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A highly sophisticated computer worm that has spread through Iran, Indonesia and India was built to destroy operations at one target: possibly Iran's Bushehr nuclear reactor.

Langner thinks that it's possible that Bushehr may have been infected through the Russian contractor that is now building the facility, JSC AtomStroyExport. Recently AtomStroyExport had its Web site hacked, and some of its Web pages are still blocked by security vendors because they are known to host malware. This is not an auspicious sign for a company contracted with handling nuclear secrets.

Many security researchers think that it would take the resources of a nation state to accomplish.

the four greatest threats to the human species - artificial intelligence, climate change, nuclear war and rogue biotechnology.

Huw Price, Bertrand Russell Professor of Philosophy and another of the centre's three founders, said such an 'ultra-intelligent machine, or artificial general intelligence (AGI)' could have very serious consequences. He said: 'Nature didn’t anticipate us, and we in our turn shouldn’t take AGI for granted.'We need to take seriously the possibility that there might be a ‘Pandora’s box’ moment with AGI that, if missed, could be disastrous.

underground shelters, almost-forgotten relics of the Cold War era, are making a comeback

a $41 million facility Radius built and installed underground that is suitable for 750 people, McCarthy says. He declined to disclose the client or location of the shelter.

Vicino, whose terravivos.com website lists 11 global catastrophes ranging from nuclear war to solar flares to comets, bristles at the notion he's profiting from people's fears. "You don't think of the person who sells you a fire extinguisher as taking advantage of your fear," he says. "The fact that you may never use that fire extinguisher doesn't make it a waste or bad. "We're not creating the fear; the fear is already out there. We're creating a solution."

I'll press your buttons here by positing that if "we" (humankind) are too dumb to self-regulate our own childbirth output, too dim to recognize that we are polluting ourselves and neighbors out of sustainable existence, we are, in fact, a ridiculous parasite on this Earth and that the planet on which we live will simply slough us off—as it well should—and will bounce back without evidence of we even being here, come two or three thousand years. Your thoughts (in as much detail as you wish)?I would recommend reading my "the next 50 years" piece here. Basically I think that
 climate change, which in this case genuinely is caused mostly by humanity, 
is just one part of the environmental problem. Overfishing, toxification of 
the seas, pesticide use, weedkillers, prescription drugs in water,
 fracking, continued air pollution, toxicity in food, destruction of animal
 habitat, attrition on bee colonies—all this is converging. And we'll be 
facing the consequences for several hundred years.

I believe humanity will
 survive, and it won't be surviving like Road Warrior or the Morlocks from The Time Machine, but I think we'll have some cruelly ugly social consequences. We'll have famines the like of which we've never seen before, along with higher risk of wars—I do predict a third world war in the second half of this century but I don't think it will be a nuclear war—and I think we'll suffer so hugely we'll be forced to have a change in consciousness to adapt. 

Several prototypes of a diplomatic system using artificial intelligence are under development in China, according to researchers involved or familiar with the projects. One early-stage machine, built by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, is already being used by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

China’s ambition to become a world leader has significantly increased the burden and challenge to its diplomats. The “Belt and Road Initiative”, for instance, involves nearly 70 countries with 65 per cent of the world’s population. The unprecedented development strategy requires up to a US$900 billion investment each year for infrastructure construction, some in areas with high political, economic or environmental risk

researchers said the AI “policymaker” was a strategic decision support system, with experts stressing that it will be humans who will make any final decision

New Mexico spaceport is only the latest entry in a triumphant time line of military and aerospace innovation in this southwestern state. Our video narrator speeds through Spanish colonialism and westward expansion to highlight the Manhattan Project’s work in Los Alamos, to the north, and Operation Paperclip, a secret program that recruited German scientists to the United States after World War II. Among them was Wernher von Braun, who brought his V-2 rockets to the state.White Sands Missile Range, a 3,200-square-mile military-testing site in South Central New Mexico’s Tularosa Basin, hosted much of this work. It’s home to the Trinity Site, where the first atomic bomb was detonated, and von Braun’s rocket testing site, too. Spaceport America is positioned adjacent to the Army property, in a tightly protected airspace. That makes rocket-ship testing a lot easier.

“It feels exciting, it’s like the future is now,”

For now, the spaceport is a futurist tourist attraction, not an operational harbor to the cosmos. The tour buses depart from a former T or C community center twice a day every Saturday. They pass thrift stores, RV parks, and bland but durable-looking structures, defiant underdogs against the mountains. We pass the Elephant Butte Dam, a stunning example of early-20th-century Bureau of Reclamation engineering that made it possible for agriculture to thrive in southern New Mexico; even so, a fellow spaceport tourist notes that the water levels seem far lower than what he recalls from childhood

As the evening progressed, more and more questions concerning justice and ethics occurred to the physicists: Are atomic weapons inherently inhumane, and should they never be used? If the Germans had come to possess such weapons, what would be the world’s fate? What constitutes real patriotism in Nazi Germany—working for the regime’s success, or its defeat? The scientists expressed surprise and bafflement at their colleagues’ opinions, and their own views sometimes evolved from one moment to the next. The scattered, changing opinions captured in the Farm Hall transcripts highlight that, in their five years on the Nazi nuclear program, the German physicists had likely failed to wrestle meaningfully with these critical questions.

looking back at the Uranium Club serves to remind us scientists of how easy it is to focus on technical matters and avoid considering moral ones. This is especially true when the moral issues are perplexing, when any negative impacts seem distant, and when the science is exciting.

engineers who develop tracking or facial-recognition systems may be creating tools that can be purchased by repressive regimes intent on spying on and suppressing dissent. Accordingly, those researchers have a certain obligation to consider their role and the impact of their work.

Strong leader Senator Jellison (who is white) then asks former Shire founder Hugo Beck what went wrong, and Beck says his fellow hippies just never realized how great technology and laissez-faire economics were, and now all his old friends are dining on human flesh under the thumb of a scary black communist.

Today, Lucifer’s Hammer reads as a depiction of a post-apocalyptic war between Trump counties and Clinton counties, simultaneously promising American renewal even as it depicts unavoidable catastrophe. The comet acts as a cleansing, wiping away so much dead wood of civilization. (Feminism, too, comes in for repeated knocks.)

SDI was only one part of a larger right-wing techno-futurist project. SDI historian Edward Linenthal cites a 1983 interview with Newt Gingrich in which the young conservative Congressman predicted that SDI would not just destroy Russia’s Communists but liberalism, too. SDI would be “a dagger at the heart of the liberal welfare state” because it destroys “the liberal myth of scarcity,” leaving only “the limits of a free people’s ingenuity, daring, and courage.”