Energy & Environment
Conservation & biodiversity
A Przewalski’s horse has been born in the wild on the Central Kazakhstan steppe for the first time in 200 years. The male foal, born on August 22, is the offspring of two horses reintroduced to Kazakhstan in 2024. Przewalski’s horses disappeared from the wild globally in the late 1960s before captive-breeding programs enabled their return to parts of their historic range.
In October, Louisiana will open a new recreational alligator hunting season, thanks in part to a dramatic recovery of the state’s wild alligator population. Since the early 1960s, the estimated number of wild alligators in Louisiana has grown from fewer than 100,000 to more than 3 million.
Following a very fruitful breeding season, the number of critically endangered kākāpō parrots in New Zealand has grown to 325, up from just 51 in 1995.
Energy production
Google has agreed to buy 396 megawatts of power from Fervo Energy’s Cape Station geothermal project in Utah, the largest enhanced geothermal power purchase agreement to date. For scale, that is roughly enough electricity to power a city of 300,000.
Nuclear power is proving resilient to heat waves and droughts. Nuclear plants cooled by river water sometimes cut output when the river runs too warm or low, to limit water usage or avoid returning hotter water than regulations allow. However, a recent study in Energy Policy finds that between 2003 and 2022, reactors affected by heat- and drought-related disruptions had to cut their overall generation by just 0.6 percent. At France's river-cooled plants, output lost to these cuts fell from 5.5 terawatt-hours in 2003 to 0.5 terawatt-hours in 2022, following cooling-tower retrofits and better outage scheduling.
Africa is expected to install 17 gigawatts of new solar capacity in 2026, up from 12 gigawatts in 2025, according to an analysis by Ember, an energy think tank. That works out to roughly 100,000 solar panels installed across the continent every day in 2026. Most of this new capacity appears to come from small-scale, distributed systems installed by households and businesses.
Pollution
Turkmenistan has begun to repair some of the large methane leaks coming from its oil and gas infrastructure. Over the last two years, the country has plugged eight major leaks after receiving alerts from a United Nations methane emissions monitoring system. Patching methane leaks is one of the cheapest ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Health & Demographics
The World Health Organization recently validated that Timor-Leste has eliminated trachoma as a public health problem. Trachoma is an eye infection that can cause blindness after years of repeated infections. Timor-Leste was the last country in WHO's South-East Asia Region where the disease was still suspected to be endemic, so trachoma has now been eliminated as a public health problem across the entire region.
Surgeons at University College London Hospitals have completed a highly successful AI-assisted brain surgery. As the surgeons removed a brain tumor that threatened a man’s sight, an AI system analyzed the surgical video feed in real time and highlighted critical structures at the base of the brain for the surgeons to avoid cutting into. The tumor was successfully removed, and the patient reported dramatically improved vision after surgery.
eGenesis, a biotechnology company developing animal organs engineered to work in humans, reports that of the five patients who received its pig kidney transplants, three maintained enough kidney function to remain off dialysis for more than eight months. The company plans to begin a clinical trial in early 2027, which will test the pig kidneys in 33 patients awaiting human donor kidneys.
Science & Technology
Robotaxi services are advancing around the world:
Waymo is now giving paid rides in Denver, San Diego, and Tampa, and is preparing to bring its service to Munich.
Uber and Wayve, a British autonomous driving company, have started a small robotaxi pilot in London. The cars drive themselves, but because UK regulators have not yet approved driverless operation, human safety drivers will be riding along for now.
Tesla has begun deploying its Cybercab—a purpose-built autonomous vehicle without a steering wheel or pedals—in its robotaxi service in Austin, Texas. Tesla hopes to sell the Cybercab for less than $30,000, a price that would be far below the estimated cost of competing US robotaxis.
Autonomous planes are beginning to fill a commercial niche in agriculture. In Brazil, about a dozen electric autonomous aircraft made by a California startup called Pyka are being used to spray crops with agricultural chemicals. The planes can fly lower than human-piloted crop dusters, which the company says reduces chemical drift. Pyka’s aircraft has also been approved for commercial agricultural use in the United States, although operations there require a ground operator and visual observer.
Violence & Coercion
According to a recent United Nations report, the global homicide rate fell by 14 percent between 2015 and 2024, from 5.9 victims per 100,000 people to 5.1.
Good to understand: the world has become less murderous. The United Nations estimates that the global homicide rate fell by 14% between 2015 and 2024, from 5.9 to 5.1 victims per 100,000 people. Progress remains very uneven, and violence is still far too common, but the long-term direction matters: fewer people are being killed by other people.