The Planet (on, and off)

Years before the air strike that killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Israeli intelligence had been quietly mapping the daily rhythms of Tehran. Nearly all of the Iranian capital’s traffic cameras had been hacked years earlier, their footage encrypted and transmitted to Israeli servers. One camera angle near Pasteur Street, close to Read more…

Advanced AI models appear willing to deploy nuclear weapons without the same reservations humans have when put into simulated geopolitical crises. Kenneth Payne at King’s College London set three leading large language models — GPT-5.2, Claude Sonnet 4 and Gemini 3 Flash — against each other in simulated war games. Read more…

Chronic ocean heating is fuelling a “staggering and deeply concerning” loss of marine life, a study has found, with fish levels falling by 7.2% from as little as 0.1C of warming per decade. Researchers examined the year-to-year change of 33,000 populations in the northern hemisphere between 1993 and 2021, and Read more…

In its 250th year, is America, land of immigration, becoming a country of emigration? Last year the U.S. experienced something that hasn’t definitively occurred since the Great Depression: More people moved out than moved in. The Trump administration has hailed the exodus — negative net migration — as the fulfillment Read more…

In a study of nearly 28 million older Americans, long-term exposure to fine particle air pollution raised the risk of Alzheimer’s disease. That link held even after researchers accounted for common conditions like high blood pressure, stroke and depression. Fine particle air pollution, known as PM2.5, consists of tiny particles Read more…