When the clock strikes midnight...

Those great thinkers mentioned in my last post have garnered more support for their pessimism. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a non-profit organization dedicated to global security analysis, has moved its famed Doomsday Clock forward by two minutes for two reasons: the spread of nuclear weapons and climate change. Now it sits just five minutes shy of midnight, the marker for the "end of humanity." You can read more about the Clock and its history here at Nature.