Doomslayer: Progress Roundup

Bigger trees in the Amazon, robo-IVF, a toothless typhoon, and more.

Economics & Development

• Barbados, Belize, Dominica, and St Vincent and the Grenadines have agreed to let citizens of all four countries move, live, and work freely across each other’s borders.

• John Stossel released a video debunking ridiculous economic nostalgia memes.

Energy & Environment

• Typhoon Ragasa, which at its peak was a Category 5-equivalent super typhoon, claimed no lives when it made landfall in China last month—part of a broader trend of improving disaster resilience in the region.

• The AI reporter Kai Williams claims that AI models “have almost completely automated” earthquake detection.

• A recently published study analyzed 30 years of Amazonian tree records and found that trees in the Amazon are getting bigger thanks to higher levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Bigger trees are better trees: better at capturing carbon, better at surviving forest fires, and better habitats for other species.

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Health & Demographics

• For men suffering from prostate cancer, there are a growing number of alternatives to prostate removal, which can cause incontinence and erectile dysfunction. Options range from simply monitoring slow-growing tumors that may never cause harm to precisely targeted therapies that kill tumors without destroying the rest of the prostate.

• In the UK, pilot programs using AI-analyzed CT scans saw stroke recovery rates triple. The key may have been faster diagnosis for stroke patients: during the pilots, the average time from hospital arrival to treatment was about an hour shorter than normal.

• Scientists in Oregon turned human skin cells into viable eggs by transplanting their nuclei into donor eggs. While only a small share developed correctly, the technique could eventually create new reproductive options for infertile women.

• Over the past three years, at least 20 babies have been born following automated in vitro fertilization, where AI software selects the strongest sperm and a robot arm fertilizes the egg with little human involvement. The technology is still experimental but may one day make IVF far more affordable.

• For decades, the only real defense against peanut allergies was avoiding exposure and carrying an EpiPen. That’s starting to change.

  • Evidence is mounting that feeding infants peanut products early can prevent most peanut allergies from ever developing.

  • Scientists are experimenting with safer ways to help desensitize allergic children to peanuts, such as a skin patch that delivers a steady trickle of peanut protein.

  • An early-phase trial is in the works to test a new drug combination that might be able to destroy the cells that produce allergy antibodies.

• Saloni Dattani and Niko McCarty have summarized more recent innovations in medicine and biotechnology, including cell transplants that evade immune rejection, AI-designed antibiotics, long-acting flu antivirals, and a potential new treatment for progeria.

Tolerance & Culture

• While same-sex marriage in Japan is not recognized nationally, broadly equivalent systems of same-sex partnership are common at the local level. According to a recent survey, 92.5 percent of the Japanese population has access to these same-sex partnership systems.

• The gender gap in AI adoption may be closing. According to OpenAI, when ChatGPT first came out, less than a fifth of users had feminine names. Now, over fifty percent do, and there is some evidence that the AI model is helping automate household labor.

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