Breaking Waves: Ocean News

Britain expands heat alerts while estimates suggest June’s death toll could surpass 20,000 across continent The UK is sweltering through the peak of its third heatwave of the year as countries around Europe struggle to recover from an early onslaught of baking summer heat. Punishing temperatures pushed higher by fossil fuel pollution have broken records across the continent in recent weeks. Western Europe experienced its hottest June on record, scientists confirmed on Thursday, accompanied by high global ocean temperatures that could cause “mass-mortality events” for some species. Continue reading...

A brown huntsman is the quickest of more than 250 species analysed by scientists in the UK and Germany If arachnophobes were not frightened enough by the horrific ability of Australia’s huntsman spiders to drag dead mice up the sides of fridges, they now have another reason. They might be the fastest spiders on the planet. Continue reading...

AI companies want to capture the value created by entire industries. That concentration of wealth and power is society’s greatest risk Opposition to AI datacenters has emerged as a primary theme in US politics, one that – surprisingly – doesn’t fall along party lines. We applaud people coming together for constructive debate on any issue, and agree that communities need to evaluate whether any economic benefits these datacenters bring is worth their costs. Still, we worry that a focus on datacenters obscures the larger impacts of AI on people’s lives: the concentration of power of AI companies, and their widespread political and financial influence. Local datacenter opposition is grounded in legitimate concerns about misallocation of land resources when housing is at a premium, pressures on already higher energy prices, and localized environmental impact. Unlike other resource-consuming and polluting industrial facilities, datacenters produce very few jobs. The fact that US opposition to datacenters seems to be most fierce among lower-income communities reflects righteous indignation with an inequitable bargain, where tech companies and developers profit from exploiting local resources but offer little in return. On a global scale, their carbon footprint could grow unsustainably if usage accelerates. And all this is in aid of a technology that many fear will propagate misinformation, take their jobs, or even cause existential risks for humanity. Continue reading...

Most cases used to be seen after exertion or being left in cars, but extreme heat has widened risk Extreme temperatures are causing heatstroke in pets even when they are restricted to homes and gardens, vets have warned, as parts of the UK enter the third heatwave of the year. Temperatures have reached 40C or more in recent weeks in countries including Germany, France and Spain, with western Europe experiencing its hottest June on record. While such events have been linked to hundreds of excess deaths in people, the rising mercury is also taking its toll on animals. Continue reading...