In a new study published this morning, and shared exclusively with TIME ahead of its release, we got the first hard numbers on how experts think the risk of a new pandemic might have increased thanks to AI. The Forecasting Research Institute polled experts earlier this year, asking them how likely a human-caused pandemic might be--and how likely it might become if humans had access to AI that could reliably give advice on how to build a bioweapon. What they found -- Experts, who were polled between December and February, put the risk of a human-caused pandemic at 0.3% per year. But, they said, that risk would jump fivefold, to 1.5% per year, if AI were able to provide human-level virology advice. You can guess where this is going -- Then, in April, the researchers tested today's AI tools on a new virology troubleshooting benchmark.

A whole lot has happened since Emily St. John Mandel published her literary science-fiction novel Station Eleven ten years ago this week--including certain global disruptions that made the book appear startlingly prescient. Station Eleven traces the aftermath of a swine-flu pandemic that kills most of the human population, following a group of traveling players who tour the Great Lakes region performing Shakespeare. Station Eleven sold over a million copies, was shortlisted for the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, and recently secured a top spot on the New York Times readers' list of the best books of the century. The 2021 miniseries, creatively adapted for HBO by Patrick Somerville, scored several Emmy nominations and the deep, abiding love of television critics. This list of accolades still fails to represent how many readers connected to this particular story of postapocalyptic society, going so far as to get "Survival Is Not Enough" tattoos--a reference to a motto the Traveling Symphony favors in the book.

On Thursday, jurors convicted former crypto mogul Sam Bankman-Fried of defrauding his customers out of as much as $10 billion. He will likely spend the rest of his 30s--and possibly his 40s, 50s, and 60s--in prison. The judge is expected to sentence him in March. As former confidants and close friends testified against him during his monthlong trial, Bankman-Fried's parents, Joseph and Barbara, showed up day after day to support their son, whose crypto exchange FTX imploded late last year. The Stanford Law professors' hand gestures and facial expressions played prominently into journalists' recounts of the proceedings, offering the real-life version of the cutaway shot integral to any courtroom TV show.

For a while, Zoom was the most important company in America. Three years ago, the pandemic had forced offices to come up with extended remote-working arrangements, and Zoom became the indispensable videoconferencing platform of choice for millions of stuck-at-home Americans. This humble enterprise app was suddenly there for everything: work, school, social gatherings, activism, dating, telehealth, government hearings, funerals, sex parties, and pretty much anything else that made up life when everyone was locked indoors. Already a profitable company by the end of 2019, Zoom became a stock trader's dream after it landed on the NASDAQ in early 2020, growing its customer base by 470 percent, quadrupling its revenue (without paying any income tax, according to one report), and expanding its workforce throughout the year. Since then, as vaccination and reduced transmission allowed American enterprise to adjust back to normalish routines, Zoom has struggled to maintain its pandemic-era success.

Tech executives and artificial-intelligence scientists are sounding the alarm about AI, saying in a joint statement Tuesday that the technology poses an extinction risk as great as pandemics and nuclear war.

"What do you think the rate of Covid-19 is for us?" This is the question that many Black people living in Berlin asked me at the beginning of March 2020. The answer: We don't know. Unlike other countries, notably the United States and the United Kingdom, the German government does not record racial identity information in official documents and statistics. Due to the country's history with the Holocaust, calling Rasse (race) by its name has long been contested.

The pandemic has prompted changes in every industry, and financial services is no exception. Some will be transitory such as 100% remote work and a 0% fed funds rate. Others will continue to have an impact for years to come. The concept of omnichannel customer service is not new in financial services. Yet, the pandemic has accelerated the development of virtual service and the integration of digital channels such as web and chatbots with live channels such as call centers and live chat.

Algorithms have always had some trouble getting things right--hence the fact that ads often follow you around the internet for something you've already purchased. But since COVID upended our lives, more of these algorithms have misfired, harming millions of Americans and widening existing financial and health disparities facing marginalized groups. At times, this was because we humans weren't using the algorithms correctly. More often it was because COVID changed life in a way that made the algorithms malfunction. Take, for instance, an algorithm used by dozens of hospitals in the U.S. to identify patients with sepsis--a life-threatening consequence of infection.

In every election, after the polls close and the votes are counted, there comes a time for reflection. Pundits appear on cable news to offer theories, columnists pen op-eds with warnings and advice for the winners and losers, and parties conduct postmortems. The 2020 U.S. presidential election in which Donald Trump lost to Joe Biden was no exception. For Caltech undergrad Sreemanti Dey, the election offered a chance to do her own sort of reflection. Dey, an undergrad majoring in computer science, has a particular interest in using computers to better understand politics.

In less than 6 hours after starting on our in-house server, our model generated 40,000 molecules that scored within our desired threshold. In the process, the AI designed not only VX, but also many other known chemical warfare agents that we identified through visual confirmation with structures in public chemistry databases. Many new molecules were also designed that looked equally plausible. These new molecules were predicted to be more toxic, based on the predicted LD50 values, than publicly known chemical warfare agents. This was unexpected because the datasets we used for training the AI did not include these nerve agents.