Doomslayer: Progress Roundup

Mar 15, 2026

Economics & Development

In an attempt to address concerns about the accuracy of its national accounts, India’s Ministry of Statistics has revised how it calculates GDP. The new methodology finds that India’s economy is 3.3 percent smaller than previously estimated but also growing faster, expanding 7.1 percent in fiscal year 2025, up from an earlier estimate of 6.5 percent.

China’s environmental ministry recently stated that the country’s economy grew 30 percent over the past five years while average particulate air pollution fell by 20 percent.
Bearded vultures are recovering in the Alps. The wild Alpine populations were hunted to extinction in the early 1900s, but after decades of conservation work, they have rebounded to over 100 breeding pairs.
Panama golden frogs are returning to the wild 17 years after they were wiped out by the deadly (to amphibians) Chytridiomycosis fungus.

More farmers in more countries are planting genetically modified crops, which help raise crop yields and farmer incomes and often reduce the need for agrochemicals. According to a recent industry report, genetically modified crops were planted on 218.7 million hectares of cropland in 2024 across 31 countries, up from 181.5 million hectares and 28 countries a decade earlier.

India has launched a huge HPV prevention program that aims to vaccinate each annual cohort of 14-year-old girls.
Kenya and Zimbabwe have received their first doses of lenacapavir, which prevents HIV infection with just two yearly injections.
Dogs are biting less in India. A 2025 survey reported 9.1 million dog bites, down from 17 million recorded in 2003. Over the same period, the number of rabies deaths in India dropped from over 17,000 to 5,726.
Japanese regulators have conditionally approved two induced pluripotent stem cell therapies, one for Parkinson’s disease and another for heart failure, marking the first commercial approvals for the technology.
The first large clinical trial of a vaccine against enterotoxigenic E. coli—a leading cause of travelers’ diarrhea and severe childhood diarrhea—has shown promising results. In a study of nearly 5,000 infants in Gambia, the experimental vaccine reduced dangerous diarrhea and produced no serious side effects.

A large psychology study finds that we consistently underestimate other people’s honesty. Across 11 experiments involving more than 8,000 participants, volunteers completed tasks where they could lie anonymously for personal gain—for example, by falsely claiming they guessed a die roll correctly to win money—and were also asked to estimate how many others would lie in the same situation. On average, participants overestimated the share of people who would lie by about 14 percentage points.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art has begun adding highly detailed 3D models of artworks and artifacts to its website, letting online users inspect the objects from every angle. They also added an augmented reality feature for smartphones that allows you to interact with the virtual objects at their true scale, say by “walking through” the model of the Temple of Dendur.
The US Federal Aviation Administration has announced a set of pilot projects for a new species of aircraft. Most will test eVTOLs, or small, electric, drone-like aircraft that take off and land vertically rather than using a runway. The program will let companies such as Joby Aviation and Archer Aviation trial passenger flights, cargo delivery, and emergency services while regulators gather data.