Dogs and Cats Living Together
and other impossible things that happened
A register of events that were, until recently, hypotheticals — and in several cases punchlines. The instrument rests on one assumption: that the rate at which the unthinkable becomes the merely documented is a faster-moving indicator than any single catastrophe, and considerably easier to measure than the thing we would actually like to know.
77 events · 2016–2026 · every entry sourced · the 2024–26 entries independently fact-checked, entry by entry, on 19 August 2026
Static edition. A printed snapshot of a decade, current to 19 August 2026. The live instrument — filters, search, and a form for logging new events — runs as a standalone file, because JavaScript on this site is a paid Squarespace feature.
Events logged
77
2016–2026
Weight, 2025
125
against 40 a year in 2016–18
DCLT index
315
2016–18 average = 100
Year on year
+213%
2025 against 2024
Hard signals
68
scoring 7 or above
Incidence
Logged events per year
Bar height is event count; the figure above each bar is that year's summed DCLT weight. 2026 is a part year, shown faded.
Events by domain
Count, with mean DCLT weight in parentheses.
Prior art
"Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling! Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes… the dead rising from the grave! Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together — mass hysteria!" Dr Peter Venkman, Ghostbusters (1984) — the first attempt at this instrument
| Fire and brimstone from the skies | Logged | 489,826 hectares burned across the EU by week 31 of 2026; France's worst since the harmonised record began, the UK's worst in fifteen years. |
| Rivers and seas boiling | Logged | 82% of the world ocean under marine heatwave conditions at end-June 2026. Boiling not yet observed. Directionally, Venkman was not wrong. |
| Forty years of darkness | Not observed | The closest entry is thirty days, on diesel generators, at Europe's largest nuclear plant. |
| Earthquakes, volcanoes | Excluded | These have always happened. The index counts departures from the baseline, not the baseline — which is precisely why it is more useful than a disaster count. |
| The dead rising from the grave | Not observed | Viable anthrax released from thawing Siberian permafrost was considered for this line and rejected as a stretch. |
| Human sacrifice | Out of scope | Definitional problems. |
| Dogs and cats living together | No longer remarkable | The trope has aged worse than the rest of the list. |
Method
Each event is scored on three ordinal axes, one to three points each. The DCLT weight is their sum (range 3–9). Events scoring 7 or above are hard signals. The index compares a calendar year's summed weight against the 2016–18 average, set at 100 — three years chosen as a baseline not because they were calm but because they are the earliest in the log, which is a different thing entirely.
Axis 1
Novelty
- Rare but precedented
- First in decades
- First ever recorded
Axis 2
Reach
- Local or single-sector
- National or regional
- Global or cross-system
Axis 3
Persistence
- Transient shock
- Likely to recur
- New baseline; not reversible
What this instrument cannot do, and one thing it accidentally proves. The log is a convenience sample assembled by an interested observer, so its density measures attention as much as incidence — and over a decade that defect becomes visible in the output rather than hiding inside it. The 2016–2023 entries were gathered by a deliberate sweep with a rough quota per year; the 2024–2026 entries were gathered by asking what had happened lately. That is why 2025 carries three times the weight of 2019, and no honest reading attributes all of that gap to the world. Reporting infrastructure also improved across the window, biasing recent years upward. Scores are judgments; two reasonable people will differ by a point per axis, and a third will object to the axes. The current year is always incomplete. Treat the shape as a prompt for inquiry rather than as evidence — and note that if the line ever turns down, that is the single most encouraging chart anyone could produce.
Event log
| Date | Event | Domain | DCLT |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-08-18 | A drone kills a worker at a bus stop inside a nuclear plant ✓ A drone detonated at a Zaporizhzhia NPP bus stop at about 06:00, causing 16 casualties among staff and subcontractors, one of them fatal. The IAEA relayed the plant director’s description of it as the worst event the facility has faced. | Security | 7 3·2·2 |
| 2026-08-13 | France records its worst wildfire year since 2012, and the UK its worst in fifteen ✓ 489,826 hectares burned across the EU by week 31 — France 99,092 ha, Spain 185,948 ha (its third-worst since 2012), the UK 22,206 ha. The EU total passed 505,000 ha days later, before the mid-August fires in Spain. | Biosphere | 6 2·2·2 |
| 2026-08-05 | An explosive-laden drone is found at a NATO logistics airport ✓ German federal police used a disposal robot at Leipzig/Halle after X-ray confirmed a drone fitted with explosives and a detonator near a Ukrainian cargo aircraft; the detonator was defective and did not fire. A DHL freighter struck an unidentified object 6km away and diverted. Germany logged 144 drone overflights the previous year. | Security | 7 3·2·2 |
| 2026-08-04 | Portuguese men o’ war sting 120 people in a day on the Basque coast ✓ The worst day of an influx that closed San Sebastián’s beaches under red flags; Cantabria recorded 236 stings from 4 July. AZTI researchers have found specimens only millimetres across inshore, suggesting the Bay of Biscay may now be warm enough for the species to breed there rather than merely receive drifters. | Biosphere | 6 2·1·3 |
| 2026-07-31 | The warmest July ocean surface temperature ever measured ✓ Copernicus put the 60°S–60°N average at 20.96°C, above the 2023 record. Global air temperature ran 1.47°C above pre-industrial; Western Europe’s June–July mean was 2.79°C above its baseline. | Biosphere | 8 2·3·3 |
| 2026-07-21 | US measles cases reach the highest level since 1991 ✓ 2,295 confirmed cases by 21 July, already exceeding all of 2025 and the most in any year since elimination was declared in 2000; the count passed 2,318 in early August and is still rising. PAHO reviews US elimination status later in 2026. | Public health | 6 2·2·2 |
| 2026-06-30 | About 82% of the world ocean is under marine heatwave conditions ✓ Copernicus Marine reported the figure for end-June 2026. Marine heatwaves touched 98% of the Mediterranean basin at some point in January–June; the tropical Pacific hit a record June mean of 27.26°C. | Biosphere | 9 3·3·3 |
| 2026-06-29 | A court blocks the first attempted firing of a Federal Reserve governor ✓ In Trump v. Cook the US Supreme Court denied the application 5–4, finding the government unlikely to succeed on the merits and holding that ‘cause’ turns on the seriousness of the alleged misconduct and its link to the governor’s duties. The opinion noted this was the first such attempt in the Fed’s 111-year history. | Institutions | 8 3·3·2 |
| 2026-01-26 | Gold breaks $5,100 an ounce ✓ Spot gold reached a record $5,104, having first crossed $3,000 in March 2025 and $4,000 in October 2025 — roughly 70% in ten months. | Institutions | 7 2·3·2 |
| 2025-12-31 | Finland seizes a cargo ship after another Baltic cable is dragged apart ✓ The Fitburg’s anchor was dragged for hours across the Gulf of Finland, damaging an Elisa telecom cable between Helsinki and Tallinn; Arelion’s cables to Estonia were damaged the same week. It follows Estlink 2 (2024), Balticconnector (2023) and the November 2024 fibre cuts. | Security | 6 2·2·2 |
| 2025-11-21 | The first human case of H5N5 influenza ever recorded, and it was fatal ✓ A backyard-poultry keeper in Washington State died after infection with a subtype never before confirmed in a human. No human-to-human transmission was found. | Public health | 7 3·2·2 |
| 2025-11-10 | The Americas lose measles elimination status ✓ PAHO withdrew the region’s verification after Canada’s outbreak re-established endemic transmission: 12,596 confirmed cases across ten countries and 28 deaths, a thirty-fold increase on 2024. | Public health | 8 3·3·2 |
| 2025-11-07 | Iran’s president warns Tehran may have to be evacuated over water ✓ The five dams supplying the city fell to about 10% capacity after 2.3mm of precipitation by early November, 81% below average, in a sixth consecutive drought year. Nineteen dams nationwide sat below 5%, up from nine three weeks earlier. | Biosphere | 7 3·2·2 |
| 2025-10-28 | Hurricane Melissa ties the strongest Atlantic landfall on record ✓ 185 mph sustained winds at landfall in Jamaica, tying the 1935 Labor Day storm and Dorian; the NHC’s post-season report later raised Melissa’s peak to 190 mph, tying Hurricane Allen for the strongest Atlantic hurricane ever measured. A dropsonde recorded a 252 mph gust, the highest ever measured by dropsonde in a tropical cyclone. 93 dead across the Caribbean. | Biosphere | 7 3·2·2 |
| 2025-10-23 | Europe’s largest nuclear plant runs on diesel for 30 days ✓ Zaporizhzhia lost all off-site power from 23 September to 23 October — the tenth and by far the longest such outage since 2022. Its grid connections have fallen from ten lines before the war to two. | Security | 8 3·3·2 |
| 2025-09-27 | China’s first large chikungunya epidemic: 16,452 local cases ✓ WHO reported local transmission across 21 cities of Guangdong. Globally, 445,271 suspected and confirmed cases and 155 deaths were reported across 40 countries in the first nine months of 2025. | Public health | 7 3·2·2 |
| 2025-09-10 | NATO aircraft shoot down Russian drones over Poland; Article 4 invoked ✓ The first time NATO forces have fired on Russian assets since the invasion began; most of the drones were downed by Dutch F-35s. Poland invoked Article 4 for only the eighth time in alliance history. | Security | 8 3·3·2 |
| 2025-08-27 | Thirteen governments jointly warn that Chinese state hackers reached Western telecom backbones ✓ Advisory AA25-239A, from NSA, FBI, CISA and partners in twelve other countries, described the Salt Typhoon campaign as targeting networks in more than 80 countries; the FBI said at least 200 US companies were hit. Reporting from October 2024 had already placed the actors inside carriers’ lawful-intercept systems and the communications of senior US officials. | Technology | 9 3·3·3 |
| 2025-08-20 | Europe records 27 local chikungunya outbreaks, including one in Alsace ✓ A continental record, with 111 cases in France and first-ever local transmission at that latitude. Aedes albopictus is now established in 369 regions of 16 countries, up from 114 regions a decade earlier. | Public health | 8 3·2·3 |
| 2025-07-21 | An AI system reaches gold-medal standard at the Mathematical Olympiad ✓ Gemini Deep Think solved five of six IMO problems for 35/42, officially graded by IMO coordinators, working in natural language inside the 4.5-hour limit. A year earlier the equivalent systems needed problems hand-translated into formal languages and took two to three days. | Technology | 9 3·3·3 |
| 2025-06-22 | The United States bombs Iranian nuclear sites in the first combat use of the GBU-57 ✓ Seven B-2s dropped 14 thirty-thousand-pound bunker-busters on Fordow and Natanz while a submarine fired more than two dozen Tomahawks at Isfahan — more than 75 precision weapons in one night, and the first operational use of the weapon. | Security | 8 3·3·2 |
| 2025-05-21 | West Nile virus found in British mosquitoes for the first time ✓ UKHSA and APHA detected fragments of West Nile virus genetic material in two pools of Aedes vexans collected in July 2023 near Retford, Nottinghamshire — the first UK detection ever recorded, announced on 21 May 2025. No locally acquired human or equine cases have been found. | Public health | 7 3·1·3 |
| 2025-04-23 | Coral bleaching reaches 84% of the world’s reef area ✓ The fourth global bleaching event, measured from January 2023 to March 2025, covered 82 countries — against 21% of reef area in 1998 and 68% in 2014–17. NOAA had to add three new alert levels because its existing top severity level no longer described the observed mortality. | Biosphere | 9 3·3·3 |
| 2025-03-22 | Arctic winter sea ice hits its smallest maximum on record — then does it again ✓ The 2025 peak of 14.31m km² on 22 March was the lowest in the satellite record; the 2026 maximum of 14.29m km² on 15 March was lower still, but inside NSIDC’s 40,000 km² threshold, so the two count as a statistical tie for lowest in 48 years. | Biosphere | 9 3·3·3 |
| 2025-02-14 | A drone strikes the Chernobyl containment arch ✓ A drone hit the New Safe Confinement at 87 metres, damaging outer and inner cladding and the main crane system and igniting fires that smouldered for weeks. The IAEA initially reported no breach of inner containment; by December 2025 it concluded the arch had lost its primary safety functions, including confinement. | Security | 8 3·2·3 |
| 2024-09-17 | Thousands of booby-trapped pagers detonate simultaneously across Lebanon ✓ At least 12 killed and about 2,800 injured on the first day, when pagers used by Hezbollah members exploded near-simultaneously; walkie-talkies detonated the following day. Human Rights Watch said customary international law prohibits booby traps of this kind and called for an investigation; UN experts called the attacks a violation of international law. | Security | 9 3·3·3 |
| 2024-04-29 | An airline drops a scheduled route because satellite navigation stopped working ✓ Finnair suspended Helsinki–Tartu for a month after two aircraft aborted landings due to GPS interference attributed to Russian jamming; Tartu’s approach depends solely on GPS. Service resumed in June once an alternative procedure was arranged. | Security | 7 3·1·3 |
| 2024-03-25 | H5N1 avian influenza establishes itself in dairy cattle ✓ A multistate US outbreak in a host species never previously known to sustain the virus. USDA passed 1,000 affected herds in April 2025 and by mid-2026 had confirmed roughly 1,166 herds across 19 states, 766 of them in California. | Public health | 9 3·3·3 |
| 2024-03-20 | America’s largest home insurer non-renews 72,000 California policies ✓ State Farm General, the California subsidiary of the largest US home insurer, announced non-renewal of roughly 72,000 policies — 30,000 homeowners and related lines plus about 42,000 commercial apartment policies, some 2% of its California book — nine and a half months before the Los Angeles firestorms. | Institutions | 7 2·2·3 |
| 2024-01-29 | Deepfaked executives on a video call take US$25m from Arup ✓ A Hong Kong finance employee of the engineering firm Arup made 15 transfers totalling HK$200m (about US$25.6m) to five accounts after joining a video conference in which the CFO and the other participants were AI-generated. Hong Kong police disclosed the case in February 2024; Arup was named in May. | Technology | 8 3·2·3 |
| 2023-10-07 | Hamas breaches Israel’s Gaza barrier and kills about 1,200 people in a day ✓ Thousands of fighters broke through the fortified perimeter by land, sea and paraglider. UN experts record approximately 1,200 killed, at least 809 of them civilians, and 252 people abducted — the deadliest single day in Israel’s history. | Security | 9 3·3·3 |
| 2023-09-30 | September 2023 breaks the monthly global temperature record by 0.5°C ✓ At 16.38°C the month ran 0.93°C above the 1991–2020 mean and a full 0.5°C above the previous warmest September — the largest margin ever seen for any month in the ERA5 record. | Biosphere | 9 3·3·3 |
| 2023-06-23 | A private army seizes a Russian military headquarters and marches on Moscow ✓ Wagner Group forces took Rostov-on-Don including the Southern Military District HQ and drove an armoured column to within about 200 km of Moscow before turning back. Putin called it an armed mutiny and a stab in the back. | Security | 7 3·2·2 |
| 2023-06-07 | Canada’s fire season burns 15 million hectares, doubling the previous record ✓ More than seven times the long-term average and more than double the 1989 record, with 834 large fires against an average of 320. New York City’s air quality index peaked at 484, the worst on record for the city. | Biosphere | 8 3·2·3 |
| 2023-05-27 | State Farm stops writing any new California property insurance ✓ California’s largest homeowners insurer ceased accepting new applications for all property and casualty lines statewide, citing catastrophe exposure and reinsurance costs — climate risk becoming uninsurable at scale rather than merely repriced. | Institutions | 8 3·2·3 |
| 2023-03-10 | Silicon Valley Bank fails after a $42bn single-day deposit run ✓ Regulators closed a bank holding $209bn in assets after outflows exceeding $40 billion in one day, with management expecting a further $100 billion the next. The Federal Reserve’s own post-mortem calls the outflow unprecedented. | Institutions | 7 3·2·2 |
| 2023-02-01 | ChatGPT is estimated to reach 100 million users in two months ✓ A UBS analyst note using Similarweb data put monthly active users at 100 million in January 2023, against about nine months for TikTok and two and a half years for Instagram. OpenAI never confirmed the figure. | Technology | 9 3·3·3 |
| 2022-11-11 | FTX files for bankruptcy nine months after a $32bn valuation ✓ FTX Trading and 101 affiliated debtors filed for Chapter 11 after a customer run. The incoming CEO, who had run the Enron wind-down, told the court he had never seen such a complete failure of corporate controls. | Institutions | 6 2·2·2 |
| 2022-09-28 | The Bank of England buys gilts to stop a pension-fund death spiral ✓ Days after the mini-budget the Bank announced unlimited temporary purchases of long-dated gilts on whatever scale was necessary, warning of a material risk to UK financial stability — its first purchases made explicitly for stability rather than monetary policy, while preparing to raise rates. | Institutions | 7 3·2·2 |
| 2022-09-26 | Undersea explosions destroy the Nord Stream gas pipelines ✓ Four ruptures caused by underwater detonations disabled both pipelines in the Baltic — the first successful sabotage of major transcontinental energy infrastructure in European waters. Responsibility remains formally unestablished. | Security | 9 3·3·3 |
| 2022-08-25 | Pakistan’s August rainfall runs 243% above normal, affecting 33 million ✓ 192.7 mm of rain against a normal of 56.2 mm — the wettest August since records began in 1961, with Sindh at 8.3 times its normal rainfall. Over 33 million people were affected. | Biosphere | 7 3·2·2 |
| 2022-07-23 | Mpox is declared a global emergency after spreading to 111 countries ✓ The first time the virus spread widely person-to-person outside West and Central Africa: 87,529 confirmed cases and 141 deaths across 111 countries, most with no prior history of mpox. | Public health | 8 3·3·2 |
| 2022-07-21 | Polio returns to New York and London ✓ A case of paralytic polio in an unvaccinated Rockland County adult — the first US case in nine years — alongside sustained detection of vaccine-derived poliovirus in London sewage, in a country declared polio-free in 2003. | Public health | 7 3·2·2 |
| 2022-07-19 | The UK exceeds 40°C for the first time ✓ Coningsby, Lincolnshire reached 40.3°C, 1.6°C above the previous national record. Forty-six stations exceeded the old record on the same day. | Biosphere | 8 3·2·3 |
| 2022-02-24 | Russia launches the largest land war in Europe since 1945 ✓ Russian forces invaded Ukraine along multiple axes. The UN General Assembly’s eleventh emergency special session deplored the aggression by 141 votes to 5 — directed at a permanent member of the Security Council. | Security | 9 3·3·3 |
| 2021-09-07 | El Salvador makes bitcoin legal tender, a world first ✓ The first sovereign state to grant a decentralised cryptocurrency full legal tender status alongside the dollar, with businesses legally obliged to accept it. The IMF had urged the government not to proceed. | Institutions | 7 3·2·2 |
| 2021-08-14 | Rain falls at the summit of the Greenland ice sheet for the first time ✓ Rain was observed at Summit Station, 3,216 m up, with no previous report of rainfall there. Temperatures stayed above freezing for about nine hours and surface melt covered 872,000 square kilometres. | Biosphere | 9 3·3·3 |
| 2021-06-29 | Lytton hits 49.6°C, smashing Canada’s heat record, then burns down ✓ The third consecutive day breaking the national record, 4.6°C above Canada’s previous all-time high set in 1937. A wildfire destroyed most of the village the following day. | Biosphere | 8 3·2·3 |
| 2021-05-07 | Criminal ransomware shuts the largest US fuel pipeline for six days ✓ Colonial Pipeline halted its entire system after a DarkSide intrusion, triggering panic buying and station outages across the Southeast. The company paid roughly $4.4m in bitcoin, of which the DOJ later seized about $2.3m. | Security | 8 3·2·3 |
| 2021-01-06 | A mob storms the US Capitol and halts certification of a presidential election ✓ Both chambers were evacuated and the electoral count suspended for roughly six hours — the first violent interruption of a US presidential certification and the first breach of the Capitol since 1814. More than 1,200 defendants have been charged. | Security | 8 3·3·2 |
| 2020-12-13 | A routine software update plants Russian spies in nine US agencies ✓ A backdoor inserted into SolarWinds Orion updates reached nearly 18,000 customers; nine federal agencies and about 100 companies were compromised, and CISA ordered agencies to disconnect the product outright. | Technology | 9 3·3·3 |
| 2020-11-30 | AlphaFold reaches experimental accuracy on protein structures ✓ A median 92.4 GDT across all CASP14 targets, with median error around 1.6 angstroms, crossing the threshold regarded as competitive with experimental determination. The field had been stuck on the problem for nearly 50 years. | Technology | 9 3·3·3 |
| 2020-06-20 | The Arctic reaches 38°C for the first time on record ✓ Verkhoyansk, Siberia, about 115 km north of the Arctic Circle, recorded 38.0°C — verified by the WMO as a record high for the Arctic region. | Biosphere | 9 3·3·3 |
| 2020-05-28 | GPT-3 shows a language model can learn tasks from a prompt alone ✓ A 175-billion-parameter model, ten times larger than any previous dense language model, performed new tasks from a handful of in-context examples with no fine-tuning — a capability widely assumed to require architectural breakthroughs rather than scale. | Technology | 9 3·3·3 |
| 2020-04-20 | US crude oil futures settle at minus $37.63 a barrel ✓ The expiring May WTI contract fell from $17.73 to settle below zero, meaning sellers paid buyers to take delivery — the first negative print in the contract’s 37-year history. | Institutions | 8 3·3·2 |
| 2020-03-11 | WHO declares COVID-19 a pandemic ✓ The first pandemic caused by a coronavirus, declared with more than 118,000 cases in 114 countries and 4,291 deaths. | Public health | 9 3·3·3 |
| 2020-01-03 | The US assassinates a serving Iranian general by drone in Baghdad ✓ A drone strike killed Qassem Soleimani, commander of the IRGC-Quds Force, announced publicly by the Pentagon as a directed killing. Iran retaliated five days later with ballistic missiles against US troops. | Security | 8 3·3·2 |
| 2019-12-18 | Australia’s hottest day on record: a 41.88°C national average maximum ✓ The area-averaged maximum beat the previous national record by more than 1.5°C — and beat the record set the day before. Eleven days that month exceeded a 40°C national average. | Biosphere | 8 3·2·3 |
| 2019-11-15 | Measles kills 83 in Samoa after vaccine coverage collapses to about 34% ✓ An epidemic of 5,707 confirmed cases and 83 deaths — 87% of them children under five — in a country of 200,000, after immunisation coverage fell from 74% to about 34% in a year. | Public health | 6 3·1·2 |
| 2019-09-14 | Drones and cruise missiles take out 5% of world oil supply in one morning ✓ Strikes on Saudi Aramco’s Abqaiq plant and Khurais field halted 5.7 million barrels a day — over half of Saudi output — triggering the largest single-day oil price jumps in a decade. | Security | 8 3·3·2 |
| 2019-08-21 | Germany auctions a 30-year bond at a negative yield ✓ The first ever 30-year zero-coupon Bund sold at an average yield of -0.11%, guaranteeing buyers a nominal loss if held to 2050; less than half the €2 billion offered was placed. Germany’s entire yield curve had gone below zero that month. | Institutions | 7 3·2·2 |
| 2018-10-02 | A journalist is killed and dismembered inside a consulate in a NATO capital ✓ Jamal Khashoggi was killed in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul by a 15-member team flown in from Riyadh. The UN Special Rapporteur concluded it was a deliberate, premeditated execution for which the Saudi state is responsible. | Security | 7 3·2·2 |
| 2018-07-23 | Japan sets an all-time national heat record of 41.1°C ✓ Kumagaya, near Tokyo, broke Japan’s national record; more than 10,000 people were hospitalised during the heatwave, which authorities treated as a disaster-level event. | Biosphere | 7 2·2·3 |
| 2018-05-19 | Nipah virus emerges in South India for the first time, killing 17 of 19 ✓ The first Nipah outbreak ever recorded in South India, in Kozhikode district, Kerala — 19 cases and 17 deaths, a case fatality rate of about 89%. | Public health | 6 3·1·2 |
| 2018-03-18 | A self-driving car kills a pedestrian for the first time ✓ An Uber test vehicle struck and killed Elaine Herzberg in Tempe, Arizona. The NTSB found the system detected her 5.6 seconds before impact but never correctly classified her, and did not register an imminent collision until 1.2 seconds before. | Technology | 7 3·1·3 |
| 2018-03-04 | A military nerve agent is used in an English cathedral city ✓ Three people were poisoned in Salisbury with a Novichok-class agent that the OPCW found to be of high purity, a signature of state manufacture. A local resident died in July after handling a discarded perfume bottle containing it. | Security | 7 3·2·2 |
| 2018-02-05 | The VIX doubles in a day and short-volatility products are wiped out ✓ The volatility index rose 115% in a single day, by far the largest move in its history; Credit Suisse’s XIV note lost over 90% of its value overnight and was delisted days later. | Institutions | 7 3·2·2 |
| 2017-12-05 | AlphaZero reaches superhuman chess, shogi and Go from scratch in 24 hours ✓ Starting from random play and only the rules, it beat the world-champion program in each game within a day of self-play, with no human game knowledge or opening books. | Technology | 8 3·2·3 |
| 2017-08-01 | Madagascar’s plague epidemic turns urban and pneumonic ✓ Between August and November 2017 Madagascar recorded 2,384 plague cases and 207 deaths, 77% of them pneumonic — the person-to-person form — striking cities including Antananarivo rather than following the usual rural bubonic pattern. | Public health | 6 2·2·2 |
| 2017-07-12 | A trillion-tonne iceberg breaks off the Larsen C ice shelf ✓ Iceberg A-68 calved from Larsen C covering roughly 5,800 square kilometres, leaving the shelf about 12% smaller in area and at its smallest recorded extent. | Biosphere | 7 2·2·3 |
| 2017-06-27 | NotPetya: a state cyberweapon aimed at Ukraine wrecks global companies ✓ Malware pushed through a Ukrainian tax-software update irrecoverably wiped systems at Maersk, Merck, FedEx/TNT and Mondelez. The White House called it the most destructive and costly cyberattack in history; the widely cited $10bn total is an estimate, not an audited figure. | Security | 9 3·3·3 |
| 2017-05-12 | WannaCry ransomware shuts down a third of England’s hospital trusts ✓ At least 81 of 236 NHS trusts were disrupted along with 595 GP practices, and around 19,000 appointments and operations were cancelled, by ransomware built on a leaked NSA exploit. | Security | 8 3·3·2 |
| 2016-10-21 | Hacked webcams and DVRs knock Twitter, Spotify and Reddit off the internet ✓ A denial-of-service attack on DNS provider Dyn, launched from consumer devices running Mirai malware, made dozens of major sites unreachable in three waves. US-CERT documented Mirai botnets of roughly 380,000 hijacked devices producing floods of at least 1.1 terabits per second. | Security | 8 3·2·3 |
| 2016-08-01 | Thawing permafrost triggers Siberia’s first anthrax outbreak since 1941 ✓ A 35°C heatwave on the Yamal Peninsula thawed permafrost holding an infected reindeer carcass, killing more than 2,300 reindeer and infecting 21 people; a 12-year-old boy died and about 90 people were hospitalised. | Public health | 6 3·1·2 |
| 2016-03-22 | Only 9% of Great Barrier Reef reefs escape the 2016 bleaching ✓ Surveys of 1,156 reefs found just 8.9% escaped bleaching entirely, against 44.7% in 1998 and 42.4% in 2002. The reef bleached again in 2017 — the first back-to-back mass bleaching on record. | Biosphere | 9 3·3·3 |
| 2016-03-15 | AlphaGo beats Lee Sedol 4-1, a decade before experts expected ✓ DeepMind’s system defeated the 18-time world champion in Seoul before an audience of more than 200 million. Go was considered the last board game where humans held a decisive edge. | Technology | 9 3·3·3 |
| 2016-02-04 | Hackers steal $81m from a central bank by forging SWIFT payment orders ✓ Attackers inside Bangladesh Bank’s network sent 35 fraudulent payment instructions to the New York Fed seeking roughly $951 million; $81 million was laundered through Philippine casinos. The DOJ attributed it to a North Korean state-backed conspiracy. | Technology | 8 3·2·3 |