OUR PICKS: BIOSECURITY, WMDA U.S. Strategy to Prevent the Creation of Mirror Life | When AI Biosafety Safeguards Block Public Health | What Makes a Weapon Too Horrific to Use?, and more
· Congo’s Ebola Epidemic Started at Least 4 Months Before It Was Detected
· Current Ebola Outbreak Worst Ever in DR Congo, WHO Says
· Day 75: How Bundibugyo Science Reached the Clinic
· CSTE Launches Public Interactive Tool to Track State and Territorial Reportable Diseases
· A U.S. Strategy to Prevent the Creation of Mirror Life
· Interpreting Dual-Use Biology Benchmarks for Frontier AI
· When AI Biosafety Safeguards Block Public Health
· Two Years On, Britain’s Biological Security Strategy Makes Strides
· Shikhani Says Accountability for Chemical Attacks in Syria Essential for Justice
· What Makes a Weapon Too Horrific to Use?
· Gas from Above: How UAVs Are Bringing Chemical Warfare Back to the Battlefield in Ukraine
Congo’s Ebola Epidemic Started at Least 4 Months Before It Was Detected (Kai Kupferschmidt, Science)
A remote mining town gripped by fear saw hundreds of suspected cases before the government declared an outbreak, report says.
Current Ebola Outbreak Worst Ever in DR Congo, WHO Says (Jamie Whitehead, BBC)
As of 30 July, there were 3,605 confirmed cases including 1,587 deaths - a fatality rate of 44%. The current outbreak is caused by the Bundibugyo strain of the virus. It was declared on 15 May 2026 and surpasses the previous biggest outbreak between 2018 and 2020, which had nearly 3,500 recorded cases of whom almost 2,300 died.
Day 75: How Bundibugyo Science Reached the Clinic (Larry Kerr and Summer Galloway, Substack)
The outbreak shows what preparedness can achieve - and why access to samples and genomes still needs clearer rules.
CSTE Launches Public Interactive Tool to Track State and Territorial Reportable Diseases (CSTE)
New interactive platform standardizes complex mandates across public health jurisdictions, allowing users to search, map, and filter reportable conditions in real time.
A U.S. Strategy to Prevent the Creation of Mirror Life (Nidhi Kalra et al., RAND)
Mirror life is a hypothetical form of life built from biomolecules with the opposite chirality—or molecular orientation—of those used by all known life on earth. Although mirror life does not yet exist, scientific advances have produced mirror-image biomolecules and components that could serve as the building blocks of mirror organisms, and some laboratories have articulated the goal of constructing a viable mirror cell. Experts estimate that mirror life could become a reality within the next few decades.
Interpreting Dual-Use Biology Benchmarks for Frontier AI (Grant Ellison, et al., RAND)
The authors use item response theory and an interpretive taxonomy to address the motivating question: “What can benchmark data reveal about what artificial intelligence (AI) can do now that it could not do before?” Findings indicate that many benchmark tasks are no longer informative, but there is a discriminating frontier of tasks, with recent gains in performance concentrated in difficult tasks theorized to be relevant to real-world risks.
When AI Biosafety Safeguards Block Public Health (Larry Kerr, Substack)
ChatGPT’s new restrictions are obstructing legitimate analysis of the Bundibugyo Ebola response—and its Trusted Access process offers remarkably little transparency when the system gets it wrong.
