Doomslayer: Progress Roundup
A new rule for supersonic flight, lab-grown oocytes, decentralized earthquake detection, and more.
Economics & Development
The Federal Aviation Administration has proposed a new rule that would allow civilian aircraft to fly faster than Mach 1 over the United States if their sonic booms stay below a strict noise threshold at ground level. If finalized, the rule, along with another planned rule that would set landing and takeoff noise standards for supersonic aircraft, would end the 1970s ban on overland civilian supersonic flight.
Finland has retired its analog copper-wire phone network, material-intensive infrastructure made obsolete by fiber optic cables.
A single fiber optic cable made from less than 150 pounds of silica can carry the same volume of information as multiple 1‑ton copper cables.
Artificial intelligence seems to be enabling a surge of solo entrepreneurs and tiny startups.
Energy & Environment
Ontario Power Generation has begun construction on what may become the Western world’s first grid-scale small modular reactor.
Air pollution in Europe continues to decline, according to the latest report from the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service.
Since 2020, and for the first time since the Middle Ages, forests have occupied a greater land area in Italy than farmland, with the former extending over more than a third of the national territory.
US Atlantic mackerel stocks, which were deemed overfished in 2017, now appear to be recovering, with surveys turning up abundant quantities of mackerel and their eggs in 2024.
Red kites, once nearly wiped out in Britain, are now numerous enough that English conservationists are sending them back to Spain. In the 1990s, Britain imported red kites from Spain and Sweden to rebuild the domestic population; since then, the UK population has risen from roughly 160 breeding pairs in 1995 to at least 4,600. In recent years, after surveys found only a handful of breeding pairs left in Extremadura, conservationists have released 126 English-born red kites to the Spanish region.
For decades, a coral community has been developing in the Port of Miami, home to endangered staghorn and elkhorn corals, large brain corals, fish, manatees, turtles, and other marine life. Intriguingly, scientists have discovered that the Miami corals are unusually resilient. They have survived pollution, disease, freshwater runoff, and extreme temperature swings that devastated other staghorn and elkhorn coral populations in the region.
The US Fish and Wildlife Service and Colossal Biosciences recently announced a plan to create a cryogenic “BioVault” for the tissues and genetic material of around 2,300 species protected under the Endangered Species Act.
Health & Demographics
In 2025, the age-adjusted death rate in the United States fell to a record low of 689 deaths per 100,000 people, thanks partly to falling overdose deaths.
The FDA has expanded approval of Casgevy, a CRISPR-based gene therapy for sickle cell disease, to children as young as two.
Science & Technology
A recent working paper finds that advice from large language models may make people’s decisions less extreme, despite the tendency of chatbots to behave sycophantically toward their users. In a large experiment, the researchers found that people who chatted with AI tended to move away from their initial judgments on a range of tasks, narrowing the gap between participants who started on opposite sides. The researchers propose that the mechanism is new information: even when the AI agreed with or flattered its users, it also offered new facts and counterarguments that sometimes changed their minds. Making the AI more sycophantic weakened that depolarizing effect, but did not reverse it.
Google’s earthquake warning system, which uses accelerometers in Android phones as seismic sensors, sent alerts to 11.4 million people in Venezuela last week, giving them precious seconds to prepare for the tremors. It’s not yet known how many lives the warnings may have saved.
Conception, a biotechnology company trying to make human eggs in the lab, says it is making progress toward that goal. This week, the company reported that it has produced early human egg cells, or primary oocytes, inside miniature ovaries grown from stem cells. The oocytes are not mature eggs, but Conception says they showed signs of entering meiosis, the special cell division required to make eggs, and forming into follicles, the ovarian structures that nurture developing eggs.