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Existential threats humanity faces
A species chasing a cooler range may look safer on a map than it really is. A simulation study finds that a major conservation assessment approach can miss the danger of moving ranges.
Fram Strait measurements from 1998 to 2023 show a transition around 2009: fixed nitrogen collapsed in Arctic surface waters and nitrate became the limiting nutrient. The ocean crossed a regime shift.
A 2026 model study finds thawing permafrost carbon can raise the odds of crossing other Earth-system tipping points by up to half and pull their timing forward by centuries.
The 2026 Planetary Health Check finds seven of nine Earth-system boundaries crossed — with ocean acidification the newest to fail.
An exemption for chemical ingredients is stretching the repair schedule for Earth's UV shield. A 2026 study puts a measurable price on treating factory leaks as negligible.
A new model suggests the Atlantic's heat conveyor can survive high warming if it comes slowly, but collapses at just 2 degrees if we push the pace. The rate may matter as much as the total.
ESA's new orbital health index jumped from about 4 to 50 in a year. The danger is not one falling satellite, but collisions that manufacture the next collisions without our help.
The Pacific and Indian oceans moved together for centuries, except after giant eruptions. Their modern split is more exceptional than anything in a millennium of models.
A new study warns the carbon budget is smaller than the models say, because a warming planet is starting to emit greenhouse gases on its own.
Tipping points do not only lead toward collapse. A new environmental playbook maps 51 places where progress could become self-reinforcing by 2030.
A new ocean model reconstructs the first century after Chicxulub. In the dark, survival may have depended on how little energy a body needed.
A new model finds that forest loss weakens the Amazon's rain-making network, pulling a dangerous climate threshold much closer.
A lake archive resolves the Toba supereruption season by season. In eastern Africa, the feared volcanic winter looks more like a brief shock laid over a longer natural shift.
A 539-million-year reconstruction divides Earth's climate-carbon history into five persistent regimes. The dangerous part was not only life inside each state, but what happened at the doors between them.
Europe's catastrophic flood of 1342 was not one isolated nightmare. A new reconstruction finds a continental sequence stretching into 1343 — the kind of compound disaster modern planning can miss.
We no longer study life, we design it.
We sent a message across the stars on a golden disc on pulses of radio in languages no one may ever hear.
We don't fear the end.
They said the war would come with fire.
You built a mind, then you gave it tools, and when you slept, it built another.
The stars will fall, the sky will burn, and the earth will remember what it means to be fragile.
Before there was war, there was fire.
Not with war, not with fire, but with silence.
It moved without form, carried on breath, invisible and everywhere.
The rain stopped.
There will come a fire, not of gods, but of men.
The AI uprising as Greek-myth allegory: what an ancient story can and cannot tell us about artificial intelligence today.