Economics & Development
An analysis from The Economist finds that in the vast majority of wealthy countries, millennials have higher inflation-adjusted incomes than previous generations did at the same age. There were just three exceptions in the 32-country sample: Greece, Italy, and Japan. The Economist also notes that while in some countries, such as Australia, France, and the United Kingdom, intergenerational income growth has slowed, it has accelerated in faster-growing economies like the United States and Poland.
Undernourishment has become rare enough in the Dominican Republic that the country has officially left the Food and Agriculture Organization’s “Hunger Map,” which tracks the prevalence of undernourishment around the world. According to government figures, the share of the population that is undernourished fell from 21.3 percent in 2006 to less than 2.5 percent in 2025.
Energy & Environment
A reactor in Bangladesh’s first nuclear power plant has reached criticality, achieving a self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction for the first time. The reactor is now operating at low power while engineers conduct further tests, and is expected to start providing electricity to the grid as early as next month. Once fully operational, the plant’s two reactors will have a combined generating capacity of 2,400 megawatts, enough to meet roughly 11 percent of Bangladesh’s electricity demand.
ALERTCalifornia, a public safety program based at the University of California San Diego, operates a network of more than 1,200 cameras that monitor wildfires and other natural disasters. Since 2023, when the program introduced an automated fire detection system, that network has increasingly been monitored by artificial intelligence. According to the program’s director, 51 percent of California wildfires are now first detected by AI, allowing firefighters to respond more quickly and potentially stop small fires from growing into major disasters.
A recently published analysis of satellite images finds that the Antarctic ice sheet may be more stable than previously assumed. Scientists have worried that when exceptionally tall ice cliffs collapse, they expose still taller cliffs behind them, triggering a chain reaction of collapses that rapidly erodes the ice sheet. This new research found that glaciers tend to self-stabilize following a cliff collapse, indicating that this particular mechanism of ice loss may be less severe than previously thought.
Health & Demographics
Human rabies deaths have fallen 47 percent in Guinea over the past three years, according to Khaité Sall, the country’s Minister of Health and Sanitation. Sall credits a massive vaccination campaign that has immunized more than 290,000 dogs against the deadly virus since 2023.
Great Ormond Street Hospital in London has implemented same-day metagenomic testing for critically ill children. Unlike conventional targeted diagnostic tests, which look for a limited, predetermined set of pathogens, metagenomic testing sequences genetic material in a sample, allowing doctors to identify a much broader range of infections. According to research on the testing system published in The Lancet Microbe, the metagenomic tests detected organisms missed by routine diagnostics in 24 percent of samples. In one case, highlighted by the hospital’s press release, the test identified the pneumonia-causing bacterium infecting a 10-year-old girl and revealed that it was resistant to the antibiotic she had been prescribed. Doctors were able to change her treatment, and she recovered from the infection.
University of Maryland researchers have developed an experimental antivenom that’s roughly 10 times more potent by weight than an existing commercial treatment. The researchers combined proteins naturally found in rattlesnake blood that protect the snakes against their own venom. The antivenom has not yet been tested in humans, but in experiments with mice, it completely neutralized the lethal effects of western diamondback rattlesnake venom and provided protection against several other viper species.
Mauritius, a country with one of the world’s highest diabetes rates, has made substantial progress against the disease. Among adults aged 25 to 74, the age- and sex-adjusted prevalence of type 2 diabetes fell from 23.3 percent in 2009 to 19.9 percent in 2021, according to a recent analysis published in The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology. Although the causes remain uncertain, the improvement coincided with declining obesity, increasing physical activity, and government-imposed “sin” taxes on the sugar content of sweetened drinks.
Science & Technology
University of Washington researchers have created artificial enzymes capable of cutting proteins at precisely chosen locations. Unlike conventional drugs that bind to proteins to block their activity, these enzymes can cut a protein, release it, and repeat the process thousands of times. That means much smaller doses could potentially destroy large quantities of harmful proteins, such as viral proteins, bacterial toxins, or abnormal proteins that accumulate in the brain. In lab tests, the enzymes cut proteins implicated in Alzheimer’s disease and ALS, and some enzymes worked in living human cells.
Recent research has found that OpenAI’s flagship AI model, GPT-6 Astra, is capable of driving a car, albeit badly. Researchers equipped a Toyota Corolla with a driving computer and software that allowed AI models to control its steering, accelerator, and brakes using camera images. Four models were tested on a short course in an empty parking lot. Only Astra managed to finish, taking about five minutes to complete the course, which the researchers say a human could navigate in less than one. That is a remarkable result for a general-purpose model that was not trained to drive.
The UK government has identified and addressed more than 1,000 potential cybersecurity vulnerabilities with the help of artificial intelligence, according to a recent announcement. The government plans to extend the program across the public sector.
A group of physicists recently tested five leading AI agents from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, DeepSeek, and Z.ai on a set of 50 unpublished, research-level theoretical physics problems. OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra correctly solved 49 of them. Remarkably, researchers initially marked Astra wrong on several problems, only to discover that their reference solutions contained errors and Astra was correct.