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DanDrollette writes:
Ten years ago, author David Quammen interviewed scientists about the possibility of a new pandemic. Their prediction: there would indeed be a new disease, likely from the coronavirus family, coming out of a bat, and it would happen in or around a wet market in China.
But what was not predictable was how unprepared we would be.
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Lasrick writes:
12 years (and billions of rubles) after skirmishes between pro-Russian separatists and government forces in Georgia and the subsequent invasion of the former Soviet republic by Russian forces, Russia has heeded the lessons learned from that conflict: The Russian military had gone to war in using World War II-era compasses for navigation and outmoded equipment for weapons targeting, a far cry from the capabilities of the US military. But Russia is now challenging the United States’ long-standing supremacy in space, working to exploit the US military’s dependence on space systems for communications, navigation, intelligence, and targeting.
Aaron Bateman of Johns Hopkins, a former US Air Force intelligence officer who has published on technology and military strategy, Cold War history, and European security affairs, writes about a coming space arms race, with Moscow’s aggressive behavior in space potentially inducing the United States to pursue more assertive policies, like the reinvigoration of Cold War-era anti-satellite weapons programs.
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Dan Drollette writes:
We absolutely, positively, must tackle climate change speedily. Or as the authors of this article put it: "By 'speed,' we mean measures—including regulatory ones—that can begin within two-to-three years, be substantially implemented in five-to-10 years, and produce a climate response within the next decade or two." (Quick aside: one of the authors, Mario Molina, won the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1995, for his work on holes in the ozone layer.)
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Lasrick writes:
Scientists with only the pursuit of truth in mind have proven—through meticulous radio-carbon dating and NO TASTING AT ALL—that half the bottles of expensive aged Scotch whisky they tested weren’t as old and valuable as purported.
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Lasrick writes:
On the surface, who could disagree with quashing the idea of supposed killer robots? Dr. Larry Lewis, who spearheaded the first data-based approach to protecting civilians in conflict, wants us to look a bit closer.
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Lasrick writes:
In a stunning change, India has been aggressively pivoting away from coal-fired power plants and towards electricity generated by solar, wind, and hydroelectric power. "The reasons for this change are complex and interlocking, but one aspect in particular seems to stand out: The price for solar electricity has been in freefall, to levels so low they were once thought impossible." This is a piece of exceptionally good news, as it follows on the heels of the general chaos and weakening of goals that seem to have come out of last week's UN climate conference in Madrid, where the United States, Australia, and Brazil pushed for carbon loopholes, sending the conference into overtime and diluting the call for countries to strengthen their commitments under the Paris Agreement.
António Guterres, the UN Secretary-General, had been pushing for the world's biggest emitters to do much more. Guterres took to Twitter over the weekend: "I am disappointed with the results of #COP25. The international community lost an important opportunity to show increased ambition on mitigation, adaptation & finance to tackle the climate crisis. But we must not give up, and I will not give up."
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Lasrick writes:
You may remember the explosion at VECTOR, once a center of Soviet biological warfare research. Filippa Lentzos, senior research fellow jointly appointed in the Departments of War Studies and of Global Health and Social Medicine at King’s College London, just posted an update on what happened after the explosion. Her research focuses on biological threats and on the security and governance of emerging technologies in the life sciences, and she's been covering the accident since it first happened in September.
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Dan Drollette writes:
The incident should serve as yet another wake-up call that the nuclear power industry needs to take cybersecurity more seriously.
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Lasrick writes:
Two Canadian climate researchers had both calculated their carbon budgets and long believed that a single transatlantic flight would blow their annual carbon budget. Then they spoke to a mathematics colleague, who helped them crunch the numbers.
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Dan Drollette writes:
Opponents of wind power claim that it's too unreliable, intermittent, unpredictable, and expensive to ever be a major energy source. But on Block Island, Rhode Island — site of North America's first commercial, offshore wind farm — residents found the exact opposite to be true. The Bulletin goes to the smallest town in the smallest state to find out why, in this multimedia package.
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Lasrick writes:
This is the first installment in a new series at the New York Times, “Op-Eds From the Future,” in which science fiction authors, futurists, philosophers and scientists write op-eds that they imagine we might read 10, 20 or even 100 years in the future. The challenges they predict are imaginary — for now — but their arguments illuminate the urgent questions of today.
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Dan Drollette writes:
A little-publicized $7 billion federal agency is key to defending the country from a biological attack. Its operators have to prepare for the unthinkable, such as what to do if 100,000 cases of some new disease with pandemic potential appears—what global health officials have sometimes dubbed “Disease X.”
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Lasrick writes:
In an era of unceasing cyberattacks, including cases of state-sponsored hacking, insurance companies are beginning to re-interpret an old line in their contracts known as the “war exclusion.” Take the case of snack company Mondelez International, hit in the so-called “NotPetya” attack of 2017. Zurich Insurance rejected a $100 million claim from the company after the White House, in January 2018, attributed the NotPetya attack to the Russian military. Mondelez filed a lawsuit last fall, so the question for Zurich is whether the chain of events that led to NotPetya striking down Mondelez’s network qualifies as warfare. A court ruling in favor of Zurich could make cyberwar much more real, and costly.
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Dan Drollette writes:
A specialist in nuclear security analyzes Game of Thones. One immediate similarity to the concept of Mutual Assured Destruction: The inherent difficulties of managing fictional dragons and real-life nuclear weapons. (Which George R.R. Martin was well-aware of.)
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Lasrick writes:
A court ruling on whether bots have First Amendment free speech rights remains in the realm of conjecture, but as a new law in California will soon force bots that engage in electioneering or marketing to declare their non-human identity, it may be coming soon. Laurent Sacharoff, a law professor at the University of Arkansas, thinks the people programming bots may want US courts to answer the question on free speech rights for bots in the affirmative. Take a hypothetical bot that engages a voter around a shared concern like motherhood, for instance. "If it has to say, ‘Well look, I’m not really a mother, I’m a chatbot mother, a mother of other chatbots. And when I say I feel your pain, I don’t actually have feelings.’ That’s just not going to be very effective,” Sacharoff says.
