2025 Science (with a capital S!) breakthrough of the year

Does Science with a capital S speak for science? I don’t know, science, or nature or Nature might have something to say about that. Small-s science, after all, is just a way of asking questions and trying to strengthen our confidence in what we think we know about nature. Despite all that, the magazine/publishing conglomerate known as Science nominates candidates for scientific breakthrough of the year and then chooses one. This year’s winner is renewable energy.

This year, renewables surpassed coal as a source of electricity worldwide, and solar and wind energy grew fast enough to cover the entire increase in global electricity use from January to June, according to energy think tank Ember. In September, Chinese President Xi Jinping declared at the United Nations that his country will cut its carbon emissions by as much as 10% in a decade, not by using less energy, but by doubling down on wind and solar. And solar panel imports in Africa and South Asia have soared, as people in those regions realized rooftop solar can cheaply power lights, cellphones, and fans. To many, the continued growth of renewables now seems unstoppable—a prospect that has led Science to name the renewable energy surge its 2025 Breakthrough of the Year…

China’s mighty industrial engine is the driver. After years of patiently nurturing the sector through subsidies, China now dominates global production of renewable energy technologies. It makes 80% of the world’s solar cells, 70% of its wind turbines, and 70% of its lithium batteries, at prices no competitor can match.

The article makes the point that this progress is not really a technological breakthrough, but rather a successful scaling up of technology invented during the space race half a century ago. Materials science does offer some possibilities for breakthroughs on the near horizon:

Solar cells today are made of crystalline silicon, but another kind of crystal, perovskites, can be layered in tandem with silicon to make cells that gain efficiency by capturing more colors of light. Material advances are enabling wind turbine blades to get longer and harvest more energy, while designs for floating turbines could vastly expand the offshore areas in which they could be deployed. And the giant lithium-ion batteries now used to store energy when sunshine and wind falter could one day give way to other chemistries. Vanadium flow batteries and sodium batteries could be cheaper; zinc-air batteries could hold far more energy.

And there you go – an agenda for research and development that the U.S. could get behind, or better yet, cooperate internationally on a win-win basis.

Meanwhile the nominees that were not chosen were:

  • Gene-editing to cure rare diseases in human babies and adults
  • New antibiotics effective against antibiotic-resistant gonorrhea, which continues to evolve
  • A breakthrough in understanding how cancer can spread through the nervous system
  • Advances in telescopes
  • DNA reconstruction of early humans
  • Large language models conducting math and scientific experiments on their own – In 2025 this was done with thorny math problems, chemical and drug development. The article notes that AI agents did not really live up to their hype overall in 2025.
  • Stuff involving subatomic particles. Honestly, this stuff is interesting but it’s hard for us normals to draw straight lines to how it might eventually affect our daily lives. Of course this doesn’t mean it won’t, it just means a lot of twists and turns as it works its way through the worlds of science and technology over time.
  • Genetically engineered organs grown in pigs and transplanted to people (successfully, at least for a period of months which seems to be much longer than these particular people were expected to live without the experimental transplants.). Are these pig organs or human organs grown in pigs? At some point it doesn’t matter.
  • Advances in heat-resistant rice

The article makes a parting shot at the U.S. government under Trump, for just intentionally shooting our entire scientific development pipeline in the foot. These were not the actions of a patriot, if I need to remind anyone.

Where does the global economy stand at the end of 2025?

Well, I’m writing this on December 20 so there is always the chance things could change drastically in the next 11 days. And of course, I have no idea when you my dear reader might be reading this. I will just assume you are an alien archaeologist reading this in 3025 as you sift through the rubble of our vanished civilization.

Anyway, a few themes right now:

  • The possible “AI bubble”. This can refer to the stock market index gains being dominated by AI-related companies. In rational econ world, this should mean that investors collectively think the future earnings of these companies are most likely to be very large.
  • The companies certainly think their future earnings are likely to be very large, and this justifies borrowing large amounts of money to invest in the technology and infrastructure. This might be okay, but there are a couple concerns. First, loans are being made to these companies under a framework of “speculative private credit“, which some say resembles the sub-prime mortgages leading up to the 2008 crash. You would like to think the banks might know what they are doing, but of course they didn’t leading up to the 2008 crash and the world is still paying the price today.
  • Second, there are some suggestions that all the borrowing and investing in AI is driven by a fear of not being a “first mover” in some sort of winner-take-all, zero-sum race to artificial general intelligence. And if that is the case, it might come crashing down if the market at some point collectively decides that particular milestone is not in fact on the near term horizon. In other words there is a risk of a hype bubble popping even though the underlying trend of slow, steady, technological progress is bumping along just fine. This is analogous to the dot-com bubble. Technological progress tends to be exponential, but we don’t know if we are on the early, slow and steady part of the curve or close to the knee where it will take off. But collective opinion can be wrong on this either one way or the other.
  • My head spins when I try to understand the relationships between bond yields, prices, economic growth, and investment returns across countries. But Reuters says real bond yields are negative in many countries and “Five of the Group of Seven major economies have experienced growth contraction this year, with Japan and the euro zone already half way into recession — defined as two quarters of negative growth.” [Um, so if my calculations are correct they had a quarter of negative growth?] There is also a clear real estate bubble deflation going on in China, which looks something like the one in 1980s Japan, but whether it will usher in several “lost decades” like it did there I am not able to say. The quality of life for many citizens of Japan seems to be just fine, I note. And China just really seems to have a winning approach to the intertwined manufacturing, education and research, infrastructure, and export issues.
  • Climate change is manifesting itself in extreme weather. There is some evidence that recent extreme weather, and not just the steady creeping advance of average temperature and sea levels, has caused gains in crop yields to plateau globally. Then, there are projections showing these yields falling steadily in the future, with the rate of decline of course dependent on the climate scenario chosen. The rate of population growth has slowed and seems likely to eventually plateau itself, but that will take awhile and the world is still projected to add around 2 billion more people (these forecasts themselves subject to scenarios, of course.) Less food and more mouths to feed translates in economic terms to inflation in more developed economies and potentially malnutrition/starvation in less developed ones, and in the segments of society left behind in the more developed ones.

So what did we just learn about the global economy at the end of 2025? Nothing really, except that things are objectively not that bad for many of us humans here on Earth, and yet we are nervous and have some good reasons to be nervous. At a policy level, we can be cautiously optimistic but clearly need contingency plans if things don’t go well. At an individual level, it seems like a good idea to scrape together some well-diversified savings. Maybe owning a bit of land and learning how to grow a bit of one’s own food would not be a terrible contingency plan, and besides this can be fun and rewarding.

construction productivity

Construction Physics has a deep dive on construction productivity around the world. We hear about the overall slowdown in productivity growth worldwide since the 1970s or so, but in the construction industry the trend is essentially stagnation even compared to other industries. The U.S. is a historical leader in absolute productivity but has actually managed a productivity decline compared to modest growth in most other countries studied. That said, there are no countries where the growth is particularly spectacular. Developing countries have managed to grow productivity faster, but that is essentially catching up. It talks a lot about the challenges of measuring productivity, suggesting that just focusing on cost might be the better way to go.

This article doesn’t go deep into potential solutions. Prefabrication of components in factories is talked about a lot, because manufacturing productivity gains have been much more dramatic than construction, which on its face is manufacturing in a much less controlled environment. But prefabrication and modularity have been worked on for a long time and delivered only modest gains. More competition and less corruption in procurement are certainly good things, but these too seem to deliver only modest improvement. Many developed countries in Asia and the Middle East use labor from developing countries, and this seems to work for them but doesn’t deliver large gains I suppose because the lower-wage workers are less skilled and less productive. Streamlining permitting and regulation is always talked about, and tends to fit certain political agendas, but there don’t seem to be enormous gains there. So governments and project teams seem to just pursue an all-of-the-above salad approach and the result is incremental gains or no gains at all. I’ve probably said this multiple times, but I think AI should be very good at construction scheduling. Add in real time inspection and comparison to the original plans using cameras and drones, and it should be possible to really reduce down time and waste in construction. I think there might be substantial potential gains on the horizon here. If I were in government, I might focus R&D funding, targeted procurement, and regulatory/financial incentives on this particular aspect.

Another thought though, is that low construction productivity is not a reason not to do construction. Both housing and infrastructure construction have long-lasting economic and quality of life benefits that go beyond just the immediate economic activity they generate in the construction sector itself. So maybe we should just pony up what they cost now, keep plugging away to try to make the modest gains, and stop worry so much about this.

what’s new with fusion?

One thing that’s new, according to the New York Times, is massive investment in R&D by the government of China. Meanwhile in the U.S., it’s more about startups and public-private partnerships. In at least one anecdotal case mentioned in the article, top scientists from China who have been based at top U.S. universities for decades are choosing to go home. The article suggests that American firms are often the first to achieve breakthroughs, but the Chinese system is better at scaling and commercializing them.

It seems like there is an opportunity to cooperate for the greater good here, no? That is not the way the political winds are blowing at the moment, of course. At least in this case, if our countries aren’t actually cooperating, they are not competing to weaponize the technology first. This technology was weaponized more than half a century ago, of course, and the quest ever since has been to learn how to control it for peaceful purposes. Of course, the joke is always that commercial fusion is two decades away, no matter what decade we are currently in. This article declines to give a clear time table for widespread commercialization, but it talks about a “pilot plant in the 2030s and 2040s”, so yep the rolling two decade projection seems to be holding.

AI investment compared to railway boom

The blog Urbanomics has a comparison of the current AI investment concentration to the 19th century railroad investment boom in England and the United States. In this particular case, the blogger neglected to provide the original source, which he or she normally does. Financial Times and Economist are typical sources. Anyway, here are some stats mentioned:

  • Peak “railway mania” in the UK was around the 1840s, and railroad investment accounted for around half of all investment at that time.
  • Between about 1830 and 1870 in the UK, railroad investment accounted for about 20% of all investment.
  • In the US, episodic railroad investment booms occurred in the 1840s and 1870s. Railroad investment at these times was around 40% of all investment. This accounted for GDP growth of about 6-10%.
  • The brief clip actually doesn’t tell us how much of total US investment in 2025 is directed to AI. But it accounts for GDP growth of around 2%.

These are interesting numbers, but I don’t think comparing 19th century and 21st century US GDP growth is a very good comparison. That is essentially comparing a fast-growing developing country to a slow-growing advanced economy. If I had to pick one or the other to live in, I would probably go with the one that has safe drinking water, antibiotics, vaccinations, relatively painless dentistry, and air conditioning.

Prospera, Trump, Thiel and the Honduras drug trafficking pardon

The former president of Honduras, Juan Hernandez, who was convicted of drug trafficking and then pardoned by Trump, has ties to Peter Thiel and the “charter city” Prospera. I keep tabs on Prospera, as I was initially interested in the charter city idea after hearing a lecture by Paul Romer (a Nobel prize winning economist). The original concept, which was about economic opportunity, efficiency, and clarity of mission, has morphed into something far more corrupt and ugly.

This governing arrangement was organized in part by Hernández, who served two terms as president of Honduras from 2014 until January 2022. Prospera was permitted to launch the charter city after Hernández allowed for the creation of semiautonomous Zones for Employment and Economic Development, or ZEDEs. The ZEDEs were then overseen by a committee that included three of Hernández’s underlings and several American libertarian activists.

So there you have it. I am not saying this is proof that Prospera is the reason for the pardon. But what we see in the press is a lot of puzzlement that the U.S. government can be simultaneously fighting an anti-drug war on the Venezuelan government and supporting a pro-drug former Honduran government. This is logically inconsistent. On the other hand, simultaneously supporting right-wing big business interests in Venezuela (think oil contracts if not outright ownership for US corporations) and right-wing big business interests in Honduras is logically consistent (not to mention corrupt and cynical).

what’s new in the JFK files?

What’s new is evidence that James Angleton at the CIA was personally tracking Oswald, and (separately, really), extensive ties between Angleton and the nuclear proliferation project of Israeli intelligence. The historical backdrop at this time, also based on evidence, is that JFK was actively and vocally resisting said nuclear proliferation. None of which seems to be a smoking gun with fresh fingerprints, just another party with motive and opportunity.

Though Angleton insisted that the agency was inattentive to Oswald and unaware of the purpose of his activities leading up to Dallas, it has since been disclosed through unclassified JFK assassination records that Angleton personally maintained a classified 201 intelligence/surveillance file on Oswald for the four years preceding Kennedy’s assassination, strictly controlling which officials inside the CIA were permitted to see it through compartmentalization.

Angleton committed perjury before the House Select Committee on Assassinations, claiming he knew almost nothing about Lee Harvey Oswald before the shooting. In another, Angleton concealed the fact that Oswald had visited the Cuban embassy in Mexico City—a visit the CIA publicly claimed it only discovered after the assassination. As Jefferson Morley, author of The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton, explained, the  counter-intelligence chief “preferred to wait out the Warren Commission rather than explain the CIA’s knowledge of and interest in Oswald’s visit to the Cuban consulate” in Mexico…

At the very moment a U.S. president was seeking to restrict Israel’s nuclear ambitions and limit the political power of its lobby in Washington, the CIA official in control of the Oswald file was secretly sharing intelligence channels, assassination communications, and off-the-books operatives with Israel—and lying to both Congress and potentially some of his own CIA colleagues about it. The government spent 60 years redacting those facts and Americans have a right to know why.

I might ask how many agents (come on, yes, Oswald was a CIA agent/informant/collaborator of some sort) Angleton had files on. Hundreds? Thousands? or just a few? Did having a file folder with your name on it really make you special?

Our World in Data 2025 Roundup

There is so much here you could spend all of 2026 digging into the data from 2025 and not get through it. This is a pretty amazing organization! I attempted a top 10 list and only got to 7 because I lumped together some similar things.

  1. Carbon dioxide emissions in the US and other developed countries peaked around 2006 and have been falling. Meanwhile they have skyrocketed in China and India and continue to increase more or less exponentially. Per capita emissions follow similar trends. Global sales of internal combustion engine cars appear to have peaked in 2018, and are very slowly declining while sales of electric vehicles are very slowly rising. Overall, the sale of cars in general appears to have declined slightly over the past decade or so. Interesting – does this represent other forms of mobility slowly coming to the fore? The world also appears to have passed “peak air pollution” a few years ago, with the one exception being ammonia from agricultural intensification. (I am not aware of ammonia as an air pollutant being a major human health risk, other than those exposed on or near farms. It is however a critical water pollutant and the intensification bodes badly for our surface and coastal waters. There may also be a connection between ammonia and nitrous oxide as a greenhouse gas that I do not fully understand.)
  2. Two different stories show a democracy index by country for the world and GDP per capita by country for the world. The two maps look about the same. Coincidence?
  3. Does the News Reflect What we Die From? The answer is no, of course. People die from heart attacks, cancer, and strokes, while the news focuses on homicide and other violence. I understand “If it bleeds, it leads” but I have always thought if they just put the anecdotal news in the context of some running statistics, it might help people put things in context. At the same time, another story shows that death rates from heart attacks and strokes have come down dramatically over the past century or so.
  4. Men commit suicide at higher rates than women in every country studied. In the US, the ratio is about 4 to 1 (access to guns, I wonder). In South Korea, only 2 to 1 but the overall rate of suicide is one of the world’s highest. In general, women live longer than men in most countries, but the gap is shocking in Russia. The Covid-19 death rate was also shocking in Russia. Now, part of the issue is the old one where choropleth maps draw your eye to the biggest countries.
  5. Overall, the world has made striking gains in poverty reduction because rates have gone from very high to very low in East Asia and South Asia between about 1990 and 2020. (But notably, Pakistan is lumped with the Middle East rather than South Asia and I am not sure about Bangladesh.) However, the progress stalled around then and has been reversed by increasing poverty in Africa.
  6. The map of where same sex marriage is legal looks a lot like the map of democracy and per capita income. One interesting thing is that many countries recognize foreign same sex marriages even if they do not allow their own citizens to marry. Homophobic attitudes have dropped dramatically in western countries between 1984 (75% in the United States) and 2022 (28%) although they are still higher than in Europe. (The way I look at it, trans-phobia is sort of the new homophobia, now that straight-up homophobia does not represent a viable political stance. Kind of like singling out Haitian or Somali immigrants is the mutated form of racism, now that straight-up anti-black racism is mostly out of style. So ugly as these things are, you could see them as indicators of progress.)
  7. Renewable electricity generation is growing exponentially, led by solar energy.

BBC: 25 most important scientific ideas of the 21st century

BBC has a list called The 25 most powerful ideas of the 21st century (so far), picked by the world’s top thinkers. They don’t spell out science or technology in the title, but I don’t see any grand philosophical or literary analysis here. It’s not exactly clear if the list is in any order, other than maybe grouped loosely by topic. I’m just going to list a few I found interesting below, in categories:

  • Medicine: stem cells that don’t come from babies, mRNA vaccines, genome sequencing, a cure for HIV*, the HPV vaccine, contraception apps [what we used to call “the rhythm method and were cautioned not to use, but the apps now make it accurate], tissue engineering [this is growing body parts from a sample of human DNA for implant back into that same person – the article says ears, trachea, and bone have been used in patients, while kidneys and hearts are still at the research stage], psychedelic therapy
  • Environment: global warming and continuing carbon emissions, attribution analysis
  • (Information) Technology: large language models, robots that can do chemistry experiments
  • (Other) Technology: self-repairing materials
  • Physics/Cosmology: dark matter, the Higgs boson, the James Webb telescope, exoplanets, gravitational waves

* The HIV cure deserves some extra discussion. HIV can be cured, at least in some people sometimes, by transplanting bone marrow from a naturally HIV-resistant person. A bone marrow transplant is such a big deal that it would not be ethical to do it for people whose only problem is HIV(!) because other effective treatments are available. It is done for people with terminal leukemia when no other treatments are available. A few of these people have HIV, and it has been shown that their HIV can be cured. So we need to keep working on applying some of the other technologies to an HIV vaccine and/or cure.

I want to just briefly talk about the contraceptive apps. I might have heard about that but didn’t realize it had been so rigorously studied and FDA-approved. It seems so simple and yet a breakthrough, which I find heartening. I find this heartening because I would like to see our society eventually move on from the abortion debate, and the way to move on in my view is to improve technology, access and knowledge about birth control while reducing stigma. This seems to me to accomplish all those objectives without a major scientific breakthrough being required. (I am under no illusions about the politics – if technology solves an issue, people who need an issue to suit their political purposes will find or manufacture another issue.)

what to do after those holiday meals

I don’t put too much stock in online nutrition and fitness advice, but here is what at least one article (Fashion Beans) suggests in the day or two after overindulgence.

  • Day 1: Start by drinking a whole bunch of water to start flushing salt from the system. Delay caffeine intake for an hour or two (ha, no chance I would ever do this, I have my priorities.) Basically just eat protein, vegetables, and a little bit of vegetable-based fat the rest of the day (hopefully there are some of these amongst the leftovers.) Take a 10-minute walk after every meal (probably never a bad idea). Exercise, but only lightly (as defined by the fitness bro who probably wrote this post.) Give alcohol a break. Get a solid sleep (they say 7.5 hours, sounds a bit overprecise to me).
  • Day 2: Lots of yogurt and fruit and more protein for breakfast.

And that’s it. Sounds totally fine for general health advice. We know what we are supposed to do right? Sleep, exercise, vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds, whole grains, protein, approved fats and oils in moderation. 0-1 alcoholic beverages per day and avoid sugar and processed foods almost entirely. Do this for a couple days and you will probably feel decent whether you behaved badly on day 0 or not, I would think. Behave badly for several days in a row, as at least I tend to do over holiday breaks and on vacation, and you might start to feel pretty crappy. So here’s the best piece of advice I can give: Do as I say, not as I do!