5 things we learned this week

1 Punctures may soon be a thing of the past. Michelin and Goodyear are both working on ‘airless tyres’ – the former’s is made of a high-strength resin stuffed with fibreglass and composite rubber. Longer term, the company aims to create an airless tyre made entirely of materials that can be melted down and reused.

2 Litter-pickers in Sweden get rewarded with a sexy message. As part of a clean streets campaign, the city of Malmö has installed interactive rubbish bins that, when opened, broadcast a sultry woman’s voice saying in Swedish ‘Oh, yeah, right there’, ‘That was crazy good’, and ‘Come back quickly and do that again’.

3 Video games based on mundane chores are all the rage. More than seven million people have watched a YouTube review of ‘PowerWash simulator’, which the reviewer calls ‘the greatest game ever made’. Other recent hits include Best Forklift Operator, Espresso Tycoon and Gas Station Simulator.

4 Canada and Denmark have resolved the politest war in history. For decades, both countries have claimed ownership of Hans Island, an uninhabited, 0.5 square mile outcrop in the Arctic. In 1984, Canadian troops quietly planted a Canadian flag on the island, alongside a bottle of Canadian whisky and a note reading ‘Welcome to Canada’. The Danish promptly did the same, but with Danish schnapps. Over the years this polite back-and-forth was often repeated. But now the ‘Whisky War’ has finally been resolved – with the combatants agreeing to divide the island in two.

5 Agatha Christie is enjoying a Gen Z resurgence. On TikTok, #Agatha Christie has racked up more than 26million views, with users praising her ‘unique way of storytelling’ as ‘very rare nowadays’. In the United States, sales of her books, which introduced iconic characters such as Belgian detective Hercule Poirot, left, are up by 39 per cent compared with last year.

Sign up to The Knowledge, a free daily newsletter that distils the world’s news into a five-minute read, at theknowledge.com