The pace of genuine scientific progress is consistently underestimated — not because scientists are doing poor work, but because breakthroughs rarely arrive as single dramatic moments. They accumulate quietly, each study building on the last, until a threshold is crossed that transforms human possibility.
The pace of genuine scientific progress is consistently underestimated — not because scientists are doing poor work, but because breakthroughs rarely arrive as single dramatic moments. They accumulate quietly, each study building on the last, until a threshold is crossed that transforms human possibility.
Dementia research reaches an inflection point. For decades, Alzheimer's disease resisted every therapeutic approach. The dominant theory — that the disease was caused by amyloid plaques accumulating in the brain — produced more than a hundred failed drug trials between 1990 and 2020. Then, in 2023, two separate drugs demonstrated the first clinically meaningful slowing of cognitive decline in early Alzheimer's patients in the history of the disease. Lecanemab, approved by the US Food and Drug Administration in early 2023, reduced the rate of cognitive decline by twenty-seven percent in clinical trials — a modest but historically unprecedented result. A second drug, donanemab, showed thirty-five percent slowing in a trial published in JAMA in 2024. These are not cures. But in a field that had never produced a single success, two working treatments arriving within eighteen months of each other represents a fundamental shift. The pipeline behind them now contains over a hundred further candidates, many targeting different biological mechanisms. The era of Alzheimer's as an untreatable condition may be ending.
Childhood cancer survival rates reach historic highs. In 1970, the five-year survival rate for childhood cancer in the United States was approximately fifty percent. By 2024, that figure had reached more than eighty-five percent overall — and over ninety percent for the most common childhood cancers including acute lymphoblastic leukaemia, which was once almost universally fatal. These gains were the product of decades of incremental clinical research, improved chemotherapy protocols, and the development of CAR-T cell therapy — a technique that engineers a patient's own immune cells to recognise and destroy cancer. CAR-T, which produced its first approved treatment in 2017, has now shown complete remission in patients with cancers previously considered untreatable, including some adult blood cancers that had stopped responding to all other therapies.
A universal flu vaccine moves toward reality. Every year, scientists must essentially guess which influenza strains will circulate in the coming season and reformulate the vaccine accordingly — a process that is laborious, imprecise, and explains why flu vaccines vary significantly in effectiveness from year to year. Research published by the National Institutes of Health and multiple university groups in 2023 and 2024 demonstrated that mRNA vaccine technology — the same platform used in COVID-19 vaccines — can produce immune responses against conserved flu proteins that remain consistent across all influenza strains. Early trials showed broad protection against strains the participants had never been exposed to. A genuinely universal influenza vaccine, if it clears remaining trials, would eliminate the annual reformulation problem entirely and provide protection against pandemic flu strains before they emerge.
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Global environmental news is dominated, understandably, by what is being lost. But there is a parallel story — smaller, less dramatic, and rarely front-page — of what is being restored.
Rewilding Europe changes faster than expected. When Rewilding Europe launched its first major project in the Danube delta in 2011, conservationists hoped to see modest recovery in fish populations and wetland habitats over twenty to thirty years. What actually happened surprised even the scientists running the programme. Within eight years, pelican colonies that had numbered in the hundreds expanded to several thousand breeding pairs. Sturgeon, absent from parts of the river for decades, were recorded spawning naturally. Wet meadow habitats that had been drained for agriculture began recovering vegetation structure without any active planting — simply from the restoration of natural water flow. The project has since expanded to the Iberian Peninsula, the Southern Carpathians, and the Scottish Highlands, where rewilded land is already showing measurable increases in biodiversity and the beginnings of wolf population recovery.
Renewable energy smashes records consecutively. In 2023, solar power capacity additions globally exceeded all other forms of electricity generation combined for the first time in history. The International Energy Agency reported that solar alone added more than four hundred gigawatts of new capacity — equivalent to adding the entire electricity grid of Germany in a single year. In the United Kingdom, renewable energy provided over fifty percent of electricity generation for the first time in 2023, a figure that would have been considered impossible by energy analysts as recently as 2010. In Portugal, renewable energy provided one hundred percent of the country's electricity needs for six consecutive days in 2024. Costs for solar electricity have fallen by more than ninety percent since 2010, making it the cheapest source of new electricity generation in history in most of the world.
The ozone layer is healing. The Montreal Protocol, signed in 1987, is often cited as the most successful international environmental agreement in history — but its most visible result, the recovery of the ozone layer, is still ongoing and still progressing. A comprehensive assessment published by the United Nations Environment Programme in 2023 confirmed that the ozone layer is on track for full recovery to 1980 levels by approximately 2066. The Antarctic ozone hole, which had grown to its maximum recorded size in the early 2000s, has been measurably shrinking every decade since. This is a direct, quantifiable result of a global agreement between nations to phase out a category of chemicals — proof that international environmental cooperation produces real-world outcomes.
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The narrative of social breakdown is pervasive and not entirely false — but it coexists with a parallel story of social progress that rarely reaches front pages.
Global extreme poverty has declined more dramatically over the past thirty years than at any previous point in human history. The World Bank defines extreme poverty as living on less than $2.15 per day. In 1990, approximately thirty-six percent of the global population lived at this level — roughly 1.9 billion people. By 2024, that figure had fallen to under nine percent. In absolute terms, the number of people in extreme poverty fell by more than a billion between 1990 and 2020 alone. This reduction was concentrated in Asia — particularly China and India — but was also significant in sub-Saharan Africa, where extreme poverty rates fell from more than fifty percent to under thirty percent over the same period.
Child mortality tells the same story. In 1990, approximately twelve million children under the age of five died annually. By 2022, that figure had fallen to under five million — a reduction of more than half in three decades, achieved through vaccination programmes, oral rehydration therapy, insecticide-treated bed nets, and improved access to basic nutrition.
Global literacy rates have risen from approximately seventy percent in 1990 to over eighty-seven percent today. Access to clean water has extended to more than two billion additional people since 1990. Maternal mortality rates have fallen by more than thirty percent since 2000, with the sharpest declines in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.
These numbers are not a reason for complacency. They are evidence that progress is possible — and that it is, in fact, already happening.
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Technology is most often discussed in terms of its harms — surveillance, addiction, misinformation, job displacement. The conversation about technology being genuinely deployed to solve fundamental human problems receives far less attention.
M-Pesa, a mobile phone-based money transfer service launched in Kenya in 2007, did more to advance financial inclusion in East Africa than decades of microfinance initiatives. By allowing people without bank accounts to send and receive money via basic mobile phones, M-Pesa enabled smallholder farmers to receive payments from distant buyers, women to save money independently of male relatives, and families to send remittances without losing significant percentages to transfer fees. Studies published by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that access to M-Pesa lifted approximately two percent of Kenyan households out of poverty — approximately two hundred thousand families — by enabling savings accumulation and economic participation that had previously been impossible.
Low Earth orbit satellite internet, now available through providers including Starlink and OneWeb, is connecting rural communities and clinics in sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, and South America that have been without reliable internet access for the entire history of the internet. School systems in rural Ethiopia and Peru are now connected to teacher training resources, curriculum content, and global communication tools that urban schools in those countries have had for twenty years. The implications for educational equity are significant and are only beginning to be measured.
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The narrative of young people as disengaged, anxious, or politically nihilistic is contradicted by what young people are actually doing.
Licypriya Kangujam began lobbying the Indian parliament for climate legislation at age seven. By age eleven, she had addressed the UN Climate Action Summit and established The Child Movement, which has trained over seventy thousand children in India as environmental advocates. She is now a teenager with a track record of institutional engagement that most adult NGO leaders do not achieve in full careers.
In Uganda, Brian Gitta and a team of engineering students at Makerere University developed Matibabu — a diagnostic device that can detect malaria without drawing blood, using a small clip placed on the finger that reads haemoglobin changes caused by the malaria parasite. The device costs a fraction of existing blood-based diagnostic equipment, requires no laboratory infrastructure, and can be operated by community health workers with minimal training. It won the Africa Prize for Engineering Innovation in 2018 and has since been trialled across East Africa.
Gitanjali Rao, a young American scientist who was named TIME magazine's first-ever Kid of the Year in 2020, had by age fifteen developed a device to detect lead contamination in water pipes — directly inspired by the Flint, Michigan water crisis. She was ten when she began the work. Her device uses carbon nanotube sensors to detect lead levels more accurately and cheaply than existing methods, and she spent several years making it accessible rather than commercialising it.
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The Swedish physician and statistician Hans Rosling spent the last years of his life asking this question — literally asking it, in surveys of thousands of people in dozens of countries. His findings, published in the book Factfulness in 2018, were both alarming and clarifying.
When asked basic questions about global trends — is child mortality rising or falling? Is the proportion of people in extreme poverty increasing or decreasing? Is literacy improving or declining? — respondents in almost every country performed worse than chance. Not just worse than experts: worse than random guessing. People consistently believed the world was worse than it had been, on metrics where it was measurably and significantly better.
Rosling argued that this was not a failure of intelligence. It was a failure of information environment. Our news diet is systematically selected for things going wrong, because those are the things that require urgent attention and generate high engagement. The gradual, statistical improvements in human welfare do not generate headlines. They simply accumulate, invisible to anyone who is not deliberately looking.
The answer to "is the world actually getting better?" is: on most measurable indicators of human welfare — poverty, mortality, literacy, access to clean water, vaccination coverage, education enrolment — yes. Significantly and demonstrably. The world faces enormous challenges that could reverse these gains. But the progress is real, documented, and worth knowing about.
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What genuinely good things are happening in the world right now?
Malaria vaccination is now available and being deployed at scale for the first time in history. Extreme poverty has fallen below ten percent globally for the first time in recorded history. Ocean ecosystems are recovering inside marine protected areas. Renewable energy is now the cheapest form of new electricity generation on Earth. Childhood cancer survival rates are at all-time highs. These are not speculative or aspirational — they are current, documented facts.
Is the world actually getting better despite what the news says?
On most quantifiable indicators of human welfare, yes. Hans Rosling's Factfulness and the Our World in Data platform, both drawing from UN, World Bank, and academic datasets, document improvements across poverty, child mortality, literacy, access to clean water, and vaccination coverage over the past thirty years that are historically unprecedented. The challenges that remain are real and urgent — but they coexist with documented progress that the news cycle systematically fails to cover.
Where can I find daily positive news without subscribing to multiple sites?
Kind Channel aggregates stories of human goodness and community action in one place. For broader international positive news, the Good News Network publishes daily stories across categories. The Our World in Data newsletter provides data-driven evidence of progress on global challenges. The Solutions Journalism Network produces and archives rigorous reporting on what is working across major social issues.
How do I avoid negative news overload while staying informed?
The research suggests three practical strategies. First, designate specific times for news consumption rather than allowing continuous passive exposure — twice daily is sufficient to remain informed. Second, deliberately introduce positive or solutions-focused sources to your regular reading diet. Third, when consuming negative news, seek out the response to the problem, not just the problem itself — this preserves awareness without triggering the helplessness response that drives doom-scrolling.