to tell me what happened, it's hard to even describe how much that means to me. It's a game-changer.

OneCourt has also partnered with NBA and Major League Baseball teams to provide its devices at games and is in talks to make them available with the NHL, along with other leagues and sports organizations all over the world.

OneCourt launched in 2023 after founder Jerred Mace saw a blind person attending a soccer match while he was a junior at the University of Washington.

This article was provided by The Associated Press.

Can a few lines of verse make commuting less worse? That, in essence, is the question asked four decades ago by Judith Chernaik, an American writer in London who wondered whether posting poems inside subway cars might enlighten, amuse, and inspire riders.

The result was Poems on the Underground, a project that turns 40 this year and has been copied in cities around the world. Since 1986, many millions of London Underground passengers have seen posters adorned with poems nestled among the advertisements on their daily journeys.

More than a dozen poets whose work has featured in the project gathered in a subway station to celebrate the milestone and pay tribute to Chernaik, who started it all.

The New York native moved to London in the 1970s and fell “absolutely in love with the city–including its transport system,” which she found compared favorably to her home city’s subway.

“I used the subway all the time in New York,” she said. “It was not one of my pleasurable activities.”

Chernaik, a novelist and essayist, also reveled in London's rich literary culture and history. “Poetry,” she said, “is part of the heritage of every Londoner.”

Along with two poet friends, Gerard Benson and Cecily Herbert, she hatched a plan to combine literature and transit. The subway operator was supportive, and the first poems went up in January 1986.

“Somehow the idea of it worked, and here we are, 40 years on,” said Chernaik, now 91.

The first year’s poems included works by William Shakespeare, Robert Burns, W.B. Yeats, Percy Bysshe Shelley—“Ozymandias,” a reflection on the transience of power—and William Carlos Williams’ imagist poem “This Is Just to Say,” with its famous opening: “I have eaten / the plums / that were in / the icebox.”

The choice soon expanded to include poems from around the world, by Wole Soyinka, Pablo Neruda, Derek Walcott, Anna Akhmatova, and many more.

The selection is changed three times a year, and Chernaik is still on the panel that chooses the poems, alongside poets George Szirtes and Imtiaz Dharker.

This article was provided by The Associated Press.

Cheers rose from a bundled-up crowd as a loggerhead sea turtle that survived a likely shark attack trundled back into the ocean after months of rehabilitation in Florida, carrying a satellite tracker to see how she fares with only three flippers.

The air on the beach was chilly, with temperatures in the 40s Fahrenheit (roughly 4 to 9°C). But the Atlantic Ocean has hovered around a comfortable 77°F (25°C), said Heather Barron, chief science officer and a veterinarian at the Loggerhead Marinelife Center in Juno Beach.

To acclimate the turtle for reentry, the facility kept her tank’s water temperature at around 80°F (27°C), Barron said. Beachgoers snapped photos as the turtle crawled down the sand, the satellite tracker’s long antenna waving in the air, before she disappeared into the waves.

The turtle was named Pyari, a Hindi term of endearment meaning “lovely” or “beloved.” She arrived at the center in November from the nearby Inwater Research Group.

Some kind of predator had tried to make a meal of her, the marine center said in a statement, leaving Pyari with extensive injuries to her neck, shell, and both front flippers. That led to the amputation of most of her left forelimb.

“It’s definitely always very gratifying to see these animals go back into their ocean home,” Barron said. “And I think it’s particularly gratifying when you can track them on satellite, and see exactly where they’re going and what they’re doing.”

While those satellite tags are expensive, about $10,000 each, Barron said it's important to gather data on these three-legged turtles because scientists know very little about how well they do after rehabilitation.

In addition to Pyari, the center is tracking two other amputees, she said. Every little bit of information helps us to understand the behavior and the success of these animals.”

This article was provided by The Associated Press.

The UK toy market returns to growth for the first time in five years, but it's adults buying toys for themselves who are helping fuel the boom. The so-called kidults have helped the toy market in the UK post a year-on-year growth of six percent, according to figures by the British Toy and Hobby Association, with one in three pounds of toy sales being spent by kidults.

Retro arcade cabinets and LEGO floral bouquets are some of the toys kidults can't get enough of. The kidult market now represents one-third of all toy spending in the UK, so it's a sector the toy industry can't ignore. Technically, a kidult is for the 12-year-and-over range, but it's adults who are a major part of this growth sector. 

At the Toy Fair in London's Olympia, Kerri Atherton, head of public affairs at the British Toy and Hobby Association, says, “But what I think we've seen shifted a little bit is sort of how wide the audience really is now for toys. So obviously, for a few years now, we've been talking about the rise of kidults, which is toys for 12 plus. But adults are a big chunk of that category as well.”

“So three quarters of 18 to 34-year-olds say that they've purchased a toy either for themselves or another adult in the last year,” says Melissa Symonds, executive director of toys for market research company Circana. They have been closely monitoring the rise of kidults, and their love of nostalgia and their spending power is a welcome boost for the toy sector.

Another key trend is the growth of Asian-influenced toys. South Korean and Japanese brands like K-POP Demon Hunters, One Piece, and Dragon Ball Z are all contributing to the year's collectibles boom. Collectible toys grew by 12 percent year-on-year in 2025, and Far East Asian licenses were a clear factor in this growth.

This article was provided by The Associated Press.

Tens of thousands of visitors flocked to Lucerne as the Lilu Light Festival turned the city’s cobbled streets and riverfront into a glowing, interactive art experience. The festival drew artists from across Europe, blending inspiration and technology, to transform the city into one of Switzerland’s most picturesque winter destinations.

In the square of Vögeligärti, the planet “Venus” by Immersive Light Factory glowed at the center, radiating warm light and showing one of Earth’s closest neighbors in wonderful detail. The planet installation was flanked on one side by the swirling “Carnival of Lights” by Lightspray Visual.

Mechanical structures brought the visuals to life, projecting small light displays onto the walls of Lucerne’s Central and University Library. Nearby, “Coloured” by Immersive Light Factory illuminated the Torbogen arch outside Lucerne’s main rail station. The combination of historic squares and cutting-edge installations created a surreal winter landscape, where centuries-old architecture met modern art and dynamic color.

Along the river Reuss, Jesuitenkirche, the Jesuit church is bathed in light. Inside, the ticketed projection mapping show “SOUL” by PROJEKTIL immersed visitors in dynamic visuals all over the church’s interior, creating a spectacular reshaping of the space and music.

André Bulli, marketing manager at Lucerne Tourism, says the festival has grown into Switzerland’s largest light event. “It’s the biggest light festival in Switzerland, with around 150,000 people every year. So, we have around 15,000 people in the city each day, which is a lot. We sell more than 80,000 tickets for the light show here in the Jesuit church, and we have more than 70 light shows in the church during the whole festival,” he says.

Bulli explains why the festival began in 2017. He says, “The reason was that in January, Lucerne is always empty for tourists and there’s not much going on. It’s cold, and people are inside. So, we tried, in cooperation with the hotels, to do something to attract more people to the city. And this was the light festival.”

This article was provided by The Associated Press.

Your watch says you had three hours of deep sleep. Should you believe it? Millions of people rely on phone apps and wearable devices like rings, smartwatches, and sensors to monitor how well they're sleeping, but these trackers don't necessarily measure sleep directly. Instead, they infer states of slumber from signals like heart rate and movement, raising questions about how reliable the information is and how seriously it should be taken.

The U.S. sleep-tracking devices market generated about $5 billion in 2023 and is expected to double in revenue by 2030, according to market research firm Grand View Research. As the devices continue to gain popularity, experts say it is important to understand what they can and cannot tell you, and how their data should be used.

Whether it's an Apple Watch, a Fitbit, an Oura Ring, or one of innumerable other competitors, health and fitness trackers largely take the same basic approach by recording the wearer's movements and heart rate while at rest, according to Daniel Forger, a University of Michigan math professor who researches the science behind sleep wearables.

The algorithms used by major brands have become highly accurate for determining when someone is asleep, Forger said. The devices are also somewhat helpful for estimating sleep stages, though an in-lab study would be more precise, he said. If you really want to know definitively how much non-REM sleep you're having versus REM sleep, that's where the in-lab studies really excel, Forger said.

Dr. Chantale Branson, a neurologist and professor at the Morehouse School of Medicine, said she frequently has patients showing up with sleep scores from fitness trackers in hand, sometimes fixated on granular details such as how much REM sleep they got on a certain night.

Branson says those patients are taking the wrong approach: the devices help highlight trends over time, but should not be viewed as a definitive measure of one's sleep health. Nor should any single night's data be seen as significant.

This article was provided by The Associated Press.