GCR News Summary April 2014

Post Date May 09, 2014
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Soap and chlorine image courtesy of UNICEF Guinea under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License (the image has been cropped)

Tensions continued to run high between Russia and the acting government of Ukraine as well-armed pro-Russian groups occupied strategic buildings across eastern Ukraine and skirmished with the Ukrainian military. An agreement between Russia, Ukraine, the US, and the EU to lower tensions fell apart when separatists captured military observers from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) and …

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GCR News Summary January 2014

Post Date January 30, 2014
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President Obama delivering the 2014 State of the Union address image courtesy of The White House/Pete Souza

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists decided to leave the small hand of its symbolic “Doomsday Clock” at five minutes to midnight. The amount of time left until midnight represents how close we are to global disaster. The clock’s hands were set at two minutes to midnight at the height of the Cold War in the 1950s. In an open letter to the members of …

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GCR News Summary November 2013

Post Date December 02, 2013
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Iranian Supreme Leader Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei image courtesy of the Foundation for Holy Defence Values, Archives and Publications

Iran reached a deal with China, France, Germany, Russia, the UK, the US to temporarily limit the amount of uranium it enriches. Iran agreed for the next six months to stop production and dilute its stock of highly-enriched uranium, to stop installing new centrifuges, to stop work on a heavy-water reactor capable of producing plutonium, and to allow greater oversight from the International …

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GCR News Summary October 2013

Post Date October 31, 2013
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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 …

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GCR News Summary September 2013

Post Date September 27, 2013
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The Earth and the Moon as seen from Voyager 1 image courtesy of NASA.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report concluded after reviewing 9,200 peer-reviewed studies that there’s at least a 95% chance that global warming is primarily caused by human activities. The IPCC said in its 2007 report that there was a 90% chance global warming was caused by humans, but alternate explanations for climate change have been ruled out since then. The IPCC found that the global …

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GCR News Summary July 2013

Post Date July 28, 2013
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Artificially-colored MERS virus image courtesy of CSIRO.

ConceptNet, an artificial intelligence program developed by a team led by Catherine Havasi at the MIT Media Lab, performed as well as an average four-year-old on the information, vocabulary, and word reasoning portions of standard intelligence test. The program uses a crowdsourced semantic network—a database of statements of basic facts—to answer questions. Miles Brundage explained in Slate that the program did well on “precisely the parts of the test that one would expect computers to excel …

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GCR News Summary May 2013

Post Date May 31, 2013
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Sunset from Mauna Loa Observatory image courtesy of NOAA/Eric Johnson.

The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration reported that for the first time the daily mean atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide at the Mauna Loa Observatory was higher than 400 parts per million. The concentration of CO2 has grown at an increasing rate since the observatory began taking measurements in 1958. The concentration of CO2 is generally believed to be 40% higher than it was before the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. It …

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GCR News Summary April 2013

Post Date April 29, 2013
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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).

So far 115 people have been diagnosed with a strain of bird flu known as H7N9 that was previously unknown in humans. Twenty-three of the people known to have contracted the disease have already died. The discovery of a 4-year-old boy who has the virus but who has no apparent …

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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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