Doomslayer: Progress Roundup

Apr 19, 2026

Economics & Development

An analysis from Brookings finds that the net price of college (i.e., “the sticker price minus scholarships and grants”) in the United States has fallen substantially in recent years, particularly for poorer students attending elite private institutions.

Around the world, rising crop yields are allowing agricultural land to be returned to nature, but how long does it take for that land to regain a wild, abundant equilibrium? A recently published study in Ecuador’s Chocó rainforest found that recovery can happen fairly rapidly. After analyzing abandoned agricultural land at different phases of recovery, the researchers estimated that within 30 years, the land regained over 90 percent of the abundance and species diversity found in old-growth forests, and about 75 percent of their species composition.
Another rainforest study finds that the Amazon may be more drought-resistant than previously assumed. The researchers argue that most studies of Amazon drought response focus on forests where groundwater lies deep underground, making them more vulnerable to lower levels of rainfall. Their study instead examined forests with shallow water tables—which make up a third of the Amazon—and found that even during a severe drought, tree mortality did not increase and tree biomass continued to rise.
Thanks to habitat restoration efforts, Central California Coast coho salmon have enjoyed a run of fruitful spawning migrations. In 2025, 30,000 adult salmon returned to Mendocino Coast rivers to breed, up from 15,000 the year before and 3,000 a decade ago.

Quaise Energy, a geothermal power company, has announced it is building a prototype “superhot” geothermal power plant in Oregon. Their key innovation is a novel drilling technique that uses microwaves to break rock instead of drill bits. This approach could let Quaise tap into deeper, hotter rocks, and thereby generate far more energy than shallower wells.
Fervo Energy, another geothermal developer, appears to be scaling up. The company recently ordered turbines totaling 1.7 gigawatts of capacity, enough to support dozens of standardized power plants.

A new variety of banana genetically modified to be slow-ripening and browning-resistant has been approved in Japan and Brazil, and will be grown in the latter.

The World Health Organization estimates that measles vaccination has prevented 19.5 million premature deaths in Africa since 2000.
A new drug for metastatic pancreatic cancer nearly doubled survival time in a phase 3 trial, with patients living for a median of 13.2 months after treatment began compared to 6.7 months on standard chemotherapy.
Organ donations have surged in the United States, partly thanks to improved harvesting methods. Until recently, most organs came from donors who were brain dead but kept on life support, with their circulatory systems still functioning. Over the past decade, however, advances in organ preservation and recovery have made it increasingly feasible to recover organs after circulatory death, when the heart has stopped and preservation becomes far more difficult. A recent study finds that in 2000, just 2 percent of donors fell into this category; by 2025, that had risen to 49 percent, with the number of such donors rising from 118 to 8,129.

The Economist’s democracy index shows a small global improvement in 2025, with scores rising or stable in 3 out of 4 countries. A welcome sign, though it does not make up for the significant democratic backsliding the world has seen since the 2010s.
Thanks to satellite constellations, humanity now has the technical ability to provide internet connection anywhere on Earth. The biggest remaining barriers are political; many governments don’t want their citizens to enjoy unfettered access to the internet, or for their domestic service providers to have to compete with foreign firms. In Argentina, where such a ban was recently lifted, two million people have connected to Starlink, many of whom live in remote areas of the country.

A recent paper finds that AI models can outperform humans at fact-checking social media posts. After generating over 1,600 AI-written Community Notes on X, researchers compared them with human-written notes on the same posts and found that the AI notes were rated as more helpful by both left- and right-leaning users.

Autonomous vehicles continue to make progress around the world:
- The Netherlands Vehicle Authority has become the first European regulator to approve Tesla’s supervised self-driving software, commenting that “Proper use of this driver assistance system makes a positive contribution to road safety.” Seems especially notable coming from the world’s foremost cycling nation.
- An autonomous bus will soon begin operating in Norway without a safety driver.
- Uber and the Chinese self-driving firm Pony.ai are launching the first European commercial robotaxi service in Zagreb, Croatia.