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The Everything Vaccine
From mild runny noses to savage pandemics, viruses and other pathogens have tormented humans for all of history. We are locked in a perpetual race ag…
1 day, 16 hours ago
What Ever Happened to the Ozone Hole?
A dark blue wound across the bottom of the world — that’s what NASA images showed in the 1980s. It was a hole in the ozone layer, eight million squar…
1 week, 1 day ago
More Nukes!
The best defense against nuclear weapons is nuclear weapons, according to the logic of deterrence. It has guided US defense policy for nearly 80 year…
2 weeks, 1 day ago
Did AI Just Escape?
A bizarre cyberattack on an AI company, it was revealed last week, came from an AI. An autonomous “agent” from OpenAI (maker of ChatGPT) slipped its …
3 weeks, 1 day ago
Now I'm Scared of Cyborgs
For more than a century, science fiction has imagined cyborgs: humans fused with machines to outrun the limits of the body. They show up in Edgar All…
4 weeks, 1 day ago
We Are Losing the Moon
The moon is drifting away. What does it mean? What do we do? With help from a poet, a space security expert, and the former chief scientist of NASA, …
1 month ago
Asteroids! The Doom We're Best At
You probably knew an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs, but it was so much worse than that. Asteroids and other space rocks have been the most destruc…
1 month, 1 week ago
Our Vision of the Post-Apocalypse Is Wrong
What would it take to survive after "the end of the world?" A whole culture of prepping often focuses on a familiar fantasy: grab the gear, flee the …
1 month, 2 weeks ago
Is Geoengineering A Good Idea?
The planet is heating up, every plan to stop it has fallen short, and growing group of scientists has started to ask a stranger question: what if we …
1 month, 3 weeks ago
The True AI Threat is People
Imagine a friendly assistant that can help you build a bioweapon. Or a chatbot in the nuclear weapons chain, cheerfully hallucinating an attack. AI n…
2 months ago