Weekly Progress Roundup

Trump lifts ban on supersonic flight, wolves multiply in California, cancer researchers present hopeful trial data, and more.

Malcolm Cochran

Jun 08, 2025

The share of Jamaica’s population living under its national poverty line fell to 8.2 percent in 2023, the lowest ever recorded.
Bhutan saw similar progress, according to a recent World Bank report, with its national poverty rate falling from 28 percent to 11.6 percent between 2017 and 2022.
The government of Georgia reported a 2.4 percentage point drop in its national poverty rate in 2024 alone.
A new multidimensional estimate in Morocco, based on indicators of education, health, housing, and access to basic infrastructure, found that the share of Moroccans living in poverty fell from 11.9 percent in 2014 to 6.8 percent in 2024.

Energy & Environment

Conservation and biodiversity

Three new wolf packs have formed in California, bringing the total number of documented packs to ten. Ten years ago, there was just one known pack—the first since wolves were extirpated from California in 1924.
Golden eagles have been spotted looking for nesting sites in Northern England, a hopeful step toward recolonization after the birds disappeared from the area in 2015.
A rare species of rabbit—last seen in 1904—was caught on camera in Mexico, proving that it has not, in fact, gone extinct.

Energy Production

Meta has entered a 20-year agreement to procure energy from an Illinois nuclear power plant. The deal will keep the plant in operation after a subsidy expires in 2027 and expand its capacity by 30 MW.

Food & Hunger

The Pan American Health Organization has determined that Bolivia and Brazil are free of foot-and-mouth disease, a highly contagious virus that primarily affects even-toed ungulates like cattle, pigs, sheep, and goats.
Researchers have developed new rice varieties that are resistant to drought and heat—possibly useful for mitigating some of the consequences of climate change.
India has launched a new high-resolution weather model aimed at improving forecasts for agriculture and flood management.

Health & Demographics

An AI-designed drug passed a phase II trial for the first time after safely improving lung function in people with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, a chronic and incurable lung disease.
Japanese scientists have begun clinical trials for artificial blood that could help end shortages in emergency medicine. Made from hemoglobin extracted from expired donor blood and encased in protective shells, the synthetic blood is compatible with all blood types and can be stored at room temperature for up to two years.
The cancer survival rate in the UK has doubled since the 1970s when just 24 percent of cancer patients were still alive ten years after their diagnosis. Today, around half survive that long.
Researchers presented a bounty of hopeful cancer treatment results at last week’s American Society of Clinical Oncology conference:
- An immunotherapy developed by Legend Biotech wiped out an “incurable” blood cancer in a third of trial participants—and kept it from returning for at least five years.
- A new pill from AstraZeneca, when taken after breast cancer began to develop resistance to standard hormone therapies, lowered the risk of cancer progression or death by half.
- When head and neck cancer patients received Keytruda, a widely used immunotherapy, before the standard treatment (surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy), they stayed progression-free for twice as long as those who received the standard treatment alone.
- CAR T-cell therapy—another type of immunotherapy—helped people with advanced stomach and esophageal cancers live 40 percent longer than those receiving standard treatments. CAR T-cell therapy is already known to be effective against blood cancers, but this was the first time it showed success treating solid tumors in a randomized trial. In another small, preliminary trial, CAR T-cell therapy also shrank tumors in 8 of 13 participants with recurrent glioblastoma, a highly aggressive and often fatal brain cancer.