Our daily travels around the world

🇦🇺☢️ Australian authorities are searching for a tiny cylinder of radioactive material that fell off a truck driving through the Outback. The capsule, which is about the size of a pea, was dislodged from a gauge used to measure radioactivity in oil and gas processing plants. Officials said close exposure to the radioactive device (within five meters) could cause skin damage in the short-term, and cancer-causing radiation sickness in the long-term. Despite the capsule being lost at an unknown point along an 870-mile stretch of desert highway, authorities say their odds of finding it are “pretty good,” thanks to radiation detectors and other specialized equipment. And even if they fail, the overall risk to the public is relatively low, per officials.

🏫 Children around the world lost over one-third of a school year’s worth of learning due to Covid, per a new peer-reviewed study. The research, published in Nature Human Behavior, analyzed data from 42 studies across 15 different countries. Scientists found the learning deficit arose “quite early in the pandemic,” and persisted throughout the two-and-a-half year time period that was studied. Researchers also found students in middle-income countries had greater learning deficits than students in higher-income countries, with no data included on any low-income countries.

🚢 A 15-year-old boy who chose a shipping container while playing hide-and-seek in Bangladesh ended up 1,600 miles from home earlier this month. When workers at Malaysia's Port Klang heard knocking from inside a shipping container that had just traveled from Bangladesh, they initially thought they had stumbled on a case of human trafficking, as the boy inside was emaciated and neither spoke nor understood the local language. But according to multiple reports, authorities later discovered the boy had been accidentally locked inside the container for six straight days without any food or water. He's currently recovering, and will be sent back home once better.