Kleenex was originally marketed as a cold cream remover

August 8th, 2026

I was listening to the Everyday Abundance podcast, when they did an episode on handkerchiefs getting replaced by tissues:

I didn’t realize where the name Kleenex came from:

Kleenex began during the First World War when the Cellucotton company developed a crepe paper gas mask filter. In the 1920s, the product was modified into the menstrual pad Kotex. A further modification of the original crepe paper made it thinner and softer, and the resultant 1924 product was called “Kleenex” and marketed as a cold cream remover. In line with the company’s requirements for their brand names to be short, easy to say, and easy to explain, the name Kleenex was selected as the “Kleen” portion of the name denotes its cleansing purpose with a sensational spelling of the word “clean”. The “ex” was added to show that Kleenex was of the family of products that included Kotex. This was the first marketing of a disposable, paper-based, facial tissue in the Western world, and was sold as a substitute for face towels or cotton wool.

In 1925, the first Kleenex tissue ad was used in magazines showing “the new secret of keeping a pretty skin as used by famous movie stars”. A few years after the introduction of Kleenex, the Cellucotton’s head researcher tried to persuade the head of advertising to try to market the tissue for colds and hay fever. The administrator declined the idea but then committed a small amount of ad space to mention of using Kleenex tissue as a handkerchief. By the 1930s, Kleenex was being marketed with the slogan “Don’t Carry a Cold in Your Pocket”, and its use as a disposable handkerchief replacement became predominant.

Posted in Business | No Comments »

Francisella tularensis is lethal in 30 percent of untreated cases

August 7th, 2026

I don’t recall ever hearing the name tularemia growing up, but I’m pretty sure I was vaguely aware of something called rabbit fever — if only because I’d seen the warning against rabbititis in Hare Tonic:

“And then suddenly everything’d go black!”

Biohazard by Ken Alibek Tularemia is a debilitating illness, Ken Alibek explains (in Biohazard), rife among wild animals and common in the Rocky Mountains, California, Oklahoma, parts of eastern Europe, and Siberia:

It is a hardy organism, capable of surviving for weeks, sometimes months, in decaying animal corpses. Tularemia is primarily transmitted to humans by ticks, mosquitoes, and wild rabbits, though squirrels, sheep, cats, and dogs have also been identified as carriers. While highly infectious, it almost never spreads directly from one person to another.

Victims can be laid up for weeks with chills, nausea, headaches, and fever. If left untreated, symptoms usually last two to four weeks, but they can continue for months. Francisella tularensis is lethal in 30 percent of untreated cases.

After World War II, scientists in the United States, Britain, and Canada developed tularemia for use on the battlefield, where it could immobilize an entire division through the intensive medical care required for each stricken soldier.

Soviet commanders considered tularemia an unpredictable weapon for close-quarter tactical maneuvers. The risk of infecting one’s own troops was high. But we had obtained, from a leading international research institute in Europe, a strain capable of overcoming immunity in vaccinated monkeys.

Our civilian credentials ensured that no questions were asked when we requested it. As far as we knew, there had never been an attempt anywhere in the world to weaponize a vaccine-resistant strain of tularemia. For Kalinin, the project represented a chance to prove what Biopreparat could do.

Five hundred monkeys were ordered from Africa for tularemia tests on Rebirth Island, he explains:

Importing that many animals at one time without arousing suspicion was not as difficult as it sounds. The arrangements were made well in advance by clandestine overseas trading associations run by the Soviet Ministry of External Trade, which also supplied us with the cages and other special equipment.

[…]

Since we were testing a vaccine-resistant weapon, all of the monkeys had to be immunized before they were exposed.

[…]

There was no telephone at the test center, and the only communication with Aralsk was through cryptograms on the army’s closed-circuit communications network.

[…]

Nearly all the immunized monkeys died.

[…]

The next year we conducted new tests with an even more efficient dry variant of tularemia, following all the procedures meticulously, and the new version of weaponized tularemia entered the Soviet arsenal.

[…]

Meanwhile, at Rebirth Island, everything connected to the tularemia test, from research notes to blood samples to the monkeys’ corpses, had to be incinerated.

[…]

Open-air testing at Rebirth Island stopped in 1992. Records of what happened there no longer exist.

Posted in Science, War | No Comments »

Can you say…hero?

August 6th, 2026

Tom Junod’s 1998 Esquire piece Can You Say…Hero? profiles Mr. Rogers:

He was barely more than a boy himself when he learned what he would be fighting for, and fighting against, for the rest of his life. He was in college. He was a music major at a small school in Florida and planning to go to seminary upon graduation. His name was Fred Rogers. He came home to Latrobe, Pennsylvania, once upon a time, and his parents, because they were wealthy, had bought something new for the corner room of their big redbrick house. It was a television. Fred turned it on, and as he says now, with plaintive distaste, “there were people throwing pies at one another.” He was the soft son of overprotective parents, but he believed, right then, that he was strong enough to enter into battle with that—that machine, that medium—and to wrestle with it until it yielded to him, until the ground touched by its blue shadow became hallowed and this thing called television came to be used “for the broadcasting of grace through the land.” It would not be easy, no—for in order to win such a battle, he would have to forbid himself the privilege of stopping, and whatever he did right he would have to repeat, as though he were already living in eternity. And so it was that the puppets he employed on The Children’s Corner would be the puppets he employed forty-four years later, and so it was that once he took off his jacket and his shoes…well, he was Mister Rogers for good. And even now, when he is producing only three weeks’ worth of new programs a year, he still winds up agonizing—agonizing—about whether to announce his theme as “Little and Big” or “Big and Little” and still makes only two edits per televised minute, because he doesn’t want his message to be determined by the cuts and splices in a piece of tape—to become, despite all his fierce coherence, “a message of fragmentation.”

He is losing, of course. The revolution he started—a half hour a day, five days a week—it wasn’t enough, it didn’t spread, and so, forced to fight his battles alone, Mister Rogers is losing, as we all are losing. He is losing to it, to our twenty-four-hour-a-day pie fight, to the dizzying cut and the disorienting edit, to the message of fragmentation, to the flicker and pulse and shudder and strobe, to the constant, hivey drone of the electroculture…and yet still he fights, deathly afraid that the medium he chose is consuming the very things he tried to protect: childhood and silence. Yes, at seventy years old and 143 pounds, Mister Rogers still fights, and indeed, early this year, when television handed him its highest honor, he responded by telling television—gently, of course—to just shut up for once, and television listened. He had already won his third Daytime Emmy, and now he went onstage to accept Emmy’s Lifetime Achievement Award, and there, in front of all the soap-opera stars and talk-show sinceratrons, in front of all the jutting man-tanned jaws and jutting saltwater bosoms, he made his small bow and said into the microphone, “All of us have special ones who have loved us into being. Would you just take, along with me, ten seconds to think of the people who have helped you become who you are….Ten seconds of silence.” And then he lifted his wrist, and looked at the audience, and looked at his watch, and said softly, “I’ll watch the time,” and there was, at first, a small whoop from the crowd, a giddy, strangled hiccup of laughter, as people realized that he wasn’t kidding, that Mister Rogers was not some convenient eunuch but rather a man, an authority figure who actually expected them to do what he asked…and so they did. One second, two seconds, three seconds…and now the jaws clenched, and the bosoms heaved, and the mascara ran, and the tears fell upon the beglittered gathering like rain leaking down a crystal chandelier, and Mister Rogers finally looked up from his watch and said, “May God be with you” to all his vanquished children.

Posted in Education, Media | 1 Comment »

They should properly be called mass casualty weapons, not weapons of mass destruction

August 5th, 2026

Biohazard by Ken AlibekOver the centuries, Ken Alibek explains (in Biohazard), armies have used primitive methods to spread pestilence:

The Romans dropped poison into wells to contaminate their enemies’ water supplies. The English gave blankets smeared with smallpox to Indians in the eighteenth century during the French and Indian Wars. Confederate troops in the American Civil War left corpses of animals to rot in ponds along the path of Union forces. And during World War II, Japanese planes dropped porcelain bombs containing billions of plague-infected fleas over Manchuria.

[…]

Soviet scientists combined the knowledge gained from postwar biochemistry and genetic research with modern industrial techniques to develop what are called “aerosol” weapons—particles suspended in a mist, like the spray of an insecticide, or a fine dust, like talcum powder.

Temperature and weather conditions will determine the success of an aerosol’s dissemination. Bacteria and viruses are generally vulnerable to sunlight; ultraviolet light kills them quickly. Heavy rain or snow, wind currents, and humidity impede their effectiveness.

[…]

A bioweaponeer will know to strike at dusk, during periods when a blanket of cool air covers a warmer layer over the ground—a weather condition called an inversion, which keeps particles from being blown away by wind currents.

We packed our biological agents in small melon-sized metal balls, called bomblets, set to explode several miles upwind from the target city.

[…]

Primitive aerosols lose their virulence and dissipate quickly. In our labs, we experimented with special additives to keep our agents from decaying when transported over long distances and to keep them alive in adverse weather conditions.

[…]

We tested a variety of animals, including rabbits and guinea pigs, but monkeys, whose respiratory systems are so similar to ours, were the most effective surrogates for humans. An average person takes in ten liters of air every minute. A monkey inhales four. If four particles of an agent in a given volume of air killed at least 50 percent of the monkeys exposed to an aerosol, we could assume that ten particles would have an equally lethal effect on human beings.

Our standard measure of success for a biological weapon was referred to as Q50, representing the amount needed to infect 50 percent of all exposed human beings in one square kilometer of territory. The Soviet Union devoted an enormous amount of time and money to developing concentrated aerosols that could reach the Q50 level with minuscule numbers of bacterial cells or viral particles.

The most effective biological weapons go on killing long after they are used. Some viruses, such as Marburg, are so hazardous that casually inhaling as few as three microscopic viral particles several days after an attack would be enough to kill you. Biowarfare strategists often look beyond the immediate target to focus on the epidemic behavior of disease-causing agents.

Unlike nuclear weapons, which pulverize everything in their target area, biological weapons leave buildings, transportation systems, and other infrastructure intact. They should properly be called mass casualty weapons, not weapons of mass destruction.

Posted in Science, War | No Comments »

Lloyd Vogel comes from the Neighborhood of Make-Believe

August 4th, 2026

I recently watched Tom Hanks’ Mr. Rogers movie, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (on Netflix), and I wasn’t expecting it to star Matthew Rhys, whom I know through The Americans and, more recently, Widow’s Bay.

Rhys plays a jaded journalist tasked with producing a puff piece on the popular children’s show host, but the experience changes him, and the piece grows into a deeply personal article that earns the cover spot on Esquire.

I may not be a jaded journalist, but I must say that my spider sense started tingling when the wife of Rhys’s character first appeared. Our White journalist in 1998 has a (light-skinned) Black wife? They wouldn’t race-swap a real-life person’s wife, would they?

Well, it turns out Rhys’s character is a made-up journalist, named Lloyd Vogel, and the actual writer was Tom Junod, who married a woman named Janet. They did not have a baby boy soon before the article came out; rather, they adopted a girl. I don’t think Junod had an estranged, alcoholic father, dying, either.

Posted in Media | 2 Comments »

Trafficking in germs and viruses was legal then, as it is today

August 3rd, 2026

Biohazard by Ken AlibekKen Alibek describes (in Biohazard) some of the basics of the Soviet bioweapons program:

At the height of the U.S. offensive biological weapons program, American scientists restricted themselves to developing armaments that could be countered by antibiotics or vaccines, out of a concern for protecting troops and civilians from potential accidents. The Soviet government decided that the best agents were those for which there was no known cure.

[…]

Trafficking in germs and viruses was legal then, as it is today. In the name of scientific research, our agents purchased strains from university research laboratories and biotech firms around the world with no difficulty.

[…]

It was from the United States, for instance, that we obtained Machupo, the virus that causes Bolivian hemorrhagic fever. We picked up Marburg, related to the Ebola virus, from Germany.

The KGB was our most dependable supplier of raw material. They were known within Biopreparat by the code name “Capturing Agency One.” Vials arrived in Russia almost every month with exotic fluids, powders, and cultures gathered by our intelligence agents in every corner of the globe. They were then sent by diplomatic pouch to Moscow, where Biopreparat technicians cautiously repackaged them.

[…]

We were never permitted to travel by air. The consequences of a crash in one of our aging Aeroflot planes was too horrible to contemplate. Instead, dressed in civilian clothes, we returned in the cramped, sweaty passenger compartments of trains, trying to be inconspicuous.

[…]

We even explored AIDS and Legionnaire’s disease. Both, as it happened, proved too unstable for use on the battlefield or against civilian populations.

[…]

One of the most infectious diseases known to man, smallpox, was declared eradicated by the World Health Organization in 1980. The last naturally occurring case was reported in 1977, and the medical profession judges the minor health risk associated with a vaccine greater than forgoing inoculation. Today, it isn’t possible to get a smallpox vaccination in the United States, unless you are a lab scientist or a member of the military. This was for us an excellent reason to weaponize it.

Although we officially had a small amount of the virus in the Ivanovsky Institute of Virology in Moscow—matching the world’s only other legal repository of the strain in the United States—we cultivated tons of smallpox in our secret lab in Zagorsk (now Sergiyev Posad), the famous Russian cathedral city a half hour’s drive from the capital. At Zagorsk, we experimented with the culture until we came up with a weapons-quality variant. Smallpox was then quietly added to our arsenal.

Posted in Science | No Comments »

Once they were no longer censored, they ceased to have a subject

August 2nd, 2026

Fifteen summers ago, Ann Manov was spending 15 hours a week in a neurology lab, sorting fruit flies under a microscope, freezing them in liquid nitrogen, and pureeing their sliced-off heads, but the only thing that made her want to get out of bed in the morning was a class on the Russian short story that was taught by a nervous Russian woman:

I remember only a few things about that class, but among them is Venedikt Yerofeyev’s observation that much of Soviet literature collapsed remarkably quickly with the disappearance of censorship—the work of not just those who wrote in support of socialism, but of those who had opposed it too. Once they were no longer censored, they ceased to have a subject, a raison d’être.

Posted in Education, Media | 3 Comments »

The most fortunate inhabitants of the Soviet Union were the condemned monkeys of Rebirth Island

August 1st, 2026

Biohazard by Ken AlibekKen Alibek describes (in Biohazard) the Rebirth Island test site in the Aral Sea:

Ten centuries ago, according to Russian legend, there was a mysterious kingdom on the shores of the Black Sea called Tmu Tarakan. Its name was variously translated as the “Place of Darkness” or the “Kingdom of Cockroaches.” Modern-day Muscovites use the phrase whenever they want to describe a destination that is as loathsome as it is remote.

[…]

The Aral Sea was once the world’s fourth-largest inland body of water, but it has been shrinking every year since the 1960s when, in a wrong-headed agricultural experiment, Soviet state planners ordered the diversion of the Aral’s river sources into concrete irrigation canals. The canals were to transform this part of Central Asia into a cotton bowl. After the first bumper harvests, the desert soil was exhausted, and local residents have been reaping the consequences ever since. The rivers silted over and clouds of toxic salts billow across the region every year, leaving one of the world’s highest cancer rates in their wake.

[…]

In 1972, two fishermen died when a shift in the direction of the wind sent a cloud of plague over their boat. In the 1970s and 1980s, abnormally high incidences of plague were detected among rodents in inhabited areas north of the testing ground. Following the Soviet collapse in late 1991, doctors reported outbreaks of plague in several areas of Central Asia.

[…]

We used to say that the most fortunate inhabitants of the Soviet Union were the condemned monkeys of Rebirth Island. They were fed oranges, apples, bananas, and other fresh fruits rarely seen by Soviet citizens. Our work teams could only admire this vision of plenty from afar. Each piece of fruit was carefully inventoried and guarded to dissuade members of the scientific teams from giving in to temptation.

[…]

Scientists on the occasional foraging trips into town were shocked to see the earthen huts with no running water that served as dwellings for most of the inhabitants. Malnutrition and hepatitis were common.

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Rats that received xanthan gum for ten weeks developed colon inflammation

July 31st, 2026

Xanthan gum, which helps give ice cream, yogurt, sauces, cakes, and gluten-free pasta their familiar texture, has been linked to gut inflammation:

Valued for its thickening, stabilizing, and gelling properties, it is among the food industry’s most widely used additives. It also helps make liquids safer to swallow for people with dysphagia, a condition that causes difficulty swallowing.

Research from the Federal University of São Paulo (UNIFESP) in Brazil, however, raises questions about the effects of prolonged consumption. Rats that received xanthan gum for ten weeks developed colon inflammation, changes in their gut microbiota, and reduced intestinal barrier integrity. The study was supported by FAPESP.

[…]

Xanthan gum is produced through biotechnology by fermenting material with the bacterium Xanthomonas campestris. “It’s a plant pathogen that, in nature, infects a variety of plants and can be observed when cabbage or kale, for example, begin to spoil,” she says.

[…]

The results may help clarify earlier reports connecting xanthan gum with necrotizing enterocolitis in premature infants in the United States. This serious disease causes intestinal inflammation that can lead to tissue death.

In 2012, 22 newborns developed the condition after receiving formula thickened with xanthan gum, and at least three died. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) subsequently prohibited its use in premature infants and advises against using it in infants more generally.

[…]

The researchers also examined the biological pathway through which the inflammatory response developed in the colon. “Xanthan gum is reactive and opens the intestinal barrier, altering a protein [Claudin-2] that’s responsible for regulating permeability between intestinal cells, which triggers an inflammatory cascade,” Rischiteli explains.

[…]

Rats fed the additive developed an inflammatory state marked by greater numbers of lymphocytes, immune defense cells, within the intestinal wall. The response was strongest among animals receiving medium and high doses of xanthan gum.

[…]

The rats also had elevated levels of the pro-inflammatory cytokines IL-1? and TNF-?, providing further evidence of an inflammatory response. “TNF-alpha, in particular, is associated with the death of cells lining the intestine [epithelium] and the development of inflammatory diseases,” she says.

Posted in Science | 2 Comments »

In Soviet government offices, an executive’s status could be measured by the number of his phones

July 30th, 2026

Biohazard by Ken AlibekKen Alibek explains (in Biohazard) his position in the Soviet system:

My great grandfather had been a khan, a member of the nobility in what is now Kazakhstan, in Central Asia, but I grew up in a system that lavished few of its privileges on non-Russians. My wife and daughter and two young sons had risen with me to a lifestyle inconceivable to the majority of Soviet citizens. With the combined salary of a senior bureaucrat and a high-ranking military officer, I earned as much as a Soviet government minister. But in the Communist system, money was not the measure of worth. What counted was the special status that gave us access to perks and influence in our supposedly egalitarian society.

[…]

The desk held the real symbols of my authority: five telephones. In Soviet government offices, an executive’s status could be measured by the number of his phones—an indication of multiple sources of authority. I even had a kremlyovka, the small white phone that connects everyone in the upper reaches of the Soviet government, from the general secretary of the Communist Party to ordinary ministers of state.

Personal mementos of family or friends were taboo in the offices of senior government officials, but I had hung portraits of a few Russian scientists: D. I. Mendeleyev, who invented the periodic table of elements; Nikolai Pirogov, a nineteenth-century pioneer in military surgery; Professor Ilya Mechnikov, a Russian microbiologist who discovered cellular immunity.

[…]

Sitting in a corner was a Western computer. I never used it, but it was another sign of “special” status in a regime that prohibited its citizens from owning a copier. I would have preferred a television or radio, but the KGB had banned them from the offices of senior personnel. Our security chiefs claimed that Western electronic surveillance was so good that foreign agents could decipher our deepest secrets by analyzing the vibrations of our conversations on glass. It made little sense to me: why not then ban the computer as well?

The KGB was thorough, and it lived by its own impenetrable logic. Once a month, security officers shooed all the lab chiefs and division heads out of their offices to check for bugs. Some believed that they were really checking on equipment they had themselves installed to record our conversations.

[…]

The third floor was home to our “First Department,” the unit responsible for maintaining our secret files and all communications with Biopreparat facilities around the country. The only people allowed in, besides security personnel, were Kalinin and myself. It was administered by the KGB.

Sometimes I went upstairs myself. For one thing, it was the only place in the building where you could copy documents. The First Department was the sole custodian of our copier machine.

Posted in Policy, Science | No Comments »

Rapamycin was changing brain function rather than rebuilding the brain’s underlying structure

July 29th, 2026

Even mild inflammation in the middle of pregnancy can produce lasting autism-like changes in developing mice:

Reported consequences include autism-like behaviors, unusual brain growth, seizures, and greater sensitivity to ordinary sounds, touch, and other sensory experiences. These effects can continue into adulthood.

In the new study, published in Nature Communications, UCLA scientists found that one dose of rapamycin improved brain communication and behavior in the affected mice in about two hours. That response was far too fast for the drug to have repaired the underlying physical changes in the brain caused by maternal inflammation.

The researchers stressed that rapamycin should not be considered a practical treatment for these symptoms in people. Its benefits were temporary, repeated use can be toxic, and the study was conducted in mice.

[…]

The drug works in part by reducing activity in the mTOR pathway, a biological signaling system that regulates cell growth and proliferation. Excessive mTOR activity has been linked to some autism-related conditions.

[…]

Neurons that had been unusually active began firing more normally. The animals became less vulnerable to seizures. Brain regions that had not been communicating properly shifted toward more typical patterns. Repetitive behaviors, sensory sensitivity, and excessive responses to sensory input also declined.

All of these changes emerged within about two hours. Because physical remodeling of brain synapses generally takes longer, the scientists concluded that rapamycin was changing brain function rather than rebuilding the brain’s underlying structure.

[…]

The strongest effects appeared in excitatory neurons, which stimulate activity in brain networks.

This suggests that the drug rapidly restored a healthier balance in neuronal excitability rather than repairing structural differences formed during early development.

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A single twenty-ton fermenter working at full capacity could produce enough spores to fill one missile in one or two days

July 28th, 2026

Biohazard by Ken AlibekKen Alibek explains (in Biohazard) that he was asked how long it would take to “arm” an SS-18 missile with anthrax:

The giant SS-18 missiles, which could carry ten five-hundred-kiloton warheads apiece over a range of six thousand miles, had never been considered before as delivery vehicles for a biological attack.

When the Soviet biological warfare program began in the 1920s, our scientists attached crop sprayers to low-flying planes and hoped that a contrary wind wouldn’t blow the germs the wrong way. After World War II, bombers armed with explosives were added to the arsenal. The Cold War fueled the development of ever more destructive armaments, and by the 1970s we had managed to harness single-warhead intercontinental ballistic missiles for use in the delivery of biological agents. Multiple-warhead missiles represented more of a challenge. Few of the agents we had weaponized could be prepared in sufficient quantities to fill hundreds of warheads simultaneously.

[…]

Through a series of tests, I’d found a way to create a more potent anthrax weapon, so that fewer spores would be needed in an attack. The new technique allowed us to load more missiles with anthrax without straining our labs’ resources.

[…]

At least four hundred kilograms of anthrax, prepared in dry form for use as an aerosol, would be required for ten warheads.

Our seed stock for anthrax production was kept inside refrigerated storerooms at three production facilities in Penza, Kurgan, and Stepnogorsk. The seed stock would have to be put through a delicate fermenting process to breed the billions of spores required. The process was complicated—and it took time. A single twenty-ton fermenter working at full capacity could produce enough spores to fill one missile in one or two days. With additives, we could probably boost the output to five hundred or six hundred kilograms a day.

[…]

The colonels looked pleased. Two weeks was not a problem. No one expected to go to war overnight.

[…]

Anthrax takes one to five days to incubate in the body. Victims often won’t know that an anthrax attack has taken place until after they begin to feel the first symptoms. Even then, the nature of the illness will not at first be clear. The earliest signs of trouble—a slight nasal stuffiness, twinges of pain in the joints, fatigue, and a dry, persistent cough—resemble the onset of a cold or flu. To most people, the symptoms will seem too inconsequential to warrant a visit to the doctor.

In this first stage, pulmonary anthrax can be treated with antibiotics. But it would take a highly alert public health system to recognize the evidence of an anthrax attack.

[…]

The first symptoms are followed several days later by the anthrax “eclipse,” a period in which the initial discomfort seems to fade, concealing the approaching danger. Proliferating bacteria will have begun to engulf the lymph nodes, local headquarters of the body’s disease protection system. Within a matter of hours the bacteria will have taken over the entire lymphatic system. From there, they enter the bloodstream, continuing to multiply at a furious pace. Soon they begin to release a toxin that attacks all organs but is particularly damaging to the lungs, filling them with liquid and gradually cutting off their supply of oxygen.

Within twenty-four hours of this toxin’s release, a victim’s skin will begin to turn a faint bluish color. At this stage, every breath becomes more painful than the last. A choking fit and convulsions follow. The end usually comes suddenly: some victims of pulmonary anthrax have been known to die in the middle of a conversation. The disease is fatal in over 90 percent of untreated cases.

A hundred kilograms of anthrax spores would, in optimal atmospheric conditions, kill up to three million people in any of the densely populated metropolitan areas of the United States. A single SS-18 could wipe out the population of a city as large as New York.

Posted in Science, War, Weapons | No Comments »

The twilight of the chatbots

July 27th, 2026

Increasingly, Ethan Mollick notes, work at OpenAI looks like managing AI:

A quarter of OpenAI workers have at least four agents running at one time every week. And, as coding is done by AIs in specialized harnesses and apps, other roles start to become coders of a sort. And they are good at it.

A separate study of Claude Code users found that software engineers had a similar success rate to other professions when actually using Claude code on coding tasks.

What actually mattered was not the profession of the user, but their expertise. The more domain experience someone had, the more successful they were in using Claude Code in that domain. And, even more interestingly, the more useful output they got from Claude from each prompt.

We are moving from a world where non-experts use chatbots to fill in gaps to one in which experts use agents to get work done. And the best way to use agents is to think of yourself as a manager.

Posted in Business, Technology | 1 Comment »

Bioweapons are no longer contained within the bipolar world of the Cold War

July 26th, 2026

Biohazard by Ken AlibekWhen I saw that Annie Jacobsen’s Biological War was coming out, I decided to revisit Ken Alibek’s Biohazard, which I read soon after 9/11 and the mysterious anthrax attacks — 25 years ago. He opens with his bona fides:

Between 1988 and 1992, I was first deputy chief of Biopreparat, the Soviet state pharmaceutical agency whose primary function was to develop and produce weapons made from the most dangerous viruses, toxins, and bacteria known to man. Biopreparat was the hub of a clandestine empire of research, testing, and manufacturing facilities spread out over more than forty sites in Russia and Kazakhstan. Nearly every important government institution played a role in the Soviet biological weapons program: the Ministry of Defense, the Ministries of Agriculture and Health, the Soviet Academy of Sciences, the Communist Party Central Committee, and, of course, the KGB.

[…]

Over a twenty-year period that began, ironically, with Moscow’s endorsement of the Biological Weapons Convention in 1972, the Soviet Union built the largest and most advanced biological warfare establishment in the world. We were among the 140 signatories of the convention, pledging “not to develop, produce, stockpile or otherwise acquire or retain” biological agents for offensive military purposes. At the same time, through our covert program, we stockpiled hundreds of tons of anthrax and dozens of tons of plague and smallpox near Moscow and other Russian cities for use against the United States and its Western allies.

[…]

Less than a decade ago, I was a much-decorated army colonel, marked out for further promotion in one of the Soviet Union’s most elite military programs. If I had stayed in Russia, I would have been a major general by now, and you would never have heard my name. But in 1992, after seventeen years inside Biopreparat, I resigned from my position and fled with my family to the United States. In numerous debriefing sessions, I provided U.S. officials with their first comprehensive picture of our activities.

[…]

Bioweapons are no longer contained within the bipolar world of the Cold War. They are cheap, easy to make, and easy to use.

He wrote that in 1999.

Posted in Science, War | 1 Comment »

The tapeworm larvae are just biding their time

July 25th, 2026

When Temnothorax nylanderi ant larvae eat woodpecker droppings, they can get infected with the tapeworm Anomotaenia brevis — which brings unusual side-effects:

Infected ants start to change color, becoming pale yellow rather than their usual darker brown. They tend not to grow as big as their nest mates, and even start to smell different — in fact, they seem to emit pheromones that other ants interpret as being from a queen.

Infected ants, meanwhile, lean into their new lifestyle. They ignore their chores, rarely leaving the nest during their extended lifespans while generations of regular workers tend to their every whim.

And throughout all this, the tapeworm larvae are just biding their time. Eventually, a woodpecker may come knocking, and while the healthy ants scatter, the infected ones sit there helpless, providing an easy snack.

Finally, the tapeworm larvae can reach their ultimate goal: the bird’s gut. There, they develop into adult tapeworms, breed, and lay eggs — which are then pooped out by the woodpecker to begin the whole cycle over again.

Their extended lifespans can be 10 times as long as normal.

Posted in Animals, Science | 1 Comment »

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