An anonymous reader shares a report: China's expansion of its rare earth export controls appeared to mark another escalation in the US-China trade war last week. But the announcements were also significant in another way: unusually, the documents could not be opened using American word processing software.

For the first time, China's Ministry of Commerce issued a slew of documents that could be directly accessed only through WPS Office -- China's answer to Microsoft Office -- as Beijing continues its tech self-reliance drive. Developed by the Beijing-based software company Kingsoft, WPS Office uses a different coding structure to Microsoft Office, meaning WPS text files cannot be opened directly in Word without conversion. Previously, the ministry primarily released text documents in Microsoft Word format.

Climate change has pushed warm-water coral reefs past a point of no return, marking the first time a major climate tipping point has been crossed, according to a report released on Sunday by an international team in advance of the United Nations Climate Change Conference COP30 in Brazil this November. From a report: Tipping points include global ice loss, Amazon rainforest loss, and the possible collapse of vital ocean currents. Once crossed, they will trigger self-perpetuating and irreversible changes that will lead to new and unpredictable climate conditions. But the new report also emphasizes progress on positive tipping points, such as the rapid rollout of green technologies.

"We can now say that we have passed the first major climate tipping point," said Steve Smith, the Tipping Points Research Impact Fellow at the Global Systems Institute and Green Futures Solutions at the University of Exeter, during a media briefing on Tuesday. "But on the plus side," he added, "we've also passed at least one major positive tipping point in the energy system," referring to the maturation of solar and wind power technologies.

The world is entering a "new reality" as global temperatures will inevitably overshoot the goal of staying within 1.5C of pre-industrial averages set by the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015, warns the Global Tipping Points Report 2025, the second iteration of a collaboration focused on key thresholds in Earth's climate system.

fjo3 shares a report from the Washington Post: Across vast stretches of farmland in southern Brazil, researchers at a carbon removal company are attempting to accelerate a natural process that normally unfolds over thousands or millions of years. The company, Terradot, is spreading tons of volcanic rock crushed into a fine dust over land where soybeans, sugar cane and other crops are grown. As rain percolates through the soil, chemical reactions pull carbon from the air and convert it into bicarbonate ions that eventually wash into the ocean, where the carbon remains stored. The technique, known as "enhanced rock weathering," is emerging as a promising approach to lock away carbon on a massive scale. Some researchers estimate the method has the potential to sequester billions of tons of carbon, helping slow global climate trends. Other major projects are underway across the globe and have collectively raised over a quarter-billion dollars. [...]

Terradot was founded in 2022 at Stanford, growing out of an independent study between James Kanoff, an undergraduate seeking large-scale carbon removal solutions, and Scott Fendorf, an Earth science professor. Terradot ran a pilot project across 250 hectares in Mexico and began operations in Brazil in late 2023. Since then, the company has spread about 100,000 tons of rock over 4,500 hectares. It has signed contracts to remove about 300,000 tons of carbon dioxide and is backed by a who's who of Silicon Valley. It expects to deliver its first carbon removal credit -- representing one metric ton of verified carbon dioxide removed -- by the end of this year and then scale up from there.

Longtime Slashdot reader hackingbear writes: Following U.S. lawmakers' call on Tuesday for broader bans on the export of chipmaking equipment to China, China dramatically expanded its rare earths export controls on Thursday, adding five new elements, dozens of pieces of refining technology, and extra scrutiny for semiconductor users as Beijing tightens control over the sector ahead of talks between Presidents Donald Trump and Xi Jinping. The new rules expands controls Beijing announced in April that caused shortages around the world, before a series of deals with Europe and the U.S. eased the supply crunch.

China produces over 90% of the world's processed rare earths and rare earth magnets. The 17 rare earth elements are vital materials in products ranging from electric vehicles to aircraft engines and military radars. Foreign companies producing some of the rare earths and related magnets on the list will now also need a Chinese export license if the final product contains or is made with Chinese equipment or material, even if the transaction includes no Chinese companies, mimicking rules the U.S. has implemented to restrict other countries' exports of semiconductor-related products to China.

Developing mining and processing capabilities requires a long-term effort, meaning the United States will be on the back foot for the foreseeable future. The Commerce Ministry also added to its "unreliable entity list" 14 foreign organizations, which are mostly based in the United States, restricting their ability to carry out commercial activities within the world's second-largest economy for carrying out military and technological cooperation with Taiwan, or "made malicious remarks about China, and assisted foreign governments in suppressing Chinese companies," it said in a separate statement, referring to TechInsights, a prominent Canadian tech research firm, and nine of its subsidiaries including Strategy Analytics which were among those blacklisted.

alternative_right shares a report from ScienceDaily: Scientists may have finally uncovered the mystery behind ultra-high-energy cosmic rays -- the most powerful particles known in the universe. A team from NTNU suggests that colossal winds from supermassive black holes could be accelerating these particles to unimaginable speeds. These winds, moving at half the speed of light, might not only shape entire galaxies but also fling atomic nuclei across the cosmos with incredible energy. [...]

But what on earth does that mean? The Milky Way is the neighborhood in the universe where you and I live. Our Sun and solar system are part of this galaxy, along with at least 100 billion other stars. "There is a black hole called Sagittarius-A* located right in the centre of the Milky Way. This black hole is currently in a quiet phase where it isn't consuming any stars, as there is not enough matter in the vicinity," [said postdoctoral fellow Enrico Peretti from the Universite Paris Cite]. This contrasts with growing, supermassive, active black holes that consume up to several times the mass of our own Sun each year. "A tiny portion of the material can be pushed away by the force of the black hole before it is pulled in. As a result, around half of these supermassive black holes create winds that move through the universe at up to half the speed of light," Peretti said.

We have known about these gigantic winds for approximately ten years. The winds from these black holes can affect galaxies. By blowing away gases, they can prevent new stars from forming, for example. This is dramatic enough in itself, but Oikonomou and her colleagues looked at something else, much smaller, that these winds could be the cause of." It is possible that these powerful winds accelerate the particles that create the ultra-high-energy radiation," said [lead author Domenik Ehlert]. The findings have been published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

If we could remove the 50 most concerning pieces of space debris in low-Earth orbit, there'd be a 50% reduction in the overall debris-generating potential, reports Ars Technica. That's according to Darren McKnight, lead author of a paper presented Friday at the International Astronautical Congress in Sydney, which calculated the objects most likely to collide with other fragments and create more debris. (Russia and the Soviet Union lead with 34 objects, followed by China with 10, the U.S. with three, Europe with two, and Japan with one.) Even just the top 10 were removed, the debris-generating potential drops by 30%.

"The things left before 2000 are still the majority of the problem," he points out, and "76% of the objects in the top 50 were deposited last century." 88% of the objects are post-mission rocket bodies left behind to hurtle through space. "The bad news is, since January 1, 2024, we've had 26 rocket bodies abandoned in low-Earth orbit that will stay in orbit for more than 25 years," McKnight told Ars... China launched 21 of the 26 hazardous new rocket bodies over the last 21 months, each averaging more than 4 metric tons (8,800 pounds). Two more came from US launchers, one from Russia, one from India, and one from Iran. This trend is likely to continue as China steps up deployment of two megaconstellations — Guowang and Thousand Sails — with thousands of communications satellites in low-Earth orbit.

Launches of these constellations began last year. The Guowang and Thousand Sails satellites are relatively small and likely capable of maneuvering out of the way of space debris, although China has not disclosed their exact capabilities. However, most of the rockets used for Guowang and Thousand Sails launches have left their upper stages in orbit. McKnight said nine upper stages China has abandoned after launching Guowang and Thousand Sails satellites will stay in orbit for more than 25 years, violating the international guidelines.

It will take hundreds of rockets to fully populate China's two major megaconstellations. The prospect of so much new space debris is worrisome, McKnight said. "In the next few years, if they continue the same trend, they're going to leave well over 100 rocket bodies over the 25-year rule if they continue to deploy these constellations," he said. "So, the trend is not good...." Since 2000, China has accumulated more dead rocket mass in long-lived orbits than the rest of the world combined, according to McKnight. "But now we're at a point where it's actually kind of accelerating in the last two years as these constellations are getting deployed."
A deputy head of China's national space agency recently said China is "currently researching" how to remove space debris from orbit, according to the article. ("One of the missions China claims is testing space debris mitigation techniques has docked with multiple spacecraft in orbit, but U.S. officials see it as a military threat. The same basic technologies needed for space debris cleanup — rendezvous and docking systems, robotic arms, and onboard automation — could be used to latch on to an adversary's satellite.")

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: CBS News has a TL;DR video report, but Jeremy Stern's earlier epic Class Dismissed [at Collosus.com] offers a deep dive into Alpha School, "the teacherless, homeworkless, K-12 private school in Austin, Texas, where students have been testing in the top 0.1% nationally by self-directing coursework with AI tutoring apps for two hours a day.

Alpha students are incentivized to complete coursework to "mastery-level" (i.e., scoring over 90%) in only two hours via a mix of various material and immaterial rewards, including the right to spend the other four hours of the school day in 'workshops,' learning things like how to run an Airbnb or food truck, manage a brokerage account or Broadway production, or build a business or drone."

Founder MacKenzie Larson's dream that "kids must love school so much they don't want to go on vacation" drew the attention of — and investments of money and time from — mysterious tech billionaire Joe Liemandt, who sent his own kids to Larson's school and now aims to bring the experience to rest of the world. "When GenAI hit in 2022," Liemandt said, "I took a billion dollars out of my software company. I said, 'Okay, we're going to be able to take MacKenzie's 2x in 2 hours groundwork and get it out to a billion kids.' It's going to cost more than that, but I could start to figure it out. It's going to happen. There's going to be a tablet that costs less than $1,000 that is going to teach every kid on this planet everything they need to know in two hours a day and they're going to love it.

"I really do think we can transform education for everybody in the world. So that's my next 20 years. I literally wake up now and I'm like, I'm the luckiest guy in the world. I will work 7 by 24 for the next 20 years to fricking do this. The greatest 20 years of my life are right ahead of me. I don't think I'm going to lose. We're going to win."

Of course, Stern writes at Collosus.com, there will be questions about this model of schooling, but asks: "Suppose that from kindergarten through 12th grade, your child's teachers were, in essence, stacks of machines. Suppose those machines unlocked more of your child's academic potential than you knew was possible, and made them love school. Suppose the schooling they loved involved vision monitoring and personal data capture. Suppose that surveillance architecture enabled them to outperform your wildest expectations on standardized tests, and in turn gave them self-confidence and self-esteem, and made their own innate potential seem limitless.... Suppose poor kids had a reason to believe and a way to show they're just as academically capable as rich kids, and that every student on Earth could test in what we now consider the top 10%. Suppose it allowed them to spend two-thirds of their school day on their own interests and passions. Suppose your child's deep love of school minted a new class of education billionaires.

"If you shrink from such a future, by which principle would you justify stifling it?"

Jeff Bezos told an audience on Friday that gigawatt-scale data centers will be built in space within the next ten to twenty years. The Amazon founder said these orbital facilities would eventually outperform their terrestrial counterparts because space offers uninterrupted solar power around the clock.

Bezos was speaking in a fireside chat with Ferrari and Stellantis Chairman John Elkann. He said the giant training clusters needed for AI would be better built in space because there are no clouds, rain or weather to interrupt power generation. Bezos predicted that space-based data centers would beat the cost of Earth-based ones within a couple of decades. He described the shift as part of a broader pattern that has already occurred with weather satellites and communication satellites. The next steps would be data centers and then other kinds of manufacturing.

An anonymous reader shares a report: It's not the vibes; Earth is literally getting darker. Scientists have discovered that our planet has been reflecting less light in both hemispheres, with a more pronounced darkening in the Northern hemisphere, according to a study published on Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The new trend upends longstanding symmetry in the surface albedo, or reflectivity, of the Northern and Southern hemispheres. In other words, clouds circulate in a way that equalizes hemispheric differences, such as the uneven distribution of land, so that the albedos roughly match -- though nobody knows why. "There are all kinds of things that people have noticed in observations and simulations that tend to suggest that you have this hemispheric symmetry as a kind of fundamental property of the climate system, but nobody's really come up with a theoretical framework or explanation for it," said Norman Loeb, a physical scientist at NASA's Langley Research Center, who led the new study. "It's always been something that we've observed, but we haven't really explained it fully."

To study this mystery, Loeb and his colleagues analyzed 24 years of observations captured since 2000 by the Clouds and the Earth's Radiant Energy System (CERES), a network of instruments placed on several NOAA and NASA satellites. Instead of an explanation for the strange symmetry, the results revealed an emerging asymmetry in hemispheric albedo; though both hemispheres are darkening, the Northern hemisphere shows more pronounced changes which challenges "the hypothesis that hemispheric symmetry in albedo is a fundamental property of Earth," according to the study.

More than 100,000 people were sent to hospitals due to heatstroke in Japan between May 1 and Sunday, according to preliminary data from the Fire and Disaster Management Agency. Bloomberg, via Japan Times: The number is the most on record, according to NHK. Transport to hospitals of patients linked to heatstroke over the period rose almost 3% to 100,143 from a year earlier as Japan saw its national temperature record broken twice in a matter of days. The country's average temperature during this summer was the highest since the statistic began being compiled in 1898, the nation's weather agency said last month.

Heat waves around the world are being made stronger and more deadly due to human-caused climate change. Government officials in August pledged to boost public health protections and encouraged the installation of more air conditioners in school gymnasiums and the use of cooling centers in communal spaces like libraries. New rules came into effect this summer that require employers to take adequate measures to protect workers from extreme temperatures.

BrianFagioli shares a report from NERDS.xyz: NASA has awarded Solstar Space a $150,000 SBIR Phase I contract to develop a Lunar Wi-Fi Access Point (LWIFI-AP). The system is designed to provide wireless connectivity for astronauts, rovers, and orbiting spacecraft as part of the Artemis and Commercial Lunar Payload Services programs. Solstar's goal is to build a space-rated, multi-band, multi-protocol access point that can survive radiation, extreme lunar temperatures, and other harsh conditions. NASA has identified Wi-Fi and 3GPP standards as core communication needs across mission systems ranging from the Human Landing System and Lunar Terrain Vehicle to the Lunar Gateway.

Although this is only an early-stage contract, Solstar's proposal addresses a clear gap in space-qualified networking hardware. The company says that just as Wi-Fi transformed daily life on Earth, it will be equally important for living and working on the Moon. If the project advances, astronauts could soon be relying on familiar wireless technology that has been adapted for one of the most challenging environments in existence.

Researchers in Texas confirmed the first documented wild hybrid between a blue jay and a green jay -- a rare pairing that is likely a result of climate change and habitat shifts. Slashdot reader fjo3 shares a report from CNN: "We think it's the first observed vertebrate that's hybridized as a result of two species both expanding their ranges due, at least in part, to climate change," said Brian Stokes, a doctoral student of biology at the University of Texas at Austin and first author of the study published September 10 in the journal Ecology and Evolution. The vividly colored green jay is found in parts of South and Central America, Mexico and a limited portion of southern Texas. But since 2000, the tropical bird's territory has expanded north by hundreds of kilometers -- more than 100 miles and about 2 degrees of latitude -- along the Rio Grande and up toward San Antonio, said study coauthor Timothy Keitt.

Avid birders across Central Texas have taken note, sharing sightings of the emerald birds on social media and apps like eBird. Keitt, a professor of integrative biology at UT Austin, has been keeping tabs on their rapid northward creep since 2018. "They're pretty unmistakable in the field," he told CNN. "You see a green jay and you absolutely know that it's a green jay." Stokes joined Keitt's project a few years later, trapping birds to take blood samples for genetic analysis and releasing them back into the wild. While monitoring social media for green jay sightings in May 2023, Stokes came across an intriguing post on a Facebook group called Texbirds. A woman in a suburb of San Antonio shared a photo of an unusual bird that didn't look like any jay Stokes or Keitt had ever seen.

"He happened to notice that this person posted a picture of this odd jay, and immediately told me, and we got in the car and drove down to find it right away," Keitt said. He and Stokes described their finding as one of the "increasingly unexpected outcomes" that arise when global warming and land development converge to drive animal populations to new habitat ranges. This, they wrote, can lead to unpredictable animal interactions -- in this case, between a tropical species and a temperate one -- and create never-before-seen ecological communities.

An anonymous reader shares a report: In a preprint titled "Can LIGO Detect Daylight Savings Time?," Reed Essick, former LIGO member and now a physicist at the University of Toronto, gives a simple answer to the paper's title: "Yes, it can." The paper, which has yet to be peer-reviewed, was recently uploaded to arXiv. That might seem like an odd connection. It's true that observational astronomy must contend with noise from light pollution, satellites, and communication signals. But these are tangible sources of noise that scientists can sink their teeth into, whereas daylight savings time is considerably more nebulous and abstract as a potential problem.

To be clear, and as the paper points out, daylight savings time does not influence actual signals from merging black holes billions of light-years away -- which, as far as we know, don't operate on daylight savings time. The "detection" here refers to the "non-trivial" changes in human activity having to do with the researchers involved in this kind of work, among other work- and process-related factors tied to the sudden shift in time. The presence of individuals -- whether through operational workflows or even their physical activity at the observatories -- has a measurable impact on the data collected by LIGO and its sister institutions, Virgo in Italy and KAGRA in Japan, the new paper argues.

To see why this might be the case, consider again the definition of gravitational waves: ripples in space-time. A very broad interpretation of this definition implies that any object in space-time affected by gravity can cause ripples, like a researcher opening a door or the rumble of a car moving across the LIGO parking lot. Of course, these ripples are so tiny and insignificant that LIGO doesn't register them as gravitational waves. But continued exposure to various seismic and human vibrations does have some effect on the detector -- which, again, engineers and physicists have attempted to account for. What they forgot to consider, however, were the irregular shifts in daily activity as researchers moved back and forth from daylight savings time. The bi-annual time adjustment shifted LIGO's expected sensitivity pattern by roughly 75 minutes, the paper noted. Weekends, and even the time of day, also influenced the integrity of the collected data, but these factors had been raised by the community in the past.

The European way of life is being jeopardized by environmental degradation, a report has found, with EU officials warning against weakening green rules. The Guardian: The continent has made "important progress" in cutting planet-heating pollution, according to the European Environment Agency, but the death of wildlife and breakdown of the climate are ruining ecosystems that underpin the economy. The seventh edition of the report, which has been published every five years since 1995, found:

1. More than 80% of protected habitats are in a poor or bad state, with "unsustainable" consumption and production patterns driving loss of wildlife.
2. The EU's "carbon sink" has declined by about 30% in a decade as logging, wildfires and pests damage forests.
3. Emissions from transport and food have barely budged since 2005, despite progress in other sectors.
4. Member states have failed to adapt to extreme weather as fast as risk levels have risen.
5. Water stress already affects one in three Europeans and will worsen as the climate changes.

Six months ago California had 48% more public and "shared" private EV chargers than gasoline nozzles. (In March California had 178,000 public and shared private EV chargers, versus about 120,000 gas nozzles.)

Since then they've added 23,000 more public/shared charging ports — and announced this week that there's now 68% more EV charger ports than the number of gasoline nozzles statewide. "Thanks to the state's ever-expanding charger network, 94% of Californians live within 10 minutes of an EV charger," according to the announcement from the state's energy policy agency. And the California Energy Commission staff told CleanTechnica they expect more chargers in the future. "We are watching increased private investment by consortiums like IONNA and OEMs like Rivian, Ford, and others that are actively installing EV charging stations throughout the state."

Clean Technica notes in 2019, the state had roughly 42,000 charging ports and now there are a little over 200,000. (And today there's about 800,000 home EV chargers.)

This week California announced another milestone: that in 2024 nearly 23% of all the state's new truck sales — that's trucks, buses, and vans — were zero-emission vehicles. (The state subsidizes electric trucks — $200 million was requested on the program's first day.) Greenhouse gas emissions in California are down 20% since 2000 — even as the state's GDP increased 78% in that same time period all while becoming the world's fourth largest economy.

The state also continues to set clean energy records. California was powered by two-thirds clean energy in 2023, the latest year for which data is available — the largest economy in the world to achieve this level of clean energy. The state has run on 100% clean electricity for some part of the day almost every day this year.
"Last year, California ran on 100% clean electricity for the equivalent of 51 days," notes another announcement, which points out California has 15,763 MW of battery storage capacity — roughly a third of the amount projected to be needed by 2045.

The heliosphere "plays a major role in why life is possible on our planet," reports CNN, "and how it perhaps once existed on others such as Mars." (Basically solar winds create "a constant flow of charged particles" that form "an enormous bubble that protects the planets in our solar system from cosmic radiation permeating the Milky Way".)

NASA says the heliosphere's boundary is three times the distance between Earth and Pluto. (After leaving the heliosphere NASA's Voyager probes collected key data about the heliosphere.) But now there's a new mission to investigate "how that solar wind interacts with interstellar space at the boundary of the heliosphere," CNN reports — called the Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (or IMAP): The spacecraft's 10 instruments will also fill gaps in the existing map of the heliosphere, pieced together from data collected by previous missions, and help further explain how the heliosphere largely shields our solar system from damaging cosmic rays, the most highly energetic particles in the universe. Along with two other space weather missions that lifted off aboard the same rocket on Wednesday, IMAP will help scientists better predict when solar storms unleashed by the sun could affect our planet. When aimed at Earth, harsh radiation from the storms, also known as space weather, can pose risks to astronauts on the International Space Station as well as interfere with communications, the electric power grid, navigation, and radio and satellite operations.

"This next set of missions is the ultimate cosmic carpool," said Dr. Joe Westlake, director of NASA's Heliophysics Division, during a news conference on Sunday. "They will provide unprecedented insight into space weather. Every human on Earth, as well as nearly every system involved in space exploration and human needs, is affected by space weather...." The IBEX, or Interstellar Boundary Explorer, satellite has been mapping the heliosphere since launching in 2008. But IMAP can explore and map the boundaries of the heliosphere like never before because it has instruments with faster imaging that are capable of 30 times higher resolution. Once it reaches an orbit about 1 million miles (1.6 million kilometers) from Earth in about three months, IMAP will also capture observations of the solar wind in real time and measure particles that travel from the sun, study the heliosphere's boundary between 6 billion and 9 billion miles (9.7 billion to 14.5 billion kilometers) away, and even collect data from interstellar space.
Also launching was the SWFO-L1 mission, which CNN says is "intended to act as a solar storm detector, providing early warnings to protect astronauts in low-Earth orbit and satellites that provide critical communications on Earth. It's a tool that will be even more necessary as astronauts venture farther into deep space."

NASA streamed the launch live on YouTube.

United Launch Alliance's Atlas 5 rocket launched 27 more Project Kuiper satellites for Amazon from Cape Canaveral, bringing the constellation's total to 129 in orbit. By the end of the year, Amazon expects over 200 satellites will be deployed, with commercial service starting in several countries by early 2026. Spaceflight Now reports: This is the third batch of production satellites launched by ULA and the fifth overall for the growing low Earth orbit constellation. [...] The 27 Project Kuiper satellites will be deployed at an altitude of 280 miles (450 kilometers) above Earth. Control will shift over to the Project Kuiper team at their 24/7 mission operations center in Redmond, Washington. The separation sequence began about 20 minutes after liftoff, concluding about 15 minutes later. From there, they will confirm satellite health, and eventually raise the satellites to their assigned orbit of 392 miles (630 km) above Earth.

The biggest trees in the Amazon are growing larger and more numerous, according to a new study that shows how an intact rainforest can help draw carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and sequester it in bark, trunk, branch and root. From a report: Scientists said the paper, published in Nature Plants on Thursday, was welcome confirmation that big trees are proving more climate resilient than previously believed, and undisturbed tropical vegetation continues to act as an effective carbon sink despite rising temperatures and strong droughts.

However, the authors warned this vital role was increasingly at risk from fires, fragmentation and land clearance caused by the expansion of roads and farms. "It is good news but it is qualified good news," said Prof Oliver Phillips from the University of Leeds. "Our results apply only to intact, mature forests, which is where we are watching closely. They suggest the Amazon forest is remarkably resilient to climate change. My fear is that may count for little, unless we can stop the deforestation itself."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The world's oceans have failed a key planetary health check for the first time, primarily due to the burning of fossil fuels, a report has shown. In its latest annual assessment, the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research said ocean acidity had crossed a critical threshold for marine life. This makes it the seventh of nine planetary boundaries to be transgressed, prompting scientists to call for a renewed global effort to curb fossil fuels, deforestation and other human-driven pressures that are tilting the Earth out of a habitable equilibrium. The report, which follows earlier warnings about ocean acidity, comes at a time of recordbreaking ocean heat and mass coral bleaching.

Oceans cover 71% of the Earth's surface and play an essential role as a climate stabilizer. The new report calls them an "unsung guardian of planetary health", but says their vital functions are threatened. The 2025 Planetary Health Check noted that since the start of the industrial era, oceans' surface pH has fallen by about 0.1 units, a 30-40% increase in acidity, pushing marine ecosystems beyond safe limits. Cold-water corals, tropical coral reefs and Arctic marine life are especially at risk. This is primarily due to the human-caused climate crisis. When carbon dioxide from oil, coal and gas burning enters the sea, it forms carbonic acid. This reduces the availability of calcium carbonate, which many marine organisms depend upon to grow coral, shells or skeletons.

Near the bottom of the food chain, this directly affects species like oysters, molluscs and clams. Indirectly, it harms salmon, whales and other sea life that eat smaller organisms. Ultimately, this is a risk for human food security and coastal economies. Scientists are concerned that it could also weaken the ocean's role as the planet's most important heat absorber and its capacity to draw down 25-30% of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Marine life plays an important role in this process, acting as a "biotic bump" to sequester carbon in the depths. In the report, all of the other six breached boundaries -- climate change, biosphere integrity, land system change, freshwater use, biogeochemical flows, and novel entities -- showed a worsening trend. But the authors said the addition of the only solely ocean-centerd category was a alarming development because of its scale and importance.

Fossil fuel burning is not just damaging the world's climate; it is also threatening the health of at least 1.6 billion people through the toxic pollutants it produces, data shows. From a report: Carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas from fossil fuel burning, does not directly damage health, but leads to global heating. However, coal and oil burning for power generation, and the burning of fossil fuels in industrial facilities, pollute the air with particulate matter called PM2.5, which has serious health impacts when breathed in.

A new interactive map from Climate Trace, a coalition of academics and analysts that tracks pollution and greenhouse gases, shows that PM2.5 and other toxins are being poured into the air near the homes of about 1.6 billion people. Of these, about 900 million are in the path of "super-emitting" industrial facilities -- including power plants, refineries, ports and mines -- that deliver outsize doses of toxic air.