Doomslayer: Progress Roundup

Apr 26, 2026

Economics & Development

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.