In her new book on biological warfare, Annie Jacobsen didn't even discuss AI because scientists can already warp Mother Nature to create extinction-level events. We've been hearing a great deal recently about the specter of AI-driven human extinction . Maybe our misplaced trust in AI intelligence will set off World War III . Or AI agents will unleash widespread cyberattacks and take over the internet. Given too much autonomy, the machines will run amok. They may seek to deceive their creators--wait, that's already happened . Suppose they conclude, like Agent Smith in, that "human beings are a plague, and we are the cure." Or perhaps the chatbots help bad humans unleash a literal plague--a biological weapon .

In "Biological War," Annie Jacobsen imagines society collapsing from a man-made plague--part of a wave of such prophecies. But what do we miss when we try to predict the future? In the fall of 1989, a select group of Soviet scientists was summoned to Obolensk, a secluded municipality on Moscow's periphery, and gathered at what appeared to be an insane asylum to discuss a pioneering technique for mass murder. If someone had been observing the institutional activity from space--a distinctly non-theoretical possibility--they might have seen a shuffle of patients roaming the grounds or playing volleyball in their pajamas. These were actors, hired to play the disturbed as a cover story for something even more disturbing. The eight-story glass building at the center of the complex, which had putatively been devoted to vaccine manufacturing, was in fact a highly classified defense facility. Its remit was called, or "biological preparations"--what one participant later described as "the most ambitious Soviet arms program since the development of the hydrogen bomb." The most recent experiments there had at last demonstrated the viability of a weapon that could wipe out entire enemy populations without leaving a scratch on their infrastructure. It was a pathogen genetically engineered to spread within hours, to kill within days, and to resist all existing treatment.

The remains of 42 hunter-gatherers show that the Black Death was already lethal 5,500 years ago. More information Adding us as a Preferred Source in Google by using this link indicates that you would like to see more of our content in Google News results. Ust'Ida I Burial #33; this shared grave contained a boy (aged 12-15 years old) and a girl (aged 13-16 years old) who were found to not be closely related, and plague DNA was obtained from their remains. That they were very close in age but not biologically related, and buried in the same grave, hints at the relationship they might have had when alive. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week.

More than just rats and fleas added to the'perfect storm' plague. Photograph of the fresco Trionfo della Morte, taken at its original location in the Camposanto Monumentale in Pisa. The fresco, known as the "Triumph of Death" and attributed to the painter Buonamico Buffalmacco, is not precisely dated; scholarly estimates range from 1335 to 1350. While it does not depict the Black Death explicitly, the selected detail shows victims of an epidemic from diverse social backgrounds, their souls carried off by demons. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday.

A 14th century trickster tale was misread as fact. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Misinformation surrounding COVID-19 is still a major problem more than five years after its emergence. Even after hundreds of years, our understanding of the Black Death () remains clouded by false narratives. In a study recently published in the, historians at the UK's University of Exeter argue the infamous plague likely didn't move across the continent as quickly as many experts thought.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are improving at an exceptional rate. With the advent of agentic workflows, multi-turn dialogue has become the de facto mode of interaction with LLMs for completing long and complex tasks. While LLM capabilities continue to improve, they remain increasingly susceptible to jailbreaking, especially in multi-turn scenarios where harmful intent can be subtly injected across the conversation to produce nefarious outcomes. While single-turn attacks have been extensively explored, adaptability, efficiency and effectiveness continue to remain key challenges for their multi-turn counterparts. To address these gaps, we present PLAGUE, a novel plug-and-play framework for designing multi-turn attacks inspired by lifelong-learning agents. PLAGUE dissects the lifetime of a multi-turn attack into three carefully designed phases (Primer, Planner and Finisher) that enable a systematic and information-rich exploration of the multi-turn attack family. Evaluations show that red-teaming agents designed using PLAGUE achieve state-of-the-art jailbreaking results, improving attack success rates (ASR) by more than 30% across leading models in a lesser or comparable query budget. Particularly, PLAGUE enables an ASR (based on StrongReject) of 81.4% on OpenAI's o3 and 67.3% on Claude's Opus 4.1, two models that are considered highly resistant to jailbreaks in safety literature. Our work offers tools and insights to understand the importance of plan initialization, context optimization and lifelong learning in crafting multi-turn attacks for a comprehensive model vulnerability evaluation.

The artificial intelligence models underpinning chatbots could help plan an attack with a biological weapon, according to research by a US thinktank. A report by the Rand Corporation released on Monday tested several large language models (LLMs) and found they could supply guidance that "could assist in the planning and execution of a biological attack". However, the preliminary findings also showed that the LLMs did not generate explicit biological instructions for creating weapons. The report said previous attempts to weaponise biological agents, such as an attempt by the Japanese Aum Shinrikyo cult to use botulinum toxin in the 1990s, had failed because of a lack of understanding of the bacterium. AI could "swiftly bridge such knowledge gaps", the report said.

We are excited to bring Transform 2022 back in-person July 19 and virtually July 20 - August 3. Join AI and data leaders for insightful talks and exciting networking opportunities. If it isn't clear by now, it will be soon: the metaverse is coming. While still only a concept, all this talk about virtual worlds, brain chips, tactile interfaces and artificial intelligence (AI) can only mean these technologies will soon come together. Many folks will get wrapped up in this merger of the virtual world with the physical world once the metaverse fully arrives. Unfortunately, anytime new and exciting technologies emerge, cybersecurity is often an afterthought.

A Steam sale is upon us, folks, and that means just one thing: sifting through literally thousands of deeply discounted games to figure out which ones in particular deserve your hard-earned cash. If you're short on time, take a gander at our recommendations below. Since it's Halloween, they're heavy on horror, but just about anyone should be able to find something they can enjoy. Note that most of these selections are decidedly adults-only: Let the kids get their spooks in Minecraft. Half-Life is a genre-defining staple of both first-person shooters and horror games, but 23 years later, it's not exactly looking like a spring chicken.

In the natural selection process, beneficial gene mutations are preserved from generation to generation until they become dominant in our genomes. The protection against pathogens drives the process. However, gene mutations that are protective against one pathogen could make people susceptible to new diseases whenever there is a change in the environment. Familial Mediterranean Fever (FMF) is one example of such disease. It is an autoimmune disease that has emerged over the past 20,000 years in southern Europe, the Middle East, and northern Africa.