OUR PICKSWhat Bush Understood That Trump Doesn’t | Climate Change Is Exposing Nuclear Power’s Reliability Problem | The Election Deniers’ Long Game, and more

What Bush Understood That Trump Doesn’t  (Jonathan Chait, The Atlantic)
The leaders of the American right have embraced the false idea that the United States is at war with Islam.

Newly Created Viruses Are a Warning. We Still Have a Window to Stop AI-enabled Bioweapons  (Steph Guerra, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists)
“Nature is the world’s worst bioterrorist” is a common maxim in the field of biosecurity, a reference to the idea that naturally emerging pathogens cause far more deaths than any biological attack a terrorist could carry out. But the trope may soon be outdated. In an article published Aug. 6 in the journal Science, scientists demonstrated that trained AI models can design novel viruses as well as—if not better than—nature itself.  
Their experiment created viruses that infect bacteria, not humans. Still, much like the multiple AI models that escaped their test environments to hack other networks this summer, these newly revealed capabilities give biosecurity experts like me pause. How do we keep enabling legitimate scientific progress, while also preventing AI from assisting in the creation of biological weapons? 

Climate Change Is Exposing Nuclear Power’s Reliability Problem  (Valerie Arnhold and M.V. Ramana, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists)
One of nuclear energy’s biggest selling points is its claims of reliability. “Nuclear energy is the only large-scale power source that can be tapped in even the most extreme weather conditions, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week,” boasts the American energy company Constellation. “Nuclear power plants are very reliable, and can run for many months without interruption, providing large amounts of clean electricity, regardless of the time of day, the weather, or the season,” says the World Nuclear Association. At a public meeting in June, Keith Ammon, a pro-nuclear Republican member of the New Hampshire House of Representatives, echoed these claims: “Nuclear doesn’t care about the weather,” he said. “It just runs.”
Over the next few months, several countries in Europe had to shut down nuclear plants because of hot weather and drought—proving that nuclear power does, indeed, care about the weather. Coming at a time when demand for electricity was high, these countries were faced with an imminent failure of the electricity grid. Citizens and businesses in Hungary and Romania had to reduce their consumption. Ironically, it was solar power—often critiqued by nuclear boosters as unreliable—that provided additional electricity and staved off shortages in some countries. A further irony is that these heat waves are more likely and more severe because of climate change, which is often advanced as the reason to expand nuclear power in the first place.

Trump’s Mail Ballot Overhaul May Come Down to Envelopes  (Amy Schoenfeld Walker, and Simon Ducroquet, New York Times)
Election officials say proposed rules for their design would prove chaotic and costly, if not impossible, to implement.

The Election Deniers’ Long Game  (Toluse Olorunnipa, The Atlantic)
Right-wing activists have slowly taken control of a significant part of America’s local election apparatus. The country isn’t prepared for what they might do.

A.I. Could Possibly End Humanity. How Are Humans Supposed to Process That?  (William J. Broad and Cade Metz, New York Times)
The technology is far from the only existential risk our species faces. But weighing such cosmic fears can become a mind-bending exercise.

Charlie Kirk Was Shot a Year Ago. The Conspiracy Theories Are More Rampant Than Ever  (David Gilbert, Wired)
Experts say conspiracy theorizing about the identity and motive of Charlie Kirk’s killer will likely continue for a long time to come.