Indian flying fox image courtesy of Fritz Geller-Grimm under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 2.5 Generic license.

The US federal government shut down for 16 days when Congress failed to authorize funds for the 2014 fiscal year. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) furloughed two-thirds of its employees, which left it without enough staff to monitor safety procedures at high-security biolabs, watch for outbreaks of potential pandemics, or respond to a major public health emergency. During the shutdown 338 people in 18 states became ill with antibiotic-resistant Salmonella from contaminated chicken. “If there is an outbreak of something like Legionella pneumonia, we may not detect it, we may not find it, we may not stop it,” CDC Director Thomas Frieden warned when the shutdown began. “If there is an outbreak of foodborne illness that affects people in multiple states, we may not identify it properly.”

The World Health Organization (WHO) identified a cluster of new cases of polio in eastern Syria. The polio virus was also detected in sewage in southern Israel, where 42 people were found carrying the virus in their intestinal system. The outbreak is probably connected to the Syrian civil war, which has meant low rates of childhood vaccination. Public health officials are concerned that the disease could spread to the countries of eastern and central Europe, which have poor disease surveillance systems and relatively low vaccination rates. A study in mBio estimated that mammals host at least 320,000 viruses belonging to nine families known to infect humans. The authors estimate it would cost around $6 billion to survey 85% of these viruses. The SARS outbreak alone may have cost the world economy $40 billion.

Saudi Arabia said that around a million fewer pilgrims traveled to Mecca this year. Saudi health officials encouraged people whose immune systems might be vulnerable to postpone their pilgrimages out of concern that they might contract and spread Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS). Most of the known cases of MERS have been in Saudi Arabia, where it appears to have originated in bats. Andrew Katz explained in Time why we don’t know yet how likely the virus is to spread. Although WHO has warned that MERS has the potential to cause a pandemic, the disease doesn’t appear to be readily transmissible among humans. So far no cases have been confirmed among pilgrims, but with an incubation period of up to two weeks, we might not know right away if the disease is spreading. WHO assistant director-general Keiji Fukuda said that surveillance of the disease was “suboptimal”.

The Washington Post reported that the US National Security Agency (NSA) secretly gathers “hundreds of millions of contact lists” from personal e-mail and instant messaging accounts:

During a single day last year, the NSA’s Special Source Operations branch collected 444,743 e-mail address books from Yahoo, 105,068 from Hotmail, 82,857 from Facebook, 33,697 from Gmail, and 22,881 from unspecified other providers, according to an internal NSA PowerPoint presentation. Those figures, described as a typical daily intake in the document, correspond to a rate of more than 250 million per year.

The Washington Post also reported that the NSA intercepts large amounts of Google and Yahoo data from fiber optic cables without the knowledge of either company. The Guardian revealed that the NSA had monitored the phone calls of 35 world leaders, including German chancellor Angela Merkel. The Guardian reported in June that the NSA collects the phone records of millions of Americans. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence said that the NSA is “focused on discovering and developing intelligence about foreign intelligence targets like terrorists, human traffickers and drug smugglers” and is “not interested in personal information about ordinary Americans.”

While there’s little evidence that the US is using the information it collects for domestic political purposes, critics worry that NSA surveillance could both undermine the security of the internet and make possible unprecedented levels of government control. The New York Times reported in September that the NSA spends $250 million a year to undermine encryption standards so that it will more easily be able read encrypted information. Security expert Bruce Schneier said that it is “sheer folly” to believe that only the NSA can exploit the vulnerabilities it is creating and accused the NSA of “building the technical infrastructure for a police state.”

Samuel Scheffler argued in The New York Times that we should think more about the importance of future generations to our own well-being. Scheffler asked us to consider how much less meaningful many of the things we do—building bridges, curing diseases, writing books, saving for our families, and so on—would be if there were no posterity to take advantage of them in the future. The Oxford Martin Commission for Future Generations called for a set of institutional reforms that would create incentives for governments and businesses to work together to make global society more prosperous, more fair, more sustainable and more resilient. Oxford Martin School director Ian Goldin said that “failure to address long-term issues exposes current generations to unacceptable instability and risk.”

New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, and hedge fund manager Tom Steyer called for a comprehensive assessment of the risks posed by climate change to the US economy:

If the United States were run like a business, its board of directors would fire its financial advisers for failing to disclose the significant material risks associated with unmitigated climate change.

A PLoS Biology paper found that greenhouse gas emissions will cause major biogeochemical changes in the surface waters of the world’s oceans. By the year 2100, nearly the entire ocean surface will simultaneously warm, become more acidic, and lose oxygen. That could have large effects on both marine diversity and the livelihood of millions of people who depend on the productivity of the oceans. The International Programme on the State of the Oceans (IPSO) reported that the oceans are already more acidic than they have been at any time in the last 300 million years. IPSO scientific director Alex Rogers said “The health of the ocean is spiraling downwards far more rapidly than we had thought.”

Wildfires burned more than 311,000 acres in eastern Australia, destroying almost 200 homes. This September was the warmest September on record in Australia—more than 2.6 °C (4.7 °F) warmer than the historical average, although it’s not yet clear whether there is a direct link between climate change and wildfires. Newly-elected Prime Minister Tony Abbott promised in his victory speech to eliminate Australia’s carbon emissions tax. The Los Angeles Times made the news by saying it doesn’t publish letters that claim there’s no evidence that human activity causes climate change. Letters editor Paul Thornton said that scientists had accumulated enough evidence that human activity is linked to climate change for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to say it was 95% sure that global warming is caused by humans. “Saying ‘there’s no sign humans have caused climate change’ is not stating an opinion,” Thornton wrote. “It’s asserting a factual inaccuracy.”

The UK and Iran began talks to normalize relations. The British embassy in Tehran has been closed since a mob stormed embassy offices in November 2011. Hossein Naqavi Hosseini, the deputy head of the Iranian Parliament’s foreign policy committee, said that Iran stopped production of weapon-usable uranium. Hosseini said that Iran had stopped producing highly-enriched uranium because it already has enough to use in its research reactor in Tehran. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) hasn’t commented on Hosseini’s claims. Pakistan’s Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif said that his country is ready to hold talks with India about ending the two countries’ “never-ending arms race”.

Robert Spalding made the case that “nuclear weapons are instruments of peace” because they deter large-scale conflicts. Critics of the nuclear peace view point out that nuclear deterrence is inherently risky since nuclear weapons deter conflict only if there’s a real possibility they could be used. One-hundred twenty-five UN member nations—including Japan, which hasn’t been willing to join similar statements in the past—signed a joint statement saying that the threat of nuclear weapons must be eliminated. A nuclear catastrophe, the statement said, would “have deep implications for human survival; for our environment; for socio-economic development; for our economies; and for the health of future generations.”

Scientists at the US National Ignition Facility produced power in a controlled nuclear fusion reaction. Although the reactor still requires more power to run than it generates because of mechanical inefficiencies, it’s the first time anyone has been able to produce power in a controlled fusion reaction. A study in the International Journal of Astrobiology suggests that von Neumann probes—self-replicating spacecraft designed to scout solar systems—could explore the entire galaxy in just 10 million years using gravitational slingshot effects. The fact that we haven’t encountered such probes suggests that there may no or very few alien civilizations in the galaxy capable of making von Neumann probes.

Ukrainian astronomers discovered a large asteroid that will pass close to the Earth in 2032. The 410m diameter asteroid appears right now to have just a 1 in 63,000 chance of hitting the Earth. But because of the asteroid’s size—it could hit the Earth with the force of 2,500 megatons of TNT—NASA added it to the short list of asteroids it considers potentially dangerous. Japanese scientists have successfully tested a “space cannon” designed to fire a copper projectile at the surface of the asteroid. The Small Carry-on Impactor is part of the the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s Hayabusa 2 mission, which will use the device to collect samples that could contain evidence of water or organic materials from the 1999 JU3 asteroid. And the UN General Assembly voted to set up an International Asteroid Warning Group that will coordinate efforts to detect a dangerous asteroid early enough to deflect it.  “If we don’t find it until a year out,” former astronaut Russell Schweickart said, “make yourself a nice cocktail and go watch.”

James Barrat argued in a new book that strong artificial intelligence could be the human race’s “final invention”. Barrat interviewed artificial intelligence experts who worry that machines who are smarter than we are could threaten our survival by consuming the resources we need in pursuit of their own ends. A software company called Vicarious claims to have created a program that can reliably read the CAPTCHA images designed to be difficult for computers to read. A program that could recognize distorted images would be a major breakthrough in artificial intelligence. And more than 270 engineers, scientists, and ethicists called for a ban on autonomous weapons systems. “Decisions about the application of violent force,” they wrote, “must not be delegated to machines.”

This news summary was put together in collaboration with and is cross-posted at Anthropocene. Thanks to Seth Baum, Kaitlin Butler, and Grant Wilson for help compiling the news.

For last month’s news summary, please see GCR News Summary September 2013.

You can help us compile future news posts by putting any GCR news you see in the comment thread of this blog post, or send it via email to Grant Wilson (grant [at] gcrinstitute.org).