Hi everyone, Gus here. There won’t be a regular edition next week as I’ll be travelling to Vancouver for the annual TED conference. I’m guest curating a session on progress, with an incredible lineup of speakers including many names that will be familiar to readers of this newsletter: Bill McKibben is speaking about solar energy, Amy Bowers Cordalis on the restoration of the Klamath River, Saloni Dattani on global health, Felix Brooks-church on solving hidden hunger, Leopoldo López Mendoza on resistance to authoritarianism, Rapelang Rabana on literacy, Drew McCartor on combating lead poisoning, and President Vjosa Osmani of Kosovo, on democracy.

We’ll be sharing all their talks here as they come out over the next few months. Thanks in advance for your patience. We’ll be back to regular programming in a fortnight :)

This week’s top stories

Four humans just flew behind the Moon…and photographed Earthrise.
At 12:37 a.m. on April 6, 2026, four people crossed an invisible line in space. The Artemis II spacecraft Orion, carrying NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch, and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen, entered the Moon’s sphere of influence. About an hour later, Koch radioed down: “We are now falling to the Moon rather than rising away from Earth.”

It has been 53 years since any human was this close to the lunar surface. The last crew to see the Moon with their own eyes was Apollo 17, in December 1972. Those astronauts walked on it. This crew would not land, but they would do something no one has done since the Nixon administration: swing around the far side of the moon and try to photograph a new Earthrise.

At 6:43 p.m. ET, the spacecraft slipped behind the Moon and the Deep Space Network lost Orion’s signal. For 40 minutes, the crew could not communicate with Earth: complete radio silence as they floated further from our home than any human beings have ever been. At the apex of their figure-8 path, Orion was 252,756 miles from Earth — 4,111 miles farther than the previous distance, a record set by Apollo 13 under less pleasant circumstances.

Then, at 7:24, Orion came around the Moon, and Earth rose.
It wasn’t the same Earthrise that Bill Anders photographed from Apollo 8 on Christmas Eve 1968 — it couldn’t be. Anders was 60 miles above the lunar surface; this crew was 4,000. Anders hadn’t planned the shot; he scrambled for colour film as the blue marble slid into view. This crew knew it was coming and had Nikon D5s ready. But the feeling, by all accounts, was the same. Koch, who had hung a print of Anders’s photograph in her childhood bedroom, spoke first as communications were restored: “It is so great to hear from Earth again.”

The Earthrise photograph from the Artemis II mission hasn’t yet been released in high definition, and won’t be until the Orion astronauts return home. But a lower-definition version has been published in PetaPixel and Scientific American: here it is.

Other tidbits from the Artemis II mission:

• The Artemis II astronauts sent back photographs of the moon’s far side, but they also studied it with their eyes. “The human eye is basically the best camera that could ever or will ever exist,” said Kelsey Young, science lead for the Artemis II mission. “The number of receptors in the human eye far outweighs what a camera is able to do.”

  • Case in point: the crew reported colour nuances on the moon’s surface — not the silver-grey of photographs, but browns and blues, subtle shifts that reveal mineral composition and age.

  • The astronauts observed two fresh lunar craters, and proposed naming one of them “Carroll,” after Commander Reid Wiseman’s late wife, who died in 2020.

• Glover was captivated by “the terminator,” the boundary between the Moon's light and dark halves, describing it in vivid terms: "The islands of light, the valleys that look like black holes — you'd fall straight to the centre of the Moon if you stepped in some of those. It's just so visually captivating."

• The Artemis crew captured the moon eclipsing the sun. Totality lasted for nearly 54 minutes, and Hansen requested that the science team on Earth should "come up with some new superlatives" because he lacked the words to express what he was seeing. In the bottom right of the picture you can see from left to right, Saturn, Mars and Mercury.

• Yes, the toilet broke. No, it wasn’t a disaster. While mission control worked to fix the out-of-commission commode, Glover, Wiseman, Koch and Hansen did their business in bags, just like astronauts did in the bad old Apollo days.

• Instead of bread, the astronauts ate tortillas — a practical necessity, not a statement piece. Bread crumbles, and in zero-g, the crumbs get everywhere, including into the equipment, which can actually endanger astronauts. Tortillas do no such thing, so they’re now standard astronaut fare.

  • Thank Rodolfo Neri Vela, a 1985 payload specialist on the Atlantis mission and the first Mexican in space.

• On Easter (or “Wester,” if you’re Eastern Orthodox), the Artemis II astronauts hid eggs around the cabin, and engaged in an Easter egg hunt. “They were the dehydrated scrambled egg variety,” said Koch, “but we’re all pretty happy with them.”

• The astronauts didn’t just capture Earthrise; they also captured “Earthset,” the earth disappearing around the curve of the moon. Unlike the new Earthrise “Earthset” got the full social media treatment and may become the mission’s most iconic photograph.

…or will the most iconic photograph be “Hello, World” released on April 3, a full-frontal image of our planet with glowing auroras at the poles?

Orion is now heading home. Splashdown is scheduled for April 10 off the coast of San Diego. Most of the photographs won’t be downloaded until after the crew returns — there’s too much data for the Deep Space Network to relay in transit. But Wiseman gave us a taste during the live broadcast, holding up his iPhone to the camera to flash a close-up of the lunar surface he’d snapped through the window.

What’s next? Artemis III. Boots on the ground. The first Moon landing since 1972.

…and now, back to Earth…

The world has finally crossed the 10% mark for ocean protection. In the past two years, we’ve protected 5 million km² of ocean, an area larger than the EU. Satellite tracking and machine learning are making enforcement easier too, even for nations with small budgets and huge protected areas, like tiny Palau. Leading the charge is Global Fishing Watch, which expanded its monitoring to 73 million km² last year (around a third of all national waters) enabling over 400 sanctions against illegal fishing activity.

The last two years have also seen a hidden surge in women’s rights. Between 2023 and 2025, 68 countries enacted 113 reforms strengthening workplace protections, expanding parental leave, and removing barriers to employment. While the gaps are still stark, these reforms will drive real progress, linking legal rights to real-world economic gains at a global scale.

The UN Special Programme on Human Reproduction’s 2025 annual report reveals women today are 40% less likely to die from pregnancy or childbirth than in 2000. That’s astonishing progress, and there are powerful reasons to believe it will continue: in 2025 the WHO issued new guidance on standardising postpartum haemorrhage treatment, the single leading cause of maternal mortality globally, responsible for around a quarter of all deaths.

☝️ possibly the most beautifully designed UN report you will ever see.

Meet “Mother,” the machine that can keep a uterus alive outside the body. Spanish scientists have successfully built a perfusion machine — plastic arteries, a pump for a heart, an oxygenator for lungs — that can keep a uterus alive outside the human body. The first test kept a donated uterus alive for 24 hours; now they’re aiming for 28 days: long enough to watch a full menstrual cycle and study implantation (the moment an embryo burrows into the uterine lining). The machine is technically called PUPER, which stands for “preservation of the uterus in perfusion.” But González’s colleague Xavier Santamaria says the team has adopted a nickname for it: “We call it ‘Mother.’” MIT Technology Review

Thailand has classified sexual harassment as a criminal offence. The amendments to the Criminal Code cover harassment by words, gestures and stalking (online and in person) with penalties rising in cases involving repeated abuse, public settings, and the abuse of authority or children under 15. UN Women

Japan has ended its sole-custody-only rule for divorce, allowing parents to negotiate joint custody for the first time in more than a century. The change, which took effect on April 1, brings Japan into line with the rest of the G7 and explicitly requires parents to respect each other’s positions and cooperate “in the best interests of their child”. The Guardian

South Africa’s HPV programme cuts dangerous infections by 83%. A decade after South Africa launched school-based HPV vaccination for Grade 4 girls, infections from the two main cancer-causing strains have fallen 83% among 17 to 18-year-olds. It’s the clearest evidence yet that HPV programmes can deliver population-level gains in high-burden African settings. The Lancet

Mozambique has wiped its IMF debt to zero. The country cleared its $701 million IMF debt by late March, making Mozambique one of a growing number of African countries with no IMF debt at all (Nigeria and Namibia cleared theirs last year). The move doesn’t end the country’s wider debt problems, but it does remove an important external liability. Business Insider Africa

As American aid to Ukraine has fallen, Europe has stepped up to keep support flowing. In 2025, the Nordic and Baltic states — despite representing just 8% of the GDP of tracked European donors — provided 33% of military aid, helping offset the evaporation of American support. Kiel Institute

The war in Iran has pushed Asia toward solar, not coal. Fears that disruptions from the war would drive Asia back to coal are overstated. Even a worst-case scenario would add only about 100 million tonnes to a 9 billion-tonne coal market, equivalent to the impact of a weather swing. Instead, higher electricity prices and faster permitting are accelerating rooftop solar adoption across the region, reinforcing a structural shift away from fossil fuel dependence. Bloomberg

The clean energy industry is taking the gloves off in the United States. After losing federal subsidies under the Trump administration, US renewable energy firms are shifting from advocacy to direct political spending. Backed by wealthy investors, the new campaigns aim to reshape support by emphasizing jobs, domestic manufacturing and lower costs, signalling an industry that is now willing to compete in the same political arena as fossil fuels. NYT

Renewables hit a record share of US electricity, overtaking fossil gas
Renewables generated over a third of US electricity in March 2026 for the first time, surpassing gas as wind and solar reached a record 26% combined share. The milestone reflects rapid structural growth, especially in solar, while coal fell to just 12%, one of its lowest levels on record. Ember

Electric vehicles won every major category at the 2026 World Car Awards, from urban and luxury to performance and design. The clean sweep suggests EVs are now the benchmark for quality, efficiency and desirability across segments, even as protectionism slows access to the best global models in some markets. CleanTechnica

China just launched a nationwide healthcare insurance system for people with disabilities, with a three-year target to cover its entire population. The reform scales up pilots that began in 2016, sets a roughly 0.3% contribution rate from employers, individuals and government subsidies, and promises the same benefits in rural and urban areas. Reuters

U.S. opioid overdose deaths have fallen by nearly half from their 2023 peak. According to CDC data, annual opioid overdose deaths dropped from almost 84,000 in June 2023 to about 43,000 by October 2025, a reversal that spans all racial groups after years of harm. Some states, including North Carolina, Ohio and Pennsylvania have seen declines of more than 50%. The shift reflects stricter border controls, wider naloxone access and more treatment, but also a huge amount of local volunteer work: grassroots groups have spent years handing out overdose-reversal kits, training neighbours, staffing drop-in centres and building trust with people often missed by formal services. WaPo

Brazil is embedding environmental enforcement into its financial system. A new rule now requires banks to check if rural loan applicants have any deforestation on their farms using satellite imagery. If bank managers detect any clearing since 2019, farmers applying for government-funded rural credit ‌must show proof of deforestation permits to get their loans approved. Reuters

Marine life rebounds off Vancouver Island after decades of loss
The waters off Vancouver Island are witnessing a striking ecological return. In north-eastern British Columbia, annual humpback sightings have risen from just seven in 2003 to more than 115, while sea otters, once hunted to near extinction, now number about 8,200. Recovering seal and sea lion populations are also drawing more orcas, a reminder that protection can rebuild entire food webs. Financial Times

And finally, in Romania’s Tarcu Mountains, European bison are proving that rewilding can change an ecosystem, not just save a species. The animals were once driven to near-extinction in Europe by hunting and habitat loss, but in areas where they have been reintroduced since 2014, researchers have found plant biomass and diversity are up by about 30%. That makes the comeback of Europe’s largest land mammal more than symbolic: a species nearly erased from the continent is now helping rebuild richer, more resilient grassland and forest-edge habitat. Ecoticias

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This week’s top stories

UNESCO’s new Global Education Monitoring Report reveals a dramatic expansion in global education since 2000. But just about every piece of reporting has focused on one statistic: the 273 million children, adolescents and youth currently excluded from education. While it’s true that progress has stalled on that front, zooming out gives a different perspective: school completion is rising at every level, and higher education participation has more than doubled in a generation. The first quarter of the 21st century has been the most expansive era for schooling in human history.

Here are some more stats buried in the report that haven’t appeared in the news media (and yes, we’ve checked).

• Since 2000, global primary and secondary enrollment has grown by 30%, reaching about 1.4 billion learners in 2024 — equivalent to 25 additional children enrolling in school every minute for the last 25 years.

• Completion rates have improved at every stage since 2000: primary completion rose from 77% to 88%, lower secondary from 60% to 78%, and upper secondary from 37% to 61%.

• Gender gaps in primary and secondary education have largely closed. Take Nepal, where girls have caught up with, and in some areas surpassed, boys.

• In 14 African countries, making education compulsory, not just free, has added more than a year of schooling for both girls and boys, while child labour laws have increased the gains further.

• And finally, congratulations to the countries who have cut out-of-school rates by 80% or more since the year 2000: Madagascar and Togo among young children, Morocco and Viet Nam among adolescents, and Georgia and Türkiye among youth. Côte d’Ivoire halved out-of-school rates across all three age groups over the same period!

Antarctic humpback whales have recovered to nearly pre-whaling levels, a remarkable reversal in the same ocean that saw more than two million whales killed in the 20th century. Humpbacks have been the fastest to rebound since commercial whaling was banned in 1986, with multiple groups of more than 100 whales recorded near the South Orkney Islands. “It’s breathtaking to see blows stretch from horizon to horizon, just as the first explorers to the region described over a century ago”. The Guardian

The first ever footage of a sperm whale birth — and it’s magical. Thanks to drone technology, scientists were able to film and analyse a remarkably social sperm whale birth, in which a calf delivered by a whale named Rounder was immediately lifted to the surface by a coordinated group that included her mother Lady Oracle, her sister Aurora, an unrelated young female Ariel, and even an adolescent male, Allan.

During the 34-minute labour off Dominica in July 2023, 11 whales surrounded Rounder, oriented themselves towards her during delivery and then towards the newborn, which was rarely left untouched and was usually in contact with at least 2 whales at once. Half the attending whales were not related to the mother, making the event especially striking as evidence that birth assistance in sperm whales may rely not just on kinship but on broader social reciprocity. The New York Times 🎁

Could Japan, Botswana and Poland be the next to legalise same-sex marriage?

Japan’s marriage equality fight is heading to the Supreme Court, putting legal recognition for same-sex couples before all 15 justices for the first time. A ruling is expected in early 2027. Japan remains the only G7 country that does not legally recognise same-sex couples, despite several lower-court rulings in recent years that found the denial of marriage benefits unconstitutional. Washington Blade

In Botswana, a High Court case scheduled to be heard in July 2026 similarly argues that, after several rulings protecting LGBTQ+ association, gender identity and same-sex intimacy, equal marriage is the next logical test of whether constitutional guarantees of dignity, liberty and equality apply in full. Washington Blade

Meanwhile, following a March 20th ruling by Poland’s Supreme Administrative Court, Poland must recognise same-sex marriages under EU law. That’s right, Poland’s highest court has ruled that authorities must recognise same-sex marriages legally performed in other EU countries, following a binding decision from the European Court of Justice. The judgment forces administrative compliance in a country with no domestic recognition, creating new legal rights for cross-border couples. Washington Blade

How far have LGBTQ rights come in Poland? Travel back in time to 2005, when Pride parades were banned in Warsaw, and the guy who banned them — Mayor Lech Kaczyński — then ran on an anti-gay stance to become Poland’s President. Kaczyński’s far-right Law & Justice party took power again in 2015, but the electorate soured on them in 2023, when a coalition of three liberal parties won 54% of the vote following the highest turnout in a Polish election since 1919. A record number of women and young people voted, many of whom said they did so to oppose Law & Justice’s platform on women’s and LGBTQ+ rights.

Iran shock speeds the shift from fossil fuels to electrification. The data is starting to come in: the Iran war is acting as an accelerant for clean energy. As oil and gas volatility pushes up costs, households from Britain to India and Pakistan are turning to EVs, solar, heat pumps and induction stoves as a hedge. These shifts will not stay local: when major economies accelerate the transition, others follow, creating spillover effects that outlast the crisis. Bloomberg / PV Magazine / CleanTechnica

Indonesia’s President, Prabowo Subianto, on the 11th March 2026:

We will build 100 gigawatts of solar panels as quickly as possible. That is my directive and my decision, and we will prove to the world that we can move faster. This situation pushes us to accelerate the energy transition.

The Philippines’ Energy Secretary Sharon Garin, on the 21st March 2026:

It’s time for us to think about electrifying everything, being less dependent on fuel. We have many plans in place and some are being implemented right now.

This year’s World TB Day theme, “Yes! We can End TB!”, landed with enthusiasm, yes (!), but also with some real evidence behind it. New vaccines and portable diagnostics are starting to close the gaps in prevention and detection.

• With the existing TB vaccine protecting infants and young children against severe disease only, new candidates advancing through clinical trials are showing promising signs of effectiveness in adolescents and adults. Gavi says these vaccines could save millions of lives and deliver up to $400 billion in economic benefits, and planning is already under way for roughly 120 million doses a year in the first five years of rollout.

• At the same time, WHO has endorsed portable molecular tests that can be used in primary care settings rather than only hospitals and labs, along with tongue swabs, which are easier than traditional sputum tests because they do not require patients to cough up mucus from the lungs. These make it easier and cheaper to diagnose TB closer to where patients live, even as international aid cuts threaten progress. Think Global Health

More than nine million vaccine doses for measles, polio and other preventable diseases were delivered to children in humanitarian settings across the Horn of Africa in 2025. Coordinated outreach and mobile campaigns overcame access barriers, showing large-scale immunisation remains feasible even in the world’s most dangerous places. IRC

A century of (don’t get creeped out) hair samples shows how sharply lead exposure fell after modern environmental rules took hold in the United States. A PNAS study found that current lead concentrations in hair from Utah’s Wasatch Front are almost 100 times lower than before the Environmental Protection Agency was established, documenting a long-run collapse after regulation of leaded petrol and other major sources.

Construction has started on the China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan railway line, which could redraw Central Asia’s economic map. The line has a long history. First proposed in the 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union, it finally got financed in December 2025, which means construction is now underway. The project is expected to be completed in 2030, and Kyrgyzstan’s President Japarov says it will transform the country from a “dead-end” to a “transit power.” It will also reduce China’s dependence on Russian transit routes and create a shorter, faster southern corridor for freight between China, Europe and the Middle East, directly eroding Moscow’s influence as the primary Eurasian trade conduit. The Diplomat

Saudi Arabia has restored 10,000 km² of degraded land and planted over 159 million trees under its Green Initiative, shifting from pledges to large-scale ecological delivery. The programme targets desertification, dust storms and biodiversity loss, and marks one of the largest coordinated restoration efforts in the world’s arid regions. Arab News

Australia’s ampurta is making a big comeback. The tiny desert marsupial was once thought close to extinction after farming and the introduction of foxes and rabbits devastated its habitat in the 19th and 20th centuries. But between 2015 and 2021 it expanded its range by 48,000 km² — roughly the size of Denmark — to 238,441 km², thanks in part to its resilience in extreme conditions and also to reduced invasive rabbit numbers.

For conservationists, the lesson is a hopeful one: “In other parts of the world where we’re cutting down forests or destroying wetlands … as long as we can bring that habitat back, we can [help] species to bounce back.” Mongabay

Egypt fossil discovery reshapes origins of modern apes
Fossils from northern Egypt dated to 17–18 million years ago identify a new ape species, Masripithecus moghraensis, likely close to the common ancestor of all living apes. The find shifts the centre of early ape evolution from East to North Africa, suggesting a different migration pathway into Eurasia and exposing gaps in a fossil record long biased toward a single region. Smithsonian

Physicists spot impossible particle called toponium, made of top quarks
Scientists at CERN have found strong evidence for “toponium,” a particle formed when a top quark briefly sticks to its antimatter twin. This wasn’t supposed to happen because top quarks decay almost instantly, but new AI tools revealed rare low-speed pairs that behave like a bound state. The signal reached five-sigma confidence (99.99994%), the gold standard for a physics discovery, filling a key gap in the Standard Model showing how the strong force binds matter. Phys.org

And finally, Artemis II, NASA’s most daring mission in generations, has launched to the Moon, marking the first time since 1972 that humans will have left lower Earth orbit. The ten-day flight will be packed with milestones: two of the crew, NASA’s Christina Koch and Victor Glover, will become the first woman and first person of colour respectively to fly into cislunar space.

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This week’s top stories

All of the chemical components of DNA have now been discovered on a second asteroid. RNA and DNA are built from five chemical bases: adenine, guanine, cytosine, thymine, and uracil. A Japanese team has now identified all of those in rocks picked up from the surface of the asteroid Ryugu. The discovery corroborates the results from a 2023 NASA mission that returned samples from the asteroid Bennu that also contained all five nucleobases. Finding all five nucleobases of life on multiple asteroids dramatically increases the chance that life was seeded by materials brought to Earth by ancient space rocks. We really might be made of stardust. 404 Media

Child mortality down 60% in two generations, as low-cost tools save millions. Since 1990, global under-five deaths have fallen from 13 million to 4.9 million a year, one of the largest public health gains in human history. Vaccines, oral rehydration, bed nets and safer births have been at the heart of this, with deaths from diarrhoea down 75% and malaria by 63%. Although progress has slowed in the last decade, the tools to prevent most remaining deaths exist. The gap is now political will rather than innovation. UNICEF

Special mention here goes to India, which has been one of the largest contributors to this progress. Expanded immunisation, maternal care and disease control have cut its under-five mortality rate by 79% since 1990. To put this another way:

India is also really starting to come to the party on climate and energy. Emissions growth has slowed to a trickle, and the country is now capable of making 210 GW of solar modules a year. That positions India as a major global solar production hub, which is crucial because… drumroll please… India’s government just announced plans to quadruple solar capacity and triple wind power by 2035, signalling a major acceleration in its energy transition. It’s likely to hit that target well ahead of schedule, too.

If we’re giving props to India, then we need to do the same for China, which just passed a sweeping new Environmental Code. Approved at the National People’s Congress, the move “demonstrates a kind of special attention and priority given to ecological and environmental protection.” Beyond serving as a political signal, it addresses a problem: there has been a spate of environmental legislation in recent decades, but some of those directives overlap and conflict with each other. The revised package replaces 10 existing laws and covers everything from water and soil pollution to ecological conservation and species protection. Bloomberg 🎁

Perhaps relatedly, China is cleaning up its steel industry: More than 80% of producers have now adopted ultra-low emissions processes, following a nationwide policy push. Upgrades have already reduced emissions by 34 million tonnes (equivalent to permanently shutting down eight coal-fired power plants). Reminder: steel production is responsible for 7% of the world’s emissions, and China manufactures more than half of that. Mysteel

Climate policies work faster and more effectively than most people think. An analysis of 40 nations finds climate policies do reduce emissions. The strongest effects come from “packages” combining carbon pricing, subsidies and regulations, rather than single measures. Nature Climate Change

Brazil has a new climate policy centred on ending deforestation. Brazil, like India, has just updated its national climate plan to 2035, but this one places forest protection at the core, aiming to eliminate deforestation by 2030 as the country’s primary emissions source. Land-use change accounts for nearly half of national emissions. Bloomberg 🎁

Kyrgyzstan builds nationwide system to support abuse survivors. Over the last few decades the central Asian country has built a national response to domestic violence, including legal protections, crisis centres and hotlines, backed by civil society and international partners. A landmark law was introduced in 2003 and strengthened in 2017, while frontline organisations now win nearly 90% of court cases they support, reflecting growing institutional capacity and access to justice for survivors. UN News

Global terrorism deaths fall to their lowest in two decades. Terrorism deaths have continued their long-term downward trend driven by reduced activity in Iraq, Syria and Nigeria. While fatalities in Western countries rose, they remain a small share of the global total. Vision of Humanity

Philippines cuts child labour cases by almost 40% in two years. Child labour cases in the Philippines fell from 828,000 in 2022 to 509,000 in 2024, driven by coordinated government action and community programmes. Over 319,000 children were removed from labour, while livelihood support reached 47,000 families to tackle root causes. The Philippine Star

Luxembourg will become the second European country after France to protect abortion in its constitution. On the 3rd March, the Chamber of Deputies backed a constitutional amendment stating that “the freedom to resort to voluntary termination of pregnancy is guaranteed”, with 48 votes in favour, six against and two abstentions. ConstitutionNet

Montana tribes use sovereignty to restore rivers at scale. The Jocko River is home to the United States’ last migratory bull trout population, sacred to the Salish and Kootenai Tribes. For decades, wrongheaded policies designed to make the water as ‘useful’ as possible mangled the river, cutting it off from its natural meanders and endangering the bull trout. Now the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes are using a landmark water rights compact, effective since 2021, to restore waterways like the Jocko, bringing back the bull trout and showing how Indigenous sovereignty can align ecological recovery with long-term water security. High Country News

Monarch butterfly population in Mexico rebounds. Mexico’s overwintering monarch population grew 64% this winter, with butterflies covering their largest area of forest since 2018. The recovery remains fragile, but suggests there’s been a positive impact from conservation efforts in the butterflies’ core habitat, where forest loss has fallen from nearly 500 hectares in 2003–04 to just under 3 hectares in 2024–25. The Guardian

Mexico expands LGBTQ+ protections across 28 federal laws. Mexico’s Senate has unanimously approved reforms embedding protections for sexual orientation and gender identity across numerous federal laws governing health, education, employment and justice. The changes extend anti-discrimination principles throughout the country’s legal system, affecting a population where more than 5% identify as LGBTQ+. Infobae

A £1m prize goes to an AI that prompts people with dementia — and slows their decline. The idea behind “Wispy” is simple: people with dementia can maintain their independence far longer if they have a facilitator standing by 24/7 to prompt them during moments of confusion. For most people, that’s effectively impossible, but an AI can be there all day and night, and create audio and visual cues to make moments of confusion less likely. Wispy’s creator, CrossSense, hopes to roll it out onto augmented reality glasses in 2027 and smartphones sometime this year. Studies (not yet peer-reviewed!) show that those with dementia not only “remember” better while wearing the Wispy-integrated glasses, but retain many of the benefits even after they take the glasses off. The Guardian

Deep-sea mining halted as global moratorium gains support. International negotiations have again resulted in a no to deep-sea mining, with no code adopted and no projects authorised. A growing coalition of 40 countries now backs a moratorium, while regulators have launched a probe into a key contractor. It appears humanity is coalescing around the conclusion that this is a bad idea. Oceanographic

Women’s representation in African parliaments is steadily rising. Women now hold at least 20% of parliamentary seats in 31 African countries, with standout cases like Rwanda exceeding 60% and recent reforms pushing representation above 25% in countries such as Sierra Leone and Benin. Higher representation is linked to gains in girls’ education and gender equality, demonstrating that political inclusion can translate into broader social progress. Deutsche Welle

And finally, we’ve already covered Ukraine’s rewilding of the Danube, but this beautifully filmed (and short, just 15 minutes!) documentary by Emmanuel Rondeau really brings it home. Next time you find yourself lost in the infinite scroll, why don’t you give your thumb and your sanity a rest and watch this instead? Rewilding Europe

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Meet Nika Kovač, the Slovenian activist who just made abortion accessible to 20 million women. In March 2024, Kovač and a network of friends launched My Voice, My Choice as a formal European Citizens’ Initiative. After they gathered more than 1.2 million signatures in 15 countries, the European Commission was required to issue a response. On 26th February, Brussels confirmed that EU funds can help women in countries with abortion restrictions access care elsewhere in the bloc, potentially affecting about 20 million women. Obama Foundation

No one is too small, no one is too unimportant, if we come together we can achieve anything. I believe that this work, this fight, is worth fighting.
Nika Kovač

But it’s not a done deal yet: the movement is being targeted by far-right groups, who most recently tried to force a clause into the 2027 EU Budget Resolution that would undermine the decision. Nika and her friends have vowed to keep fighting. My Voice, My Choice

Cancer death rates in the United Kingdom have fallen to a record low. Between 2022 and 2024, about 247 people per 100,000 died from cancer each year in the U.K., down 29% from the 1989 peak and by 11% from a decade ago. The decline reflects decades of progress in screening, vaccination and care, and should be more widely celebrated but of course it’s not. The Conversation

Chilean President Gabriel Boric has signed a decree adding 360,000 km² of full protection to waters around the Juan Fernández archipelago. The move brings the fully protected area around these parks to almost one million km², making it the third-largest fully protected marine area in the world (behind the Ross Sea and the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument) and taking Chile past 50% protection of its exclusive economic zone. Oceanographic Magazine

Nigeria unlocks $552 million for basic education. The HOPE-EDU programme is the largest individual tranche of education financing in Nigeria’s history. It aims to build 13,000 classrooms, improve learning for more than 29 million children, support half a million teachers, and bring back more than 1.5 million out-of-school children. It’s part of a bigger surge; education spending has increased more than fourfold in Nigeria since 2022, reaching $2.5 billion in the latest budget. TVC News / Premium Times

More than half the adult population of Príncipe, the ‘African Galápagos’ has joined a scheme that pays quarterly if people follow an environmental protection code. The payments are backed by South African billionaire Mark Shuttleworth, who set out to support a model of development that ties conservation to tangible improvements such as better housing and more secure livelihoods. The Guardian

The Iran war is turning energy security into an electrification story. As oil and gas prices surge, countries with more solar, batteries and EVs are proving less exposed. Pakistan’s solar boom has already avoided more than $12 billion in fossil fuel imports, and will avoid a further $6.3 billion through 2026. The bigger point: three-quarters of the world’s population live in fossil-importing countries, and every time oil and gas prices spike they have to send more of their wealth to another country. Renewables and electrification do the opposite. NPR / Bloomberg / Ember

Some world leaders are taking note…

Canada’s Supreme Court has opened Quebec’s daycare system to refugee claimants. Bijou Cibuabua Kanyinda, a refugee from the DRC, entered Quebec in 2018 with three young children. Despite securing a work permit, she was denied reduced-fee childcare because her refugee claim had not yet been formally accepted. She challenged the rule all the way to Canada’s highest court: on the 6th March, the Supreme Court ruled 8–1 that the exclusion was discriminatory. CTV News

How the Quapaw Nation brought one of America’s most contaminated mining landscapes back to life: “After years of cleanup, the Laue has been cleared of chat. The ground has been restored and tested. The soil is healthy again. Like hundreds of acres across the Quapaw Nation, it has returned to agriculture. And the Quapaw, a community with more than 6,000 members, have led this revitalization themselves as the first and only tribal nation in the country to manage and carry out a Superfund cleanup.” The Guardian

If you like that then you’ll love this. Across the western United States, the Land-Back movement is returning ancestral lands to Indigenous communities. California is moving to scale the shift, pledging to bring 7.5 million acres, about 7% of the state, under tribal stewardship. The policy formalises land return, access and co-management, linking restitution with biodiversity recovery, wildfire resilience and long-term ecosystem repair. High Country News / LA Times

A Japanese company has received the green light to mass-manufacture a treatment for Parkinson’s that transplants stem cells directly into the brain. Sumitomo Pharma’s new treatment introduces induced pluripotent stem cells into the precursors of dopamine-producing brain cells, which are no longer present in people with Parkinson’s. In a seven-person study no adverse effects were observed and more than half the participants showed some signs of recovery. Because the study was so small, the license is provisional: patients will continue to be monitored and if the drug proves dangerous, it will be withdrawn. Still, Japan’s health minister, Kenichiro Ueno, has expressed some optimism: “I hope this will bring relief to patients not only in Japan but around the world.” Parkinson’s Today

Adult smoking in the United States has dropped below 10% for the first time. New analysis of national survey data found that cigarette use fell from 10.8% of adults in 2023 to 9.9% in 2024 (about 25 million people) down from 42% in 1964. The shift has helped drive a long fall in cancer mortality, with the American Cancer Society estimating reduced smoking prevented nearly four million lung cancer deaths between 1970 and 2022. Gizmodo

EU moves to end animal testing for detergents and surfactants. Under the revised Detergents Regulation, animal tests for this category will be prohibited from mid-2029, and only scientifically validated non-animal methods will be allowed to assess risks to human health and the environment. Eurogroup for Animals

More than $50 billion has now been committed to a plan to connect 300 million Africans to electricity by 2030. In an age of foreign aid cut-backs, Mission 300 is one of the most important philanthropic initiatives in the world. Since its launch in January 2025, it’s already delivered electricity to 44 million people. “There is a pipeline of tens of millions more by the end of 2026.” Bloomberg 🎁

‘Truly spectacular’ drug for sleeping sickness simplifies treatment, raising hopes for eradication. European regulators have approved acoziborole, a new treatment for sleeping sickness that cures the disease with a single oral dose. The drug replaces complex regimens requiring hospitalisation, spinal taps and weeks of monitoring, making treatment far easier in remote regions. Experts say the breakthrough could help eliminate the disease this decade. Science

…but wait, what is sleeping sickness and why is having a simple treatment such a big deal? “In the realm of tropical diseases, African trypanosomiasis has always offered researchers glamour, drama, and mystery” — so starts a PubMed review of Peter Kennedy’s 2007 memoir about going to Africa to study the disease. Glamour and drama is one way to put it — sleeping sickness, which comes from the tsetse fly bite — is more like something out of a horror movie. Symptoms spring up suddenly, flu-like at first, chills, fever, the usual. But that’s not where it ends. Exhaustion morphs into violent mood swings and full-on personality changes as the brain swells, followed by an endless sleep, a coma which eventually kills you.

For almost 60 years, the only available drug was melarsoprol, a derivative of arsenic that had such severe side effects it killed one in every 20 patients, which gives you some idea of how fatal sleeping sickness is if left untreated — not 100%, but close enough. The first non-poisonous treatment was only offered in 2009 (!): consisting of 14 intravenous infusions and several pills. The problem is, that treatment requires several hospital visits and trained professionals to administer, which is why single-oral-dose acoziborole could really be a game-changer.

Read more

Since 2019, we’ve donated 30% of revenue from paid subscriptions to small, grassroots organisations delivering real change with clever, practical solutions. It’s our way of putting our money where our mouth is; along the way, we’ve partnered with almost 70 organisations working across over 35 countries to improve education, healthcare, conservation and human rights.

In 2025, we donated approximately US$65,000 through paid subscriptions, and our mid-year crowdfunding campaign raised a further US$20,000. These funds supported projects in nine countries: new medical equipment for a rural hospital in India, protection for over hundreds of chimpanzees in Sierra Leone, 100 bunk beds for a boarding school in Uganda, clubfoot braces for 30 children in Pakistan and disaster relief in Haiti in the wake of Hurricane Melissa.

In 2026, we’re stepping things up. Our goal is to donate US$96,000, delivered through six big grants of US$12,000, alongside six smaller grants of around US$4,000 each. We’re also expanding our collective giving model so that any of our readers can take part, and we’ll keep sharing ways to support these organisations beyond financial contributions.

Introducing the Myriad Alliance

As our giving grows, so does our responsibility to do it well. We’ve realised that we need to hold our donations to the same standard of transparency and rigour as our reporting. That’s why we’ve partnered with Myriad Australia, a platform that supports donors and organisations to give internationally in a secure, regulated way.

Partnering with Fix The News was a natural alignment. Their philanthropic focus extends beyond borders, and their community reach is truly global. In the landscape of international philanthropy, that passion must be supported by robust frameworks and thorough documentation to ensure funding is protected and directed where it’s needed most.
Anita Toy, CEO Myriad Australia

Because Myriad Australia is part of a global alliance, we’ve also been able to link up with Myriad USA, which means any donations made to our collective giving fund are now tax-deductible for both our Australian and US-based subscribers.

Every grant we make through Myriad now undergoes due diligence, tailored to the country and the conditions our partners are working in. Anita and her team have already gone above and beyond, joining late-night video calls with different partners around the world and guiding us through each step of the process.

The ripple effect

One of the most unexpected outcomes of our giving last year was how you, our subscribers, showed up — again and again. In June 2025, we donated A$12,000 to Te-Kworo, a boarding school for young mothers in Uganda, to buy 100 bunk beds. For students who had previously slept on the floor, the beds profoundly improved their health, dignity, and focus on learning.

After our announcement, Te-Kworo received 17 additional subscriber donations from six different countries, totalling A$11,130, almost doubling the original gift! The organisation also welcomed three new regular givers, alongside a major donor whose support has continued across subsequent campaigns.

The gift from Fix The News has been a genuine turning point for us, connecting us to a global audience and showing our students and our team just how powerful individual generosity can be. We are incredibly grateful.
Lexi Hepworth, Te-Kworo Foundation

Other partners reported similar ripples of generosity throughout the year and we witnessed it for ourselves during our crowdfunding campaign for Miracle Feet and Glia, two organisations using medical innovation to change lives. In just 72 hours, our readers contributed almost A$17,000. What blew us away was that most donations were between $10 and $50 — proving that charity doesn’t have to rely on a few big donors. It can also just be lots of people choosing to take part.

You can now contribute to our giving fund

Our collective giving program now allows any Fix The News reader to contribute to our efforts. You can give any amount, either as a one-off contribution or on a regular basis, and 100% of your donation will go directly to the organisations we support.

All donations are processed through Myriad, making them tax-deductible for readers in Australia and the United States.

We’ll keep you updated on both these funds. We’ll also continue highlighting ways to give beyond donations, including volunteering, pro bono support and spreading the word.

New gift announcement: renewal of a river barrier with Sungai Watch

Our first small grant for 2026 goes to Sungai Watch, a Bali-based environmental organisation we partnered with last year when we sponsored a river barrier in Lembah Sanggulan, Central Bali.

Over the past 12 months the Fix The News barrier has collected 5,452 kg of waste. What’s even more impressive is that when a severe flash flood swept the barrier away last June, volunteers and staff continued regular clean-ups around the site until the barrier could be reinstalled.

This year we’re sending US$3,675 to renew the barrier for another 12 months, along with an additional US$1,050 to support a regeneration project in Delod Rurung, Tabanan. The site has been used as an illegal waste dump for more than 50 years. The Sungai Watch team has already removed over 10 tonnes of waste, and the plan now is to restore the land into a green space for the community, planted with native trees and vegetation.

This project serves as a symbol of hope, recovery and collective care. We believe when communities care, nature recovers.

Would you like to help?

• Spread the word: Share Sungai Watch’s mission and build awareness about plastic pollution and river protection.

• Volunteer: From hands-on clean-ups in Indonesia to supporting organisations closer to home, every piece of plastic removed from the environment makes a difference.

• Sponsor a barrier: Sungai Watch has opened new barrier opportunities in East Java at US$8,000 per barrier. This is one of the final interception points before plastic flows into the Indian Ocean toward Australia, East Africa and the Pacific Islands.

We’re genuinely excited about what’s emerging here. Partnering with these organisations is a powerful reminder that all around the world, thousands of people are quietly getting on with the job of making things better. We’re proud to share their stories and to support what they’re building.

Over the next few months we’ll be checking in on all our partners, and we’ll publish their updates in a special roundup edition in July.

Much love,

Amy

This week’s top stories

India launches world’s largest HPV vaccination campaign. The new initiative will target millions of adolescents each year to prevent cervical cancer. Delivered for free in public clinics, the campaign could dramatically reduce deaths in the coming decades - cervical cancer causes about 80,000 deaths a year in India, roughly a quarter of the global burden. The Telegraph/The Hindu

☝️ Just to re-state: this is huge. The nation-state is our standard unit of analysis because that’s how world news is usually organised, but it’s worth driving home, for this story in particular, how enormous India is. If this vaccination campaign were in Finland or New Zealand, it would cover around 150,000 girls in each country. In India though, you’re looking at a campaign that will cover something like 60 million girls between the ages of 10 and 14 over the next few years, which is 15-20% of the global total. That is an astonishing number. Once more…

60 million girls

Paid-leave laws now cover a record share of mothers in the United States, despite the absence of a federal policy. 14 state laws now extend paid leave coverage to an estimated 46 million people, roughly a third of all workers. Some programmes are also widening what support looks like, beyond time off to care for a new baby or to get medical treatment. Take Colorado, which recently expanded paid leave by an additional 12 weeks for parents with babies in neonatal intensive care. The 19th

A three-year programme led by Plan International has shifted life trajectories for girls in Cambodia’s north-east. In the provinces of Ratanakkiri and Stung Treng, marriage among girls aged 18–22 fell from 26.3% to 9.5%, while marriage before 15 dropped to 0.6%. At the same time, Grade 9 completion and post-training employment surged — showing a direct link between girls’ empowerment and reductions in early and forced marriage. ANN

My shop has completely changed my life and I am so proud to run it. I want all girls to continue studying and build their own futures like I did ~ Kanada

Across Africa, reforms are shifting women’s rights from declarations to enforcement. Mali now sends sexual-violence cases through courts, Sierra Leone mandates 30% female leadership, and Liberia has closed traditional bush schools that performed genital mutilation. Lesotho and Togo run one-stop survivor centres; Senegal’s girls’ clubs have cut teenage pregnancy; Madagascar and Somalia now integrate women into peace processes; and Algeria, Malawi and the Central African Republic are reforming justice and security institutions. UNSDG

Child marriages in the Indian state of Assam, home to around 36 million people, have fallen by 84%, while teenage pregnancies declined 75%. Officials attribute the shift to stricter enforcement and prosecution, alongside sustained government campaigns. Sentinel Assam

Oman has cut maternal mortality by more than half since 2019. The Ministry of Health said maternal deaths fell from 17 per 100,000 in 2019 to 8 per 100,000 in 2025, a drop that officials attribute to better maternal care, stronger follow-up systems and expanded preventive programmes. Oman Observer

Malawi is reporting measurable declines in maternal mortality as safer childbirth reaches more women. The health ministry says maternal mortality fell to 225 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2024, down from 381 in 2020, with 97% of women now delivering in health facilities with trained staff. Daily Times

Global perceptions of respect for women have rebounded since the pandemic. Gallup found that, in 2025, a median 72% of adults across 140 countries said women are treated with respect and dignity, up nine points from 2022, with 24 countries posting gains of at least 10 points. The survey also found that countries with smaller gender gaps correlated to women feeling safer walking alone at night. Gallup

Five southern African countries have launched Africa’s first cross-border birding route. The new route spans 36 protected areas across Angola, Botswana, Namibia, Zambia and Zimbabwe (a region larger than France and Germany combined) and stitches together birding zones in the Kavango, Zambezi, Chobe, Kwando and Kafue river systems. Dubbed The Rivers of Life it connects ancient migratory corridors that support more than 650 bird species, linking biodiversity protection with regional eco-tourism. Travel and Tour World

Nigeria is notching up measurable wins against neglected tropical diseases: A government-led campaign has been taking medications door-to-door to break the transmission of diseases such as elephantiasis and intestinal worms. Since 2019, it has delivered over 100 million treatments a year, helping cut the lymphatic filariasis burden by 72% and reduce the population needing treatment by 97 million. This is an extraordinary, massive reduction in overall human suffering, and almost nobody in the world has heard about it. END Fund

Global coalition backs protection across 266,000 km² of the Amazon. The Brazilian government, plus an international coalition of financiers and conservation groups have launched ARPA Comunidades. It’s a $120 million, 15-year fund that will support community-led conservation across 237,000 km² of existing protected Amazon forest while adding 30,000 km² of new protected areas.

With the addition of this new project, over 210 million hectares of lands and waters are durably conserved, with ten more projects underway and more than 150 local partners engaged around the world. The momentum of this work is driven by local leadership, collective knowledge, and stewardship that safeguard biodiversity, sustain cultural vitality, expand economic opportunities, and ensure the well-being of future generations.
Zdenka Piskulich, Managing Director of Enduring Earth

Cultured beef looks like it contains fewer allergenic proteins than normal, cow-made meat. For those not up with the lingo, ‘cultured beef’ is beef grown in a lab, from cow cells — a more ethical alternative to ‘normal’ meat where, to get it, you have to slaughter a whole cow. Eureka Alert

A new immunotherapy is showing rare promise against advanced prostate cancer, a disease long thought resistant to this kind of treatment. In an early trial of 58 men whose cancer no longer responded to standard care, 88% had only mild side effects; and five of 11 men with measurable tumours saw them shrink. The drug is designed to activate only inside the tumour, which may both reduce dangerous inflammation and require fewer doses. The Guardian

China has cut air pollution while growing its economy. Between 2021 and 2025 GDP grew 30% while average fine particulate levels fell 20%, and the number of cities meeting air-quality standards rose from 206 to 246. Starting this month, China is introducing stricter national limits for air pollution. Officials say the new standards are projected to cut carbon emissions by more than 7 billion metric tons by 2035. China Daily

River otters have staged a remarkable comeback across North America’s Great Lakes after disappearing from many waterways by the 1970s. Reintroductions beginning in the 1980s, combined with wetland restoration and pollution controls under the 1972 US–Canada Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement, have allowed breeding populations to recover across Ohio, New York, Ontario and beyond. As apex predators, their return signals cleaner water and healthier ecosystems. Rewilding Magazine

Chile blocks $2.5 billion mine to protect Humboldt penguin habitat. Chile’s courts have permanently rejected a massive iron and copper mining project near the Humboldt Penguin National Reserve, safeguarding one of the most biodiverse marine ecosystems in the Pacific. Chile hosts around 80% of the world’s Humboldt penguins; the ruling protects breeding islands and waters home to more than 560 marine species. Noticias Ambientales

Kenya and Zimbabwe will be among the first African countries to roll out lenacapavir, the breakthrough, twice-yearly injectable drug that has shown 100% efficacy in preventing HIV infections. Kenya has begun offering the twice-yearly jab free at selected public facilities, becoming the first country in East Africa to launch it, while Zimbabwe is initially targeting more than 46,000 people at high risk of contracting HIV across 24 sites nationwide.

Archaeologists have discovered a 1,400-year-old Zapotec tomb in southern Mexico, adorned with complex carvings, which has been called “the most significant archaeological discovery of the last decade.” Located in the state of Oaxaca, the Tomb Of The Owl was built by the Zapotec culture in around the year 600, according to Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History.

El Pais has a piece on the dramatic discovery of the tomb — which includes tomb robbers, the Covid-19 pandemic, and “tiny winged ants that gnawed through soft stone.”

And if you want more incredible Mexican architecture after that….

That church is not on a hill.

It’s on top of the pyramid of Cholula, in Puebla México. It is also not a pyramid, but seven consecutive constructions, one over the other, built over a thousand years (from 200BC to 900AD, approximately).

Every new pyramid made it necessary to increase the size of the base, till it reached 450m on each side. It’s not very tall (66m) but its base, which is four times larger than the Great Pyramid of Giza, makes it the biggest pyramid in the world. It was originally dedicated to Chiconauquiahuitl, the goddess of the nine rains, then later to Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent.

Archaeologists have excavated tunnels along the site, discovering the previous pyramids and a huge 56 metre mural showing 110 people drinking pulque in a religious festivity (pulque is a Mesoamerican drink made from the fermented sap of agave). The mural is dedicated to Mayahuel, the goddess of pulque, and shows people clearly drunk, which was allowed during the festivities.

In 1594, the Spanish built a Catholic sanctuary, Iglesia de Nuestra Señora de los Remedios, or Our Lady of the Remedies, on top of the pyramid. A classic conquest move. Today it is a declared heritage site, making further archeological digs impossible. Instead, we get one of the most striking architectural juxtapositions in the world - with Popocatépetl (smoking mountain) an active volcano, behind the church and pyramid.

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Lots to cover in this edition. Chile has knocked out leprosy, Libya has eliminated out trachoma, Croatia has finally finished clearing its landmines, and malaria vaccines are working in Nigeria. In Kazakhstan, the Aral Sea looks like it might be starting to fill back up, and they’re getting ready to welcome home wild tigers for the first time in 70 years.

We’ve also got batteries muscling gas off major grids in Australia and California, a David and Goliath story about river defenders in Brazil, and researchers who’ve developed a glass storage medium that could preserve data for 10,000 years (the key ingredient is the same stuff we make solar panels from). One captures sunlight, the other captures knowledge.

Grab a coffee, settle in. We hope you find it illuminating :)

This week’s top stories

Oil tanker spills have declined dramatically over the past half-century. In the 1970s, global shipping recorded roughly 70 to 100 tanker spills each year; today the annual total is typically below ten, a 90% drop. The volume of oil spilled has also collapsed, from more than 300,000 tonnes a year in the 1970s to under 10,000 tonnes a year over the past decade, reflecting tighter maritime safety rules and improved tanker design. OWiD

Renewables generated 26% of the United States’ electricity in 2025 (a new record)

Wind, solar and batteries are expected to supply all net new power capacity in the United States in 2026.

The Strait of Hormuz is in the news a lot right now. Last year, 82 million tonnes of fossil gas was shipped through it, around 20% of the world’s total, enough to produce around 650 terawatt-hours of electricity. But that gas is burned by a power plant only once, and then you have go drill for more. Meanwhile in 2025 the amount of electricity generated by solar panels rose by about the same amount: 650 terawatt-hours. The difference? Those solar panels will generate 650 terawatt-hours of electricity again this year, and the year after that, and will keep going for decades. That’s why it’s called renewable energy.

Chile eliminates leprosy
The WHO says it is the first country in the Americas and only the second globally to achieve the milestone. There have been no locally acquired cases since 1993, supported by mandatory reporting, sustained surveillance and universal access to treatment. The verification follows more than 30 years of vigilance in a disease that still causes over 200,000 new cases annually worldwide.

Libya eliminates trachoma
Trachoma has been documented in the country for over a century, yet a 2025 survey found infections below WHO elimination thresholds across all target districts after the Ministry of Health prioritised elimination in 2017. This is all the more impressive given years of political instability and humanitarian strain that disrupted health services. WHO

The Ocean Cleanup is now intercepting between 2% to 5% of all the world’s plastic that enters the ocean from rivers. Here’s how they’re doing it.

Seychelles breeding lab pioneers sexual reproduction of coral. An ARC Lab in Seychelles has recorded its first controlled sexual coral spawning event, producing hundreds of thousands of embryos and yielding tens of thousands of settled juvenile corals. This is a big step forward for genetic diversity in coral restoration, since most coral labs breed via “fragmentation,” which results in genetically identical corals. Oceanographic

Democracy has established a tenuous foothold in the Central African Republic. The Central African Republic recently completed its most extensive elections to date, combining presidential, legislative and regional votes, and its first municipal polls since 1988. The December 2025 ballot proceeded peacefully across most of the country and marks a milestone in the implementation of the 2019 peace agreement, alongside ongoing disarmament that has demobilised more than 1,200 combatants since mid-2025. UN News

In South Korea, birth rates are rising and suicide rates are declining.

A solution to the ‘digital dark age’… glass data storage that could preserve information for 10,000 years. Digital information is easy to copy, easy to move, but doesn’t stick around for long. Link-rot, servers go down, people take websites offline. The information we create is quickly destroyed, for all the noble efforts of the Internet Archive. But now researchers working with Microsoft’s Project Silica have developed a laser-etched glass storage system — borosilicate chips capable of holding 4.8 terabytes that could survive (theoretically) for 10,000 years. The technique encodes information in microscopic “voxels” using femtosecond lasers, creating a durable archival medium designed for museums, governments, and long-term data preservation. It’s amazing. Gizmodo

Balcony solar is taking US state legislatures by storm. In more than half of states, Republican and Democratic lawmakers have introduced legislation that would boost adoption of small plug-in solar panels that sit on apartment balconies and plug directly into household outlets. The simple technology is already in use in millions of households in Germany. Canary Media

Carbon capture sounds great on paper — if there’s too much CO₂ in the atmosphere, why not take some out? — but thus far it hasn’t been put to much use. There have been a lot of proof-of-concepts but most struggle with efficiency. Now that might be changing though. Scientists have developed an electrode that can capture CO2 directly from flue gas and even straight from the atmosphere, no purification required. The electrode process turns the CO₂ into formic acid, a weak acid currently used to preserve livestock feed and tan leather. American Chemical Society

The Aral Sea is one of the Anthropocene’s most famous cautionary tales. Once the fourth-largest lake on Earth, by the mid-2010s it had lost about 90% of its water, splintering into smaller, highly saline remnants that devastated local ecosystems. Except, now it might be back? Kazakhstan created a dedicated Ministry of Water Resources and Irrigation in 2023 and adopted a new water-use law that improved management in the Syr Darya basin, alongside a regional water-sharing agreement with Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. A new report now puts the North Aral at 24.1 billion m³, up 5 billion m³ since 2023, with the World Bank estimating water levels 50% above the low point. Euronews

Kazakhstan is rebuilding habitat for the return of wild tigers more than 70 years after the species vanished from Central Asia. Conservationists planted 37,000 trees along Lake Balkhash in 2025, adding to 50,000 earlier plantings and a national effort that has already reached 1.4 billion trees since 2021. The restoration is reviving prey populations and preparing landscapes for Amur tigers expected to arrive from Russia later this year. Live Science

Southern Africa doubles electricity access in 15 years. Electricity access across the 16 countries of the Southern African Development Community has climbed to 56% of the population, up from roughly 30–32% around 2010. Accounting for population growth, an estimated 120 million additional people have gained power in that time, driven by grid expansion, off-grid systems and regional power-pool integration. The milestone signals steady progress toward universal electrification.

The Scottish Parliament has passed the Natural Environment (Scotland) Bill, putting nature recovery on a legal footing for the first time by requiring statutory targets to enhance biodiversity. Scottish Parliament

In Kerala, whale-shark rescues are becoming part of the job. Every year, between October and March, the sharks move along India’s Arabian Sea coast following plankton blooms in warm nearshore waters, which brings them close enough to get snagged in shore-seine nets. That used to infuriate fishers because the animals can rip expensive gear, wipe out the day’s catch, and stall the whole haul — all for a protected species they couldn’t sell. But a culture shift has taken hold: with training and compensation from the Wildlife Trust of India, releases have become practical, adding up to 54 rescues along Kerala’s coast. Down To Earth

Croatia is officially free of landmines, three decades after the Yugoslav wars. The country has declared itself free of landmines, completing a 30-year clearance programme across roughly 13,000 km² of land. Authorities removed about 410,000 mines and explosive remnants from the former frontlines of the 1991–95 war. The €1.2 billion effort has restored farmland, forests and rural communities long considered unsafe and fulfils Croatia’s obligations under the Ottawa Convention. TVP World

How Costa Rica regrew its rainforests: with laws, economic incentives and tourism. Costa Rica has completely reversed its rampant deforestation from the 20th century, lifting natural forest cover from under 25% by 1985 to well over half the country today. A national payments for ecosystem services scheme helped, along with a 1996 ban on converting natural forest, a beef-price slump that reduced pasture profits, and booming ecotourism that created more incentives to keep forests standing than to cut them down. Vox

A shift away from capital punishment is spreading across Southeast Asia. While eight of 11 countries still retain the death penalty in law, several now operate de facto moratoriums, and Indonesia’s 2026 criminal code reforms push it towards a conditional, last-resort sentence rather than an automatic endpoint. Singapore which still uses the death penalty for drug cases, remains the clearest outlier. DW

Sweden cuts shootings by 63% after policing overhaul. Gun violence in Sweden has dropped sharply since peaking in 2022, with shooting incidents falling to 147 in 2025, down from the 390 recorded three years earlier. Authorities attribute the shift to expanded surveillance powers, tougher sentencing and new police tactics targeting criminal networks, which have also improved asset seizures and disruption of gang operations. Reuters

The Misery Machine

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Standing in a wheat field under the vast skies of rural Australia, it would be easy for the rest of the world to slip away. But during last year’s winter harvest, as Rob Houghton worked on his farm in Leeton - a country town five hours west of Sydney -he wasn’t thinking about his fields. His attention was fixed beyond the horizon, on Sudan, where millions of people were starving.

“In my business, yield is king,” Rob says. “But I’ve always had a knot in my gut that there are a lot of people in the world who haven’t got enough to eat.”

Rob has spent his life producing food. His family came to the Riverina in the 1930s as part of a soldier settlement scheme, and today the property produces chickpeas, popcorn, cereal crops and cotton. Farming, he says, has always been about feeding people. That’s why he and a small group of friends have decided to ship 500 tonnes of wheat to Sudan.

From mung beans to mates

Leeton sits in the heart of the Riverina, on Wiradjuri country, in Australia's food bowl. Water from the Murrumbidgee River flows through thousands of kilometres of channels to feed the region's thirsty farms. They produce grain, rice and cotton, and over a quarter of the fruit and vegetables grown in New South Wales. The town itself is a quintessential slice of rural Australia, flat and sunbaked, with Art Deco buildings, tree-lined streets and rusty water towers.

Leeton has been shaped by immigration since Italian settlers arrived after World War Two. When Ken Dachi moved there in 2019, Leeton was home to around 11,000 people from more than 30 countries. That number has since grown, driven by programs bringing new residents for work in manufacturing and trades. “It’s like the United Nations of small towns,” Ken says. “There’s a footprint from every continent on the planet. The cultural diversity is astonishing.”

Ken and his wife Sekai, originally from Kenya and Zimbabwe, moved to Leeton from the United Kingdom, where Ken had spent years working in international development. It didn’t take long for word to spread around the tight-knit community, and he was approached by the local council to advise on multicultural affairs. But it was the farmers who really caught his attention. He was curious about how producers in the area were using technology to improve productivity, and Rob Houghton was one of the most inventive.

“We hit it off from day one,” Ken recalls. “And to make matters sweeter, he was growing mung beans, which are a delicacy in East Africa.” Their friendship grew over curries and Friday lunches at Rob’s farm where they started having long conversations about food systems and what Australian agriculture could do beyond its own borders.

The numbers don’t add up

When I jump on a call with Rob and Ken in late January 2026, it’s early afternoon and already uncomfortably hot. In Leeton, the temperature has soared to 46 degrees (114.8°F) - the kind of Australian heat that shuts down paddocks and silences machinery.

“You can’t run equipment over 40 degrees, so everyone’s knocked off for the day,” Rob explains. “That’s our hardship story - but at least we’re not starving.” The chat bounces back and forth between big global issues and the self-deprecating banter you’re likely to overhear at the bar of any country pub.

The tone of their conversations shifted in July 2025, when Ken started telling Rob about the deepening crisis in Sudan, exacerbated by the sudden disappearance of USAID. The cuts weren’t only American. Australia’s foreign aid has been falling for a decade, and now sits at just 0.18% of gross national income, ranking it 28th out of 32 wealthy nations.

For Rob, those numbers didn’t make sense. According to the Australian Government’s Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, national winter crop production for 2025/26 is projected to reach 62 million tonnes, the third largest harvest on record. Meanwhile, famine - the most extreme form of food crisis - has been declared in four different parts of Sudan, alongside widespread malnutrition and collapsing medical care.

Australian silos were full. Sudanese refugees were starving. Rob’s response was blunt. He told Ken it was up to them. If governments around the world were slashing aid, it was time for ordinary people to step in.  “The gut-wrenching thought was that these people, who were so reliant on overseas help, had it pulled from them overnight. They didn’t have another option,” Rob says. “That initial discussion with Ken was about creating an option.”

Rob wanted something direct, practical and fast. Sudan was an emergency. Instead of lobbying government and waiting for them to get on board, he urged Ken to help him build a proof of concept to show that the idea could work.

Ken admits he was doubtful. “I remember thinking: we’re not significant. We’re powerless. Surely there are bigger players who can do this work?” But Rob had no patience for bureaucracy or symbolic gestures. He told Ken that they were going to drive this from the ground up.

Ken knew there was no backing out. “That was the moment I realised, this will be the largest and most complicated thing I’ve ever done in my little life.”

Australia is the Sudanese word for wheat

Rob’s idea was simple. Get local farms to donate grain, then ship it to those in need. It didn’t require a ten-point plan, just a handful of people prepared to do something. Ken reached out to his network and within weeks formed a small working group. By August 2025 they had their first meeting and shortly after, secured a partnership with the World Food Programme.

For Ken, it was the confirmation he was looking for. “If you get a pushback from the World Food Programme it means there’s something wrong with your idea,” he explains. “The process of building a network of partnerships, especially with those who are experienced in this space, is crucial to making this work.”

One of the first calls he made was to Patricia Garcia, who’d spent years working in conflict zones, including Darfur during the 2003 genocide. She knows how aid systems work. She also knows Sudan.

“The first time I arrived in Khartoum” she told me, “the taxi driver asked where I was from. When I said Australia, he replied, ‘Your country has the best wheat in the world.’ Later, in Darfur, people told me they called wheat flour ‘Australia.’”

Sudan is the world’s largest humanitarian crisis. More than 21 million people - almost half of the population - are facing acute food insecurity, and 13 million have been forced from their homes, most of them women and children. Many have survived sexual violence; nearly all have been displaced multiple times. Despite the scale of devastation, the situation is largely underreported.

“If people knew as much about what’s happening in Sudan as they did about Gaza or Ukraine, there would be a lot more assistance,” Patricia says.

Most displaced families are gathering near border areas, particularly between Sudan and Chad, where aid can still reach them. Getting food into camps like Zamzam in North Darfur is difficult, but possible. Access depends on daily negotiations with armed groups. Some days trucks pass. Other days they’re turned back.

“We need to get the wheat in there to save lives,” Patricia says. “There are people eating dirt and animal fodder just to survive.”

Patricia knows the importance of working with local residents who can navigate the routes and the realities of access. “This isn’t about outsiders coming in,” she says. “It’s about trusting the people who are already there, trying to get food to the survivors.”

From Leeton to Zamzam

One metric tonne of wheat can feed around 90 people for a month. A 500-tonne shipment would provide food for approximately 45,000 people: a meaningful intervention in a crisis where survival is measured day by day.

The wheat will be shipped as whole grain and milled into flour in Sudan to meet national standards. Getting it there involves a 12,000 kilometre relay race. The grain will be loaded in approximately 20 shipping containers in Port Melbourne and travel to a transshipment hub in Asia before being transferred to a vessel bound for the Middle East. From there, it gets loaded onto a smaller feeder vessel for the final leg.

Rob has been calling fellow producers across the Riverina, asking them to set aside a portion of their crop. The response has been steady. Together, they expect to source the full 500 tonnes from local contributions alone.

“It’s a really easy sell. Every farmer I’ve spoken to is happy to set aside a truckload of wheat,” Rob says. “You’d be surprised how many people want to make a difference beyond making money.”

But when the team laid out the numbers for transport, shipping, milling and distribution, the wheat turned out to represent only 10% of the total cost. Getting all 500 tonnes to Sudan will cost approximately $1.3 million: $275,000 for transportation from individual farms to Port Melbourne, and $1.1 million to ship it through to the camps.

Rob admits the process has been an eye-opener. “I naively thought that once we donated the grain, it’d be a no-brainer. It’s been a rude awakening to learn how much it costs, especially shipping into a war zone.”

Once again, rather than waiting for government, the group decided to get a head start and raise the money themselves.

The first donor to step forward was Paul Hines, an old school friend of Rob’s and the founder of an insurance brokerage based in Sydney. After hearing the outline of the project, Paul committed $100,000.

“I was watching what was happening in Gaza and felt completely helpless,” he says. “When Rob called about Grain of Hope, I thought, well, this is something we can actually do.”

With the first donation secured, the group has established a fundraising pathway through Myriad Australia, opening the project to additional philanthropic and public support, and to test the model for future endeavours.

The responsibility to have a crack

Steph Wurst, a producer and mother of three on Kangaroo Island, rounds out their core team. She joined after Ken laid out his vision during an Australian Rural Leadership Program they’d done together. She knows what they’re up against. “This was never going to be easy but that’s why it hasn’t been done before,” she says. On her own island, she fought for years to secure government funding for a childcare centre. It got built. She’s used to long odds.

With 100 tonnes of wheat already secured and cleared to World Food Programme standards, the team is moving ahead with the first shipment, while they continue fundraising for the full 500 tonnes.

If the first shipment works, they want to make it standard practice: a donation option at every grain delivery site on the eastern and western seaboards of Australia, so producers can send surplus wherever it’s needed most.

“Our world has so many complex challenges and so often we feel, as individuals, that we can’t contribute on a nationwide or global scale,” Steph says. “But it’s so important to stop and reflect on how we drive change. You can always make a difference.”

There’s no tidy ending to the story. The wheat hasn’t shipped yet. The fundraising isn’t complete. Grain of Hope is six people, seven months in, trying to build something that has no template and no guarantee of working. The logistics could stall. The access routes could close. The money might not come together in time. But the grain is committed, the partnerships are in place, and the team is already thinking about how to build a continuous cycle of shipments.

Ken hopes that laying the groundwork will help bring the Australian government on board, a partnership that will open up crucial diplomatic channels. “There is so much need out there, and the traditional mechanisms for providing aid are being pulled apart,” he says. “This is a hybrid approach, using both food and money.”

Whatever the future holds, Ken believes that Grain of Hope will remain a stand-alone organisation. “We want this to outlive us,” he says. “We’re building a legacy for Australian farmers.”

No one involved believes 500 tonnes of wheat will end famine. But it may challenge something just as entrenched: the assumption that distance equals helplessness, and that someone else will step up.

Rob is blunt. “We’re not going to solve the world’s problems,” he says. “But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t get involved.”

He leans back in his kitchen chair, Ken beside him. “We have a responsibility to at least have a crack.”

For more information on this story, email amy@fixthenews.com or dachi@consultant.com.

This week’s top stories

Since the October 2025 ceasefire the United Nations has been ramping up flows of aid to Gaza: Around 750 tonnes of food now enters each day, soap is finally being delivered and UNICEF teams are providing counselling to children. World Central Kitchen says more predictable entry and safer movement has enabled it to reach the milestone of serving one million hot meals a day in Gaza.

Today, we reached one million hot meals a day in Gaza. It’s not a statistic. It’s Palestinians feeding Palestinians, cooking with dignity under impossible conditions. It’s communities refusing to give up on one another. Today we honor this achievement—and tomorrow, we keep cooking. Because feeding people is the most basic act of humanity, and Gaza still needs the world to show up.
José Andrés, Founder, World Central Kitchen

USAID’s former innovation arm relaunches with $48 million in backing. Development Innovation Ventures was a small programme that repeatedly punched above its weight by finding and backing practical ideas that actually worked. Costing less than 12 cents per US citizen per year, it funded new approaches, checked the results, and helped the strongest ones grow (see Semilla Nueva in Guatemala or Uganda’s Health Access Connect). After being fed into the woodchipper in 2025, it has now re-emerged as an independent fund with $48 million in philanthropic backing - less than half the old budget, but enough to keep the engine running. AP

Interpol-led tech crackdown on illegal smuggling rescues 30,000 animals. Late last year Interpol coordinated raids across 134 nations, seizing about 30,000 live animals and flagging over 1,100 suspected traffickers. The success of the operation reflects the wider use of three new technologies - AI cargo scanning, online monitoring and portable DNA kits. Between 2018 and 2023, tech firms also removed 23 million wildlife-linked listings online, tightening digital markets. The Conversation

The Great Bear Sea moves from pact to practice in Canada. A decade after a 2014 agreement, the 101,200.0 km² Indigenous-led marine protected area network in the Great Bear Sea is shifting from pledge to implementation. 17 First Nations are now negotiating site-level protections, deploying ranger programmes and directing CA$335 million in secured finance toward stewardship and local enterprise. Nature Conservancy

New blood test spots cancer before scans. Chinese scientists have built a highly sensitive blood test that can detect tiny traces of lung cancer long before a tumour shows up on a scan. The convergence of three technologies, DNA nanotechnology, CRISPR, and quantum dots (how’s that for a 21st century cocktail) had made it possible to spot near-invisible warning signals in blood, opening the door to earlier diagnosis and faster treatment decisions. Science Daily

Underwater hydrofoils bring passenger boats up to speed. Like an F1 car with airfoils, a boat can have hydrofoils - ‘wings’ curved up top and flatter underneath, so when they move through a fluid the pressure reduces on top and increases underneath, producing lift. Traditional hydrofoils make for a bumpy ride, but put them underwater, and the speed gains are huge while the ride stays smooth… smooth enough to create nearly no wake.

Right now most waterways near cities are no-wake zones, which means powered boats have to go slow. That makes waterways underused, compared to, say, roads, something that underwater hydrofoiling could change. The foiling also makes the boats quieter, and cuts energy usage by up to 80%, which is huge (and helpful for electric boats). The first hydrofoil ferries are currently moving from concept to reality, as firms like Sweden’s Candela start delivering to cities around the world. The Economist

The convergence of three technologies has made the reinvention of the hydrofoil possible.

Geothermal energy could be huge. But we need oil and gas companies to build it. That was a TIME headline from 2023. It’s still true: new analysis from Ember suggests geothermal could replace 50% of Europe’s fossil power, but the drilling experts are the oil and gas industries, and they’re against clean energy… or are they? In the United States, geothermal is having a real moment, with Big Oil, perhaps seeing the writing on the wall, looking to transition its expertise. Brock Yordy, a third-generation driller, talks to Inside Climate News about how he hopes to lure other drillers like himself into geothermal, while Fervo, a startup piloted by a former fracking guy, just drilled its hottest well to date in the western United States.

Singapore demonstrates that specially-bred mosquitos can keep dengue suppressed at city-scale. Wolbachia is a bacterium that lives in many insects; when scientists breed male Aedes aegypti mosquitoes with it, those males don’t bite, and when they mate with wild females the eggs don’t hatch. In a 24 month trial across 15 residential areas in Singapore, this approach slashed wild female mosquitoes by around three‑quarters and reduced symptomatic dengue risk by roughly 70%. Medical Xpress

Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon on track to fall to its lowest level ever recorded. Brazil detected 1,325 km² of deforestation between August 2025 and January 2026, down from 2,050 km² a year earlier. Annual loss fell 11% to 5,796 km², an 11-year low. Environment Minister Marina Silva says that if current policies hold, the country could reach a historic milestone. “There is an expectation that we will reach, in 2026, the lowest deforestation rate in the historical series in the Amazon if we continue with these efforts.”

The Philippines’ Supreme Court has given same-sex couples a concrete legal foothold by recognising co-ownership of property. The country’s ‘Family Code’ defines marriage exclusively as a bond between a man and a woman, but the high court said Article 148, which governs “property relations of people who live together but cannot legally marry”, does not discriminate based on gender and applies to same-sex couples, “otherwise, we render legally invisible some forms of legitimate intimate relationships.” BBC

Filipinos also want clean energy, and they’re willing to pay. Imported fossil fuels currently power most of the country, but they’re a security risk, and expensive, so now the government is changing things up. They’ve committed to buy at least 25GW of clean energy each year between now and 2035. Next on the docket, 3.2GW of utility solar across all three island groups—Luzon, Visayas and Mindanao. This is what we call a “long-term market signal,” positioning renewables to displace fossil fuels and strengthen energy security across the archipelago. PV Tech

Bolivia has added nearly a million hectares to its protected areas to link Indigenous territories with nearby national parks. That’s 9,072.4km² of protected-area mosaics, created by municipal governments and Indigenous groups to curb encroachment from mining, logging and agribusinesses while protecting wildlife corridors, forest livelihoods, and water sources. Remarkably, some municipalities have protected more than half their territories. Mongabay

Cancer mortality in Canada is declining as earlier detection and better treatment improve survival: 64% of people diagnosed today are expected to live for more than five years. The biggest gains are in lung and colorectal cancer, thanks to decades of tobacco control, plus organised screening and everyday prevention like quitting smoking and using sunscreen. The pressure points now are gaps in HPV vaccination and cervical screening, and cutting the 18–24 month waits for some cancer drugs. Medscape

The IEA calls peak coal, as the world enters the age of electricity. Rapid growth in renewables and nuclear is outpacing new coal generation, reshaping power markets despite rising overall electricity consumption. RenewEconomy

Amanda Royal: “I’d fire the Washington Post’s climate desk, too.”

Solar overtakes nuclear in clean power race. Global nuclear generation held a narrow lead over wind and solar combined in full-year 2025, at about 9% of electricity. But in the second half of the year, solar alone appears to have surpassed nuclear output. With wind already level and solar still accelerating, 2026 is likely to push nuclear into third place among clean sources, marking a structural shift from thermal baseload to variable renewables. Liebreich

India is building a comprehensive national health system. Launched in 2018, Ayushman Bharat has delivered free hospital care to over 110 million people, adding 25 million beneficiaries in the past year alone. The scheme now covers 15,733 private hospitals, 182,944 primary-care centres, and nearly 490 million digital health IDs. As a result, average out-of-pocket spending in India has declined from 64% of total health expenditure in 2014 to 39% in 2022. That means fewer families forced to borrow, sell assets, or fall into poverty because of hospital bills.

South Africa recorded a 16% national decline in rhino poaching in 2025, with 352 rhinos killed compared to 420 in 2024, reflecting continued reductions in illegal hunting driven by enforcement and anti-trafficking efforts. Africa News

Vienna reclaims street space by ending free parking and turning parking spots into shade, trees and Dutch-style cycling. The city has run over 350 projects to swap asphalt for green/public space, including a ‘Dutch-inspired’ cycling street where 140 parking bays became 1.3 km of bike lanes and planting. Since 2022, all street parking has been paid, raising €180m/year, and nudging commuters to public transport. DW

This one’s interesting: a new book claims that Francis Crick and James Watson did not steal Rosalind Franklin’s data. One of the most famous “science is sexist” stories might be more complicated? Franklin was an active, central contributor whose group was independently converging on DNA’s structure, but was under‑credited in a male‑dominated system. Blame James Watson, whose animosity towards “Rosy” in his memoir badly distorted her image. Franklin and Crick later became genuine collaborators and friends, continuing to share notes for years after the discovery of DNA. Nautilus

Male birth control, maybe? A newly discovered molecular ‘switch’ supercharges sperm — a finding that could both cure infertility, and make male birth control a reality. Science Daily

And finally, we usually share stories about changes in the lives of millions, or even billions of people. Sometimes though, it’s worth remembering that progress is also better irrigation systems in Kenya that boost rice yields, or a new bridge in Sierra Leone that cuts travel from half a day to five minutes, or a new road in Azerbijan that attracts teachers to schools (and saves migratory birds) or a new sewage plant in Gabon that stops human waste from being dumped in rivers. The world gets better quietly, one piece of infrastructure at a time, long before the changes show up in statistics or stories.

Read more

Hi everyone, Gus here. Happy Lunar New Year to all who celebrate. To mark the occasion and bring a slightly different sensibility to our usual news, I invited my friend, musical-philosopher Will Tait, to dig through the archives here at Fix The News. His current focus is on developing transformative ways of gathering and co-learning, and he can be found, with his fellow musician and partner, at willandkate.com.au.

2026 may feel like it has already delivered a year’s worth of upheavals, but in the traditional Chinese calendar, the year has only just begun. To honour that turning, as the last skins of the ‘wood snake’ fall away, here are 99 stories from the year that was: inspirational trail-mix to pop in our saddlebags as we gallop forth into the Year of the Fire Horse. As you’ll see, these stories are gathered in nine themes, from improved human lives to the restoration of our living world, to cosmic revelations. May they offer uplifting sustenance with each bite.

Obviously we’re not just talking health-and-safety box-ticking here. So many lives around the world are improving in lasting and fundamental ways. Safety (both real and perceived) is on the rise, and we saw the enactment of laws protecting the wellbeing of millions, particularly children.

1. Disease Elimination

It takes years of dedication and multi-agency coordination to eliminate a disease, and yet 17 countries hit that milestone in 2025 - the most in one year ever. Trachoma bit the dust in Egypt, Mauritania, Senegal, Burundi, Fiji. The first-ever ‘triple elimination’ by the Maldives. Brazil became the first country of over 100 million to stop mother-to-child transmission of HIV. The list goes on.

2. Disease Reduction

Deaths from the world's deadliest infectious disease, tuberculosis (down 29% since 2015) may be set for a continued decline with the introduction, in 80 countries, of mobile x-ray units linked to an AI program. Signs of tuberculosis are highlighted in vivid, heat map-like scans, revealing cases that would otherwise go unseen.

3. Disease Prevention

Having declared 2024 the 'highest-ever impact year for immunisation' The Gavi Alliance maintained impressive momentum throughout 2025: $9 billion secured to immunise 500 million children by 2030, and an extra $90 million freed up for their focus on malaria, with a negotiated 25% price cut in the R21 vaccine.

4. Disaster Response

What do Ebola outbreaks and natural disasters have in common? We're ready for them. In the first half of 2025, 94% fewer people died in weather-related disasters compared to the historical six-month average. And in September an Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo was isolated and sequenced in just 24 hours.

5. Cleaner Air

Are we entering the clean-air-ocene? Global concentrations of sulphur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide and organic carbon are all falling. The EU has been smashing clean-air pledges ahead of schedule. And the average citizen now lives 2.9 years longer in China thanks to air-quality reforms.

6. A New Era of Global Health

“For the first time in our species’ history, infectious disease is not the dominant threat," proclaimed The Lancet in October in a sweeping analysis revealing a new era of global health. Deaths from TB, diarrhoea and HIV have plunged by between 20% and 49% since 2010.

7. Feeling Safe

"Do you feel safe walking alone at night in the city or area where you live?" Gallup has asked globally since 2006. Their 2025 report cited the highest positive response yet. Yes: 73%. Asia-Pacific, Western Europe, Latin America, Caribbean and sub-Saharan Africa all showed an uptick. 

8. Poverty Reduction

Millions of people across the world are escaping poverty. Last year UNICEF reported 95 million fewer children living in poverty since 2014, and India declared the 60-million-strong state of Kerala free of extreme poverty. Mexico, Nepal, Iraq - just three of 12+ other countries recording impressive drops.

9. Better Living in Brazil

33 million Brazilians went to bed hungry just three years ago - now it’s off the hunger map. Social cash transfers have played a decisive role in lifting 6.5 million out of poverty since 2022, and poverty reduction in turn has driven a 60% drop in teenage births in the country since 2000.

10. Less Violence

Last year World Bank data revealed a 25% fall in the global homicide rate since 2000. In the US the murder rate fell to its lowest level in 70 years. Nevertheless, media splurges coverage on terrorism and murder, leaving the real killers - heart disease and cancer - in the shadows.

11. Child Welfare

Laws banning child marriage have proliferated across Asia, Africa and Latin America over the past year, and the 70+ list of countries banning corporal punishment grew longer, with the addition of the Czech Republic and Thailand. Meanwhile the global under-five mortality rate has fallen by over 50% since 1990.

It’s all very well being healthy and safe, but we don’t stay that way without food, water and energy. Access to electricity, education, transport, and other modern day fundamentals is crucial for basic participation in the global economy. How have we been faring with all of this?

12. Record Harvests

Population growing, soil depleting, a gnawing sense that global famine is just a few failed harvests away. But what does the data say? Record levels of wheat, rice and soybean production. Same for pears and lemons. Coffee and corn set for record highs in 2025-26. The global larder is well-stocked.

13. Rice Breakthroughs

2025 gave us three rice production breakthroughs with huge potential impact for this primary global staple: a Chilean cultivation innovation that cuts water use in half; discovery of a gene in a hardy Indian variety that skyrockets heat tolerance; a new strain that reduces methane emissions by 70%. 

14. Smart Tech

We're meeting the challenges of a changing climate in extraordinary ways. Last year, 38 million farmers across India received 30 days’ notice of the arrival of the monsoon, accurately predicted by machine learning. In Nigeria, smart irrigation is delivering consistent flows despite unpredictable rains.

15. Simple Tech

'Smart’ tech isn't always about algorithms. In Chile's Atacama - the planet’s driest desert - fog nets are harvesting coastal mist to supply 1,400 litres of water daily for production, and a simple mix of yeast, sugar and water that attracts predator insects is fast becoming cotton's low impact pesticide.

16. Free Meals for Kids

We’re seeing a growing global focus on nourishing young minds and bodies with national school meal programmes now serving 466 million children worldwide, up by 80 million since 2020. Most impressive? Indonesia’s plan to feed all 80 million of its schoolkids, which kicked off last year.

17. Water, Sanitation Access

In August the WHO and UNICEF served up a bucket of welfare wins. The decade from 2015 saw one of the fastest expansions of basic services ever recorded: 961 million people gained safe drinking water, 1.2 billion gained safe sanitation, 1.5 billion gained access to basic hygiene. Health and dignity on the rise.

18. Electricity Access

“Keeping the lights on” is tricky if you’ve never had access to electricity. Fortunately the number of humans in that category dropped by 292 million in the last decade, despite a corresponding global population rise of 760 million. Kenya, Nepal, Mozambique all significantly increased access in the last year.

19. Solar Health

Solar energy, a major facilitator of humanity's increased access to electricity, is also playing a pivotal role in remote health. Solarisation in Zambia, Ethiopia, Uganda, Malawi and Pakistan is enabling 24 hour patient care and providing the consistent 2 to 8 degrees Celsius required for vaccine storage.

20. Solar Food

As they soak up the sun, solar panels provide an unanticipated service to agriculture: shade. Strawberry growers taking advantage of 'agrivoltaics' are reporting 18% increase in yields, and South Korea has incorporated the growing of cabbages around solar arrays into their food security strategy.

21. Education Access

UNESCO reported a global surge in girls’ access to education. And support is growing for the Convention on the Rights of the Child - the most widely accepted human rights treaty globally - to expand its education guarantee to obligate free schooling from pre-primary through to secondary.

22. Free Transport

What’s the benefit of giving someone a free ride? Iowa City scrapped bus fares in 2023. The result: 2.9 million fewer kms driven by residents, 24,000-tonnes less CO₂ emitted, and an economic breather for all. Aiming for similar metrics, Ireland has introduced free public transport for under nines.

Nothing represents the alarming unravelling of life more poignantly than the loss of a species. Flip that around and you have an iconic symbol of hope. A major study released in March last year shows that we are reliably bringing many species back from the brink. Let's say hello to some returning heroes.

23. Teeming with Turtles

Northwest Africa Loggerheads, Mexican Kemp’s Ridleys, Indian Olive Ridleys, Pacific Green Turtles, all demonstrating exponential increase thanks to conservation efforts. And successful reintroduction of freshwater turtles to their former haunts in Brazil and Poland. It’s turtles all the way up.

24. Returning Fish

Waterways are welcoming back their former inhabitants: salmon swim in England's Don River and the headwaters of the Klamath for the first time in 100+ years. Bluefin tuna surge back to Cornish waters. Lake sturgeon evade extinction's net, resuming their keystone role in the Mississippi Basin.

25. Rat-Free Islands

There's no shortage of rats on Planet Earth, but some species need that shortage in order to take wing again. Endangered Palau Ground Doves and Tongan Herald Petrels are just two of countless bird species that are on the rise after successful rat eradication on islands and atolls across the Pacific.

26. Cranes vs Storks

Cranes and storks are fighting it out in the dramatic turnaround championships. Black-necked cranes, China, record numbers. White stork nestlings, Denmark, same. Common cranes return to Scotland after 300 years. Captive-bred adjutant storks revive wild colonies in Cambodia. Who's winning? Everyone.

27. Reviving Raptors

White-tailed Golden Harpy! Not a bizarre insult, but names of eagles that have returned to their former habitats in England, Scotland and Brazil. Like Cheshire's rebounding barn owl, and the revived Red Kite of northern Spain, they owe their resurrection to years of dedication by passionate humans.

28. Dragons & Frogs

25 Blue Dragons. 100 Dusky Gopher Frogs in a single pond. Macabre potion ingredients? Nope. The remaining members of these two species before conservation efforts turned their numbers around. 7 Red and Yellows? Captive-bred tree-frogs successfully making their way in Australia's Gondwana Rainforest.

29. Christmas Crabs

Return of the Red Crab - a Christmas Story. The famed march of the millions, an annual stream of red crabs across Christmas Island, was nearly eradicated by the invasive Yellow Crazy Ant. Now restored by the introduction of the Malaysian Micro-wasp. Is this conservation? Maybe not, but it worked.

30. Healthy Herds

Herds are returning to the great grasslands. Saiga antelope on Central Asia's Golden Steppe grew from just 30,000 in 2006 to nearly 4 million today. The 39 Milu deer reintroduced into China's Dafeng Milu Reserve in 1986 now number 8,500. European bison: from 54 in the 1920s to 10,000 roaming today.

31. Bears & Wolves

Golden Jackals 46%. Eurasian Wolves 35%. Brown Bears 17%. Wolverines 16%. Trumping them all - Iberian Lynx 1,900%. Sports team betting odds? No, increased numbers of Europe's wild predators since 2016, marking their stunning comeback. Wolves, bears and pumas are also steadily on the rise in the US.

32. Cats Bounce Back

Snow leopards in Himachal Pradesh, asiatic lions in Gujarat, jaguars in Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, tigers the world over. Populations of these big cats in the wild are all increasing. The 60% rise in tiger numbers since 2010 brings long hoped-for confirmation that global recovery is within reach.

33. Dogs to the Rescue

Dogs. Far from extinct, but due a special mention for their services to other animals. In South Africa and Zimbabwe Welsh-trained police dogs are successfully tracking Rhino-hunting poachers. And in the Pacific Northwest, sniffer dogs on boats are helping monitor endangered southern resident orcas.

Such excitement on the high seas in 2025: a tangible shift in action from broad environmental goals to enforceable, specific legislation, and somehow amidst current crises of global trust we managed the diplomatic feat of binding ourselves to an agreement to care for our international waters.

34. High Seas Treaty

Uniting the world in protection of the oceans beyond national boundaries, the High Seas Treaty started last year with just 14 of the 60 ratifications needed to bring it into force. By May that number doubled. It hit 50 in June. The magic moment: September 19th, Morocco the 60th to ratify. Huzzah!

35. Marine Protected Areas

French Polynesia's 2025 announcement of 5 million km² of marine protection (the world's largest) was a big splash in a global shower of such agreements made by a roll call of countries from Spain to Samoa. A huge expansion of sanctuary for fragile reefs, seagrass meadows and all species of swimmers.

36. Indigenous Marine Protected Areas

In September plans were announced for the Melanesian Ocean Reserve, the world’s first Indigenous-led marine protected area stretching across the Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu and New Caledonia. It will bring a marine area the size of the Amazon rainforest under Indigenous governance.

37. Preventing Overfishing

Does marine protection actually prevent illegal fishing? A new global study tracked ships with advanced satellite technology has answered that question with a resounding 'Yes'. This aligns with news that marine agreements have all but eradicated overfishing in the territorial waters of the US.  

38. Reef Relief

There's hope in the water for our planet's beleaguered reefs. A team in the Maldives has pioneered a portable coral hatchery, rearing more than 3 million larvae and successfully deploying more than 10,000 juvenile corals. The project offers exciting restorative promise for reefs across the Pacific.

39. Booming Stocks

England's coastline saw bottlenose dolphins calving last year for the first time in decades and grey seal populations hitting record numbers. Greece's Mediterranean monk seals have dived off the 'critically endangered' list. Humpback whales off Eastern Australia’s coast now exceed pre-whaling numbers.

40. Shark Protection

The movie Jaws may have locked the eternal terror of the shark in the human psyche, but these exquisite ancient fish have a lot more to fear from us humans. Fortunately 2025 saw the unveiling of a global shark “de-extinction” programme and extra protections in Mexico's waters and the Indian Ocean.

41. Bottom Trawling Bans

The unpleasant-sounding practice of bottom trawling is an unseen scourge of seafloor ecosystems. Happily 2025 saw a wave of bans in national protected waters from Sweden to Australia and an international resolution to end bottom trawling on the underwater biodiversity hotspots known as seamounts. 

42. Less Litter

Ocean Cleanup has now removed 20 million kg of plastic from the world's waters since 2013. They also have a new goal: one third less plastic outflow from the world's 30 most polluted rivers by 2030. Meanwhile the EU and Australia reported a drop in marine litter of around 30% over the past decade.

43. Better Ships

The first ever binding targets for global shipping emissions were signed in April. They will no doubt be aided by vessels like China's Gezhouba, a fully electric 13,000 tonne cargo ship launched in October. And we have less to fear from oil tankers: data shows a 97% drop in spills since the 1970s.

44. Deep Sea Wonders

2025 revealed new wonders in the deep: first-ever footage of the elusive colossal squid; whole new ‘chemosynthetic' ecosystems that survive beyond the reach of sunlight; iridescent armoured worms and carnivorous "Death-ball" sponges - two of the 30 new species spotted in the Southern Ocean depths.

2025 was a pivotal year in the global climate story. With the passing of two crucial thresholds - China’s drop in emissions, and renewables surpassing coal - we find ourselves in an exciting new chapter of possibility. Let’s see where the Fire Horse takes us.

45. More Power than Coal

Remember this: history was made in 2025. Renewables produced more power than coal globally for the first time ever. Wait, what about the 603 TWh rise in global electricity demand? How are we keeping pace with that? Solar and wind surpassed it, generating 635 TWh in the first nine months of the year.

46. The Sun is the One

Renewables are winning as a team, but solar is definitely king. We are now putting up 1GW of solar panels every 15 hours (roughly the same GW as one coal-fired plant). 2025's first-half-of-year installations were up 64% on 2024. Alternative no more, solar is transforming the global energy system.

47. Solar Innovations

Solar is surfacing in all shapes and sizes: vertical solar floating on a Bavarian quarry lake, offering storm resistance and benefits to aquatic life; shade-giving solar now required by law over South Korean carparks; a solar park 7 times the size of Manhattan spanning the world's highest plateau.

48. Solar’s Other Benefits

As solar spreads, we're discovering the ecological benefits of the panels themselves: solar-over-canal systems combating drought in California; British bumblebees finding refuge in wildflower-sown solar farms; shade from solar arrays boosting soil and vegetation health in China's Talatan Desert.

49. Market Rules

Renewables are winning the money game. Solar and battery prices are on a joint downward spiral as the cost of fossil fuel generation continues to rise. Clean energy roles also accounted for 82% of all new American energy jobs last year, expanding three times faster than the overall workforce.  

50. Transformative Batteries

Round-the-clock power was the fossil fuel trump card that solar could never beat. Today sun-soaked cities like Las Vegas and Muscat, Oman can hit that steady power mark year round. And with batteries rapidly improving as their prices plummet, the solar-battery combo is now reshaping grid planning.

51. China’s Historic First

In the global climate story, China is the main-stage event. For years they've been in a race to eclipse their titanic emissions with green energy proliferation, both at home and abroad. And then last year a historic first: China's carbon emissions began falling even as power demand grew. Hope.

52. India Surges Forward

Last year India surged from behind the pack to overtake Germany as the world's third-largest generator of wind and solar electricity. This year record installations of renewables and reductions in coal power secured their Paris pledge of 50% clean power capacity, five years ahead of schedule.

53. Less Fossils & Costs

Coal was surpassed by wind-plus-solar in the US in May, by solar alone in Australia five months later. The UK, having doubled solar energy generation in the first half of the year, then banned new oil and gas exploration, and reported wind power's £104 billion slice off UK energy costs since 2010.

54. Africa Soaks up the Sun

After 30 African heads of state agreed on expanded access to reliable, affordable, sustainable electricity, the first half of 2025 saw a record 15GW import of solar. The continent's green energy transition subsequently received a double boost: $4.2 billion in philanthropic funds; $15 billion from the EU.

55. Global South Gains

The Global South is now leading the clean-energy revolution as risks of fossil-fuel dependence increase. Alongside the rapid rise of renewables in Africa, 2025 saw Iran commit $2.3 billion to solar expansion, and Oman double its share of renewables in its bid to become a global green-steel hub.

Despite COP30's failure to deliver on its big-ticket climate items, deals were struck in the margins on oceans, forests, land rights - triggering action and billions of dollars in funding. These wins echo the countless untold ways that humans keep stepping up to the plate as planet protectors.

56. Forest Protection

2025: a big year for forest protection - from the creation of "The World’s Largest Forest Reserve" (540,000 km² stretching across the Congo) to the $6.6 billion raised for November's launch of the Tropical Forest Forever Fund, a public-private purse that pays countries to protect their forests.

57. Declining Deforestation

The FAO released a new report showing that global deforestation has been declining for the last 30 years, and forest restoration is on the up. 49 countries now have 2030 forest-restoration targets covering 1.77 million km², including Brazil, whose plan funds Indigenous communities to restore 12 million hectares of the Amazon's "arc of deforestation".

58. Amazon Protections

Hope for the ‘Earth’s Lungs’ grew in 2025. Colombia declared its entire Amazon biome, 42% of its territory, a reserve for ‘renewable natural resources’. Peru protected half its northern Amazon carbon in a new reserve. Brazil, Bolivia, Columbia and Suriname all enacted bold new forest protections.

59. Indigenous Governance in the Amazon

Indigenous governance is becoming central to conservation across South America. For example, last year In Ecuador and Colombia land rights wins by the Kichwa secured thousands of hectares of primary rainforest from logging and mining, and landmark rulings protected the lands of uncontacted tribes.

60. Indigenous Governance in Canada

A milestone in returning governance of land to its original caretakers, Canada's deal with 21 Indigenous governments in July protected an area larger than Germany. And March saw British Columbia's Supreme Court side against a logging giant to grant authority over ancient forests to the Haida Nation. 

61. New National Parks

So many new national parks in 2025, amongst them: Argentina's Patagonia Azul Provincial Park, Australia's Great Koala National Park, Chhayanath National Park (Nepal's 13th) and Poland's Lower Oder Valley National Park, a wetland-rich reserve hosting 237 bird species and more than 460 plant species.

62. Chinese Park Proliferation

Having created its first national park just four years ago, China announced a plan in June to achieve a network of 49 parks covering 1.1 million km² by 2035. Priorities of the plan include ecological connectivity, Indigenous rights, and protection for species like pandas, tigers, and snow leopards.

63. International Collaboration

When precious landscapes spread across national boundaries, conservation calls for next-level collaborations. Mexico, Guatemala and Belize responded to that call last year with the creation of the 57,000 km² Great Mayan Forest bio-cultural corridor, protecting habitat for jaguars and scarlet macaws.

64. Pangolin Reprieves

A double reprieve for the Pangolin last year: West Africa's strongest wildlife law to date passed in Nigeria; China's removal of the scaled marvel from their official medicine guide. Meanwhile new data shows China's 2018 ivory ban led to a roughly 50% fall in elephant poaching across 43 countries. 

65. Humans in Nature

From Solomon Islanders' defence of their untouched forests to small farmers restoring land up to 20 times more effectively than NGOs, 2025 gave us further proof that - contrary to old top-down 'wilderness' ideologies - biodiversity improves where humans actively engage with the land as custodians.

66. Rewilding Revolution

2025 showed us that the rewilding revolution isn't just a boon for non-humans: we saw beavers providing flood-protection, a Sierra Leone chimpanzee reserve securing human water supply, ecosystem renewal reviving abandoned Spanish towns, and wetlands-restoration healing Ukraine's front-line fighters.

Last year gave us a fresh taste of what could become our new normal before we know it - swimmable city rivers, green energy sovereignty, advance earthquake alerts.

67. City Swimming

2025 saw swimmers in Chicago River and the Seine for the first time in a century. Similar scenes are now a feature in cities across Europe. City river clean-ups in Brazil are reducing disease and reviving biodiversity. The once "biologically dead" Thames is now one of the world’s cleanest rivers.

68. City Transport

How we move through our cities has seen a fundamental shift. Take the example of London, where walking, cycling, and wheeling now account for three-quarters of all observed travel activity. Cycling has increased six-fold since 1999, whilst motor vehicle usage dropped two thirds in that time.

69. Man Mountain

Last year a unanimous parliamentary vote granted legal personhood to Taranaki Maunga - a mountain in New Zealand - giving it rights to protection, preservation, and the ability to initiate legal action. This adds to the global list of natural entities whose right to flourish is recognised by law.

70. LGBTQ Milestones

When Hungary attempted to ban Budapest Pride in June more than 30 embassies expressed support for the march. The unstoppable crowd swelled into a 100,000 strong anti-government protest. Months later the Vatican made history, hosting its first officially recognised pilgrimage for LGBTQ+ Catholics.

71. Re-energising Moldova

Moldova will never be the same again. The tiny nation turned loss of access to Russian gas into a green energy revolution. Replacing gas with biomass, lining schools with solar, they've halved bills and boosted resilience. Part of a trend of soaring solar and battery capacity across Eastern Europe.

72. Green Steel

The ‘Steel = Emissions’ equation saw 2 big shifts in 2025: Boston Metal’s breakthrough production of a ton of steel using electricity instead of coal; a government-mandated retrofit that put two thirds of China’s steel plants on a race to meet “ultra-low emissions” standards by the end of the year.

73. Seismic Smarts

2025 gave us news of a huge advance in earthquake alerts thanks to two tweaks of existing tech: an android app turning millions of smartphones into a global seismic sensor grid, and a system for monitoring tiny tremors that could be deployed across the world's 4 billion kms of fibre-optic cabling.

74. AI Energy Efficiency

As AI transforms the world we're figuring out how to radically reduce its ecological impact. Efficiency gains saw a 33-fold cut in AI energy use in the year to August, gains that could be accelerated by a new light-powered AI chip using up to 100x less energy and motion-learning based on bee brains.

75. Repurposing Tech

Plenty of countries and jurisdictions have said “Frack Off” to perhaps the world’s most fraught means of fossil-fuel extraction but the contentious tech has now been repurposed to ignite a clean energy geothermal boom. What other troublesome tools will we reconfigure to bring about a greener future?

76. Zero-Waste Materials

Exciting breakthroughs this year from scientists wrestling with the problem of plastic: biodegradable plastic that completely dissolves in seawater within hours; plastic bottles turned into paracetamol using hacked E. coli bacteria; polyurethane turned into reusable chemicals by AI-created enzymes.

77. Floating Turbines

What transformations await the iconic "landscape dotted with turbines" as innovation advances our energy generation systems? Take last year's successful flight by China of the world’s largest and most powerful airborne turbine, a milestone that promises cheaper, more reliable green energy.

2025 saw a profound expansion in our understanding of brains, as we provided ourselves with paradigm shifting tools and interactive repositories of knowledge to help us in our quest to heal human bodies. We were also kissed by evolution and left with glowing skin.

78. Brain Insights

Last year we boosted our brain intel: the first-ever atlas of brain development showed how stem cells turn into neurons; analysis of 4,000 scans revealed 5 distinct 'ages' of the brain ('adolescence' lasts into our 30s); and a breakthrough mouse-brain study mapped an 'impossible' 523 million neural connections.

79. Recharging the Brain

Research released in August showed how memory can be restored in mice by recharging their brain’s "batteries", the mitocondria that power living cells. This study's success points to mitochondria as a powerful target in the design of new treatments for neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s.

80. Walking & Talking

2025 saw two world firsts in the restoration of fundamental human functions: an injection of reprogrammed neural stem cells enabled a paralysed man to stand once again on his own two feet; a brain implant granted expressive speech to a man with a severe speech disability, even allowing him to sing.

81. MRI Treasure Trove

In July UK Biobank celebrated the completion of the world's largest whole-body human imaging project, after scanning 100,000 volunteers for brain, heart and bone images. This transformative MRI treasure trove will allow health practitioners to flag dozens of diseases years before symptoms occur.

82. Gene Revelations

February's launch of Evo 2 allows us to speed through the evolution of genes to witness their harmful or beneficial effects on human health, and rapidly generate new genetic sequences for curing disease and solving environmental challenges. What's more, this all-access generative AI is open-source.

83. Resisting Antibiotic Resistance

2025 brought good news in the face of growing global antibiotic resistance: a familiar bacterium emerged as the source of an effective superbug-killer 100 times stronger than existing antibiotics; and an AI-designed virus outperformed existing 'bacteriophages' in killing resistant strains of E.coli.

84. Blood Boons

Three new blood-related breakthroughs in 2025: a new blood test that successfully detected over 50 types of cancer in a 25,000-person study; new enzymes designed to convert all donated blood into universal type O; an engineered floral-scented fungus that lures blood-hungry mosquitos to their death.

85. Accessible Design

Two innovative designs met real-world needs in 2025: the world's first fully 3D-printed, easy-assemble microscope capable of sub-cellular resolution, with a unit cost of only £50; an external fracture fixator made entirely inside the Gaza Strip, using recycled plastics and solar-powered 3D printers.

86. Organ Regrowth

Fantasy hero regrows severed limb. Jealous. But could that be us one day? With the flipping of a long-silenced metabolic switch a rodent fully repaired its ear tissue within 30 days last year, pointing to the possibility that all mammals may have ancient regenerative programmes awaiting activation.

87. Life Emits Light

Next time someone says "you're glowing with health" (hopefully any minute now), consider the fact that it might be true. This year an experiment on mice and two plant species documented an eerie 'biophoton' emission ceasing on death, suggesting that us humans may also emit light while we are alive.

88. A Deeper Kiss

Kissing received a vivid definition in a study of its evolutionary origins released in November. It turns out that "oral-oral contact with some movement of mouthparts and no food transfer" is a habit that we share with a wide range of mammals, and was probably started by apes 21.5 million years ago.

In 2025 we unearthed and mapped intimate marvels of life on Planet Earth, and cracked open whole new cosmic vistas, as our telescopes, satellites and radio arrays offered up more detailed imagery of the stars than ever before.

89. Originating Life

May gave us news that we're closer to recreating life’s first step. After a decades-long investigation into life's emergence from lifeless chemistry, synthetic chemists have created molecules that can self-replicate under conditions that mimic early Earth, demonstrating how biology may have begun.

90. Evolving Evolution

Our understanding of evolution evolved last year. February offered us the best evidence yet that birds and mammals evolved their intelligence independently, and in August we learnt that the majority of Earth’s species stem from a few evolutionary 'explosions' that sparked rapid diversification.

91. Animal Talk

We humans are not alone in our use of language. 2025 documented elephants inventing unique “names” for one another; bonobos combining calls to make complex phrases. And with this year's launch of DolphinGemma, an AI trained on 40 years of audio, we may soon know the structure of "dolphin language".

92. Uncanny Compass

Last year a study of bats revealed 'directional neurons' forming an inner mammalian compass unaffected by moon, stars or horizon, and a study of deep-diving Manta rays suggested these ocean greats build maps of vast, featureless stretches of open ocean by 'tasting' magnetic signals in the depths.

93. Lidar Reveals

Our ability to map built structures with airborne lasers is upending preconceptions of ancient human habitation in the Americas: a network of thousands of garden cities has surfaced in the "untouched" Amazon and in June a study revealed a vast network of ridged maize fields in precolonial Michigan.

94. Underground Atlas

Fungi's overlooked role in underpinning global ecosystem health was given a visibility boost in July with the launch of the Underground Atlas - a global project to map and protect mycorrhizal networks, and thereby preserve their much-needed capacity to boost worldwide biodiversity and food security.

95. 3D Milky Way

In 2025 we vastly expanded our capacity to view the Milky Way: the Murchison Widefield Array's latest radio image revealed star-forming regions and supernova remnants with 10x more fidelity, and Gaia completed its scan of 2 billion stars for the creation of our best ever dynamic 3D Milky Way map.

96. Car-sized Camera

In June Vera C. Rubin Observatory's car-sized 3,200-megapixel camera teased us with its first stunning views of galaxies, nebulae and newly catalogued asteroids. Its grand mission: to map billions of undiscovered celestial features via snaps taken of the entire night sky every few days for a decade.

97. Cosmic Catch

2025 marked two milestones in humanity's race to inhabit space. In March, the first fully successful commercial moon landing. And in September, a dramatic win for interplanetary comms: NASA’s Psyche spacecraft fired off a stream of laser-encoded data across 351 million kilometres, and Earth caught it.

98. Life’s Ingredients

Theories on life's extraterrestrial origins gained extra weight this year as signs of biological activity surfaced on a planet 124 light years from Earth, and NASA's sample of asteroid Bennu revealed 'life molecules' and a history of saltwater that could have served as their activating ‘broth’.

99. At least you’re not on Tylos!

Terrible day? At least you're not trapped on Tylos (a super-hot planet that we now know is whipped by winds of vaporised metal) or caught in a black hole feeding frenzy (like the one in November that belched the brightest star-munching flare ever recorded). Thank your lucky stars you're on boring, beautiful Earth!

So there we have it: just under a hundred servings of information nourishment that demonstrate humanity’s ability to care and collaborate, scrutinise and solve, imagine and improve. As usual the list could go on and on.

Despite the chaos and carnage that runs alongside them, inspirational stories like these are perennial and pervasive - proof that there’s no shortage of humans who choose service, driven by a sense of justice, wonder, or possibility, and follow through until they leave a positive mark on the world.

I have no doubt the team at Fix The News will keep bringing you such stories as we all navigate another year together. In the meantime, may these favourites from the past year find a spot in your saddlebag as snackable sustenance for the ride ahead.

This week’s top stories

The world is becoming more equal. Contrary to popular belief, global consumption patterns are converging. New data covering 194 economies show that the ratio between spending by the world’s richest 10% and poorest 50% has more than halved since 2000. Back then, the rich spent about 40 times more than the poor; today the figure is closer to 18. Over the same period, the richest 1% have seen their share of consumption shrink. Economist 🗄️

Armenia is building a universal health care system. Mandatory health insurance started on 1st January 2026, rolling out over three years, with a single national benefits package. The state will fully cover minors, senior citizens and several vulnerable groups, with the first phase aiming to reach 1.6 million people. The government says it expects the share of people skipping healthcare for cost reasons to drop by around 30%. OC Media

Clean-energy industries drove more than one-third of China’s economic growth in 2025 and over 90% of new investment, according to Carbon Brief. The clean sector is now responsible for 11.4% of GDP, led by EVs, batteries and solar. Without clean energy, China would have missed its growth targets, underscoring the sector’s increasingly central economic role.

China’s emissions really do look like they’ve peaked. China’s CO₂ emissions have been flat or falling for 21 months, with what looks like a 0.3% decline in 2025. Clean power met all electricity-demand growth as solar, wind and nuclear rose, pushing coal generation down 1.9%. Chemicals emissions are now the outlier, up by 12%. If this is China’s peak (still to be officially confirmed) it’s the climate story of the century. Carbon Brief

Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana lead US education rebound. Three southern states once synonymous with weak schools now lead the country in post-pandemic learning recovery. Mississippi ranks ninth nationally in fourth-grade reading and first after demographic adjustment, while Alabama leads math recovery and has the lowest chronic absenteeism. Tighter accountability, early reading mandates and relentless attendance tracking are driving gains despite limited public funding. NYT 🎁

Colombia titles 5,214.9 km² of Amazon land to Indigenous groups
Colombia has formally titled a huge swathe of land in the Amazon to Indigenous communities, securing territory for 12,792 families across five frontier departments. The move coincides with a broader shift: early data show Amazon deforestation fell 25% last year, suggesting that land rights, community governance and enforcement are beginning to bend the deforestation curve. ColombiaOne

France launches its largest ever rewilding project in the Dauphiné Alps. Launched late last year, the project builds on decades of natural species return, aiming to restore herbivores, predators and river systems across mostly forested land, pairing biodiversity recovery with local economic activity and climate resilience in one of Europe’s fastest-warming mountain regions. Mongabay

African countries are cutting cervical cancer by meeting women where they are. Zambia has screened over 1.5 million women since 2006 by task-shifting to nurses, embedding services in clinics and mobilising traditional leaders. Burkina Faso has paired free screening with mobile clinics, reaching nearly two million women. In Zimbabwe, bicycle-riding community health workers are now a keystone of care, immunising millions of girls in rural districts.

A major new piece of research finds that combining solar panels with farming could boost global crop output by enough to feed more than two billion people a year. This is revolutionary news because it means any suitable piece of cropland can now be modified to produce more food, more power, more income, more biodiversity and fewer emissions, all in a single step. The report drily notes that potential added agricultural income could exceed $1 trillion.

The Undisputed Champion of Coal has overseen more retirements of coal plants than any other president in US history. A new analysis shows 57GW retired across Trump’s two terms, versus 48GW under Obama and 41GW under Biden. Ageing plants and cheaper fossil gas and renewables have driven this trend, with wind and solar now generating more electricity in the United States than coal.

Hospitals are cutting climate pollution by dropping a common anaesthetic. Medical institutions across Europe, North America and Australasia are phasing out desflurane, a widely used anaesthetic with 2,530 times the warming impact of CO₂. The shift to alternatives has already cut anaesthetic-related emissions by nearly 30% over a decade, with no loss of clinical quality and significant cost savings. Regulators now see operating rooms as a fast, low-cost climate win. Bloomberg 🎁

AI reads brain MRIs in seconds and flags emergencies. Researchers at the University of Michigan have developed an AI system that can analyse scans in seconds, identifying neurological conditions with up to 97.5% accuracy while also triaging urgency. Tested on over 30,000 MRI scans, the model flags strokes and haemorrhages for immediate attention, offering a potential fix for radiology backlogs and delayed diagnoses as MRI demand outpaces specialist capacity. Science Daily

You’ve heard of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault - did you know Chile has one too?
In the Atacama Desert, one of the world’s driest regions, the Initihuasi Seed Bank is freezing thousands of native plant species to safeguard them against climate change, extinction and disaster. Stored at –20°C in earthquake-proof vaults, the collection now underpins species recovery, supports rewilding pilots, and acts as a genetic backstop for a country where 46% of plant species exist nowhere else on Earth. OPB

And finally, a legendary golden fabric once worn only by emperors has made an astonishing comeback. Sea silk’s beauty is legendary: often referred to as the "golden fibre of the sea," it was among the most treasured materials of ancient Rome, possessing a golden sheen that never fades. Historically reserved for Emperors and Popes, it’s produced in southern Europe from byssus threads produced by Pinna nobilis, a large Mediterranean clam. Today, these clams are endangered and harvesting their beards is strictly controlled, and it was feared the art of sea silk weaving would die with the bivalves’ last surviving seamstress.

But behold! Halfway across the world, fish farmers in Korea cultivate a common clam called Atrina pectinata. Late last year, researchers made the first true sea silk from its beard threads: now they’ve discovered why the colour lasts for so long. The team found that sea silk’s iridescence is created by a spherical protein structure known as photonin. These proteins form layered arrangements that reflect light in a way similar to soap bubbles or butterfly wings. Because the colour comes from structure rather than pigment, it remains stable for thousands of years. Science Daily

Women in Mesopotamia used the exceptionally light fabric to embroider clothes for their kings some 5,000 years ago. It was harvested to make robes for King Solomon, bracelets for Nefertiti, and holy vestments for priests, popes and pharaohs. It’s referenced on the Rosetta Stone, mentioned 45 times in the Old Testament and thought to be the material that God commanded Moses to drape on the altar in the Tabernacle.

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This week’s top stories

Youth-driven protests force Bulgaria’s unpopular government to resign. Bulgaria’s late-2025 street protests used the same playbook as Nepal and Madagascar: young organisers turned online networks into mass turnout, culminating in the government’s resignation in December 2025. “What this moment makes clear is that social media has not distracted Gen Z from civic life but, instead, placed political participation in the palm of their hands.” International IDEA

Spain is about to regularise half a million undocumented migrants. The Socialist-led coalition government has approved a royal decree (meaning no parliamentary approval required) to regularise about 500,000 undocumented people and asylum seekers, due to take effect in April 2026. Applicants must show no criminal record and prove they were in Spain for more than five months (or had sought protection) before 31 December 2025. A 700,000-signature citizens’ push in 2024 helped force the issue. The Guardian.

See also: For each year from 1994 to 2023, US immigrants generated more in taxes than they received in benefits from all levels of government.

England and Wales just hit a near-50-year low for homicides. Police recorded 499 killings in the year to September 2025, the lowest number since 1977 and a 7% drop on 2024. This is largely due to knife killings falling by 23% during this time. Knife crime offences were also down by 9% and firearms offences fell by 9% to just under 5,000, the lowest since 2003. BBC

India has expanded rural tap water access from 16.7% of the population in 2019 to 81% in 2026, connecting 125 million rural households to clean, running water. In sheer numbers, this is the biggest, fastest, and most important sanitation drive in human history. Why has it not been more widely reported? PIB Delhi

We may soon see new species brought to life in the lab. In February 2025, we shared a story about Evo 2, an AI model that can design new DNA sequences, and predict the functions of genomic code with far greater insight than even the best of scientists. Awesome, right? But if you really want to create new life, designing the genome isn’t enough — you have to actually turn your computer model of something that could exist into something grown in a petri dish.

Until now, quick, accurate DNA synthesis has been nearly impossible, but in January 2026, Caltech scientists released a tool called Sidewinder, which they described as the “printing press” of DNA. The excitement around the potential of this Sidewinder/Evo 2 combo has been intense: in biology, they’re calling it “a pivotal moment in the history of life on Earth.” If the hype is right, we could soon be seeing entirely new species designed, crafted and brought to life in the lab.

Of course, if these tools make it relatively easy to create new life, you should assume their potential for building things like vaccines is even more stunning. Says Kaihang Wang, one of Sidewinder’s creators: “During the pandemic it took 42 days from getting the COVID sequence to make the first mRNA vaccine, and that was just, wow. It was a huge achievement. But with our technique, from getting the DNA code, we could do it in 62 hours.” The Times

Australia returns an extinct frog to the wild after four decades. Scientists have reintroduced green and golden bell frogs to the Australian Capital Territory for the first time since the species vanished locally in the early 1980s. Using captive breeding, disease immunisation, and engineered “frog saunas” that suppress deadly chytrid fungus, researchers plan 15 releases totalling about 375 frogs. The project marks a rare reversal of amphibian extinction driven by fungal disease. The Guardian

A giant skate is making a comeback off Scotland. The critically endangered flapper skate is rebounding in and around the Loch Sunart and Sound of Jura Marine Protected Area, after commercial fishing of the species became illegal in 2009. Researchers interviewed commercial fishers from all over Scotland, with half reporting flapper sightings on a daily basis. BBC

Toronto’s Don River was declared “biologically dead” decades ago — now fish are returning after a major wetland restoration. Monitoring in 2025 recorded more than 20 fish species in Toronto’s Don River, including Atlantic salmon and native predators such as walleye and northern pike. The rebound follows a C$1 billion renaturalisation that rebuilt wetlands, reshaped the river’s course, and restored spawning habitat. National Observer

Soon, soil health should be as easy to check as the weather. The Earth Rover Program borrows seismology to read soil structure from vibrations: tap a metal plate resting atop the earth with a hammer, read the wave patterns with cheap sensors, and turn the squiggles into practical advice so farmers can see what’s happening with their ground. While the tech is currently being tested in Kenya, the Earth Rover team hopes to soon roll it out everywhere, letting farmers get a “soilcast” that tells them what to fix, and where. Mongabay

Gavi’s 2025 numbers say the global vaccine machine is still running. Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, says it delivered a record 300 million doses in 2025, surpassed its goal of reaching 86 million girls with the HPV vaccine, and supported malaria vaccine rollouts in 24 countries — while also rebuilding how it operates. All of this happened in a year of sharp aid cuts, rising fragility across partner states and conflict and climate shocks driving need up as funding tightened. Gavi

Following that up, the malaria vaccines are working. In a study of 45,000 children across Ghana, Kenya and Malawi, researchers compared vaccinated kids (after three doses) with their unvaccinated peers. The vaccinated children had 30% less malaria and 58% less severe malaria, plus fewer malaria hospitalisations and less anaemia. All-cause deaths were lower too. Next up: an end-of-study analysis will look at longer-term impact, including what happens after the fourth dose and up to two years of follow-up. The Lancet

Angola has secured Ramsar Convention on Wetlands status for a critical area known to locals as lisima lya mwono (“source of life”). Officially designated last October by the Angolan government and announced Jan. 6 by the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands, the site covers around 53,000 km², supplies water to the region’s most important rivers, and supports unique native wildlife inside. Mongabay

Исправим новости

A few months ago one of our readers, Julia Miller, reached out to ask if she could translate our newsletter into Russian and record it as a podcast for Russian-speaking listeners. Of course we said yes. She’s been doing it regularly since late 2025, splitting each edition into two shorter episodes to keep them digestible. The project started as a way to share hopeful news with her parents, and while it’s been warmly received by friends and family, it’s still looking for a wider audience. Check out the 2025 year recap or the latest episode — and if you know any Russian speakers who could use some good news, please share!

Human Progress

Brazil’s murder count just fell for a fifth straight year. New 2025 totals show 34,086 deaths from violent crime (including homicide, femicide and robbery-murder), down 11.2% from 38,374 in 2024 — a drop of 4,288 lives in one year. The improvements aren’t evenly shared (state-by-state rates still swing wildly), with experts attributing the variations to higher or lower levels of conflict between gang factions. Still, the direction is now hard to ignore: fewer killings, sustained over half a decade. G1

U.S. life expectancy hit a record in 2024, powered by fewer ‘accidental’ deaths. Provisional figures put life expectancy at 79 years, as around 3.07 million people died — about 18,000 fewer than in 2023 — and deaths from unintentional injuries (including overdoses) fell more than 14%. Heart-disease death rates also dropped about 3% for a second straight year, and COVID-19 fell out of the top 10 causes of death. The U.S. still trails peer countries, but preliminary statistics suggest it will see continued improvement in 2025. ScienceAlert

The war on malaria is entering a new era. More than ten million children were vaccinated in 2025. Add in infant chemoprevention during routine vaccination checkups, Novartis’s new treatment designed specifically for newborns weighing as little as two kilograms and lab work on a “split-second” antibody target, and the parasite is finally encountering a multi-layered defence. The Conversation

Uganda’s measles success story. Health officer Edson Tumusherure recalls hospital wards in the 1980s where almost half of all hospitalised children died; after catch-up campaigns in the 1990s and early 2000s, deaths fell by 63%, and by 2009 the country logged just nine confirmed cases. But measles is brutally contagious: even with first-dose vaccine coverage of around 90%, 67 districts reported outbreaks in 2025. The good news is that the fix is underway: a newer vaccine began rolling out in 2022, and 62 of those 67 districts have already completed response campaigns. Gavi

Between 2018 and 2024 the World Bank ran a program in Mali and Mauritania that rewarded health providers for actually providing care. It worked. Over five million people accessed basic health services, beating the original goal of 3.65 million. Mali delivered 1.17 million under-five consultations for illnesses like malaria, respiratory infections and diarrhoea. Mauritania vaccinated 200,000+ children (3× the target) and delivered almost five million under-5 consultations.

Laos is on track to graduate from the UN’s poorest-country list. Laos has been recommended by the United Nations to leave Least Developed Country status in 2026, followed by a transition period to 2029. The government is targeting 6% average growth for 2026–2030, after roughly 4.3% growth in 2024, and officials are already planning for the harder bit: losing some grants and special support once the label changes. Vientiane Times

Multidimensional poverty continues to decline in Ghana. The latest figures from the Ghana Statistical Service show deprivation falling from 23.9% in Q1 2025 to 21.9% in Q3, with 360,000 people exiting poverty in a single quarter, and about a million over the course of a year. Education and geography still decide a lot: rural poverty remained stubbornly high, as does poverty in households with no formal education. Nevertheless, progress. MyJoyOnline

And finally, in this excellent VoxDev interview, Vietnamese economist Phạm Chi Lan walks through how Vietnam went from post-war privations to lifting millions of people out of poverty. The politics surrounding pro-market reforms in Communist Vietnam were messy: years of debate over whether markets would betray socialist ideals, with the “voice of the grassroots” eventually breaking the deadlock. Provincial leaders loosened controls, giving farmers and producers more autonomy; when food and output improved, it became evident that the Vietnamese could build a market economy that actually served the country.

Conservation & Restoration

Ostriches return to Saudi Arabia after nearly 100 years. In December, five red-necked ostriches were released into the Arabian desert, with more to come if they successfully breed. Saudi Arabia’s native “Arabian” ostrich was hunted to death in the mid-20th century and since then there’s been no big grazing birds to disperse seeds from the desert’s grasses and leaves. Gamekeepers hope the red-necked ostriches, North African natives used to surviving harsh deserts, will fill that ecological niche. With fewer than 1,000 red-necked ostriches left globally, the move also widens that species’ survival map. Arab News

Bolivia has created the 838 km² Gran Paitití de Mapiri Municipal Park and Integrated Natural Management Area, adding a new piece to its Amazon–Andes wildlife corridor. Established in October 2025 through a community-led process in La Paz, it links several conservation areas and safeguards an amphibian hotspot with nearly 30 species. Andes Amazon Fund

In China’s Yangtze River, the finless porpoise population is rising: the latest count puts it at 1,426 in 2025, up 177 since 2022. Scientists link the recovery to the ten year fishing ban that began in 2021, alongside tighter habitat protection and monitoring. They’re now aiming for 1,700 by 2030 and 2,000 by 2035, backed by an action plan including local governments and research bodies. China Daily

Toronto to turn former airport into a sustainable district. Toronto is redeveloping the former Downsview Airport into a C$30 billion, multi-decade urban district planned to house over 60,000 residents and 20,000 jobs. Built around transit, walkability and reused infrastructure, the 370-acre site will add 30,000 homes, 70 acres of parks and a pedestrian boulevard on a former runway, targeting net-zero emissions by 2040. Newsweek

South Australia has begun a $17 million wetland repair programme, targeting the Coorong, Lower Lakes, Murray Mouth and the South East. Announced in January, the Shorebird and Wetland Habitat programme will upgrade water-control infrastructure, restore breeding and foraging habitat, and cut pressures from weeds, feral foxes and cats, and pest fish. Glam Adelaide

And, for the first time in more than 40 years, rhinos are roaming Uganda’s Ajai wildlife reserve. The Uganda Wildlife Authority has moved four southern white rhinos from Ziwa Rhino Sanctuary, which has been successfully breeding white rhinos since the early 2000s, as phase one of a plan to establish 20 animals at Ajai, which fell into disuse after the species was driven to extinction in the 1970s and 80s due to poaching and political unrest. This monumental milestone follows decades of strategic restoration efforts in the West Nile region and could be a game-changer for tourism in an oft-overlooked area. TTW

Energy & Climate

The climate debate feels stuck right now between optimism and despair. Both sides are citing the same data, yet keep reaching opposite conclusions. As climate scientist Aaron Thierry points out, this looks confusing until you realise the disagreement isn’t about facts, but about what kinds of questions are being asked.

The optimists say, “Are things moving in the right direction? Is change accelerating?” The pessimists (who correctly call themselves realists), ask “Are we still within safe boundaries? Are absolute levels declining? Is the transition happening fast enough?” One side is looking for signs of change, the other is concerned about where we’re running up against physical limits.

Take CO₂ emissions. Growth has slowed over the past decade. The world’s wealthy countries have all peaked, and China and India look set to follow quicker than expected. Read for momentum, this looks like the curve bending, like the technology and the economics working, like the trajectory shifting. Read for limits though, it shows absolute emissions still rising, atmospheric concentrations climbing and carbon budgets still shrinking. Both readings are accurate. The disagreement is about which one matters more.

The growth of renewable energy brings this into even sharper focus. Global solar, wind and battery installations are rising exponentially. A dynamic reading says we’re on a cost and deployment curve that will eventually see these technologies replace coal, gas and oil. But when you’re looking at the same data for limits, you can see that renewables are not yet being added at the scale required to start really drawing down on fossil fuels. The tension is between the overall direction versus current reality.

Perhaps the clearest example comes from warming projections. A decade ago, business-as-usual scenarios pointed toward four or five degrees of warming by 2100. Today those projections land closer to 2.6 degrees. For the optimists, this is proof that action works, that we’ve avoided the worst and that we could bend the curve even further. For the pessimists, it’s an admission of failure: we’re not going to make the Paris Agreement’s target of 1.5 degrees. Our climate is already changing, and the impacts are going to be devastating.

In other words, this isn’t really about data. It’s about frameworks. Everyone’s worried, but some care about direction, acceleration, and whether positive feedback loops are starting to kick in. Others care about absolute levels, about how much room remains in our carbon budgets and whether the current pace of change is fast enough to meet the targets we’ve all agreed are necessary to prevent disaster.

Climate communication often treats this as a knowledge problem, as if people just need more graphs. But most people aren’t confused. They’re just using different frameworks. You can have accelerating progress that’s still insufficient. You can have impressive momentum that nonetheless fails to meet physical constraints in time. Both can be true simultaneously, which is why citing more data doesn’t resolve anything.

There’s nothing wrong with the limits camp. Their warnings are accurate and their insistence that we focus on what’s actually required to hit ambitious goals reflects genuine concern. But that’s not the lens we use. We keep finding evidence that things are changing remarkably quickly (faster than most models predicted). That dynamism gives us more confidence about both our climate and energy futures than a lot of other people who care about this stuff.

The question isn’t whether the glass is half-empty or half-full. It’s whether you’re watching how fast the water level is rising or tracking how much space still remains. Both matter. But they tell different stories about what comes next.

Some headlines from the last week:

Global battery prices have plunged 60% in two years, reshaping power grids.

All five offshore wind projects cancelled by Trump are back on track.

Adoption of electric vehicles in California is cutting air pollution.

Ten European countries pledge €95 billion to accelerate North Sea wind.

We’ve hit peak cement (it’s not coming back) and that’s good for climate.

Electric cars go mainstream as adoption surges worldwide.

India goes full throttle on solar panel manufacturing.

A revival for coal in India looks impossible as renewables dominate.

Court forces German government to decide stronger climate actions.

Amsterdam becomes first capital city to ban fossil fuel advertising.

Science & Technology

New worm species discovered in Utah’s Great Salt Lake. Roundworms are so-called ‘extremophiles,’ evolved to survive in incredibly harsh environments — specially adapted roundworms, or nematodes have been found in Antarctica’s McMurdo Valley, and deep underground in a South African gold mine. Which is why, when Julie Jung, a roundworm specialist, was told nothing could survive Utah’s Great Salt Lake except brine shrimp and brine flies, she started looking for nematodes… and found one. Diplolaimelloides woaabi (the species epithet, “wo’aabi”, is the Shoshone word for “worm”) lives in the Great Salt Lake and apparently nowhere else on Earth. Jung found hers in a soil sample brought home in a takeout container (“they don’t leak.”) NPR

Long thought only the glue between neurons, astrocytes regulate the brain. Neurons are the brain’s big stars: they create a dazzling electrical network, exchanging signals to depress or excite each other up to 1,000 times per second. Given all that glitz, perhaps it’s no wonder that for centuries we’ve believed neurons to be the brain’s sole arbiter of perception, thought, emotion, and behaviour… but we were wrong.

Astrocytes are the gluey bits of brain that fill the space between neurons like so many slimy packing peanuts, and it turns out they regulate neurons. Thank a trio of papers published in Science in 2025 for proving it beyond a shadow of a doubt. “Neuroscience has only cared about neurons for a century now, and we don’t yet have a cure for a single brain disorder,” says Thomas Papouin, the author of one of the papers. The way to change that, he says, is to accept the influence of non-neuronal cells such as astrocytes, and to include them in experiments and models. Quanta

South Africa has yielded the oldest direct evidence of poisoned hunting weapons. Residues on 60,000-year-old quartz arrowheads show early humans used plant toxins, likely from Boophone disticha, to enhance lethality. The find pushes poison-based hunting deep into the Pleistocene and reveals sophisticated chemical knowledge, planning and tool use far earlier than previously documented. Ars Technica

Immune breakthroughs, in three ways:

• In London, clinicians at Great Ormond Street Hospital and University College London used base-editing to treat T-cell leukaemia in nine children and two adults. Researchers reported “deep remission” in most patients, with seven still disease-free three years later. Positive News

• Two decades after a small Duke breast cancer vaccine trial, every participant is still alive — a rare outcome for metastatic disease. When researchers looked closer, they found the women’s immune systems still carried “memory” cells that recognised the cancer. Science Daily

• And prevention may have wider spillovers than we thought: Eric Topol explores the evidence that older adults who received a shingles vaccine had a roughly 20% lower risk of developing dementia in later years.

MIT engineers show waste heat inside electronic devices can do useful computation. Using microscopic silicon structures, they encoded information as temperature differences and achieved over 99% accuracy on matrix multiplication, a core AI operation. While not scalable for deep learning yet, the work may lead to ultra-efficient sensing and self-monitoring chips that compute using energy that would otherwise be wasted. MIT

And finally, a young coyote who was kicked out of his territory survived a swim to Alcatraz Island and is now living near the notorious prison. The coyote is being monitored by San Francisco naturalists, who’ve noted that the affectionately-nicknamed ‘Floyd’ has gotten fat fast off of eating unprepared seabirds. BBC

That’s it for this week thanks for reading! We’ll see you next week :)

With love,

The FTN team

Hi everyone, we’re thrilled to introduce you to our first charity partner for 2026, Dogs4Wildlife. Run by professional police and military K9 trainers Darren Priddle and Jacqui Law, they’re teaching dogs to become elite wildlife protectors across the African continent. Their latest project transforms rescue dogs in Zimbabwe into conservation assets working alongside African Parks in Matusadona National Park.

We’re sending them AUD$20,000 to build a specialised training and agility area at a new sanctuary just outside Harare. The sanctuary will serve two purposes: it’ll provide critical training infrastructure for seven conservation dogs currently in training, building their confidence, coordination and problem-solving abilities, while also giving more than 450 rescue dogs a space to play, explore and thrive.

Darren and Jacqui told us that for the conservation dogs, structured enrichment and agility work is essential for developing trust with handlers and ensuring they enjoy their training. For the wider sanctuary population, it’s a permanent space where they can express natural behaviours, reduce stress, and simply be dogs.

Thanks to all of you, our premium subscribers, for making this donation possible. This sanctuary will benefit both African wildlife and rescue dogs for years to come.

Full Stack Human isn’t another wellness fad or productivity hack. It’s an evidence-based playbook for finding agency in chaos, opportunities in disruption and turning information overwhelm into actionable capacity. This is neuroscience meets real talk - get it while everyone else is still doom-scrolling.

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This week’s top stories

The world just passed eight years and four months without a nuclear explosion, the longest period since the atomic era began more than 80 years ago. The most recent test was in North Korea on September 3rd 2017. That’s a welcome milestone: Daniel Ellsberg (the guy who leaked the Pentagon Papers) skipped a retirement fund assuming a nuclear holocaust would arrive first. Could someone please share this news with the Doomsday Clock people? Vox

Since 2021, poverty has declined in most countries, but progress is uneven. Three in four countries in the world saw a decline in poverty between 2021 and 2024, signalling a broad recovery after the shock of the pandemic. Countries mired in conflict and violence continue to confront the steepest challenges, but things are starting to look up (slowly) - the World Bank estimates that four in five countries saw poverty decline in 2025, the largest share in ten years.

The mental health of America’s students is improving. UCLA surveyed 84,000+ students across 135 campuses nationwide, and found severe depression fell to 18% in 2025 (down from 23% in 2022), and suicidal thoughts fell to 11% (from 15%). Loneliness is still high and only one in three students said they were ‘flourishing’; still, the results reflect an important counter narrative to the constant headlines about young people’s mental health.

India is going green faster than China did at the same income level. Cheap solar, wind and batteries are allowing the world’s largest country to bypass a fossil-heavy growth phase. As Bill McKibben notes, costs have flipped so dramatically that renewables now undercut coal itself, opening a credible path for emerging economies to grow as “electrostates” that are built on clean electricity rather than fossil fuels. Ember

In 2025, wind and solar generated more electricity than fossil fuels in the EU, while nuclear provided an additional 23%. Gas, coal and oil only generated 29%, with coal becoming increasingly marginal at 9.2%. A big shout out for solar, which now generates a cool (or should we say ‘hot’?) 13% of electricity for more than 450 million people across the continent. Ember

Australia’s clean energy transition is going better than almost anyone realises. In the last quarter of 2025 renewables supplied a record 51% of the country’s electricity, with wind, solar and batteries each at all-time highs. The share of fossil gas is at its lowest since 2000, coal power is at its lowest level ever, emissions are down, and wholesale electricity prices have plunged by 44%. The figures show a system shifting faster than the public debate has caught up with yet. AEMO

And in case you were worried about the United States…
99% of new US capacity in 2026 will be solar, wind + storage. (EIA)
US green energy growth is proving hard to kill. (Financial Times)
Trump is trying to kill clean energy. The market has other plans. (Grist)

Meanwhile, deforestation keeps falling across the Amazon —

• In Brazil, deforestation in the Amazon is down to its lowest level since 2014. At COP30, President Lula recognised 24,500 km² of Indigenous territories, with another 45,000 km² in the pipeline; funders pledged $1.8 billion for land rights and $100 million for wildfire prevention. Context

• In Colombia, new figures show forest lost from January to September 2025 is down 25% compared to the same period in 2024. Officials credit a government-led plan that leans on Indigenous collaboration, rural land-use zoning, restoration and voluntary conservation deals, as well as cash incentives. Mongabay

And on the border with Peru and Brazil, Bolivia recently added two new protected areas to stitch the western Amazon together. Created by municipal governments, the 7,300 km² of intact forest, rivers and floodplains will give jaguars, tapirs, river dolphins, giant otters and spider monkeys corridors to move around vast territories. Andes Amazon Fund

If you want to go deeper, check out Oliver Gordon’s excellent solutions journalism deep dive on food forests in Brazil. The indigenous practice of agroforestry is gaining traction in Brazil, replacing degraded pasture with mixed tree-crop systems that restore soils, cut emissions and raise incomes. So-called ‘food forests’ (dense, mixed plantings of fruit, nut and other productive trees) provide habitats for animals while also providing food (and income!) for farmers. Just Stories

Heart disease deaths fall in the United States as pandemic surge recedes. According to new data from the American Heart Association deaths from heart disease and stroke declined in 2023, reversing a multi-year rise linked to the pandemic. Around 25,000 fewer Americans died from heart disease than in 2022, with improvements in age-adjusted death rates. Despite the progress, heart disease and stroke still cause more than a quarter of all US deaths.

Soon, asymptomatic illnesses could see you glowing green. Rising inflammation in the body is one of the best ways to spot illness before symptoms show up. Now a Japanese team has found a way to bioengineer living skin to glow green when inflammation hits…currently in mice, maybe someday in humans. Upside: now you’ll know you’re ill before you start suffering, and be able to treat preemptively. Downside: you’ll have to plan your outfits a little more carefully. Nature

Standard cannabis measurements are coming, and could do wonders for public health. Cannabis currently exists in a measurement grey zone; people talk about joints, bowls and gummies, but that rarely translates into how much THC someone actually consumes. Now scientists from the University of Bath have proposed a standardized THC unit for cannabis much like units for alcoholic drinks. Public health experts have welcomed the proposal, and if this (or any) cannabis standardisation sees pickup, it could help users pace themselves and doctors assess risk. Vice

Veronika, a 13-year-old cow, has been filmed using sticks and a broom as a bovine backscratcher. Her newly-recorded tool use is causing us to rethink what we know about cow intelligence, and the possibility of tool use among large mammals more generally.

And in what may or may not count as tool use (apparently it’s controversial) last year, a wolf in British Columbia was caught on camera dismantling and robbing crab traps. If ‘dismantling crab traps’ does count, this is the first tool use recorded in a wild canid.

Hawaiʻi modernises parentage law, locking in protections for LGBTQ+ families. The new law replaces heteronormative, marriage-based rules with gender-neutral standards that recognise intended parents, assisted reproduction and surrogacy. The reform secures legal parentage for children born into LGBTQ+ families without requiring adoption or court orders after birth and closes gaps that left families vulnerable during medical emergencies or custody disputes. Kauaʻi Now

Cycling surges in the world’s most iconic cities. Forget Waymo. Bikes and e-bikes are reshaping urban transport faster than autonomous taxis, helped by pandemic-era habits, cheaper batteries, and separated lanes. In London cyclists now outnumber cars in the financial district by two to one. In Paris, they now outnumber motorists across the whole city. Even in Beijing the number of cyclists is rising again - and as cities reallocate street space, we’re starting to see a “war on cars.”. Bring it on.

Waymo, Alphabet’s self-driving taxi firm, proudly proclaims that its cars do around 250,000 trips a week. Yet in New York alone that number of trips is made every three days using the city’s bike-share scheme.

Bogotá’s care blocks are buying women their time back. Colombia’s capital is home to eight million people, and 1.2 million women who do more than ten hours a day of unpaid care. Since 2020 though, the city has opened 25 neighbourhood hubs where caregivers can drop off children or elderly relatives, do the laundry, then use free legal aid, training or mental-health support - or just sit down and read a book. The model is now spreading to Sierra Leone, Mexico and (soon) the United States. Vox

And finally, one of the most beautiful rewilding stories of our time, courtesy of French filmmakers Arnaud Hiltzer and Aurélie Miquel (and their little girl Rose).

Subtitles are available in English and Spanish.

Read more

Do you know someone who’s changing the climate story for the better? Nominations are open for the Gulbenkian Prize for Humanity 2026 - a €1 million award that shines a spotlight on individuals, groups and organisations that are turning bold climate vision into measurable change. They’re looking for more nominations (they didn’t get a lot through this year) and we figured there would be plenty of readers who might be interested. Past winners include Greta Thunberg, the Antarctic Southern Ocean Coalition, and the Covenant of Mayors for Climate and Energy. Entries close Friday 30th January 2026.

This week’s top stories

For the first time in history, more people in Mexico are categorized as middle class than as living in poverty. Income poverty has declined from 35.5% of the population in 2018 to 21.7% in 2024, according to World Bank data. Over the same period, the middle class expanded from 27.2% to 39.6%. The shift reflects what President Sheinbaum calls “a moral economy, welfare programs, rights, not assistance programs but rights.” Mexico News Daily

And, for the first time since October 2023, aid partners in Gaza now hold enough food to meet 100% of minimum caloric needs. That compares with late 2025, when families received just 50–75% of required calories. The United Nations is supporting the production of around 170,000 two-kilogram bread bundles daily, but access, security and the risk of Israel suspending NGO operations mean the gains remain fragile. UN News

According to Albert Cheung, the Head of Global Transition Analysis at BloombergNEF, the global energy transition is still accelerating, even as the politics worsen. Global wind and solar installations passed 800 GW last year, triple the pace of 2021, falling battery costs have enabled grid-scale storage just as renewable penetration deepens, and electric vehicles now account for over 25% of global car sales. The drivers of the transition have shifted from moral appeals to energy security and competitiveness. Hard-to-abate sectors still lag, policy uncertainty remains real and 1.5°C is not going to happen. But economics, rising demand and technological capacity are now carrying the transition forward — unevenly, but irreversibly.

Global electric vehicle sales reached 20.7 million in 2025, up 20% year on year, driven by strong growth in Europe and emerging markets, according to Benchmark Mineral Intelligence. Europe overtook China as the fastest-growing major market, while sales outside China, Europe, and North America jumped 48%.

Gregor Macdonald notes that the global consumption of gasoline is starting to flatline…

… and electrified models outsold combustion Porsches in Europe for the first time in 2025.

After 20 years of negotiation, the High Seas Treaty entered into force last week, creating the first legal framework to protect biodiversity across the 64% of the ocean beyond national jurisdiction. Attention now turns to what comes next: setting up a secretariat, agreeing on funding and benefit-sharing rules, launching a scientific body to propose marine protected areas, and negotiating with fisheries bodies and deep-sea mining regulators. Many question marks remain, but, for the first time ever, high seas conservation sits on a legally enforceable framework. Dialogue Earth

🐾 Some nice animal stories for your feed

• New Zealand’s critically endangered kākāpō have begun breeding for the first time since 2022, triggered by a ‘mega-mast’ fruiting of native rimu trees that provides the energy needed to raise chicks.

• New York has passed the Horseshoe Crab Protection Act, setting a timetable to end commercial harvesting of this ancient species by 2029.

• Belgium has banned imports of hunting trophies from endangered species, while Germany has banned fur farming (Poland, Europe’s largest producer, banned it last month).

• An explosion of water voles! (Petition to make that the new collective noun). Endangered water vole populations across the east of England have surged following sustained eradication of invasive American mink, their main predator.

• Some recoveries are quieter. European wildcats, once thought lost from central Europe, are being rediscovered through camera traps, with scientists estimating around 140,000 persist across more than two dozen countries.

• Przewalski’s horse, extinct in the wild by the 1960s, now roams again in Mongolia and Kazakhstan following decades of captive breeding led by the Prague Zoo.

• Global tiger numbers have risen from 3,200 in 2010 to 5,574 by 2023, with Thailand now supporting up to 223 tigers after two decades of protection.

• In India’s Assam state, no rhinos were poached in 2025, only the second such year since records began.

• And in China, the Yangtze sturgeon, absent from the wild since 2000, is back, following two decades of captive breeding and releases led by Zhou Liang.

Psychiatry is finally finding an objective way to spot mental illness. Depressed people speak differently: compared to their pre-depressed selves, they pause more and speak less, and their voices lack variation in pitch. This is devilishly difficult for a psychiatrist to detect, but for an AI on your phone, it’s easy… and for mental health professionals, it might be the holy grail. Psychiatry has, since its inception, tried to mimic the diagnostic precision of more physical forms of medicine, but it hasn’t. And how could it? Psychiatrists have little to work with besides patients’ descriptions of their own internality, which can be fuzzy, never mind fraught.

Now we’re within reach of something better. A rush of startups in the United States are using AI and wearables to try and identify biomarkers associated with various mental illnesses. The hope is to eventually allow for diagnostic data to supplement patient self-reports, improve psychiatric precision, or enable those who can’t go to a psychiatrist get a diagnosis. New Scientist

No-till farming helps Canada post record grain exports. Canadian farmers are harvesting record spring wheat and canola crops, driven largely by widespread no-till and zero-till farming that locks in soil moisture and cuts erosion. Longer term, yields are up 77% for wheat and nearly double for canola since the mid-1990s. As the world’s largest canola exporter and a top five wheat producer, Canada’s gains are easing global food supply pressures even as climate volatility intensifies. Reuters

“We were sitting with our calculator saying ‘we can afford that!’” A manufacturer in Bangladesh will launch a generic version of the cystic fibrosis drug Trikafta in spring 2026, cutting annual costs from about $370,000 to as little as $12,750 for adults and $6,375 for children. The breakthrough follows years of campaigning by parents, challenging monopoly pricing that left three-quarters of the world’s 190,000 CF patients without access. The Guardian

Since 2015 India, the world’s most populous country, has cut malaria incidence by 80%, tuberculosis by 21%, and maternal mortality from 130 to 88 per 100,000 live births. Infant and under-five deaths have also fallen sharply, with the government emphasising that sustained primary-care and treatment scale-up remain a priority going forward. Times of India

Poland moves to recognise same-sex couples. Poland’s government has approved a bill introducing “cohabitation contracts” for couples living together regardless of gender - its first nationwide legal recognition of queer relationships. The bill, which covers health, housing and tax rights, stops short of marriage, but activists say it’s the only one with a real shot of passing in the current parliament. Reuters

Really good news: American lawmakers have agreed to a $50 billion compromise foreign assistance budget for 2026, restoring funding for Gavi and the International Development Association while preserving over $9.4 billion for global health, $5.4 billion for humanitarian aid and $691.5 million for global education. As one education advocate put it, the funding is “relatively good, considering everything.” Devex

And finally, Dylan Matthews revisits the core argument of a book project he was working on that collapsed because editors struggled to believe it: that since the 1970s, the US social safety net has expanded and absolute poverty has fallen a lot.

The overall point that the safety net has grown, and that living standards at the bottom have improved, struck me as so obvious and clear in the data that I hadn’t braced myself for the depth of disbelief. I suspect a large part of the issue is that the people I was pitching are mostly liberals and leftists, and an unstated premise of a lot of left-of-center advocacy is that you must paint the world in a maximally negative way so as to inspire people to push for change.

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Welcome to 2026. Thanks for your patience while we were on our summer break, Sammy and I had two lovely weeks on the Sapphire Coast of Australia. Lola is nut brown and brave enough to swim under the waves now, Cleo got stung by a bluebottle and flew a kite for the first time, and Juno managed to eat her bodyweight in beach sand.

While we started the year slowly, the same is not true of the news. Things feel insane. A reminder - while we’ve been following all that stuff too, you won’t find any coverage of it here, because you’re already drowning in it. Both legacy and social media are explicitly designed to show you what’s breaking, what’s terrifying, what’s going wrong. We’re trying to offer a correction to the distortion.

The stories you’re about to read are just as important, if not more so, than the chaos currently dominating your feed, but they’re invisible because they don’t generate the emotional charge required to break through. Progress doesn’t spike cortisol. Disease elimination doesn’t trigger shares. That doesn’t stop them from happening though.

This week: Iraq offers a counterpoint in the Middle East, trachoma exposure falls below 100 million worldwide (down from 1.5 billion in 2002), coal power drops simultaneously in India and China for the first time since 1973, astonishing progress in the fight against cancer, and how conservationists saved one of the world’s most beautiful species of antelope.

Our version of the news isn’t more true than the one you’re seeing everywhere else, but it is a lot harder to find. If it helps, please share it!

This week’s top stories

The WHO just released new data showing the number of people exposed to trachoma worldwide has fallen below 100 million, down from over 1.5 billion in 2002, signalling an extraordinary reduction in the world’s leading infectious cause of blindness. The WHO’s SAFE strategy - surgery, antibiotics, facial cleanliness and environmental improvement - is working, with elimination now validated in 27 countries.

Iraq is ‘unrecognisable and remarkable’ after years of conflict (that’s a nice thing to write). According to the United Nations the country has emerged from two decades of conflict into a more stable phase, with poverty falling to 17.5% and security improvements enabling about five million internally displaced people to return home. Recent parliamentary elections saw a 56% turnout, up 12 points on the previous vote, and a third of the candidates were women. UN News

Global vaccine development has moved from serendipity to precision engineering. Saloni Dattani on how advances in microscopy, cell culture, genomics and mRNA platforms are now letting scientists design vaccines atom by atom, with a turnaround of just weeks. After more than a century of slow iteration, the pace has sharply accelerated, with multiple diseases getting their first ever vaccines in the past five years.

In the next few years we can expect:
- A universal flu vaccine.
- Next-generation COVID-19 vaccines with broader, longer-lasting protection.
- Personalised cancer vaccines, starting with melanoma.
- Malaria vaccines with higher efficacy and longer durability.
- Tuberculosis vaccines providing adult protection.
- Second-generation RSV vaccines for more age groups.
- Safe dengue vaccines without the need for prior infection screening.
- Gonorrhoea vaccines reducing antimicrobial resistance pressure.
- Chlamydia vaccines targeting the most common bacterial STI.

Ocean protection rose to 9.6% of global waters in 2025, a 1.2-point increase driven by some very large designations. The biggest moves came from French Polynesia’s planned 4.8 million km² reserve, Samoa’s nine new MPAs covering 30% of its ocean, and new protections in the Philippines, Pakistan and the Marshall Islands. Mongabay News

Happy Public Domain Day! On January 1, 2026, Nancy Drew entered the public domain, as did the papers of Hannah Arendt and Albert Einstein, Langston Hughes’ Not Without Laughter and Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon. For more works entering the public domain this year, check out the Public Domain Review.

Global cancer deaths have doubled since 1980, but this reflects population growth and ageing, not treatment failure. Once age is accounted for, cancer deaths have fallen by more than 20%. What that means is that for people of the same age, the likelihood of dying from cancer is now significantly lower than four decades ago, reflecting real progress in prevention, detection and care. Our World in Data

Also, in the United States: “Seven in 10 people now survive their cancer for five years or more, up from only half in the mid-70s. This stunning victory is largely the result of decades of cancer research that provided clinicians with the tools to treat the disease more effectively, turning many cancers from a death sentence into a chronic disease.” US Cancer Statistics 2025

Oh, and in Britain, the first leukaemia patient just received CAR-T cell therapy on the NHS. “Usually, this type of leukaemia is aggressive and patients don’t live beyond 6–8 months. With this, we are able to offer them years and potentially a cure.”

Coal power falls in both India and China. In 2025, coal-fired electricity generation fell simultaneously in India and China for the first time since 1973. India cut coal power 3% and China 1.6% as record solar, wind and storage additions outpaced rising demand. Together, these two countries account for roughly 40% of global annual CO₂ emissions from fossil fuels and industry. Guardian

Given this, it’s perhaps unsurprising that global seaborne coal exports fell 5% in 2025, the first annual decline since 2020, driven mainly by lower imports across Asia. China cut thermal coal imports 12% as clean power surged, while India’s imports fell by 3%, raising the prospect that global coal trade has peaked. Reuters

The United States Congress has moved to overturn President Trump’s proposed 22% cut to federal science spending, rejecting what would have been the steepest reduction since World War II. NASA in particular is breathing a sigh of relief: spared a 75% cut in science funding, projects including the Dragonfly to Titan mission and the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope are now safe.

The US Senate has also rejected Trump’s proposed $1 billion cut to National Park Service funding, instead advancing a bipartisan bill that includes provisions to retain and rehire staff, require congressional notice of any mass firings, and protect conservation and maintenance funding. Plus, a US appeals court has upheld an injunction preventing the National Institutes of Health from imposing a flat 15% cap on indirect cost payments to universities.

Chinese scientists have created a hybrid rice that reproduces clonally through its seeds, locking in high-yield traits across generations without annual repurchasing. The advance tackles the main constraint limiting hybrid rice uptake, particularly in low-income regions. With hybrids already delivering up to fourfold yield gains in parts of Africa, clonal varieties could dramatically lift global food output. South China Morning Post

Pakistan and Rwanda have both registered measurable progress against child stunting. Over the last five years Pakistan’s Nashonuma Programme cut stunting among under-twos by 6.4% and among six-month-old babies by an “enormous” 20%. Rwanda lowered national stunting from 33% to 27% between 2020 and 2025, halving the number of high-burden districts and reducing acute malnutrition, showing sustained nutrition policies are delivering gains across very different contexts.

South Korea has ended bear bile farming, formally banning the breeding, possession and bile extraction of bears under strengthened animal welfare laws. The decision follows a 2022 agreement between the government, farmers and animal rights groups, as demand for bear bile collapsed amid cruelty concerns and medical alternatives. Associated Press

London recorded 97 homicides in 2025, pushing the city’s homicide rate to 1.1 per 100,000 - the lowest level since current records began. Metropolitan Police.

The results speak for themselves: fewer lives lost, fewer families shattered. Every murder is a tragedy, but we will continue to use every tool at our disposal to drive down serious violence.
Sir Mark Rowley, Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis

New York City just recorded the lowest number of shootings in its history. There were 688 shooting incidents in 2025, the lowest total ever, while murders dropped 20.2% year-on-year and major crime declined 3% overall. CBS News

Each of those percentage points adds up to dining room tables without an empty seat, lives freed from the dark cloud of grief, children that grow up with a parent at home
Zohran Mamdani, Mayor of New York

US cities where murder rates fell to all-time lows in 2025
San Francisco / Detroit / Baltimore / Chicago / Philadelphia / Oakland / Fresno / Modesto / Newark / Bridgeport / Providence / Richmond.

Meet five new species discovered in 2025: live-birthing toads in Tanzania, a smiley snailfish from the deep sea, a mini-marsupial in the Andes, an undercover spider in California, and, from the fossil record, a long-extinct sea cow that lived in the Persian Gulf and was an ‘ecosystem engineer’ much like today’s manatees and dugongs. NPR

Neither jellyfish nor sea anemones have brains. But these animals sleep in ways strikingly similar to humans.

And finally, the scimitar-horned oryx has been brought back from extinction through captive breeding. After wild populations vanished in the 1980s, the antelope has now been re-established in Chad through one of the most complex rewilding efforts ever attempted. Following decades of coordinated breeding in European and U.S. institutions, the turning point came in March 2016, when 25 oryx from a genetically curated “World Herd” were released into the Ouadi Rimé–Ouadi Achim Faunal Reserve, an area larger than Ireland. Since then, 347 animals have been reintroduced and around 600 now roam free, prompting the IUCN in 2023 to downgrade the species from “extinct in the wild” to “endangered.” BBC Future

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Chlamydia trachomatis is a bacterium, about a quarter of a micrometer across, small enough that half a million can fit on the tip of a sewing needle. It’s a shape-shifter: one strain causes chlamydia, the world’s most common sexually transmitted infection. Another strain targets human eyes, causing a disease called trachoma, and trachoma is a lesson in how much damage time can do.

It begins in young children, spread by flies attracted to the moisture in their eyes and noses. At first it feels like conjunctivitis. The kids rub constantly, their eyes glued shut in the mornings from discharge, spreading the infection to their siblings. This goes on for years, infection after infection, each one leaving a little more scar tissue.

Then comes the turning point, quite literally. The scarred eyelid turns in on itself. At first, one or two lashes touch the eye. They can be plucked, but grow back in weeks, thicker. More turn inward until blinking becomes an assault. Sunlight is agony. Squinting presses the lashes down harder. The pain is relentless; people describe it as glass shards scraping the cornea. Sleep becomes impossible because closing your eyes hurts too much.

Trachoma is old. Evidence of it has been found in human skulls from the Ice Age. The Ebers Papyrus, written two centuries before Tutankhamun, contains a suggested treatment: after ripping out your eyelashes, apply an ointment of myrrh, lizard blood, and bats’ blood. Thousands of years later, homemade remedies aren’t much better, so people employ increasingly desperate coping strategies.

They tie string around their eyelashes, pulling them away from the eyeballs. When the pain becomes unbearable, they pluck the lashes out - with tweezers if they have them, with fingernails if they don’t. Some burn their lashes away with hot ash. In the worst cases, they cut notches in their eyelids to change the angle. Left untreated, the cornea scars until vision disappears entirely, but the lashes keep scraping even after the world goes dark.

In the 19th century, trachoma was endemic in Europe and North America. Charles Dickens based Nicholas Nickleby on a boarding school in Yorkshire where the boys were blinded by what was then known as Egyptian ophthalmia. William Wordsworth suffered repeated infections that left him fearing blindness, which he recorded in The Excursion. Irish immigrants were examined at Ellis Island and deported if infected. It ravaged Native American communities and the barracks of the First World War.

By the mid-20th century though, trachoma had vanished from the West, not because of medicine, but as a side effect of prosperity. Indoor plumbing meant faces could be washed with clean water. Sewage systems and garbage collection eliminated the flies. The disease retreated to the world’s poorest places, where it persists today, the most common infectious cause of blindness on the planet, a plague that’s been with us since before the pyramids.

Or at least it was. In November 2025, Egypt eliminated trachoma. Senegal, Burundi, Mauritania, Fiji, Togo and Papua New Guinea eliminated it this year too, while India, Pakistan and Vietnam crossed the finish line in 2024. A decade ago 192 million people lived in areas where trachoma was endemic. That number has now almost halved, and the number of people blinded has fallen from 3.5 million to 1.2 million.

It’s one of the most inspiring things I’ve ever heard of, one of best things happening in the world right now, yet not a single major news organisation reported anything about trachoma in 2025.

When something goes wrong in space, the public watches the visual feed: explosions, debris, visceral evidence of danger. Mission control watches everything else: oxygen levels, trajectory drift, the systems that determine whether the crisis is survivable. This year felt like being stuck in that room. On the screen, collapse: 56 conflicts raged, the most since the Second World War. Gaza remained a graveyard, satellite imagery showed blood in the rivers of Sudan, and Putin’s invasion of Ukraine approached its fourth anniversary.

According to Reuters four in ten people now avoid the news, and after a year like this, who can blame them? What made 2025 exceptional wasn’t any individual atrocity but their sheer velocity, the sense that they arrived bullet-like, leaving no room to recover. Wildfires in Los Angeles, Zelensky’s humiliation in the White House, a Swiss village buried by mud and ice, antisemitic terror attacks in Manchester and Sydney. It was the year the predators stopped pretending. Nations slashed aid and started stockpiling missiles. The rich got tax breaks and stock market highs, everyone else got expensive eggs and crippling mortgages.

Beneath this ran a deeper anxiety: that digital technology has done permanent damage, replacing our shared stories with fragments of conspiracy and grievance. Oxford’s word of the year in 2024 was “brain rot.” This year, it was “rage bait.” And while we scrolled, the coral reefs bleached. Glaciers lost ice at record rates. Bulldozers kept flattening forests. Ships kept bottom-trawling. In Texas, the Guadalupe River rose overnight and drowned children in their beds. The planet is on track for temperatures that will reshape continents, yet the political will to change course, incredibly, went backward.

I watched it all, spending hundreds of hours mainlining all the corruption and cruelty until the scale stopped registering. I can’t remember ever feeling more angry. But each week, I also monitored the consoles at the back of the room: WHO technical reports, Spanish-language newspapers, Chinese state media, energy analysts on LinkedIn, a website devoted to a guru of transcendental meditation that publishes good news because “the media is a mirror of collective consciousness.”

We published 38 editions of our newsletter this year, featuring 1,932 stories from 170 countries, and what we found was that while the headlines kept insisting on collapse, the data - child mortality rates, vaccination coverage, emissions intensity, deforestation curves - kept showing stubborn progress. While everyone was staring in horror at the flames outside the capsule, we were looking at telemetry that said there was more than enough oxygen to make it home.

This gap, between the world as it is and how we’re told to see it, comes down to a choice about what we do with our attention. Mission control doesn’t ignore danger. It’s acknowledged, monitored, taken seriously. But knowing which emergencies require immediate action means you need to watch all the instruments, not just the alarms. That’s the difference between panic and an effective response.

Every year, Gallup surveys around 1,000 people each in 142 countries, asking about their lives and expectations. In its most recent edition, 33 percent of respondents said they were thriving, the highest proportion on record. The share who said they were suffering dropped to 7 percent, matching the lowest level since tracking began in 2007. A decade ago it was 12 percent.

You might expect these numbers to feature prominently in coverage about the state of the world. They don’t. A record four in five people are satisfied with their personal freedoms and three in four say their country is a good place for children to learn and grow. Economic optimism has rebounded to its highest point since the financial crisis. More people in more countries report living better lives than at any point since measurements began.

If you watched the news, you'd think these people were delusional. Everyone knows the global economy has had a terrible year. In April, Trump's tariffs triggered a sharp rise in trade tensions. Growth projections fell by 0.4 percentage points. But by November, they’d recovered to exactly where they started: 2.7 percent. The pattern has become familiar. Since the pandemic, global growth has repeatedly exceeded expectations.

But resilience isn’t evenly distributed, and neither is the attention. While American and British media spent a lot of this year focusing on sinister political forces and affordability crises, in much of the rest of the world people felt measurably better about their prospects. Not because growth was spectacular (it wasn't) but because daily life kept improving in ways that GDP doesn't capture.

Consider what happened with food. Global hunger is falling for the first time since the pandemic, driven by gains in Asia and the Americas. In 2025 the world produced record harvests of wheat, rice and soybeans for the third consecutive year, pushing grain prices down 8 percent and rice prices to their lowest in 18 years (and this required less land - global farmland peaked in the 2000s and has been falling ever since, according to the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization).

That abundance has translated into extraordinary gains in places you don’t often hear about. Indonesia reduced childhood stunting from 30.8 percent in 2018 to 19.8 percent in 2024, one of the largest and fastest drops ever recorded, and in 2025, it reached 30 million more women and children with free meals. This was part of a global surge: over half a billion children were fed at school this year, 100 million more than were fed in 2020.

Global unemployment reached its lowest level since 1991. More than 80 percent of the world's adults now have access to bank accounts, up from half in 2011. Extreme poverty remained stubbornly high in conflict-affected and fragile states but is falling almost everywhere else. Not just India and China but Indonesia, Mexico, Uzbekistan, Nepal, Vietnam - countries where hundreds of millions have escaped the worst kinds of deprivation in recent years. None of this resolves affordability crises in the rich world. But it complicates the narrative that everything everywhere is getting worse.

The gains extended beyond food and income. In August, the WHO and UNICEF released data showing that over the last decade 961 million people gained access to safe drinking water, 1.2 billion gained safe sanitation, and 1.5 billion gained basic hygiene services. Over the same period the number of people without electricity fell by 292 million, even as the global population grew by 760 million. According to the International Energy Agency, this represents the fastest expansion of electricity access in history.

The scale of this achievement is staggering. Charles C. Mann describes them as ‘secular cathedrals’: electric grids, public water, food supply chains and public health networks that rank among civilisation’s greatest accomplishments. These systems change lives in the most tangible of ways. Homes that now have power and toilets. Clinics with soap and handwashing basins. Hundreds of millions of women who no longer have to carry water each day. Countless communities that can focus on more than just survival.

Yet even that wasn’t the best thing we saw in the telemetry this year. In September, The Lancet released a report with one of the most extraordinary statistics I’ve ever seen: since 2010, humanity’s total burden of illness and early death has dropped by 12.6 percent, driven by declining deaths from the world's deadliest infectious diseases: tuberculosis, lower respiratory infections, diarrhoea, HIV/AIDS, all down by between 25 and 49 percent.

This progress has been so dramatic that for the first time in our species' history, lifestyle diseases (heart disease, cancer, diabetes) have displaced infectious illness as the dominant global threat. And here, mortality is falling too. The probability of dying from one of these diseases before 80 has declined in four out of five countries since 2010. Global cancer death rates are roughly a third lower than their early-1990s peak - child leukaemia deaths are down 59 percent. In the United States, every generation now has lower dementia risk than the last.

A record 17 countries eradicated a disease this year, the highest number in history. It wasn’t just trachoma; Niger became the first African nation to eliminate river blindness, Guinea and Kenya beat sleeping sickness, the Maldives achieved the world’s first triple elimination: no babies born with HIV, hepatitis B or syphilis. Japan and 21 Pacific nations were declared free of measles and rubella this year too.

More than ten million children were vaccinated against malaria, part of a broader surge that pushed global vaccination levels to record highs. Not because of belief in a moral arc, but because thousands of people worked together across continents: scientists in labs in England and India, healthcare workers loading cooler boxes onto bicycles, market women passing messages between vegetable stalls, religious leaders finding Quranic verses to counter vaccine myths.

Perhaps more striking still, the world is a safer place than ever before. Most people would dispute this; surveys show majorities in almost every country believe violence is rising. Yet the World Bank released data in September showing the global murder rate has declined on every continent during this century, and Gallup found that 73 percent of people globally now feel safe walking alone at night, the highest level ever recorded.

In 2025 the United States will almost certainly record its lowest murder rate in history. Not since the pandemic, not since the 1990s crime wave, but lower than any year since the FBI began tracking in 1960. Violent crime is at its lowest level since 1968. Property crime is at the lowest rate ever measured. Baltimore, which The Wire made synonymous with drug violence, has seen emergency rooms that once overflowed with gunshot victims nearly empty out.

Even on the world’s most dangerous continent, homicide rates have declined in the last decade, by 22.6 percent in South America and 58 percent in Central America. Brazil's homicide rate fell 15 percent in the first half of 2025, reaching its lowest level since 2012. Mexico's daily murders have dropped by 37 percent under President Sheinbaum. Jamaica recorded a 42 percent decline, the steepest annual fall in four decades.

We have built the safest civilisation in human history while convincing ourselves that we live in the most dangerous. Billions of people experienced measurable improvements in health, safety, and material conditions in 2025. That progress didn’t make the news. But it happened anyway, one vaccine, one school meal, one kilowatt-hour at a time.

Look, I don’t want to sound like some bloodless bureaucrat here. You can’t fact-check people out of a feeling. For hundreds of millions, the world feels like a terrible place at the moment. If you’re a democracy activist languishing in a Hong Kong jail or a single mother in New Jersey struggling to pay the rent or a cobalt miner risking your life in the DRC, lines on a graph don’t matter.

That said, I do think the collapse merchants have gotten carried away. We now have an entire genre about living in the worst timeline, about how fascism is inevitable and the kids are doomed, and almost all of it is created by people cosplaying the apocalypse from positions of extraordinary comfort. They’re being lazy. It's easier to predict the end of the world than to wrestle with the truth, which is that some things are genuinely scary, some things are going great, and most of it is just really complicated.

But nuance doesn’t sell. Pessimism does. It sounds smart, sophisticated, proof that you’re a clear-eyed realist. Plus, doom is dramatically satisfying in ways that incremental progress never can be. You get to use words like predator, crippling and conspiracy. You get to be the prophet who saw it coming, brave enough to tell hard truths while collecting your advance and planning your next speaking tour.

The problem compounds when 90 percent of the world’s English-language media comes from the United States. What reads as analysis of global collapse is mostly American psychodrama mistaken for planetary diagnosis. The Republic of Letters has been annexed by the Republic of Feelings, and the feelings in question belong to people whose material circumstances remain comfortable enough to afford the luxury of existential dread.

No story in 2025 showed this more clearly than the assassination of Charlie Kirk. For weeks, this dominated news cycles, social media feeds, conversations. It made headlines in hundreds of countries and ended the year as Wikipedia’s second most-read article, behind only the death of Pope Francis in April. Humanity devoted billions of hours of our attention to this over the course of September and October 2025.

The coverage was almost entirely worthless. Instead of investigations into political violence or security failures, we got endless cycles of hypocrisy-identification. People argued over whether to feel sympathy. The assassin’s online history got picked over for tribal markers. Antifa or groyper? Weeks of takes that resolved nothing, a drizzle of commentary that amounted to ‘mimetic outrage spirals’ (thanks Sam Kriss) masquerading as incisive political discourse.

During the weeks that this story dominated our feeds, the UN High Seas Treaty was ratified, giving governments power to establish conservation zones across the two-thirds of ocean that lie beyond national borders. NASA announced that Perseverance had found mudstone covered in markings resembling those left by microbes on Earth, the strongest evidence yet that life once existed on Mars. The World Bank released a report showing nearly 100 million children have been lifted from poverty in the last decade.

Bolivia became the 14th Latin American country to ban child marriage, following a four-year campaign led by girls and civil society groups. In Japan, new figures showed same-sex partnerships are now approved by 92 percent of municipalities. Pakistan launched its first vaccination drive against cervical cancer, mobilising 50,000 healthcare workers. A Dutch-American team successfully treated Huntington’s disease for the first time. Philanthropists in New York announced deals to supply a new miracle HIV drug to 120 low and middle-income countries.

Solar became the largest source of electricity in California, overtaking fossil gas for the first time. Peru created a massive protected area of rainforest that will lock away over half the country’s carbon. Mexico reported that wild jaguar populations are up 30 percent since 2010. Brazil, the fourth-largest cosmetics market in the world, banned animal testing. In the Pacific, chiefs from Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu endorsed a proposal for the world’s largest ocean reserve, an area the size of the Amazon rainforest.

We didn’t hear any of these stories though, because we were too busy scrolling through hot takes about Erica Kirk, Jimmy Kimmel, and free speech. According to the logic of our modern information apparatus, one of the most important things that happened in 2025 was the death of an American political entrepreneur, an event deemed a thousand times more newsworthy than a treaty to protect two-thirds of the world’s oceans, tens of millions of children escaping poverty, and the potential discovery of extraterrestrial life.

The news is not the report. It’s what Jennifer Mercica calls ‘a misery machine’, specialising in stories with very specific rules about what matters. Those rules have nothing to do with importance and everything to do with what makes compelling narrative. Engraved memes on bullet casings, drone strikes in Ukraine, masked agents dragging people off streets - they all offer what the machinery requires: visceral imagery, immediate threat, endless angles for outrage.

A story about Morocco becoming the 60th nation to ratify a global maritime treaty, thereby triggering its entry into force? That doesn’t tick any of the boxes. Neither do disease elimination or electricity access. These things happen slowly, invisibly, the result of decades of incremental gains. Cathedral-building, not crisis. There are no villains, no victims, no dramatic turning points. They reduce threats rather than amplify them, make the world safer rather than more dangerous. From an attention-economy perspective, that makes them worthless.

This is why 2025 looked so awful. Not because journalists were lying but because the entire media apparatus is structured toward grievance-based attention farming. Progress remains invisible because it doesn’t generate the emotional payload required to compete. What remains is a funhouse mirror: accurate in its particulars, grotesque in its proportions. The fires were real. The floods killed people. The predators did stop pretending. But staring at the feed while ignoring the telemetry creates panic, and panic is what creates space for populists who insist they alone can fix the disasters we're told define our age.

By this point, I know the climate activists will be climbing the walls. Health, sanitation, education, nutrition, safety. Fine. But there’s no progress on a dead planet. What's the point of eliminating trachoma when rising temperatures spread new diseases? Who cares about electricity access when crops fail and the sea swamps our cities? All this runs on a devil's bargain: we’re still pumping out more carbon.

Except we aren’t. Since the Paris Agreement entered into force in 2016, China has been responsible for roughly 90 percent of global emissions growth. Strip China out and emissions from the rest of the world have flatlined in the last decade. In other words, it worked! All the pleas, the backroom deals, the documentaries, the marches. But while those battles raged, China exploded, pumping out hundreds of millions of extra tonnes of carbon each year, the equivalent of adding five Germanys to the global emissions ledger.

Now that’s changed. China’s emissions have been flat or falling for 18 months. Unless there’s a dramatic last minute revision, China’s carbon emissions will fall over the full calendar year, not because of an economic downturn, but because the structure of its energy system is transforming. This is the biggest turning point in the history of energy. The country responsible for a third of global emissions, the one adding two United Kingdoms’ worth of electricity demand every year, is now satisfying all that growth with panels, turbines and batteries instead of coal or gas.

The scale of the buildout is staggering. China is expected to add at least 330 gigawatts of solar and wind capacity this year. To give a sense of scale, in May alone, it installed 230 million solar panels, roughly the same amount in a month that Germany has installed in its entire history. In November, electric vehicle production hit 52 percent of all vehicles while production of internal combustion vehicles fell 10 percent. Solar generation grew 50 percent year-on-year, wind by 37 percent. Coal’s share of total electricity dropped to 53 percent, down from 59 percent just two years ago.

More importantly, China is exporting its clean energy transition everywhere. It manufactures over 70 percent of the world's solar panels, wind turbines and batteries, at a scale that has crashed prices and made clean energy the obvious economic choice. Pakistan generated a third of its electricity from solar in 2025, up from zero six years ago. Solar panel imports to Africa rose by 60 percent. In Australia, renewables just overtook coal. India’s power sector emissions fell for only the second time in half a century. The United Kingdom now generates more than half its power from wind and solar.

For the first time in history, renewables overtook coal this year as the largest source of global electricity, with wind and solar covering all growth in the first half of the year. That’s why Science called renewable energy the breakthrough of the year. It’s the structural change we’ve all been waiting for. Not pledges at climate summits, but the moment when clean energy grows fast enough to meet rising demand and begins displacing fossil fuels. Three of the world’s four largest emitters - China, the EU and India - are now seeing fossil generation flatten or fall.

Even in the United States, where the Trump administration spent the year trying to reopen coal plants and block wind farms, 92 percent of new electricity capacity through November came from solar, wind and batteries. Despite the president’s repeated insistence that windmills are national security threats and too expensive to operate, wind accounted for more new gigawatts this year than fossil gas. The commercially viable version of reality kept asserting itself regardless of what was said on Truth Social.

Ultimately, this year settled an argument that dominated climate discourse for months: energy transition or energy addition? Are renewables displacing fossil fuels or just getting stacked on top? China’s declining emissions provided the answer. Renewables are replacing coal and gas, not supplementing them. Of course, climate isn’t just electricity. It’s transport, food systems, land use, industrial heat, a complex equation with dozens of variables. But ten years ago, projections showed us heading toward 4°C or more of warming. Today those estimates sit at 2.7°C.

That’s not good enough. We’re going to blow past 1.5°C, and the loss of the reefs, precious ecosystems and coastlines will be among humanity’s greatest crimes. But we’re still on a better path than we were. If current patterns hold, we might stay below 2°C, which is the difference between catastrophic and survivable. The oil and gas companies may have captured politics: Trump in the White House, climate action blocked at COP, petrostates emboldened. But the decisive shift is happening in Shandong province and the Atacama Desert and on suburban rooftops in Karachi. That was the climate story of the year. Everything else was an afterthought.

In October, Rhett Butler, founder of Mongabay, published an essay that circulated widely in my corner of the internet. “Optimism, properly understood, is not a mood,” he wrote. “It is a method.” His argument was simple: treat optimism as a discipline. Tell stories that build agency. Refuse the lazy fatalism that mistakes headlines for trend lines. Destiny is not fixed.

That method matters because narratives, once established, are difficult to dislodge. The Sixth Mass Extinction for example, has become shorthand for the biodiversity crisis, repeated so often it feels like settled fact. But in November this year, Kristen Saban and John Wiens, two ecologists from the University of Arizona, published research that complicates the story. After analysing 912 extinctions across plants and animals over the past 500 years they found that extinction rates peaked about a century ago and have been declining since.

Their findings don’t deny an environmental crisis. Most historical extinctions were driven by invasive species on islands: rats, pigs, and goats wiping out birds, plants, and reptiles with no defences. Today’s threats are different: habitat loss, climate stress, ecosystem degradation. On multiple fronts this year though, people went after those threats, and what they pulled off was remarkable.

Consider the saiga antelope. In 2006, roughly 30,000 remained scattered across the grasslands of Central Asia. The animal had survived ice ages, but industrial hunting, habitat loss and a series of catastrophic die-offs from bacterial infection had pushed it close to extinction. What followed was not glamorous: anti-poaching patrols across Kazakhstan and Mongolia, cross-border coordination between governments that never agree on anything, better law enforcement against horn trafficking.

By 2025, the population had climbed to nearly four million.

The saiga wasn’t alone. This year we learned that India’s tiger population has doubled in a decade. Iberian lynx went from 100 at the turn of the century to over 2,400. Green turtles were removed from the endangered list. Humpback whales in eastern Australia now exceed pre-whaling numbers. In New Guinea, Attenborough’s long-beaked echidna, feared extinct, turned up on camera traps. European bison have risen from 54 in the 1920s to 10,000 today. Black rhino numbers in Africa are recovering.

None of these stories made headlines. The recoveries accumulated quietly. The work was technical, expensive, and slow. Transmitters on every animal. Artificial insemination. Predator-free zones. Habitat corridors maintained across borders. Communities paid to monitor instead of poach. That stuff just can’t compete with the latest drama from Washington DC or speculation about whether Ariana Grande is on Ozempic. The machinery has rules, and gradual success doesn’t qualify.

But it works. Penny Langhammer and colleagues reviewed 665 conservation interventions and found that two-thirds either improved biodiversity or slowed its decline. Habitat protection works. Invasive species removal works. Restoration works when maintained over time. Where interventions failed for their intended targets, other species often benefited unintentionally, or the failures informed better strategies elsewhere. Success wasn’t guaranteed, but it wasn’t rare either.

Forests told a more complicated story. On the upside, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization reported that net forest loss has fallen by more than half since the 1990s, from 10.7 million hectares per year to 4.12 million. Millions of hectares of tropical forest are now in some stage of natural regrowth, but that’s because destruction continues. Forests regenerate after being cleared, burned, or logged. Each flare-up opens space for new shoots, even as it drains the ecosystem’s ability to recover.

Still, progress was real. In Brazil, deforestation in the Amazon fell to its lowest level in 11 years. Colombia declared all its rainforests, an area the size of California, off-limits to new large-scale extraction. Across the broader region, a patchwork of around 20,500 square kilometres of forests, wetlands, cloud forests, and páramos were protected, placing long-term stewardship in the hands of Indigenous peoples and local governments. Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize launched a tri-national reserve protecting 57,000 square kilometres of Maya forest, the largest protected area in the Americas after the Amazon.

Rewilding accelerated. Roughly 18 million square kilometers have been spared from cultivation since the early 2000s. That abandoned land is reverting to grasslands and forests across Europe, North America, Australia, and Central Asia. As people abandon those spaces, wildlife has returned. Europe’s wolf populations have increased by 58 percent in a decade. Golden jackals surged 46 percent. Brown bears climbed 17 percent. In North America, pumas, black bears, and grizzlies have reclaimed millions of square kilometers.

Simple technologies bent outcomes too. China has converted tens of thousands of square kilometres of its deserts into green farmland, using a simple technique involving straw grids. In the last decade deaths from air pollution, the thing that kills more people than anything else, have dropped by 21 percent, driven largely by billions of people gaining access to cleaner stoves.

Animal welfare is another bright spot. A decade ago, fur farms killed 140 million animals a year. That number has now fallen to less than 20 million. The collapse came quicker than anyone expected: luxury brands abandoned fur after Gucci’s 2017 pledge, COVID-19 outbreaks on mink farms forced closures across Europe, and demand crashed in Russia and China. What was a $40 billion industry a decade ago had been gutted by a combination of consumer pressure, disease risk and regulatory tightening.

Perhaps more striking still, ocean protections illustrated that collective action at scale still works. It wasn’t just the High Seas Treaty. Nations agreed to ban bottom trawling on seamounts, and several countries put a moratorium on the practice altogether. French Polynesia created the world’s largest marine protected area, covering nearly five million square kilometres. Samoa protected 30 percent of its ocean territory. Spain, Greece, Portugal, Colombia, and Tanzania all designated new reserves. In the United States, new figures showed that overfishing has been almost entirely stopped in territorial waters, with 50 stocks rebuilt since 2000.

The challenges we face are daunting, and well-meaning volunteers won’t be enough. Today’s pressures - heat stress, drought, degradation, ecosystem failure - are slower and more diffuse, so addressing them is going to require sustained institutional capacity rather than targeted campaigns. Do we have a chance of pulling it off? In 2025, across multiple domains in conservation and restoration, the answer was yes.

Somewhere in Egypt this year, a community health worker visited a village to distribute antibiotics and teach face-washing. She’s been doing it for years. That’s how diseases really get eliminated, not through medical breakthroughs or political bargaining, but because people keep showing up.

When I first started doing this work a decade ago I was certain that if I gathered enough data, stacked enough evidence, I could convince people that the collapse narrative was wrong. But you can’t prove the world is getting better or worse - it’s too hard to see from our current vantage point. We lack perspective. Future generations will decide that for us. They’ll look back and render their verdict based on what we left them.

Then I thought maybe I could identify the bad guys. Expose the masterminds, show who’s manipulating our attention and why. That didn’t work either. Part of growing older is realising that nobody is actually in charge. There’s no villain, no evil genius in a boardroom deciding what gets reported and what doesn’t. The system isn’t run by anyone; it’s the result of billions of choices made over decades, editors chasing clicks, coders optimising for engagement, audiences rewarding outrage, reporters following incentives. It’s not malicious. It’s emergent.

Now I do this work - watch the instruments, scour the internet, squint to see through the news - as a tribute to the millions of people who make it happen. Activists who spent years fighting child marriage in Bolivia. Nurses who traveled for days to distribute vaccines in Pakistan. Rangers in Zimbabwe who ran anti-poaching patrols around the clock for rhinos. Forest monitors in the Amazon who prevented fires from spiraling.

Engineers in China who somehow installed 230 million solar panels in a month. The scientists who ran malaria vaccine trials for years. The teams on opposite sides of the world who blew up the dams on the Klamath and Yangtze so salmon and sturgeon could spawn again. Researchers who devoted their careers to proving that conservation works. Diplomats who negotiated the High Seas Treaty through years of setbacks.

Egypt didn’t eliminate trachoma because of some natural law of progress. People did that. Solar panels didn’t transform the global energy system because of magic. That happened because people made the right choices, then kept making them long enough for the results to compound. The United States didn’t cut murder rates to all-time lows because of historical inevitability. Police and violence interrupters and youth workers made that happen.

None of them are going to stop because of who’s in the White House or Downing Street next year. They’ll load the cooler boxes and pull on their high heels for another day in court. That’s what makes the difference. Not a belief in progress, but the understanding that fixing is always harder than destroying, and that’s why it’s worth doing. All these people kept the world working in 2025.

They’ll do it again in 2026.

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In this moment, compiling a recap of all the hidden stories of progress from 2025 doesn’t feel appropriate or even possible. We’re going to delay publication until the period between Christmas and New Year. Thanks in advance for your understanding and please give your loved ones a squeeze. We’ll see you before the end of the year when we’ll have better news, we promise.

With love,

Gus

You’re reading Fix The News, a weekly roundup of stories of progress. We give away 30% of subscription fees to charity. Give someone a gift subscription. Get a group subscription for friends, family or your organisation. Listen to our podcast. If you need to unsubscribe, there’s a link at the end.

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It’s our last official edition of the year! Over the next two weeks we’ll be publishing some personal essays and a big end-of-year roundup, before turning off our screens for the summer break (yeah we know, Australia). To finish in style we’ve got a bumper edition for you this week, including a new charity partner. This isn’t the last time you’ll hear from us in 2025 but it is our last big regular news roundup. We hope you’ve enjoyed it as much as we’ve loved putting it all together.

This week’s top stories

Humanity’s fight against measles in three charts. A new report from the WHO reveals that annual measles deaths fell by 88% between 2000 and 2024, from 777,000 to 95,000 a year. Vaccinations have prevented an estimated 58 million deaths over this period, one of our species’ greatest ever achievements. Routine immunisation, including a second-dose surge from 17% to 76%, has reshaped our collective immunity, particularly in Africa, yet there is still so much work to be done: 20.6 million children missed their first dose last year, driving outbreaks in 59 countries. Gavi

Energy analysts say electricity demand in the United States is about to skyrocket. And they really do mean skyrocket — predicted to grow 25% by 2030, which would be the largest increase in electricity demand in US history. It’s mostly being blamed on generative AI: data centres are already driving up electricity prices around the country.

But… that may not be the full picture. Newly released data from the EIA show that after a scary start to 2025, when electricity use jumped 4.8% and coal generation spiked 23%, the US grid has shifted course: demand growth has slowed to 2.3% in the first nine months of the year, while solar has grown by 36%. That pace has allowed solar to cover more than 80% of new electricity demand, putting the country close to a structural tipping point where solar growth fully absorbs rising consumption and starts squeezing out fossil fuels (including gas). Good, yes?

Well yes, but seriously, what is AI even good for? Is this all just in aid of search summaries and ChatGPT girlfriends? Well, not entirely. Five years of AlphaFold has caused a global shift in how biology is done. Humanity now has a public database of 200 million predicted protein folds used by millions of researchers, faster pathways for drug design, and the tool has been cited in more than 35,000 papers. AI can now predict not just protein structures, but full molecular interactions, accelerating discovery far beyond what labs alone could achieve.

Turkish undergraduate students Alper and Taner Karagöl taught themselves structural biology during the pandemic using online AlphaFold tutorials – with no prior training. They’ve now published 15 research papers.

Surprising everyone (including us), the United States has reaffirmed its commitment to the Global Fund, the world’s largest financier of AIDS, TB, and malaria prevention and treatment programs. To say this comes as a surprise is an understatement - after all this year’s shocking news, this represents a lifeline for millions. The $4.6 billion commitment (the largest from a single donor) enables continuation of pooled medicine purchases and frontline service delivery. Think Global Health

A $6.25 billion gift turbocharges new child investment accounts in America. The US government is creating ‘Trump accounts’ for children born between 2025 and 2028, each seeded with a $1,000 deposit and invested in an index fund that matures at adulthood. Parents and others may contribute up to $5,000 a year until the child turns 18. Michael and Susan Dell will put an extra $250 into the accounts of children who live in zip codes with a median family income of $150,000 or less. The Guardian

DRC and Rwanda endorse US-brokered peace deal despite ongoing fighting. Both governments have agreed to withdraw foreign troops and disarm the FDLR militia group, but analysts say the absence of a functioning ceasefire limits the immediate impact. Trump has framed the agreement as a precursor to major investment in Congo’s mineral sector. BBC

Scientists reach untouched Arctic ridge in 5km deep-sea dives. Chinese researchers have completed the first intensive survey of the eastern Gakkel ridge, carrying out more than 40 crewed dives beneath the Arctic sea ice to map volcanic terrain as deep as 5,277 metres. The expedition retrieved rocks, fluids and fauna from one of Earth’s slowest-spreading plate boundaries, opening a new window on hydrothermal systems that may mirror those on icy ocean worlds. Nature

‘Fortress conservation,’ that evicts people from places that have been their home for generations is (thankfully) falling out of fashion. There’s a reason for that: we now know that biodiversity is highest on land managed or co-managed by Indigenous communities. But does this only work for communities that have lived on the same land for thousands of years? Turns out, no!

A little context.

Centuries ago, a lot of people from Africa were taken as slaves to South America, and a lot of those people fled to the forests (for a fascinating history of this check out National Geographic’s article on Brazilian quilimbos). Today, many of their descendants live on what are now protected lands, and a new study shows that these places have also seen lower levels of deforestation and greater biodiversity conservation than protected areas that are free of people. It appears that humans can live in harmony with nature even if their ancestors haven’t been in the same place for millennia, so… let’s do it?

We might be doing it. In Europe, rewilding is reversing the fortunes of ‘Empty Spain.’ In the sparsely populated Serranía Celtibérica, a decade of rewilding efforts has revived ecosystems, wildlife and rural livelihoods. Semi-wild herbivores and predators are returning to abandoned farmland, local timber and resin businesses are gaining sustainable footing, and young volunteers are helping build a rewilding movement rooted in community and ecological renewal. Rewilding Europe

Amazing news from one of our charity partners: Glia has built the first externally fixated fracture device ever designed and manufactured entirely inside the Gaza Strip. Using recycled plastics, 3D printers powered by solar panels, and no imported components, they are producing functioning orthopaedic fixators at a moment when more than 90% of local medical facilities are damaged and conventional devices are unobtainable. Glia

Britain ends new fossil fuel exploration. The government has introduced a legal moratorium on all new oil and gas exploration licences, ending five decades of North Sea expansion and aligning policy with 1.5°C targets. Existing fields will keep producing under stricter climate tests, but future investment will now flow to offshore wind, carbon-free heat and upgrades to the grid. Greenpeace UK

The Indian state of Kerala, home to over 60 million people, says it has eliminated extreme poverty — from over 60% of the population in the 1970s to nearly zero today. You’ve heard us talk about Kerala before! For decades, the state had some of India’s best literary and health indicators, yet some of its lowest incomes. That gap has now been closed. The shift stems from micro-interventions delivering food, housing, medical care, education support and job cards, backed by intensive local monitoring and community implementation. Brookings

Meanwhile, Vietnam’s multidimensional poverty rate has dropped to 1.3%, a sharp fall from 4.4% just three years ago, and Tajikistan has cut national poverty from 56% in 2010 to about 20% today.

Plus, poverty in Latin America fell to 25.5% of the population in 2024, the lowest level on record. The 2.2% drop from 2023 means there are now 12 million fewer people living in poverty: a decline driven largely by rising wages in Mexico and Brazil. Colombia One

Wildlife rangers in southern Africa have plenty of experience in chasing off poachers — but often lack the tools to actually catch the culprits. Now parks in South Africa and Zimbabwe have started employing police dogs from Wales, with great success. Nonprofit Dogs4Wildlife, which provides the dogs, gives priority to smaller reserves, which have far fewer anti-poaching resources than Africa’s most renowned parks. “Some of the smaller wildlife reserves have almost eradicated poaching completely, just because of the deterrent value.” CNN

Australia’s environmental laws are set for their biggest improvement in decades, after a years-long deadlock between Labour and the Greens. The deal establishes Environment Protection Australia as the country’s first independent environmental regulator and introduces legally enforceable national environmental standards, as well as finally subjecting native forest logging and high-risk clearing to federal scrutiny. BBC

An 18-year-old in Alabama redrew their state’s senate map on free software, and a federal judge adopted it over plans drafted by professional cartographers, fixing a Voting Rights Act violation for nearly 300,000 people.

And finally — a 14-year-old boy has folded origami that can hold 10,000 times its weight. Miles Wu used the Miura-ori fold, which is known for collapsing and expanding with precision. He’d like to use his origami experiments to help improve pop-up emergency shelters, which currently are “sometimes strong,” sometimes “easily deployable,” and sometimes “can compact really small,” but rarely all three.

Ray of Hope

We are so pleased to introduce you to our final giving partner for 2025: the Asha Kiran Society, an incredible grassroots organisation in Odisha, one of the poorest states in India. Asha Kiran - which means “Ray of Hope” - began in 1991 when three young medical students rented a mud hut in the small village of Lamtaput with a shared dream to serve tribal communities overlooked by India’s mainstream health system.

Today, the 45-bed hospital delivers an outsized impact, offering affordable healthcare to more than 40,000 patients each year. When we spoke with hospital director, Dr Ravi Ninan George, he explained that because the closest referral hospital is 200 kilometres away, many patients choose to return home and die rather than travel for treatment – which puts increasing pressure on their small facility to offer services beyond their resources.

Cataracts are one of the most common health problems, and for older patients the impact is profound. As Dr George explained, “When you can’t contribute, you’re slowly pushed out. But once their sight returns, they can care for children, tend cattle and rejoin family life - so more people are coming forward for surgery.”

We’re sending them $10,000 USD for ophthalmic instruments for community screenings. Any extra funds will cover a defibrillator, new lights for the operating theatres and lab equipment to help with diagnostics, including malaria screenings. If you’d like to add to the donation, we now offer tax deductible options for readers in both the United States and Australia. 100% of your contribution will get added directly to the money we’re sending to Asha Kiran.

Other ways to help:

• If you’re interested in volunteering, reach out to the team here.

• They are fundraising to upgrade the existing hospital facility (approximately $1.5 million) by adding a maternity ward, special newborn care unit, and intensive care unit. If you want to get involved contact: ravigeorge@ashakiransociety.org

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This week’s top stories

95 million children lifted out of extreme poverty in this century
Extreme child poverty has fallen from 507 million in 2000 to 412 million in 2024, even as the global child population grew by a few hundred million. This decline has given humanity a roadmap: the countries that made the largest reductions used the same package: embedding child rights in national budgets, expanding inclusive cash transfers, lowering the cost of schooling and healthcare, and improving labour security for caregivers. UNICEF

Remember how in FTN 312 we talked about how the world has hit peak farmland, which means rewilding is going be a big deal? Well now it’s time to talk about some rewilding.

In Scotland’s Affric Highlands, Britain’s largest rewilding landscape is being reshaped by a coalition of landowners, residents and conservationists. These partnerships are reconnecting ancient Caledonian pinewoods, peatlands and river corridors while securing long-term commitments from private estates — strengthening habitat for wildcats, pine martens and golden eagles (and newly released beavers, the first in 400 years!)

Across Romania, Spain and Bulgaria, Europe’s skies are beginning to fill with giant silhouettes once again. Final releases of cinereous vultures in the Carpathians — alongside coordinated flights of new cohorts in Spain and Bulgaria — are restoring a keystone scavenger that stabilises food webs, limits disease and signals the revival of functioning ecosystems.

Further east, environmentalists in Cambodia have released captive-bred milky storks into the Tonle Sap floodplain — the first step in restoring a species reduced to only a few hundred birds.

In Ukraine, rewilding is fusing with healing. A new ‘Nature for Veterans’ programme is engaging frontline soldiers and their families directly in the restoration of wetlands and forests across the Danube Delta, and the release of wild donkeys, steppe marmots, eagle owls, and fallow deer.

And as these efforts multiply, the IUCN has just issued the world’s first formal rewilding standard, giving governments and practitioners a shared, accountable framework for what counts as rewilding (and what doesn’t), and creating global guardrails for a field that has expanded faster than its definitions. The guidance sets criteria for restoring ecological processes, reintroducing species, and securing community consent.

(Can someone please tell RFK Jr) Cabo Verde, Mauritius and Seychelles have become the first countries in sub-Saharan Africa to eliminate both measles and rubella, each sustaining more than 36 months without endemic transmission. The achievement rests on two decades of regional strategies built on two-dose vaccination, periodic mass campaigns, intensive surveillance and stronger outbreak response WHO Africa

Gavi’s drive to revitalise HPV vaccination has reached its target ahead of schedule, protecting 86 million girls by end-2025. More than 50 countries have introduced the vaccine, and uptake is rising fastest in high-burden regions: coverage in Africa hit 44% in 2024, overtaking Europe’s 38%. The scale-up is projected to avert 1.4 million future deaths, consistent with long-term data showing 75–92% reductions in invasive cancer when the vaccine is delivered in early adolescence.

In the latest wave of action Angola launched a historic nationwide HPV vaccine campaign in October, vaccinating 2.2 million girls in its first phase alone. Meanwhile, Malawi — which has one of the world’s highest cervical cancer mortality rates — has doubled down with a major late-2025 rollout targeting girls in urban and rural settings alike, backed by mobile teams and community outreach.

Meanwhile, Gavi and UNICEF have secured a deal to cut the price of the R21 malaria vaccine by 25%, down to $2.99 per dose. The savings, roughly $90 million, will finance around 30 million extra doses and reach an estimated 7 million more children over the next five years, even as donor budgets tighten. Reuters

COP30 failed on the big ticket stuff, sabotaged yet again by petrostates and their lobbyists. Governments walked away without a deforestation roadmap, agriculture talks collapsed, and carbon market rules stayed muddy. Inside the halls, though, a very different story unfolded: billions in funding for forests and land-rights, hard-won adaptation indicators, ocean and methane deals, and concrete steps on Indigenous tenure and smallholder resilience. The formal outcome of COP30 was weak, but on the margins, there was plenty of progress:

• Brazil’s new Tropical Forest Forever Fund launched with $6.6 billion raised.

• Countries renewed and expanded rainforest finance for the Congo Basin, pledging more than $2.5 billion over five years.

• A global pledge of $1.8 billion was made to secure land rights for Indigenous peoples, local communities and Afro-descendant groups.

• Brazil announced 10 new Indigenous territories and a five-year plan to secure 590,000 km² of land.

• Colombia, Italy and Vietnam joined the Alliance of Champions for Food Systems Transformation, expanding the bloc committed to national food system reforms.

• UNEP and partners launched a food waste initiative aiming to halve global food waste by 2030 and cut methane emissions by up to 7%.

• The Gates Foundation committed $1.4 billion for smallholder climate adaptation in sub-Saharan Africa and south Asia.

• The Rockefeller Foundation committed $5.4 million to strengthen climate-resilient food systems and school meals.

• Forest countries, led by Colombia, committed to maintaining Amazon territories free from oil and mining activity.

• The Climate and Clean Air Coalition launched an accelerator with an initial $25m for methane reductions across seven developing countries.

• 11 countries issued new commitments to drastically reduce fossil methane emissions.

• Bloomberg Philanthropies announced $100 million for methane detection and reduction, including satellite monitoring, and…

• COP30 formally recognised Indigenous land rights and traditional knowledge in its core mutirão decision, strengthening Indigenous standing in climate governance.

And Brazil capped the conference with a major ocean pledge: a commitment to bring 100% of its 5.7 million km² of national waters under sustainable management by 2030. If delivered, it would be the largest ocean governance upgrade ever undertaken by a coastal nation.

EU court orders Poland to recognise same-sex marriages performed abroad
The EU’s top court has ruled that member states must recognise same-sex marriages legally contracted elsewhere in the bloc, after Poland refused to register a marriage between two Polish citizens wed in Germany. The judges found that blocking recognition violates freedom of movement and the right to family life, unlocking a route for thousands of couples to claim legal status in Poland despite its domestic ban. Le Monde

A study of kissing across primates and ancient human cultures has pushed back the theorised origins of romantic kissing by millions of years. By comparing kissing across dozens of species, from wolves to polar bears (very sloppy, lots of tongue), researchers reconstructed an evolutionary “family tree” of the behaviour. Scientists used a rigorous definition: “non-aggressive, mouth-to-mouth contact with lip or mouthpart movement and no food exchange”(hot). Under those criteria, kissing appears widespread across great apes, meaning the behaviour likely existed in the common ancestor of humans, chimps and bonobos about 21.5 million years ago. BBC News

In one of the world’s most comprehensive studies of how neural wiring changes from infancy to old age, scientists in Cambridge have identified the five major “epochs” of human brain development. Analysis of almost 4,000 MRI scans shows the brain shifts through five distinct wiring phases, with major transitions at the ages of nine, 32, 66 and 83. Adolescence appears to run from nine to the early 30s, the only period when neural networks become more efficient. The findings should help explain age-linked risks across mental health and dementia. BBC

Electric vehicle sales have slumped in the United States since September 2025… but the United States is not the world.

Globally, EV sales are up 23% from 2024, with 1.9 million new units sold in October alone. Last month, petrol and diesel engines combined fell to just over a third of EU new car sales, with electrified vehicles now dominant. Pure battery-electric cars reached an 18.9% share and hybrids made up the rest of the almost two-thirds total. Special shoutout to Latin America, where EV sales rose 55% in the third quarter, in a transition that remains largely subsidy-free, and another shoutout to China, where the electric truck surge is starting to seriously dent global demand for diesel.

Plus, want a bit of science on how batteries git good? Take a look at this piece from WIRED, which carefully goes through all the terminology, from “solid state” to “silicon anodes,” and explains what’s actually going to make next year’s batteries better, and what’s still a pipe dream.

The Sycamore Gap project turns loss into a living legacy. The 150-year-old Sycamore Gap tree, growing on Hadrian’s Wall in Northumberland, was one of the UK’s best-known and most loved trees. After the tree was criminally felled in 2023, the National Trust grew 49 saplings from its seeds, one for each foot of the tree’s original height. Now those “trees of hope” are being rooted in places shaped by hardship and resilience, from a former pit-disaster site to a Northern Irish town still healing from The Troubles. The Guardian

And finally, an explainer about how humanity is getting better at helping our immune systems fight cancer.

Ok first, T-cells. They’re a type of white blood cell that helps our immune system detect and destroy infected or cancerous cells. It turns out though, that T-cells get exhausted. In the face of chronic infections or tumours they’ll sometimes slow their attacks — an adaptive ‘brake’ that limits damage from ongoing immune activation and inflammation. Sneakily, cancers exploit this by sending out a molecular signal to exhaust T-cells early. Now scientists have figured out how to block this cancerous signal, which keeps the T-cells attacking tumours… making existing immunotherapy drugs work better, while helping the body’s own defences kill cancer more effectively.

This is a good thing, because getting our T-cells to fight cancer is the holy grail of cancer therapy. Most cancer medication sucks, because it attacks cells indiscriminately — both chemotherapy and radiation poison large swaths of the body — whereas T-cells know what they’re doing. They know what cancer cells are. And if they’re engineered to attack them, well…

… we could be on the cusp of a golden age of “living drugs,” where we tinker with people’s T-cells to cure tumours. Our new heroes, curing what was incurable, are TIL therapies, where T-cells already fighting cancer are extracted from the body, treated with a formula for cell growth, then injected back into the bloodstream.

But sometimes tumours camouflage themselves from the immune system — so then there’s CAR-T therapies, where T-cells are extracted from the body, have their genetics modified so they’re better at their job, and then are injected back into the bloodstream.

Thus far, the “injected back into the bloodstream” bit means these therapies are primarily being used to treat blood cancers — last month, doctors at Madrid’s La Paz Hospital reported early success treating children and teenagers with leukemia using a ‘living drug that fits on a spoon’ helping 8 of 11 patients reach remission long enough for curative transplants. Eventually though, this could go beyond blood cancers — last year, the US FDA approved the first TIL therapy for solid tumors.

No More Adultwashing

Hope Is A Verb, Season 4, Episode 11

🎙️ Apple | Amazon | iHeart

The documentary ‘Future Council’ follows eight young activists as they travel across Europe in a yellow bus confronting big business leaders about their obligations to the next generation. In our final episode for this season of the podcast, we chat with filmmaker Damon Gameau and two of the members of Future Council – Skye Neville, a 15 year old environmental campaigner from Wales, and Clemence ‘CC’ Currie, the 12 year old CEO of CCs Plastic Pick-up Crew in Scotland. A timely reminder than when it comes to changing the world, none of us can sit on the sidelines.

Topic discussed: what adults can learn from young activists; early encounters with environmental risk; hope as a tool for young campaigners; generational views on climate crisis; power dynamics inside boardrooms; media narratives shaping climate perception; digital networks for youth organising; the role of families in early activism; values-driven climate decision-making; the tension between optimism and urgency; and the fine line between encouragement and overwhelm.

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