GoKawiil
Tech News
A roundup of science and tech stories covers efforts to cut down the volume of false and non-critical alarms in hospitals, a phenomenon known as alarm fatigue that can cause staff to miss urgent alerts. The same digest touches on why people increasingly speak like chatbots, how El Niño suppressed the Atlantic hurricane season, and efforts to build AI-based defenses against bioweapons threats.
Researchers at Collaborations Pharmaceuticals found their AI drug-discovery tool could generate 40,000 potentially toxic chemical warfare molecules in under six hours, some more lethal than known nerve agents. The finding, first reported in 2022, is now cited by biosecurity experts as evidence that AI systems and increasingly accessible gene-editing tools could lower the barrier to creating dangerous biological or chemical agents.
As alarm grows over AI-enabled bioweapons—fueled by Anthropic's report on misuse attempts of Claude and Stanford research on AI-designed viral genomes—some scientists argue the danger is overstated. David Bellamy of the Institute of Foundation Models says AI is not a fundamentally new threat, noting that the internet, translation tools, and open science journals already made dangerous biological information accessible long before large language models existed.