The Weekly Anthropocene, May 28 2025
Pandemic prevention, electric cars, the amazing shrinking clownfish, solar in Zambia and Iraq, space bacteria, baby sharks, kingfisher eggs, hummingbird beaks, McCormick Place, SNAP-X, and more!
The Big Picture: Pandemic Prevention
In a world-historic step forward, May 2025 saw 124 member states of the World Health Organization (WHO) vote to adopt the WHO Pandemic Agreement, a new legally binding treaty to improve international coordination on planning for and responding to any future pandemics. (The U.S. is in the process of leaving the WHO, since January 2025, and did not join the new treaty). Among other provisions, the treaty includes plans for wealthier countries to share more tests, vaccines, and treatments with poorer countries as well as structures to create world-spanning supply chain, logistics, early-warning, and pandemic prevention financing networks. It will go into effect when 60 states ratify it. As climate change roils ecosystems and increases the risk of zoonotic disease “spillover” events, this efflorescence of farsighted international cooperation is more welcome than ever! Spectacular news.
China has announced a pledge to give $500 million to help fund the WHO over the next 5 years, meaning it will replace the departing U.S. as the global health effort’s top donor. A geopolitical power move — that will likely save a lot of innocent lives.
The Big Picture: Electric Cars
A new International Energy Agency report quantifies the accelerating global growth of electric vehicles. In 2024, over 20% of all new cars sold worldwide were either plug-in hybrids (PHEVs) or fully electric (EVs), and that’s on track to rise to over 25% in 2025. China is currently far and away the leader in this sector: of the over 17 million EVs and PHEVs sold worldwide in 2024, over 11 million were sold within China itself — and that’s not counting exports to other countries’ fast-growing clean car markets.
BYD announced a new wave of price reductions for its electric cars. Their cheapest model, the all-electric BYD Seagull hatchback, now costs just $7,780 in China. Wow.
The Big Picture: Clean Energy
This new video from renowned science YouTuber Hank Green summarizes the recent Global Electricity Review from think tank Ember. It’s a great encapsulation of the really-amazingly-good state of affairs on accelerating global clean energy growth!
Papua New Guinea
Once per lunar month between February and August 2023, a group of scientists measured the length of 67 breeding pairs of wild clown anenomefish (Amphiprion percula, aka “clownfish”) totaling 134 individuals in Kimbe Bay off Papua New Guinea — during the world’s 4th major marine heatwave-driven coral bleaching event. Fascinatingly, they found that 101 of the clownfish physically shrunk in response to the heat stress, a previously unknown response. A single shrinking event appeared to increase an individual’s survival probability by 78% compared to the 33 that did not shrink, and breeding pairs that shrank together were also more likely to survive. The shrinking likely helps fish survive too-warm seas by requiring less oxygen and food.
Notably, this wasn’t evolution, but phenotypic plasticity: the same individual fish grew smaller over months instead of generations, and not just skinnier but shorter from head to tail. It’s not yet clear how this happens biologically (maybe hormone shifts triggering neuroendocrine pathways?), but it’s entirely possible that this might be a widespread capability in many (most?) fish species and we’ve only now noticed it. A powerful new adaptive response with wide potential implications! Great research.
Zambia
Fast-electrifying Zambia just opened the Chisamba solar farm, with 100 MW of clean electricity-generating capacity. This is now the largest grid-connected solar farm in sub-Saharan Africa outside of South Africa! And it’s about to be doubled, with plans underway to build another 100 MW at the same site. Great work!
Germany
Germany has dropped its long-standing opposition to nuclear power, announcing that they would now align with pro-nuclear France in EU energy decision-making. Germany’s choice to close its relatively self and clean nuclear plants in the 2010s was a massive screwup, creating a “treadmill” effect where for years renewables growth effectively served to replace the wave of closing nuclear plants, leaving coal power and its carbon emissions untouched for far too long. (See my in-depth article on this from 2023). It’s great to see Germany moving towards the successful French model!
Scientists at the University of Bayreuth in Germany have created gene-edited common house spiders that produce red fluorescent spider silk, in an advance for understanding of gene-editing practices as well as multiple materials science uses.
Brazil
Brown howler monkeys (Alouatta guariba) are beginning to bounce back in Brazil in the wake of a devastating yellow fever outbreak in 2016, with some populations growing again thanks to a nationwide vaccination effort inoculating wild monkeys. A reintroduced population of vaccinated howlers is now thriving in Tijuca National Park, an urban forest at the heart of Rio de Janeiro. Great work!
Tiangong
A new species of bacteria has been discovered on China’s Tiangong1 space station in Earth orbit. Niallia tiangongensis is closely related to a common Earth soil bacterium, and its ancestor spores were clearly brought up accidentally by humans at some point, but it seems to have evolved an array of unique distinguishing features suitable for life in its new habitat, including specializing in growing on gelatin and possibly radiation damage repair. Looks like an early example of a new species evolving in space! Wow.
Nigeria
A landmark new World Bank study reports that a randomized controlled trial of AI chatbot tutors in Nigeria (specifically the free Microsoft Copilot/GPT-4) was highly successful, with first-year students using the AI tutors for just six weeks resulting in learning gains in the English language equivalent to up to two years of usual schooling. Along with other AI applications (like the AI apps for small-scale farming advice) this has fascinating potential for scalably boosting African development!
A new agreement was signed to build 100 MW of solar power — with accompanying battery storage — to supply electricity to four states in northern Nigeria.
Iraq
The first 100% clean energy-powered off-grid village in Iraq recently began operating. The Kulak village is in the Harir district of Kurdistan in northern Iraq, and thanks to the local Rwanga Foundation, it now has 195 solar panels providing round-the-clock electricity to 36 homes, a mosque, a school, and a town hall. Up next are plans for solar-powered irrigation and replicating this model across the region to help more villages adapt to desertification. Spectacular work!
Japan
Researchers at an aquarium on Okinawa island, Japan have developed an artificial shark womb incubator that can nurture still-alive “preemie” baby shark fetuses whose mothers were accidentally killed in the nets of local fishers. Fascinating work!
United States
Though Republicans in Congress attempt to hobble their own nation’s cutting-edge cleantech industries and the executive branch continues its destructive stupidity, ordinary people across America are still striving to build a brighter future.
A new census highlights the incredible progress already made in building out domestic U.S. cleantech manufacturing in the 2020s. As of 2025, the U.S. already has 200 solar, wind, and battery factories online, plus 800 more facilities supplying earlier stage materials and subcomponents, which together create 122,000 jobs and $33 billion in economic value. 73% of these factories are in states that voted Republican in 2024. If the current destructive budget is stopped and the long list of additional planned cleantech factories are able to be built, total U.S. cleantech manufacturing benefits could reach 579,000 jobs and $164 billion by 2030. It’s all up to Congress.
Microsoft just signed a binding commitment to purchase up to 622,500 metric tons of low-carbon cement from Massachusetts cleantech startup Sublime Systems over a six to nine year period, for use in building new data centers. Sublime has developed a new electrochemical process that creates high-quality industry-standard cement without using highly emissions-intensive cement kilns, resulting in 90% lower emissions than traditional kiln-made cement. This is a major financial boost to a promising new vector of decarbonization! Great news.
In September 2024, a bold new conservation milestone began with the release of nine individual Guam kingfishers (Todiramphus cinnamominus, aka the sihek) on Palmyra Atoll. The species had previously been extinct in the wild, with the new Palmyra population released into a brand-new habitat separated from their snake-plagued original home island of Guam by thousands of miles of ocean. Now, as of spring 2025, all nine have survived in their new home and one young breeding pair has laid eggs! This project is a spectacular example of proactive Anthropocene-ready conservation, breaking convention by releasing an at-risk species in an area where it wasn’t native. More captive-bred sihek will be released on Palmyra in summer 2025. Superb work!
A new study finds that Anna’s hummingbirds (Calypte anna) have evolved rapidly to maximize benefits from friendly humans’ hummingbird feeders, with their beaks growing longer and more voluminous in feeder-dense areas to suck more “nectar” from the relatively-vast new reservoirs available. The availability of hummingbird feeders has likely also enabled this species’ recent northward range expansion from California up through British Columbia. Another Anthropocene coexistence effect!
A young Cooper’s hawk in New Jersey was recently observed using a traffic light to aid its hunting, strategically swooping at red lights when the line of waiting cars could hide its low-flying approach towards prey birds in nearby backyards.
McCormick Place, a giant glass-covered convention center in Chicago, was once infamous as a mass killer of migrating birds who would slam into its deceptively clear façade. But in summer 2024, they applied a simple fix, sticking on a pattern of close, opaque dots atop the glass so that birds could see it. It’s worked wonders: in fall 2024, bird deaths fell by 95% compared with the previous two fall migrations. Great work!
A multi-institution team of scientists have invented SNAP-X, a biomimetic “nanoink” loaded with nutrient-bearing exometabolite molecules derived from crustose coralline algae. It essentially functions as a “Miracle-Gro” attractor for building coral reefs, creating a microhabitat tailor-made to encourage and nourish the settlement of coral larvae. The team found that larvae from a primary reef-building coral species in Hawaii were a whopping 20 times more likely to settle and grow on substrates sprayed with SNAP-X, with denser settlement when higher concentrations are applied. The next step is to scale up manufacturing of SNAP-X, hopefully to soon become a vital new tool in supporting coral reef habitats throughout the world-ocean!
But it's true that Trump is cancelling so many climate research establishment like the warming of the Seas around the World.It deeply concerns me that Trump does not support anything to do with Climate Change.The words Drill baby Drill filled me with HORROR can't he see that this should be the number one topic to be talked.Joe Biden knew just how important the Climate Crisis is.
There's no money to be made in Climate Change is that the reason Trump behaves as if the Climate Crisis doesn't exist.And Fossil Fuels are the answer to everything especially filling his bank balance.But can it be true that we will get to the point when Man realises that " Oh we can't use Fossil Fuels no more because we can't go out and Sunbath anymore,unless we want to roast on the beech after 20 mins." Will that day come along.Then Trump will come along and say" I said we must not use Fossil fuels anymore I tried to tell everyone". WE CAN'T GO ALONG THIS WAY ANYMORE WE HAVE TO CHANGE DIRECTION NOW BEFORE WE CRASH.WHEN WILL THIS BE REALISED. It has to be said Joe Biden done a huge amount for Climate Change and for America to be noticed for this.And it's not mentioned enough. Truth is Trump came along and undid everything he did