This week's top stories
2024 was an astonishingly good year for clean energy. The world installed 599 GW of solar panels last year, up by about a third from 2023. Generating power only 15% of the time, those panels should produce about 787 TWh of electricity — equivalent to the output of a third of the world’s nuclear reactors. Add that to the roughly 344 TWh of wind that was connected last year, and the incremental amount of wind and solar added in 2024 alone was equivalent to about 6.2% of all the fossil-fired electricity on the planet. Repeat that trick for 16 years running and hold demand steady, and net zero could, in theory, be solved. Bloomberg 🎁
We're making child marriages a thing of the past in Malaysia. The number of girls being married before the age of 18 dropped by 37% between 2019 to 2023, according to statistics from the Ministry of Women, Family and Community Development. The country has underlined its commitment to addressing the root causes of the practice, including by changing social norms at the grassroots level. FMT
Internet now reaches 79% of Indonesia’s population up from 53% in 2022. The rise of digital wallets, meanwhile, means that seven times the population of Switzerland has been added in the past decade to Indonesia’s banking system. WEF
And speaking of digital wallets, the Thai government’s Digital Wallet program has provided a one-time cash transfer to 14.5 million Social Welfare Card holders since its launch in September. It's part of the government's suite of anti-poverty efforts, which have seen more than 2.8 million people lifted out of poverty between 2021 and 2024. World Bank
Europe’s wild predators stage a stunning comeback. Since 2016, golden jackal numbers have surged by 46% to 150,000, wolves have increased by 35% to 23,000, brown bears by 17% to 20,500, and Eurasian lynx and wolverine populations expanded by 12% and 16% to 9,400 and 1,300 animals respectively. The best recovery? Iberian lynx numbers are up from 100 at the turn of the century to over 2,000 today. Guardian
The winner of this year's Underwater Photographer of the Year.
Did someone just say trophic cascade (again)? European bison released in England’s ancient woodland have doubled in number since 2022, and the woodland has gotten healthier since, reviving previously extinct beetle species and increasing sightings of dormice and reptiles. And England isn’t the only European nation getting bison back in business: In the 1920s, there were just 54 European bison after intense hunting over millennia, but thanks to re-wilding efforts there are now around 10,000, mostly in Russia and Belarus. RTBC
US states hit the ground running on renewables. Wind and solar are expected to meet nearly 50% of power demand in Texas this spring, in Minnesota the state’s largest utility just announced plans to reach carbon-free targets by 2035, and 48 days into 2025, fossil gas use for electricity in California is down almost 28%, while battery use is up 78%.
Pop up health clinics get rolled out in Ukraine. In 2024, a joint WHO-EU-Ukraine initiative deployed 12 modular clinics across Ukraine, ensuring up to 50,000 patients can continue accessing essential healthcare in war-torn areas. These clinics, which are equipped with electricity, sanitation, waiting and examination rooms, and generators in case of power outages, can be installed in as little as 10 days and have a lifespan of over 10 years. WHO EURO
Puerto Rico can now take on climate criminals. A US judge ruled that Exxon, Chevron, and Shell must face claims in Puerto Rico accusing them of misleading the public on climate change and suppressing clean energy alternatives. Reuters
Free AI model creates functional genomes. Scientists at Stanford have released Evo 2, biology's largest-ever AI model, trained on 128,000 genomes spanning all imaginable life forms, from humans to bacteria - the entire tree of life.
Imagine being able to speed up evolution – hypothetically – to learn which genes might have a harmful or beneficial effect on human health. Imagine, further, being able to rapidly generate new genetic sequences that could help cure disease or solve environmental challenges. Now, scientists have developed a generative AI tool that can predict the form and function of proteins coded in the DNA of all domains of life, identify molecules that could be useful for bioengineering and medicine, and allow labs to run dozens of other standard experiments with a virtual query – in minutes or hours instead of years (or millennia).
New model enables humanoid robots to manipulate objects unseen. The future coming at ya: "A dual-system architecture that combines a language model for understanding commands with a fast visuomotor policy for precise execution, enabling humanoid robots to coordinate their entire upper bodies—including individual fingers—at 200Hz." Figure
Major wins for U.S. rape kit reform. In 2016, the Joyful Heart Foundation developed an actionable nationwide campaign to end the backlog of untested rape kits across the United States. As of January 2025, 21 states and Washington D.C. have achieved full rape kit reform, benefitting 163.4 million people. Two recent, big wins occurred in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, which both implemented a rape kit tracking system in 2024. End The Backlog
Coming soon: the world's 'most colourful' map of the cosmos.
NASA's SPHEREx telescope, launching today, will create an unprecedented multi-coloured map of the entire sky by dividing light into 96 distinct spectral bands. Unlike Webb and Hubble, which examine tiny portions of space in high detail, this compact but powerful instrument will survey the full sky every six months, cataloging over 450 million galaxies and 100 million stars. The Conversation
Long-dormant Toronto airport reborn as wildlife corridor. After decades of struggle against development, Rouge National Urban Park will grow by thousands of hectares, preserving part of a wildlife corridor connecting Lake Ontario to protected land northeast of Toronto. The corridor allows wildlife — including species at risk — to move between habitats, giving them a stronger chance of survival. Narwhal
If you think humanity's doomed, a reminder from UNICEF
- Since 1990, annual under-five child mortality has declined by 60%.
- Since 2000, the number of children with stunting has declined by 40%.
- Safe water is available to 2.1 billion more people compared to 20 years ago.
- In the past 25 years around 1.9 million deaths and 4 million HIV infections have been averted among pregnant women and children.
- Over 68 million child marriages have been prevented in the last 25 years.
- 23 million more girls finish high school each year compared to a decade ago.
- Open defecation has declined by two-thirds since 2000.
- 77% of children under five are registered, up from 60% in the early 2000s.
- Vaccines have saved 154 million lives in the last 50 years.
Aube Rey Lescure, a French-Chinese-American writer, returns to China after four years away, where she finds her father working as a food delivery man and obsessively documenting a 'secret pattern' - a spiral shape he sees everywhere from ancient bronzes to modern media. As she travels from Shanghai to Yunnan's mountains to her grandmother's apartment in Dalian, she weaves together themes of worship, death, and the search for meaning across generations. Throughout the journey, she notices her own search for patterns too - in wild graves dotting mountainsides, in Buddhist shrines, in the stories of family tragedies during the Cultural Revolution, and in the jarring juxtapositions of ancient traditions against QR code menus and influencers with high-end equipment. Granta
One of my more obscure internet habits is to periodically check out China Daily's "Ten Photos You Don't Wanna Miss" page, where they post images of life around the country. All of the photos in this collection where taken during February 2025.