Twenty-four undergraduate teams, drawn from a global field of more than 12,000 students who competed in local rounds across Asia Pacific and beyond, gathered in Hong Kong from 1 to 5 June for the HSBC/HKU Asia Pacific Business Case Challenge 2026 — the largest undergraduate case competition of its kind. Now in its nineteenth edition, the Challenge concluded with the team representing The University of Sydney, Australia, named the winners of the 2026 edition, after five days of intensive analysis, debate, and live presentations before a panel of industry executives.

New research led by UNSW found a simple, community-led intervention can significantly reduce psychological distress among refugees living in prolonged uncertainty.

People generally only engage in reciprocal generosity with others of equal or unknown status, MIT researchers experimentally demonstrated. During repeated interactions between people of different social status, generosity typically flows only one way, either up or down.

Using 20 years of satellite-derived data on wildfire severity and smoke particulate matter from California, Iván Higuera-Mendieta and Marshall Burke conclude that low-severity fires – a proxy for prescribed burns – can significantly reduce the probability of very high severity wildfires for a decade. The smoke particulate pollution produced by these less severe fires is outweighed by the reductions in future smoke from wildfires as a result. The researchers’ modeling suggests that sustained treatment of 500,000 acres annually in California with prescribed burns would reduce cumulative harmful smoke pollution by about 10% over a decade. The findings by Higuera-Mendieta and Burke fill an important data gap about potential air quality tradeoffs associated with prescribed burns. The effects measured in the study are most impactful in the state’s conifer forests, the researchers found. A policy that applies prescribed burning for up to 1 million acres/year in California conifer forests would yield cumulative benefits in terms of smoke reduction that exceed the costs of the added smoke from the initial prescribed burning “in as early as two years, with benefits exceeding costs by at least three-fold a decade after project initiation,” the authors write.