Doomslayer: Progress Roundup

May 03, 2026

Economics & Development

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.

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.

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.

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.

Pakistan’s Punjab province has banned child marriage, following Sindh, which became the first Pakistani province to do so in 2013.