u/Crabbexx

>“Renewables were the world’s largest source of total energy supply growth last year for the first time outside a recession, according to a new Energy Institute report, with solar accounting for 72% of the total.

>China delivered another record year for both solar and wind — more than the rest of the world combined — but analysts said it is stockpiling fossil fuels as insurance.

>In 2025, US emissions rose 3.2%, four times the growth of China.

>Solar’s advance is supported by battery storage, whose average cost plunged 45% in 2025, according to Ember, an energy-focused think tank.

>The Iran war has turbocharged these trends as countries seek to reduce their reliance on oil and gas from the Gulf.”

>From Semafor.

>“Infant mortality in the U.S. dropped to a new all-time low in 2025, according to preliminary government data.

>There were slightly fewer than 5.4 infant deaths per 1,000 live births in 2025, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

>While that appears to be a small decline from about 5.5 in 2024 and 5.6 in the two years preceding, researchers say it is statistically meaningful and translates to hundreds of fewer infant deaths per year.”

>From STAT.

>“Children vaccinated at age 12–13 against HPV (human papillomavirus) have close to zero risk of dying from cervical cancer before the age of 30, landmark new research reveals.

>The first study of its kind shows deaths have fallen sharply since school-age girls began being offered it in 2008, and around 200 lives have been saved in England so far thanks to the vaccine.

>Between 2020 and 2024, no cervical cancer deaths were recorded in women aged 20 to 24 – the first time that had happened over a five-year period.

>Without vaccination, around 23 deaths would have been expected.”

>From BBC.

>“Artificial intelligence most likely saved Louie Quiros’s life.

>Mr. Quiros, a 45-year-old caregiver and security guard, showed up at a Queens emergency room in February 2025. For the past four days, he said, he had been coughing up blood and finding it harder and harder to breathe.

>His heart was beating fast, and he wasn’t getting much air to his lungs, but a chest X-ray showed no abnormalities. He also had an electrocardiogram, or ECG, a common test that records the heart’s electrical activity. It was abnormal but showed nothing that would lead to a clear diagnosis. It indicated he might have coronary heart disease — rare in someone his age. But, as it turned out, that was not his problem.

>The emergency room doctors learned Mr. Quiros had been exposed to wildfire smoke on a recent visit to California and sent him home with asthma medicine and an inhaler.

>Luckily for Mr. Quiros, that emergency room is part of NewYork-Presbyterian’s medical system. Researchers were analyzing all electrocardiograms done on patients in that medical system with an A.I. program, EchoNext, to see if it could find patterns in the scans indicating damage to the heart — patterns a human would not detect.

>It’s part of a clinical trial evaluating the A.I. program, which was developed there by Dr. Pierre Elias, medical director of A.I. and cardiologist at NewYork-Presbyterian and Columbia University Irving Medical Center, and his colleagues. Dr. Elias says EchoNext reads an ECG less than 10 minutes after it is performed, and that they analyze nearly 500,000 ECGs a year. Dr. Elias has started a company, Pathway Labs, to market it.”

>From New York Times.

>“Test time has arrived: the first person has been treated in a highly anticipated gene-therapy trial that aims to coax aged cells to take on a younger identity.

>The clinical trial is testing an innovative technique that involves turning on three genes that can ‘partially reprogram’ old cells, allowing them to behave as if they were young again. Some scientists argue that partial reprogramming could rejuvenate old organs. But this trial will test the activation of these three genes as an approach for treating disease — in this case, a form of glaucoma, a condition that can cause blindness.

>The hope is that the proteins encoded by the genes will enable regeneration of neurons in the optic nerve, which connects the eye to the brain and is damaged in people with glaucoma. These neurons are not normally capable of regeneration. The company sponsoring the trial, Life Biosciences in Boston, Massachusetts, announced today that it had treated its first participant.”

>From Nature.

>“Globally, more people are satisfied with their freedom to choose what they do with their lives than were satisfied two decades ago, with gains driven largely by countries where those satisfied with this freedom were once in the minority. But the sentiment has waned in some places — particularly in established democracies, where such freedoms have long been taken for granted.

>In 2025, a median of 82% of adults across 138 countries said they were satisfied with their freedom to choose what they do with their life, while 17% were dissatisfied. This is nominally the highest level of satisfaction on record, though perceptions have been relatively stable near 80% since 2017.

>Satisfaction today is significantly higher than the 71% recorded at the start of this Gallup trend two decades ago. The low point of 65% was recorded two years later, in 2008, amid the onset of the global financial crisis.”

>From Gallup.

>“Delhi recorded its lowest average Air Quality Index (AQI) for the January-May 2026 in eight years, excluding 2020 when Covid-19 restrictions led to a sharp drop in pollution levels, according to the Commission for Air Quality Management (CAQM).

>Data released by the commission showed that the city’s average AQI between January and May 2026 stood at 211.

>In comparison, the average AQI was 214 in 2025, 231 in 2024, 213 in 2023, 238 in 2022, 235 in 2021, 181 in 2020,

>237 in 2019 and 243 in 2018.”

>From Times of India.

>“Gilead Sciences said on Friday [5/22/26] that its experimental drug for a rare and deadly ​liver infection that had no approved treatment has won U.S. approval.

>The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the drug, Hepcludex, to treat chronic hepatitis delta virus, or HDV, a liver ​disease that affects only people already infected with hepatitis B and ​can lead to scarring, cancer, organ failure and death…

>The approval was based on a late-stage trial, in which ​about 48% of patients who received the treatment showed a meaningful improvement after 48 weeks, ‌compared ⁠with 2% of those whose treatment was delayed. The virus became undetectable in patients the longer they remained on Hepcludex, the trial showed.”

>From Reuters.

>“The world’s most popular weight-loss and diabetes drugs are linked to a powerful new possible benefit: better outcomes for cancer patients. 

>A suite of four new studies suggest that people taking so-called GLP-1 drugs like Novo Nordisk’s Ozempic and Eli Lilly’s Mounjaro saw reductions in tumor progression, lower overall chance of death and less risk of developing breast cancer.

>‘It’s really provocative that they showed, in several cancers, that people who took these drugs seem to have a lower risk of their cancer returning,’ said Dr. Jennifer Ligibel, a breast oncologist at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute who wasn’t involved in any of the studies.

>One study from researchers at the Cleveland Clinic Cancer Institute tracked more than 10,000 patients with early-stage cancers who started GLP-1 drugs after diagnosis and compared their disease progression to those on a different diabetes medication. Those on GLP-1s were less likely to see their cancer spread.

>In lung cancer patients, the rate of progression to advanced disease was cut roughly in half—10% in GLP-1 users versus 22% in the comparison group. Breast cancer patients showed a similar pattern, with progression rates of 10% versus 20%. Colorectal and liver cancers also showed statistically significant reductions.”

>From Wall Street Journal.

>“More than 4,000 kilometers of high-voltage transmission lines have been built to connect the electricity grids of 15 West African countries through the WAPP, enabling utilities to trade electricity across borders. As a result, about 8 percent of regional electricity is now traded (approaching the European Commission’s 10–12 percent cross-border electricity trade benchmark), lowering costs and improving supply reliability.”

>From World Bank.

>“2024 saw the lowest general aviation fatal accident rate since the FAA began tracking it in 2009, with particular improvement among experimental and amateur-built aircraft and helicopters.”

>From Federal Aviation Administration.

>“For about a decade, scientists have had remarkable success curing some blood cancers by modifying a patient’s own immune cells to recognize and kill the malignant cells.

>That same approach may help control H.I.V., among the wiliest of viruses, scientists will report on Tuesday. After a single infusion of immune cells engineered to recognize the virus, two people in a new study have suppressed their H.I.V. to undetectable levels, one of them for nearly two years.

>The data is scheduled to be presented at a gene therapy conference in Boston, but the researchers shared an early copy with The New York Times.

>The treatment is years, if not decades, from being widely available, but the study offers what scientists call “proof of concept,” and the tantalizing hope that a single shot could one day offer lifelong relief from H.I.V.”

>From New York Times.

>“The World Health Organization (WHO) has validated Tunisia as having eliminated trachoma as a public health problem…

>Trachoma is closely linked to limited access to water, sanitation and hygiene, and hits vulnerable populations hardest. In the early to mid-20th century, trachoma was endemic in Tunisia, affecting at least half of the population, especially in its southern regions…

>Trachoma is caused by the bacterium Chlamydia trachomatis and spreads through close contact with infected individuals, contaminated surfaces, and flies that carry eye and nose discharge. Repeated infections can lead to scarring of the eyelids, turning eyelashes inward, and ultimately causing blindness if untreated.”

>From World Health Organization.

>“The arrival of the RTS,S malaria vaccine was a landmark moment; Ghana, Kenya and Malawi were the first countries in the world to offer it to their populations as part of a pilot project launched in 2019, and the World Health Organization (WHO) recommended it for wider use in 2021.

>Early studies indicated that the vaccine had a 13% drop in all-cause mortality, and a comprehensive new study of the last four years of vaccine roll-out published in The Lancet has confirmed this figure. That translates to roughly one in eight deaths prevented…

>The study tracked 158 clusters across the three countries, with 79 areas introducing the vaccine in 2019 and 79 serving as comparison areas that received it later. Surveillance was built on a network of more than 26,000 local reporters who notified researchers of child deaths in their communities, followed by home visits to confirm details.

>The findings carry particular weight because of how the study was designed. Clusters were randomly assigned, baseline characteristics were balanced, and coverage of other interventions, including bed-nets, routine vaccines and care-seeking for fever, remained similar across implementation and comparison areas throughout the four years.

>This means, say the researchers, that the drop in deaths can be  ‘confidently attributed’ to the vaccine itself rather than to other shifts in malaria care.”

>From Gavi.

>“Recent advances in autonomous and semi-autonomous vehicle technologies promise substantial cost savings for goods shipped by truck. In this study, we quantify the impacts of these transport cost reductions on the US interstate trade using a structural gravity model of domestic trade. Based on projected cost savings from the widespread adoption of self-driving technologies, we estimate significant increases in total interstate trade value. State-level impacts vary from 40.3% of GDP in Mississippi to 5.9% in Florida, while the largest impacts in dollar value are observed in Texas and New York. The sectoral analysis highlights motorized vehicles, mixed freight, and electronics as the industries experiencing the largest trade value growth. Additionally, goods with low value-to-weight ratios—where shipping costs represent a large share of the delivered value—are expected to benefit most in relative terms. These findings underscore the transformative potential of autonomous vehicle technologies in reshaping US trade patterns and sectoral dynamics.”

>From Journal of Regional Science.

>“Violent crime fell sharply across the largest U.S. cities in early 2026, extending a nationwide decline that began after the pandemic-era crime spike.

>Why it matters: Data from 67 major U.S. law enforcement agencies show violent crime fell across major categories during the first quarter compared with the same period in 2025.

>The declines show up across every major region, suggesting a systemic, nationwide trend.

>The quarterly reports collected by the Major Cities Chiefs Association have been a good measure of trends that are reflected in the annual FBI crime data released in the fall.

>By the numbers: Homicides dropped 17.7%.

>Robberies fell 20.4%.

>Rapes declined 7.2%.

>Aggravated assaults decreased 4.8%.

>Zoom in: Some of the nation’s biggest cities posted especially dramatic homicide declines in the first three months of 2026.

>Among those that saw sizable percentage drops in homicide were Washington, D.C. (64.7%), Philadelphia (54%), and Memphis (34.4%).

>New York City experienced a 31.7% drop in homicides during Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s first months in office.

>Los Angeles (23%) and Houston (36.4%) also posted homicide declines during the same period.”

>From Axios.

>“Police Commissioner Jessica S. Tisch today announced that the NYPD delivered the fewest murders in recorded history for the first four months of the year and the month of April. During the four-month stretch, there were 76 murders, shattering the previous record of 86 set in 2018. April also saw the fewest murders in recorded city history with 19, beating the previous record of 21 set in 2014 and 2017.

>Shooting incidents and shooting victims are down double digits compared to last April with an 18.6% and 19.3% decline, respectively.

>Major crime continued to fall in April, down 9.5% citywide. These historic reductions extended to the city’s public housing developments, where the NYPD delivered the safest start to any year in recorded history with the fewest murders, shooting incidents, shooting victims, and robberies.”

>From New York City Police Department.

>“Minister of National Security and Peace Dr Horace Chang says that after a massive slash in major crimes last year, Jamaicans are now set to reap a ‘peace dividend’, putting the benefits of safer communities at the forefront of the country’s progress.

>He explained that this ‘peace dividend’ refers to the tangible social, economic, and developmental gains flowing directly to communities as crime declines, including safer streets, stronger families, expanded opportunities for young people, and an overall improved quality of life.

>Chang underscored the important role Jamaican citizens have played in reducing crime, noting that the 2025 murder tally of 673 was the first time the figure fell below 700 since 1993.

>Part of this impact has involved citizens providing tips to the police about criminal activities. While the number of tips has increased nearly tenfold over the past decade, most tipsters – 94 per cent – have not collected the promised reward…

>The 673 murders recorded in 2025 represented a 40 per cent decline from the 1,139 recorded the previous year. This meant the homicide rate fell from 40 per 100,000 residents to 23.7 per 100,000.”

>From The Gleaner.

>“Most people in the world would think very little before flicking on the lights, charging a mobile phone or turning on a laptop to read this.

>But that’s a very different reality from the almost 700 million people in the world who have no access to electricity. While this number is large, it has halved this century, falling from 1.35 billion to 675 million. You can see this in the chart.

>However, this progress has been far from even. The number has fallen across all regions except Sub-Saharan Africa, where it has increased.

>That doesn’t mean no progress has been made: the share of people in Sub-Saharan Africa with electricity has doubled, rising from 26% to 53%. But population growth has outpaced this expansion, meaning the number of people without electricity has still risen.”

>From Our World in Data.