• Global jet fuel supply chains are adapting to wartime turmoil. In April, the head of the International Energy Agency warned that Europe had “maybe six weeks or so (of) jet fuel left” if oil supplies remained disrupted by the Iran war. Instead, imports from the United States, India, and Nigeria, drawn by higher prices in Europe, have staved off shortages so far.

• According to a recent industry report, US home internet has become much faster and cheaper over the past decade. Inflation-adjusted prices for popular broadband plans are down 43.6 percent since 2014, while average download speeds have improved by 145 percent.

• Competition between online retailers is making our lives even more convenient. In certain locations, Amazon and Walmart are now offering 30-minute delivery for a set of everyday goods.

Energy & Environment

Conservation and biodiversity:

• A mother puma with three kittens was recently spotted in Minnesota, the first evidence in over a century of pumas breeding in the state.

• Florida’s wildlife agency reports that there are 82 percent more loggerhead sea turtle nests in the state this year compared to the same period of 2025, the latest good news in a broader story of sea turtle recovery.

• Biologists have discovered a thriving deep-sea coral reef off the coast of Argentina. The scientists are still measuring the extent of the reef, but it may turn out to be one of the largest cold-water reefs in the world.

• Deforestation in Brazil’s Atlantic forest—the large coastal biome home to Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo—fell to its lowest level in at least 40 years in 2025, according to an NGO report.

• Ecologists in Namibia are testing whether satellite-linked animal tags can be used to detect sudden changes in wildlife behavior. By studying how the animals react to simulated hunting threats, they hope to train algorithms to recognize “animal panic” from satellite data and alert rangers to poaching incidents.

Energy and infrastructure:

• The number of homes in the UK with air conditioning has doubled over the past three years, reaching an estimated 4 million.

• As part of Tuvalu’s ongoing coastal adaptation work, engineers have reportedly expanded the land area of Fongafale, the country’s most populous islet, by more than 10 percent.1

Health & Demographics

• A gene therapy from Verve Therapeutics sharply reduced LDL cholesterol, a major causal risk factor for heart disease, in an early human trial. The treatment, which turns off the PCSK9 gene, lowered LDL cholesterol by 62 percent at the highest-tested dose. Drugs that block PCSK9 are a well-tested method of lowering cholesterol, but this new treatment aims to achieve the same effect with a one-time infusion.

• The FDA has approved the first treatment for chronic hepatitis D, a rare but dangerous liver infection that previously had no approved treatment options.

Science & Technology

• Emergency services dispatchers in Snohomish County, Washington, are using an AI system to triage non-emergency calls in an effort to reduce wait times and prioritize callers with urgent problems.

• Biohub, a biomedical research nonprofit, has released an AI-generated database of more than one billion predicted protein structures. For context, AlphaFold, the best-known AI protein-prediction system, includes a public database of 214 million predicted structures. Biohub says its much larger database could help scientists compare obscure proteins and generate new leads for medicine and drug design.

• Chinese researchers have sent human embryo models into space to study how microgravity and radiation affect early human development. The models are lab-grown stem-cell structures that mimic early embryo development, but cannot grow into viable fetuses.

• The Ocean Census, an international research project dedicated to accelerating the discovery of marine life, claims to have identified 1,121 likely new marine species in a single year, well above the usual pace of discovery. Much of the acceleration seems to have come from better coordination; 728 of the species were identified by researchers analyzing existing collections, and the Ocean Census also credits a new database that centralizes records of potential new species while they await formal scientific description, a process that typically takes over a decade.

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• President Trump’s decision to waive the Jones Act, a century-old law that restricts domestic shipping to US-built, US-flagged, and US-crewed vessels, is generating valuable information about the costs of maritime protectionism. Because compliant tankers are scarce and expensive, the law often makes it uneconomical to ship petroleum products by sea between US ports. Removing that constraint revealed how much trade the law had been suppressing. In the first 50 days after the waiver took effect, foreign-flagged tankers moved record quantities of petroleum products between the Gulf Coast and the West Coast. They also carried propane to Puerto Rico, where the Jones Act typically makes domestic shipments so expensive that buyers rely on foreign imports from as far afield as Chile. A better world is possible!

Education

• Harvard faculty have agreed to cap the share of A grades to 20 percent to control grade inflation. It’s not a perfect fix, as all lower grades, including A minuses, remain uncapped, but it’s a step in the right direction.

Energy & Environment

Conservation and biodiversity:

• Journalists are increasingly using satellite imagery and machine learning to detect illegal resource extraction in remote rainforests, where on-the-ground investigations can be difficult and dangerous. The Pulitzer Center and the nonprofit Earth Genome have used these tools to create systems that monitor the Amazon and tropical forests in Africa, flagging suspicious changes for reporters to investigate.

• A small population of critically endangered Raffles’ banded langurs is recovering in the treetops of Singapore, growing from 40 individuals in 2011 to at least 80 today. The recovery has been aided by citizen scientists, who have tracked the monkeys for years and helped conservationists identify good locations for rope bridges and food trees.

Energy and infrastructure:

• The Hormuz crisis is straining global energy markets, but also showing the resilience of the system. The Economist notes that, despite the loss of 14 percent of global petroleum output, crude oil prices have so far stayed far below the extreme levels that some analysts predicted. One reason for that development is that exports from outside the Gulf have surged, particularly from the US, where crude oil exports recently hit a record-high 6.5 million barrels per day.

• There are also signs of longer-term adaptation to oil supply risks. A second pipeline in the UAE, expected to begin operating next year, would bypass the Strait and potentially double the country’s non-Strait export capacity to 3.6 million barrels per day. And worldwide, electric vehicles are adding a small but growing buffer against future oil shocks.

• West Africa is making progress toward a regional power grid. A World Bank-financed program has built more than 4,000 kilometers of high-voltage transmission lines connecting the grids of 15 countries. Eight percent of the region’s electricity is now traded across borders, helping improve reliability and reduce costs.

Health & Demographics

• Eli Lilly has announced the main results of a phase 3 trial for retatrutide, its new GLP-1-based weight loss drug. In the trial, obese adults without diabetes lost an average of 28 percent of their body weight on the highest dose, broadly confirming an earlier result Lilly reported in December. That exceeds the results of the pivotal obesity trials for semaglutide (Wegovy) and tirzepatide (Zepbound), which produced average body-weight losses of roughly 15 percent and 21 percent, respectively.

• There’s more evidence that the US obesity rate has entered a sustained decline. Recent data released by Epic, an electronic health records company, indicate that the obesity rate has been falling since 2021. The increasing uptake of GLP-1 weight loss drugs is one plausible explanation.

• Four recent observational studies have found that people taking GLP-1 drugs tend to have better cancer outcomes, including lower rates of tumor progression and mortality, as well as lower rates of breast cancer diagnosis. The studies do not attempt to show causation; they are simply promising observations and signals for further research.

• A new analysis of Global Burden of Disease data across 204 countries and territories found that, from 1990 to 2021, the global age-adjusted prevalence of substance use disorders fell by 16.9 percent.

• The US has made commercial airline travel extraordinarily safe. The harder, albeit smaller problem is general aviation—think small aircraft, helicopters, and private jets—where the fatal accident rate is roughly two orders of magnitude higher. However, even this riskier part of aviation seems to be getting safer. According to the Federal Aviation Administration, there were 0.68 fatal general aviation accidents for every 100,000 hours of flight time in 2024, the lowest rate since the agency began tracking its current series in 2009, and likely the lowest rate in US history.

Science & Technology

• Waymo continues to expand its robotaxi service. The company says it has begun growing its service area in Miami, with expansions in Austin, Atlanta, Houston, and the San Francisco Bay Area close behind. Over the next few weeks, Waymo expects to cover more than 1,400 square miles across 11 cities.

• An OpenAI general-purpose reasoning model has produced a counterexample disproving a long-standing conjecture posed by the mathematician Paul Erdős. Unlike earlier AI-related progress on Erdős problems, where human mathematicians used AI tools largely as research assistants, the core conceptual work behind this new result appears to have originated from the model itself.

• Humanity has not lost the ability to create magnificent stone structures. Around the world, modern Hindu temples are being built with load-bearing stone, intricate hand carving, and design principles inherited from ancient architectural texts.

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Modern Hindu Temples

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• Sweden, long treated as a model of democratic socialism, has spent the past three decades moving toward freer markets. Following a period of economic stagnation and a financial crisis in the early 1990s, the country cut taxes, restrained public spending, opened parts of education and healthcare to private providers, and generally liberalized the economy. According to reporting from The Wall Street Journal, Sweden’s growth prospects now look unusually strong by European standards, with projections roughly equal to those of the United States and about twice as high as those of France and Germany.

• America’s productivity growth is recovering after years of post-financial-crisis stagnation. The Economist reports that US productivity has grown by about 2 percent a year over the past five years, up from 1 percent in the 2010s. Reflecting that welcome news, the Federal Reserve recently raised its median estimate of America’s long-run GDP growth rate from 1.8 percent to 2 percent.

Energy & Environment

• The United States set a new energy production record in 2025, the fourth consecutive year of growth.

• Mountain bongo antelope are returning to Kenya’s forests after nearly disappearing from the wild. The Associated Press reports that fewer than 100 wild mountain bongos remain, but a breeding program at the Mount Kenya Wildlife Conservancy now maintains a large captive population that is gradually being reintroduced to protected forest habitat.

Health & Demographics

• Tunisia has been recognized by the World Health Organization for eliminating trachoma as a public health problem. Trachoma is a bacterial eye disease that can cause blindness after repeated infections.

• A four-year evaluation of the RTS,S malaria vaccine pilot in Ghana, Kenya, and Malawi has found that introducing the vaccine led to a 13 percent reduction in mortality among eligible children and a 22 percent reduction in severe malaria hospitalizations, despite incomplete coverage.

Science & Technology

• Ramp, a corporate payments platform, has been tracking AI spending from its clients since 2023. In its April 2026 AI Index, the company reported that more than half of the businesses on its platform paid for AI tools in March, up from 35 percent a year earlier.

• Atoco, a company building machines that harvest atmospheric water, recently showed Bloomberg its latest prototype ahead of a planned commercial debut. The company was founded by Omar Yaghi, a Nobel Prize-winning chemist whose work helped pioneer metal-organic frameworks, which the device uses to pull drinking water from the air. Atoco says the machine can produce up to 4,000 liters a day, and while it will be more expensive than desalinated water, it could be useful inland or in places without reliable water infrastructure. The company is also developing a version that produces less water but runs on ambient sunlight.

• India’s Department of Biotechnology is funding a major effort to catalog the country’s genetic variation. So far, the survey has sequenced the genomes of 9,768 people and identified 44 million genetic variants that were absent from global scientific databases. The initiative aims to eventually sequence one million genomes, which would greatly expand the genetic map researchers use to study disease, ancestry, and human biology.

• The FCC has loosened rules that constrained low-Earth-orbit internet satellites by limiting the strength of the signals they could send to customers on the ground. Under the new rules, satellite networks such as Starlink could use up to eight satellites to serve a given area and frequency band simultaneously, up from one under the old limits, allowing the networks to serve more users at once and potentially improve internet speeds.

Violence & Coercion

• Crime continues to fall across the United States. According to data from 67 major police departments, homicides were down 17.7 percent in the first three months of 2026 compared with the same period in 2025. The same comparison shows a 20.4 percent decline in robberies, a 7.2 percent drop in rapes, and a 4.8 percent fall in aggravated assaults, continuing the post-pandemic drop in violent crime.

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• A common concern about data centers is that they burden local communities with noise and higher electricity demand without giving much back. Loudoun County, Virginia, offers a strong counterexample. The affluent jurisdiction was an early center of data-center construction and will soon get nearly half of its tax revenue from data centers, helping lower the homeowner property-tax rate by about 40 percent over the past decade.

• For years, governments have mostly agreed not to put tariffs on digital trade, meaning countries do not tax cross-border downloads, streaming media, software, and other electronic products the way they tax some physical goods. That arrangement recently came under pressure, with Brazil and some other countries reluctant to extend the measure because they worry it limits future tax revenue. Now, 19 countries including the United States have agreed among themselves to keep digital trade duty-free, helping preserve a small but important piece of open commerce.

Energy & Environment

• The Asiatic wild ass, which vanished from Mongolia’s Eastern Steppe in the mid-20th century after the Trans-Mongolian Railway fenced off its migration routes, is beginning to return thanks to targeted fence removals along the railway.

• Until recently, the Victorian grassland earless dragon was thought to be extinct after farms and suburbs destroyed almost all of its native habitat. Then, in 2023, scientists found a surviving wild population on a single private grazing property. Melbourne Zoo is now breeding the lizards, with the ultimate goal of returning a restored population to the wild.

Health & Demographics

• The World Health Organization has prequalified the first malaria drug designed specifically for newborns and small infants, clearing the way for UN agencies, donors, and public health systems to buy and distribute it in highly malarial countries.

• In a randomized controlled trial, an experimental pill helped men with pattern baldness regrow significantly more hair than a placebo. After six months, men taking the drug reportedly gained about 30 to 33 hairs per square centimeter of scalp, compared with about seven for men on placebo.

• The World Health Organization says that Sudan and South Sudan have eliminated maternal and neonatal tetanus, an infection that can kill newborns within days without proper care. Note that Sudan’s validation relies on data collected before its civil war began, so it is uncertain how that achievement is holding up.

• The government of Burkina Faso is reporting a major drop in malaria cases and deaths after adding the malaria vaccine to a broader prevention campaign. Recorded malaria cases fell 32 percent between 2024 and 2025, while deaths fell 44 percent, though officials note that the gains came from several tools working together, including vaccines, bed nets, seasonal prevention drugs, and insecticides.

Science & Technology

• Japan Airlines is testing humanoid robots as baggage handlers at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport, starting with the hard physical work of moving luggage and cargo on the tarmac.

• In a recent blog post, Jack Clark, one of the founders of Anthropic, argues that AI systems may soon be capable of performing AI research by themselves, citing major improvements in their ability to code, conduct research, and manage other models. If he’s right, it would raise the possibility of “recursive self-improvement,” a milestone that could dramatically accelerate AI progress.

Violence & Coercion

• New York City has recorded just 76 murders over the first four months of the year, the lowest number for that period in the city’s history.

• Jamaica recorded 673 murders in 2025, the lowest number since 1993 and a 40 percent drop from the year before. The country’s national security minister credits the decline partly to an increase in tips to police, which have risen nearly tenfold over the past decade.

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• India and New Zealand have signed a free trade agreement, making all Indian exports to New Zealand duty-free and cutting or eliminating tariffs on 95 percent of New Zealand’s exports to India.

Energy & Environment

• The United States Geological Survey recently estimated that there are over 2 million metric tons of undiscovered, economically recoverable lithium in the Appalachian Mountains, enough to supply the country for centuries at current levels of consumption.

• Salmon populations are bouncing back in California following dam removals and a series of wet winters. Responding to that recovery, the Pacific Fishery Management Council has reopened commercial salmon fishing off the California coast.

• Ribbed mussels are proliferating along Virginia Beach. These aren’t the kind of mussels you’d order at a restaurant, but ecologists say the growing population could help reduce erosion and clean up excess nitrogen, phosphorus, and bacteria in local waterways.

• Scientists have found some remarkably heat-resistant corals near the Houtman Abrolhos archipelago off Western Australia. During an extreme 2025 marine heatwave and in lab tests, the corals showed little bleaching or mortality at temperatures that are typically deadly to coral. The researchers are still trying to explain the source of that resilience.

Health & Demographics

• A recently published randomized controlled trial found that the GLP-1 drug semaglutide substantially reduced alcohol consumption in heavy drinkers compared to a placebo.

• Australia has eliminated trachoma as a public health problem. While the disease was already rare in most of the country, it remained endemic in some remote indigenous communities until recently.

Science & Technology

• California is now allowing companies to test and deploy driverless trucks, beginning with a safety driver behind the wheel, then moving to fully driverless testing, and finally commercial deployment once companies satisfy the state’s requirements.

• The Chinese battery manufacturer CATL has signed the world’s largest sodium-ion battery deal to date, which will supply 60 gigawatt-hours of sodium-ion batteries to Beijing HyperStrong Technology over three years. Sodium-ion batteries are less energy-dense than lithium-ion batteries, but they use cheaper, more abundant materials, making them especially promising for grid storage.

• A desalination plant in Saudi Arabia has set a new desalination efficiency record: a reverse-osmosis unit at the Yanbu complex used just 1.55 kilowatt-hours to produce a cubic meter of fresh water, below the previous 1.7 kWh/m³ benchmark set earlier in 2026 and the 2.34 kWh/m³ record reported in 2025.

Violence & Coercion

• Pakistan’s Punjab province has banned child marriage, following Sindh, which became the first Pakistani province to do so in 2013.

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• Over the past two decades, Paraguay’s national poverty rate has fallen from over 50 percent to around 16 percent. World Bank economists credit sustained economic growth of nearly 5 percent per year, along with rising labor productivity that has driven gains at the bottom of the income distribution.

• A new analysis of US incomes finds that each generation has ended up richer than the last, though the pace of progress has slowed in recent decades. The authors find that much of the earlier gains were driven by rising work hours among women, while more recent generations have seen smaller gains as that trend has leveled off.

Conservation & Biodiversity

• Forty years after their reintroduction, there are now over 900 Przewalski’s horses in China, some of which are living in “self-sustaining wild herds.” Przewalski’s horse was extinct in the wild by the late 1960s but is now recovering thanks to captive breeding and reintroduction programs.

• A recently published study of African elephants found that, despite a large and prolonged population decline, the species has generally maintained good genetic health.

• Following years of population recovery, Humpback whales are now regularly spotted in massive pods.

Energy & Natural Resources

• Desalination in California is helping reduce pressure on the Colorado River. By adding new supply, notably from the Carlsbad Desalination Plant in San Diego, coastal utilities are freeing up river water for other states in exchange for desalination funding.

• Clean energy generation rose by 887 terawatt-hours in 2025, outpacing growth in global electricity demand for the first time in history.

• The first LNG tanker has arrived at Golden Pass, a new LNG terminal on the Texas coast with a planned annual export capacity of 18 million metric tons. Once fully operational, it will rank among the largest LNG export terminals in the United States.

Health & Demographics

• The World Health Organization recently verified that Algeria has eliminated trachoma as a public health problem, and The Bahamas has eliminated mother-to-child transmission of HIV.

• The FDA has approved a gene therapy for a form of congenital deafness caused by a faulty OTOF gene. The treatment uses a virus to deliver a working copy of the gene, a technique that has shown very promising results in recent trials.

• In a small, early stage trial, an experimental mRNA vaccine for pancreatic cancer triggered long-lasting immune responses in a subset of patients. Only about half of the recipients responded to the treatment, but those who did had a much lower rate of cancer recurrence, though the study was small and not designed to show that the vaccine caused the difference.

Science & Technology

• Last year, Beijing hosted a half marathon for both humanoid robots and humans. The robots performed poorly, with the fastest mechanical finisher trailing the fastest human by nearly three hours. This year’s race was a different story: the fastest robot finished in just 50 minutes and 26 seconds, beating the human half-marathon world record.

• Google now claims that 75 percent of its new code is generated by AI, up from 50 percent in the fall of 2025.

• ASML has started selling a new extreme ultraviolet lithography machine that can potentially triple transistor density on computer chips. Using upgraded optics, the machine can print extremely fine patterns—just 8 nanometres wide—in a single step, allowing many more transistors to be packed into the same space.

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• An analysis from Brookings finds that the net price of college (i.e., “the sticker price minus scholarships and grants”) in the United States has fallen substantially in recent years, particularly for poorer students attending elite private institutions.

Conservation & Biodiversity

• Around the world, rising crop yields are allowing agricultural land to be returned to nature, but how long does it take for that land to regain a wild, abundant equilibrium? A recently published study in Ecuador’s Chocó rainforest found that recovery can happen fairly rapidly. After analyzing abandoned agricultural land at different phases of recovery, the researchers estimated that within 30 years, the land regained over 90 percent of the abundance and species diversity found in old-growth forests, and about 75 percent of their species composition.

• Another rainforest study finds that the Amazon may be more drought-resistant than previously assumed. The researchers argue that most studies of Amazon drought response focus on forests where groundwater lies deep underground, making them more vulnerable to lower levels of rainfall. Their study instead examined forests with shallow water tables—which make up a third of the Amazon—and found that even during a severe drought, tree mortality did not increase and tree biomass continued to rise.

• Thanks to habitat restoration efforts, Central California Coast coho salmon have enjoyed a run of fruitful spawning migrations. In 2025, 30,000 adult salmon returned to Mendocino Coast rivers to breed, up from 15,000 the year before and 3,000 a decade ago.

Energy & Natural Resources

• Quaise Energy, a geothermal power company, has announced it is building a prototype “superhot” geothermal power plant in Oregon. Their key innovation is a novel drilling technique that uses microwaves to break rock instead of drill bits. This approach could let Quaise tap into deeper, hotter rocks, and thereby generate far more energy than shallower wells.

• Fervo Energy, another geothermal developer, appears to be scaling up. The company recently ordered turbines totaling 1.7 gigawatts of capacity, enough to support dozens of standardized power plants.

Food & Hunger

• A new variety of banana genetically modified to be slow-ripening and browning-resistant has been approved in Japan and Brazil, and will be grown in the latter.

Health & Demographics

• The World Health Organization estimates that measles vaccination has prevented 19.5 million premature deaths in Africa since 2000.

• A new drug for metastatic pancreatic cancer nearly doubled survival time in a phase 3 trial, with patients living for a median of 13.2 months after treatment began compared to 6.7 months on standard chemotherapy.

• Organ donations have surged in the United States, partly thanks to improved harvesting methods. Until recently, most organs came from donors who were brain dead but kept on life support, with their circulatory systems still functioning. Over the past decade, however, advances in organ preservation and recovery have made it increasingly feasible to recover organs after circulatory death, when the heart has stopped and preservation becomes far more difficult. A recent study finds that in 2000, just 2 percent of donors fell into this category; by 2025, that had risen to 49 percent, with the number of such donors rising from 118 to 8,129.

Politics & Freedom

• The Economist’s democracy index shows a small global improvement in 2025, with scores rising or stable in 3 out of 4 countries. A welcome sign, though it does not make up for the significant democratic backsliding the world has seen since the 2010s.

• Thanks to satellite constellations, humanity now has the technical ability to provide internet connection anywhere on Earth. The biggest remaining barriers are political; many governments don’t want their citizens to enjoy unfettered access to the internet, or for their domestic service providers to have to compete with foreign firms. In Argentina, where such a ban was recently lifted, two million people have connected to Starlink, many of whom live in remote areas of the country.

Science & Technology

• A recent paper finds that AI models can outperform humans at fact-checking social media posts. After generating over 1,600 AI-written Community Notes on X, researchers compared them with human-written notes on the same posts and found that the AI notes were rated as more helpful by both left- and right-leaning users.

• Autonomous vehicles continue to make progress around the world:

  • The Netherlands Vehicle Authority has become the first European regulator to approve Tesla’s supervised self-driving software, commenting that “Proper use of this driver assistance system makes a positive contribution to road safety.” Seems especially notable coming from the world’s foremost cycling nation.

  • An autonomous bus will soon begin operating in Norway without a safety driver.

  • Uber and the Chinese self-driving firm Pony.ai are launching the first European commercial ​robotaxi service in Zagreb, Croatia.

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• The Wall Street Journal recently published a fascinating set of data visualizations showing how life has changed for the average American worker over the past few centuries. In short, despite all the hand-wringing over our transition out of a manufacturing-dominated economy, the modern worker has a lot to be grateful for.

  

Energy & Environment

• The New York State Department of Health has determined that, thanks to a reduction in water pollution—namely, declining levels of toxic polychlorinated biphenyl compounds (PCBs)—certain fish species in the lower Hudson River are now safe to eat in moderation.

• Conservationists in Zambia are using synthetic furs to reduce leopard poaching. An important festival of Zambia’s Lozi people involves dressing up in leopard skins. Rather than trying to end the practice, the cat conservation non-profit Panthera Corporation began distributing ultra-realistic synthetic pelts. According to a recently published study of the program, the fake furs were rapidly adopted by the Lozi and were followed by a drop in poaching incidents and a rise in leopard sightings by camera traps.

• The ampurta, a formerly endangered carnivorous marsupial found in Australia, has rebounded in recent years, expanding its range by an area the size of Denmark between 2015 and 2021. Researchers credit some of the resurgence to the 1995 release of rabbit hemorrhagic disease virus, which wiped out large numbers of invasive rabbits in Australia and thereby reduced the population of feral cats and foxes, major predators of the ampurta.

Health & Demographics

• In a small trial in China, a single-injection gene therapy improved hearing in all ten congenitally deaf participants. One even gained near-normal hearing within just four months.

• The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reports that traffic deaths in the US were 6.7 percent lower in 2025 than in 2024, reaching the second-lowest death rate per mile traveled ever recorded.

• US pedestrian deaths were 10.9 percent lower in the first half of 2025 than in the same period a year earlier, though they remained slightly above the 2019 level.

• An experimental hookworm vaccine sharply reduced infection intensity in a Phase 2 trial, with vaccinated participants showing a median of zero detectable worm eggs in their feces after exposure. If approved, this would be the first vaccine for the parasitic disease, which infects hundreds of millions of people each year and is a leading cause of anemia.

Science & Technology

• Rapid delivery is not only for urbanites. According to recent reporting in Bloomberg, Amazon now provides two-day delivery to 62 percent of rural and small-town households in the US, and one-day delivery to 20 percent.

• Total robotaxi travel distance doubled in California last year, from 3.8 million kilometers per month at the end of 2024 to 9.4 million in December 2025.

• Scientists at the Innovative Genomics Institute in California used sorghum leaf cells to model how thousands of genetic tweaks affect photosynthesis, building a detailed map of which changes could plausibly enhance the process. The researchers hope their insights will generalize across crops and offer new ways to increase yields.

• A new CRISPR gene-editing technique could make it much easier to engineer staple crops. Using a refined CRISPR enzyme they call CasY7, researchers from the South China Agricultural University were able to edit rice and maize genomes 2.7 times more efficiently than a typical CRISPR system, potentially speeding up the development of higher-yielding, more resilient crops.

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• UNESCO recently published an encouraging report on access to education around the world. It finds that 1.4 billion students were enrolled in school in 2024, 30 percent more than in 2000. Over the same period, the global “out-of-school rate,” which measures the share of appropriately aged children who are not enrolled in primary or secondary school, fell from 27.2 percent to 16.8 percent. Unfortunately, the report also notes that enrollment progress has stagnated over the past decade.

• Argentina’s national poverty rate fell to 28.2 percent in the second half of 2025, the lowest it’s been since 2018.

Energy & Environment

• Koalas in the Australian state of Victoria have long since bounced back from their near-extinction in the early 1900s, but many worried that inbreeding threatened their long-term prospects. Happily, a new genetic database suggests Victorian koala genetic diversity is also recovering.

• Whale populations in the Southern Ocean have rebounded to the point that researchers now regularly report spotting pods numbering in the hundreds.

Health & Demographics

• An analysis from Brookings finds that US health care spending in 2024 was $977 billion lower than the government projected it would be back in 2010. The authors attribute some of the gap between the projections and reality to technological innovations that have lowered the costs and improved the effectiveness of certain treatments.

• CDC data indicate that the decline in US drug overdose deaths continued into October 2025.

Science & Technology

• NASA has launched Artemis II. The flight will send four astronauts around the Moon—humanity’s first crewed journey out of low-Earth orbit in over fifty years.

• Data centers receive power from utilities in the form of alternating current electricity, but the computers inside them run on direct current. Because of this mismatch, most facilities end up converting electricity multiple times as it moves through the system, wasting energy at each step. This may now be changing: multiple data center infrastructure suppliers are developing new power distribution systems that require only a single AC-to-DC conversion, potentially making future data centers more resource and energy efficient.

• ChatGPT has solved a math problem on FrontierMath: Open Problems, a benchmark of unsolved problems designed to test AI systems. This is the first problem from the benchmark to be solved so far.

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• The United States is changing from a middle-class society to one of mass affluence. Data compiled by the economist Owen Zidar show that the number of “ultrawealthy” US households with a net worth of over $30 million (in inflation-adjusted 2025 dollars) is growing faster than the population in general, reaching 430,000 in 2022.

  

• Paraguay’s economy has grown by an average of 4 percent annually for two decades—a record of stability that helped earn it investment-grade credit ratings and is now drawing in foreign investors.

Energy & Environment

• There was a bumper monarch butterfly migration to Mexico this winter. The population was 64 percent larger than last year’s and covered the largest land area since 2018. The butterflies remain far below their historical numbers, but seem to have stabilized in recent years.

• Southern white rhinos are back in Uganda’s Kidepo Valley National Park for the first time since 1983, when they were extirpated by poachers.

• European forests continue to recover from their preindustrial nadir. According to the European Union’s statistical office, forests grew in 2023 in every EU country with data except Estonia.

Health & Demographics

• A pill for sleeping sickness that can cure the disease with a single dose has been approved by EU regulators and could be deployed in endemic countries as soon as next year. It’s far easier to administer than the current standard 10-day regimen and could make it much easier to treat patients in remote areas.

• A recently published meta-analysis found that people on GLP-1 weight loss drugs lose about the same amount of muscle, relative to total weight loss, as people who lose weight through diet and lifestyle changes.

• The FDA has approved a new kind of insulin injection for type 2 diabetes that only needs to be used once a week, rather than the standard daily dose.

Science & Technology

• Scientists at CERN have transported antimatter by truck for the first time in history. The goal is to eventually distribute antiprotons to other laboratories in Europe.

• A new electric vehicle charging system from the Chinese manufacturing giant BYD can recharge a battery from 10 percent to 70 percent in just five minutes.

• The Rwandan government has agreed to expand its partnership with Zipline to build the world’s first nationwide drone delivery network for healthcare. The system will extend beyond rural areas into cities like Kigali, enabling on-demand delivery of blood, vaccines, and medicines across the entire country.

• AlphaFold, Google’s AI system that predicts the 3D shapes of proteins, now includes predictions of how proteins pair up and work together in its database. As many proteins only function properly when bound to others, the advance could help scientists better model cells and develop new treatments.

• An Australian tech entrepreneur claims he used AlphaFold and ChatGPT to design a customized mRNA cancer therapy for his dog. Working with scientists at the University of New South Wales, the treatment was produced and administered in a matter of months.

Violence & Coercion

• The Global Terrorism Index reports that global deaths from terrorism fell by 28 percent from 2024 to 2025, reaching their lowest level since 2007.

• Best Friends Animal Society, an animal welfare nonprofit, estimates that the number of cats killed in US shelters has fallen 75 percent over the past decade.

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• There are now 61 snow leopards in Uzbekistan’s largest nature reserve, more than double the 2015 count.

• Using GPS-tracking collars, a system of mobile alerts, and more hands-on herding, cattle farmers in Botswana’s Okavango Delta are successfully coping with rebounding lion populations. Over a decade after implementing these technologies and techniques, both lion and cattle killings in the region have fallen.

Health & Demographics

• According to recently updated UNICEF data, 4.9 million children under the age of 5 died in 2024, down from 13 million in 1990.

• Patents on semaglutide will soon expire in many countries, including India, China, Brazil, Turkey, Canada, and South Africa, permitting cheaper generic versions of the weight loss drug in countries home to a large share of the world’s overweight population.

• Endometriosis, a painful condition where uterine-like tissue grows outside the uterus, is notoriously difficult to diagnose. A new blood test could help. In a recent study, it detected 80 percent of positive cases, ruled out the disease in 98 percent of negative cases, and caught 62 percent of cases missed by medical imaging.

• In a small, early-stage trial, an experimental RNA-modulating drug cut seizures by an average of 80 percent in children with Dravet syndrome, a treatment-resistant congenital form of epilepsy.

• There are some signs that young people are starting to adapt to social media by restraining their use. Large shares of Gen Z report having deleted a social media app, and time spent on social media appears to have fallen worldwide since 2022, particularly among young people.

Science & Technology

• Across much of the US, Amazon is now delivering certain products in three hours or less.

• An analysis of NASA’s 2022 DART mission, which sought to redirect the Dimorphos asteroid by crashing into it with a spacecraft, found that not only did the collision alter Dimorphos’s orbit around its parent Didymos, but it also slightly shifted both asteroids’ orbits around the sun—providing a proof of concept for planetary defense.

• Waymo now has 170 million miles of safety data for its robotaxis. The results are much the same as before: the vehicles are 13 times safer than human drivers (i.e., they are involved in 92 percent fewer serious injury-causing crashes).

Violence & Coercion

• The crime analyst Jeff Asher finds that rare but widely-covered “flash mob” looting events peaked in the US in 2024 and are now trending downward.

• A randomized control trial in northern Nigeria found that an educational program providing girls with schooling, vocational training, and after school support reduced their likelihood of being married as children by 80 percent.

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• In an attempt to address concerns about the accuracy of its national accounts, India’s Ministry of Statistics has revised how it calculates GDP. The new methodology finds that India’s economy is 3.3 percent smaller than previously estimated but also growing faster, expanding 7.1 percent in fiscal year 2025, up from an earlier estimate of 6.5 percent.

Energy & Environment

• China’s environmental ministry recently stated that the country’s economy grew 30 percent over the past five years while average particulate air pollution fell by 20 percent.

• Bearded vultures are recovering in the Alps. The wild Alpine populations were hunted to extinction in the early 1900s, but after decades of conservation work, they have rebounded to over 100 breeding pairs.

• Panama golden frogs are returning to the wild 17 years after they were wiped out by the deadly (to amphibians) B. dendrobatidis fungus.

Food & Hunger

• More farmers in more countries are planting genetically modified crops, which help raise crop yields and farmer incomes and often reduce the need for agrochemicals. According to a recent industry report, genetically modified crops were planted on 218.7 million hectares of cropland in 2024 across 31 countries, up from 181.5 million hectares and 28 countries a decade earlier.

Health & Demographics

• India has launched a huge HPV prevention program that aims to vaccinate each annual cohort of 14-year-old girls.

• Kenya and Zimbabwe have received their first doses of lenacapavir, which prevents HIV infection with just two yearly injections.

• Dogs are biting less in India. A 2025 survey reported 9.1 million dog bites, down from 17 million recorded in 2003. Over the same period, the number of rabies deaths in India dropped from over 17,000 to 5,726.

• Japanese regulators have conditionally approved two induced pluripotent stem cell therapies, one for Parkinson’s disease and another for heart failure, marking the first commercial approvals for the technology.

• The first large clinical trial of a vaccine against enterotoxigenic E. coli—a leading cause of travelers’ diarrhea and severe childhood diarrhea—has shown promising results. In a study of nearly 5,000 infants in Gambia, the experimental vaccine reduced dangerous diarrhea and produced no serious side effects.

Science & Technology

• A large psychology study finds that we consistently underestimate other people’s honesty. Across 11 experiments involving more than 8,000 participants, volunteers completed tasks where they could lie anonymously for personal gain—for example, by falsely claiming they guessed a die roll correctly to win money—and were also asked to estimate how many others would lie in the same situation. On average, participants overestimated the share of people who would lie by about 14 percentage points.

• The Metropolitan Museum of Art has begun adding highly detailed 3D models of artworks and artifacts to its website, letting online users inspect the objects from every angle. They also added an augmented reality feature for smartphones that allows you to interact with the virtual objects at their true scale, say by “walking through” the model of the Temple of Dendur.

• The US Federal Aviation Administration has announced a set of pilot projects for a new species of aircraft. Most will test eVTOLs, or small, electric, drone-like aircraft that take off and land vertically rather than using a runway. The program will let companies such as Joby Aviation and Archer Aviation trial passenger flights, cargo delivery, and emergency services while regulators gather data.

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• Operation Vulindlela, a South African deregulatory initiative, appears to be stimulating private investment in the country. Recently announced private infrastructure projects total 382.5 billion rand (23 billion USD), more than triple the amount recorded in 2024.

Energy & Environment

• Conservationists suspect that wild California condors have laid an egg in Northern California for the first time in more than a century, suggesting the population is beginning to breed on its own. After decades of conservation work, the endangered species has rebounded from near-extinction to more than 600 birds.

• A coral breeding lab in the Seychelles has recorded its first coral spawning event, a milestone for efforts to restore damaged reefs. Most coral breeding projects rely on cloning coral fragments, but spawning can produce more genetically diverse and resilient corals.

• The nuclear power company TerraPower has received a permit from the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission to build a sodium-cooled reactor in Wyoming, the first approval for a non-water-cooled commercial reactor in decades. Sodium cooling allows reactors to operate at higher temperatures and lower pressures than conventional water-cooled plants, which can improve efficiency. The design will also include thermal storage, allowing the reactor to store energy as heat during periods of low demand.

Health & Demographics

• A new working paper suggests that remote work may help boost fertility. Using survey data from 38 high- and middle-income countries, the researchers found that couples who work from home at least one day a week have about 0.32 more children on average than those who don’t.

• Undernourishment is falling again in Latin America and the Caribbean. 5.1 percent of people in the region were undernourished in 2024, down from 6.1 percent in 2020, but still slightly above the historic low in 2014.

• After 30 years without a locally contracted case, Chile has been verified by the WHO for eliminating leprosy.

• More than 200,000 children in Nigeria’s Kebbi State have received the R21 malaria vaccine, and local health centers report a 50 percent drop in malaria diagnoses since the vaccination campaign began.

Science & Technology

• Aurora Innovation, a self-driving truck company, has expanded its network to 10 routes, including a 1,000-mile circuit between Fort Worth, Texas, and Phoenix, Arizona. On such long routes, the company says its trucks can cut transit times in half by avoiding regulations that limit the number of hours a human trucker can drive continuously.

• The market analyst Daniel Marques found that Waymo’s recently disclosed remote operator ratio is far lower than that of its Chinese competitors.

• A San Diego biotech startup claims its new gene-sequencing system can read an entire human genome for about $100.

Violence & Coercion

• Croatia is officially free of landmines set during its 1990s war of independence.

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• A newly released working paper finds that fewer Americans are taking night shifts. The authors used two different methods to calculate the change between two different periods (see the charts below), with each showing a clear decline in the share of US employees working at night. They argue this shift is due to workers demanding higher wage premiums for night work rather than changes in the relative size of different industries, noting that “the trend exists in all major industries except retail.”

Energy & Environment

Conservation and biodiversity:

• The wood stork is no longer considered endangered in the United States following a sustained recovery from around 5,000 nesting pairs to over 10,000.

• The government of Kazakhstan is replenishing its portion of the Aral Sea, which was the world’s fourth-largest lake before it was largely emptied by Soviet irrigation projects. According to a recent statement from the Kazakh president, over the past 20 years, the water volume in the North Aral Sea has nearly doubled.

Energy and natural resources

• The Wall Street Journal reports that the US is producing record quantities of crude, even as oil prices drop. Thanks to technical improvements like remote monitoring and more efficient wells, as well as industry consolidation, drillers are pumping more oil out of the ground with fewer rigs and crews, reinforcing the industry against low prices and global competition.

• Also in the Permian, a nuclear startup is working with a major oilfield water handler to clean up drilling wastewater. The startup, Natura Resources, is developing small nuclear reactors that, under the agreement, will power water treatment and desalination systems, potentially making the vast volumes of contaminated water produced by oil wells safe for agriculture and other industrial uses.

• The data scientist Hannah Ritchie has created an online tool showing the relative energy consumption of various technologies. One general lesson is that the energy demands of devices that deal with bits are trifling compared to those that deal with atoms.

Health & Demographics

• Sugar prices are at their lowest level since 2020, and financial analysts credit falling demand driven by GLP-1 weight loss drugs.

• The UK has welcomed its first baby born via a transplanted womb from a dead donor.

• Surgeons in California have treated six children with spina bifida by applying stem cells to their spinal cords while they were still in the womb. The babies were born without major complications, and all showed reversal of a brain abnormality tied to the condition. The experimental therapy is meant to improve on standard fetal surgery for spina bifida, after which about 60 percent of children are still unable to walk independently.

Violence & Coercion

• While chattel slavery has been formally abolished worldwide, other forms of forced labor persist. Thankfully, though, they appear to be diminishing. Using data from the Varieties of Democracy Project, researchers at Our World in Data judged that just 9 countries still practiced large-scale forced labor in 2024, the lowest number in history.

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• The United States Supreme Court has ruled that President Trump lacked the authority to impose widespread tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. The ruling does not end President Trump’s broader tariff policy or invalidate tariffs created under other statutes, but it does strip the executive of one mechanism for unilaterally imposing sweeping trade barriers.

• China has promised to eliminate tariffs on imports from every African country except Eswatini, which maintains diplomatic relations with Taiwan.

Energy & Environment

Conservation and biodiversity:

• Elephant seals are no longer considered “near threatened” in South Africa after their population reached 5,500 in 2023, up from 3,000 in 2016.

• After being driven to the brink of extinction in Serbia in the late 20th century, the eastern imperial eagle—which graces the national coat of arms—has been reestablished in the country, with 19 breeding pairs recorded in 2025.

• The cheetah is back in India, and its population is growing. In 2022, conservationists began reintroducing the species using animals from Namibia and South Africa. As of this week, the wild population has risen to 38.

• In 2009, the UK began officially reintroducing beavers, which were extirpated in the 16th century, but only within closely monitored areas. Last year, those restrictions were lifted in England, and this year, there are plans to release around 100 beavers into the wild.

• Since August, according to official satellite data, deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon has fallen to its lowest level since 2014. If the trend continues, 2026 might see the lowest level of Amazonian deforestation since 1988, when monitoring began.

• According to a recent government report, forest and tree cover in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh expanded by roughly 338,000 acres (about 528 square miles) between 2017 and 2023.

Energy production

• Fervo, a geothermal energy company, has drilled a well with a temperature above 555 degrees Fahrenheit, its hottest well yet. The hotter the well, the more electricity each borehole can produce, boosting efficiency and helping move US geothermal closer to commercial viability.

• US companies are trying to repurpose jet engines into natural gas turbines to power data centers. According to a Jefferies analyst, about 1,600 commercial jet engines are retired each year, and if a third were converted, they could yield roughly 13 gigawatts of generating capacity.

Health & Demographics

• Libya has eliminated trachoma, a bacterial eye infection, as a public health problem, and Nepal is on the verge of eliminating Kala-Azar, a highly deadly parasitic disease.

• Measles is coming back under control in Europe and Central Asia. Cases fell 75 percent last year, dropping from 127,000 in 2024 to 34,000 in 2025.

• Canada is making progress against cancer. According to a recent government report, the five-year survival rate has grown from 55 percent in the early 1990s to around 64 percent today.

• The FDA commissioner Marty Makary recently announced plans to make one major study, rather than two, the agency’s new default requirement for approving new drugs. He argued that advances in biomedical science make duplicate trials less necessary, and that the change should speed up approvals and encourage more drug development. Makary has also promised to allow more drugs to be sold without a prescription.

Science & Technology

• Waymo recently disclosed that its fleet of 3,000 robotaxis requires just 70 remote operators on duty at any given time, a small ratio that suggests the vehicles rarely need human assistance.

Violence & Coercion

• The death penalty is losing ground in Southeast Asia. While only Cambodia, the Philippines, and Timor-Leste have fully abolished it, several other countries—including Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam—have sharply reduced executions or narrowed their use.

• The blogger Scott Alexander has assembled some arguments for why we should take the long term decline in US crime rates seriously:

  • The National Crime Victimization Survey, which asks people directly whether they have been victims of crime and operates independently of police reports, shows a broadly similar long-run decline to other crime measures.

  • Homicide and motor-vehicle theft, which are consistently reported and reliably measured, have dropped at similar rates to other crimes.

  • Improved hospital trauma care likely doesn’t explain the long-run drop in murder; research suggests that although medical treatment has improved, gunshot injuries have grown more severe over time, leaving overall lethality per violent act roughly stable.

  Astral Codex Ten

  Record Low Crime Rates Are Real, Not Just Reporting Bias Or Improved Medical Care

  Read more

  4 months ago · 319 likes · 682 comments · Scott Alexander

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• Argentina’s Senate has approved a major labor reform bill that loosens rules around hiring and firing and curbs union power. The bill still has to pass through the lower house, but the Senate—where President Milei’s party, La Libertad Avanza, holds a smaller share of seats—was the larger hurdle. As policy analyst Marcos Falcone recently discussed on our podcast, labor reform is a crucial step toward fixing the Argentine economy:

Argentina also has a very high degree of informality in its labor market because it’s very expensive to hire employees legally, and it can be even more expensive to let them go because of litigation. Businesses, particularly small and medium enterprises, are constantly trying to avoid litigation because they know, due to the way that the judicial system is set up, if they face a lawsuit by a former employee, they’re going to lose. This needs to stop, and the Milei administration knows this and is going to push for labor reform.

Energy & Environment

• US forests are absorbing historically high amounts of carbon. According to a recently published study, thanks to higher CO₂ levels, warmer temperatures, shifting rainfall, expanding forests, and maturing trees, US forests have stored more carbon over the past two decades than during any comparable period in the last century.

• China’s 2021 Yangtze fishing ban didn’t just benefit the porpoise: the whole river is recovering. A new study finds that Yangtze fish biomass more than doubled two years after the ban, with species diversity rising by 13 percent.

• The greater Bermuda snail, once thought to be extinct, is now thriving. After a few hundred were discovered in Bermuda’s capital city—likely the last of their species—conservationists bred and released 100,000 of them across the island, establishing six stable populations.

Health & Demographics

• Thanks to successful elimination efforts, fewer people need preventive treatment for neglected tropical diseases. According to the World Health Organization, around 1.4 billion people required large-scale distribution of preventive medicines in 2024, 92 million fewer than in 2023.

• The number of organ transplants in the US has increased nearly every year since 2013 (2020 was the exception), reaching a record 49,064 in 2025.

• In a large trial in Singapore, releasing male mosquitoes infected with Wolbachia bacteria—which prevents certain viruses from replicating and mosquito eggs from hatching—reduced dengue infections by roughly 70 percent.

Science & Technology

• Southwest Airlines plans to outfit more than 300 aircraft with Starlink by the end of the year, bringing faster and more reliable connection to passengers.

• Paul Erdős, a prolific 20th-century mathematician, left behind over 1,000 open math problems. Since October, researchers have used AI models to find solutions for about 100 of them—mostly by tracking down and combining overlooked proofs, but in some cases by generating novel solutions.

Tolerance & Culture

• Same sex couples in the Philippines can now share ownership of property.

Violence & Coercion

• There were 34,086 homicides in Brazil in 2025, down from 38,374 in 2024—the fifth consecutive annual drop.

• In the 12 months before September 2025, England and Wales suffered just under 500 homicides, the lowest number since 1977. Property crime is also way down from its 1990s peak.

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• 82 percent of rural Indian households now have access to tap water, up from just 17 percent in 2019, representing over 125 million new tap water connections.

• A recently updated report from our managing editor Chelsea Follett and the economist Vincent Geloso finds that not only has global well-being improved substantially since 1990, but global inequality in well-being has also fallen across many metrics.

• Another analysis published in The Economist finds that global inequality in consumption spending is falling. In 2000, the richest 10 percent of humanity spent 40 times more than the poorest 50 percent. In 2025, they spent around 18 times more.

• The United States has made new trade commitments, including large bilateral trade agreements with India and Argentina, and has also extended a program that lets many sub-Saharan African countries export certain goods to the US duty-free.

• President Javier Milei has also been unilaterally lowering trade barriers. As a result of his actions, Argentine consumer goods imports were 55 percent higher in 2025 than the year before.

Energy & Environment

• Saudi Arabia’s Royal Natural Reserve is now home to endangered red-necked ostriches, a close relative of the native Arabian ostrich, which was driven to extinction in the early 20th century. The ostrich is the twelfth creature to be reintroduced to the reserve as part of a plan to reestablish 23 species in the country.

• China’s endangered Yangtze finless porpoise is recovering thanks to a fishing ban. The population is now estimated at 1,426 porpoises, up from 1,012 in 2017.

• Deforestation dropped 25 percent in Colombia: the country lost 36,280 hectares of forest during the first three quarters of 2025, down from 48,500 hectares during the same period the year before.

• Bogotá is becoming less smoggy. Thanks largely to improved infrastructure, the Colombian city’s air pollution fell 24 percent between 2018 and 2024.

Health & Demographics

• A study of the RTS,S malaria vaccine’s effectiveness in Ghana, Kenya, and Malawi found that vaccinated children suffered about 30 percent fewer malaria cases and 58 percent fewer severe cases than their unvaccinated peers.

• A large UK study monitoring 25,000 teenagers over three school years found no evidence that time spent on social media or video gaming led to increased anxiety or depression.

Science & Technology

• Waymo says it now provides 400,000 robotaxi rides per week, up from 200,000 around this time last year. That number will likely grow even more this year, with the company planning to expand operations to more than 20 new cities.

• China has become the first country to issue commercial licenses for autonomous flying taxis.

• A new startup plans to sell a drone that autonomously monitors and herds cattle, potentially saving ranchers hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.

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• India and the European Union have agreed to an enormous free trade deal, with both sides committing to cut or eliminate tariffs on over 95 percent of traded goods by value.

Energy & Environment

Conservation and biodiversity:

• According to recently published field research, polar bears living in the Svalbard archipelago have been getting fatter over the past few decades. This is especially interesting because sea ice around Svalbard is shrinking much faster than in other polar bear habitats, something widely expected to harm polar bear populations by shortening their seal-hunting season.

• An ambitious attempt to restore the Galápagos Island of Floreana to its pre-discovery state is making progress. The initiative aims to eradicate invasive rats, cats, and other non-native animals, rebuild native habitats, and reintroduce around a dozen locally extinct species, including giant tortoises. Conservationists report that native wildlife is already starting to rebound.

Natural disasters and pollution:

• Boyan Slat claims that his non-profit The Ocean Cleanup removed over 27,000 tons of plastic from the world’s waterways in 2025, which he estimates is 2 to 5 percent of annual plastic pollution. If the operation can maintain its current rate of growth, it could meet its goal “to clean up 90% of floating ocean plastic pollution by 2040.”

  

• As countries begin to develop economically, they tend to damage their environment. However, after reaching a certain level of wealth, the trend reverses, and they start to invest more in clean technology, conservation, and generally taking better care of the environment.

  

  This relationship, known as the Environmental Kuznets Curve, is becoming flatter thanks to the global diffusion of cleaner technology. The chart above shows how peak carbon intensity is falling over time, with poorer countries reducing their emissions per dollar of GDP at much lower income levels than earlier industrializers. The energy think tank Ember recently illustrated this trend by comparing India and China, the former of which is curbing coal use and electrifying its economy at a much lower level of development.

Health & Demographics

• The CDC reports that US life expectancy climbed to an all-time high of 79 years in 2024, finally surpassing its pre-Covid level.

• Researchers have published the full results of the largest randomized trial of AI cancer screening to date, comparing mammograms read by one radiologist assisted by AI with the standard two-radiologist review. The AI-supported process cut the radiologists’ workload by 44 percent and detected 29 percent more cancers, without additional false positives. Women who received a negative result during their AI-assisted mammogram ended up having 12 percent fewer cancer diagnoses before their next scheduled screening than those in the control group, suggesting that the AI screen missed fewer aggressive cancers.

• The Healthy Minds Study, a large survey of US college students’ mental health, shows some improvement between 2022 and 2025: the share reporting severe depression fell from 23 percent to 18 percent, anxiety from 37 percent to 32 percent, loneliness from 58 percent to 52 percent, and suicidal thoughts from 15 percent to 11 percent.

Science & Technology

• Paleontologists have published their first comprehensive analysis of a giant fossil site in southern China containing the remains of a 512-million-year-old marine ecosystem. The team analyzed thousands of specimens from the site representing 153 species—nearly 60 percent of them new to science.

• Neuralink has now implanted its brain chip in 21 people with paralysis, allowing them to use digital tools like computers and cameras with their minds. According to a company blog post, some chip recipients can now operate a computer as fast or faster than the typical able-bodied user.

• Sometime next year, NASA plans to place the first radio telescope on the far side of the Moon. Far away from Earth’s atmosphere and protected from human radio interference, the instrument will be able to measure faint, low-frequency radio signals that are inaccessible from Earth, potentially leading to new discoveries about a wide range of cosmic phenomena.

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• According to World Bank data, the middle class now outnumbers the poor in Mexico. The calculation is based on World Bank income thresholds for upper-middle-income countries.1

• Iraq’s national poverty rate has fallen from 23 percent to 17.5 percent over the past three years, according to government data.

• The International Monetary Fund’s global economic growth forecast has grown more optimistic, with the world economy now expected to expand 3.3 percent in 2026, up from an earlier prediction of 3.1 percent in October. The revision is based largely on a surge in AI-related investment.

Energy & Environment

Conservation and biodiversity:

• The much-diminished European water vole population is rebounding in the East of England after a program to cull the American Mink, one of the vole’s predators.

• Thailand’s tiger population is enjoying a robust recovery, thanks in part to a newly protected forest corridor that is allowing the cats to expand into new habitats.

• The Kākāpō, a critically endangered, flightless, owl-faced parrot from New Zealand, is expected to have a very fruitful mating season this year.

• China created 3.6 million hectares of forest and 4.9 million hectares of grasslands in 2025, as part of its decades-long effort to control desertification.

• Once common across eastern North America, the American chestnut was nearly wiped out in the early 20th century by an invasive tree fungus. Since the 1980s, scientists have been trying to restore the species by breeding and genetically engineering blight-tolerant trees. A recent field trial in Maine shows the project is bearing some fruit: American chestnut saplings given a gene from blight-resistant wheat developed much smaller blight cankers than both their non-engineered counterparts and the Chinese chestnut, which coevolved with the disease.

Energy and natural resources:

• People in Nigeria imported solar panels with a combined 1,721 MW of generation capacity between June 2024 and 2025—equal to 5 percent of the country’s total electricity demand. The panels are bringing electricity to large swaths of the Nigerian population who lack reliable access to the national grid.

• Tesla has begun operating a new lithium refinery that the company claims is the largest and most advanced in the United States.

• Japan has begun the world’s first deep-sea mud mining test in an attempt to reduce its dependence on Chinese rare earth minerals.

• US recycling firms are investing billions in automating recycling facilities, using AI-driven vision systems and high-speed sorting to pull valuable metals, plastics, and paper out of waste. According to reporting in The Wall Street Journal, the new technology is making recycling far more efficient and eliminating some unpleasant jobs.

Natural disasters and pollution:

• Not only has human microplastic exposure likely been overstated, but new research from the University of Vienna finds that previous estimates of atmospheric microplastic pollution may have been exaggerated by “several orders of magnitude.” By comparing real-world environmental samples with widely used models, the researchers found that modeled atmospheric microplastic levels were 100 to 10,000 times higher than what measurements actually showed.

• A century ago, pollution in Boston Harbor was so severe that shellfishing was banned, save for a handful of licensed, tightly regulated producers. Now, after decades of cleanup, the state of Massachusetts is opening parts of Boston Harbor to shellfish harvesting by the general public.

Health & Demographics

• Moderna and Merck have released the results of a Phase 2b trial of their mRNA cancer vaccine. In the trial, the vaccine combined with the immunotherapy drug Keytruda cut the risk of melanoma recurrence and deaths within 5 years by half compared with Keytruda alone.

• India’s malaria incidence has fallen over 80 percent since 2015, according to an announcement from the health minister, while tuberculosis incidence has fallen 21 percent.

• US overdose deaths continued to fall during the first half of 2025. The CDC reports that there were 73,000 overdose deaths between August 2024 and 2025, 21 percent fewer than in the previous 12 months.

• Maternal mortality in Uzbekistan has fallen nearly 80 percent since 1991, from 65 deaths per 100,000 live births to less than 15. Infant and child mortality fell by around 75 percent over the same period.

• The investment banking firm Jefferies has calculated that, if widespread use of GLP-1 weight loss drugs makes airline passengers about 10 percent lighter on average, the resulting fuel savings could boost US airlines’ earnings per share by as much as 4 percent.

Politics & Freedom

• Poland’s government has approved a bill offering “cohabitation contracts” for couples of any sex, which would give same-sex couples some of the legal rights and protections of marriage without the formal title.

Science & Technology

• Shai Wininger, the president of the Lemonade insurance company, has announced that the company will offer 50 percent lower per-mile premiums for Tesla drivers who use self-driving—a testament to the technology’s safety compared to human drivers.

• This year, Walmart plans to launch Wing drone delivery in an additional 150 locations across the United States, bringing the service to 12 percent of the population.

• Zipline, another drone courier, has now made over 2 million commercial deliveries.

• Blue Origin is planning to launch its own Starlink-style satellite internet network. Unlike Starlink, however, Blue Origin will not serve the everyday consumer market; its goal is to provide speeds of six terabits per second anywhere on Earth—useful for very large-scale data processing.

Violence & Coercion

• A report from the Council on Criminal Justice indicates that the US murder rate in 2025 may have been the lowest since 1900. The research uses police data from 35 large American cities to approximate the national murder rate.

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• According to the World Bank, poverty fell in three-quarters of countries between 2021 and 2024. The organization also estimates that 80 percent of countries saw poverty decline in 2025.

Energy & Environment

Conservation and biodiversity:

• The critically endangered Lesser Antillean iguana is recovering after conservationists relocated some of the species’ last survivors to an island free of competing lizards.

• The endangered flat-headed cat has been spotted in Thailand for the first time in 30 years. Previously, scientists had suspected that the elusive feline was extinct in the country.

• Numbering just 384 individuals, the North Atlantic right whale is among the most vulnerable whale species in the world. Thankfully, its prospects may be improving; the population has grown about 7 percent since 2020, and scientists are reporting an unusually fruitful calving season this winter.

• Fishermen around Scotland are catching increasing numbers of flapper skate, suggesting that the endangered fish is recovering in the area.

Energy and natural resources:

• Amazon has struck a deal with Rio Tinto to supply US data centers with copper extracted by microorganisms. The company claims that the process, called bioleaching, produces pure copper from low-quality ore with far lower carbon emissions and water use than conventional smelting.

Natural disasters and pollution:

• For the first time in 25 years, there is no drought anywhere in California.

• Over the past few years, a number of widely publicized studies have made extreme claims about microplastic accumulation in the human body. But a recent investigation by The Guardian finds that much of the research is deeply flawed, with many reported detections likely driven by contamination and false positives. Critics say a commonly used detection method can mistake fats in human tissue for plastic, and that some studies report microplastic exposure that is simply “not biologically plausible.”

Food & Hunger:

• Hybrid rice, produced by crossing two genetically distinct parent varieties, typically produces much higher yields through a phenomenon called heterosis, or “hybrid vigor.” However, the benefit doesn’t extend to the next generation of seeds, which lose their yield advantage when replanted, forcing farmers to buy new seed every season. Scientists at the China National Rice Research Institute now claim they’ve solved that problem by creating hybrid rice that produces seeds that are genetically identical to itself, a long-sought breakthrough in rice breeding.

• The share of Rwandan children with stunted growth fell to 27 percent in 2025, down from 33 percent in 2020. Acute malnutrition declined from 8 percent to 6 percent over the same period.

Health & Demographics

• According to the annual report from the American Cancer Society, the five-year survival rate for US cancer patients has crossed 70 percent, the highest ever recorded. The report also estimates that improved cancer treatment has averted around 5 million premature deaths in the US since 1991.

• Stanford Medicine researchers have developed an AI model that can analyze sleep data to estimate a person’s future risk of more than 100 health conditions, including cancer, heart disease, and neurological disorders.

• The FDA has instructed Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk to remove suicide-risk warnings from their GLP-1 weight-loss drugs after concluding that the evidence doesn’t support the concern.

Science & Technology

• NASA is about to launch the first crewed mission in its Artemis program, which aims to return humans to the Moon and lay the groundwork for a long-term lunar presence. The upcoming mission will send four astronauts on a ten day journey around the Moon and back, marking humanity’s first crewed flight beyond low-Earth orbit in more than fifty years.

• Despite a communications blackout, Iranian dissidents were able to share footage of state violence online using thousands of illegal Starlink terminals. One researcher at Amnesty International said that almost every video they analyzed during the protests was uploaded by someone with access to Starlink.

• A Finnish startup is building glasses that automatically adjust your prescription based on what you’re looking at, using eye-tracking sensors and liquid crystals. They are marketing the device as a more flexible alternative to bifocal lenses.

Violence & Coercion

Crime

• There were just 97 murders in London last year, the lowest number since 2014. The murder rate was the lowest since 1997.

• In 2025, New York City saw overall crime fall 3 percent, murders fall 20.2 percent, and robberies fall nearly 10 percent, according to the NYPD.

• State Police data show a sustained decline in New Jersey shootings and car thefts.

• The number of murders fell 32 percent last year in DC, and violent crime in general fell 29 percent, according to metropolitan police statistics.

Treatment of animals

• South Korea has banned bear bile farming, a cruel traditional practice that typically involves confining bears to tiny cages for their entire lives.

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