Our daily trip around the world

🚢🌍 The US announced an international naval coalition to defend the Red Sea from attacks by Houthi militants in Yemen. US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said the new coalition – which includes the UK, Canada, France, Italy, Norway, Spain, and others – is aimed at warding off Houthi attacks on merchant ships, which have escalated in recent days. Iran-backed Houthi militants first began seizing merchant ships one month ago, framing the incidents in the southern Red Sea – which sees ~12% of all global trade pass through it – as a show of support for Hamas in Gaza. Houthi leaders initially said they were targeting Israeli shipping, but have attacked merchant ships from a wide variety of nations.

🇵🇰 Pakistan used artificial rain for the first time to combat smog. On Saturday, scientists from the UAE used two planes equipped with cloud-seeding technology to stimulate rain in the Pakistani city of Lahore, which features air pollution levels 66x higher than the WHO's danger limits. In the cloud-seeding process, different salts are released into existing clouds to encourage the production of rain, which brings polluting aerosol particles down with it.

🇰🇷 South Korean researchers developed an AI tool that can diagnose childhood autism. The scientists trained their algorithm using images of nearly 2,000 retinas from child patients, combined with their autism symptom severity test scores. Upon completion, the AI model was able to identify patients diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder with 100% accuracy based solely on the shape of their optic disc.