Flag football rising 📈, a new kidney 🐷, and the next generation of mosquito nets

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These days, it feels like there’s a new AI model released every week, more capable than the last, that fundamentally changes how we interact with the world. But that’s always been the case with technology, maybe just never quite this fast. Calculators by no means eliminated math, but they changed what it means to be good at it. When Google arrived, it didn’t just make information easier to find but changed the value of memorizing things.

When ChatGPT first came out in 2022, I was a junior in college. While tempting to use for school work, it was a horrific writer and had next to no utility for editing, let alone essay writing, no matter how I prompted it. Really, the only use case was writing funny stories about my friends and me. It couldn’t even tell you how many r’s are in the word strawberry (that one took a few years for it to figure out).

But AI improved quickly, and as it did, everyone had to adapt. Teachers had to rethink how they taught and assessed students, knowing that AI could not only do outstanding research, but was also getting good enough at writing to become nearly undetectable. At work, as AI became better at taking on more of our day-to-day responsibilities, we had to rethink our own jobs, too. The question used to be: how can AI help me? Now, it’s becoming: what should I do differently now that AI can do this?

That can be a scary feedback loop. Every time technology lurches forward, it takes something off our plate but it doesn’t shrink it. We just have to figure out what belongs on that plate instead. But there’s something exciting about that, too. If AI can handle things that used to consume our time, we get to spend more of it on things that AI can’t do. The goal, then, is figuring out how to properly adapt.

On that note, this week we’re bringing you three stories where the solution adapted to an ever-evolving problem. Across the country, flag football is bringing sports to girls for the first time while teen inactivity is growing. A patient with kidney disease successfully received a pig kidney that bought nine more months amid a growing transplant waitlist. And mosquito nets got an upgrade proven to work against insects that adapted to the old ones.

With gratitude,

Brenner, Jordan, and Zac

Last year, physical inactivity among 13-to-17-year-olds rose 4.4%, per the Sports & Fitness Industry Association (SFIA). Worse yet, they were the only age group to move the wrong direction. But while fewer teens are getting active, one group of high schoolers is finding a new way onto the field: girls playing flag football. Last season, the sport crossed a major threshold: 100,000 girls lacing up (nearly enough to fill Michigan’s stadium). Next year, flags are expected to be pulled across 37 states.

Rewind the tape: this all started in 2012 out of Clark County, a school district in Las Vegas, where girls’ soccer was scheduled for the fall, leaving the winter season wide open. The district surveyed families about what they wanted instead. Flag football won. With a few very successful years under the county’s belt, the Nevada Interscholastic Activities Association made it an official statewide sport for the 2016-2017 season. It then spread state by state in no small part thanks to the NFL.

Across the nation, NFL teams helped turn pilot programs into statewide sports. The New York Jets seeded New Jersey’s first high school girls flag league in 2021, supplying equipment and organizing it. After the Jets invested $3.5 million over five years, the state made it official for the upcoming season. In Kansas, the Chiefs ran an advocacy campaign called “Let Her Play,” including an online petition, before the state board adopted the sport for this season.

Stat sheet: 50% of the girls joining flag football teams are playing a high school sport for the first time. The appeal isn’t hard to understand: in SFIA’s survey, over 40% of respondents named cost as a barrier to enrolling kids in sports. Flag football removes much of that burden. No helmets, pads, or other expensive equipment – just flags and a ball. Last year’s growth came from 1,200 new schools picking up the sport. As flag football is embraced around the country, schools aren’t just adding another sport to the schedule. They’re creating an entry point for thousands of girls who might never have taken the field otherwise.

Tim Andrews, a retired supermarket manager in New Hampshire, was diagnosed with stage-three kidney disease in 2023 and started dialysis shortly after. While type O blood makes him a universal donor, it leaves him a narrow receiver with a type O kidney as his only option. He faced a grim outlook from his doctors: an estimated seven years on the waitlist for a viable kidney against five years of life on dialysis. However, that arithmetic only accounted for human kidneys.

In January 2025 under an FDA Expanded Access protocol, Massachusetts General Hospital surgeons put a pig kidney into him instead. The organ was provided by eGenesis, a biotech company based in Cambridge, which genetically modified the pigs using CRISPR to make 69 edits (adjustments for human compatibility like turning off dormant pig viruses).

The results: the kidney lasted 271 days. During that time, there were a few health complications that required minor hospital stays, but Andrews described a weight being lifted off his shoulders: he could walk his dog and cook at home, freedoms that dialysis had taken from him. The pig kidney was ultimately removed after it failed in October due to an infection. Then Andrews went back on dialysis three times a week and received a human kidney in January 2026 from a deceased donor. It worked immediately with no evidence that a pig organ had left him worse off.

Zooming out: Tim’s situation is not unique. There are currently over 95,000 people in the US on the kidney waiting list. And they don’t have many options – under 30,000 transplants were performed last year (meanwhile nearly 4,000 candidates fell off the waitlist after passing away and another 5,000 were removed after becoming too sick). Tim’s treatment is not available to the masses but has proven what the art of the possible looks like. Now, eGenesis is expanding to a trial of 33 similar patients in early 2027.

For those living with end-stage kidney disease stuck on the waiting list, dialysis can keep them alive, but it can’t replace a functioning kidney. As the hospital frames it, xenotransplantation, the act of using a non-human organ, could eventually serve as the bridge between end-stage failure and a human transplant, freeing patients from dialysis in the meantime.

In sub-Saharan Africa, beds are draped with nets that help protect against malaria-carrying mosquitoes. The disease kills more than 600,000 people a year. Most of them are children under five in Africa. Since 2000, these nets have helped prevent more than a billion cases across the continent. They’re widely considered one of the most cost-effective forms of global health aid. The nets themselves act as a physical barrier but are also treated with insecticide so that the mosquito dies upon landing, lowering the risk for the whole village with each net. For someone spending eight hours a night under this net for years on end, the safety bar is very high, so only one family of insecticides, pyrethroids, ever cleared it. That means hundreds of millions of nets across the continent, all with the same compound.

Unfortunately, Darwin’s First Law says a mosquito at rest will stay at rest evolve to survive whatever killed its ancestor. And evolve they did. Mosquitoes that survived the pyrethroids outbred the ones that didn’t, and by the 2010s, resistance was widespread across sub-Saharan Africa. Fixing the nets proved to be a multi-year process. Finding a second insecticide potent enough to kill the new mosquitoes but safe enough for people to sleep beside every night was difficult. Running village-scale trials to determine whether the new nets actually prevented malaria took years more.

The fix: eventually, a second chemical was found – chlorfenapyr – a farm insecticide used in Oklahoma that kills mosquitoes by sabotaging energy production. In a two-year trial in Tanzania, villages using chlorfenapyr-treated nets had nearly half as many malaria infections as neighboring villages with standard nets. These new nets are only 95 cents more. WHO began recommending them in 2023. In May, a Ghanaian PhD student published data from clinical records showing the results from the 700,000 nets Ghana purchased in 2021: 40% fewer cases after thirty months. Now, four out of every five nets shipped are chlorfenapyr-treated.  

The victory won’t last forever. Just like with pyrethroids, mosquitoes can eventually evolve resistance to chlorfenapyr. For now, 61 million of these new nets have been distributed and each one buys another night of protection while scientists prepare for mosquitoes’ next move.