Doomslayer: Progress Roundup

Jul 12, 2026

Economics & Development

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.