Doomslayer: Progress Roundup

May 31, 2026

Economics & Development

Global jet fuel supply chains are adapting to wartime turmoil. In April, the head of the International Energy Agency warned that Europe had “maybe six weeks or so (of) jet fuel left” if oil supplies remained disrupted by the Iran war. Instead, imports from the United States, India, and Nigeria, drawn by higher prices in Europe, have staved off shortages so far.
According to a recent industry report, US home internet has become much faster and cheaper over the past decade. Inflation-adjusted prices for popular broadband plans are down 43.6 percent since 2014, while average download speeds have improved by 145 percent.
Competition between online retailers is making our lives even more convenient. In certain locations, Amazon and Walmart are now offering 30-minute delivery for a set of everyday goods.

A mother puma with three kittens was recently spotted in Minnesota, the first evidence in over a century of pumas breeding in the state.
Florida’s wildlife agency reports that there are 82 percent more loggerhead sea turtle nests in the state this year compared to the same period of 2025, the latest good news in a broader story of sea turtle recovery.
Biologists have discovered a thriving deep-sea coral reef off the coast of Argentina. The scientists are still measuring the extent of the reef, but it may turn out to be one of the largest cold-water reefs in the world.
Deforestation in Brazil’s Atlantic forest—the large coastal biome home to Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo—fell to its lowest level in at least 40 years in 2025, according to an NGO report.
Ecologists in Namibia are testing whether satellite-linked animal tags can be used to detect sudden changes in wildlife behavior. By studying how the animals react to simulated hunting threats, they hope to train algorithms to recognize “animal panic” from satellite data and alert rangers to poaching incidents.

The number of homes in the UK with air conditioning has doubled over the past three years, reaching an estimated 4 million.
As part of Tuvalu’s ongoing coastal adaptation work, engineers have reportedly expanded the land area of Fongafale, the country’s most populous islet, by more than 10 percent.1

A gene therapy from Verve Therapeutics sharply reduced LDL cholesterol, a major causal risk factor for heart disease, in an early human trial. The treatment, which turns off the PCSK9 gene, lowered LDL cholesterol by 62 percent at the highest-tested dose. Drugs that block PCSK9 are a well-tested method of lowering cholesterol, but this new treatment aims to achieve the same effect with a one-time infusion.
The FDA has approved the first treatment for chronic hepatitis D, a rare but dangerous liver infection that previously had no approved treatment options.

Emergency services dispatchers in Snohomish County, Washington, are using an AI system to triage non-emergency calls in an effort to reduce wait times and prioritize callers with urgent problems.
Biohub, a biomedical research nonprofit, has released an AI-generated database of more than one billion predicted protein structures. For context, AlphaFold, the best-known AI protein-prediction system, includes a public database of 214 million predicted structures. Biohub says its much larger database could help scientists compare obscure proteins and generate new leads for medicine and drug design.
Chinese researchers have sent human embryo models into space to study how microgravity and radiation affect early human development. The models are lab-grown stem-cell structures that mimic early embryo development, but cannot grow into viable fetuses.
The Ocean Census, an international research project dedicated to accelerating the discovery of marine life, claims to have identified 1,121 likely new marine species in a single year, well above the usual pace of discovery. Much of the acceleration seems to have come from better coordination; 728 of the species were identified by researchers analyzing existing collections, and the Ocean Census also credits a new database that centralizes records of potential new species while they await formal scientific description, a process that typically takes over a decade.