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.
The Brazilian government has launched a long-awaited operation to remove thousands of non-Indigenous invaders illegally occupying two ancestral territories in the Amazon Rainforest, in what human rights defenders hail as a victory for protecting Native communities.
Researchers at the Olivia Newton-John Cancer Research Institute at La Trobe University in Australia have found that how a patient responds to cancer comes down to how effective a group of immune cells in the large bowel are.
It is Germany’s largest-ever offshore wind auction and marks a substantial milestone in Germany’s quest for renewable energy expansion and is worth about $13.96 billion.
Australia’s EV market hit a milestone in September 2023, with plug-in vehicles making up 10.6% of new car sales — the first time the country has crossed double digits in a single month. That meant nearly 10,000 plug-in cars found new homes, led by the Tesla Model Y, which outsold every passenger car except two utes. The shift reflects more than new models on lots: salary sacrifice schemes, Chinese automakers expanding their reach, and access programs for public sector workers are bringing EVs to buyers who once found them out of reach. With transport responsible for nearly a fifth of Australia’s emissions, this kind of broad-based momentum is exactly what the climate transition looks like when it finally clicks into gear.
The interinstitutional agreement to phase out fluorinated gases (or F-gases) paves the way for Europe to become the world’s first HFC-free continent by 2050, setting an unprecedented environmental and climate standard on a global scale.
In 2016, Antigua and Barbuda, the archipelago nation that owns Redonda, launched an eradication campaign that cleared the island of rats. After that, they simply waited.
Butler has served as a senior strategist in VP Kamala Harris’ 2020 presidential campaign, has worked as the director for public policy and campaigns at Airbnb, served as president of the California chapter of the Service Employees International Union, and served on the University of California Board of Regents.
Wab Kinew has become the first First Nations person elected premier of a Canadian province, leading his New Democratic Party to a legislative majority in Manitoba — a province where roughly 18 percent of residents identify as Indigenous. A former rapper, broadcaster, and university administrator, Kinew spoke directly to Indigenous youth in his victory speech, telling them his own life changed when he stopped making excuses and started looking for reasons in family and community. His government has pledged to reopen three shuttered emergency rooms and invest in social housing. In a country still reckoning with the legacies of residential schools and broken treaties, his win is a quiet but powerful sign of what fuller Indigenous representation in democratic life can look like.
Bioprinted skin combining all six primary skin cell types has, for the first time, been successfully grafted onto wounds in pre-clinical trials — closing them faster and with noticeably less scarring. Researchers at Wake Forest layered keratinocytes, fibroblasts, adipocytes, melanocytes, and two other cell types into a three-layer structure mirroring real skin, then watched it grow blood vessels and integrate naturally with surrounding tissue. A larger graft, roughly two inches square, worked on a pig model — a meaningful step toward the kind of scale human patients actually need. For burn survivors and others who simply don’t have enough healthy skin to donate, a lab-grown alternative made from their own cells could transform one of medicine’s most painful, limited tools into something closer to true regeneration.
A White House official said that the new discharges bring the total approved debt cancellation to $127 billion for nearly 3.6 million borrowers so far during Biden’s time in office.
