Rishi Sunak to become first person of color to be Britain’s prime minister
Sunak’s rise to the top office is especially significant in a country that has sometimes struggled to grapple with the legacy of its colonialist past.
This archive spans the years 2017 through 2025, a period marked by rapid advances in clean energy, medicine, technology, and social equity. It collects documented breakthroughs, policy wins, and scientific achievements from the present era. If you want evidence that progress is real and ongoing, this is where to look.
Sunak’s rise to the top office is especially significant in a country that has sometimes struggled to grapple with the legacy of its colonialist past.
Psilocybin therapy is making history: Compass Pathways will launch the world’s first Phase 3 trial for treatment-resistant depression by the end of 2022, enrolling nearly 1,000 participants across two pivotal studies. This is the threshold every promising drug must cross to become an approved medicine, and no psychedelic compound has crossed it before. For the roughly 100 million people worldwide whose depression doesn’t respond to standard treatments, the stakes are real — current options are few, often invasive, and inconsistently helpful. A single guided dose, if the evidence holds, could reshape what care looks like. Beyond depression, this moment signals that a long-stigmatized class of medicines is finally being tested with the rigor patients deserve.
The money will be used to help implement the Global Polio Eradication Initiative’s strategy through 2026 and will be focused particularly on Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Marine protected areas can do more than guard what’s inside their borders — and Papahānaumokuākea is proving it. This vast Hawaiian reserve, spanning over 580,000 square miles, was created to protect biodiversity and culturally sacred Indigenous sites, not to boost commercial fishing. Yet catch rates for yellowfin tuna in surrounding waters rose 54%, a spillover effect driven by the monument’s sheer scale. The findings strengthen the global case for ambitious ocean protection, arriving just as momentum builds toward safeguarding 30% of the world’s oceans by 2030.
Zimbabwe just became the first country in Africa to approve cabotegravir, a long-acting HIV prevention injection given once every two months — joining only Australia and the United States. For young women and girls especially, that change is huge: a single shot replaces the daily pill regimen that stigma, privacy concerns, and patchy healthcare often make hard to sustain. It builds on a remarkable turnaround, with AIDS-related deaths in Zimbabwe falling from roughly 130,000 in 2002 to about 20,000 in 2021. As advocate Nyasha Sithole put it, ending the epidemic requires a real “basket of tools.” Zimbabwe’s quick action sends a powerful signal that African regulators don’t have to wait in line for life-saving HIV breakthroughs.
Germany’s new program will support Afghans suffering persecution at the hands of the Taliban, including women’s and human rights advocates and people who have persecuted because of their religion, gender, or sexual orientation.
In 2022, firms have announced 61 new CCS projects, bringing the total number of commercial facilities in the pipeline to 196, including 30 currently in operation, 11 under construction, and 153 in development, a Global CCS Institute report found.
Irish company OceanEnergy has signed on to a four-year project to test, validate and commercialize he OE35, billed as the world’s largest capacity floating wave energy device, off the coast of Orkney, Scotland.
Dubbed Hollywood’s first Asian American movie star, Wong championed the need for more representation and less stereotypical roles for Asian Americans on screen.
In a 50 to 16 vote, the largest state in Mexico has legalized same-sex marriage, becoming the 29th of 32 Mexican states to do so.