The United States has informed Congress and its allies in Europe about Russian advances on a new, space-based nuclear weapon designed to threaten America’s extensive satellite network, according to current and former officials briefed on the matter.

Such a satellite-killing weapon, if deployed, could destroy civilian communications, surveillance from space and military command-and control operations by the United States and its allies. At the moment, the United States does not have the ability to counter such a weapon and defend its satellites, a former official said.

Officials said that the new intelligence, which they did not describe in detail, raised serious questions about whether Russia was preparing to abandon the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which bans all orbital nuclear weapons. But since Russia does not appear close to deploying the weapon, they said, it is not considered an urgent threat.

The intelligence was made public, in part, in a cryptic announcement on Wednesday by Representative Michael R. Turner, Republican of Ohio and the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. He called on the Biden administration to declassify the information without saying specifically what it was.

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Such a satellite-killing weapon could destroy civilian communications, surveillance from space and military command-and control operations by the United States and its allies. At the moment, the USA does not have the ability to defend its satelliteshttps://t.co/y4MKjFV6Kk

— Lucia Alessi (@lucialessi) February 15, 2024

Russia, China and other U.S. adversaries are using the newest wave of artificial intelligence tools to improve their hacking abilities and find new targets for online espionage, according to a report Wednesday from Microsoft and its close business partner OpenAI.

While computer users of all stripes have been experimenting with large language models to help with programming tasks, translate phishing emails and assemble attack plans, the new report is the first to associate top-tier government hacking teams with specific uses of LLM. It’s also the first report on countermeasures and comes amid a continuing debate about the risks of the rapidly developing technology and efforts by many countries to put some limits on its use.

The document attributes various uses of AI to two Chinese government-affiliated hacking groups and to one group from each of Russia, Iran and North Korea, comprising the four countries of foremost concern to Western cyber defenders.

Read it all.

"#Russia, #China & other U.S. adversaries .. using .. #ArtificialIntelligence tools to improve their #Hacking abilities & find new targets for online espionage, according to a report Wednesday from @Microsoft .. close business partner @OpenAI." @josephmenn https://t.co/V06CVI0Mvw

— Christina Ayiotis, Esq., CRM, CIPP/E (@christinayiotis) February 15, 2024

Nextgov/FCW: Talk about how you prepared for the water-systems security hearing today and any major takeaways from it. 

Clancy: We met with the majority and minority staff ahead of the hearing to get a sense of their objectives. Of course, MITRE has a diverse set of sponsors in these areas, so we engaged with them to make sure we were representing a whole-of-government view across the sectors.

My big message is what I said in my opening statement. A lot of these policy fixes on the fringes are not going to deal with the scale of the threat that we face. So if you want to continue to fight against harassment campaigns from nation states…the sorts of solutions people were talking about are probably okay, but I think the big point I want to get across that didn’t get enough air time is that the threat has really changed.

We’ve got maybe three years to figure this out before China does an all-out attack against our critical infrastructure. We’re going to have to train and prepare to disconnect our operational technology systems from our information technology systems ahead of a major attack from China.

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Expect China to attack US infrastructure within 3 years, MITRE CTO says https://t.co/zWHBOAn8uH

— Defense One (@DefenseOne) February 11, 2024

The World Health Organisation estimates that endometriosis affects around one in ten women during their lifetime—roughly the same as the proportion of the global population with diabetes. But whereas doctors understand why diabetes occurs and how to treat it, their understanding of endometriosis is languishing “30 to 40 years” behind, according to Andrew Horne, a professor of gynaecology and reproductive sciences at the University of Edinburgh and president-elect of the World Endometriosis Society. He blames it on a lack of research and awareness, driven by funding shortages.

Things are starting to change. A clinical trial of the first non-hormonal, non-surgical treatment for endometriosis, started in 2023 in Scotland, is showing promising results. Dr Horne says that the trial, which he co-leads, grew out of closer examinations of how endometriosis lesions form. By taking samples from patients during diagnostic laparoscopies, his team found that those with peritoneal endometriosis—meaning disease on the lining of the pelvic cavity, which represents around 80% of cases—had significantly higher levels of a chemical called lactate in their pelvises than those without.

Lactate is produced when the body breaks down glucose (and is also the cause of the uncomfortable stitches that can suddenly strike runners). Its increased presence, the researchers reckoned, suggested a hand in the development of endometriosis lesions, possibly similar to the role lactate plays in helping cancer cells proliferate.

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At last, progress is being made on a condition that affects one in ten women. The first new drug for endometriosis in four decades is on the horizon https://t.co/ixwWrB8flC 👇

— The Economist (@TheEconomist) February 8, 2024

Elon Musk announced on Jan. 29 that his company Neuralink had surgically implanted its first computer chip in a living person’s brain. The chip is intended to allow people to use phones or computers simply by thinking about what they want to do on the devices.

In a fall 2021 Pew Research Center survey, we asked Americans about the prospect of computer chip brain implants that might one day allow people “to far more quickly and accurately process information.” Americans generally expressed cautious and negative views about the idea, but their opinions varied depending on how such chips might be used.

More than half of U.S. adults (56%) said that widespread use of brain chips to enhance cognitive function would be a bad idea for society. Only 13% said it would be a good idea, and 31% weren’t sure. A large majority (78%) said they would not want a chip implant for themselves, while 20% said they would want one.

Read it all.

In a fall 2021 Center survey, we asked Americans about the prospect of computer chip brain implants. Americans generally expressed cautious and negative views about the idea, but their opinions varied depending on how such chips might be used. https://t.co/Jk6M5fehZY

— Pew Research Center (@pewresearch) February 2, 2024

The first shot of the next war between the world’s big powers, it is often said, will be fired in space. As conflict spreads on Earth, ill omens are emerging in the firmament. As countries race to develop new capabilities in space, some are also building the forces and weapons to fight beyond the atmosphere. On January 28th Iran said it had launched three satellites; Western countries fear they could be used in its ballistic-missile programme. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has opened a new chapter in space war. But America’s biggest dread is China, which seeks to match if not surpass America’s primacy in the heavens. Admiral Christopher Grady, vice-chairman of America’s joint chiefs of staff, explains it bluntly: “Space has emerged as our most essential warfighting domain.”

American generals scrutinise the cosmos from Space Command’s headquarters in Colorado Springs. “Guardians”, as America’s new breed of space warriors call themselves, monitor about 15 daily missile launches, from Ukraine to Iraq and North Korea, at the Joint Operations Centre (joc). They also watch the fast-growing deployment of satellites, heaps of orbiting junk and the re-entry of objects into the atmosphere. Above all, they look for danger.

Among the most closely observed objects are two recently launched robotic space planes, smaller versions of the space shuttle. America’s x37-b lifted off from Cape Canaveral on December 28th (pictured). China’s Shenlong, or Divine Dragon, was lofted a fortnight earlier. Both missions are largely secret.

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War in space is no longer science fiction. My report on the growing danger that earthly conflict will spread to space–and vice versa. Countries are tooling up.🧵 1/6 https://t.co/7xh4gNQMYL

— Anton La Guardia (@AntonLaGuardia) February 1, 2024

In this issue of The Century, theologian Katherine Schmidt writes about the role of the humanities in a world where AI is becoming increasingly powerful, generative, and autonomous. As corporations and policymakers grapple with the blurring lines between human agency and computer-generated agency, Schmidt argues that “ethical theory and ethics education” are vital. Further, she points out that theologians and philosophers are “uniquely qualified” to weigh in on the conversation, since they are skilled at addressing basic questions about truth, meaning, and agency.

Madry’s characterization of a bad actor in the AI world as someone who asks, “How can I be most ingenious in my evilness?” supports Schmidt’s argument. It’s one thing to have a team of technology experts devoted to squelching the plans of folks who deliberately deploy their evilness in ingenious ways. It’s another thing for the developers and disseminators of AI technology to consider the questions behind Madry’s hypothetical question. What exactly is “evilness”? Who gets to define it? Where does it come from? How intrinsic is it to human nature? Is it even possible to recognize it in ourselves? Can it spread from one person to another or multiply within a group of people? How can it be measured, and who does that measuring? To what extent might it be foiled by human effort?

Read it all.

“It’s not unreasonable to believe that AI experts will be better equipped to prevent catastrophes if they’ve spent some time considering theological questions—whether about evil, creation, incarnation, or agency.”

– the Christian Century editorshttps://t.co/R4r9LuWUB4

— theChristianCentury (@ChristianCent) January 26, 2024

TP: What about in the decade ahead, what is a best- and worse-case scenario for how the world might look with gen AI?

EB: The pessimistic scenario is not so much about stagnation. It’s more that the nefarious uses of it will catch us off guard, whether that is weaponising them or through information warfare and abuse. The unknown unknowns. We are into uncharted territory where we have technologies that are much more powerful than before, and history suggests that often the biggest effects are ones that no one anticipated. On the optimistic side, we could start seeing significant productivity growth in the 2020s. We will see new kinds of creative work, scientific progress, industrial designs and new products and services being invented.

TP: A key determinant of which of those two paths we will be closer to are the laws, norms and institutions we develop around gen AI. How optimistic are you that we can get that right?

EB: I would not assume that everything is automatically going to work out fine. I think these are super-powerful technologies and we should have our eyes open, and be quite careful about how we use them. If they’re used right, this could be the best decade in human history. If they’re used badly, it could be one of the worst. So there’s a real premium on smart governance, managers and policymakers really paying attention to this technology. We should not fly blind. 

Read it all.

Excellent stimulating exchange on gen-AI's potential, between @erikbryn and @tejparikh90: ‘On the productivity side, I think 2024 is going to be a year of harvesting a lot of the capabilities’ https://t.co/UJlksthtFo via @ft

— Andrew Hill (@andrewtghill) January 31, 2024

While the public’s attention has been captured by AI chatbots, a quiet revolution has been brewing in the sciences. One of the most promising fields AI is impacting is biology—long dominated by the tradition of the “wet lab,” which favors pure experimental data over computer simulation. Deep learning is changing that. It enables computers to understand complex patterns in data and generate ideas based on those patterns, and that’s making AI more and more central to experimental biology. There is no field more complex in its patterns than biology, so AI is the perfect tool for understanding it. And—as a host of new companies are showing—engineering it.

Oddly enough, even the success of large-language models, or LLMs, like ChatGPT could be seen as evidence of AI’s ability to understand biological complexity. After all, language is a product of a particular biology—ours. The text on which ChatGPT is trained is just one of many complex forms of data produced by biological systems. In nature, this complexity reaches up from the smallest working parts—our proteins, our DNA—but also extends up through cells, organs, to physiology, disease, and behavior.

AI, with the right data, can span all of these scales and make sense of the data we collect on all of them. It’s poised to accelerate basic science, the business of biotechs, the behemoth pharmaceutical companies, and the broader bioeconomy.

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The most exciting aspect of wet AI is that it promises to turn the molecular world into a programmable medium. That could have far reaching impacts, giving us the ability to imagine new categories of products based on engineered biology.https://t.co/Cb5mziIFaF

— proto.life (@protolifemedia) January 20, 2024

In a 30-square-mile patch of northern Virginia that’s been dubbed “data center alley,” the boom in artificial intelligence is turbocharging electricity use. Struggling to keep up, the power company that serves the area temporarily paused new data center connections at one point in 2022. Virginia’s environmental regulators considered a plan to allow data centers to run diesel generators during power shortages, but backed off after it drew strong community opposition.

In the Kansas City area, a data center along with a factory for electric-vehicle batteries that are under construction will need so much energy the local provider put off plans to close a coal-fired power plant.

This is how it is in much of the US, where electric utilities and regulators have been caught off guard by the biggest jump in demand in a generation. One of the things they didn’t properly plan for is AI, an immensely power-hungry technology that uses specialized microchips to process mountains of data. Electricity consumption at US data centers alone is poised to triple from 2022 levels, to as much as 390 terawatt hours by the end of the decade, according to Boston Consulting Group. That’s equal to about 7.5% of the nation’s projected electricity demand. “We do need way more energy in the world than we thought we needed before,” Sam Altman, chief executive officer of OpenAI, whose ChatGPT tool has become a global phenomenon, said at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland last week. “We still don’t appreciate the energy needs of this technology.”

Read it all.

AI needs so much power that old coal plants are sticking around https://t.co/VBOC34Uz8j

— Businessweek (@BW) January 25, 2024

Tumors constantly shed DNA from dying cells, which briefly circulates in the patient’s bloodstream before it is quickly broken down. Many companies have created blood tests that can pick out this tumor DNA, potentially helping doctors diagnose or monitor cancer or choose a treatment.

The amount of tumor DNA circulating at any given time, however, is extremely small, so it has been challenging to develop tests sensitive enough to pick up that tiny signal. A team of researchers from MIT and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard has now come up with a way to significantly boost that signal, by temporarily slowing the clearance of tumor DNA circulating in the bloodstream.

The researchers developed two different types of injectable molecules that they call “priming agents,” which can transiently interfere with the body’s ability to remove circulating tumor DNA from the bloodstream. In a study of mice, they showed that these agents could boost DNA levels enough that the percentage of detectable early-stage lung metastases leapt from less than 10 percent to above 75 percent.

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Researchers improve blood tests’ ability to detect and monitor cancer: The advance makes it easier to detect circulating tumor DNA in blood samples, which could enable earlier cancer diagnosis and help guide treatment. https://t.co/cPA3MJVQ08 pic.twitter.com/CRRIFAFWbQ

— Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) (@MIT) January 19, 2024

In the year ahead, the use of biometrics — an individual’s unique physical identifiers, such as fingerprints and faces — will be expanded at airports in the United States and abroad, a shift to enhance security, replace physical identification such as passports and driver’s licenses, and reduce the amount of time required by travelers to pass through airports. Biometric technology will be seen everywhere from bag drops at the check-in counters to domestic security screening.

In the United States, the Transportation Security Administration is expanding its program allowing passengers to opt in for a security screening relying on a facial recognition match with their physical identification — a photo taken in real time is compared against a scan of a license or passport and assists the T.S.A. officer in verifying a traveler’s identity. This program is currently available at 30 airports nationwide, including Salt Lake City International Airport and Denver International Airport; the T.S.A. said it will expand to more than 400 airports in the coming years.

T.S.A. PreCheck travelers who are flying on Delta Air Lines may not even need to show their identification at all during bag drop and security, if they opt in to Delta’s digital ID program.

Read it all.

Will Passports Be Replaced by Biometrics? https://t.co/4uBMQ6D0JE pic.twitter.com/2nvuvuv7Z1

— Stephanie Maurice Zapata (@StephanieZapa12) January 19, 2024

It is now possible to generate fake but realistic content with little more than the click of a mouse. This can be fun: a TikTok account on which—among other things—an artificial Tom Cruise wearing a purple robe sings “Tiny Dancer” to (the real) Paris Hilton holding a toy dog has attracted 5.1m followers. It is also a profound change in societies that have long regarded images, video and audio as close to ironclad proof that something is real. Phone scammers now need just ten seconds of audio to mimic the voices of loved ones in distress; rogue ai-generated Tom Hankses and Taylor Swifts endorse dodgy products online, and fake videos of politicians are proliferating.

The fundamental problem is an old one. From the printing press to the internet, new technologies have often made it easier to spread untruths or impersonate the trustworthy. Typically, humans have used shortcuts to sniff out foul play: one too many spelling mistakes suggests an email might be a phishing attack, for example. Most recently, ai-generated images of people have often been betrayed by their strangely rendered hands; fake video and audio can sometimes be out of sync. Implausible content now immediately raises suspicion among those who know what ai is capable of doing.

The trouble is that the fakes are rapidly getting harder to spot.

Read it all.

Phone scams, fake videos of politicians and AI-generated Tom Hankses and Taylor Swifts are proliferating. As fakes rapidly get harder to spot, dystopian possibilities abound—yet societies will also adapt to the fakers. Here’s how: https://t.co/yLgDa37oSd 👇

— The Economist US (@EconUS) January 19, 2024

The truth is that I was and am looking for something—ultimately, Someone. We all are. “There is a religious feeling,” writes Romano Guardini in The Wisdom of the Psalms, “which seems to be very rare, although it really should arise very strongly from the depths of man’s being; that is, the longing for God.” As Augustine’s ever trenchant image of the restlessness of the human heart implies, God “has created us in such a way that our created nature is an urge toward Him.” Yet, as Guardini notes, “this urge of longing” can be “choked by life’s commonplaces.” The world “reaches out for us, draws our attention, our feelings and desires toward itself. This covers the depths, drowns out the basic voice.” Guardini captures what YouTube and other similar platforms do: They cover the depths. That is, they hijack yearnings, most significantly the primordial human yearning for God. They numb the longing as they proselytize on behalf of the god of distraction.

I think, therefore, that obsession with various social media platforms and screens both evinces and exacerbates what I would call misplaced eschatology. In this regard, I have in mind Guardini’s revelatory depiction of the human condition in The Word of God: On Faith, Hope, and Charity: “Deep within man there lives the consciousness that something must happen to him, that this present existence is not the real and true one, that it must become new and different and so attain to its proper reality.” Man waits for this “with a hope that he perhaps does not admit even to himself.” Then comes the crucial piece: “This hope is often mistaken about its own meaning.”

When hope is “mistaken about its own meaning,” it is misplaced. So man hopes “that his next work will be more successful than the last, that he will rise to success and power or will find the person whose love can wholly rouse and fill him.”

Read it all.

Mindless entertainment is distracting in the worst possible way. It deludes us into thinking we are looking for nothing at all. The hijacking stupefies yearning.https://t.co/OlXSkPe4bq

— First Things (@firstthingsmag) January 17, 2024

It is notoriously tricky to synthesize data from all the world’s weather stations into one measure of global warming, but all of the major efforts to do so for 2023 are now in, and they are also all in distressing alignment: Last year was the warmest recorded in modern history, and it broke that record by an exceedingly large margin, one that conventional climate science has not yet managed to adequately explain.

The big data sets are now all in, and one of them, published by Berkeley Earth last week, contained what counts as an eye-popping assertion even against the backdrop of the record-setting year: The global average temperature was more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above the preindustrial level. (Other models had it just below.)

When climate scientists and advocates talk about the risks of breaching 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming — as they have somewhat obsessively at least since it was established as the ambitious climate goal of the 2015 Paris Agreement and since the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change described the consequences of exceeding it in its 2018 Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C — this isn’t exactly what they mean. That threshold describes a long-term average rather than a single-year anomaly. But because it describes a multidecade average, the measure will always be backward-looking, with the precise moment the world crossed the 1.5 mark clear only in retrospect. This year a handful of prominent scientists have suggested that when we do look back to mark that time, we may well circle 2023.

Read it all.

How hot was it last year?

Read: https://t.co/zfXKwLBnE2

— New York Times Opinion (@nytopinion) January 18, 2024

Advanced artificial intelligence models can be trained to deceive humans and other AI, a new study has found.

Researchers at AI startup Anthropic tested whether chatbots with human-level proficiency, such as its Claude system or OpenAI’s ChatGPT, could learn to lie in order to trick people.

They found that not only could they lie, but once the deceptive behaviour was learnt it was impossible to reverse using current AI safety measures.

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AI can easily be trained to lie – and it can’t be fixed, study says
https://t.co/r5rx8DNJUA

— Brendan Tierney (@brendantierney) January 15, 2024

Using a type of artificial intelligence known as deep learning, MIT researchers have discovered a class of compounds that can kill a drug-resistant bacterium that causes more than 10,000 deaths in the United States every year.

In a study appearing in Nature, the researchers showed that these compounds could kill methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) grown in a lab dish and in two mouse models of MRSA infection. The compounds also show very low toxicity against human cells, making them particularly good drug candidates.

A key innovation of the new study is that the researchers were also able to figure out what kinds of information the deep-learning model was using to make its antibiotic potency predictions. This knowledge could help researchers to design additional drugs that might work even better than the ones identified by the model.

“The insight here was that we could see what was being learned by the models to make their predictions that certain molecules would make for good antibiotics,” said James Collins, the Termeer Professor of Medical Engineering and Science in MIT’s Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES) and Department of Biological Engineering, a core faculty member of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University, and an institute member at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. “Our work provides a framework that is time-efficient, resource-efficient, and mechanistically insightful, from a chemical-structure standpoint, in ways that we haven’t had to date.”

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We are thrilled to announce the latest discovery by our partners at the Collins Lab: a novel class of antibiotics with activity against MRSA! Read more about the team's "explainable AI" approach underlying this groundbreaking discovery.https://t.co/o8PRSLULwM

— Phare Bio (@PhareBio) December 21, 2023

Pentagon planners worried about the increasing threat from drones have looked at everything from mesh nets and missiles to cannons and lasers, but now a once highly-classified technology is attracting more attention and funding.

High-power microwave devices that can disrupt or even fry the electronics of aerial threats—such as drones and missiles—are moving to the forefront of defense strategies after years of development. In theory, microwave systems offer the ability to keep firing for as long as they have power, which could help take down a swarm of drones.

The stakes for developing such technologies are high: The relatively low cost of small drones has increasingly made them the weapon of choice for less sophisticated armies, terrorists and militant groups trying to overwhelm or slip through defense systems. Hamas has used suicide drones to attack Israel, and the Houthis have been launching drones from Yemen over the Red Sea.

Last week, a U.S. Navy destroyer shot down 14 Houthi drones. The Houthi attacks prompted the U.S. on Monday to unveil a multinational naval force to protect merchant vessels in the Red Sea.

Read it all (registration or subscription).

High-power microwave devices that can disrupt or even fry the electronics of aerial threats are moving to the forefront of defense strategies after years of development https://t.co/tKVbFDTYG2

— The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) December 19, 2023

On 5 December, a U.S. company called Orchid Health announced that it would begin to offer fertility clinics and their hopeful customers the unprecedented option to sequence the whole genomes of embryos conceived by in vitro fertilization (IVF). “Find the embryo at lowest risk for a disease that runs in your family,” touts the company’s website. The cost: $2500 per embryo.

Although Orchid and at least two other companies have already been conducting more limited genetic screening of IVF embryos, the new test offers something more: Orchid will look not just for single-gene mutations that cause disorders such as cystic fibrosis, but also more extensively for medleys of common and rare gene variants known to predispose people to neurodevelopmental disorders, severe obesity, and certain psychiatric conditions such as schizophrenia.

That new offering drew swift backlash from genomics researchers who claim the company inappropriately uses their data to generate some of its risk estimates. The Psychiatric Genomics Consortium (PGC), an international group of more than 800 researchers working to decode the genetic and molecular underpinnings of mental health conditions, says Orchid’s new test relies on data it produced over the past decade, and that the company has violated restrictions against the data’s use for embryo screening.

Read it all.

Genetics group slams company for using its data to screen embryos’ genomes: Orchid Health’s new in vitro fertilization embryo test aims to predict future health and mental issues | Science | AAAS https://t.co/RukcF29qiJ

— Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics (@bermaninstitute) December 18, 2023

In the 16th century, the Belgian cartographer Abraham Ortelius created the world’s first modern atlas — a collection of maps that he called “The Theater of the World.” The maps, drawn by Ortelius and others, detailed what was at the time the best knowledge of the world’s continents, cities, mountains, rivers, lakes and oceans and helped usher in a new understanding of global geography.

Similarly, the creation of cell atlases — maps of organs and bodies constructed cell by cell — is heralding a new era in our understanding of biology. Powerful sequencing and imaging technologies invented in the last decade are revealing with unprecedented detail the composition of human organs and tissues, from the pancreas and liver to the placenta, as well as those of other animals like the mouse and fruit fly. With these new tools, researchers can fingerprint individual cells based on which genes they are expressing. That information has revealed subtle and unsuspected distinctions among cells and has begun to illuminate how the diversity of cell types can be essential to the healthy functioning of organs.

“We’re at this amazing point in time in science where we’re now able to understand the composition of these cell types,” said Steve Quake, a bioengineer and biophysicist at Stanford University who helped develop the technologies that make cell atlases possible. “It’s changed the way we understand how human biology works.”

Read it all.

.@QuantaMagazine: "New Cell Atlases Reveal Untold Variety in the Brain and Beyond"

✍️ @yasemin_sap#studyBRAIN #BICCN @USBrainAlliancehttps://t.co/S1M3aH820s

— Allen Institute (@AllenInstitute) December 13, 2023

Journalists should not spend much of their time writing about journalism. The world is more interesting than the inky habits of the people who report on it. But this week we are making an exception, because the discovery and dissemination of information matters a lot to politics. Don’t take our word for it: “A popular government,” wrote James Madison in 1822, “without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy; or, perhaps both.” Were Thomas Jefferson offered a choice between a government without newspapers and newspapers without a government, he said that he would choose the press (though that is probably going a bit far).

As the turmoil at America’s elite universities over antisemitism shows, creating a political culture in which people can argue constructively, disagree and compromise is not something that happens spontaneously. In media, business models, technology and culture can work together to create those conditions. They can also pull in the opposite direction. Our analysis of over 600,000 pieces of written and television journalism shows that the language of the mainstream American media has drifted away from the political centre, towards the Democratic Party’s preferred terminology and topics. That could lower the media’s credibility among conservatives.

As the country braces for next year’s election, it is worth thinking about the internal forces that deepened this rift. You can take comfort from the fact that the industry has been buffeted time and again during its long history, yet somehow survived. The worry is that today’s lurch may prove worse than any before.

Read it all (subscription).

The leftward leanings of America’s mainstream media undermine their ability to put the record straight. Can you have a healthy democracy without a common set of facts? https://t.co/saHG3ZVRJc pic.twitter.com/KeQN8ScUbn

— The Economist (@TheEconomist) December 14, 2023

Christian groups have welcomed an international agreement, the first of its kind, in Dubai, on a transition away from fossil fuels. The speed and scale of this transition remains in question, however. Developing countries represented at the COP28 climate summit say that there is a lack of funding to help them to decarbonise their economies.

Although this was the 28th COP, the words “fossil fuels” had never previously been included in a final-outcome agreement. Patrick Galey, a senior fossil-fuels investigator at Global Witness, wrote on social media: “Imagine a global process to tackle malaria where it took 30 years for the word ‘mosquitoes’ to appear in decision texts, then that being hailed as a win. That’s how low the bar has been set for climate talks and fossil fuels.”

Talks at the two-week summit ran through the night and ended on Wednesday morning, nearly 24 hours after the proposed closing time.

The final agreement calls on countries to make a commitment to “transitioning away from fossil fuels” and to accelerating action in this “critical decade” to achieve net zero by 2050. It is hoped that this will send a political signal to investors, markets, and the world at large that countries are committed to decarbonising the global economy.

Read it all.

“It is clear that the era of fossil fuels is coming to a close. We may not have driven the nail into the coffin here at COP28, but the end is coming for dirty energy." https://t.co/HTHzgkgIVJ

— Church Times (@ChurchTimes) December 13, 2023

This summer was the Arctic’s warmest on record, as it was at lower latitudes. But above the Arctic Circle, temperatures are rising four times as fast as they are elsewhere.

The past year overall was the sixth-warmest year the Arctic had experienced since reliable records began in 1900, according to the 18th annual assessment of the region, published by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on Tuesday.

“What happens in the Arctic does not stay in the Arctic,” said Rick Thoman, a climate specialist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and an editor of the new report, called the Arctic Report Card.

Read it all.

Observations from researchers and residents, published annually in a report by NOAA, reveal a region grappling with rapid change. https://t.co/xpCDBdkONA

— NYT Science (@NYTScience) December 12, 2023

The Chinese military is ramping up its ability to disrupt key American infrastructure, including power and water utilities as well as communications and transportation systems, according to U.S. officials and industry security officials.

Hackers affiliated with China’s People’s Liberation Army have burrowed into the computer systems of about two dozen critical entities over the past year, these experts said.

The intrusions are part of a broader effort to develop ways to sow panic and chaos or snarl logistics in the event of a U.S.-China conflict in the Pacific, they said.

Among the victims are a water utility in Hawaii, a major West Coast port and at least one oil and gas pipeline, people familiar with the incidents told The Washington Post. The hackers also attempted to break into the operator of Texas’s power grid, which operates independently from electrical systems in the rest of the country.

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The Chinese military is ramping up its ability to disrupt key American infrastructure, including power and water utilities as well as communications and transportation systems, according to U.S. officials and industry security officials.https://t.co/o1z71pOf0F

— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) December 11, 2023

The Food and Drug Administration on Friday approved the world’s first medicine based on CRISPR gene-editing technology, a groundbreaking treatment for sickle cell disease that delivers a potential cure for people born with the chronic and life-shortening blood disorder.

The new medicine, called Casgevy, is made by Vertex Pharmaceuticals and CRISPR Therapeutics. Its authorization is a scientific triumph for the technology that can efficiently and precisely repair DNA mutations — ushering in a new era of genetic medicines for inherited diseases.

In a clinical trial, Casgevy was shown to eliminate recurrent episodes of debilitating pain caused by sickle cell, which afflicts approximately 100,000 people in the U.S., a vast majority of whom are Black. The therapy, whose scientific name is exa-cel, is described as a potential cure because the genetic fix enabled by CRISPR is designed to last a lifetime, although confirmation will require years of follow-up.

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The FDA has approved the world’s first medicine based on #CRISPR gene-editing technology, a groundbreaking treatment for sickle cell disease. 🧵 https://t.co/01YGdXybX8

— STAT (@statnews) December 8, 2023

A YouTuber who intentionally crashed his plane in Southern California and recorded a video of it in a scheme “to gain notoriety and to make money” has been sentenced to six months in prison for obstructing an investigation into the crash by destroying the wreckage, federal prosecutors said Monday.

The YouTuber, Trevor D. Jacob, 30, of Lompoc, Calif., pleaded guilty in June to one count of destruction and concealment with the intent to obstruct a federal investigation, after he removed the wrecked plane from the crash site in December 2021, just over two weeks after the episode, according to a plea agreement filed in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles.

He was sentenced on Wednesday by Judge John F. Walter, and ordered to surrender to the authorities by Jan. 29. “This experience has been so humbling,” Mr. Jacob said in a statement shared by his lawyers. He described the sentence as the “right decision.”

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A YouTuber who intentionally crashed his plane in California and recorded a video of it in a scheme “to gain notoriety and to make money” was sentenced to six months in prison for obstructing an investigation by destroying the wreckage, prosecutors said. https://t.co/PBiiRItPTI

— The New York Times (@nytimes) December 5, 2023

The 137-year-old pharmaceutical and medical-device company has hired 6,000 data scientists and digital specialists in recent years, and spent hundreds of millions of dollars on their work, such as using machines to scour massive health-record datasets. Last year the company opened a state-of-the-art research site near San Francisco that houses advanced data science.

Some early efforts focus on diagnostics, like an algorithm that analyzes heart tests to spot a deadly type of high blood pressure much sooner than humans can, and voice-recognition technology to analyze speech for early signs of Alzheimer’s disease. There’s a virtual-reality goggle set to help train surgeons on procedures like knee replacements.

The long game, though, is a goal that has seen a lot of hype but less concrete proof that it will become a reality: using AI for drug discovery.

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Can 6,000 data scientists and a massive database speed up discovery of new drugs? J&J is trying it. https://t.co/9KKphmEx1U https://t.co/9KKphmEx1U

— The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) November 30, 2023

The world’s largest collection of full human genomes has just gone live.

The UK Biobank — a repository of health, genomic and other biological data — today released complete genome sequences from every one of the 500,000 British volunteers in the database. Researchers around the world can apply for access to the data, which lack identifiable details, and use them to probe the genetic basis for health and disease.

“Scientists are looking at this like Google Maps,” Rory Collins, the UK Biobank’s chief executive, said at a press briefing. “When they want to know what are the pathways from lifestyle, environment, genetics to disease, they don’t go Google, they go to UK Biobank.”

Today’s bonanza releases the complete 3-billion-letter genome sequence for every UK Biobank participant, and follows the 2021 release of whole genomes from 200,000 Biobank participants. The £200-million (US$250-million) effort was funded by the biomedical-research funder Wellcome, the UK government and several pharmaceutical companies — which, in return, got access to the data 9 months before their wider release.

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The world’s largest collection of full human genomes has just gone live.

UK Biobank — a repository of health, genomic and other biological data — today released complete genome sequences from every one of the 500,000 British volunteers in the database https://t.co/p5qC39Avvj

— nature (@Nature) November 30, 2023

Four years ago, Victoria Gray joined a groundbreaking clinical trial that would change her life. She became the first sickle-cell patient to be treated with the gene-editing technology CRISPR—and one of the first humans to be treated with CRISPR, period. CRISPR at that point had largely been used only to tinker with cells in a lab. When Gray got her experimental infusion, scientists did not know whether it would cure her disease or go terribly awry inside her. The therapy worked—better than anyone dared to hope. With her gene-edited cells, Gray now lives virtually symptom-free. Twenty-nine of 30 eligible patients in the trial went from multiple pain crises every year to zero in 12 months following treatment.

The results are so astounding that this therapy, from Vertex Pharmaceuticals and CRISPR Therapeutics, became the first CRISPR medicine ever approved, with U.K. regulators giving the green light earlier this month; the FDA appears prepared to follow suit in the next two weeks. No one yet knows the long-term effects of the therapy, but today Gray is healthy enough to work full-time and take care of her four children.

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Sickle-cell disease is the first disease—and unlikely the last—to be transformed by CRISPR, @sarahzhang reports: https://t.co/kYSZCbY8Ds

— The Atlantic (@TheAtlantic) November 28, 2023

Russia sent waves of explosive drones to strike cities across Ukraine in the largest attack since last winter that likely marks the start of a fresh campaign aimed at demoralizing and dislocating Ukrainians.

Ukraine’s military said it intercepted all but one of 75 Shahed drones overnight, most of which were targeted at Kyiv. Authorities in the capital said five people were slightly injured, including an 11-year-old child, and several buildings damaged.

Russia has spent much of the year rebuilding its stocks of explosive drones and missiles with the aim, Ukrainian officials say, of trying to knock out power and heat in cities over winter. By forcing Ukraine to use air-defense systems to defend cities, Russia is also seeking to divert them from the front line and use up precious missiles, allowing Russian warplanes more freedom to launch attacks on Ukraine’s military.

Russia targeted Ukraine’s power grid with drones and missiles last winter, damaging around 40% of the system and knocking out power in several cities for hours at a time. But a combination of quick repairs and air-defense systems hurriedly delivered by allies prevented lengthy outages of power and heat that could have led people to flee.

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This is Putin’s Russia: massive drone strikes targeting cities, civilian infrastructure. “The leadership of Russia is proud that it can kill.” https://t.co/LGG5f3vpE0

— Antonia Ferrier (@ahrferrier) November 27, 2023