From fleeing Hitler to Mars: the scientist who changed space travel


The remarkable journey of Ben Abeles will be celebrated next week by the opening of a new archive

Robin McKie Science editor

THE GUARDIAN
Sun 28 May 2023 

Ben Abeles’ impact on science was out of this world. He helped develop alloys that were key components of the radioisotope generators that powered US robot space probes on their interplanetary journeys. Nasa was then able to reveal the wonders of the solar system, from the ancient river beds of Mars to the icy moons of Jupiter.

One of the devices is still in use, providing electricity for the Perseverance robot rover that currently trundles across the surface of the red planet.

Abeles was a brilliant scientist, yet his start in life could not have been grimmer. He arrived in Britain from Prague as a child refugee on the Kindertransport, the rescue effort that helped around 10,000 children flee Nazi-occupied Europe and settle in Britain.

This remarkable journey – from fleeing Hitler to extraterrestrial travel – will be celebrated next week when the University of Southampton opens an archive of documents and photographs that tell Abeles’ life story. Items will include the tag placed round his neck when he boarded the Kindertransport; the Stuart Ballantine medal, given to him in 1979 by the US Franklin Institute for his work on powering space probes; and a note, sent home in 1941, to tell his parents: “Am healthy. Working in kitchen.”

At the end of the war, Abeles returned to what was then Czechoslovakia to search for his parents and elder sister but discovered they had died in the Trawniki concentration camp in Poland. He stayed on to study at university in Prague before emigrating to Israel and then on to New Jersey in 1956, where he worked as a physicist for 53 years.

“Ben clearly went on to live a remarkable life after arriving on the Kindertransport and did great things,” said Tony Kushner, professor of history at the University of Southampton, who has been closely involved in establishing the archive. “But that is not the reason for allowing refugees into your country – because you think they will become brilliant scientists. You do it because it’s the right thing to do, regardless of their later careers. You take in refugees in order to save people’s lives.”

This point was supported by his wife, Helen Abeles. “Ben always said that the real heroes of the Kindertransport were the parents,” she said. “They let go of their children to give them a chance. I just got on the train, he used to say. Why are they making such a fuss?”

Ben Abeles died in December 2020, aged 95, and his family has given his archive to the university’s Parkes Institute, which houses one of the largest Jewish archives in western Europe.

“He was the most positive person I have ever met, which, given the tragedies that he lived through and the difficulties of his early life, has always amazed me,” Helen Abeles told the Observer. “He was always conscious about wanting to give something back to society. So when he retired, he volunteered at a soup kitchen in New Jersey, for example.”

However, it was the generator that he developed – working with co-inventor George Cody – that was his greatest gift to society, said Charlie Ryan, an astronautics expert based at the University of Southampton. “Ben helped to develop a type of power source that has been used on some of the most groundbreaking missions ever launched, such as the Voyager probes that have explored the outer solar system and beyond. It had a massive influence on space exploration.”

Will AI free us from drudgery – or leave us jobless and hungry?

Arwa Mahdawi

Opinion
Artificial intelligence (AI)

THE GUARDIAN
Tue 30 May 2023 

Artificial intelligence promises more leisure and creativity for workers. But at the same time, corporations are clamping down on unions and making plans to replace their expensive human employees

Goodbye humans, hello “Tessa”. The US-based National Eating Disorders Association (Neda) is making headlines after firing all its staff and replacing them with an AI-assisted chatbot called Tessa. This happened just four days after the six paid employees, who oversaw about 200 volunteers, successfully unionised. Coincidence? Oh, absolutely, Neda said; it was a long-anticipated change that had nothing to do with unionisation. A blogpost written by a helpline associate begs to differ and calls the move “union busting, plain and simple”.

Is this a harbinger of things to come? Are we about to see millions of jobs wiped out as humans are replaced by AI assistants with female names? After stealing all of our jobs, are the Tessas of the world going to unionise and stage a digital takeover of Earth?

The short answer is: maybe. All emerging technology goes through the “Gartner hype cycle”; now, we’re at the inflated expectations and breathless predictions stage of that cycle, and heading towards the “trough of disillusionment”, before things supposedly level out. I don’t think AI will lead to the end of civilisation as we know it in the near future. But I do think an awful lot of corporations are champing at the bit to replace as many expensive humans as they can with AI and will use the new technology as a way to clamp down on a recent wave of labour organising. In the next few years I think we are going to see a lot of chaotic experimentation as companies rush to cost-cut and bring their own “Tessas” to market.

Not everyone is admitting this, of course. It tends to be bad for employee morale when your boss is crowing about how many extra yachts they can buy when they replace you with an algorithm. IBM is one of the few companies sharing specifics about how many people AI might replace: in a recent interview CEO Arvind Krishna said the technology company will pause hiring for “back-office jobs” in the coming years and automate those roles. “I could easily see 30% of [about 26,000 workers] getting replaced by AI and automation over a five-year period,” Krishna told Bloomberg. That’s about 7,800 jobs.

What companies aren’t saying is also important. AI, and how it is used to create content, is a major sticking point in the Writers Guild of America (WGA) strike. The WGA wants to ensure protections are put in place to stop the big Hollywood studios from training algorithms on writers’ work and then replacing the bulk of its creatives with AI. “Based on what we’re aiming for in this contract, there couldn’t be a movie that was released by a company that we work with that had no writer,” screenwriter John August told Vox. The studios didn’t agree to this in negotiations that took place before the strike. Instead, they magnanimously said they could have “annual meetings to discuss advancements in technology.” Which seems like code for: “We’re getting rid of as many as you as we possibly can ASAP.”

While all this sounds deeply depressing, there are lots of AI optimists eager to reassure us that artificial intelligence is actually going to make the world a better place. Yes, AI will replace some jobs, but it will also create better jobs. Technology will do all the drudge work and humans will have more free time to sit around writing poetry in the sun. Nobody is entirely sure how everyone will be able to feed themselves amid all this newfound leisure time but “universal basic income” (UBI) gets thrown around a lot in this scenario. (UBI is a libertarian scam and will absolutely not save us, but that’s a topic for another day.)

Jonah Peretti, the CEO of BuzzFeed, was one of these vocal AI optimists. “We see the breakthroughs in AI opening up a new era of creativity that will allow humans to harness creativity in new ways with endless opportunities and applications for good,” Peretti wrote in a memo to BuzzFeed employees in January. We all know what happened a few months later, don’t we? BuzzFeed shut down its news division, dismissed a bunch of people and leaned more heavily into AI. There is certainly a lot of potential for AI to change the world for the better. I just don’t think there’s an appetite among the people at the top to harness that potential.

Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist

Was ‘the first man to reach the North Pole’ a fraud?

Frederick Cook claimed to have reached the top of the world, but a new book says he was lying

Vanessa Thorpe
Sun 28 May 2023 

Who was the first person to reach the north pole? According to American adventurer Frederick Cook, it was him. But now a new book will set out the evidence that the explorer’s 114-year-old claim was an instance of fake news on a global scale.

In The Explorer and the Journalist, author Richard Evans has examined the greatest scandal in polar history, reigniting a debate that has smouldered since September 1909, when Cook, who had been missing for a year, sent out a telegram announcing he had reached the pole in 1908.

The son of German immigrants, Cook grew up in the foothills of New York state’s Catskill Mountains. He quickly became a popular hero, embraced by scientists because of his humble attitude and the credit he gave to the Inuit. “He had a mild manner that made him seem genuine and believable,” said Evans. “And he was seen as a kind of antidote to all the big personalities of other explorers, like his fellow American Robert Peary, and the Norwegian Roald Amundsen.”

Cook’s eventual undoing came in the shape of a British journalist, Philip Gibbs, who was sent by his newspaper, the Daily Chronicle, to secure the first interview with the triumphant American. Tracking him down to his berth on a boat off the coast of Denmark, Gibbs joined Cook for a fateful breakfast in the dining saloon, writing in his memoir: “I was favourably impressed by the first appearance of the man who says he reached the pole.

“Here, surely, was a typical sea rover. Under his Danish cap there was a mass of shaggy fair hair, a pair of smiling blue eyes, and a florid face with a powerful nose and a large mouth which, when he smiled, showed broken teeth. An honest face, surely, if any face is honest.”

Gibbs was keen to get the polar scoop. But as the putative explorer started to avoid the topic of his exploits, the reporter’s doubts grew. Cook had already made his name as part of the Belgica expedition, the first group to over-winter in Antarctica. And on that southern trip he had earned a favourable reputation by prescribing fresh meat to fight off scurvy and coming up with an idea to free the boat from ice. Also on board the Belgica was a young Amundsen, who remained a lifelong admirer of Cook even after scandal struck.

A photograph that Cook claimed was of him and two Inuit men at the North Pole. Photograph: ullstein bild/Getty Images

“I read Gibbs’s memoir about six years ago and it kept drawing me back,” said Evans, whose book was published last week. “I have set my book in Copenhagen in that year because at that moment it was like the centre of the world, with all the rival polar explorers and their backers in one place. Most journalists would have given their eye teeth for the kind of early access that Gibbs got. But although the Scientific Society in Copenhagen really believed Cook, Gibbs pushed on with his doubts and got his paper to publish this potentially libellous piece, suggesting that Cook was lying.”

When Gibbs filed his sceptical, explosive accusations he was 32 years old and on his fifth job in Fleet Street. The Cook story permanently elevated him to the rank of the leading British journalists of his day. Polar scholars have obsessed over details of the competing claims ever since. But after assessing the case and laying out the counterclaims, Evans concludes Gibbs was on to the truth: “For what it is worth, I agree.”

Lack of evidence was Cook’s main problem. He had told Gibbs his notes would prove his claim, but said he had given them to someone to take to New York. Conclusive documents never materialised.

Looking back: polar exploration

To complicate matters further, days after Cook got to Copenhagen, his former friend Peary also announced he had reached the north pole. Peary soon accused Cook of lying, while Cook attempted to rise above the allegations. Today, many believe both men were lying.

Cook went back to America to ride out the reputational storm, earning big money as a lecturer, but questions about his honesty persisted. Before his north pole expedition, he had been best known as the first person to reach the top of Mount McKinley – now called Denali – in Alaska. But when doubters looked back at this claim it seemed that the photograph of the summit Cook had submitted looked just like another much lower one in the range.

Some people still argue that Cook did reach the pole, and he himself spent the rest of his life trying to establish his claim. He went on to become a Texas oilman and was later accused of fraud, spending six years in prison.

While the race to the south pole has a clear winner in Amundsen, the truth about the race to the north pole is uncertain.

Some now give the credit to Amundsen once more, because he flew over it in an airship in 1926. American Ralph Plaisted reached it on a snowmobile in 1968 and British explorer Sir Walter Herbert got there on foot a year later.

Genes Don’t Lie: DNA Reveals a New Twist in Human Origin Story

By MCGILL UNIVERSITY MAY 29, 2023

A study published in the journal Nature has proposed a new model for human evolution, asserting that modern Homo sapiens stemmed from multiple genetically diverse populations across Africa rather than a single ancestral population. This conclusion was reached after researchers analyzed genetic data from present-day African populations, including 44 newly sequenced genomes from the Nama group of southern Africa.

Contemporary DNA evidence suggests that humans emerged from the interaction of multiple populations living across the continent.

A new study in Nature challenges prevailing theories, suggesting that Homo sapiens evolved from multiple diverse populations across Africa, with the earliest detectable split occurring 120,000-135,000 years ago, after prolonged periods of genetic intermixing.

There is broad agreement that Homo sapiens originated in Africa. But there remain many uncertainties and competing theories about where, when, and how.

In a paper published on May 17, 2023, in Nature, an international research team led by McGill University and the University of California-Davis suggest that, based on contemporary genomic evidence from across the continent, there were humans living in different regions of Africa, migrating from one region to another and mixing with one another over a period of hundreds of thousands of years. This view runs counter to some of the dominant theories about human origins in Africa.

Competing theories about human origins in Africa

One theory holds that, about 150,000 years ago, there was a single central ancestral population in Africa from which other populations diverged. Another suggests that this central ancestral population was the result of the mixing of modern humans with a Neanderthal-like hominins (human-like beings), resulting in a leap forward in human evolution, as has been suggested took place in Eurasia

“At different times, people who embraced the classic model of a single origin for Homo sapiens suggested that humans first emerged in either East or Southern Africa,” says Brenna Henn, a population geneticist in the Department of Anthropology and in the Genome Center at the University of California, Davis and co-lead author of the research. “But it has been difficult to reconcile these theories with the limited fossil and archaeological records of human occupation from sites as far afield as Morocco, Ethiopia, and South Africa which show that Homo sapiens were to be found living across the continent as far back as at least 300,000 years ago.”

So, the research team took a different approach.

Contemporary genomic evidence tells a different story

In the first systematic test of these competing anthropological models against genetic data, the team worked backward from contemporary genomic material of 290 individuals from four geographically and genetically diverse African groups to trace the similarities and differences between the populations over the past million years and gain insight into the genetic interconnections and human evolution across the continent.

The groups were the Nama (Khoe-San from South Africa); the Mende (from Sierra Leone); the Gumuz (recent descendants of a hunter-gatherer group from Ethiopia); and the Amhara and Oromo (agriculturalists from eastern Africa). The researchers also included some Eurasian genetic material to include the traces of colonial incursions and mixing in Africa.

“We used a new algorithm to rapidly test hundreds of possible scenarios. Those with gene flow back and forth between populations in various parts of the continent over the course of hundreds of thousands of years provided a much better explanation of the genetic variation we see today,” adds Simon Gravel, Associate Professor in the Department of Human Genetics at McGill University, and co-senior author on the paper. “We wrote this algorithm to understand how genetic disease risk varies across populations, and it led us to this deep dive into human origins. It’s been really fun to tie applied and fundamental research together in this way.”

For more on this research, see DNA Research Changes Origin of Human Species.

Reference: “A weakly structured stem for human origins in Africa” by Aaron P. Ragsdale, Timothy D. Weaver, Elizabeth G. Atkinson, Eileen G. Hoal, Marlo Möller, Brenna M. Henn and Simon Gravel, 17 May 2023, Nature.
DOI: 10.1038/s41586-023-06055-y

India’s protesting wrestlers say will toss medals into Ganges

Athletes protesting against alleged sexual harassment by a top official threaten to throw their medals in the river in the temple town of Haridwar.

India's Sakshi Malik poses with her bronze medal for the women's wrestling freestyle 58kg competition at the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil 

File: Markus Schreiber/AP]

Published On 30 May 2023

India’s top wrestlers have threatened to hurl their medals into the river Ganges as they demand the arrest of the head of the Wrestling Federation of India (WFI) over sexual harassment allegations.

In a joint statement issued on Tuesday intensifying their month-old protest, the wrestlers, including Olympic medallists Sakshi Malik and Bajrang Punia, spelled out their next step.

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“We are going to immerse these medals into river Ganga … The more sacred we consider the Ganga, the more sacredly we had achieved these medals by toiling hard. These medals are sacred for the whole country and the right place should be in the Ganga itself,” said their statement in Hindi.

“These medals are our lives, our souls. There would be no reason to live after immersing them into the Ganga today,” it said

.

Malik, in blue, is detained by police during a protest in New Delhi on Sunday [File: Altaf Qadri/AP]

The athletes said they will throw the medals away in Haridwar, a temple town on the banks of the river considered holy by Hindus.

The act echoes iconic boxer Muhammad Ali famously throwing his 1960 Rome Olympics gold into the Ohio River after he was denied entry into a restaurant in Louisville due to racial segregation in the United States.

After throwing their medals away, the Indian athletes said they will return to capital New Delhi to begin a hunger strike at the British-era India Gate memorial.

The wrestlers had been camping in New Delhi since April 23 demanding action against WFI president Brijbhushan Sharan Singh, who has denied any wrongdoing. Singh is also a parliamentarian from Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

Indian wrestlers, from right, Bajrang Punia, Sangita Phogat and Vinesh Phogat embrace ahead of their protest march towards the new parliament building in New Delhi [File: Shonal Ganguly/AP]

Several of the protesting wrestlers were briefly detained by the Delhi Police on Sunday and their campsite was cleared after they tried to move towards India’s new parliament building, inaugurated by Modi.

Singh, 66, has been stripped of his administrative powers but the wrestlers are seeking his arrest over allegations of sexual harassment towards female wrestlers.

Train drivers to hold first of three rail strikes in England this week


Aslef members will hold widespread stoppages on Wednesday and Saturday, while RMT crew and station staff will strike on Friday


Joe Middleton

THE GUARDIAN

Tue 30 May 2023 17.00 BST

Passengers are bracing for the first of three rail strikes this week as services in England come to a standstill amid a long-running dispute over pay and conditions.

Members of the drivers’ union Aslef will embark on a 24-hour strike on Wednesday. The union also plans to strike on Saturday.

On these days, no trains will run on networks including Avanti West Coast, Chiltern Railways, CrossCountry, East Midlands Railway, Great Northern, Southern, Southeastern, Thameslink and Northern.


Train drivers’ union says it has received ‘significant’ pay offers in Wales and Scotland

Separately, about 20,000 onboard crew and station staff who are members of the RMT plan to take industrial action on Friday. That strike will disrupt services, but many operators will still run some trains.

The latest stoppages are likely to affect parents and children on the half-term break and passengers trying to travel to big events on Saturday, including the FA Cup final between Manchester City and Manchester United at Wembley and a date of Beyoncé’s Renaissance tour at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium.

The strike comes after Aslef rejected a pay rise offer of 4% a year over two years from the Rail Delivery Group (RDG), which represents the train operating companies.

The transport minister Huw Merriman has urged Aslef and the RMT to put the government’s “fair and reasonable” pay offer to their members.

The RMT called the pay deal from the RDG “unacceptable” and said no further proposals had been put forward for them to consider.

The union’s general secretary, Mick Lynch, said: “The government is once again not allowing the Rail Delivery Group to make an improved offer that we can consider. Therefore, we have to pursue our industrial campaign to win a negotiated settlement on jobs, pay and conditions. Ministers cannot just wish this dispute away.”

The RDG has warned passengers that between Wednesday and Saturday, rail services will be “severely reduced with variations across the network and no services at all in some areas”.

An RDG spokesperson said: “The upcoming rail strikes called by the Aslef and RMT leadership will not only affect our passengers’ daily commute, but will also impact those travelling from [and] to the FA Cup final and other events across the country, causing disappointment and frustration for tens of thousands of people.

“It will also inconvenience families who have been looking forward and have planned their half-term holidays. It will also further burden our people who have already lost thousands of pounds at a time of financial strain.”

Malaysia investigates Chinese barge suspected of links to looting of British WW2 wrecks

Search of vessel registered in Fuzhou, China, reveals cannon shell suspected to date from second world war

Associated Press
Tue 30 May 2023 

Malaysia’s maritime agency has said it found a cannon shell believed to be from the second world war on a Chinese-registered vessel and was investigating if the barge carrier was involved in the looting of two British warship wrecks in the South China Sea.

The agency said it detained the vessel registered in Fuzhou, China, on Sunday for anchoring without a permit off southern Johor state, and that an inspection revealed scrap metal and a cannon shell it suspected dated from the second world war. It said there were 32 crew members aboard, including 21 Chinese, 10 from Bangladesh and a Malaysian.



The world's biggest grave robbery: Asia’s disappearing WWII shipwrecks

The maritime agency said it believed the rusty cannon shell was linked to the police seizure of dozens of unexploded artillery and other relics at a private scrapyard in Johor. The New Straits Times newspaper reported that the ammunition was believed to be from the warships and that police conducted an on-site controlled explosion of the weapons.

Malaysian media reported that illegal salvage operators were believed to have targeted the HMS Repulse and the HMS Prince of Wales, which were sunk in 1941 by Japanese torpedoes, days after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

A total of 842 sailors died, and the shipwrecks off the coast of central Pahang state are designated war graves. Fishers and divers alerted authorities after spotting a foreign vessel near the area last month.

Pictures and a video released by the agency showed a barge carrier with a large crane and heaps of rusty metal on board. Known as prewar steel, the material from the two warships is valuable and could be smelted for use in manufacturing of some scientific and medical equipment.
This undated photo released by the Malaysian Maritime Enforcement Agency (MMEA) shows scrap metal and an old cannon shell on a Chinese-registered vessel after it was detained in the waters of east Johor. Photograph: AP

The agency said officials from the National Heritage Department and others will work together to identify the cannon shell.

Britain’s National Museum of the Royal Navy said last week it was “distressed and concerned at the apparent vandalism for personal profit”.

It was not the first time that the two shipwrecks have been targeted.

The New Straits Times reported that foreign treasure hunters used homemade explosives in 2015 to detonate the heavy steel plates on the ships for easy pickings. Other media said authorities detained a Vietnamese vessel involved in the looting of the wreckage at the time.

Protesters clash with police in China over partial demolition of mosque

Unrest breaks out in Muslim town of Nagu in Yunnan as people object to removal of dome and minarets


Amy Hawkins 

Senior China correspondent
THE GUARDIAN

Tue 30 May 2023 

Hundreds of police have clashed with protesters in a Muslim town in south-west China amid anger at plans to partially dismantle a 14th-century mosque.

The unrest broke out on Saturday, seemingly in response to attempts by the authorities to dismantle parts of Najiaying mosque in Nagu, a town in Yunnan province.

In 2020, a court ruled that recent additions to the mosque, including a domed roof and minarets, were illegal and should be removed. But when the deconstruction work started over the weekend, local people in Nagu, which is populated by the Hui ethnic group, a predominantly Muslim minority, objected, temporarily halting the works.

Videos posted on western social media showed police with riot shields and protective gear clashing with hundreds of protesters outside the mosque. Some of the protesters were throwing chairs and stones. Several people were reportedly arrested.

Another video posted on Twitter showed a man in handcuffs with bruising on his chest, while a woman could be heard complaining about his treatment.

On Sunday, local police issued a statement acknowledging the unrest and giving protesters until 6 June to turn themselves in.

Discussion of the incident on Chinese social media was swiftly censored. Searches on Weibo, a Twitter-like service, for “Najiaying mosque” returned few results, with only pro-government comments left online. Using the hashtag #Najiaying, one Weibo user wrote: “I don’t want to say too much, I just want to say: I strongly support the national policy, and I hope that the state will not spare any wolfish extremists who intend to impact the law.”

The Hui people are China’s third biggest ethnic minority. Unlike China’s other main Muslim ethnic group, the Uyghurs, Hui people speak Mandarin and are seen as being more assimilated with the Han majority.

But Hui communities have still been targeted by the Chinese government. In 2015, Xi Jinping, China’s president, said the growing number of religious believers in the country should be treated with caution.

China’s constitution guarantees religious freedom but in recent years the government has tightened its grip on religious expression, particularly among Muslims. In 2018, hundreds of Hui Muslims in Ningxia, a Hui region in central China, staged a sit-in at a mosque to prevent its demolition. The mosque survived but authorities still removed many of the domed minarets.

Additional reporting by Chi Hui Lin

Oldest evidence of plague in Britain found in 4,000-year-old human remains

Traces of Yersinia pestis bacteria were found in teeth of people buried at bronze age sites in Cumbria and Somerset

Ian Sample Science editor
THE GUARDIAN

Tue 30 May 2023 

The oldest evidence for the plague in Britain has been discovered in 4,000-year-old human remains unearthed at bronze age burial sites in Cumbria and Somerset.

Traces of Yersinia pestis bacteria were found in the teeth of individuals at the Levens Park ring cairn monument near Kendal, and Charterhouse Warren in the Mendips, a site where at least 40 men, women and children were buried, dismembered, in a natural shaft.

The shaft at the Charterhouse Warren site, 1972, where the remains 

of at least 40 people were found. Photograph: Tony Audsley

The findings show that an outbreak of the plague which swept Eurasia in the early bronze age spread north-west and across the sea to Britain, thousands of years before the country’s first documented cases of the disease in the Plague of Justinian outbreak in AD541.

“This is the earliest plague found in Britain,” said Pooja Swali, first author on the study in Nature Communications and a PhD student at the Francis Crick Institute in London.

Evidence for the ancient outbreak emerged when Swali and her colleagues screened DNA lurking in the dental pulp of teeth taken from 34 skeletons from the two burial sites. Material from one woman, between 35 and 45 years old, buried at the Cumbrian monument tested positive for plague bacteria, along with two children, aged 10 to 12, at Charterhouse Warren.

The burial site at Charterhouse Warren, 1972. Photograph: Tony Audsley


Because DNA degrades rapidly when exposed to the elements, it is possible that other individuals at the burial sites were also infected but were not picked up by the tests. Radiocarbon dating at the sites found that the three people lived at roughly the same time, about 4,000 years ago.

Swali was working in the laboratory late one Friday night when the significance of the findings became clear. “I had my eureka moment, but there was no one to share it with,” she said. “There was a moment of ‘Wow. This is the earliest ever plague genome in Britain’.”

Previous studies have reported cases of the plague across Eurasia between 5,000 and 2,500 years ago, but until the latest work, none had been identified in Britain that long ago.

An electron micrograph depicting a mass of Yersinia pestis bacteria. 

Photograph: Rocky Mountain Laboratories/AP

DNA analysis showed that all three individuals were infected with a form of Yersinia pestis that lacked the yapC and ymt genes seen in later strains. The ymt gene played an important role in allowing the plague to be spread by fleas, leading to the bubonic form of the disease which triggered devastating pandemics such as the Black Death, which killed half of the European population in the 14th century.

The disease that reached Britain 4,000 years ago was probably the pneumonic form of plague, which causes fever, headache, weakness and pneumonia as the bacteria take hold in the lungs. According to documented cases in Europe, pneumonic plague could spread from a single hunter or herder to an entire community within days.

Prof Rick Schulting, an archaeologist at Oxford University and co-author of the study, said it is unclear what happened at the Charterhouse Warren site, which contains the dismembered bodies of dozens of individuals. “Evidence for violence is very rare in early bronze-age Britain, with nothing on this scale having been discovered before,” he said.

“The finding of plague was completely unexpected, as this disease leaves no traces on the skeleton,” he added. “At the moment we’re not sure how this new evidence fits into the story of what happened at the site, and whether or not there may be some connection between the disease and the violence.”

Dr Pontus Skoglund, another co-author and head of the ancient genomics lab at the Crick, said ancient DNA can help identify and reconstruct outbreaks of infectious disease that would otherwise remain unknown. “The only way we know about this one is through DNA. We would have no idea there was Yersinia pestis around otherwise,” he said.

“We hope to build a record and eventually have a number of examples of outbreaks of infectious disease, epidemics, and pandemics, and then be able to understand more generally how our DNA evolves in response to these and how human societies and health are affected,” he added.

Risk of extinction by AI should be ‘global priority’, say tech experts


Hundreds of tech leaders call for world to treat AI as danger on par with pandemics and nuclear war

Geneva Abdul

THE GUARDIAN
Tue 30 May 2023 

A group of leading technology experts from across the globe have warned that artificial intelligence technology should be considered a societal risk and prioritised in the same class as pandemics and nuclear wars.

The brief statement, signed by hundreds of tech executives and academics, was released by the Center for AI Safety on Tuesday amid growing concerns over regulation and risks the technology poses to humanity.

“Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war,” the statement said. Signatories included the chief executives from Google’s DeepMind, the ChatGPT developer OpenAI and AI startup Anthropic.

The statement comes as global leaders and industry experts – such as the leaders of OpenAI – have made calls for regulation of the technology amid existential fears the technology could significantly affect job markets, harm the health of millions, and weaponise disinformation, discrimination and impersonation.

Earlier this month the man often touted as the godfather of AI – Geoffrey Hinton, also a signatory – quit Google citing its “existential risk”. The risk was echoed and acknowledged by No 10 last week for the first time – a swift change of tack within government that came two months after publishing an AI white paper industry figures have warned is already out of date.

While the letter published on Tuesday is not the first, it’s potentially the most impactful given its wider range of signatories and its core existential concern, according to Michael Osborne, a professor in machine learning at the University of Oxford and co-founder of Mind Foundry.

“It really is remarkable that so many people signed up to this letter,” he said. “That does show that there is a growing realisation among those of us working in AI that existential risks are a real concern.”

AI’s potential to exacerbate existing existential risks such as engineered pandemics and military arms races are concerns that led Osborne to sign the public letter, along with AI’s novel existential threats.

Calls to curb threats come after the success of ChatGPT after its launch in November last year. The language model has already been widely adopted by millions of people and has rapidly advanced beyond predictions by those best informed in the industry, said Osborne.

“Because we don’t understand AI very well there is a prospect that it might play a role as a kind of new competing organism on the planet, so a sort of invasive species that we’ve designed that might play some devastating role in our survival as a species,” he said.

Yes, you should be worried about AI – but Matrix analogies hide a more insidious threat

We need not speculate on ways AI can cause harm; we already have a mountain of evidence from the past decade

Samantha Florea
Tue 30 May 2023 

As the resident tech politics nerd among my friends, I spend a lot of time fielding questions. Help! I’ve been part of a data breach, what do I do? What on earth is crypto and should I care? And lately: should I be worried that AI is going to take over and kill us all?


‘They’re afraid their AIs will come for them’: Doug Rushkoff on why tech billionaires are in escape mode

There is so much hype around artificial intelligence that the concern is understandable but it’s important that we hang on to our critical faculties. The current AI frenzy ultimately serves those who stand to benefit from implementing these products the most but we don’t have to let them dictate the terms of the conversation.

If there is one thing that I try to impart to friends – and now you – it’s this: Yes, you should be concerned about AI. But let’s be clear about which boogeyman is actually lurking under the bed. It’s hard to fight a monster if you don’t know what it is. No one wants to be the fool using a wooden stake on a zombie to no avail.

Rather than fretting over some far-flung fear of an “existential threat” to humanity, we should be concerned about the material consequences of far less sophisticated AI technologies that are affecting people’s lives right now. And what’s more, we should be deeply troubled by the way AI is being leveraged to further concentrate power in a handful of companies.

So let’s sort the speculative fiction from reality.

Every other day a high profile figure peddles a doomsday prediction about AI development left unchecked. Will it lead to a Ministry of Truth a la George Orwell’s 1984? Or perhaps hostile killing machines fresh out of Terminator. Or perhaps it’ll be more like The Matrix.

This all acts as both a marketing exercise for and a diversion from the more pressing harms caused by AI.
... We’re not talking about the danger of some far-off sci-fi future, we’re talking about the amplification of systems and social problems that already exist

First, it’s important to remember that large language models like GPT-4 are not sentient, nor intelligent, no matter how proficient they may be at mimicking human speech. But the human tendency toward anthropomorphism is strong, and it’s made worse by clumsy metaphors such as that the machine is ‘hallucinating’ when it generates incorrect outputs. In any case, we are nowhere near the kind of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) or ‘superintelligence’ that a handful of loud voices are sounding the alarm on.

The problem with pushing people to be afraid of AGI while calling for intervention is that it enables firms like OpenAI to position themselves as the responsible tech shepherds – the benevolent experts here to save us from hypothetical harms, as long as they retain the power, money and market dominance to do so. Notably, OpenAI’s position on AI governance focuses not on current AI but on some arbitrary point in the future. They welcome regulation, as long as it doesn’t get in the way of anything they’re currently doing.

We need not wait for some hypothetical tech-bro delusion to consider – and fight – the harms of AI. The kinds of technologies and computational techniques that sit under the umbrella marketing term of AI are much broader than the current fixation on large language models or image generation tools. It covers less show-stopping systems that we use – or are used upon us – every day, such as recommendation engines that curate our online experiences, surveillance technologies like facial recognition, and some automated decision-making systems, which determine, for example, people’s interactions with finance, housing, welfare, education, and insurance.

The use of these technologies can and do lead to negative consequences. Bias and discrimination is rife in automated decision-making systems, leading to adverse impacts on people’s access to services, housing, and justice. Facial recognition supercharges surveillance and policing, compounding the effect of state-sanctioned violence against many marginalised groups. Recommender systems often send people down algorithmic rabbit holes toward increasingly extreme online content. We need not speculate on ways this tech can cause harm; we already have a mountain of evidence from the past decade.

As for generative AI, we are already seeing the kinds of harms that can arise, in far more prosaic ways than it becoming sentient and deciding to end humanity. Like how quickly GPT-4 was spruiked as a way to automate harassment and intimidation by debt-collectors. Or how it can turbocharge information manipulation, enabling impersonation and extortion of people, using new tech for old tricks to scam people; or add a hi-tech flavour to misogyny through deepfake porn. Or how it entrenches and seeks to make additional profit from surveillance capitalism business models that prioritise data generation, accumulation and commodification.

The through-line here is that we’re not talking about the danger of some far-off sci-fi future, we’re talking about the amplification of systems and social problems that already exist. Sarah Myers West of AI Now said that the focus on future harms has become a rhetorical sleight of hand, used by AI industry figures to ‘position accountability right out into the future.’ It’s easy to pay attention to the fantastical imaginary of AI but it is in the more mundane uses where the real, material consequences are happening.

The future of AI is chilling – humans have to act together to overcome this threat to civilisation
Jonathan Freedland

When interviewed about his warnings on the dangers of AI, the so-called ‘Godfather of AI’ Geoffrey Hinton dismissed the concerns of longstanding whistleblowers such as Timnit Gebru and Meredith Whittaker, claiming their concerns were not as ‘existential’ as his. To suggest that rampant bias and discrimination, pervasive information manipulation, or the entrenchment of surveillance is not as serious as the chimera of AGI is disturbing. What such people fail to realise is that AI does pose an existential threat to many, just not people they care about.

Too often AI is presented as a risk-benefit tradeoff; where the historical evidence and present risks are dismissed as the cost of an overblown hypothetical future. We are told that there is so much potential for good, and that to slow ‘progress’ or ‘innovation’ would prevent us from realising it. But overlooking material impacts of past and present AI in favour of an imaginary future will not lead us to socially progressive technology. And that’s way more worrying than speculative AI overlords.

Samantha Floreani is a digital rights activist and writer based in Naarm