Even as it races to set up the new U.S. AI Safety Institute, the crisis at the degrading lab is becoming more acute. On Sunday, lawmakers released a new spending plan that would cut NIST's overall budget by more than 10 percent, to 1.46 billion. While lawmakers propose to invest 10 million in the new AI institute, that's a fraction of the tens of billions of dollars tech giants like Google and Microsoft are pouring into the race to develop artificial intelligence. It pales in comparison to Britain, which has invested more than 125 million into its AI safety efforts.

This story was originally published by Undark and appears here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Joanne Seiff, a resident of Manitoba, contracted Lyme disease a couple of years ago but didn't remember pulling off the tick that bit her; nor did she have the telltale bullseye rash of a tick bite. Her husband Jeff Marcus, who grew up in New York's Hudson Valley, about an hour and a half from the eponymous town of Lyme, Connecticut, recognized her symptoms immediately because Lyme disease was common there. Canadian doctors, however, were not convinced. "Even though we had been telling people for months that she had Lyme disease and that all she needed was about four weeks of antibiotics, we were seeing specialist after specialist, and getting the same run-around," Marcus says.