GCR News Summary July 2014

Post Date July 30, 2014
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Boy with smallpox image courtesy of the CDC Public Health Image Library

Workers found vials containing the smallpox virus in a storage room at a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) laboratory at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) campus in Bethesda, Maryland. The vials appear to have been in the laboratory since the 1950s. They were moved to a Centers for Disease Control (CDC) containment laboratory shortly after they were discovered. The CDC said that there was no sign the vials …

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GCR News Summary August 2013

Post Date August 31, 2013
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California Rim Fire image courtesy of the USDA.

California governor Jerry Brown declared a state of emergency for San Francisco County when a large wildfire on the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada mountains threatened to disrupt public utilities. Two of the three hydroelectric power stations in the region were forced to shut down. San Francisco also gets 85% of its water from the nearby Hetch Hetchy reservoir. Most of the western US is in drought and the recent increase in the number …

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GCR News Summary March 2013

Post Date March 26, 2013
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This post marks the first of what we hope will be an ongoing series of global catastrophic risk news summaries. You can help by posting any GCR news you see in the comment thread of this blog post, or send them via email to Grant Wilson (grant [at] gcrinstitute.org).

In Science, British Astronomer Royal Martin Rees argued that we need to take existential risk more seriously. Foreign Policy did a profile of the Cambridge Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, which Rees helped …

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