This archive covers progress stories from North and Central America, spanning the U.S., Canada, Mexico, and the nations of Central America. Readers will find reporting on health, environment, community resilience, and policy advances across the region.
Researchers at the University of North Carolina have developed an AI model that can predict in real-time whether or not cancerous tissue has been fully removed during breast cancer surgery. The model performed as well as, or better than, human doctors.
At schools where 25% of families participate in income-based public benefits, such as the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, the U.S. federal government now will cover the cost of free meals for all enrolled students. Previously, the qualifying threshold was 40%.
The U.S. Climate Alliance is a bipartisan coalition of 25 governors securing America’s net-zero future. Members have agreed to collectively reach 20 million climate-friendly heat pump installations across the coalition by 2030, with the aim of ensuring at least 40% of benefits flow to disadvantaged communities.
Researchers from the University of Chicago have created a new vaccine that can effectively treat these debilitating diseases in a way that doesn’t require suppressing the entire immune system and thus prevents a variety of negative side effects.
A genetically modified pig kidney kept working inside a human body for 61 days at NYU Langone Health — the longest a non-human organ has ever functioned in a person. Surgeons used a simplified approach, transplanting a kidney from a pig with just one gene edit and leaving the thymus gland attached to help the recipient’s immune system accept it. Around 100,000 Americans are on the kidney waitlist at any given time, and researchers hope pig organs could one day help close that gap. The team is now preparing for clinical trials pending FDA approval. For the thousands waiting on a kidney that may not arrive in time, this is real, tangible hope.
Seeing just two humpbacks in Puget Sound was noteworthy in the 1980s. Today, the number of humpbacks has grown by an order of magnitude from about 500 on the West Coast to more than 5,000, including about 2,000 in Washington and southern B.C. waters.
The Biden administration also announced proposed rules aimed at providing stronger protections against new leasing and development in portions of the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska that are designated as special areas for their wildlife, subsistence, scenic or other values.
Mexico’s supreme court has unanimously ruled that state laws prohibiting abortion are unconstitutional and violate women’s rights, in the latest in a series of victories for reproductive rights activists across Latin America.
Fentanyl vaccines are heading into their first human trials, with Phase 1 testing set to begin in early 2024 at Columbia University. Developed by researchers at the University of Montana and University of Washington, the vaccines train the immune system to grab fentanyl molecules in the bloodstream, like a sponge, before they can reach the brain. That means no high, and no slowed breathing, which is what makes overdoses fatal. The team is especially focused on people in the first two years of recovery, when relapse risk is highest. If it works, this could become a powerful new tool in a crisis that has demanded every bit of compassion and ingenuity we can offer.
Every student in the city will engage in two to five minutes of daily mindfulness, a tactic that has shown positive effects in schools around the world.
