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.
Insulin costs in the U.S. are notoriously high compared to the costs in other countries; the Rand Corporation, a public policy think tank, estimated that in 2018, the average list price for one vial of insulin in the U.S. was $98.70.
The government intends to increase the extent of the Macquarie Island marine park. The island between Tasmania and Antarctica is a vital place for seabirds, penguins, and seals to eat and raise their young.
REI aims to have all cookware and apparel sold in its stores free of PFAS by fall of 2024. PFAS have been linked to cancer and other health problems.
Despite being critically endangered, hammerhead sharks have been bought and sold in Costa Rica for years, with demand being driven by shark fin soup.
The invasion of miners has contributed to the spread of malaria among the Yanomami, with devastating consequences
Spiral-welded wind turbine towers could quietly dissolve one of the biggest barriers holding back wind energy: the highway. Because conventional towers must be trucked in, U.S. road regulations cap their diameter — and therefore their height — well below what the physics of wind actually allows. Keystone’s mobile factories build towers on-site from coiled steel, removing that constraint entirely and making towers tall enough to reach stronger, more consistent winds. One tower doesn’t rewrite the industry, but it proves the concept works. If the approach scales, it could bring competitive wind energy to regions that have never had it.
Spain’s new law allows those over the age of 16 to legally change their gender without medical supervision or a judge’s approval.
An incredible 92 percent of companies said they would continue to have employees work four days.
Australian wildlife is staging a quiet comeback, with 26 threatened animals — including the greater bilby, humpback whale, and sooty albatross — now recovered enough to fall outside the country’s threatened-species criteria. A new study in Biological Conservation, drawing on more than two decades of data, credits much of the progress to fencing off predators like cats and foxes, relocating vulnerable populations to island sanctuaries, and steady habitat care. Researchers call these “partial successes” — many species still occupy just slivers of their historic range — but the pattern is unmistakable: when people show up year after year, decline can be reversed. In a country that has lost more mammals to extinction than any other, it’s a hopeful blueprint for conservation everywhere.
Like the “Berlin patient” and the “London patient” before him, the “Düsseldorf patient” received treatment for an acute blood disease and, in the process, was cured of HIV infection.
