Economics & Development
According to new government statistics, the number of child laborers in Brazil fell by nearly 29 percent between 2016 and 2025, from 2.1 million to 1.5 million.
Vietnam has signed a free-trade agreement with Norway, Switzerland, Iceland, and Liechtenstein, the four members of the European Free Trade Association. The Norwegian government says roughly half of the country’s exports to Vietnam will become duty-free when the agreement takes effect, rising to more than 98 percent within seven years.
Energy & Environment
A new sewer tunnel beneath London has dramatically reduced sewage overflows into the River Thames, according to a report from Thames Water, London’s primary water utility. In 2025, the tunnel’s first full year of operation, around 3 million cubic meters of sewage-contaminated water entered the river. That’s 86 percent less than the 2020–2023 baseline average, and 81 percent less than the volume discharged in 2022, a year with a similar level of rainfall to 2025.
Annual deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon has fallen to its lowest level since at least 1988, when systematic satellite monitoring began. According to satellite estimates from Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research, 3,335 square kilometers of the forest were cleared between August 2025 and July 2026, down 42 percent from the previous year and 27 percent below the previous record low in 2012.
Stanford researchers have found that corals can rapidly recover from bleaching by touching healthy, genetically identical clones. When healthy corals touch damaged coral, their tissues fuse, allowing the microscopic algae that provide them with food to pass from the healthy coral into the bleached one. In laboratory experiments, all five bleached coral fragments placed in contact with healthy clones recovered within eight weeks, while five fragments kept slightly apart failed to recover.
Health & Demographics
A recent analysis of birth records and household survey data found that the global birth rate among girls aged 10–14 fell by 76 percent between 1990 and 2023, dropping from 4.5 annual births per 1,000 girls to 1.1. Among girls aged 15–19, the rate fell by 48 percent, from 74.7 annual births per 1,000 girls to 39.
More than 1.5 million Wolbachia-infected mosquitoes have been released in Barcelona to control the city’s mosquito population. The released mosquitoes are all male, meaning they don’t bite, and the bacteria they carry prevent eggs from hatching when they mate with wild females. The release marks Europe’s first large-scale urban deployment of the technique, which has successfully reduced mosquito populations in cities around the world.
The FDA has approved an immunotherapy that could allow some rectal cancer patients to avoid chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery. The drug, called dostarlimab, helps the immune system attack tumors with a certain genetic defect. In a clinical trial involving 154 patients whose tumors had this defect, 71 percent needed no additional cancer treatment and showed no signs of disease progression after a median follow-up of around two years.
Radical Numerics, a biotechnology startup, says it has used AI-designed viruses to treat a human patient for the first time. The company reportedly used artificial intelligence to modify bacteria-eating viruses to attack the patient’s E. coli infection, which had resisted antibiotics and existing bacteria-eating viruses. According to the company, a cocktail containing the modified viruses killed samples of the patient’s bacteria in laboratory tests and was then administered under FDA authorization, though it’s not yet known whether the treatment succeeded.
Science & Technology
More than 2,500 aircraft are now equipped with an autonomous emergency landing system developed by Garmin. If a pilot becomes incapacitated, the system can automatically select a suitable airport, navigate there, communicate with air traffic control, and land the aircraft. In December 2025, the system completed its first real-world emergency landing, safely bringing a Beechcraft King Air down in Colorado after a cabin pressurization failure.
Over the past two weeks, three research teams have reported advances toward more powerful and reliable quantum computers.
Researchers at Google have developed a better method for producing “magic states”, special states of qubits that quantum computers consume to perform some of their most demanding operations.1 Producing these magic states reliably has been a major challenge because they are highly vulnerable to errors. Google’s method reduced the error rate of its resulting states roughly 40-fold. If it can be scaled up, the method could also reduce the computing resources needed to produce magic states, leaving more capacity for actual calculations.
Quantinuum, a quantum computing company based in Colorado, has demonstrated a major advance in quantum error correction. By distributing information across multiple qubits to protect it against errors, the company reduced its already exceptionally low error rate by a further tenfold in tests of quantum memory. The researchers also demonstrated improvements in the reliability of certain quantum operations.
In England, University of Oxford researchers entangled qubits in two separate quantum devices and sustained that fragile connection for about 10 seconds. Entanglement links the quantum states of particles so that measuring one can reveal information about the other, even when they are physically separate. Preserving entanglement for longer periods could make it possible to combine multiple quantum computers into one larger and more powerful machine.
A qubit is the quantum equivalent of a classical bit. While a classical bit has a value of either 0 or 1, a qubit can exist in a combination of both states until measured.