"We are adults, but we never stopped being kids," the 42-year-old artist tells AFP. "Who doesn't like toys? Who doesn't like miniatures?"

As he spoke from his workshop in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn, he sat among recycled objects found on the streets.

On his table was a current project, the tiny replica of a worn and dirty building facade. Near a bricked-in window, a plastic bushel basket had been hung: a poor man's basketball hoop.

"This represents my childhood," Cortes said, putting touches to the model in his preferred medium, polystyrene.

"Everything looked like this: abandoned, empty, a lot of drugs in the area."

- From $30 to $10,000 -

One of his recent creations is a modest Chinese restaurant with a battered yellow sign and with its red-and-mauve brick walls covered with graffiti.

Standing outside the restaurant -- the real one -- Cortes, sporting a black jacket and a baseball cap over his round face --  smiles as he tells how New York rapper Joell Ortiz, who grew up in the neighborhood, insisted on buying the model, saying, "Yo, I need that."

The price?

"Ten thousand dollars," Cortes says, adding that "the first piece I sold was like $30, and I was so happy that I got $30."

The artist builds collectibles based on the most banal of urban scenes, "the little things that we pass by every day" and pay no attention to, but which collectively form the unique cityscape that is New York.

- 'It just took off' -

One of his first signature works was a rendering of a simple white commercial ice box -- the kind that sits outside corner groceries, the words "ICE" in block red letters on its side, and often covered in graffiti, which Cortes reproduces with meticulous detail.

His repertoire also includes a classic ice-cream truck like the one in Spike Lee's 1989 film "Do the Right Thing," its musical chimes guaranteed to bring young New Yorkers running.

His work resonates with nostalgia, and he often incorporates tributes to mythical local rappers like Notorious B.I.G. and the Wu-Tang Clan.

Cortes was not always an artist -- he has worked in sales, construction, and at a homeless shelter.

But the pandemic changed his life, pushing him to take more seriously what had been an enjoyable pastime.

After he displayed his first creations on social media, his work "just took off," he said.

Artistic label Mass Appeal, which partners with rap legend Nas, commissioned him to do a model of a ghetto-blaster  boombox for the cover of a mini album by DJ Premier ("Hip Hop 50: Vol. 1").

In March 2022, four of Cortes' works were sold in a hip-hop auction at Sotheby's. They included an ice-cream truck that went for $2,200.

And he has branched out, building a miniature replica of an Atlanta restaurant for its owner, the rapper 2 Chainz.

- 'A lot of change' -

But Cortes' heart remains in Brooklyn.

"He has really captured the grimy, gritty atmosphere that was the birthplace for a lot of the '90s style of hip-hop music," said Monica Lynch, former head of Tommy Boy Records and a consultant on the Sotheby's auction.

Through his work, Cortes said he wants to document a place where "there is a lot of change," particularly his Bushwick neighborhood. Now a trendy locale favored by artistic types, it is also a symbol of gentrification -- but Cortes said he's okay with that.

"I think it's good, I think it's safer, even though Bushwick is always gonna be Bushwick," he said. "There are more opportunities."

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French authorities plan to use an AI-assisted crowd control system to monitor people during the 2024 Paris Olympics, according to a draft law seen by AFP on 

The system is intended to allow the security services to detect disturbances and potential problems more easily, but will not use facial recognition technology, the bill says.

The technology could be particularly useful during the highly ambitious open-air opening ceremony  with Olympians sailing down the river Seine in front of a crowd of 600,000 people.

French police and sports authorities faced severe criticism in May after shambolic scenes during the Champions League final in Paris when football fans were caught in a crowd crush and teargassed.

The draft law, which was presented to the cabinet on Thursday, proposes other security measures including the use of full-body scanners and increases the sentences for hooliganism.

Organisers and Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin have both argued in favour of using so-called "intelligent" security camera software that scans images for suspect or dangerous behaviour.

The use of such a system during the Olympics is an "experimentation", the draft law says, but could be applied for future public events which face terrorism-related or crowd control risks.

"No biometric data is used, nor facial recognition technology and it does not enable any link or interconnection or automatic flagging with any other personal data system," the bill states.

The games' organising committee said on November 21 that it needed to lift its budget estimate by 10 per cent from 3.98 billion euros to 4.48bn euros, partly as a result of inflation.

Rather than opening the games in an athletics stadium as is customary, organisers have planned a ceremony on July 26, 2024 with a flotilla of some 200 boats sailing down the river Seine.

The banks of the river can accomodate 100,000 people who will have to buy tickets, while another 500,000 are set to watch for free from the street level, according to government estimates.

The draft law is expected to be debated in parliament in January where the minority government of President Emmanuel Macron will need support from opposition groups to pass it.

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"Nature has spent hundreds of millions of years optimising elegant solutions to extremely complicated problems," said Alon Gorodetsky, a biomedical engineer at the University of California, Irvine.

"So if we look to nature, we can shortcut our development process and get to a valuable solution right away," he told AFP.

From squid-skin food warmers to a lubricant made of cow mucus, here is a selection of this year's scientific work inspired by nature.

- Okra plasters stop bleeding hearts -

Stopping the bleeding hearts and livers of dogs and rabbits without stitches may now be possible with a biodegradable plaster made of sticky okra gel.

Okra is a fuzzy green vegetable with a slimy texture that inspired Malcolm Xing from Canada's University of Manitoba to turn it into a medical adhesive.

"Okra is a fantastic material," said Xing.

In the July study published in Advanced Healthcare Materials, researchers discovered that refining okra in a juicer and then drying it into a powder creates an effective bioadhesive that quickly creates a physical barrier and starts the blood clotting process.

The researchers plan to test this plaster on humans in the coming years.

- Cow mucus lubricant -

Snot may invoke feelings of disgust, but laboratory tests found that a lubricant made of cow mucus showed promise at curtailing the spread of certain sexually transmitted infections.

The study, published in Advanced Science in September, is very preliminary, however. It has not yet been tested on humans and should not replace other forms of protection, like condoms.

Researchers extracted the mucus from the salivary glands of cows and turned it into a gel that binds to and constrains viruses. Mucus is made of a protein called mucin that might have antiviral properties.

It is also both a solid and a liquid.

"Being a solid, it can trap bacteria or viruses in the body. Being a liquid, it can clear those pathogens from the body," said study co-author Hongji Yan from Sweden's KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.

- Robot fireflies -

Fireflies that light up the night sky inspired scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to create tiny, bug-sized robots that emit light when they fly.

The glowing artificial muscles help the honey bee-sized robots communicate with each other, which may make them useful for search and rescue missions some day.

Though the robots can only operate in a laboratory environment so far, the researchers are excited at their potential future uses.

- Cancer-sniffing ants -

There are an estimated 20 quadrillion ants in the world, and researchers have discovered that one species might be able to sniff out cancer in human breasts.

In a study conducted at Sorbonne Paris Nord University and published on the preprint server bioRxiv, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, scientists used a sugar-water reward to train ants to smell the difference between mouse urine implanted with, and without, human tumours.

While dogs can be trained to use their super noses to detect cancer, this is expensive and takes time.

Ants might provide a cheaper, albeit less cute, alternative.

- Squid-skin tea cosies -

The strange skin of squids has inspired a packaging material that can keep coffee and food warm for as long, or as little, as wanted, according to a March study published in Nature Sustainability.

Squids have miniature organs called chromatophores that can drastically change size, and also help them change colour.

To mimic "these pigment-filled organs", study co-author Alon Gorodetsky, from the University of California, Irvine, said they developed "little metal islands that you could move apart" and contract.

The heat level can then be controlled by how much the material is stretched.

"If you put it around a warm object -- for example, a coffee-filled cup or a hot sandwich -- you can control the rate at which it cools down," he said.

"Nature really is the epitome of innovation and engineering," Gorodetsky added.

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In a project launched at Dubai's gleaming Museum of the Future, it announced that the UAE's economy ministry was setting up shop inside the immersive virtual world that is now taking shape.

Those who don their virtual reality goggles or use other means to venture within will find a ministry open for business with companies and even ready to sign bilateral agreements with foreign governments, officials said.

The metaverse is an online world where users will eventually be able to game, work and study, its proponents say -- although it is still in a "test" phase, the UAE's economy minister conceded.

Abdulla bin Touq Al Marri was speaking at the inaugural Dubai Metaverse Assembly, held at the museum whose innovative ring shape decorated with Arabic calligraphy flanks the city's main thoroughfare.

Representatives of tech giants mingled with entrepreneurs and developers exploring the potential of the metaverse, a network of digital spaces intended as an extension of the physical world.

"In the last couple of years we've seen investments, we've seen companies move in, and with the changes of the (visa) regime... we see talent coming in," Al Marri told AFP in an interview.

"We trained our employees to really immerse themselves in the metaverse, use the metaverse and engage with the Generation Z that is going to come," he added.

The UAE, which has a history of bold projects including the 830-metre (2,723-foot) Burj Khalifa, hopes the metaverse can add $4 billion to annual GDP and 40,000 jobs to its workforce by 2030.

In its bid to become one of the world's top-10 metaverse economies, Dubai wants to attract 1,000 companies specialising in blockchain and related technologies, helped by eased visa rules for freelancers, entrepreneurs and creatives.

As the coronavirus pandemic pushed more people into the online world, "Covid really accelerated" the trend, Al Marri added.

"We thought the metaverse is a phase technology" that might take 10 to 20 years to emerge," he said. "Covid-19 really immersed us so fast and expedited the use of the metaverse."

- Virtual Mars trips -

Unlike the UAE's oil-rich capital, Abu Dhabi, crude represents just five percent of Dubai's economy which has pivoted towards business, tourism, real estate and new technologies.

The UAE has already introduced a law governing virtual assets and a regulatory body for cryptocurrencies, while welcoming major crypto exchange platforms.

One of the UAE's early private-sector metaverse projects is called 2117, named after the dream of Dubai's ruler Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid to colonise Mars a century from now.

Metaverse users can now buy tickets to join a virtual shuttle carrying settlers to the red planet.

"A lot of us won't live long enough to see this mission with our own eyes," said Amin Al Zarouni, founder of the Bedu start-up behind the virtual Mars trip.

"We'll try to replicate this experience in the metaverse."

Until now, use of the metaverse is niche and even its architects say widespread adoption is years away. How it will develop is unknown.

According to Meta, which owns Facebook and other social media titans, Analysis Group research has shown that the metaverse could add $360 billion to GDP in the Middle East, North Africa and Turkey in 10 years, if it follows the growth pattern of mobile technology.

"We also know that when policy supports innovation, it accelerates the adoption of new technologies," the company said, when asked about Dubai's prospects of becoming a metaverse hub.

"If we look at the context of Dubai, there's already a clear strategy and goals to accelerate metaverse adoption and investments in the building blocks of the metaverse."

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Eyes glued to his mobile phone, farmer Sotiris Mournos pores over the latest microclimate and humidity data about his fields on the plain of Imathia in northern Greece.

The high-tech farming techniques he uses are making slow progress in Greece's tradition-bound and struggling agricultural sector, but growers like him see them as key to their future.

Mournos, 25, employs a Greek smart-farming app to boost production of his family's cotton fields and fruit trees.

Using real-time data recorded by a weather station, he can analyse and correlate the impact of weather conditions on his 10-hectare (nearly 25-acre) cotton plantation.

"We've managed to reduce the use of fertiliser and irrigation... (and thereby to) increase the financial return" of the farm, said Mournos, who gave up studying computer science at university to devote himself to the family holding in the town of Platy.

Measuring the humidity or the nitrogen level in the soil helps to curb the excessive use of fertilisers and saves water, he notes.

As in many other southern European countries, Greece's agricultural sector is chronically short of water and smart farming could help deal with that problem.

- Boosting yields -

The sector has also lost a major share of its available labour in recent decades, as young people snub farm work for better-paid jobs in services such as tourism.

Agriculture now represents just five percent of Greece's GDP, half what it was 20 years ago.

The government has budgeted 230 million euros ($231 million) over the next three years to revive the country's farming industry.

Most of that derives from the European Union's Common Agricultural Policy innovation fund.

"Most young people in my village prefer other jobs and have given up working in the fields," Mournos told AFP.

But he is making a go at farming, aiming to work smart by using the farming app for several years now.

It means he uses 40 percent less fertiliser on his cotton field and can avoid using two pesticide sprays -- altogether saving 9,000 euros (about $9,000) -- without affecting production rates.

Analysts say the farming app is not widely used in Greece although interest is gradually picking up.

But persuading farmers who may be less technologically minded than Mournos to embrace it faces myriad challenges.

A key hurdle is the small size of Greek farms -- less than 10 hectares on average -- and the country's largely mountainous terrain.

Greek farms are often family businesses or involve rented fields, making investment in tools and practices less appealing.

- Convincing farmers -

Meanwhile, an "endemic" lack of cooperation among farmers prevents them sharing costs, says Aikaterini Kasimati, an agricultural engineer at the University of Agronomy in Athens.

As a result, Greece lags far behind other European states in the use of smart farming, says Vassilis Protonotarios, marketing manager of Neuropublic, a company specialising in digital agriculture.

He said farmers could benefit from new technology without having to invest in expensive equipment or have "specialised digital skills".

Then, there is the difficulty of convincing farmers to try something new.

Organic farmer Thodoris Arvanitis says his colleagues are not interested in new technologies because they don't know enough about them and prefer long-used conventional methods.

"Farmers won't go after technology when they don't have enough money for fuel," he added, at his farm in the small town of Kiourka, some 30 kilometres (nearly 20 miles) north of Athens.

Attitudes may change in time as climate change puts additional pressure on farm costs, says Machi Symeonidou, an agronomist and creator of the agricultural IT startup Agroapps.

The war in Ukraine and its impact on global food supplies also shows that it is increasingly necessary to produce food at a local level, said agricultural engineer Kasimati.

"We see a constant degradation of fields and a fall in yield," she said, adding that water was also becoming expensive.

"But as the technology becomes simpler and cheaper, these tools will see more use," she added.

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Lisbon, Portugal-Nathan Hadlock moved to Portugal to escape the violence and lack of social welfare he saw in the United States, while still enjoying the sun and sea he had loved in California.

"Lisbon checked all the boxes," the 40-year-old American entrepreneur told AFP.

It even has a suspension bridge that is almost a dead ringer for San Francisco's Golden Gate.

"My partner and I were looking to slow life down and enjoy things more. And so we made a list of the top 10 places in the world and Lisbon quickly made it to the top."

The couple, who started a family when they moved to the Portuguese capital in 2020, were drawn by the weather, the good food, the cheaper lifestyle and the ease of travelling to other parts of Europe.

They also wanted to escape the darker sides of US society.

"One of the main reasons (US) investors are looking to move here, is their kids' safety. They often say, 'I don't want my kid to go to school and get shot,'" Hadlock insisted.

"And that's a real thing in the United States that just no one here in Europe has to experience."

Jen Wittman, who uprooted from the Golden State to Lisbon during the pandemic with her husband and teenage son, said the United States was "really kind of falling apart at the seams".

"The George Floyd incident and the pandemic, the political division, the racism... Everything was just getting overwhelming in America."

Having a European social net made a big difference too.

"America is terrible with health care. And it's terrible if you're a retiree and you have a health condition. Essentially in America you can be bankrupted by an illness," the 47-year-old said.

At around 7,000, the number of US citizens living in Portugal remains tiny compared to the 42,000 British expats who had made the country their home.

But while the influx of Brits -- the largest expat community from western Europe -- has begun to tail off, incomers from the States have doubled since 2018.

This year Americans are jostling with the Chinese for top spot among overseas investors lured by Portugal's "golden visas" -- residents permits issued for foreigners prepared to buy property or transfer capital to the Iberian country.

But most come on a D7 visa, which demands they have a regular "passive income" from pensions, rents or investments.

- 'Different mentality' -

Joana Mendonca, a lawyer for migration consultancy Global Citizen Solutions, speaks "almost every day" to US clients.

"Some come because they're digital nomads and want to work from home by the sea," she said.

"There are also entire families, who dream of one day getting their children into European universities.

"And there are retired people who sell everything in the States so they can enjoy a good retirement in Portugal."

Mendoca said Americans had "a different mentality" from other foreign investors, who were drawn to Portugal essentially by residency permits and tax exemptions.

"They really want to come and live here and adopt a different lifestyle," she said, even though the introduction of the golden visa scheme in 2012 has contributed to an unwelcome surge in property prices.

Hadlock started off as a digital nomad in Portugal. Now he works for an investment fund that buys up land for olive and almond groves in the rolling hills of the Alentejo.

The region south of Lisbon reminds him of California's Napa and Sonoma valleys.

- 'Surf and good wine' -

In Lisbon, Hadlock runs get-togethers to develop business ties between California and Portugal. The group calls itself Red Bridge, in a nod to the red suspension bridges spanning San Francisco Bay and the Tagus estuary.

Jonathan Littman, one of the members, still lives in California but is learning Portuguese.

He got to know Portuguese start-ups in Silicon Valley when Lisbon started organising yearly international web summits in 2016.

"We sort of see this as the California of Europe," he said.

"The surfing, the coast... We both have great wine. We both have a love of seafood and healthy cuisine. We both can be a little laid back."

Like her compatriots, Wittman and her family left the States to escape a "divisiveness" that Hadlock said is "pulling the US apart" and is palpable "as soon as you get off the plane".

But Portugal was not their first choice.

"We tried to move to Italy but they were not accepting American visa applicants at all," she recalled. "And so, we were like, 'Who in Europe will take Americans?' And it was Croatia and Portugal."

She and her husband run their own digital marketing company and have no plans to move back.

"It's safe. It's inclusive. We feel safe walking around, we feel safe at night. We do things that we could never do in America without being in constant fear," she said.

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Johannesburg (AFP) – South African Precious Moloi-Motsepe, one of the richest women in Africa, is a staunch promoter of fashion designers from the young, vibrant and culturally diverse continent