Antibiotic resistance is one of the biggest issues of the 21st century. It threatens everything from global health to food security, making easily treatable infections like gonorrhoea and salmonellosis impossible to cure. The good news is that there might be a secret antidote. Not only is it one of the world’s most abundant organisms, it is about the last place you might have thought to look for a cure to a disease.

Bacteriophages are a type of virus. They’re also very efficient killers of bacteria, and can also be engineered to be more effective at fighting different strains. They’re able to inject their DNA into a bacterial cell and destroy it, preventing it from multiplying further. Although phage therapy was discovered in the 1930s, the cure fell by the wayside after the Second World War, when antibiotics become commonplace in the West. The treatment was widely used in the Soviet Union, however – and is still commonly used against bacterial infections in Georgia and Russia.

We also learned today that the UK government’s plan to fight the obesity crisis might not be as simple as encouraging children to walk to school. A recent study by academics at the University of Liverpool found that children living in deprived areas were both most likely to walk to school, and more likely to be overweight. While there are numerous explanations for these findings, combating childhood obesity essentially comes down to tackling inequality in deprived communities.

Is this thing on? Amazon’s popular voice assistant Alexa has suffered widely publicised privacy issues related to the way it records users talking, but worse could be yet to come. As the company partners with more organisations such as the police and NHS, the risks of sensitive data being gathered and shared increase, argues one researcher. The case for avoiding bringing Alexa into your home could be growing.

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