Doomslayer: Progress Roundup

Sep 13, 2026

Economics & Development

Higher education is growing rapidly in India. According to the country’s Ministry of Education, India’s higher-education gross enrollment ratio—the total number of enrolled students divided by the college-aged population—rose from 23.7 percent in 2014–15 to 30 percent in 2023–24. The female gross enrollment ratio increased even faster, from 22.9 percent to 31.2 percent.
Boeing projects that Africa’s commercial airline fleet may more than double over the next two decades, from 755 aircraft to over 1,600, to serve an estimated 6 percent annual growth rate in passenger traffic.
Average incomes have more than doubled in nine African countries since 1990. Our World in Data highlights this progress in Burkina Faso, Cabo Verde, Egypt, Ethiopia, Ghana, Mauritius, Mozambique, Rwanda, and Uganda, using GDP per person adjusted for inflation and differences in the cost of living. All nine countries also saw declines in the share of people living in extreme poverty.
China has nearly reached high-income country status. Every year, the World Bank classifies countries into income groups based on their gross national income per person. Last year, China’s GNI per person reached $14,230, just $145 below the World Bank’s high-income threshold.

Two Amur leopards have been born at Helsinki Zoo. The cubs matter for conservation because their paternal grandfather was rescued from the wild, making their genetic lineage rare among zoo populations. After falling to a historic low of 30–35 in 2000, the number of Amur leopards living in the wild has risen to over 100 today.

Eight orangutans have been born at US zoos since the beginning of 2025 through the Orangutan Species Survival Plan, a long-standing coordination effort among zoos that aims to maintain a healthy and genetically diverse captive population of the critically endangered apes.

The global health workforce nearly tripled between 1990 and 2023, according to a new study in The Lancet Public Health, rising from 40.9 million health workers to 122.1 million.
The World Health Organization recently validated that Bhutan has eliminated dog-transmitted human rabies as a public health problem.
In Thailand, the World Health Organization has also announced that rubella, a virus that can cause severe birth defects if contracted by a pregnant woman, is no longer a public health problem.
Global childhood vaccination coverage rose slightly in 2025. Estimates from WHO and UNICEF indicate that 90 percent of infants worldwide received at least one dose of the diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis vaccine in 2025, while 85 percent completed the full three-dose series. Both rates were one percentage point higher than in 2024, although they remain slightly below their 2019 levels.
In a recently published trial, daraxonrasib—a drug that just received FDA approval for treating metastatic pancreatic cancer—shrank tumors in more than 30 percent of participants with a common form of lung cancer.

A new $1 million prize will reward academics conducting rigorous but controversial research. The Carob Trust Prize for Academic Courage, launched by Harvard economist Roland Fryer and investor Bill Ackman, will award up to five prizes each year to scholars who “pursue bold ideas that challenge prevailing orthodoxies—whether political, intellectual, or methodological—and hold the potential to reshape knowledge, policy, or society.”
An experimental AI system from OpenAI may have solved the Navier–Stokes existence and smoothness problem, a 90-year-old open frontier math problem with a $1 million bounty. According to OpenAI, a swarm of roughly 10,000 AI agents spent about 88 hours working on the problem using a powerful unreleased model.
Isar Aerospace, a German startup, has completed the first successful commercial orbital launch from continental Europe.

The average number of daily homicides in Mexico has fallen by more than half over the past six years, from 96.5 in August 2020 to 40.8 in August 2026, according to national crime data.