Hope Is A Verb - NewsFix - Empty Spain. Alphafold. Measles ⬇️

Episode Date: December 9, 2025

This week's headlines include – a medical breakthrough in Gaza; death rates plummet for one of our most contagious viruses; ‘Empty Spain’; Australia’s environmental reform;more bad news for fossil fuels and AI for good.  NewsFix is brought to you by ⁠Fix TheNews⁠. Hosted by Anthony Badolato, ⁠Hear That! ⁠ If you want to get in touch with the team, email [e-mail]

Welcome to our last regular news fix for 2025. I'm Anthony Badolato and what better way to kick off a new week than our round-up of the top good news stories from around the world. A remarkable medical breakthrough in Gaza. Global deaths from measles plummet. Good news for solar energy and abandoned farmland in Spain and how AI is helping to rewrite the playbook of modern science. Let's get into some details with two big stories in world health. Amid the near total collapse of Gaza's health system where over 90% of facilities have been damaged or destroyed, a team of Palestinian doctors and engineers have achieved the impossible. Glea, a medical solidarity organization and one of our giving partners at Fix the News, has created the first external fixator, a device that's used

to stabilize severe fractures. It normally costs hundreds of dollars and uses precision parts that Gaza can no longer import. So the team built one using local materials, recycled plastics, 3D printing and solar power. Since August 2025, three patients have received the Gaza-made fixator, all avoiding amputation. And there are 12 more patients in line. And because Glea is committed to open source design, this technology can now be replicated in crisis zones everywhere. Did you know that measles is one of the most contagious viruses ever discovered?

In fact, one person can infect up to 18 other people and the virus can survive in the air for two hours. Which makes COVID look almost polite by comparison. But according to a new report from the World Health Organization, measles deaths have plummeted by an astounding 88% since the year 2000. With vaccines preventing around 58 million of those deaths, That's entire city's worth of people who grew up, went to school, fell in love and lived full lives, all because of a simple, low-cost intervention. Now, this doesn't mean that the disease has completely gone away.

Global vaccination coverage still falls short of the 95% needed to stop outbreaks, but the big takeaway here is that elimination is possible. Okay, onto conservation and the sparsely populated region known as empty space. A decade of rewilding is bringing abandoned farmland back to life, restoring ecosystems once thought lost. While on the other side of the world, my side, Australia is about to overhaul its environmental laws in the biggest upgrade in decades. After years of political deadlock, Labour and the Greens have struck a deal that will create Environment Protection Australia, the country's first independent environmental regulator. The reforms will include legally enforceable national standards and for the first time put native forest logging and high-risk land clearing under federal scrutiny.

There's also some big energy shifts on both sides of the Atlantic. Britain has ended all-new fossil fuel exploration, bringing five decades of North Sea expansion to an end. And a surprising twist in the US, despite fears that AI would send electricity demand skyrocketing, New data shows that growth has slowed and solar is booming, with the sun providing over 80% of new demand. This means the country is close to a tipping point where solar could start pushing fossil fuels off the grid entirely. And finally, when the topic of AI comes up at a family or work gathering during the silly season, maybe tell them about AlphaFault,

an AI that predicts the 3D shape of proteins and has mapped almost every protein in the human body, plus more than 200 million proteins across the tree of life. In five years, it's been used by millions of researchers and cited in 35,000 papers, speeding up drug design and molecular science like a fast forward button. And the kicker? During the pandemic, two Turkish undergrads learned AlphaFold online, and now have published 15 research papers. So yes, AI is a big topic, and there's a lot to discuss. but it's good to know that it can be used for more than search summaries and fake girlfriends.

That's it from me. Make sure you check out the full edition at FixTheNews.com and I'll be back with one more edition this year when we round up the top stories of 2025.