What tech will matter most in the coming year? Read Amy Webb's annual letter.

Move is expansion of existing program that has helped lift tens of thousands of people out of poverty

New York Times reporter Sheryl Gay Stolberg discusses how Kennedy's cuts to government staff and expert groups will impact everyday Americans. A vaccine skeptic, he fired the CDC director last week.

As the Trump administration ramps up immigration arrests, flooding the streets of Los Angeles with masked agents, it’s stripping half a million people of protections that allowed them to enter the cou...

A century after its publication, the book rewards revisiting at various stages of life.

President’s assault on science –particularly climate science – has led to unprecedented funding cuts and staff layoffs

A complaint filed under the Biden administration alleged that on more than 1,000 occasions in 2022 and 2023, the GEO Group had its employees use the disinfectant, which causes irreversible eye damage…

The Trump administration has made repeated cuts targeting the organization’s clinics. Now the US supreme court has struck another blow

Photographer who took harrowing images of the conditions in which poor British people lived in the 1960s and 70s

Turkish state media say authorities have detained a prominent journalist for allegedly "threatening" President Recep Tayyip Erdogan online.

As 2024 comes to a close, four photographers — Carolyn Van Houten, Lorenzo Tugnoli, Salwan Georges and Carmen Abd Ali — look back at the stories they covered.

The top federal lab on native bees is set to close under President Trump’s budget.

Inactive and abandoned oil and gas wells in Canada are a much bigger climate problem than previously thought, emitting seven times more methane than the official estimates, according to a new study fr...

Court votes to back challenge to state waiver that allows it to set tougher car emission standards than federal limits

Abstract. In a rapidly changing climate, evidence-based decision-making benefits from up-to-date and timely information. Here we compile monitoring datasets (published at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15639576; Smith et al., 2025a) to produce updated estimates for key indicators of the state of the climate system: net emissions of greenhouse gases and short-lived climate forcers, greenhouse gas concentrations, radiative forcing, the Earth's energy imbalance, surface temperature changes, warming attributed to human activities, the remaining carbon budget, and estimates of global temperature extremes. This year, we additionally include indicators for sea-level rise and land precipitation change. We follow methods as closely as possible to those used in the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) Working Group One report. The indicators show that human activities are increasing the Earth's energy imbalance and driving faster sea-level rise compared to the AR6 assessment. For the 2015–2024 decade average, observed warming relative to 1850–1900 was 1.24 [1.11 to 1.35] °C, of which 1.22 [1.0 to 1.5] °C was human-induced. The 2024-observed best estimate of global surface temperature (1.52 °C) is well above the best estimate of human-caused warming (1.36 °C). However, the 2024 observed warming can still be regarded as a typical year, considering the human-induced warming level and the state of internal variability associated with the phase of El Niño and Atlantic variability. Human-induced warming has been increasing at a rate that is unprecedented in the instrumental record, reaching 0.27 [0.2–0.4] °C per decade over 2015–2024. This high rate of warming is caused by a combination of greenhouse gas emissions being at an all-time high of 53.6±5.2 Gt CO2e yr−1 over the last decade (2014–2023), as well as reductions in the strength of aerosol cooling. Despite this, there is evidence that the rate of increase in CO2 emissions over the last decade has slowed compared to the 2000s, and depending on societal choices, a continued series of these annual updates over the critical 2020s decade could track decreases or increases in the rate of the climatic changes presented here.

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