Doomslayer: Progress Roundup
Falling global hunger, a technique for saving sea ice, a new monkey, and more.
Energy & Environment
Conservation and biodiversity:
There are now close to 400 wild Asian elephants living in China, up from around 150 in the 1980s.
The Hawaiian stilt and the razorback sucker are no longer considered endangered in the United States following substantial recoveries.
A system of canopy bridges has apparently eliminated roadkill deaths for tree-dwelling animals along a road near Alta Floresta, a small town in the Brazilian Amazon. Brazil’s federal transport agency has made the design its recommended standard for highways.
Energy production:
Fervo Energy, a geothermal energy company, has drilled its deepest and most complex well yet, reaching a measured depth of nearly 19,500 feet in just 21 days. The new well, Sawtooth 7, will contribute to a 400-megawatt geothermal power project in Utah scheduled to begin delivering electricity in 2028.
Cypress Creek Energy and Google have begun construction on an energy project in Arkansas that is set to become the largest solar project in the United States. When completed, the facility will provide 2.5 gigawatts of solar capacity and 2.9 gigawatt-hours of battery storage, enough to power 315,000 homes.
Natural disasters:
The area burned in the Brazilian Amazon fell to 3.1 million hectares in 2025, the smallest area since at least 1985, when satellite records began.
A British climate technology company is testing a simple method for preserving Arctic sea ice: pumping seawater onto its surface during winter to create thicker ice. At the start of the 2026 melt season, treated ice near Cambridge Bay, Canada, was 20 inches thicker and more reflective than untreated ice, helping it melt more slowly. The pumps themselves use surprisingly little power. According to reporting in The Guardian: “The small pumps require less power than a toaster as they are only lifting the water from just under the ice to just on top.”
Food & Hunger
According to estimates from the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization, the share of the world’s population that was undernourished1 fell to 7.8 percent in 2025, down from 8.1 percent in 2024 and 8.6 percent in 2022. The decline marks the third consecutive year that global hunger has fallen, a welcome recovery after progress against hunger stalled during the 2010s amid conflict and economic stagnation, particularly in Africa, and then partially reversed during the COVID-19 pandemic as incomes fell and food prices rose. In Asia and Latin America, the rate of undernourishment has now fallen to historic lows.
Health & Demographics
The World Health Organization reports that the global rate of road traffic deaths fell by 21 percent between 2011 and 2025. The rate dropped or remained the same in every region except Africa.
A new analysis from the Global Burden of Disease study finds that the age-adjusted US death rate from ischemic heart disease, which is caused by blocked coronary arteries, fell 59 percent between 1990 and 2023. The model also found especially large declines in the mortality burden attributed to smoking and particulate air pollution.
According to recent estimates from the World Health Organization, the number of people living in areas requiring mass trachoma interventions has roughly halved over the past decade, falling from 190.2 million in 2016 to 92.0 million in 2026, while the estimated number suffering from the disease’s advanced, potentially blinding stage has fallen 58 percent, from 2.8 million to 1.2 million.
India has approved its first dengue vaccine, a two-dose vaccine from Takeda Pharmaceutical that, in a late-stage trial, was 80 percent effective against confirmed dengue during the year following the second shot.
With assistance from the Gates Medical Research Institute, India’s Serum Institute is preparing for large-scale production of what could become the first new tuberculosis vaccine in over a century.
Belgian medical researchers have restored sperm production in a man left infertile after childhood chemotherapy using testicular tissue that had been frozen for 16 years. A year after transplantation, the tissue showed active sperm production and yielded a mature sperm cell.
Science & Technology
Another Waymo safety study, this time conducted independently by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, finds that Waymo vehicles were involved in 68 percent fewer police-reportable crashes per mile than human drivers. The research also found that Waymo vehicles were involved in 81 percent fewer injury-causing crashes than human drivers and 91 percent fewer rear-end crashes in which they struck another vehicle.
European regulators have approved Science Corporation’s PRIMA retinal implant, which combines a tiny chip inserted beneath the retina with camera-equipped glasses to restore functional vision.
AI adoption continues to rise. A recent Gallup poll finds that 47 percent of US employees said their organization was using AI in the second quarter of 2026, up from 38 percent at the end of 2025. Recent research from Google estimates that 21 percent of tasks at the typical job are now completed with AI assistance.
Skyroot Aerospace, an Indian startup, launched the country’s first privately developed orbital rocket last weekend.
A new species of monkey has been described in the Congo rainforest.
Violence & Coercion
Today, throughout much of the chicken egg industry, newly hatched male chicks—economically useless because they neither lay eggs nor grow efficiently for meat—are gassed or thrown into industrial grinders. That horror may come to an end thanks to in-ovo sexing, a relatively new technique that allows hatcheries to cheaply identify and destroy male chicken embryos before they are capable of feeling pain. According to a recent report from Innovate Animal Ag, an animal agriculture think tank, 40 percent of Europe’s commercial laying flock had been sexed in ovo as of June 2026, up from 34 percent in 2025. The report also notes that the technology has been adopted by certain hatcheries in the United States, Brazil, and Australia.
