Most frightening and/or depressing story: The most frightening climate change tipping points may not be the ones we hear the most about in the media (at least in my case, I was most aware of melting ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, collapse of ocean circulation patterns). The most damaging may be melting permafrost on land and methane hydrates underwater, both of which contain enormous amounts of methane which could set off a catastrophic and unstoppable feedback loop if released in large quantities.

Most hopeful story: Space-based solar power could finally be in our realistic near-term future. I would probably put this in the “interesting” rather than “hopeful” category most months, but I really struggled to come up with a hopeful story this month. I am at least a tiny bit hopeful this could be the “killer app” that gets humanity over the “dirty and scarce” energy hump once and for all, and lets us move on to the next layer of problems.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: Philip K. Dick was not only a prolific science fiction author, he also developed a comprehensive theory of religion which could possibly even be the right one. Also, possibly related but not really, if there are aliens out there they might live in creepy colonies or super-organisms like ants or termites.