Hope Is A Verb - NewsFix - Literacy Soars. Sixth Sense. Air Pollution.

Episode Date: October 30, 2025

Welcome to our first edition of NewsFix - your weekly dose of good news! On today's episode: global air-pollutiondeaths fall as the 'clean-air' era begins, hidden progress on youth literacy, why we're celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Paris Agreement, a new atlas to map the human body, how AI is helping farmers in India, species extinction is losing speed and some big news for the humble zipper. NewsFix is brought to you by the team at Fix The News and hosted by Anthony Badolato from Hear That. If you want to find out more about what's gone right in the world this week, subscribe to our newsletter.

Welcome to NewsFix, your quick hit of what's going right in the world. I'm Anthony Badolato and here's what should be making news this week. Happy 10th anniversary to the Paris Agreement. The writing's officially off the wall as youth literacy rates saw. Another week, another nail in the coffin for fossil fuels, how AI is helping farmers in India and the humble zipper gets its first upgrade in over a century. Okay, so let's get into the details. In 2015, the Paris Agreement put climate on the agenda,

when almost 200 countries made a pact to stop global warming and protect the planet. And we've made some pretty good headway since. The world's projected temperature rise has dropped from 4 degrees Celsius to 2.6 degrees Celsius. Solar capacity is growing 15 times faster than what was predicted 10 years ago, and clean power now supplies over 40% of global electricity. That's what I call exceeding expectations. Speaking of top marks, did you know that 93% of the world's young people aged 15 to 24 can now read and write?

And in East Asia, Latin America and Central Europe, youth literacy has reached near universal levels. Literacy is one of the most powerful indicators of progress, which makes this one of the most successful, yet underreported stories in global development right now. And even though the alarms keep sounding on a sixth mass extinction, a new analysis has found that species loss actually peaked about a century ago. Although extinctions are still happening, they're not on the same scale as the mass die-offs of the past, and each decade fewer species are going MIA. This means that conservation laws, protected areas and rewilding have all started working. So now it's time to double down and safeguard what we can. And just a reminder that

not all endings are bad, in a landmark ruling the European Court of Human Rights has ordered Norway to assess the global climate impacts of oil and gas before approving new fields. This means that human rights limits will be applied to new oil projects raining in new fossil fuel expansion across Europe. Meanwhile, global deaths from air pollution dropped by 20, 21% between 2013 and 2023, and it looks like there's even cleaner air on the horizon thanks to the fastest tightening of air quality laws in history over the past 18 months. For all the debates over AI, this summer 38 million farmers across India received advanced warnings after machine learning accurately forecasted the arrival of the monsoon

up to 30 days in advance. And Google has integrated geospatial reasoning into Google Earth to detect disasters in real time. There's even a new chatbot feature where you can ask it to find dried up rivers or track wildfires and algae blooms in real time. And if you've ever wondered how your brain knows you're hungry or your heart needs to beat faster, rest assured, scientists at Scripps Research have been given $14.2 million to map this hidden sixth sense known as a as interoception. The team are going to be busy building the first 3D Atlas to show how these sensory neurons connect deep within the body.

And finally, the zipper is getting its first upgrade in over a century. Congratulations. YKK, the Japanese company that makes about half the world zippers, has created a zipper that removes the traditional fabric tape, creating a lighter, more flexible closure. This could signal the end of fighting with jammed zippers. dipper teeth when you're running late for work and best of all, it's going to cut waste at

massive scale. Now that's what we call fastening the future. That's it for this week. If you need a bigger fix of good news, check out our newsletter at fixthenews.com and tune in for a new episode on Hope is a Verbe next week. The team are chatting with four incredible women who are leading the way in science, conversation and creating a better world for the next generation. information. Thank you.