If you want to sink a well in California and pump out as much water as you can, there historically hasn’t been a lot to stop you. Unlike other Western states, California has never regulated groundwater withdrawals. As a result, over the last 150 years, Californians have pumped nearly 160 cubic kilometers of groundwater from the Central Valley, the state’s agricultural heartland. That’s enough water to fill Lake Powell, Lake Mead, and all the Colorado River reservoirs downstream — twice, with some left over. Groundwater withdrawal in the Central Valley was accelerating even before the current drought began in 2011. As much as 20 cubic kilometers of Central Valley groundwater may have been pumped out in just the last three years, according to one estimate. That’s about 12 percent of the last 150 years’ total depletion.

With less water in the aquifer beneath it to hold it up, the soil throughout the Central Valley is sinking. In some places, the land is dropping as much as a foot a year, damaging roads and other infrastructure and exposing communities to increased flood risk. But the missing water wasn’t just holding up the soil; it may have been holding the earth down as well. A study published earlier this year in the journal Nature suggested that the more water gets pumped out of the ground in the Central Valley, the greater the chance of earthquakes on the nearby San Andreas Fault.

It’s no surprise that groundwater pumping can set off earthquakes. A May 2011 quake in Lorca, Spain, which killed nine people and caused extensive damage to historic buildings, is thought to have been sparked by overdrafting of the local aquifer. It would seem the same physical processes operate in California.

California isn’t the only place where people are overdrafting their aquifers, of course. A recent study by the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the University of California, Irvine, found that the drought-plagued Colorado River basin has lost 50 cubic kilometers of groundwater in the last nine years. That’s 17.3 trillion gallons of water.

The Bible repeatedly describes the Temple as the spiritual center of the world and the source for peace and prosperity. In Isaiah’s famous vision the prophet describes, “They shall beat their swords into plowshares…for my house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations.” The absence of the Temple is seen in the stories reported on the nightly news and its void adversely affects nations, geo-politics and global peace. Director of the Temple Institute in Jerusalem, Rabbi Chaim Richman explains that the 9th of Av “is not about bemoaning the Temple. It’s about bemoaning the world without the Temple. A world that has lost its light, its color and its direction.”

Indeed, there is a growing “Temple Movement” in Israel today with thousands of Jews working to rebuild the Temple. According to a poll taken last year in a leading newspaper Ha’aretz, one third of Israelis believe that Israel should erect the Temple on the Temple Mount. Israel’s Housing Minister called publicly for the rebuilding of the Temple, “We’ve built many little, little temples,” MK Uri Ariel said, referring to synagogues, “but we need to build a real Temple on the Temple Mount.”

When terrorists were stupid enough to come out of the shadows, they fought as a mob of individuals. One rip of a Kalashnikov or a single launch of a rocket-propelled grenade was enough. If they stood to reload, they risked annihilation at the hands of their disciplined, well-trained and heavily armed American opponents.

Today, it’s different. We see Islamist fighters becoming skilled soldiers. The thrust of the Islamic State down the Euphrates River illustrates a style of warfare that melds old and new. US soldiers fighting in Iraq used to say: “Thank God they can’t shoot.” Well, now they can. They maneuver in reasonably disciplined formations, often aboard pickup trucks and captured Iraqi Humvees. They employ mortars and rockets in deadly barrages. To be sure, parts of the old terrorist playbook remain: They butcher and execute prisoners to make unambiguously clear the terrible consequences of resistance. They continue to display an eager willingness for death and the media savvy of the “propaganda of the deed.”

We see these newly formed pseudo-armies emerging across the Levant as well. The Darwinian process of wartime immersion has forced them to either get better or die. While these new armies are becoming more professional, they retain the terrorist’s specialty of disciplined killing. Terrorist killing used to be mostly random. But now killings are often orchestrated, media-driven executions of surrendering soldiers and opposition leaders. Such strategic killing can give the armies a psychological advantage before the clash of arms begins.

Musk is talking about “Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies” by Nick Bostrom of the University of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute. The book addresses the prospect of an artificial superintelligence [AI] that could feasibly be created in the next few decades. According to theorists, once the AI is able to make itself smarter, it would quickly surpass human intelligence.

What would happen next? The consequences of such a radical development are inherently difficult to predict. But that hasn’t stopped philosophers, futurists, scientists and fiction writers from thinking very hard about some of the possible outcomes. The results of their thought experiments sound like science fiction — and maybe that’s exactly what Elon Musk is afraid of. Artificial intelligences could be created with the best of intentions — to conduct scientific research aimed at curing cancer, for example. But when AIs become superhumanly intelligent, their single-minded realization of those goals could have apocalyptic consequences.

“The basic problem is that the strong realization of most motivations is incompatible with human existence,” Daniel Dewey, a research fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute, said in an extensive interview with Aeon magazine. “An AI might want to do certain things with matter in order to achieve a goal, things like building giant computers, or other large-scale engineering projects. Those things might involve intermediary steps, like tearing apart the Earth to make huge solar panels."

"A superintelligence might not take our interests into consideration in those situations, just like we don’t take root systems or ant colonies into account when we go to construct a building.”

If your Twitter feed is anything like mine, news that Ebola might have turned up in Manhattan is freaking out a lot of Americans. “Helpful” bits of commentary include as that it’s “deadly uncurable,” has a 90% fatality rate, and causes “a hemorrhagic fever that eventually leads to a complete bleed-out.” Today’s news merely amplifies the anxiety that’s been building since word got out that two Americans infected with Ebola have been moved to US hospitals for treatment.

There are plenty of people who should be protecting themselves against Ebola’s spread — and they live in West Africa. Those of us who are in the US should feel comforted by the following: Ebola’s not airborne. It can only be spread through bodily fluids. The virus spreads when blood, semen, urine, vomit, feces, or other bodily fluids of an infected person come into contact with someone else’s mucus membranes.

And it’s not just any infected person — it’s a symptomatic infected person. People can only catch ebola from someone actually exhibiting symptoms. Those include vomiting, diarrhea, and, in some cases, hemorrhaging of mucus membranes, such as nose, nail beds and eyes — in other words, pretty hard to miss.

Nearly every hospital in the US is equipped to treat Ebola patients and keep them in isolation. And the symptoms, once they set in, are so aggressive that it’s hard to do much of anything except head to the hospital.

Another reason for all the worry is that the media (Quartz included) has tended to zero in on this outbreak’s rapid spread and its being the “deadliest in history.” While both are true, that says way more about the quality of medical care in war-torn, poverty-stricken pockets of West Africa than it does about Ebola’s virulence. Compare the Mount Sinai response with those Liberian hospitals, which are so packed that they’re having to turn away Ebola patients. The country is running out of rubber gloves, and the health ministry just dumped 37 Ebola-infected corpses in a swampy, open hole near a (so far, relatively healthy) village. Those aren’t first-world problems.

Santamarta, a consultant with cyber security firm IOActive, is scheduled to lay out the technical details of his research at this week's Black Hat hacking conference in Las Vegas, an annual convention where thousands of hackers and security experts meet to discuss emerging cyber threats and improve security measures.

His presentation on Thursday on vulnerabilities in satellite communications systems used in aerospace and other industries is expected to be one of the most widely watched at the conference. "These devices are wide open. The goal of this talk is to help change that situation," Santamarta, 32, told Reuters.

"This is historically unprecedented," former national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski told Foreign Policy magazine recently. "Huge swaths of global territory are dominated by populist unrest, anger and effective loss of state control."

Brzezinski's point wasn't merely that disorder is loose in the world; that's happened in earlier periods of war and revolution (think of Europe in the aftermath of World War I, for example). His point was that chaos is breaking out simultaneously in many regions, and that governments are less capable of meeting those challenges than before.

Moreover, in an age of instant communication, conflicts can spread more readily. In the Middle East, the democratic uprisings of the Arab Spring led to anarchy in Libya, a counterrevolution in Egypt and a civil war in Syria. The war in Syria immediately became part of the larger, regionwide conflict between Sunni and Shiite Muslims, and spread across the border into Iraq.

And with that, two epic struggles were joined: the political battle over who will govern the fractious nations of the Arab world, and a religious war between two major branches of Islam. These aren't the kind of conflicts that end quickly or neatly.