Doomslayer: Progress Roundup

May 24, 2026

Economics & Development

President Trump’s decision to waive the Jones Act, a century-old law that restricts domestic shipping to US-built, US-flagged, and US-crewed vessels, is generating valuable information about the costs of maritime protectionism. Because compliant tankers are scarce and expensive, the law often makes it uneconomical to ship petroleum products by sea between US ports. Removing that constraint revealed how much trade the law had been suppressing. In the first 50 days after the waiver took effect, foreign-flagged tankers moved record quantities of petroleum products between the Gulf Coast and the West Coast. They also carried propane to Puerto Rico, where the Jones Act typically makes domestic shipments so expensive that buyers rely on foreign imports from as far afield as Chile. A better world is possible!

Harvard faculty have agreed to cap the share of A grades to 20 percent to control grade inflation. It’s not a perfect fix, as all lower grades, including A minuses, remain uncapped, but it’s a step in the right direction.

Journalists are increasingly using satellite imagery and machine learning to detect illegal resource extraction in remote rainforests, where on-the-ground investigations can be difficult and dangerous. The Pulitzer Center and the nonprofit Earth Genome have used these tools to create systems that monitor the Amazon and tropical forests in Africa, flagging suspicious changes for reporters to investigate.
A small population of critically endangered Raffles’ banded langurs is recovering in the treetops of Singapore, growing from 40 individuals in 2011 to at least 80 today. The recovery has been aided by citizen scientists, who have tracked the monkeys for years and helped conservationists identify good locations for rope bridges and food trees.

The Hormuz crisis is straining global energy markets, but also showing the resilience of the system. The Economist notes that, despite the loss of 14 percent of global petroleum output, crude oil prices have so far stayed far below the extreme levels that some analysts predicted. One reason for that development is that exports from outside the Gulf have surged, particularly from the US, where crude oil exports recently hit a record-high 6.5 million barrels per day.
There are also signs of longer-term adaptation to oil supply risks. A second pipeline in the UAE, expected to begin operating next year, would bypass the Strait and potentially double the country’s non-Strait export capacity to 3.6 million barrels per day. And worldwide, electric vehicles are adding a small but growing buffer against future oil shocks.
West Africa is making progress toward a regional power grid. A World Bank-financed program has built more than 4,000 kilometers of high-voltage transmission lines connecting the grids of 15 countries. Eight percent of the region’s electricity is now traded across borders, helping improve reliability and reduce costs.

Eli Lilly has announced the main results of a phase 3 trial for retatrutide, its new GLP-1-based weight loss drug. In the trial, obese adults without diabetes lost an average of 28 percent of their body weight on the highest dose, broadly confirming an earlier result Lilly reported in December. That exceeds the results of the pivotal obesity trials for semaglutide (Wegovy) and tirzepatide (Zepbound), which produced average body-weight losses of roughly 15 percent and 21 percent, respectively.
There’s more evidence that the US obesity rate has entered a sustained decline. Recent data released by Epic, an electronic health records company, indicate that the obesity rate has been falling since 2021. The increasing uptake of GLP-1 weight loss drugs is one plausible explanation.

Four recent observational studies have found that people taking GLP-1 drugs tend to have better cancer outcomes, including lower rates of tumor progression and mortality, as well as lower rates of breast cancer diagnosis. The studies do not attempt to show causation; they are simply promising observations and signals for further research.
A new analysis of Global Burden of Disease data across 204 countries and territories found that, from 1990 to 2021, the global age-adjusted prevalence of substance use disorders fell by 16.9 percent.
The US has made commercial airline travel extraordinarily safe. The harder, albeit smaller problem is general aviation—think small aircraft, helicopters, and private jets—where the fatal accident rate is roughly two orders of magnitude higher. However, even this riskier part of aviation seems to be getting safer. According to the Federal Aviation Administration, there were 0.68 fatal general aviation accidents for every 100,000 hours of flight time in 2024, the lowest rate since the agency began tracking its current series in 2009, and likely the lowest rate in US history.

Waymo continues to expand its robotaxi service. The company says it has begun growing its service area in Miami, with expansions in Austin, Atlanta, Houston, and the San Francisco Bay Area close behind. Over the next few weeks, Waymo expects to cover more than 1,400 square miles across 11 cities.
An OpenAI general-purpose reasoning model has produced a counterexample disproving a long-standing conjecture posed by the mathematician Paul Erdős. Unlike earlier AI-related progress on Erdős problems, where human mathematicians used AI tools largely as research assistants, the core conceptual work behind this new result appears to have originated from the model itself.
Humanity has not lost the ability to create magnificent stone structures. Around the world, modern Hindu temples are being built with load-bearing stone, intricate hand carving, and design principles inherited from ancient architectural texts.