55 Funny Photos That Prove Last Year Was Weird In The Best Way

Quirks & Quarks is a science news program that has been running on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) for 50 years. Back in the year 2000, they celebrated the 25th anniversary of the show by imagining what the world would be like in the year 2025.

It was a mostly optimistic look at the future, and there were predictions that by 2025 we would have privately run mega-yachts carrying 10,000 tourists into orbit every week. We'd use fusion engines to get up to the moon, where people would stay in lunar hotels and go snowboarding into the deep craters.

However, even though we've celebrated the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing in 2019, we have yet to return humans to the lunar surface.

However, the showrunners also made several predictions about cloning that were mostly on the mark. At the time, cloning was top of mind for many. Dolly the sheep, the first cloned mammal, was revealed in 1997, and it led to fears that humans would be next—a sort of "Brave New World" scenario where identical clones would be performing mundane jobs or even becoming living organ donors, raising serious human rights issues.

A Quirks & Quarks on-stage expert predicted that by this time we would have many, many cloned animals, but cloned humans would still be illegal. Sure enough, many mammals have been cloned, including the rise of cloned pets, but laws were put in place around the world to ban the cloning of human embryos.

And while some people online are calling 2025 “a long and disappointing year,” with the war in Ukraine, vibecessions, growing AI fears, and other issues, there was also a bright side to it.

For example, in August 2024, a baby named KJ Muldoon was born with a severe carbamoyl phosphate synthetase 1 deficiency, an ultra-rare genetic disorder that prevents the liver from clearing ammonia. The condition is gruesome: half of all babies born with it pass away in infancy.

But researchers at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) and the University of California, Berkeley’s Innovative Genomics Institute, as well as other institutions, developed, in just six months, a personalized in vivo base-editing therapy that could go into KJ’s body and correct that one fatal genetic error.

After 307 days in the hospital, he was discharged—the first person ever healed with a personalized gene therapy.

For a long time, one of the biggest environmental concerns was the ozone hole. Basically, humans tore a hole in the layer of the atmosphere that protects life from harmful UV rays, and unlike climate change, it was easily visible—a big, black blob over Antarctica.

But 40 years after the world signed the Montreal Protocol to phase out ozone-eating chemicals, the ozone layer is measurably recovering. In 2025, European and U.S. scientists said the Antarctic ozone hole was the smallest since 2019 and the fifth smallest since 1992.

Meanwhile, nearly 99 percent of banned ozone-depleting substances have already been phased out.

If countries keep complying with the treaty, experts estimate the ozone layer over most of the world will return to 1980 levels by around 2040, with the Arctic following by about 2045 and even the notoriously damaged Antarctic ozone hole healing by roughly 2066.

Also, people are drinking less in many places around the world. In the European Union, overall alcohol consumption per person aged 15 years and over dropped by 2.9 litres (roughly 0.75 gallons) over the last four decades, from 12.7 litres (3.35 gallons) to 9.8 litres (2.59 gallons).

In the United States, the trend is similar. Gallup now finds just 54 percent of Americans say they drink alcohol at all—the lowest share since the question was first asked in 1939.

In 2018, medieval scholar Michael McCormick nominated 536 as “the worst year to be alive” because of the volcanic winter of 536, caused by a volcanic eruption early in the year. This caused average temperatures in Europe and China to decline, resulting in crop failures and famine for well over a year.

“For the sun gave forth its light without brightness, like the moon, during the whole year,” wrote Byzantine historian Procopius.

Temperatures in the summer of 536 fell 1.5°C to 2.5°C, initiating the coldest decade in the past 2,300 years. Snow fell that summer in China; crops failed; people starved.

The effects were devastating. The Irish chronicles record “a failure of bread from the years 536–539.” Then, in 541, bubonic plague struck the Roman port of Pelusium in Egypt. What came to be called the Plague of Justinian spread rapidly, wiping out one-third to one-half of the population of the Eastern Roman Empire and hastening its collapse.

While 2025 wasn’t ideal, it sure was better!