• According to the World Bank, the number of economies with high levels of inequality, defined as having a Gini coefficient greater than 40, fell by 40 percent between 1995 and 2024. The Gini coefficient measures how unevenly incomes are distributed across a population, with zero representing perfect equality and 100 representing a situation in which one person receives everything.

Past Imperfect

A Reality Check on the Inequality Panic

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called for far higher taxation in a recent blog entry, arguing that current wealth concentration is higher than that of the Gilded Age and is about to get worse globally. The chart-topping singer Billie Eilish implored billionaires to…

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3 months ago · 36 likes · 8 comments · Chelsea Olivia Follett

• The latest Energy Progress Report, jointly produced by five international agencies, contains some impressive figures:

  • 92 percent of the world’s population had access to electricity in 2024, up from 84 percent in 2010. About 86 percent of those still without electricity lived in Sub-Saharan Africa.

  • 75 percent of the global population had access to clean cooking fuels in 2024, up from 57 percent in 2010.

  • Global primary energy intensity—the amount of energy used per unit of economic output—fell from approximately 4.75 megajoules per 2021 purchasing power parity-adjusted dollar of GDP in 2010 to 3.76 megajoules in 2023, a decline of about 21 percent.

Energy & Environment

• The co-founder of The Humpback Whale Project, a Brazilian research and conservation nonprofit, estimates that the western South Atlantic humpback population has grown from around 2,000 whales four decades ago to roughly 35,000 today, approaching or possibly matching its estimated pre-commercial whaling abundance.

• The New York Times recently reported on a research center in South Carolina that burns houses to better understand how wildfires spread through neighborhoods. Funded by the insurance industry, the research identifies the physical mechanisms that allow flames and embers to ignite buildings and is helping inform building standards and wildfire-mitigation programs across the country.

Food & Hunger

• The European Union is substantially loosening its restrictions on certain gene-edited crops. Last month, the European Parliament passed a law that will allow plants with genetic modifications that could occur naturally or through conventional breeding to bypass the EU’s onerous approval process for genetically modified organisms. The new regulatory process is expected to take effect in around two years.

Health & Demographics

• Fewer teenagers are dying in motor-vehicle crashes in the United States. According to data from the US Department of Transportation, 2,899 teenagers died in crashes in 2024, 67 percent fewer than in 1975, though motor-vehicle crashes remained the leading cause of death for US teens.

• Hospital-acquired infections have become less common in the US. A CDC survey of 13,653 patients at 218 hospitals found that 2.6 percent had at least one infection acquired during care in 2023, down from 3.2 percent in 2015. Over the same period, the estimated annual number of infections fell from 687,000 to 518,000.

• The FDA has approved a pill that blocks PCSK9, a protein that limits the liver’s ability to remove LDL cholesterol from the blood. In trials, the drug lowered LDL cholesterol by roughly 60 percent. Injectable drugs that treat high cholesterol the same way are already approved but carry list prices of around $500 per month. The new pill will be listed at $315 per month.

• El Salvador has become the first country in Central America to eliminate trachoma as a public health problem. Trachoma is an eye infection that can cause blindness after several untreated infections.

Science & Technology

• The Federal Communications Commission has approved a test flight of a satellite designed to reflect sunlight to the dark side of the Earth, potentially useful for harvesting solar energy at night or simply illuminating an area without the need for electric lighting. The prototype satellite, Eärendil-1, is equipped with a 60-foot mirror that can light up a three-mile-wide circle on the Earth’s surface.

• Drones are now assisting with a variety of public services:

  • In Australia, land managers used drones to clear an island of mice, and authorities are employing drone pilots to help warn beachgoers about great white sharks.

  • In India, a pilot program is using drones to rapidly transport phlegm samples from rural areas to laboratories for tuberculosis testing, helping patients avoid costly trips to distant testing centers.

  • During recent floods in China, rescue operators used drones to deliver emergency supplies and hoist stranded people to safety.

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• Five countries—Vietnam, the Philippines, Micronesia, Sri Lanka, and Jordan—advanced from lower-middle income status to upper-middle income this year, according to the World Bank. In addition, Togo moved from low to lower-middle income, but mostly thanks to a large reduction to its population estimate. No countries moved down.

• Interjurisdictional competition is paying off in North America. In Vancouver, the Squamish Nation is using a parcel of its land that is not subject to the city’s zoning authority to build large residential towers that would be illegal under Vancouver’s extremely restrictive zoning rules. And in the United States, data center developers are courting Indian reservations, attracted by the possibility of securing faster approvals from sovereign tribal governments.

• Norway is currently building a 26.7-kilometer-long subsea road tunnel, which will be the longest and deepest in the world once completed.

• North Carolina has passed a law that will abolish mandatory parking minimums in most of the state, following similar, though less extensive, reforms in California, Colorado, Montana, Washington, and Maine.

Energy & Environment

Conservation and biodiversity:

• Two decades after rats were eliminated from Lundy Island in the UK’s Bristol Channel, its seabird populations are soaring. The island’s total seabird population has risen from 7,351 in 2000 to more than 40,000 today, including 1,335 puffins and more than 150 breeding pairs of storm petrels, which had previously vanished from the island.

• Researchers at Australia’s Macquarie University have developed an AI system designed to detect trafficked marine wildlife in packages and luggage. In simulated tests on bags that incorporated classic smuggling tricks, the system detected concealed shark fins and seahorses 95 to 96 percent of the time and sea cucumbers 86 percent of the time.

Energy and natural resources:

• Since 1976, the solar panel industry has maintained a long-run learning rate of 26 percent, meaning that module prices have fallen by an average of 26 percent each time cumulative global production doubled, according to a recent industry report. The report also notes that manufacturers shipped roughly the same volume of modules in 2025 as in 2024 while using about 20 percent less silver.

• Several major automakers are adapting to high copper prices by replacing some of their copper wiring with aluminum. Ferrari claims that switching to aluminum is not only cheaper but can reduce total wiring weight by up to 20 percent.

• Four nuclear startups participating in Department of Energy reactor-testing programs have brought experimental reactors to criticality, meaning they can sustain controlled nuclear chain reactions. The department had aimed to reach that milestone with at least three designs by July 4; the companies delivered four. Analysts at the Breakthrough Institute argue that the programs are restoring a crucial stage in the nuclear innovation cycle by allowing companies to build, test, and improve reactor designs before attempting to build costly commercial-scale plants.

The Ecomodernist

From Paper to Real-Life Reactors: The Holistic View of the Reactor Pilot Program

The July 4 deadline for the Department of Energy’s Reactor Pilot Program (RPP) is just days away, and the program has met its central early test: three advanced test reactors have reached criticality on an extraordinarily compressed timeline…

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18 days ago · 47 likes · Adam Stein and Spencer Toohill

Pollution:

• The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has proposed a practical disposal pathway for “Greater-Than-Class-C” nuclear waste, the most radioactive category of low-level nuclear waste, which currently has no functioning disposal route and is instead being held at various power plants, hospitals, and other facilities across the country. The proposed rule would tailor disposal requirements to the radioactivity of the material, potentially allowing nearly 80 percent of GTCC waste to be buried near the surface rather than in a deep geological repository, which does not currently exist in the United States for this kind of waste.

Health & Demographics

• According to a recent Gallup poll, 11 percent of US adults now take GLP-1 drugs for weight loss, up from 3 percent in 2024.

• The recent drop in US traffic deaths has continued into early 2026. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, traffic deaths were 4.3 percent lower in the first three months of 2026 than during the same period of 2025. If the trend continues, 2026 will mark the fifth consecutive year of falling traffic deaths.

• Wolbachia-infected mosquitoes are now being released in the DC area in an effort to control mosquito populations. The released mosquitoes are all male, meaning they don’t bite, and the bacteria they carry cause any eggs produced when they mate with wild females to fail to hatch.

• Likang Life Sciences, a Chinese biotech company, has begun building a production line for AI-assisted personalized cancer vaccines. The facility, expected to open in October, will start by producing LK101, an experimental mRNA vaccine tailored to the mutations in each patient’s tumor.

Science & Technology

• China has landed the booster stage of an orbital rocket, replicating a version of the feat pioneered by SpaceX in 2015.

• An index from the Center for AI Safety finds that frontier AI models are getting much better at completing economically valuable work. The researchers gave AI agents realistic projects in fields such as graphic design, video production, software development, and data analysis, then compared their work with examples produced by human professionals. They found that Fable 5, the best-performing system, completed roughly 16 percent of the projects to an acceptable standard. In late 2025, when the index launched, the best model completed just 2.5 percent of projects acceptably.

• In its first 18 months surveying the sky, the European Space Agency’s Euclid Space Telescope discovered 31 quasars, extremely bright galactic cores powered by supermassive black holes. Twelve date to the universe’s first 770 million years, more than doubling the number previously known from that period. The expanded sample could help astronomers explain how such enormous black holes formed so soon after the Big Bang.

Violence & Coercion

• Four men have been brought to trial in Sierra Leone over the alleged forced marriage of a 17-year-old girl. Activists say the trial—the first of its kind in the country—shows that the national ban on child marriage is starting to be enforced.

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• The Federal Aviation Administration has proposed a new rule that would allow civilian aircraft to fly faster than Mach 1 over the United States if their sonic booms stay below a strict noise threshold at ground level. If finalized, the rule, along with another planned rule that would set landing and takeoff noise standards for supersonic aircraft, would end the 1970s ban on overland civilian supersonic flight.

• Finland has retired its analog copper-wire phone network, material-intensive infrastructure made obsolete by fiber optic cables.

A single fiber optic cable made from less than 150 pounds of silica can carry the same volume of information as multiple 1‑ton copper cables.

“Markets and Dematerialization,” Jonathan H. Adler.

• Artificial intelligence seems to be enabling a surge of solo entrepreneurs and tiny startups.

Energy & Environment

• Ontario Power Generation has begun construction on what may become the Western world’s first grid-scale small modular reactor.

• Air pollution in Europe continues to decline, according to the latest report from the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service.

• Since 2020, and for the first time since the Middle Ages, forests have occupied a greater land area in Italy than farmland, with the former extending over more than a third of the national territory.

• US Atlantic mackerel stocks, which were deemed overfished in 2017, now appear to be recovering, with surveys turning up abundant quantities of mackerel and their eggs in 2024.

• Red kites, once nearly wiped out in Britain, are now numerous enough that English conservationists are sending them back to Spain. In the 1990s, Britain imported red kites from Spain and Sweden to rebuild the domestic population; since then, the UK population has risen from roughly 160 breeding pairs in 1995 to at least 4,600. In recent years, after surveys found only a handful of breeding pairs left in Extremadura, conservationists have released 126 English-born red kites to the Spanish region.

• For decades, a coral community has been developing in the Port of Miami, home to endangered staghorn and elkhorn corals, large brain corals, fish, manatees, turtles, and other marine life. Intriguingly, scientists have discovered that the Miami corals are unusually resilient. They have survived pollution, disease, freshwater runoff, and extreme temperature swings that devastated other staghorn and elkhorn coral populations in the region.

• The US Fish and Wildlife Service and Colossal Biosciences recently announced a plan to create a cryogenic “BioVault” for the tissues and genetic material of around 2,300 species protected under the Endangered Species Act.

Health & Demographics

• In 2025, the age-adjusted death rate in the United States fell to a record low of 689 deaths per 100,000 people, thanks partly to falling overdose deaths.

• The FDA has expanded approval of Casgevy, a CRISPR-based gene therapy for sickle cell disease, to children as young as two.

Science & Technology

• A recent working paper finds that advice from large language models may make people’s decisions less extreme, despite the tendency of chatbots to behave sycophantically toward their users. In a large experiment, the researchers found that people who chatted with AI tended to move away from their initial judgments on a range of tasks, narrowing the gap between participants who started on opposite sides. The researchers propose that the mechanism is new information: even when the AI agreed with or flattered its users, it also offered new facts and counterarguments that sometimes changed their minds. Making the AI more sycophantic weakened that depolarizing effect, but did not reverse it.

• Google’s earthquake warning system, which uses accelerometers in Android phones as seismic sensors, sent alerts to 11.4 million people in Venezuela last week, giving them precious seconds to prepare for the tremors. It’s not yet known how many lives the warnings may have saved.

• Conception, a biotechnology company trying to make human eggs in the lab, says it is making progress toward that goal. This week, the company reported that it has produced early human egg cells, or primary oocytes, inside miniature ovaries grown from stem cells. The oocytes are not mature eggs, but Conception says they showed signs of entering meiosis, the special cell division required to make eggs, and forming into follicles, the ovarian structures that nurture developing eggs.

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• Mission 300, a collaborative effort by the World Bank, the African Development Bank, The Rockefeller Foundation, and other public and private partners, has connected over 50 million people in Africa to electricity since launching in 2024. The initiative intends to connect 300 million by 2030.

Energy & Environment

• According to data compiled by the US Energy Information Administration, China’s nuclear energy generation capacity nearly doubled between 2016 and 2026, growing from 31.4 gigawatts to 58.7. The EIA also reports that 36 reactors, totaling another 38.9 GW of capacity, are currently being built in China, making up 49 percent of all global nuclear energy construction. All that development has led to learning; nuclear power plants in China are completed in an average of six years, three years faster than the global average.

• Loggerhead sea turtles are nesting in record numbers on the beaches of Boa Vista, a large island in the Cabo Verde archipelago. According to a recent study, nesting activity increased 80-fold between 1998 and 2024. The research also found that during peak years, some Boa Vista beaches contained over 22,000 nests per kilometer of shoreline—an incredible density compared with other major nesting sites.

• In the early 2000s, a population of flamingos began making the Venetian Lagoon their winter home. Since then, the annual population peak has risen to nearly 24,000 birds. The Associated Press quotes an ornithologist who claims the lagoon is now “one of the most important wintering spots in its entire habitat range.”

Food & Hunger

• Solar-powered cold storage systems are helping farmers save more of their produce in Africa, where many rural areas lack reliable electricity. SoKo Fresh, a Kenyan firm that leases space in solar cold rooms, claims its customers have cut spoilage from as high as 50 percent to under 2 percent.

Health & Demographics

• Doctors in Ontario recently used an experimental treatment to help treat a burn victim’s face. Instead of skin grafts, which can cause disfiguring scars, the doctors obtained a compassionate-use authorization to treat her face with exosomes, microscopic particles released by cells that carry repair signals to damaged tissues. After two treatments, her facial burns healed without grafting.

• An AI tool may have saved a man’s life in New York City. In a recent case report, a patient came to an emergency room with shortness of breath and was discharged with a presumed asthma flare-up. In reality, his heart was failing. Luckily, an AI model being trialed at the hospital analyzed his electrocardiogram, a routine test of the heart’s electrical activity, and flagged a high risk of structural heart disease. The patient was then called back and ultimately received a heart transplant. Pathway Labs, the company commercializing the AI software, plans to make it available for free to any physician who uses OpenEvidence, its free medical AI platform.

• CAR-T immunotherapy, which has so far been used mostly against blood cancers, is beginning to move into solid tumors. This week, a CAR-T immunotherapy called satri-cel became the first approved CAR-T therapy for solid tumors after receiving a green light from Chinese regulators.

• In England, zero women aged 20 to 24 died of cervical cancer between 2020 and 2024, the first recorded five-year period during which that has happened. Recent research associates the achievement with widespread HPV vaccination.

• Like the US, Canada is also seeing a large decline in overdose deaths. According to federal data, opioid-related deaths in Canada fell 23 percent between 2024 and 2025, while stimulant-related deaths fell 31 percent.

• The share of adults in India who use tobacco halved between 2000 and 2022, dropping from 50 percent to 24 percent.

Science & Technology

• Researchers involved in the Vesuvius Challenge have used detailed X-ray scans and machine learning to digitally “unroll” and read the surviving text of an entire carbonized Herculaneum scroll. The researchers had already used similar methods to read parts of other carbonized scrolls, but this recent work marked the first time the preserved text of a rolled Herculaneum scroll had been read end to end. Unfortunately, because earlier attempts to physically unroll the scroll damaged its outer layers, only fragments of the original text are legible.

• “SpaceX has now launched more satellites than the rest of humanity, combined.”

• PepsiCo is operating a fleet of 35 driverless trucks in Arizona in what The Wall Street Journal describes as “the first major U.S. consumer-goods company to disclose the real-life, large-scale use of autonomous trucks on public roads.”

• A recent analysis of taxonomic history finds that the rate of species discovery has accelerated, with the annual number of new species descriptions rising above 16,000 between 2015 and 2020 and surpassing the previous peak in the early 1900s. The researchers also estimate that about 15 percent of all known species have been formally described in the past 20 years alone.

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• A new study finds that economic liberalization is not at odds with protecting the environment. After examining 49 cases of sustained economic liberalization since 1970, economists Justin Callais, Vincent Geloso, and Alicia Plemmons found that, compared with similar countries that did not liberalize, reforming countries saw GDP per capita rise 16 percent within ten years, no effect on total greenhouse gas emissions, and a modest decline in air pollution deaths."

• Kangaroo Island, a large island off the Southern coast of Australia, has been fully cleared of invasive feral pigs, setting the stage for a recovery of native species.

• Recent research led by the Wildlife Conservation Society identified 64,000 square miles of coral reef that may be able to survive rising ocean temperatures. After identifying 42 variables that predict how well reefs weather climate change, such as proximity to cold water currents and cyclone exposure, the researchers used a machine learning model to comb through 45,000 coral field surveys and estimate which reefs are likely to retain their coral cover through 2050. The result is a global map of resilient reefs that could help conservationists determine the areas they should prioritize protecting.

Food & Hunger

• India, the world’s largest rice exporter, is entering a potentially poor monsoon season with its granaries full. Following a series of strong harvests, India has accumulated more than five times its target level of national rice reserves, giving the government a large buffer if future harvests disappoint.

• Despite increased demand (particularly from voracious children), berries are becoming more affordable in the United States. The economist Jeremy Horpedahl finds that between 2013 and 2023, median wages in the United States grew much faster than berry prices, reducing the working hours required to afford the fruits.

  

Health & Demographics

• According to provisional CDC data, the US infant mortality rate fell to an all-time low in 2025, reaching fewer than 5.4 infant deaths per 1,000 live births.

• A recently published analysis of data from the Global Burden of Disease study found that annual deaths from intestinal infections fell by 66 percent between 1990 and 2023, from 3.69 million to 1.27 million. The researchers credit wider vaccination, improved water and sanitation systems, and broader access to oral rehydration therapy.

• A new mosquito-breeding facility in France is producing 1.5 million sterile mosquitoes per week to help control the population of invasive tiger mosquitoes, which can carry diseases like dengue, Zika, and chikungunya. The owner, a startup called Terratis, plans to scale up production to 40 million mosquitoes per week within two years. For comparison, Brazil’s large Wolbachia-infected mosquito factory can produce 100 million mosquito eggs per week.

• Scientists have developed a maternal blood test that can detect thousands of serious fetal genetic conditions by analyzing DNA fragments in the mother’s bloodstream. In a study of 565 pregnancies, the test found more than 97 percent of the clinically relevant genetic variants detected by more invasive prenatal testing, suggesting doctors may be able to get much of the same information without sticking needles into wombs.

• Midjourney, a firm best known for AI image generation, has announced that it is developing a full-body ultrasound scanner that can map the entire human body in about 60 seconds, potentially turning advanced internal imaging into a routine service.

Science & Technology

• Currently, imaging satellites function as orbital sensors: they collect vast amounts of data and beam it back to Earth for interpretation. Artificial intelligence could turn them into orbital analysts. In a recent demonstration, a satellite with a vision-language model onboard was able to analyze imagery in orbit, hinting at a future where satellites autonomously “watch” the Earth for meaningful changes, such as wildfires, floods, crop failures, or troop movements.

• The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is now operating the country’s first dedicated space-weather satellite, which will help forecasters track solar phenomena that can disrupt power grids, communications, aviation, satellites, and space travel. The new satellite, called SOLAR-1, will observe the sun continuously and send images back to Earth within 30 minutes, much faster than the roughly eight hours required by older instruments.

• Most of the molecular machinery inside cells cannot be directly observed by humans. The most advanced cryo-electron microscopes can reveal the structure of about 10 percent of human proteins when they are isolated, and only about 1 percent when looking inside real cells. That may soon change. Researchers at Biohub and UC Berkeley have demonstrated a new method that dramatically boosts the contrast of cryo-electron microscope images, making faint biological structures much easier to see. The researchers estimate that the technology could make more than half of functionally important proteins visible.

Violence & Coercion

• Child marriage and domestic violence continue to decline in India. A recently published national survey found that 20.1 percent of women aged 20-24 were married as children in 2023 and 2024, down from 23.3 percent recorded in the previous survey conducted between 2019 and 2021. The same survey found that the share of married adult women who reported experiencing spousal violence dropped from 29.2 percent in 2019-21 to 22.3 percent in 2023-24.

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• The New York Times recently profiled the growing intra-African tourism industry, made possible by rising incomes, growing flight coverage, and loosening visa requirements.

• A new review process could help alleviate one of the biggest bottlenecks to building new power plants in America. Federal regulators have approved a plan to speed up interconnection reviews—the studies that determine whether new plants can safely connect to the grid—for large projects in PJM, the country’s biggest grid market. The new process will let PJM consider up to 10 major projects per year, with the goal of connecting qualifying plants to the grid within three years. Recently, the median time from filing an interconnection request to reaching commercial operation has stretched to over four years.

• Georgia is opening more licensed jobs to people with criminal records. Under a new law, licensing boards can no longer deny applicants based on vague “moral turpitude” standards; they must show that a conviction is directly related to the job. More than one in five jobs in Georgia requires an occupational license, including many in fields such as health care and childcare.

Energy & Environment

• Global mangrove forests are recovering. A recently published analysis of Landsat satellite imagery found that, although the global area of mangrove forests declined between the 1980s and 2010, it has since expanded massively, resulting in only a small net decline (−0.5% ± 1.4%) over the full forty-year period.

• US drinking water seems to be getting cleaner. A recent National Bureau of Economic Research analysis of 266 million drinking water readings found that the share of readings with levels of regulated pollutants that exceed current health standards fell by half between 2003 and 2019.

• Amazon says that its data centers are using water much more efficiently. According to a company report, Amazon’s data centers used just 0.12 liters of water per kilowatt-hour of compute in 2025, about one-seventh of the industry average and less than half of Amazon’s rate of 0.25 liters in 2021.

• The Northeastern Bulrush is no longer considered endangered in the United States following a more than elevenfold increase in the number of distinct populations.

Health & Demographics

• The FDA has approved a new sunscreen ingredient for the first time in 20 years. The reform is a long time coming—the ingredient, called bemotrizinol, has been available in Europe for decades—and should make sunscreens more effective. Bemotrizinol can effectively block both UVA and UVB rays, both of which can cause skin cancer, while sunscreens available in the US have historically been poorer at blocking UVA rays.

• A hospital in Tampa is using software from Palantir to rapidly detect cases of sepsis. The system aggregates data from health records, lab results, clinician notes, and bedside monitors to quickly flag potential sepsis cases, which the hospital claims are now treated within an hour (when it comes to sepsis, rapid treatment is crucial). Since the system was deployed in August 2022, sepsis deaths in the hospital have fallen 68 percent, saving an estimated 886 lives.

• Saloni Dattani and Niko McCarty have written another great roundup of recent innovations in biology, including more cancer treatment highlights, a potential cure for hepatitis B, and a major advancement in pharmaceutical production.

Science & Technology

• The crew of the US Army helicopter that went down near the Strait of Hormuz was rescued by an autonomous maritime drone, the first reported US military rescue operation using the technology.

• Amazon has developed a warehouse robot that can be assigned tasks using plain conversational English (and haul around carts weighing up to 400 kilograms).

• Life Biosciences, a biotech company focused on treating age-related diseases, has begun the first human trial of a cellular anti-aging therapy. The treatment, which is being tested in patients with optic nerve damage, uses gene therapy to briefly activate a set of genes that, in mouse models, restored more youthful function to aged and injured cells.

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Energy and natural resources:

• Antares Nuclear’s Mark-0 microreactor has become the first reactor to reach criticality in the Department of Energy’s Reactor Pilot Program, which aims to accelerate the development of new reactor designs.

• Much of the world’s lithium is extracted from brine, but abundant deposits—such as those in the Appalachians—also exist in hard-rock ore. The problem is that extracting lithium from hard rock is expensive and energy-intensive; it typically requires baking the ore above 1,000 degrees Celsius and prolonged chemical leaching. In an attempt to make hard-rock lithium more economical, a group of researchers has developed a lower-temperature process for extracting lithium from spodumene, the main source of hard-rock lithium. The researchers estimate their process could cut hard-rock lithium extraction costs in half, and they are now working on commercializing the technology.

Pollution:

• Microfibers are one of the most common forms of microplastic pollution, and washing machines send large quantities of textile fibers into wastewater. A number of companies have now developed filters designed to catch microfibers, and The Guardian reports that some appliance manufacturers are beginning to integrate them into their washing machines.

Conservation and biodiversity

• Sixty years ago, the Dartford Warbler, a plump-looking, long-tailed songbird, had nearly vanished from the UK. Today, thanks to extensive habitat restoration, the population has risen to an estimated 4,100 breeding pairs.

• The rough popcornflower, a wetland plant found only in the Umpqua River Basin of Oregon, is no longer considered endangered after its population increased to more than 2 million plants.

• Crested ibis are being reintroduced to the Japanese mainland, where they were extirpated in the 1970s.

Health & Wellbeing

• Self-reported freedom reached a record high in 2025. According to a recently published Gallup poll, 82 percent of people surveyed across 138 countries reported being satisfied with their freedom to choose what to do with their lives, up from 71 percent in 2006, when the survey began. Some of the largest gains came from countries in the former Eastern Bloc. Gallup notes that this result is more closely associated with other metrics of subjective wellbeing than with formal measures of political and personal freedom.

  

• The American Society of Clinical Oncology’s annual conference has wrapped up, leaving behind a long list of hopeful cancer headlines. The star of the show was daraxonrasib, which received a standing ovation for its unusually strong results against metastatic pancreatic cancer. Some other promising results include:

  • A radioactive wafer implanted at the site of surgically removed brain tumors that nearly doubled two-year survival rates in a randomized trial.

  • A genomic test that helped many breast cancer patients safely skip chemotherapy.

  • A multiple-myeloma immunotherapy that kept nearly 70 percent of patients progression-free for 18 months, compared with about 27 percent of those on standard treatments.

  • A targeted cancer drug that, when combined with standard immunotherapy, cut the risk of cancer progression or death by nearly two-thirds in patients with the most common form of lung cancer.

Science & Technology

• Merlin Labs, an aerospace and defense tech firm, is developing an autonomous piloting system intended to handle all stages of flight across a wide range of aircraft, from single-engine planes to commercial cargo jets. After completing a series of reviews by the US Special Operations Command, the system will now be tested on C-130J transport aircraft and may eventually make its way to commercial cargo carriers and other civil aircraft.

• In a recent live-streamed demo, humanoid robots developed by Figure AI autonomously handled packages for 200 hours without any serious reported errors.

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• 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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