Humanity's demands exceed our planet's capacity to sustain us by 50%. So we need the equivalent of 1.5 planets to provide what we ask for. The 2012 Living Planet Report, launched by WWF this week, provides a sobering wake-up call to the reality that human activity is exceedingly impacting negatively on our planet.

In late January and again in the second week of March, the sun lashed out in a bit of a temper tantrum, on both occasions sending out a powerful interplanetary coronal mass ejection whose full effects reached Earth in a few days. We got lucky: Nothing much happened, and the resulting space weather storm didn’t pack as big a punch as expected.

Having a problem with your internet or cellphone connection? Or making strange bleeps yourself? You may have to blame a higher power – the sun.