Doomslayer: Progress Roundup

Jun 14, 2026

Economics & Development

The New York Times recently profiled the growing intra-African tourism industry, made possible by rising incomes, growing flight coverage, and loosening visa requirements.
A new review process could help alleviate one of the biggest bottlenecks to building new power plants in America. Federal regulators have approved a plan to speed up interconnection reviews—the studies that determine whether new plants can safely connect to the grid—for large projects in PJM, the country’s biggest grid market. The new process will let PJM consider up to 10 major projects per year, with the goal of connecting qualifying plants to the grid within three years. Recently, the median time from filing an interconnection request to reaching commercial operation has stretched to over four years.
Georgia is opening more licensed jobs to people with criminal records. Under a new law, licensing boards can no longer deny applicants based on vague “moral turpitude” standards; they must show that a conviction is directly related to the job. More than one in five jobs in Georgia requires an occupational license, including many in fields such as health care and childcare.

Global mangrove forests are recovering. A recently published analysis of Landsat satellite imagery found that, although the global area of mangrove forests declined between the 1980s and 2010, it has since expanded massively, resulting in only a small net decline (−0.5% ± 1.4%) over the full forty-year period.
US drinking water seems to be getting cleaner. A recent National Bureau of Economic Research analysis of 266 million drinking water readings found that the share of readings with levels of regulated pollutants that exceed current health standards fell by half between 2003 and 2019.
Amazon says that its data centers are using water much more efficiently. According to a company report, Amazon’s data centers used just 0.12 liters of water per kilowatt-hour of compute in 2025, about one-seventh of the industry average and less than half of Amazon’s rate of 0.25 liters in 2021.
The Northeastern Bulrush is no longer considered endangered in the United States following a more than elevenfold increase in the number of distinct populations.

The FDA has approved a new sunscreen ingredient for the first time in 20 years. The reform is a long time coming—the ingredient, called bemotrizinol, has been available in Europe for decades—and should make sunscreens more effective. Bemotrizinol can effectively block both UVA and UVB rays, both of which can cause skin cancer, while sunscreens available in the US have historically been poorer at blocking UVA rays.
A hospital in Tampa is using software from Palantir to rapidly detect cases of sepsis. The system aggregates data from health records, lab results, clinician notes, and bedside monitors to quickly flag potential sepsis cases, which the hospital claims are now treated within an hour (when it comes to sepsis, rapid treatment is crucial). Since the system was deployed in August 2022, sepsis deaths in the hospital have fallen 68 percent, saving an estimated 886 lives.
Saloni Dattani and Niko McCarty have written another great roundup of recent innovations in biology, including more cancer treatment highlights, a potential cure for hepatitis B, and a major advancement in pharmaceutical production.

The crew of the US Army helicopter that went down near the Strait of Hormuz was rescued by an autonomous maritime drone, the first reported US military rescue operation using the technology.
Amazon has developed a warehouse robot that can be assigned tasks using plain conversational English (and haul around carts weighing up to 400 kilograms).
Life Biosciences, a biotech company focused on treating age-related diseases, has begun the first human trial of a cellular anti-aging therapy. The treatment, which is being tested in patients with optic nerve damage, uses gene therapy to briefly activate a set of genes that, in mouse models, restored more youthful function to aged and injured cells.