A restructuring at the research organisation has brought redundancies

A key industrial research facility on Teesside has encountered financial difficulties and applied for an insolvency measure.

The Materials Processing Institute, based in Middlesbrough, is a centre of innovation in the country’s manufacturing sector, where researchers carry out pioneering work in areas such as advanced materials, industrial decarbonisation and digital technologies. It runs a range of facilities including laboratories, a metal alloys making site and offices used by a number of small and medium-sized companies.

Court filings show the not-for-profit organisation – which until recently had employed about 70 people and has roots extending back about eight decades – has applied to make a Company Voluntary Arrangement, a mechanism that insolvent companies can use to pay creditors over a specified time.

The move follows extensive investment in MPI over recent years, including millions of pounds of public funding to tackle productivity, sustainability and competitiveness-driving innovations. Most recently, MPI installed a new, seven-tonne electric arc furnace at its Green Steel Centre on Eston Road, creating a one-of-a-kind facility in the UK.

The equipment was supported by £2.9m grant funding from Innovate UK, part of national funding agency, UK Research and Innovation. In recent years similar sums have been awarded to the institute.

Total capital invested in new research equipment and facilities over the last four years is more than £10m. New facilities also include hydrometallurgy to look at the recycling of electric vehicle batteries and a pilot scale hydrogen gas network for investigations into fuel switching, hydrogen reduction processes and heating.

News of the CVA follows 2025 accounts for loss-making MPI, published in recent weeks, which includes details of problems encountered while trying to diversify the organisation away from a reliance on grant funding.

The company ran into what it called significant cashflow challenges that have prompted a full restructuring of the business – including a significant number of redundancies. Directors talked of the need to financially restructure MPI’s balance sheet, a process which is now being carried out via the CVA.

Within the most recent accounts, MPI said: “The company has experienced a challenging trading period during the year, resulting in losses and pressure on short-term cash flows. In response, management has initiated a restructuring programme aimed at reducing the cost base and improving operational efficiency. The company is currently in advanced discussions with its creditors regarding the implementation of a Company Voluntary Arrangement (CVA).

“The successful approval and implementation of the CVA is a key component of the company’s financial restructuring. The directors have prepared cash flow forecasts and projections, which incorporate the anticipated impact of the restructuring activities and the proposed CVA.

“These forecasts indicate that, subject to the successful outcome of the CVA, the company will have sufficient resources to continue trading and meet its liabilities as they fall due for a period of at least 12 months from the date of approval of these financial statements.

“However, the requirement to successfully agree and implement the CVA, represents a material uncertainty that may cast significant doubt on the Company’s ability to continue as a going concern. If the CVA is not approved or the anticipated support is not maintained, the company may be unable to realise its assets and discharge its liabilities in the normal course of business.”

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NEW YORK — Wordle players faced a tricky five-letter puzzle Monday, with Tuesday’s Wordle No. 1878 leading many solvers down false paths involving air travel and geometry before the correct answer became clear.

The word of the day was SNIPE, a term that can refer to either a family of long-billed wading birds or the act of shooting at a target from a hidden position — and, in its more common colloquial usage, a sharp, cutting remark aimed at belittling someone. The dual meaning tripped up a number of players who spent their early guesses testing unrelated five-letter words before narrowing in on the correct answer.

Wordle, the daily word-guessing game created by software engineer Josh Wardle in 2021 before it was acquired by The New York Times, challenges players to identify a hidden five-letter word within six attempts. After each guess, tiles turn green if a letter is correct and in the right position, yellow if the letter appears elsewhere in the word, and gray if the letter does not appear at all. A new puzzle is released daily at midnight in each player’s local time zone, and the game allows only one attempt per day, a limitation that has helped fuel its popularity as a shared daily ritual among friends, families and coworkers who compare results each morning.

Puzzle trackers and hint sites that cover Wordle daily noted that Monday’s word carried a moderate difficulty level, in part because of its unusual letter pattern. SNIPE contains two vowels and three consonants with no repeated letters, and begins with the letter S — a common Wordle starting letter that nonetheless left plenty of room for guesswork given the number of valid five-letter words that share that structure. Hint outlets that publish daily walkthroughs described the puzzle as one that rewarded players who used their early guesses to test common vowel combinations before committing to a final answer, rather than fixating on a single interpretation of the word’s meaning too early.

Several outlets that track Wordle results characterized Monday’s puzzle as one that produced a wide spread of outcomes, with some players solving it in three or four guesses while others needed the full six attempts to land on the correct word. Commentary from puzzle writers described the day’s clue landscape as one where “connection, teamwork, and smooth handovers” served as the guiding theme suggested by editors framing their daily hint columns, a device commonly used across puzzle-hint sites to nudge readers toward the answer without revealing it outright.

Wordle has become one of the most widely played online word games since its debut, spawning spinoffs including Connections, Strands, the Mini Crossword and, more recently, a sports-themed edition of Connections produced in partnership with The Athletic. The success of the format has also inspired a wave of imitators covering categories from geography to color identification, many of which now compete for the same daily audience of casual puzzle solvers.

For players who prefer to solve the puzzle without hints, strategy guides recommend opening with words that test a broad mix of common vowels and consonants, then using the feedback from that first guess to eliminate as many letters as possible before the second attempt. Players who already know a word contains repeated letters should not rule out reusing a letter in later guesses, since Wordle answers frequently include double letters — though Monday’s answer, SNIPE, was not one of them. Guides also generally advise against making random or “wild” guesses in the final two attempts, when the letter pool has typically narrowed enough that only a handful of plausible words remain.

The puzzle’s daily reset has made Wordle a recurring subject of coverage across major outlets, many of which publish same-day hint columns designed to help subscribers extend their personal win streaks without accidentally seeing the answer before they are ready. Streaks — the number of consecutive days a player has solved the puzzle — have become a central part of Wordle’s appeal, with the game tracking and displaying a player’s current and longest streaks alongside their guess distribution over time.

Monday’s puzzle arrived as part of a broader slate of New York Times word games published each day, including the standard Connections puzzle, the newer Connections: Sports Edition, and the Mini Crossword, all of which reset at midnight alongside Wordle. Puzzle enthusiasts often complete the full slate of games in sequence each morning, a routine that has become a fixture for millions of regular players since the Times folded Wordle into its broader games app.

The Times does not publish official difficulty ratings for individual Wordle puzzles, but third-party trackers that analyze aggregated player data have said the game’s average difficulty has remained relatively stable over the past year, even as the pool of previously used answers has grown large enough that some veteran players now try to anticipate which five-letter words remain unused in the archive. Puzzle-hint sites have taken to publishing running lists of common five-letter words that have not yet appeared as Wordle answers, a resource aimed at players hoping to gain a slight statistical edge on future puzzles.

As with every Wordle puzzle, Monday’s word will not repeat, and the archive updates automatically at midnight local time with a new challenge for Tuesday. Players who missed Monday’s puzzle can still access it through Wordle’s official archive, which allows solvers to catch up on past puzzles they skipped.

LOS ANGELES — “Jurassic World Rebirth,” the Scarlett Johansson-led dinosaur blockbuster that grossed nearly $870 million at the global box office last year, has landed among the biggest streaming movies of 2026 so far, according to newly released viewership data from Nielsen.

The film ranked third on Nielsen’s mid-year “Streaming Landscape 2026” report, which tracks viewing on connected televisions across the United States between December 29, 2025, and June 28, 2026. “Jurassic World Rebirth” racked up roughly 3.4 billion minutes viewed during that window, trailing only two Netflix original films: the Matt Damon and Ben Affleck crime thriller “The Rip,” which topped the list with about 4.4 billion minutes viewed, and Alan Ritchson’s science-fiction action film “War Machine” in second place.

The film’s placement on the list is notable in part because it is not a Netflix original production. “Jurassic World Rebirth” first arrived on Peacock last October under an existing licensing arrangement between NBCUniversal and Netflix, before landing on Netflix itself in February 2026. That dual-platform release, sometimes referred to in the streaming industry as a “Pay 1” window, gave the film access to two of the largest streaming audiences in the country and is widely credited with helping drive its viewership total well past several theatrical hits that debuted on streaming later in the period, including “Sinners” and “One Battle After Another,” the latter of which failed to crack Nielsen’s top 10 despite winning acclaim during awards season.

Directed by Gareth Edwards from a script by David Koepp, “Jurassic World Rebirth” serves as the seventh installment in the franchise that began with Steven Spielberg’s 1993 original “Jurassic Park.” The film picks up five years after the events of “Jurassic World Dominion” and follows Johansson as Zora Bennett, a covert operations specialist who leads a team on a mission to a remote island once used for secretive genetic research. Their objective is to extract DNA from three of the largest dinosaur species that remain, including a Mosasaurus, a Tyrannosaurus rex and a Titanosaurus, a task complicated when the team encounters a range of genetically modified creatures on the island.

The film also stars Mahershala Ali, Jonathan Bailey, Rupert Friend, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo and Ed Skrein, and was produced by longtime franchise collaborators Frank Marshall and Patrick Crowley under Amblin Entertainment and Universal Pictures.

Released theatrically on July 2, 2025, “Jurassic World Rebirth” earned approximately $339.6 million domestically on its way to a worldwide total of roughly $869 million, against a production budget reported to be between $180 million and $225 million. While that made it one of the highest-grossing films of last year and the sixth-highest-grossing release of 2025 overall, it fell short of the $1 billion mark reached by several of the franchise’s earlier installments, making it the first “Jurassic” film since “Jurassic Park III” not to cross that threshold. The film also received a nomination for best visual effects at the most recent Academy Awards, marking the first Oscar nomination for the franchise in any category since “The Lost World: Jurassic Park.”

Despite its comparatively softer theatrical performance relative to earlier entries in the series, the film’s streaming success has reinforced Universal’s plans to continue the franchise. A sequel was confirmed to be in development following the film’s theatrical run, though the project hit a setback earlier this year when Edwards departed amid reported creative differences over the direction of the follow-up. It remains unclear who will step in to direct the next installment, or how the change might affect the film’s timeline.

The film’s continued popularity on streaming comes as Johansson prepares for another high-profile franchise turn, joining director Mike Flanagan’s upcoming reboot of “The Exorcist,” slated for release next year. Johansson has emerged as one of the most consistently bankable stars in Hollywood across both theatrical and streaming platforms in recent years, with “Jurassic World Rebirth” marking her second major franchise commitment following her long-running role as Natasha Romanoff, or Black Widow, in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Nielsen’s report also highlighted broader trends shaping the streaming landscape during the first half of 2026, including Netflix’s continued dominance of original film production and the growing importance of shared theatrical-to-streaming distribution windows for major studio releases. Alongside “Jurassic World Rebirth,” Universal’s animated hit “How to Train Your Dragon” also benefited from an early Peacock-to-Netflix shared window, landing at number 15 on the same chart. Netflix additionally claimed several of the top spots among family and animated titles during the period, led by its in-house original “KPOP Demon Hunters,” which ranked second overall among all films with more than 5.5 billion minutes viewed.

The Nielsen data underscores a broader shift in how audiences are consuming major theatrical releases, with streaming viewership increasingly rivaling — and in some cases surpassing — the cultural impact of a film’s original box office run. For “Jurassic World Rebirth,” that shift appears to have extended its commercial life well beyond its theatrical release window, cementing its place as one of the defining blockbusters of the past year even as the franchise’s next chapter remains in flux following its director’s exit.

“Jurassic World Rebirth” is currently available to stream on Netflix.