Doomslayer: Progress Roundup
Cold chain logistics in Africa, the first "unrolled" Vesuvius scroll, accelerated taxonomy, and more.
Economics & Development
Mission 300, a collaborative effort by the World Bank, the African Development Bank, The Rockefeller Foundation, and other public and private partners, has connected over 50 million people in Africa to electricity since launching in 2024. The initiative intends to connect 300 million by 2030.
Energy & Environment
According to data compiled by the US Energy Information Administration, China’s nuclear energy generation capacity nearly doubled between 2016 and 2026, growing from 31.4 gigawatts to 58.7. The EIA also reports that 36 reactors, totaling another 38.9 GW of capacity, are currently being built in China, making up 49 percent of all global nuclear energy construction. All that development has led to learning; nuclear power plants in China are completed in an average of six years, three years faster than the global average.
Loggerhead sea turtles are nesting in record numbers on the beaches of Boa Vista, a large island in the Cabo Verde archipelago. According to a recent study, nesting activity increased 80-fold between 1998 and 2024. The research also found that during peak years, some Boa Vista beaches contained over 22,000 nests per kilometer of shoreline—an incredible density compared with other major nesting sites.
In the early 2000s, a population of flamingos began making the Venetian Lagoon their winter home. Since then, the annual population peak has risen to nearly 24,000 birds. The Associated Press quotes an ornithologist who claims the lagoon is now “one of the most important wintering spots in its entire habitat range.”
Food & Hunger
Solar-powered cold storage systems are helping farmers save more of their produce in Africa, where many rural areas lack reliable electricity. SoKo Fresh, a Kenyan firm that leases space in solar cold rooms, claims its customers have cut spoilage from as high as 50 percent to under 2 percent.
Health & Demographics
Doctors in Ontario recently used an experimental treatment to help treat a burn victim’s face. Instead of skin grafts, which can cause disfiguring scars, the doctors obtained a compassionate-use authorization to treat her face with exosomes, microscopic particles released by cells that carry repair signals to damaged tissues. After two treatments, her facial burns healed without grafting.
An AI tool may have saved a man’s life in New York City. In a recent case report, a patient came to an emergency room with shortness of breath and was discharged with a presumed asthma flare-up. In reality, his heart was failing. Luckily, an AI model being trialed at the hospital analyzed his electrocardiogram, a routine test of the heart’s electrical activity, and flagged a high risk of structural heart disease. The patient was then called back and ultimately received a heart transplant. Pathway Labs, the company commercializing the AI software, plans to make it available for free to any physician who uses OpenEvidence, its free medical AI platform.
CAR-T immunotherapy, which has so far been used mostly against blood cancers, is beginning to move into solid tumors. This week, a CAR-T immunotherapy called satri-cel became the first approved CAR-T therapy for solid tumors after receiving a green light from Chinese regulators.
In England, zero women aged 20 to 24 died of cervical cancer between 2020 and 2024, the first recorded five-year period during which that has happened. Recent research associates the achievement with widespread HPV vaccination.
Like the US, Canada is also seeing a large decline in overdose deaths. According to federal data, opioid-related deaths in Canada fell 23 percent between 2024 and 2025, while stimulant-related deaths fell 31 percent.
The share of adults in India who use tobacco halved between 2000 and 2022, dropping from 50 percent to 24 percent.
Science & Technology
Researchers involved in the Vesuvius Challenge have used detailed X-ray scans and machine learning to digitally “unroll” and read the surviving text of an entire carbonized Herculaneum scroll. The researchers had already used similar methods to read parts of other carbonized scrolls, but this recent work marked the first time the preserved text of a rolled Herculaneum scroll had been read end to end. Unfortunately, because earlier attempts to physically unroll the scroll damaged its outer layers, only fragments of the original text are legible.
“SpaceX has now launched more satellites than the rest of humanity, combined.”
PepsiCo is operating a fleet of 35 driverless trucks in Arizona in what The Wall Street Journal describes as “the first major U.S. consumer-goods company to disclose the real-life, large-scale use of autonomous trucks on public roads.”
A recent analysis of taxonomic history finds that the rate of species discovery has accelerated, with the annual number of new species descriptions rising above 16,000 between 2015 and 2020 and surpassing the previous peak in the early 1900s. The researchers also estimate that about 15 percent of all known species have been formally described in the past 20 years alone.
Lots of great info showing the pessimists are still wrong. Thanks!
I really enjoyed this roundup, especially the loggerhead sea turtle and flamingo updates. The Boa Vista nesting numbers are incredible <3.
Fun fact: female loggerhead sea turtles can return to nest in the same general area where they hatched decades earlier. Scientists think they do this partly through geomagnetic imprinting: as hatchlings, they learn the magnetic signature of their natal coastline and later use Earth’s magnetic field like an internal map to navigate back across the ocean (https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/turtles-use-the-earths-magnetic-field-as-a-global-gps). Is this so cool?
Also, flamingos get their pink color from pigments in the algae and tiny crustaceans they eat, which makes the Venetian Lagoon story even more fun to picture.