2 factors destroy civilization: climate and economics. The West is currently facing severe problems in both areas.

Some possible precipitating factors are already in place. How the West reacts to them will determine the world’s future, says Rachel Nuwer.

Depression, anxiety, grief, despair, stress—even suicide: The damage of unfolding climate change isn’t only counted in water shortages and wildfires, it’s likely eroding mental health on a mass scale, too, reports the American Psychological Association, the preeminent organization of American mental health professionals.

Direct, acute experience with a changing climate—the trauma of losing a home or a loved one to a flood or hurricane, for example—can bring mental health consequences that are sudden and severe. After Hurricane Katrina, for example, suicide and suicidal ideation among residents of areas affected by the disaster more than doubled according to a paper led by Harvard Medical School, while one in six met the criteria for PTSD, according to a Columbia University-led paper. Elevated PTSD levels have also been found among people who live through wildfires and extreme storms, sometimes lasting several years.

But slower disasters like the “unrelenting day-by-day despair” of a prolonged drought, or more insidious changes like food shortages, rising sea levels, and the gradual loss of natural environments, will “cause some of the most resounding chronic psychological consequences,” the APA writes in its 69-page review of existing scientific literature, co-authored by Climate for Health and EcoAmerica, both environmental organizations. “Gradual, long-term changes in climate can also surface a number of different emotions, including fear, anger, feelings of powerlessness, or exhaustion.”

Somewhere in his packed schedule, he has found time to start a neuroscience company that plans to develop cranial computers, most likely to treat intractable brain diseases first, but later to help humanity avoid subjugation at the hands of intelligent machines.

Beijing: The closure of Beijing’s last big coal-fired power station, which had dominated the skyline of the city’s outskirts for 18 years, has been welcomed by environmental groups, who hope China will maintain momentum on its ambitious clean energy targets.

Beijing had promised in 2013 to have its four coal-fired power stations shut down by this year.

Words and promises of action in some far off future election will not save the once great natural wonder of the Great Barrier Reef from death.

If most of the world’s coral reefs die, as scientists fear is increasingly likely, some of the richest and most colorful life in the ocean could be lost, along with huge sums from reef tourism. In poorer countries, lives are at stake: Hundreds of millions of people get their protein primarily from reef fish, and the loss of that food supply could become a humanitarian crisis.

IBM has taken its first step towards selling computers that are millions of times faster than the one you’re reading this on.

The company has set up a new division, IBM Q, that is intended to make quantum computers and sell them commercially.

Until now, quantum computers have mostly been a much hyped but long away dream. But IBM believes they are close enough to reality to start work on getting software ready for when they become commercially available.

Coca-Cola is ditching flesh and blood creatives in favour of software algorithms in an experiment to see whether AI bots have what it takes to beat their human masters.

Mariano Bosaz, Coca-Cola’s global senior digital director, is spearheading the move as part of wider efforts to push the bounds of technology to see what they are capable of.

In an interview with Adweek at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona Bosaz said: “Content creation is something that we have been doing for a very long time—we brief creative agencies and then they come up with stories that they audio visualize and then we have 30 seconds or maybe longer. In content, what I want to start experimenting with is automated narratives.”

Solar manufacturers led by China’s Trina Solar Ltd. are probably selling at a loss after prices fell to a record low this week.

This thing was not imagination,” he says, jabbing his index finger into the tablecloth. By Cuarón’s estimation, anyone surprised at the accuracy of his movie’s predictions was either uninformed or willfully ignorant about the way the world already was by 2006.’

Revisiting the overlooked 2006 masterpiece with director Alfonso Cuarón.

John Glenn, who captured the nation’s attention in 1962 as the first American to orbit the Earth during a tense time when the United States sought supremacy over the Soviet Union in the space race, and who rocketed back into space 36 years later, becoming the oldest astronaut in history, died Dec. 8 at a hospital in Columbus, Ohio. Mr. Glenn, who in his post-NASA career served four terms as a U.S. senator from Ohio, was 95.

The death was confirmed by Hank Wilson, communications director at the John Glenn College of Public Affairs at Ohio State University. Mr. Glenn had a stroke after heart-valve replacement surgery in 2014, but the immediate cause was not announced.

Mr. Glenn was one of the seven original astronauts in NASA’s Mercury program, which was a conspicuous symbol of the country’s military and technological might at the height of the Cold War. He was not the first American in space — two of his fellow astronauts preceded him — but his three-orbit circumnavigation of the globe captured the imagination of his countrymen like few events before or since. Mr. Glenn was the last survivor of the Mercury Seven.