Citizen Cartwright

Good news on renewable energy, stroke treatment, 3D printing

In Fix the News’ 300th edition, the free section includes the decline of global poverty; shifting norms in China and India away from a preference for sons; the FDA’s approval of lab-grown salmon for human consumption.

Among the 33 items for subscribers:

— In the first three months of 2025, renewables generated more than a quarter of all electricity in the United States, reports Green Energy Times, citing data from the Energy Information Administration.

This means the mix of renewables has strengthened its position as the second largest source of electrical generation, behind only natural gas, with the gap closing rapidly, says Green Energy Times.

— Stanford University researchers have developed a new technique called the milli-spinner thrombectomy that could significantly improve success rates in treating strokes, as well as heart attacks, pulmonary embolisms and other clot-related diseases. 

The milli-spinner is an extension of work on millirobots – tiny, origami-based robots built to swim through the body to dispense medicine or assist with diagnostics. The milli-spinner can shrink blood clots without rupturing them. The research is published in the journal Nature.

— MIT engineers have developed a new 3D printing method that generates less waste. The details are published in the journal Advanced Materials Technologies.

What’s next after U.S. bombing of Iran nuclear facilities

President Trump announced on Saturday that the U.S. military had dropped 30,000-pound bunker-buster bombs on three of Iran’s nuclear sites, including its underground uranium-enrichment facility at Fordo.

The bombs were widely seen as the best chance of damaging or destroying Fordo, built deep into a mountain and untouched during Israel’s weeklong offensive, says The Associated Press.

The United States is the only military capable of dropping the weapons— using its B-2 Spirit stealth bombers.

The attacks are expected to have caused “very significant damage,” the United Nations’ atomic agency chief Rafael Grossi has said on Monday at a special meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s board, The Wall Street Journal reports.

Trump on Sunday raised the issue of regime change in Iran, as senior administration officials warned Iran against retaliation, says Reuters.

Retaliation

— Iran’s parliament voted on Sunday to close the Strait of Hormuz, according to Press TV, Iran’s network broadcasting in English. About 20 percent of the world’s oil passes through the strait.

— Across the region, there are more than 40,000 U.S. troops on bases and warships, and they’re now on high alert, braced for “almost-certain retaliation from Iran,” says The New York Times.

— Iran could attack U.S. embassies, and diplomats in Iraq and Israel have started evacuating, Euronews says.

— Iran's proxy in Yemen, the Houthis, had said on Saturday that they would target U.S. ships in the Red Sea if the United States participated in an attack against Iran, says Euronews.

— There’s currently no specific intelligence of a direct, credible threat against the U.S. homeland, says ABC News. FBI and Homeland Security officials had conference calls with some of the nation's governors on Sunday, specifically urging them to be alert for cyber and infrastructure threats.

Regime change

“Although it is true that many Iranians despise the ruling theocracy, and though it is true that the Iranian people are among the most pro-American in the region, there is no reason to be confident that even the most restive will welcome foreign intervention,” says Karim Sadjadpour, a scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who worked as an analyst with the International Crisis Group in Tehran from 2003 to 2005. 

“And it is unlikely, at least in the short term, that what will follow this regime, if it falls, will be a secular liberal democracy with civil rights for women and religious minorities,” Sadjadpour says.

James Acton, chair and co-director of the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, tells The New Yorker, “Even a more pro-Western democratic regime, which I think is quite unlikely to emerge, would not necessarily give up the [nuclear] program just because of how wrapped up it is in Iranian self-image.”

Here is more on the strikes, from historian Heather Cox Richardson.

Here is reaction from world leaders, from Reuters.

Good news on clean energy, AI, physics

Fix the News says it’s excited about this issue, and I am, too. Among the items that require a subscription:

— South America has achieved an energy milestone and set a global benchmark, says Clean Technica. The entire continent has zero new coal-fired power plants planned. 

— There are reasons to believe that underlying business realities will ultimately bend toward more energy-efficient AI, and MIT Technology Review discusses four of those reasons.

— It’s the 100th birthday of quantum mechanics, and physicists are now gazing on the dawn of a new quantum era, says Science News. 

Current research — what some call the second quantum revolution — involves a new level of precision control over quantum systems, and Science News has spoken with five physicists who are “pushing the quantum envelope.”

For example, physicist Clarice Aiello wants scientists to take quantum biology seriously. Quantum mechanics may play a role in photosynthesis, and birds may use a quantum compass to sense magnetic fields.

Angus Hervey talks progress at TED

The talk by our Fix the News friend at the main TED conference in Vancouver last month has been released. 

Angus tells us the backstory here.

The talk itself is here.

As usual, I’m grateful for his focus on what’s aspirational and inspirational.

Good news on imagining the future

As usual, I’ll leave the free section of our Fix the News edition for your scrolling and will focus on items that are behind the paywall.

At the end of the newsletter, Gus writes:

“It's been a while since I did one of these. One of the great things about scouring the internet for stories of progress is that you come across a ton of great content that doesn't surface on most people's social media feeds (or anywhere else really). Here's a collection of my favorite links from the past few months.”

He summarizes 10 items. Here are three of them about people living so large, one way or another, that it’s an inspiration and gift to us all:

— “Jeremy Reimer rewinds to 1966, when Bob Taylor dashed off a one-page pitch, got ARPA funding in a 20-minute call, and effectively lit the pilot light that gave us the internet, proof that history sometimes begins with a hunch and a telephone. Ars Technica

— “Wired co-founder Peter Leyden has a remarkably convincing, optimistic take on what's happening in the world right now. ‘At a historic juncture like this, you do not want to defend the old systems of the status quo at all costs but look to what much better systems could now be built going forward.’ Freethink

— “And finally, for pure joy: watch 20-year-old Ilia Malinin land six quads at the 2025 World Ice Skating Championships.” The link Gus provides says “video unavailable; the uploader has not made this video available in your country.” This is the best video I can find.

Good news on malaria prevention, brain microrobots, violets for a landfill

As usual, I hope you’ll have time to scan the many items of good news that are free in our Fix the News edition for this week.

Among the items behind the paywall:

— Insecticide-treated malaria nets have helped prevent more than 2 billion cases and nearly 13 million deaths since 2000, says the World Health Organization. 

— The French startup Robeauté is developing microrobots the size of a grain of rice that can navigate inside the brain, delivering targeted treatments and collecting samples without invasive surgery, reports the online publication EU-Startups.com. 

— Staten Island's Freshkills Park, once the world's largest landfill, is planting 50,000 native violets to attract monarch butterflies and bees, says SILive.com. 

More on DOGE consolidation of Americans’ information in 1 database

The Trump administration’s moves increase the risk of exposing data to hackers and other adversaries, according to security analysts, and experts worry that any breaches could erode public confidence in government, The Washington Post reports.

 

“Separation and segmentation is one of the core principles in sound cybersecurity,” says Charles Henderson of security company Coalfire. “Putting all your eggs in one basket means I don’t need to go hunting for them — I can just steal the basket.”

Civil rights advocates and some federal employees also worry that the data assembled under DOGE could be used against political enemies or for decisions about funding or basic government services.

 

Here is historian Heather Cox Richardson on the Post article and related developments.

Good news on clean energy, wildlife conservation, AI

There’s lots of global good news in this week’s Fix the News that’s free to read. 

Among the items behind the paywall: 

— Clean energy sources generated more than half of all U.S. electricity supplies for the first time in March, Reuters reports.

— The world’s largest six-lane wildlife crossing is being constructed across California’s Highway 101 in Los Angeles County, to enable local wildlife to access their natural habitat. The crossing is expected to become a global model for urban wildlife conservation, says Interesting Engineering.

— Artificial intelligence is helping to develop more resilient crops. It typically takes 15 years to develop a new crop, but AI-aided breeding can complete the same task within three years at an 80 percent lower cost, according to The Economic Times. A faster-growing broccoli is expected to be sold in U.S. supermarkets this year. And work is being done to develop cotton and sugarcane that use less water. 

‘DOGE is building a surveillance state’

“President Trump could soon have the tools to satisfy his many grievances by swiftly locating compromising information about his political opponents or anyone who simply annoys him,” says Julia Angwin, a longtime investigative reporter, in a New York Times opinion article. 

“The administration has already declared that it plans to comb through tax records to find the addresses of immigrants it is investigating — a plan so morally and legally challenged, it prompted several top IRS officials to quit in protest. Some federal workers have been told that DOGE is using artificial intelligence to sift through their communications to identify people who harbor anti-Musk or -Trump sentiment (and presumably punish or fire them),” she says.

“Over the past 100 days, DOGE teams have grabbed personal data about U.S. residents from dozens of federal databases and are reportedly merging it all into a master database at the Department of Homeland Security,” Angwin says.

And “this month House Democratic lawmakers reported that a whistle-blower had come forward to reveal that the master database will combine data from such federal agencies as the Social Security Administration, the Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Health and Human Services. The whistle-blower also alleged that DOGE workers are filling backpacks with multiple laptops, each one loaded with purloined agency data,” she says.

Angwin cites Georgetown law professor Paul Ohm, who in 2009 envisioned the assemblage of a DOGE-like amount of data into what he called a “database of ruin.” He said, “Almost every person in the developed world can be linked to at least one fact in a computer database that an adversary could use for blackmail, discrimination, harassment or financial or identity theft.”

Several lawsuits allege that DOGE's data incursions violate the Federal Privacy Act of 1974, but that law doesn’t give judges the ability to levy meaningful fines or easily stop illegal actions, Angwin says.

The United States is the only one of the 38 developed nations making up the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development that lacks a data protection agency to enforce comprehensive privacy laws, she says. 

Congress could defund DOGE, repeal Trump’s executive order establishing it, or support legislation that Democratic Sens. Ed Markey, Mass., and Ron Wyden, Ore., have introduced to update the Privacy Act to provide more meaningful fines and criminal penalties.

“This should be a bipartisan issue,” Angwin says. “Because once we create a database of ruin, none of us are safe from having our information — no matter how innocuous — used against us.”

Good news on health, energy, planets

It seems you can read the first 15 of this Fix the News edition without a password. And I’ve got tears of exhilaration as I go through them. For example:

"The world has made remarkable progress in reducing child mortality," says UNICEF. Since 2000, the global mortality rate of children under five has dropped by 52 percent. Clicking through to the UNICEF article and seeing the photo of the baby — whose eyes show such excited intelligence — could not be a better way to start my day.

And congratulations, California, on your win-win effort to generate energy while combatting drought. A pilot project is covering canals with solar panels, simultaneously generating clean energy and preventing water evaporation, says PV Magazine. 

Among the 28 items behind Fix the News’ paywall:

— A tiny magnetic robot that can take 3D scans deep inside the body could revolutionize early cancer detection. Researchers at Britain’s University of Leeds say they’ve generated the first high-resolution three-dimensional ultrasound images taken by a probe moving through the colon. 

— In 1990, there wasn’t a single planet known beyond our solar system. We’ve now discovered nearly 6,000 confirmed exoplanets. And a proposed telescope could find Earth-like exoplanets using just one pixel of data, says BigThink.

— California, Illinois, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, New York and Pennsylvania have joined in a Clean Rides Network. The group is working on environmentally friendly transportation projects it says the federal government has abandoned, The Associated Press reports.