Every year about 200,000 British men “opt for a hair transplant”, said The i Paper, and globally the hair loss industry is valued at “more than $23 billion”. Beard transplants were “almost unknown until the early 2000s”, but that’s changing rapidly. According to the International Society of Hair Restoration Surgery, the number performed worldwide has “shot up radically”, quadrupling over the past 20 years.

‘The Prince William effect’

In the 1990s, men in the spotlight tended to be clean-shaven – but in the early 2000s, celebrities such as George Clooney and David Beckham “helped to bring the hirsute look into fashion”, said The i Paper. Manish Mittal, a hair transplant surgeon in London, started to see more requests for beard transplants from 2019. His clients (mainly men in their 30s) “want to be taken more seriously” and look “manly”, he told the paper.

A study published in 2016 found that men with facial hair were perceived as more attractive than their clean-shaven peers. “It may be because it gives the face more definition in the jawline and enhances perceptions of age and masculinity,” author Barnaby Dixson, a human behavioural ecologist, told HuffPost.

Last year Prince William debuted a beard – “so popular with royal fans that they actually mourned the dashing look when he shaved”, said Marie Claire. It “inspired other men” to copy his look. One clinic in Istanbul claimed to have performed 200% more beard transplants, which its co-founder dubbed the “Prince William effect”. “They think it looks rugged and masculine,” Murat Alsac, co-founder of a Turkish hair-transplant clinic, told the Daily Express.

And a doctored image of Mark Zuckerberg with a beard “broke the internet” last year, said the New York Post. It prompted the question: “What about men with facial hair is oh-so hot?”

The ‘Wild West’ industry

But the “wider outbreak of pogonophilia (love of beards)” over the past decade was turbocharged by the pandemic, said The Guardian. Lockdowns created a “compelling combination of spare time and disposable income”, compounded by a “harsh mirror of endless video calls”. Demand soared for a “whole gallery of aesthetic tweaks“, and “prompted a surge in bigger, fuller beards”.

Nadeem Khan, who runs the Harley Street Hair Clinic in London, told the paper inquiries from beard patients have tripled since 2020. “I think there’s this new form of masculinity where the beard has become important and now every man wants to be like Gerard Butler in ‘300’,” he told the paper.

But that rising demand has “created a minefield”, said the paper. “Slick websites and social media accounts” obscure “dodgy practices“. In the UK, there is “no formally recognised training”, or law preventing one doctor from overseeing multiple procedures done by “less qualified technicians”. Clinics in “transplant-tourism hotspots“, particularly Turkey, have boomed, offering procedures at a “fraction” of UK prices. “It’s still a Wild West, this industry,” said Spencer Stevenson, a mentor for balding men, known as Spex.

Beard transplants are more complex than hair transplants. Surgeons use a needle to pull hairs – typically from thicker areas of hair at the back of the head – and insert these into the face “via tiny cuts in the skin”, said The Guardian. But the face is full of nerves, and head hair is finer than facial hair, requiring “careful blending” to achieve a “uniform look”. Reversals are possible, but pulling out or lasering bad grafting risks scarring. On the face, “the stakes are higher”.

Last year, a 24-year-old student from France travelled to Istanbul for a beard transplant, which was a “disaster”, said The Telegraph. The clinician was an estate agent “posing as a surgeon”. Mathieu Vigier Latour’s new beard was “irregular, poorly mapped out and hairs were growing at an unnatural angle from his face”, said his father. “When it started to grow out, it looked like a hedgehog,” his father told the French broadcaster BFM TV. “He was in pain, suffered from burns, and he couldn’t sleep.”

Three months after the “botched” transplant, Latour took his own life. “He had entered a vicious circle from which he could no longer escape,” said his father in The Guardian.

Ministers have finally given the green light to the Lower Thames Crossing, ending years of delays and false starts.

The scheme, which will connect Kent and Essex, has become a “symbol of Britain’s sclerotic planning system“, said the Financial Times (FT).

What is it?

Described by National Highways as “the most significant road project in a generation”, the 14.5-mile road and tunnel project linking Essex and Kent is “aimed at reducing congestion on the Dartford Crossing by nearly doubling road capacity across the Thames east of London”, said The Independent.

This will include two 2.6-mile tunnels under the Thames, which would be “the UK’s longest road tunnels”.

One official said the project would be a “key strategic route” for drivers, freight and logistics, improving connectivity between southern England and the Midlands and unlocking regional economic growth.

What’s the hold-up been?

Tuesday’s announcement by Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander was “16 years in the making, with the project first mooted in 2009”, said the BBC.

More than £1.2 billion has already been spent on planning, consultations, traffic modelling, environmental assessments, legal and advisory fees and land purchases, despite construction not yet having started.

The FT said the planning document for the project “runs to 359,070 pages, equivalent to nearly 300 times the complete works of William Shakespeare“.

Originally costed at between £5.3 billion and £6.8 billion when it was first agreed in 2017, it is currently forecast to cost around £10 billion. Barring any further hold-ups, work on the tunnel is expected to begin next year and it is scheduled to open in 2032.

Why is it controversial?

The Lower Thames Crossing “has seen many controversies along its now 20-year lifespan”, said New Civil Engineer.

Last October, residents of Thurrock, Essex, told the BBC the plans have been “looming” over them for years, leaving them unable to sell their homes and move.

Thurrock Council leader John Kent said the proposals “would do nothing to improve congestion locally or regionally and would add little capacity to the national strategic road network”.

He added that the tunnels would, however, “cut Thurrock in two, severing communities, bring huge amounts of pollution to the borough, but bring no discernible benefits for local people”.

The project has also faced a number of “legal threats” from environmental groups, The i Paper reported. “Conservationists claim several developments that are central to the Government’s growth agenda” – including the Lower Thames Crossing – “do not take into consideration new laws designed to improve England’s protected national park and landscapes.”

National Highways has promised to build “the UK’s greenest ever road”, but environmental groups have “raised concerns over the destruction of ancient woodlands and habitats for wildlife”.

There has also been fierce debate about how the project will be funded, with the government “yet to decide what method of private finance to use”, said the FT.

A proposal to have a “regulated asset base” model – in which private investors would collect road toll revenues to pay back their investments over the life of the projects – is “favoured by the Treasury, according to people with knowledge of the discussions”.

This option – which would require nearly £2 billion of taxpayer funding to attract £6.3 billion of private investment – would cost the Treasury £200 million more in upfront costs than if the government paid for the scheme directly, according to a recent National Highways document.

Could our galaxy actually be inside a black hole? New research seems to suggest this possibility. NASA’s James Webb Telescope discovered that the rotation of the galaxies goes against what scientists previously thought about the universe. The findings have revealed new insights about deep space.

Not so random

Data from NASA‘s James Webb Space Telescope Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey found that the majority of galaxies rotate in the same direction, according to a journal article in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. After analyzing 263 galaxies, two-thirds were found to rotate clockwise, while approximately one-third of them rotated counterclockwise.

The Milky Way rotates counterclockwise, putting it in the minority. These findings are surprising because if the universe is random, as previously thought, “there should be an approximately equal amount of galaxies rotating in both direction[s],” said Popular Mechanics.

One explanation for this phenomenon is that the “universe was born rotating,” Lior Shamir, a computer science professor at Kansas State University and author of the study, said in a statement. This explanation “agrees with theories such as black hole cosmology, which postulates that the entire universe is the interior of a black hole.” However, if the universe was born rotating, “it means that the existing theories about the cosmos are incomplete.”

Black hole cosmology “suggests that the Milky Way and every other observable galaxy in our universe is contained within a black hole that formed in another, much larger, universe,” said The Independent. The theory “challenges many fundamental models of the cosmos, including the idea that the Big Bang was the beginning of the universe.” The study’s data also opens the door to the idea that each black hole is a door to another universe and that we exist in a multiverse.

Black hole in the wall

The idea that the universe is in the interior of a black hole is decades old. It posits that the “‘event horizon’ (the boundary from within which nothing can escape a black hole, not even light) is also the horizon of the visible universe,” said Space.com. In turn, “each and every black hole in our universe could be the doorway to another ‘baby universe,'” and “these universes would be unobservable to us because they are also behind an event horizon.”

This would also explain why there seem to be more rotations in one direction. “It would be fascinating if our universe had a preferred axis,” Nikodem Poplawski, a theoretical physicist at the University of New Haven, said to Space.com. “Such an axis could be naturally explained by the theory that our universe was born on the other side of the event horizon of a black hole existing in some parent universe.”

The black hole theory is only one potential explanation for why most galaxies appear to rotate clockwise. The other is that the Milky Way’s rotational velocity is affecting the measurements. “If that is indeed the case, we will need to recalibrate our distance measurements for the deep universe,” said Shamir. The “recalibration of distance measurements can also explain several other unsolved questions in cosmology.”