The end-of-year numbers aren't in yet, but 2023 should be the year that wind and solar finally generate more electricity than coal here in the US.
https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/report/BTL/2023/02-genmix/article.php

For new generation projects coming online in 2023, 86% of the electricity is from non-fossil sources. The generation capacity that was retired in 2023 was all fossil based.
https://www.energy.gov/eere/vehicles/articles/fotw-1304-august-21-2023-2023-non-fossil-fuel-sources-will-account-86-new

The first CRISPR gene editing treatment for sickle cell disease was approved. An amazing start to what I hope is a future of cures for various genetic diseases.

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/fda-approves-cure-sickle-cell-disease-first-treatment-use-gene-editing-rcna127979

Dracunculiasis (disease caused by Guinea worm infection in humans) is almost eradicated. We hit a new all-time low for known cases: 13 last year, and now only 3 in the first half of 2023.

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/72/wr/mm7245a4.htm

https://www.cartercenter.org/health/guinea_worm/index.html

Humanity was able to experience Baldur's Gate 3.

Honestly, AI has been helping me a lot as a student and someone that just likes to research stuff. It's development over the last year has been incredible.

Well I work in cybersecurity so everyday is a new year

This was yesterday: https://www.vice.com/en/article/4a35kp/scientists-have-reported-a-breakthrough-in-understanding-whale-language

I have been really appreciating open source software this year. I always preferred FOSS over the alternatives (Firefox, Thunderbird, Libre Office etc) but I tried to use it for as much as I could this year, even professionally.

Haven't bootet into my Windows partition with Adobe Cloud for months now, it's almost exclusively Inkscpape, Scribus, Blender and Krita on Fedora and I love it! I'm also slowly, slowly getting into Godot which seems like another piece of amazing software.

Sure there are some (very) rough edges here and there and I will have fire up Illustrator or Unity (🤢) at some point when clients demand it but I'm pretty amazed at how well it's going.

Welp, sending this is totally gonna jinx it but whatevs 😘

Kissinger's death primarily.

We started deploying malaria vaccines!

John Green and Nerdfighteria was able to pressure Johnson and Johnson to give millions access to life saving tuberculosis medication

Maybe not a breakthrough compared to some of the other comments but home assistant got local voice control this year. For the price of a raspberry pi and a 13 dollar microphone you can have a completely local home automation system controlled by your voice. You can even hook it up to a LLM like chat gpt if you want via a different phrase to do some fun party tricks

There was a breakthrough in cat medicine research that is showing promising results in doubling the lifespan of cats.

Edit: Sorry for leaving y'all in suspense, I didn't remember exactly what it was at the time of commenting, but I found it https://www.u-tokyo.ac.jp/focus/en/features/z1304_00039.html

China's carbon emissions are now entering structural decline thanks to the massive push in renewables and nuclear https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/nov/13/chinas-carbon-emissions-set-for-structural-decline-from-next-year

A multi-material 3D inkjet printer. Most of the rest of science news too.

We have just set up a fund for poor countries effected by climate change.

Lemmy jumped to its current two million member milestone, I consider that a good thing humans have achieved.

https://humanprogress.org/trends/