English references

Named one of the “world’s ten most influential intellectuals” by MIT, Douglas Rushkoff is an author and documentarian who studies human autonomy in a digital age. Rushkoff’s work explores how different technological environments change our relationship to narrative, money, power, and one another. He coined such concepts as “viral media,” “screenagers,” and “social currency,” and has been a leading voice for applying digital media toward social and economic justice. In the conversation we talk about the power of ideas, our disconnection from reality, going meta, ancestral fears, tech billionaires mindset and how they are preparing for the apocalypse. We also reflect on the urgent need to be more human and reconnect with what is essential.

Ahead of the United Nations climate talks in Brazil, advocacy groups are pushing for companies and governments to set meaningful emissions targets to lower emissions from livestock.

Antibiotic use in farming is now rampant. How meat is produced in China may mean the drugs you need here won’t work, says Prof Devi Sridhar, chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh

US president’s son-in-law was instrumental in getting deal – which could bring him huge windfall if plan to redevelop Gaza ever comes to fruition […] For a man with no formal role in the White House, Jared Kushner last week literally took centre-stage as Donald Trump’s emissary to the Middle East. As the administration took a victory lap for hammering out a Gaza ceasefire last week, Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, stood in Tel Aviv’s ‘hostages square’, addressing a feverish crowd that had booed the mention of Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and later broke into chants of: “Thank You Trump!”

Daniel P. Aldrich (born 1974) is an academic in the fields of political science, public policy and Asian studies. He is currently full professor of political science and public policy at Northeastern University.[1] Aldrich has held several Fulbright fellowships, including a Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Applied Public Policy (Democratic Resilience) at Flinders University in Australia in 2023,[2] a Fulbright Specialist[3] in Trinidad-Tobago in 2018, a Fulbright research fellowship at the University of Tokyo's Economic's Department for the 2012–2013 academic year, and a IIE Fulbright Dissertation Fellowship in Tokyo in 2002–2003. His research, prompted in part by his own family's experience of Hurricane Katrina,[4] explores how communities around the world respond to and recover from disaster.

Author Adam Greenfield demonstrates the power of mutual aid and community networks, but they lack to power to fundamentally change societyIn his book Lifehouse, Adam Greenfield shows that ordinary people are capable of organising themselves and running their own lives even in the most difficult circumstances.

.. the real risk of geoengineering is not some Hollywood-style catastrophe, but complacency. A cheap way to delay the effects of warming risks undermining the need to rapidly reduce emissions, and going down that path would risk locking our children into a dependency where even stopping the process becomes too expensive to contemplate...

Activist tells Swedish officials she has been subjected to harsh treatment, including insufficient food and water

Four key parts of the Earth’s climate system are destabilising, according to a new study with contributions from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK). Researchers analysed the interconnections of four major tipping elements: the Greenland ice sheet, the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC), the Amazon rainforest and the South American monsoon system. All four show signs of diminished resilience, raising the risk of abrupt and potentially irreversible changes.

We live in a world of worry. The ongoing Covid-19 pan­demic, having driven reversals in human development in almost every country, continues to spin off variants unpre­dictably. War in Ukraine and elsewhere has created more human suffering. Record-breaking temperatures, fires, storms and floods sound the alarm of planetary systems increasingly out of whack. Together, they are fuelling a cost-of-living crisis felt around the world, painting a pic­ture of uncertain times and unsettled lives.

The planet is nearing dangerous limits. Yet progress on clean energy shows what’s possible. With political will, cooperation can still avert the worst of the climate crisis

A California outfit has used artificial intelligence to design viral genomes before they were then built and tested in a laboratory. Following this, bacteria was then successfully infected with a number of these AI-created viruses, proving that generative models can create functional genetics. "The first generative design of complete genomes." That's what researchers at Stanford University and the Arc Institute in Palo Alto called the results of these experiments. A biologist at NYU Langone Health, Jef Boeke, celebrated the experiment as a substantial step towards AI-designed lifeforms, according to MIT Technology Review. "They saw viruses with new genes, with truncated genes, and even different gene orders and arrangements," Boeke said.

The vast ice of Antarctica has long seemed impregnable. But sudden changes are arriving – from shrinking sea ice to melting ice sheets and slowing ocean currents.

Predictably, soon, most young people will reject extremist views. This will be none too soon because it is the essential step leading to global political leadership that appreciates the threat posed by climate’s delayed response to human-made changes of Earth’s atmosphere. Then the annual fraud of goals for future “net zero” emissions announced at United Nations COP (Conference of Parties) meetings might be replaced by realistic climate policies. It is important, by that time, that we have better knowledge of the degree and rate at which human-made forcing of the climate system must be decreased to avoid irreversible, unacceptable consequences.

A UN commission has found Israel’s war in Gaza ranks among history’s greatest crimes. The UK government must stop hiding behind legal fictions and recognise the reality

"What we are seeing is compelling evidence that the climate crisis is not just an environmental emergency, it is potentially a neurological one."

President Donald Trump has been sending campaign fundraising emails with the subject line: “I want to try and get to Heaven.” The emails follow recent public remarks regarding Russia’s war on Ukraine, in which he said he was trying to “get to heaven,” comments which gained national attention. Framing his political survival and legal battles as signs of divine purpose, the emails request supporters to donate $15 during a “24-HOUR TRUMP FUNDRAISING BLITZ.”

Our modelling of European fish species shows a patchwork of winners and losers as sea temperatures rise.

In a simulation game, five off-the-shelf large language models or LLMs were confronted with fictional crisis situations that resembled Russia’s invasion of Ukraine or China’s threat to Taiwan. The results? Almost all of the AI models showed a preference to escalate aggressively, use firepower indiscriminately and turn crises into shooting wars — even to the point of launching nuclear weapons.

The Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) is an important tipping element in the climate system. There is a large uncertainty whether the AMOC will start to collapse during the century under future climate change, as this requires long climate model simulations which are not always available. Here, we analyze targeted climate model simulations done with the Community Earth System Model (CESM) with the aim to develop a physics-based indicator for the onset of an AMOC tipping event. This indicator is diagnosed from the surface buoyancy fluxes over the North Atlantic Ocean and is performing successfully under quasi-equilibrium freshwater forcing, freshwater pulse forcing, climate change scenarios, and for different climate models. An analysis consisting of 25 different climate models shows that the AMOC could begin to collapse by 2063 (from 2026 to 2095, to percentiles) under an intermediate emission scenario (SSP2-4.5), or by 2055 (from 2023 to 2076, to percentiles) under a high-end emission scenar