Doomslayer: Progress Roundup

Nov 23, 2025

Economics & Development

UNICEF’s latest State of the World’s Children report finds that the share of children living in “severe deprivation” fell from 65.1 percent to 40.6 percent between 2000 and 2023. Note that this measure is not based on family income, but instead on indicators related to education, health, housing, nutrition, sanitation, and water.

In ASEAN (Southeast Asian) countries, the poverty rate—defined as the share of people living under their country’s poverty line—fell to 10.8 percent in 2023, down from 13.3 percent in 2016.
Argentina’s year-over-year inflation rate was 31 percent in October, down from 193 percent a year earlier.
Seventy-three percent of women and 78 percent of men in low- and middle-income countries had financial accounts in 2024, thanks largely to mobile phones.

Following a successful rat eradication, Puffins are nesting on Northern Ireland’s Isle of Muck for the first time in at least 25 years.
American crocodiles are recovering in Florida, thanks in part to a thriving nesting ground in the cooling canals of the Turkey Point nuclear plant, where biologists recorded more than 600 hatchlings this summer. The Florida population, once down to just a few hundred animals, now numbers around 2,000 statewide and is spreading back into its old territory.

Valar Atomics has become the first company in the Department of Energy’s new pilot program to achieve a self-sustaining chain reaction in its reactor. This is a test, not a commercial deployment, but it marks early progress in an effort to bypass the normal onerous licensing process for test reactors and help younger nuclear companies bring their designs into reality.
Israel is now pumping desalinated seawater into the drought-stressed Sea of Galilee—apparently the first time in history that desalination has been used to refill a natural lake.
Rainmaker, a US startup, is attempting to use cloud seeding to increase snowfall in Utah, thereby replenishing the Great Salt Lake.

Aug 13

Rather than a fixed natural endowment, fresh water is largely a product of human innovation and engineering.

According to the World Health Organization, global tuberculosis deaths fell by over 40 percent between 2010 and 2024, from 2.13 million to 1.23 million. Africa, where a large share of tuberculosis deaths occur, saw particularly rapid progress.

The African island nations of Cabo Verde, Mauritius, and Seychelles have eliminated measles and rubella.

Scientists have successfully extracted and sequenced RNA molecules from a ~40,000-year-old frozen woolly mammoth—the oldest RNA ever recovered. RNA can show which genes were active at the moment of death, providing insights about the animal’s metabolism, stress level, immune activity, and even the microbes it carried.
Researchers have built a tiny robot that can move through blood vessels, deliver a dose of drugs to a precise spot, and then dissolve. The robots hit their target in more than 95 percent of tests in pigs and sheep, offering a possible way to treat disorders like strokes or brain tumors without exposing the entire body to powerful chemicals.
Cellular Tracking Technologies, a wildlife-tracking hardware company, has built radio tags light enough to ride on a Monarch butterfly, letting scientists track individual insects across their long migration routes.
The CEO of Foxconn, the world’s largest electronics contract manufacturer, recently announced plans to deploy humanoid robots in the company’s Houston factory within “six months or so.”
Zoox, the Amazon-owned robotaxi company, is now offering rides in San Francisco, and Waymo has started operating in Miami.

Representatives from the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Rwandan-backed M23 rebel group recently met in Qatar to lay out a preliminary plan to end their conflict, which has killed thousands of people and displaced hundreds of thousands more.