People Change:
The United Nations forecasts that China’s working age population will shrink from 1 billion to 300 million by 2100.
Moderna has won funding to develop an Ebola mRNA vaccine. China has approved the world’s first invasive brain-computer chip. Surgeons have transplanted pig liver and kidneys into a living person.
British researchers have developed a drug that can shrink tumours by at least 30% in six of the most common forms of cancer. In trials cancer drug aminvantamab shrank head and neck cancer tumours in more than a third of patients.
In other trials daraxonrasib was found to double the lifespan of patients with severe pancreatic cancer.
Scientists have developed a genomic test which will identify which breast cancer patients need chemotherapy.
Food and Water:
The UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) estimates that antimicrobial resistance in Europe costs € 11 billion a year and could lead to tens of millions of people dying.
Texas is at the forefront of US efforts to contain the movement northwards of the flesh-eating New World Screwworm.
According to the FAO, more than one third of the world’s fish stocks are overfished.
French companies have built a prototype floating solar shellfish farming platform combining PY power generation with oyster farming.
Climate Change and the Environment:
European countries are experiencing record high temperatures.
The UN’s third World Ocean Assessment found that sea levels continue to rise at an increasing rate from 2 mm per annum prior to 2015 to 4.3 mm in 2023, while 16% of the rise in global ocean heat since 1955 has occurred since 2018.
Low Cost Renewable Energy:
According to SolarPower, a record 664 GW of solar was installed worldwide in 2025, 57% in China and 16% in the rest of Asia. India has overtaken the USA as the second largest solar market.
China is building a 60 GW hydropower plant in Tibet.
According to Ember, solar generated 12.8% of American electricity in May 2026, ahead of coal for the first time at 12.2%.
Both the Ukraine and Iran are replacing major energy assets that suffered wartime damage with smaller, distributed solar, wind and battery systems.
The world’s largest banks provided funding of US$ 906 billion to the fossil fuel industry in 2025.
Autonomous Electric Vehicles:
According to the IEA, global sales of heavy electric trucks tripled to 230,000 in 2025, mostly in China.
BYD has launched its first 1.5MW Flash Chargers in Europe and plans 3,000 stations by 2027.
CATL, which has more than 1,200 Chinese battery swapping stations, and Octopus plan to build 30 European battery swapping stations which could service 300,000 electric trucks by 2035.
Mass Data Mining and Storage:
Cloudflare’s Radar tool now shows agentic AI bots generating 57.4% of web requests globally, with humans accounting for just 42.6%
The European Parliament has replaced Google with Qwant as its default search engine, citing digital sovereignty and privacy priorities.
Google has limited Meta’s use of its Gemini AI models due to resource constraints.
