Doomslayer: Weekly Progress Roundup

Jul 06, 2025

North Carolina has banned local mandates that force developers to build parking lots, lowering construction costs and freeing up land.
California has relaxed parts of its environmental review law, the California Environmental Quality Act, in an effort to speed up housing construction.

Energy & Environment

Populations of greater roadrunner, the desert-dwelling bird of Looney Tunes fame, are expanding in both range and number as the climate warms. Beep beep!
A critically endangered Argentine frog is rebounding thanks to hardworking conservationists who have removed invasive predators, fenced off its habitat from cattle, and released thousands of captive-bred tadpoles.

Bloomberg reports that the BeeHome, a high-tech apiary, has a colony loss rate 5 times lower than normal beehives. The machine uses a scanner paired with artificial intelligence to monitor the hives for parasites and other dangers. And it’s not just a prototype: 300,000 BeeHomes are already in farms across the United States.

Suriname has become the 46th country to eliminate malaria.
US fast food consumption is trending down. New CDC data show that—as of mid‑2023—adults get just 11.7 percent of their daily calories from fast food, down from 14 percent in 2013–14. Among kids and teens, fast food accounts for 11.4 percent of daily calories, and about 30 percent eat it on any given day, compared to over 36 percent in the mid-2010s.
Microsoft has unveiled an AI tool that outperformed doctors at diagnosing tricky medical cases. Tested on real case studies from The New England Journal of Medicine, the system got it right about 86 percent of the time, compared to just 20 percent for a panel of physicians.
A team in Houston has performed the first fully robotic heart transplant in the United States.

A new wave of warehouse robots is finally tackling one of the toughest tasks: loading and unloading trucks. Boston Dynamics’s Stretch robot can unload around 580 packages per hour—nearly twice the speed of a human—and the shipping company DHL already has seven operating in the US, with 1,000 more on order.
Amazon now employs over one million robots in its warehouses—almost equaling the size of its human workforce. This automation has coincided with surging productivity.
A Tesla has driven itself home from the factory.
From July 1 onward, any research funded by the US National Institutes of Health will be made immediately free to read at publication. Previously, papers could be held behind paywalls for up to 12 months.