I saw my first Ectemnius wasp yesterday, at Tārerekautuku/Yarrs Lagoon south of Lincoln, NZ. It's a northern hemisphere wasp that unexpectedly appeared in Ōtautahi-Christchurch in a suburb near the airport in February 2020. An undergraduate student at #LincolnUniversityNZ, Hannah Noley, found it when doing her insect collection for our entomology class. It's since been found south to Leeston and north to Kaiapoi, gradually spreading.
The hunger for invasive weeds on the NSW Mid North Coasts
On the Weed Wide Web "we found 155 different declared invasive plants just being sold on one platform, and just in one year...Invasive plants have effectively cost Australia an estimated $200 billion since 1960, and it is becoming increasingly difficult to monitor online trade of species."
Fire Ants: 'Throwing everything at our efforts' reads more like 'playing with the fringes'.
Considering the closing end of Winter, you'd think this would be the last timing to increase the number of field officers doing surveys and baiting in Queensland;
while NSW increase field officers to first deploy on Verroa mites, and redeloy where needed to survey far-north NSW for fire ants.
Interesting research challenging the persistent claim that in the 14th century beleaguered Mongols at Caffa hurled their plague dead over the fortress walls.
The fear “is that repeating false claims of past biological #warfare normalizes the idea of intentional use of disease, making the actual use of biological weapons more likely.”
There are more media stories in the past few days about the apparently illicit biolab facility discovered months ago in a warehouse in CA. It may have been that the associated businesses were trying to move a lab and using the warehouse as a transitional storage location (without proper permits). There was apparently no concern for the public's safety but local and state officials are taking hits now for not announcing the discovery immediately. #biosecurity#biosafety
#AI#GenerativeAI#BioTech#BioSecurity#BioWeapons: "Researchers at MIT recently conducted an experiment. They asked undergraduate students to test whether AI-driven chatbots could be prompted to assist non-experts in causing a pandemic. Within an hour the chatbots had suggested four potential pandemic pathogens, explained how they could be created from synthetic DNA using reverse genetics, and supplied the names of DNA synthesis companies judged unlikely to screen orders.
Developing bioweapons is not that easy, and chatbot instructions currently only go so far, but the experiment shows what can happen when AI technology barrels through scientific knowledge. The troubling fact is that large language models and new biological design tools are dramatically lowering the barriers to engineering the next pandemic. The former Google CEO Eric Schmidt describes AI-designed bioweapons as “a very near-term concern”."
A #biological testing device company and industrial #graphene manufacturer are collaborating on large-scale production of graphene #biosensors for widespread use.