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Just this past week, the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) had its 2023 Leadership Summit in Arlington, VA, which is a three-day meeting for board members and volunteer leaders to connect and collaborate on ID workforce strategies and other top priorities of the organization. During this summit, IDSA members went to Capitol Hill to talk to Congressional leaders and their staffs about antimicrobial stewardship and specifically the Pasteur Act. For those not familiar with it, the Pasteur Act is a prospective bill that looks to encourage innovative drug development targeting the most threatening infections, improve the appropriate use of antibiotics, and ensure domestic availability of antibiotics when needed. The Pasteur Act would establish an innovative payment contract (subscription model) where the federal government invests in highly novel antibiotics and antifungals through installment payments in exchange for free access to developers’ drugs in government programs once available.

The bill was initially introduced in Congress in 2020, then reintroduced in both 2021 and earlier this year. When it was reintroduced back in April, five national organizations, the Biotechnology Innovation Organization, the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, IDSA, the Partnership to Fight Infectious Disease, and The Pew Charitable Trusts, issued a joint statement on the topic. “Antimicrobial resistance is not a partisan issue. It is an increasingly challenging public health emergency that reverberates far beyond just health care settings. Every 15 minutes, a person in the United States dies from an infection resistant to treatment with existing antimicrobial drugs. This means that since PASTEUR’s last introduction on June 16, 2021, more than 64,000 Americans have died because they did not have adequate medications to treat their infections,” part of the statement read.

If the dangers of falling behind in the global tech race are obvious, so is the best way for America to stay ahead: high-skilled immigration reform.

This policy imperative reflects three hard truths:

Recent commentary has sounded the alarm on the ability of so-called “emerging” technologies to tilt the balance of terror and complicate strategic stability calculations. Indeed, from the longbow and gunpowder to the tank and nuclear weapons, technological innovation has revolutionized and redrawn the borders of the battlefield. The same will be true of the range of new capabilities on the horizon, not least those in the space and cyber domains. But how are these new technologies distinguishable from that which came before them—in qualitative and quantitative terms? And how can we measure the impact of these technologies in a way that is not alarmist, but rather, allows us to systematically evaluate them on their potential for disruption?

Comparing the impacts of heterogenous technologies side by side (especially across two domains) can be challenging; it is the policy equivalent of comparing apples with oranges. This becomes especially apparent when we consider the numerous and wide-ranging ways in which emerging technologies have the potential to complicate strategic stability. They could, for example, provide new ways to use or stop the use of nuclear weapons (e.g., AI for missile defense could significantly change the deterrence calculation). They might blur the boundary between nuclear and non-nuclear infrastructure (e.g., the dual-use nature of satellites might increase the potential for misidentification or unintended escalation). They could create new vulnerabilities within existing systems (e.g., new technologies might enable cyberattacks on civilian infrastructure). And more fundamentally, they might even change the game (i.e., the technology, and its proliferation to new actors, could make attribution more difficult).

Are the U.S., China, and Russia recklessly undertaking an “AI arms race”? Clearly, there is military competition among these great powers to advance a range of applications of robotics, artificial intelligence, and autonomous systems.

So far, the U.S. has been leading the way. AI and autonomy are crucial to the Pentagon’s Third Offset strategy. Its Algorithmic Warfare Cross-Functional Team, Project Maven, has become a “pathfinder” for this endeavor and has started to deploy algorithms in the fight against ISIS. The Department of Defense also plans to create a “Joint Artificial Intelligence Center,” which could consolidate DoD AI initiatives.

The idea of the nation's power grids becoming the next battleground for cyber warriors could make hacking into consumers’ credit card accounts and personal information seem like child’s play. While U.S. power companies are likely targeted by foreign governments and others in increasingly sophisticated breaches, actually shutting off the lights and causing chaos is far more complicated than many pundits make it seem. Dan Scali, senior manager of industrial control systems at Mandiant, a cybersecurity consulting arm of FireEye (FEYE), explained that while cyber criminals may gain access to power and utility data systems, it doesn’t necessarily mean the result will be a power outage and a total takedown of power grid control systems. In other words, the power grid is controlled by more than just a panel of digital buttons. “Losing the control system is bad from the perspective that it takes you out of your normal mode of operations of being able to control everything from one command center, but it doesn’t mean you’ve lost control or all the lights go out [in the city],” Scali explained. While many of the systems have been modernized to include digitized control panels, if a hacker were to infiltrate the system, a utility worker could still have the ability to manually control the machines by flipping a switch, pushing a button, or tripping a breaker. As the world saw with the recent attack in Ukraine, which caused a blackout for 80,000 customers of the nation’s western utility, the biggest problem may be ensuring the power grid’s control systems are not vulnerable to cyber break ins. The January attack in Ukraine was likely caused by a corrupted Microsoft Word attachment that allowed remote control over the computer, according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Scali said there was no evidence from the incident in Ukraine that the hacker’s malware was able to physically shut down the power. “It wiped out machines, deleted all the files. Kill disk malware made it impossible to remotely control things. It caused chaos on the business network, and the area where control system operations sat. But the attacker, we believe, would have had to actually used the control system to cause load shedding, which caused the power to go out, or trip breakers to cause the actual problem. Malware itself didn’t turn the power out,” Scali said. He said what most likely happened in that incident was the hacker stole user credentials and logged into the system remotely. The bottom line: Yes, a similar event could happen in the U.S. And corporate America is concerned. A recent survey released in January on the state of information security, conducted by consulting firm Pricewaterhouse Coopers, showed cybersecurity as one of the biggest concerns among the top brass at U.S. power and utilities firms. Part of the problem, Brad Bauch, security and cyber sector leader at PwC said, is the interconnectedness of the industry’s tools. “Utilities want to be able to get information out of [their] systems to more efficiently operate them, and also share that information with customers so they have more real-time information into their usage,” he explained. While allowing access to their own consumption data allows the companies to give their customers more of what they want, it also opens up a host of access points for hackers, making the systems more vulnerable than they otherwise would be. But to say that the power grid is susceptible to cyber hackers is a bit of an oversimplification.

As India recovers from a blackout that left the world’s second-largest country — and more than 600 million residents — in the dark, a ripple of uncertainty moved through the Federal Regulatory Commission’s command center today in the U.S. The Indian crisis had some people asking about the vulnerability of America’s grid. “What people really want to know today is, can something like India happen here? So if there is an outage or some problem in the Northeast, can it actually spread all the way to California,” John Wellinghoff, the commission’s chairman, told ABC News. “It’s very, very unlikely that ultimately would happen.” Wellinghoff said that first, the grid was divided in the middle of the nation. Engineers said that it also was monitored more closely than ever. The grid is checked for line surges 30 times a second. Since the Northeast blackout in 2003 — the largest in the U.S., which affected 55 million — 16,000 miles of new transmission lines have been added to the grid. And even though some lines in the Northeast are more than 70 years old, Wellinghoff said that the chances of a blackout like India’s were very low.

So, why do Americans engage in violent extremism? I think it’s really interesting to kind of divide our homegrown extremists. We have found most recently are principally people who are loners [and] they have come to these ideas and the decision to engage in violence either on their own or sometime in pairs. And, that’s been true for the most part of both people on the top of the left-hand side of the slide, who were inspired by Al Qaeda and ISIS ideology and people on the bottom who were more inclined towards a white supremacist point of view. And I think this is a very, very different phenomenon [than what] was going on abroad, whether it be the Taliban or Hamas, or other violent extremist movements such as ISIS, Al-Qaeda as well, which are really much more foreign insurgencies against the ruling class, the state in these foreign countries. ISIS and Al-Qaeda especially do target foreigners and they do target Americans, which happened on 9/11. But, if you’re looking at the vast majority of terrorism, it’s coming from foreign groups who are much more involved in mass political movements rather than individuals.

U.S. national security suffered in 2017. Russia is running amok, allies are losing faith in American security and prosperity commitments, and the liberal order is in crisis. Surrounding these clouds, however, a silver lining stands out: counterterrorism. U.S. counterterrorism proved successful this year, especially against jihadist movements that have plagued the United States and the world since 9/11. Jihadist terrorism still poses a problem, of course, and other forms of terrorism have risen too in intensity, but a look at the terrorism balance sheet for 2017 shows a net positive. Yet, the U.S. disengagement from the Middle East provides fertile soil for terrorist groups to grow. Long-term counterterrorism success requires a reexamination of U.S. policy in the Middle East at large. The collapse of the Islamic State’s caliphate in Iraq and Syria represents the biggest counterterrorism success. The Islamic State will go underground and otherwise try to adapt, but losing their territory dealt a big blow: only three years ago, the group seemed deeply rooted in Iraq and Syria and was metastasizing in Egypt, Libya and other countries in the Muslim world. In addition to the U.S. assault on the Islamic State’s territory, the group’s virtual presence is under siege due to counterterrorism efforts, with both the quality and quantity of its propaganda suffering. Even with the collapse of the Islamic State’s caliphate, so-called “homegrown violent extremists” (HVEs) will likely attack, the group will strive to restore itself in Iraq and Syria, and frustrated, would-be foreign fighters may also strike. Some of the Islamic State’s thousands of foreign fighters will also return home, posing an additional danger. Regardless, the collapse of the caliphate dealt a big blow to Islamic State. Setting aside the fall of the caliphate, the counterterrorism picture looks positive from the perspective of U.S. homeland security. In 2017, nine people died on U.S. soil from jihadist terrorist attacks (a security guard killed in Denver, two Americans and six foreign tourists, killed during the car-ramming attack in New York City). That’s nine too many but it should not obscure that the overall number is low. This low number probably stems from a mix of strong U.S. counterterrorism measures abroad, aggressive investigations and better defenses at home, and the overall weakness of jihadist networks in the United States.

As the end of 2022 approaches, important changes are coming to the trademark prosecution process before the United States Patent and Trademark Office (“USPTO”). Trademark practitioners and applicants must be aware of the new deadline, effective December 3, 2022, and how it may impact trademark applications and prosecution strategies.

The new deadline shortens the deadline to respond to office actions issued on or after December 3, 2022, from six months to three months. However, USPTO will allow trademark applicants to extend the deadline for an additional three months if the applicant files for an extension prior to the expiration of the three-month deadline and pays a $125 extension fee.

The United States Patent and Trademark Office’s (USPTO) efforts to modernize its practices and increase the efficiency of examination have started to take shape. As of May 24, 2022, the USPTO is now only issuing electronic trademark registration certificates. This change marks a move in the direction of full electronic processing and registration for trademarks in the United States.

The change to electronic trademark registration certificates is intended to give trademark owners easier and quicker access to their trademark certificates upon registration. According to the USPTO, the electronic trademark registration certificates will allow trademarks to be issued 1-2 weeks sooner than the current paper printed registration certificates. The new electronic certificates will be issued by the USPTO with a digital seal to authenticate the registration, and then emailed to trademark owners and attorneys through all emails of record associated with the trademark.

With clever chemical tweaks, an old antibiotic can dole out any of three lethal blows to some of the deadliest bacteria—and give evolution one nasty concussion. The antibiotic, vancomycin, has always been a heavy hitter against odious germs; it uses one crafty maneuver that can take out even drug-resistant foes and is often used as a last resort. But, with three chemical modifications, reported this week in PNAS, the drug now has three distinct molecular moves to take out pathogens. The menacing modifications render vancomycin at least 25,000 times deadlier. And with that level of potency, dazed bacteria stumble at developing resistance when given the chance in lab experiments. And maybe that should be the real goal in the war against drug-resistant microbes, the authors of the new study—chemists at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California—argue. “As an alternative to championing the restricted use of antibiotics or conceding that bacteria will always outsmart us, can durable antibiotics be developed that are capable of continued or even more widespread use?” Perhaps, they write, we should be designing drugs that “overcome the forces of evolution and selection responsible for bacterial resistance, that are less prone or even impervious to resistance development, that avoid many of the common mechanisms of resistance, and that are more durable than ever before.” It’s not a new idea, but it’s certainly a very hard thing to accomplish. To take a serious swing at evolution, the team, led by chemical biologist Dale Boger, built upon years of detailed structural work on vancomycin. The drug has some useful characteristics for this feat, including that bacteria naturally have trouble resisting it. Vancomycin can kill bacteria with one of the two main types of cell wall structures—so called Gram-positive bacteria, such as Staph aureus. (Bacteria mainly fall into either Gram-positive or Gram-negative categories, which are based on the structures of the protective, rigid walls surrounding their cells. The structure can be figured out using Gram staining, named for bacteriologist Hans Christian Gram. An example of a Gram-negative bacteria is E. coli.) Knock-out drug Unlike other antibiotics, which often target important enzymes or cellular machinery, vancomycin kills Gram-positive bacteria by clamping onto, basically, a molecular brick in their cell wall—linked amino acids D-Alanine-D-Alanine. Vancomycin doesn’t do anything to the brick, it just gets in the way so the wall can’t cement together properly. As such, the wall crumbles apart, destabilizing the bacteria’s structure, leading to cell death. (Gram-negative bacteria use a different wall-building method, so they’re generally safe.) Time has shown that bacteria are bad at evolving resistance to the brick attack—there’s no simple genetic mutation to get around it. In nearly 60 years of clinical use, resistance to vancomycin has developed relatively slowly. And the resistance that has shown up is complicated and bulky: bacteria use a two-component signaling system that first senses if vancomycin is invading, then they trigger a late-stage switch in building materials, swapping D-Alanine-D-Alanine bricks for D-Alanine-D-Lactate in their walls. Facing this defense, vancomycin is a thousandfold less lethal to bacteria. Lucky for us, there is a simple trick to defeat this cumbersome resistance: a chemical tweak to the part of vancomycin’s structure that binds to the brick can make it just as likely to glom onto D-Ala-D-Lac as D-Ala-D-Ala. With that modification, Boger and his team could crush vancomycin resistance. But they weren’t done. They also figured out how to tweak two other areas of vancomycin’s structure. On the top of the molecule, they added (4-chlorobiphenyl)methyl or CBP, which can pummel an enzyme, called transglycosylase, involved in cell wall construction. Then, the chemists figured out that if they added a quaternary ammonium salt to the left side of the structure, this could punch holes in the cell’s membrane, the delicate barrier underneath the protective wall. Each of the three tweaks could kill bacteria on their own. But together, they make one killer antibiotic. In tests, the triple threat proved to be between 25,000 and 50,000 times deadlier to vancomycin-resistant bacteria than basic vancomycin. It also further slowed the bacteria’s ability to develop resistance.

Death rates from bacterial infections dropped over 90% from historic levels before the introduction of penicillin. Sanitation and vaccines are far more effective methods to control bacterial infections than antibiotics ever were or ever will be. Boring old soap and water, filtration, bleach, and alcohol kill superbugs just fine. None of these things are in short supply. The acquisition of multiple drug resistances generally (but not always) causes bacteria to become a bit less fit and unable to infect otherwise healthy adults. The victim of this particular superbug was in her seventies and had been in and out of hospitals for over a year. This is a fairly typical profile for victims of multi-drug resistant bacteria. The worst-case scenario, if we continue to abuse and overuse antibiotics in feedlots and hospitals, is that these bugs will pick up compensatory mutations and become more virulent. Many fairly routine procedures - chemotherapy, thoracic and orthopedic surgery - will become much more risky. But the risk will still be largely confined to hospitalized patients. MDR bacteria are extremely unlikely to cause a global pandemic on the scale of the 1919 influenza or AIDS epidemics, so long as we continue to provide clean food and water to the public.

The worst-case scenario would be that it would be like 1940, only without a raging World War. Keep in mind that by 1940, before the introduction of penicillin, deaths from infectious diseases in the US had been reduced by 90% from their 19th century levels [1]. This reduction was entirely due to the provisions of clean food, water, and vaccines. We have (or should have) better systems for delivering these public health goods than we did 75 years ago.

But there is never going to be a post-antibiotic era. Antibiotic therapy will continue to be effective most of the time. If antibiotic therapy is informed by rapid microbiology testing, then it will be effective nearly all of the time. Very few bugs are, or will be, pan-resistant and untreatable by antibiotics. Even the worst superbugs—MRSAs, CREs, ESBLs, and now MCR-1s—are almost always susceptible to at least one clinically useful antibiotic (XDR TB is the most troubling exception to this rule).

Some climate scientists think that calling climate change an existential threat is misleading. “I don’t think it’s an existential threat to humanity or ‘life on Earth,’” Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, told Grist. “There’s this popular notion that there’s some level of warming after which the warming becomes self-sustaining, which is actually not our understanding as physical scientists of how the climate system works.”

Scientists have long known that climate change may have “tipping points,” levels of warming at which certain parts of the climate system, like ice sheets or coral reefs, will not be able to recover. Though it’s true that passing any of these tipping points would mean a substantial increase in warming, as far as scientists know, none of them will create a situation in which the planet must keep warming forever. (Put another way, Earth isn’t Venus — which famously had a greenhouse effect so strong that it evaporated the planet’s oceans.)

Thirdly, many of the feedbacks in the Hothouse Earth pathway are long-term, committing us to a Hothouse state in several centuries’ time rather than over the next few decades. Several tipping elements in the cascade figure above (e.g. ice sheets & the thermohaline circulation) will take centuries to millennia to complete their transitions even if tipped soon, while some of the others (e.g. permafrost thaw and Amazon/Boreal forest dieback) will still take decades to centuries. Stability of both the Greenland and West Antarctic Ice Sheets is projected to be at risk of tipping above 1.5-2°C (often mistakenly cited as evidence for a generic global tipping point rather than ice-specific). This would guarantee the eventual collapse of these ice sheets, and parts of West Antarctica may have already crossed this point. But ice sheets are so massive that this will still take far longer than our lifespans to play out. The Hothouse Earth trajectory also assumes temperatures stabilise and remain above these limits long-term – if we were to overshoot 2°C for a few decades but successfully draw down enough carbon to go back below, this might still stop these processes early enough to prevent a total collapse.

Finally, some of the coverage used the term “runaway warming” to describe the Hothouse Earth trajectory, but this is inaccurate. Runaway warming in scientific terms means when positive feedbacks surpass all negative feedbacks and uncontrollably amplifies warming until all water evaporates, creating a ‘moist greenhouse’ as likely happened on early Venus. But this is not what the Hothouse Earth paper is proposing – instead they are suggesting that there is an alternative stable climate state at around 4°C warmer than pre-industrial (shown in the stability landscape figure earlier on), and that the 2-4°C range is inherently unstable and leads to the Earth warming until it reaches this state. But this new state is potentially quite stable (as in the stability landscape image), and warming beyond it is unlikely without substantial further emissions. As the greenhouse effect is logarithmic (i.e. each 100ppm extra CO2 causes less warming than the 100ppm before) the effectiveness of positive feedbacks is gradually curtailed. True ‘runaway warming’ would take far more emissions (and probably much more than we are actually capable of) to surpass this, and so accelerating warming does not imply runaway warming that continues indefinitely. And even if people saying runaway is likely don’t mean a true Venusian runaway, the term still implies that a large amount of warming will soon become unstoppable, which calculations of feedback and tipping point impacts currently indicate is very unlikely.

There is no scientific basis to suggest that climate breakdown will “annihilate intelligent life” (by which I assume the report authors mean human extinction) by 2050.

However, climate breakdown does pose a grave threat to civilization as we know it, and the potential for mass suffering on a scale perhaps never before encountered by humankind. This should be enough reason for action without any need for exaggeration or misrepresentation!

Yet another problem with the assumption that catastrophic human-caused environment change simply causes civil war, as Salehyan and Hendrix noted, is that violence at the scale of a civil war requires significant resources. In their view, civil wars are more likely to occur in times of relative abundance. While “riots and protests, may emerge from conditions of scarcity,” they argue, “sustaining a militant organization requires considerable planning and resources” (Salehyan and Hendrix 2014, p. 240). Reasons to fight might exist. For this to turn into civil war, however, people “also need the capability to do so, and environmental scarcity may limit such capability, thus undermining the resource base necessary for mobilizing armed violence” (Salehyan and Hendrix 2014, p. 240).

A related debate concerns what Adams and colleagues have claimed to be a sampling bias in studies of the connection between environment change and armed conflict (Adams et al. 2018). Levy accepts the existence of some sampling bias but rejects the view that this bias results in an overstatement of the connection between environment change and conflict. “Knowing that case selection is biased is useful, but not a reason to lower our estimate of the climate’s impact on conflict” (Levy 2018, p. 441).

While the concern for the effects of global warming is new, the underlying argument about armed conflict and other social consequences bears extensive similarities to the traditional neoMalthusian argument. Indeed, as Meierding (2013: 186) points out, ‘quantitative climate change–conflict researchers usually import arguments from earlier environmental conflict studies or from the civil wars literature’ and the same would seem to apply to the non-quantitative literature as well. Once again, even though climate change is not a traditional pollution issue, the fear of developing scarcities is at the core. The IPCC reports that a warmer climate will lead to more drought and be detrimental to agriculture, particularly rain-fed agriculture in Africa and the Middle East. Excessive temperatures may drive people away from their traditional homelands and force them to become migrants, leading to competition for scarce resources in their countries of arrival. Other parts of the world may be more affected by excessive rainfall, leading to floods that will negatively affect human habitation and livelihoods. More generally, a warmer climate will increase the probability of natural disasters such as storms and hurricanes. Rising sea levels will threaten low-lying areas as well as coastal cities and may make small low-altitude islands uninhabitable. The warming of the oceans will also impact the world’s fisheries, with possible consequences for another important component of food security (IPCC, 2019b).

The first reports from the IPCC paid little direct attention to armed conflict. The Third Assessment Report (IPCC, 2001) made a few references to the potential for climate change-induced conflict, mainly water wars, conflicts generated by migration, and resource wars. The report had a weak basis in peer-reviewed literature. The Fourth Assessment Report (IPCC, 2007) contained even fewer references to armed conflict. The Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) included a chapter on human security with a 4.5-page section on conflict, which noted that ‘collectively the research does not conclude that there is a strong positive relationship between warming and armed conflict’ (IPCC, 2014: 772). The report also noted ‘high agreement’ that ‘in the specific circumstances where other risk factors are extremely low […], the impact of changes in climate on armed conflict is negligible.’ The Africa chapter noted the possibility of water conflict. A chapter labeled ‘Detection and attribution’, devoted to assessing the robustness of relationships reported in other chapters, dismissed the link from climate change to violence out of hand. More recent reports from IPCC do not deal extensively with armed conflict, although it is briefly mentioned in the special reports on the impact of 1.5° global warming (IPCC, 2019a: 245), on the oceans (2019b: 30), and on land use (2019c: 23, 25), and neither will AR6 (IPCC, 2021).

The Chicken Littles at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are at it again.

The panel recently released its sixth assessment report on global warming. The verdict? The world is doomed.

But the purpose of this chapter is finding and assessing threats that pose a direct existential risk to humanity. Even at such extreme levels of warming, it is difficult to see exactly how climate change could do so. Major effects of climate change include reduced agricultural yields, sea level rises, water scarcity, increased tropical diseases, ocean acidification and the collapse of the Gulf Stream. While extremely important when assessing the overall risks of climate change, none of these threaten extinction or irrevocable collapse.

Crops are very sensitive to reductions in temperature (due to frosts), but less sensitive to increases. By all appearances we would still have food to support civilization.85 Even if sea levels rose hundreds of meters (over centuries), most of the Earth’s land area would remain. Similarly, while some areas might conceivably become uninhabitable due to water scarcity, other areas will have increased rainfall. More areas may become susceptible to tropical diseases, but we need only look to the tropics to see civilization flourish despite this. The main effect of a collapse of the system of Atlantic Ocean currents that includes the Gulf Stream is a 2°C cooling of Europe—something that poses no permanent threat to global civilization.