"I think ultimately we're going to live in a world where the majority of cyberattacks are carried out by agents," says Mark Stockley, a security expert at the cybersecurity company Malwarebytes. "It's really only a question of how quickly we get there." While we have a good sense of the kinds of threats AI agents could present to cybersecurity, what's less clear is how to detect them in the real world. The AI research organization Palisade Research has built a system called LLM Agent Honeypot in the hopes of doing exactly this. It has set up vulnerable servers that masquerade as sites for valuable government and military information to attract and try to catch AI agents attempting to hack in.

Maxime Firth's business is complicated to manage, even in good times. His company, Onduline, turns recycled fibres into roofing material, after dousing them with bitumen to make them waterproof, and sells products in 100 countries. Its eight production plants span from Nizhny Novgorod in Russia and Penang in Malaysia, to Juiz de Fora in Brazil. Further complicating his supply chain, Mr Firth's business is strongly seasonal. People install roofs in the summer, so products are made from January to March, to sell from April to September.

Two facts about simple viruses have been known for a long time. Firstly, that genetic economy leads to the use of symmetry, such that virus capsids aremostly icosahedral or helical. Secondly, packaging signals, that is secondary structure features in the viral RNA, are often required for encapsidation inviruses with single-stranded genomes. Examples are the origin of assembly sequence in Tobacco Mosaic virus, the psi element in HIV and the TR sequence in MS2. This is an evolutionary advantage, as it ensures vRNA-specific encapsidation and can increase assembly efficiency through a cooperative role of the RNA, which acts as a nucleation site. More recently, it has been shown that taken together, these two facts suggest that there could be more than one packaging signal, with multiple signalsin fact dispersed throughout the genome. This is because the capsid is symmetric, and the packaging signal mechanism functions via interaction betweenviral RNA and the coat protein (CP). In several cases, this RNA-CP interaction leads to a conformational change in the CP, which only then makes it assembly competent (e.g.