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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

European scientists have started work on a project to create simple forms of life from scratch in the lab, capitalising on theoretical and experimental advances in the fast-growing field of synthetic biology.

Starting with inanimate chemicals, the researchers aim to produce metabolically active cells that grow, divide and show “Darwinian evolution” within six years.

The €13mn “MiniLife” project, which is funded by the European Research Council and involves biologists and chemists from several universities, could be the first in the world to reach the minimum criteria for a synthetic living system.

“Success would constitute a landmark achievement in basic science,” said Eörs Szathmáry, director of the Centre for the Conceptual Foundations of Science at the Parmenides Foundation in Germany, who is a principal investigator on the ERC grant. “De-novo creation of living systems is a long-standing dream of humanity.”

John Sutherland, who works on the chemistry of early life at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, said the project joins a growing worldwide effort to “create minimal living systems”.

Sutherland, who is not involved in the MiniLife project, added: “This is driven by the perennial desire to understand how life originated on Earth and whether it could also have originated elsewhere in the observable universe.”

Other artificial life researchers are working with the known building blocks of life on Earth, particularly the nucleotides that make up ribonucleic acid. The ERC project, in contrast, aims truly to start from scratch, without using molecules that are themselves products of evolution.

“We abstract away from known life forms because they are highly evolved creatures,” said Szathmáry, “and simplify so as to arrive at a minimalistic formulation.”

The MiniLife researchers are evaluating four systems that might, individually, or in combination, be developed into a basis for minimal life. All are “autocatalytic”, a property essential for self-replication in which a chemical reaction is catalysed by its own products.

One candidate is the formose reaction. The process, discovered in the 19th century, converts an extremely simple chemical, formaldehyde, into an increasingly diverse and complex series of sugar molecules. As the reaction is fed with formaldehyde, the droplets’ behaviour varies with the composition of sugars inside them.

“Some grow faster and divide more quickly than others,” said Andrew Griffiths, a MiniLife investigator at the École Supérieure de Physique et de Chimie Industrielles in Paris. “We end up with the emergence of something equivalent to fitness in biology, like a mixture of slow-growing and fast-growing bacteria, but in a very simple chemical system.”

The formose-based system must be able to display reliable hereditability — passing on acquired characteristics from one generation to the next — perhaps in conjunction with one of the other systems being evaluated.

The six-year timing is ambitious, said Griffiths, who is optimistic that the project will be able to “demonstrate rudimentary Darwinian evolution”. As a minimum that would involve a system that can switch between two heritable states in different environments, analogous to the famous peppered moth whose wings are white in clean environments and black when it lives in polluted places with dark surfaces.

Sijbren Otto, a professor of systems chemistry at Groningen university and another member of the MiniLife team, said his primary motivation was “fascination with the nature and origin of life. Although the molecules we develop will probably not be the ones from which life started on the prebiotic Earth 3.8bn years ago, the mechanisms we hope to unveil will be very relevant for understanding what happened then.”

Last month an international group of researchers warned of the “unprecedented risks” posed by another area of synthetic biology. They said “mirror life” — manufactured bacteria that are structural reflections of natural microbes — could overwhelm the defences of people, other animals and plants.

Asked about the safety of the MiniLife project, Otto said its creations were “extremely unlikely to have any viability outside very controlled lab conditions” and posed no possible risk to the public.

However, the team is working with experts to develop an ethical framework for the research. “Now is the time to think much further ahead to where the research is likely to lead,” Otto said.

Minimum-wage workers in 21 states will see a bigger paycheck come the new year. They’re among the many thousands of laws changing as a new year begins.

Those wage increases will impact an estimated 9.2 million workers and raise pay by a total of $5.7 billion, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a think tank that publishes economic research and examined the expected 2025 wage increases.

An additional 48 cities and counties will raise their minimum wages above their state wage floors starting Tuesday.

California, which is increasing the minimum wage from $16 to $16.50, is one of the 14 states adjusting the minimum to increase for inflation. The average full-time minimum-wage worker in these states will make around $420 more annually, according to EPI.

Five states are bumping up the statewide minimum wage through previously adopted legislation, and two states — Nebraska and Montana — are making changes after voters passed ballot measures.

With these continued increases, EPI found that 19 states and Washington, D.C., will have at least a $15 minimum wage by 2027.

Meanwhile the federal minimum wage of $7.25 has not increased in 15 years and the spending power of one dollar is not what it used to be — putting workers in a tough spot as prices for groceries and housing have risen over time.

Research shows that a full-time minimum wage worker earning $7.25 an hour makes just $20 more than the poverty guidelines for a single-person household. Add kids or needing to care for other family members, and that worker falls below poverty levels. Drexel University’s Center for Hunger-Free Communities found in 2021 that “a true living wage” that supports an individual’s basic food and housing needs would be between $20 and $26 or more per hour depending on the state.

Dollar bills are shown in New York. The Economic Policy Institute says the Jan. 1 minimum wage increases show that the “minimum wage continues to be a powerful tool for combating racial and gender wage disparities.”

Mark Lennihan/AP

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Mark Lennihan/AP

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Who are most impacted by increases?

Among those most directly benefiting from these wage increases are women and Black and Hispanic workers.

“The January 1 increases show that the minimum wage continues to be a powerful tool for combating racial and gender wage disparities, supporting working families, and reducing poverty,” EPI said in its report.

Women make up almost 60% of workers seeing a raise, according to EPI’s analysis. A little over 11% of workers seeing higher paychecks are Black, and nearly 40% are Hispanic.

College student Jimena Sanchez (right), who studies children’s development, works as a part-time cashier earning minimum wage at a family store in Los Angeles on Oct. 11.

Damian Dovarganes/AP

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Damian Dovarganes/AP

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But the minimum-wage level may still be too low to keep up with rising prices and home costs, according to EPI. That’s especially the case if a locality’s minimum wage was tied to inflation years ago and has not been reexamined since. EPI pointed to Ohio, a state that last passed a significant increase to its minimum wage in 2007, and that will see it increase this year from $10.45 to $10.70 because of an inflation adjustment.

High food and housing costs were issues top of mind for voters in the 2024 election. Many polls and experts pointed to voters’ unhappiness with the economy as a big reason for President-elect Donald Trump’s reelection — despite experts, including Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, indicating that the U.S. economy was on good footing as 2024 came to a close.

In my day job as an FT columnist, I cast a sceptical, often irreverent eye over the world around me. I tend to be someone who challenges everything — not for the sake of it, but because I’m suspicious when a whole group of people believes the same thing. I have often been labelled a “contrarian”. I once hosted a podcast series called A Sceptic’s Guide to Crypto. I have the word “snark” in my X bio. You get the idea. 

So you might be surprised to hear of some of the things I dabble in during my free time. I use the word “synchronicity” with no sense of irony. I swear by my definitely psychic kinesiologist. I am a member of a coven called Sisters of the Sanitary Cloth (both the descriptor and our name are slightly tongue-in-cheek, though the latter more than the former). I’ve become obsessed with Co-Star, an app claiming to use Nasa data to give you “super-accurate” AI-generated horoscopes, ahem. (It was recommended to me by a senior colleague. I shan’t be naming names.) I write Morning Pages, as espoused by Julia Cameron, author of the creativity bible The Artist’s Way. I am, you know, “doing the work”. 

I am mainly tapping to clamber off the dating wheel of doom

But how can someone who is so wary of consensus views, and so passionate about the importance of truth and objectivity, be so into what many of you might consider quackery? I think it’s quite simple: I have an open mind. And while I believe in the value of reason and empiricism, I would also argue that it is actually rational to explore alternative approaches to science and medicine and life. 

Which is how I find myself standing underneath a chandelier in a plush, Edwardian-style suite in the Savoy hotel, using the tips of my fingers to gently tap my “eyebrow points” as silent tears roll down my cheeks. “I feel like I’m on a never-ending hamster wheel of dates,” I repeat after my instructor as I tap (we have already discussed how I’m feeling; she’s not just guessing). “I’m fed up” — I move my fingertips down to tap just to the side of my eyes. “Eurgh” — below my eyes. “Bleurgh” — below my nose. “So many dates” — under my lower lip. “So many dates!” — collarbone. “But I’m prepared to stay open to love” — top of my head. “And I trust my intuition more and more each day” — back to my eyebrow points. Et cetera. 

My instructor is Poppy Delbridge, a former Warner Brothers executive who quit the world of entertainment TV in 2018 to dedicate herself full-time to tapping, a mainly self-administered form of therapy that combines modern psychology and ancient Chinese medicine. I came across her a few months ago, having decided it was high time to meet the love of my life. I went along to a “taster session” feeling rather dubious, spent most of our hour together in a state of deeply cathartic weeping (she has had this effect on me in all of our one-to-one sessions), and left feeling as if I was floating on air. 

I now tap every day. I am a tapoholic. Guided by Delbridge’s Rapid Tapping app as well as her book, Tapping In, I have tapped on park benches, in saunas, on a Greek island, in the bath. I have completed her “Pivot into Power” personal empowerment programme (fellow graduates include British Fashion Council chief executive Caroline Rush and The Royle Family co-writer Phil Mealey). I have been on one of her “rapid retreats” (our group of five included a Delevingne sister and a superfan who’d flown in from the Caribbean). And I’m now doing her “30-day Love Cleanse”, which, like all of Delbridge’s programmes, involves not just tapping but also some quite intense soul-searching and personal development work. 

How to do the two-minute tap

Poppy Delbridge’s guide to “Rapid Tapping”

Getting Started

Sit or stand comfortably.

Set your intention: decide how you’d like to feel right now (calm, energised, focused).

Check your frequency level: place both hands on your chest and notice your current feeling. Rate yourself from +10 (high joy) to -10 (low energy or stress).

Take a breath.

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Move your hands: slide them a few inches down from your collarbones and massage your “sore spots” firmly to balance and ground.

Set your intention: 

1. “I feel … ” identify your current emotion. 

2. “Because … ” acknowledge why you feel this way.

3. “But it is possible for me to … ” 

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Rapid Tapping Sequence

Using two fingers on each hand, tap on these points while repeating your three-step answers. 

1. Between eyebrows

2. Sides of eyes

3. Under eyes

4. Under nose

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5. Chin

6. Collarbone and heart area

7. Top of head 

Finish with a head hug and shake-it-off: rub your hands together, place one hand on your forehead, the other on the back of your head, and hold for 10 seconds. Hold and smile.  Then shake out your hands and body to recalibrate and refresh. 

The 7-Day Rapid Reset is available in the free app as a video demonstration

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Tapping is a so-called “somatic” therapy, meaning it focuses on the connection between the mind and the body. It has roots in ancient Chinese medicine but was invented by an American psychologist in the 1980s and then simplified by one of his students in the ’90s to become “Emotional Freedom Technique”. With EFT, you tap on nine main “meridian points” — pressure points that are also used for acupuncture — in order to release trapped energy from traumatic experiences stored in the body. While some have dismissed it as pseudoscience — Gary Bakker, a clinical psychologist and lecturer at the University of Tasmania, calls tapping a “purple hat therapy” and tells me “there is no evidence whatsoever that tapping on your imaginary meridians does anything for a clinical psychological problem” — there are studies that argue that tapping can be a way of treating depression, anxiety, PTSD, food cravings and even physical pain and the symptoms of autoimmune conditions. 

And the more I’ve been tapping, the more issues I have found it helps me with — particularly around stress, lack of motivation and self-doubt. 

Delbridge’s version, “Rapid Tapping”, focuses on seven meridian points that EFT uses and also usually includes an initial massage of the “sore spots” — fleshy bits about an inch below the collarbones that feel tender to the touch — as well as a “head hug” at the end (her app includes a how-to video). She wants to use tapping to focus less on moving away from bad things in the past, as with traditional EFT, and more towards good things in the future, by “rewiring our neural pathways”. To put another way: to “manifest” the things that you desire into your life. 

If this sounds gushy, be assured there’s none of that distinctly woo-woo brand of toxic positivity. The fact that every session begins by stating out loud how you really feel and, if that’s negative, repeating it until the feeling starts to become less acute, is part of what I think makes the practice so helpful. Not only does it feel like you are releasing tension when you say your negative feelings out loud, but some of them start to feel a bit ridiculous once you do.

Most taps start by asking you to score how you’re feeling — either in general or on a particular issue — and end by asking you to score it once again. Some days my emotions only edge up; other days my mood is totally transformed in minutes. Whatever it’s doing, it does feel like something is working. I also sigh when I’m tapping, a lot. Other people yawn. “I joke that I’m the only public speaker that, when the whole audience is yawning, I’m not offended,” says Nick Ortner, who has more than 100,000 subscribers to his The Tapping Solution App.

“At the very minimum you’re resetting your nervous system into an  arasympathetic state — from fight or flight into rest and relax,” says Dr Tara Swart, a neuroscientist and one of Delbridge’s clients, who now taps most days. “People who aren’t used to being in a state of relaxed alertness can end up feeling sleepy.”

For my part, while I may not have yet met the love of my life, sigh, I feel I have broken down a number of barriers — or “love blocks” — since my first session with Delbridge in May. I also seem to spend much less time self-sabotaging, and am managing to regulate my emotions more successfully. I now use tapping as part of my morning routine, and sometimes at other points in the day too, and find it similar to meditation in the way that it grounds me, though it is usually more uplifting, motivating, and can be more focused if you want it to be.

I can assure you I felt like a fool — a fool! — the first time I did it, but these days tapping around my face and chest with my fingertips feels weirdly natural. Give it a try, I say. What’s the woo-woorst that could happen?