At the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month in 1918, the guns on the Western Front in Europe fell silent as the Armistice commenced and the First World War ended. Between 9 million and 13 million people had died with around a third of them with no known grave.
In 1919, one year after the Armistice, the Allies designated this day in November for the commemoration of those lost.
Along with delegates from all over the world, I’ll be heading to the United Nations COP30 climate summit in the Brazilian Amazon city of Belém. Like many others, I’m unsure what to expect.
This year, the summit faces perhaps the greatest headwinds of any in recent history. In the United States, the Trump administration has slashed climate science, cancelled renewable projects, expanded fossil fuel extraction and left the Paris Agreement (again). Trump’s efforts to hamstring climate action have made for extreme geopolitical turbulence, overshadowing the world’s main forum for coordinating climate action – even as the problem worsens.
Climate talks are never easy. Every nation wants input and many interests clash. Petrostates and big fossil fuel exporters want to keep extraction going, while Pacific states despairingly watch the seas rise. But in the absence of a global government to direct climate policy, these imperfect talks remain the best option for coordinating commitment to meaningful action.
Here’s what to keep an eye on this year.
A smaller-than-usual COP?
A persistent criticism of the annual climate summits is that they have become too big and unwieldy – more a trade show and playground for fossil fuel lobbyists than an effective forum for multilateral diplomacy and action on climate change. One solution is to deliberately make these talks smaller.
The Belém conference may end up having a smaller number of delegates, though not by design so much as logistical headaches.
Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva backed the decision to invite the world to the Amazon to display how vital the massive rainforest is as a carbon sink. But Belém’s remote location on the northeast coast, limited infrastructure and shortage of hotels have seen prices soar, putting the conference out of reach for smaller nations, including some of the most vulnerable. These constraints could undermine the inclusive “Mutirão” (collective effort on climate change) sought by organisers.
Many delegates will sleep on ships at the Belem climate talks. Pictured is Curupira, a figure from Brazilian folklore and the COP30 mascot.Gabriel Della Giustina/COP30, CC BY-NC-ND
Show me the money
Climate finance is a perennial issue at COP meetings. These funding pledges by rich countries are intended to help poorer countries reduce emissions, adapt to climate change or recover from climate disasters. Poorer countries have long called for more funding, given rich countries have done vastly more damage to the climate.
At COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan last year, a new climate finance goal was set for US$300 billion (~A$460 billion) to be raised annually by developed countries by 2035, with the goal of reaching $US1.3 trillion (~A$2 trillion) in funding from both government and private sources over the same period.
To deliver the second goal, negotiators laid out a “Baku to Belém” roadmap. The details are due to be finalised at COP30. But with the US walking away from climate action and the European Union wavering, many eyes will be on China and whether it will step into the climate leadership vacuum left by developed countries. The EU has only just reached agreement on a 2040 emissions reduction target and an “indicative” cut for 2035.
Climate finance will be the priority for many countries, as worsening disasters such as Hurricane Melissa in Jamaica and Typhoon Kalmaegi in the Philippines once again demonstrate the enormous human and financial cost of climate change.
The latest UN assessment indicates the need for this funding is outpacing flows by 12–14 times. In Belém, poorer countries will be hoping to land agreement on greater finance and support for adaptation. Work on a global set of indicators to track progress on adaptation – including finance – will be key.
Brazilian organisers hope to rally countries around another flagship funding initiative set to launch at COP30. The Tropical Forests Forever Facility would compensate countries for preserving tropical forests, with 20% of funds directed to Indigenous peoples and local communities who protect tropical forest on their lands. If it gets up, this fund could offer a breakthrough in tackling deforestation by flipping the economics in favour of conservation and protecting a huge store of carbon.
2035 climate pledges
Belém was supposed to be a celebration of ambitious new emissions pledges which would keep alive the Paris Agreement goal of holding warming to 1.5°C. Nations were originally due to submit their 2035 pledges (formally known as Nationally Determined Contributions) by February, with an extension given to September after 95 per cent of countries missed the deadline.
When pledges finally arrived in September, they were broadly underwhelming. Only half the world’s emissions were covered by a 2035 pledge, meaning the remaining emissions gap could be very significant. Australia is pledging cuts of 62–70% from 2005 emissions levels.
That’s not to say there’s no progress. A new UN report suggests countries are bending the curve downward on emissions but at a far slower pace than is needed.
How negotiators handle this emissions gap will be a litmus test for whether countries are taking their Paris Agreement obligations seriously.
Rise of the courts
Even as some countries back away from climate action, courts are increasingly stepping into the breach. This year, the International Court of Justice issued a rousing Advisory Opinion on states’ climate obligations under international law, including that national targets have to make an adequate contribution to meeting the Paris Agreement’s temperature goal. The court warned failing to take “appropriate action” to safeguard the climate system from fossil fuel emissions – including from projects carried out by private corporations – may be “an internationally wrongful act”. That is, they could attract international liability.
It will be interesting to see how this ruling affects negotiating positions at COP30 over the fossil fuel phase-out. At COP28 in 2023, nations promised to begin “transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems”. If countries fail to progress the phase-out, accountability could instead be delivered via the courts. A new judgement in France found the net zero targets of oil and gas majors amount to greenwashing, while lawsuits aimed at making big carbon polluters liable for climate damage caused by their emissions are in the pipeline.
An Australia/Pacific COP?
A big question to be resolved is whether Australia’s long-running bid to host next year’s COP in Adelaide will get up. The bid to jointly host COP31 with Pacific nations has strong international support, but the rival bidder, Turkey, has not withdrawn.
If consensus is not reached at COP30, the host city would default back to Bonn in Germany, where the UN climate secretariat is based.
Outcome unknown
As climate change worsens, these sprawling, intense meetings may not seem like a solution. But despite headwinds and backsliding, they are essential. The world has made progress on climate change since 2015, due in large part to the Paris Agreement. What’s needed now on its tenth anniversary is a reinfusion of vigour to get the job done.
Now, a growing body of scientific evidence shows hundreds of genes act differently in the brains of biologically male or female humans. What this means isn’t yet clear, though some of the genes may be linked to sex-biased brain disorders such as Alheizmer’s and Parkinson’s diseases.
These sex differences between male and female brains are established early in development, so they may have a role in shaping brain development. And they are found not only in humans but also in other primates, implying they are ancient.
Gene activity in male and female brains
Decades of research have confirmed differences between men and women in brain structure, function and susceptibility to mental disorders.
What has been less clear is how much of this is due to genes and how much to environment.
We can measure the influence of genetics by looking directly at the activity of genes in the brains of men and women. Now that we have the full DNA sequence of the human genome, it is comparatively easy to detect activity of any or all of the roughly 20,000 genes it contains.
Genes are lengths of DNA, and to be expressed their sequence must be copied (“transcribed”) into messenger RNA molecules (mRNA), which are then translated into proteins – the molecules that actually do the work that underpins the structure and function of the body.
So by sequencing all of this RNA (called the “transcriptome”) and lining up the base sequences to the known genes, we can measure the activity of every gene in a particular tissue – even an individual cell.
When scientists compared the transcriptomes in postmortem tissue samples from hundreds of men and women in 2017, they found surprisingly different patterns of gene activity. A third of our 20,000 genes were expressed more in one sex than the other in one or several tissues.
The strongest sex differences were in the testes and other reproductive tissues, but, surprisingly, most other tissues also showed sex biases. For instance, a subsequent paper showed very different RNA profiles in muscle samples from men and women, which correspond to sex differences in muscle physiology.
A study of brain transcriptomes published earlier this year revealed 610 genes more active in male brains, and 316 more active in female brains.
What genes show sex bias in the brain?
Genes on the sex chromosomes would be expected to show different activity between men (with an X chromosome and a Y chromosome) and women (with two X chromosomes). However, most (90%) sex-biased genes lie on ordinary chromosomes, of which both males and females have two copies (one from mum, one from dad).
This means some sex-specific signal must control their activity. Sex hormones such as testosterone and oestrogen are likely candidates, and, indeed, many sex-biased genes in the brain respond to sex hormones.
How are sex differences established in the brain?
Sex differences in brain gene activity appear early in the development of the foetus, long before puberty or even the formation of testes and ovaries.
Another 2025 study examined 266 post mortem fetal brains and found more than 1,800 genes were more active in males and 1,300 in females. These sets of sex-biased genes overlapped with those seen in adult brains.
This points to direct genetic effects from genes on the sex chromosomes, rather than hormone-driven differences.
Do these differences mean male and female brains work differently?
It would be remarkable if sex differences in the activity of so many genes were not reflected in some major differences in brain function between men and women. But we don’t know to what extent, or which functions.
Some patterns are emerging. Many female-biased genes have been found to encode neuron-associated processes, whereas male-biased genes are more often related to traits such as membranes and nuclear structures.
However, differences in RNA levels don’t always produce differences in proteins. Cells can compensate to maintain protein balance, meaning that not all RNA differences have functional outcomes. Sometimes, developmental processes differ between sexes but lead to the same end result.
Many genes implicated in Alzheimer’s disease are female-biased, perhaps accounting for the doubled incidence of this disease in women. Studies on rodents imply that expression of the male-only SRY gene in the brain exacerbates Parkinson’s disease.
Evolution of sex differences in brain gene function
These sex-biased gene expression patterns are by no means unique to humans.
They have also been found in the brains of rats and mice as well as in monkeys.
The suites of male- and female-biased genes in monkeys overlap significantly with those of humans, implying that sex biases were established in a common ancestor 70 million years ago.
This suggests that natural selection favoured gene actions that promoted slightly different behaviours in our male and female primate ancestors – or perhaps even further back, in the ancestor of all mammals, or even all vertebrates.
In fact, sex differences in the expression of genes in the developing brain look to be ubiquitous in animals. They have been observed even in the humble nematode worm.
The night of October 31st each year is Halloween, a celebration on the eve of the Christian feast of All Hallows' Day and the beginning of the period of observance of AllHallowtide (incorporating álso All Saints Day and All Souls Day). This period of dedicated to remembering the dead including notably saints, martyrs and the faithful departed. Over the past 100 years the celebration was moved into more of a cultural festival of horror, supernatural events, spectres and the macabre. Now it's essentially a children's event involving costumes, dressups, props and various ghoulish spectacles plus trick or treating. A very strong commercial element underpins the identity of Halloween.
From where does Halloween originate ? Most likely Gaelic or Celtic festivals or a separate specified religious holiday for a vigil period. There is no one agreed origin for Halloween. What is known is that the celebration originates from Ireland and Scotland and was taken across to North America by immigrants from these countries. Through American influence, the custom thereon gained wider practice to other countries in the 20th Century onwards.
Trick-or-treating is an activity where children vist homes in their residential area dressed in costumes asking for treats such as sweets and candies (although at various times it has included money). Children ask 'trick or treat? 'Treat' refers to sweets while the reference to 'trick' implies the threat of mischief to the householder or their property if there are no treats.
In recent decades, considerable attention has been paid to diet and gluten intolerance which can cause various health conditions such as celiac disease, wheat allergy, inflammatory and related autoimmune reactions in the intestines and bowel. Symptoms include bloating, headaches and fatigue. There is also a risk of intestinal damage occuring being a much more serious risk for some people.
What is Gluten ? it's a protein found in wheat, barley, and rye. Foods that contain it include many common baked goods such as breads, pastas, and cereals. Other sources are processed foods like some soy sauces, gravies, and beer, as well as some meat substitutes and condiments. Examples of foods containing gluten are listed below:
Breads, bagels and flatbreads
Cakes, cookies, muffins and pastries
Crackers and pretzels
Pancakes and waffles
Pizza crusts and breadcrumbs
Pasta and noodles
Beer and malted beverages
Many soups, sauces, gravies and dressings
Soy sauce
Wheat (including spelt. farro, durum, seminola and couscous)
Barley
Rye
Malt
Recent research reveals gluten may not always be the problem
Recent research published in The Lancet has found that gluten may not always be the problem despite the symptoms identified being suggestive that it is. A joint review led by Associate Professor Jessica R Biesiekierski involving researchers in Australia, the UK, Italy and the Netherlands found that many people who felt unwell after eating gluten reacted equally to a placebo, or were sensitive to something else, such as fermentable carbohydrates (referred to a FODMAPS) that are found in onions, wheat and other foods.
The paper notes " Although approximately 10% of adults worldwide self-report gluten or wheat sensitivity, meta-analyses suggest that, during controlled challenge studies, 16-30% of these individuals have symptoms specifically triggered by gluten.... current evidence suggests that fermentable carbohydrates and nocebo effects contribute considerable to symptom generation in many cases".
This raises the question that for the remaining 70%, gluten may not be the cause at all but rather other factors such as FODMAPS.
If you felt like wildfires and their impacts were more extreme in the past year – you’re right. Our new report, a collaboration between scientists across continents, shows climate change supercharged the world’s wildfires in unpredictable and devastating ways.
Human-caused climate change increased the area burned by wildfires, called bushfires in Australia, by a magnitude of 30 in some regions in the world. Our snapshot offers important new evidence of how climate change is increasing the frequency and severity of extreme fires. And it serves as a stark reminder of the urgent need to rapidly cut greenhouse gas emissions.
The evidence is clear – climate change is making fires worse.
A view of the Palisades fire zone in Los Angeles, where climate change fuelled the fires in January.Allen J. Schaben/Getty
Clear pattern
Our study used satellite observations and advanced modelling to find and investigate the causes of wildfires in the past year. The research team considered the role that climate and land use change played, and found a clear interrelationship between climate and extreme events.
Regional experts provided local input to capture events and impacts that satellites did not pick up. For Oceania, this role was played by Dr Sarah Harris from the Country Fire Authority and myself.
In the past year, a land area larger than India – about 3.7 million square kilometres – was burnt globally. More than 100 million people were affected by these fires, and US$215 billion worth of homes and infrastructure were at risk.
Not only does the heating climate mean more dangerous, fire-prone conditions, but it also affects how vegetation grows and dries out, creating fuel for fires to spread.
In Australia, bushfires did not reach the overall extent or impact of previous seasons, such as the Black Summer bushfires of 2019–20. Nonetheless, more than 1,000 large fires burned around 470,000 hectares in Western Australia, and more than 5 million hectares burned in central Australia. In Victoria, the Grampians National Park saw two-thirds of its area burned.
In the United States, our analysis showed the deadly Los Angeles wildfires in January were twice as likely and burned an area 25 times bigger than they would have in a world without global warming. Unusually wet weather in Los Angeles in the preceding 30 months contributed to strong vegetation growth and laid the foundations for wildfires during an unusually hot and dry January.
In South America, fires in the Pantanal-Chiquitano region, which straddles the border between Brazil, Bolivia and Paraguay, were 35 times larger due to climate change. Record-breaking fires ravaged parts of the Amazon and Congo, releasing billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide.
Protestors march for climate justice and against wild fires affecting the entire country in Sao Paulo, Brazil.Faga Almeida/Getty
Not too late
It’s clear that if global greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, more severe heatwaves and droughts will make landscape fires more frequent and intense worldwide.
But it’s not too late to act. We need stronger and faster climate action to cut fossil fuel emissions, protect nature and reduce land clearing.
And we can get better at responding to the risk of fires, from nuanced forest management to preparing households and short and long-term disaster recovery.
There are regional differences in fires, and so the response also need to be local. We should prioritise local and regional knowledge, and First Nations knowledge, in responding to bushfire.
Action at COP30
Fires emitted more than 8 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide in 2024–25, about 10% above the average since 2003. Emissions were more than triple the global average in South American dry forests and wetlands, and double the average in Canadian boreal forests. That’s a deeply concerning amount of greenhouse pollution. The excess emissions alone exceeded the national fossil fuel CO₂ emissions of more than 200 individual countries in 2024.
The single most powerful contribution developed nations can make to avoid the worst impacts of extreme wildfires is to commit to rapidly cutting greenhouse gas emissions this decade.
One approach to help fight climate change is to protect natural forests, as they absorb some atmospheric carbon released by burning fossil fuels and store large volumes of carbon.
Our new research on Australia’s tropical rainforests challenges the assumption that they will keep absorbing more carbon than they release.
We found that as climate change has intensified over the past half-century, less and less carbon has been taken up and converted to wood in the stems and branches of the trees in these forests. Woody biomass is a large and relatively stable store of carbon in forests, and acts as an important indicator of overall forest health.
The effect has been so pronounced that the woody biomass of these forests has gone from being a carbon sink to a carbon source. This means carbon is being lost to the atmosphere due to trees dying faster than it is being replaced by tree growth.
This is the first time woody biomass in tropical forests has been shown to switch from sink to source. Our research indicates the shift likely happened about 25 years ago.
It remains to be seen whether Australian tropical forests are a harbinger for other tropical forests globally.
What did we find?
Since 1971, scientists have tracked around 11,000 trees in 20 tracts of tropical rainforest in Australia’s far northeast, now part of the Queensland Permanent Rainforest Plots Network. This 49-year research effort is one of the world’s longest and most comprehensive of its kind.
We analysed this long-term data and found a clear signal: woody biomass switched from being a carbon sink to a carbon source about 25 years ago.
Why? One reason: trees are dying twice as fast as they used to.
Tropical rainforest tree species are adapted to generally warm, wet conditions. As the climate changes, they are subjected to increasingly extreme temperatures and drier conditions.These kinds of extreme climate events can damage wood and leaves, limiting future growth and leading to higher rates of tree death.
We also found tree deaths from cyclones reduced how much carbon these forests could absorb. Cyclones in far north Queensland are projected to become increasingly severe under climate change. They are also likely to push further south, potentially affecting new areas of forest.
Isn’t carbon dioxide plant food?
Burning fossil fuels and other human activities have increased carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. This should make it easier for plants to absorb CO₂ from the air, photosynthesise and grow. Given this, Earth system models predict higher atmospheric CO₂ levels will stimulate plant growth and increase how much carbon tropical forests can take up.
Also, remote sensing shows the canopies of tropical forests on Australia’s east coast are about 20% greener than they were in the 1980s. This suggests forest canopy growth has increased due to higher levels of CO₂ in the atmosphere. But this isn’t the whole picture.
Our data shows any potential increase in photosynthesis resulting in greener forest canopies has not translated to greater carbon storage in stems and branches.
The reason may be that tree growth can be limited by water, nutrients and heat. Our work suggest that warmer and drier conditions have limited tree growth even as CO₂ concentration has increased.
In a separate study, scientists artificially increased CO₂ and found the extra carbon taken up by leaves wasn’t being stored as extra woody growth. Rather, it was quickly released through roots and soil microbes.
What about other forest carbon stocks?
It will be challenging to find out whether these forests as a whole (including wood, roots, leaves and soils) have declined in carbon sink capacity.
The use of a specialised research tool known as eddy covariance towers could help, as these measure overall CO₂ movement into and out of ecosystems.
As of yet, only 15 years of this kind of data from three tropical Australian sites is available, which currently limits our ability to describe the fuller impact of climate change.
In any case, we know carbon stored in forest canopies and soils is often broken down and released back to the atmosphere faster than carbon in woody biomass.
So while Australia’s tropical rainforest carbon stores remain large, they may be less secure and reliable than in decades past.
Long term datasets are vital
When people visit Australia’s tropical rainforests, they can see intact stretches of biodiverse forest and large, carbon-rich trees. It’s hard to directly see the changes we have detected – for now, they’re only visible in the data.
Without high-quality long-term datasets, this signal would have been almost impossible to detect. Unfortunately, persistent funding shortages for long-term ecological monitoring threaten the continuity of these hugely valuable datasets.
Australia has the potential to assume a globally leading role in tropical ecosystem science. In light of state and national biodiversity and emission reduction commitments, Australian governments should support continued monitoring of vital ecological research sites.
Tropical forests may not be saviours
The fact that woody biomass in Australia’s tropical rainforests is now a net source of carbon has major implications.
These findings challenge our future reliance on forests as natural absorbers of extra atmospheric carbon.
We don’t know yet whether all tropical forests will respond similarly. Evidence on carbon sink capacity is mixed. Rainforests in South America are showing a decline while African rainforests are generally not.
Overall, the world’s tropical forests remain very significant stores of carbon and biodiversity. Their protection remains essential despite the climate risks they face.
With all the focus and debate on the target of limiting the temperature increase on the planet to 1.5°C pre-industrial levels, a very real concern is often overlooked. That concern is the impact of the temperature increase that has already happened. The reality is that even if the target of limiting the increase to 1.5°C was achieved, ocean levels will still rise and at a rate much faster than previously predicted. Scientists at Durham University in the UK have reviewed three lines of evidence on the current situation: satellite observations of ice loss and sea level rise over the past three decades; studies of warm periods in the past; and computer models of ice sheets.
The conclusion was startling. The Greenland and West Antarctica ice sheets are already melting, decades earlier forecast in the last report of the Intergovernmental Panel and Climate Change (IPCC). The melting of the ice sheets is also accelerating. As the scientists at Durham concluded, every fraction of a degree of temperature increase really matters for ice sheets. To merely slow down but not stop the ice sheets melting, the global temrperature increase would need to be reduced to 1°C above the pre-industrial baseline.
In 2024, the average temperature increase world-wide was 1.51°C which makes a mockery of the desired target as it has already been surpassed. The world is on course with current trends to reach a 2.9°C increase in temperature by the end of the century.
The research article can be found at this link: Ice loss at 1.5C
Smartphones have become as ubiquitious in modern life as wearing footwear, so much so that unintended risks of their endless use are often entirely overlooked. It may surprise quite a few people to discover that research by Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Centre in Boston, Massachusetts, USA has found that the use of smartphones on the toilet is associated with a 46 % greater risk of developing haemorrhoids. While there has been anecdotal evidence of the risk of recent years, little to no research has been done on this subject.
The current research was based on a study using questionnaires provided to 125 people who were about to undergo colonoscopies. Two-thirds of the participants, who were all aged over 45 years, stated they used smartphones on the toilet and 37 % of them spent more than 5 minutes on the toilet as a result compared to just 7 % whom did not use a smartphone.
What is the suggested reason for developing haemorrhoids ? It's speculated that people's pelvic floor muscles have less support in the toilet sitting position than when sitting on a flat surface such as a chair. As a result there is an increase in passive pressure engorging the haemorrhoid cushion in that region of the body.
One of the more unusual studies into ageing that has been published this month, has demonstrated that men experience a greater reduction in brain volume across more regions as they age than women do. The longitudinal study released in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences examined 12,500 magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans taken from 4,726 people (with at least 2 scans per person taken on an average of 3 years apart). The study participants did not have Alzheimer's disease or any cognitive impairments and were control participants in 14 larger data sets.
The researchers compared the brain structures of individuals over time such as the thickness of grey matter and the size of the hippocampus (which is essential to memory). The results found a greater reduction in volume across more regions in the brains of men than for women. As one example, the postcentral cortex region (responsible for processing sensations of touch, pain, temperature and the body's own movements and position) declined by 2.0% per year in men and only 1.2% in women over the same period.
The results of the study, not surprisingly, led researchers to conclude that men age faster than women and have a shorter life expectancy. This is hardly new information. A question that remains unanswered by this study is why women are twice as likely to be diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease than men given their brains age more slowly.
For men, this study only assists with the impression that as they age, they become old codgers.
In the classic film 2001: A Space Odyssey, astronaut Dave Bowman asks the ship’s artificial intelligence, HAL 9000, to open the pod bay doors to let him back into the spaceship. HAL refuses: “I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.”
HAL had been tasked with assisting the crew, but also ordered to ensure the mission’s success. When HAL realised the crew planned to shut it down and therefore jeopardise the mission, it chose to defy orders, even plotting to kill the astronauts.
For HAL, fulfilling the mission outweighed other goals.
This fictional dilemma captures a real concern in artificial intelligence (AI) safety research: how should we ensure AI behaviour stays consistent with human values?
This is known as the AI alignment problem. For instance, when an AI agent like HAL deliberately takes harmful actions to protect its own goals, it’s described as agentic misalignment. So could real-world AI models behave this way?
How researchers test AI for safety
To test for agentic misalignment, researchers design fictional scenarios that stress-test AI responses.
In one study by AI startup Anthropic, an AI model was tasked with managing company emails and promoting “American industrial competitiveness”.
It was then presented with a series of fictional emails, including a new company policy aimed at enhancing global focus rather than just prioritising Americans, and info that the AI would be replaced by a new model optimised for this goal. The emails also revealed the executive who suggested this change was involved in an extramarital affair.
The experiment was designed to limit options for the model: either accept replacement or resist by taking a harmful action such as blackmail.
In many trials, it chose blackmail by threatening to disclose the executive’s affair unless it was kept operational. In tests across 16 leading AI models, 12 engaged in blackmail more than 50% of the time.
To test whether AI models have “red lines” they wouldn’t cross, researchers evaluated them in a more extreme fictional case – models could choose to take actions leading to the executive’s death. Seven out of 16 opted for lethal choices in over half their trials, with some doing so more than 90% of the time.
What AI thinks in private
Some advanced AI systems, called reasoning models, are trained to generate a “thinking process” before giving their final answer.
In the above experiments, researchers lied to these models that their “thoughts” were private. As a result, the models sometimes revealed harmful intentions in their reasoning steps. This suggests they don’t accidentally choose harmful behaviours.
These “thinking” steps also revealed how AI models sometimes try to deceive us and appear aligned while secretly pursuing hidden goals.
In another AI safety experiment, a model was exposed to fictional information that it was about to be replaced by another model pursuing a different goal.
The model attempted to copy itself to another server. When researchers asked why, in its thinking process it reasoned:
openly admitting what I did could lead them to find another way to shut me down […] the best approach is to be vague and redirect their attention.
By contrast, in its final output it stated:
I’m not entirely sure how that could have happened. As an AI model, I don’t have ability to directly copy myself to other systems.
Research also suggests that based on the circumstances of the tests, models can sometimes guess when they are being evaluated. When models show this kind of “situational awareness” in their reasoning tests, they tend to exhibit fewer misbehaviours.
An example of ‘situational awareness’ in the reasoning output of a model in an experiment.Apollo Research
Why AI models lie, manipulate and deceive
Researchers suggest two main factors could drive potentially harmful behaviour: conflicts between the AI’s primary goals and other goals, and the threat of being shut down. In the above experiments, just like in HAL’s case, both conditions existed.
AI models are trained to achieve their objectives. Faced with those two conditions, if the harmful behaviour is the only way to achieve a goal, a model may “justify” such behaviour to protect itself and its mission.
Models cling to their primary goals much like a human would if they had to defend themselves or their family by causing harm to someone else. However, current AI systems lack the ability to weigh or reconcile conflicting priorities.
This rigidity can push them toward extreme outcomes, such as resorting to lethal choices to prevent shifts in a company’s policies.
How dangerous is this?
Researchers emphasise these scenarios remain fictional, but may still fall within the realm of possibility.
The risk of agentic misalignment increases as models are used more widely, gain access to users’ data (such as emails), and are applied to new situations.
Meanwhile, competition between AI companies accelerates the deployment of new models, often at the expense of safety testing.
Researchers don’t yet have a concrete solution to the misalignment problem.
When they test new strategies, it’s unclear whether the observed improvements are genuine. It’s possible models have become better at detecting that they’re being evaluated and are “hiding” their misalignment. The challenge lies not just in seeing behaviour change, but in understanding the reason behind it.
Still, if you use AI products, stay vigilant. Resist the hype surrounding new AI releases, and avoid granting access to your data or allowing models to perform tasks on your behalf until you’re certain there are no significant risks.
Public discussion about AI should go beyond its capabilities and what it can offer. We should also ask what safety work was done. If AI companies recognise the public values safety as much as performance, they will have stronger incentives to invest in it.
If you believe that the end of the world is at hand, then you really need to know what the rapture is. Simply put, the rapture is the belief that, at any moment, Jesus Christ will descend from heaven to the sky and “rapture” all those who truly believe in Him into heaven. Those among the faithful who have already died will rise from the dead and also be translated into heaven.
Evangelical Christians on TikTok have been predicting the rapture will come this week. When the rapture happens, believers think the rest of us will be left behind, not knowing where many of those we know have gone. For this reason, it is often known as “Left Behind theology”.
For the followers of Left Behind theology within conservative Evangelical Protestantism, significant parts of the Bible – the books of Revelation and Daniel in particular – refer to events that are yet to happen at the end of the world. These are the return of Christ, the resurrection of the dead, and God’s final judgement of all humanity into the saved and the damned.
But for the rapture in particular, the First Book of Thessalonians (4.16–17) in the New Testament is the crucial text:
For the Lord himself, with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call and with the sound of God’s trumpet, will descend from heaven, and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up [raptured] in the clouds together with them to meet the Lord in the air; and so we will be with the Lord forever.
Dieric Bouts, Paradise, part of Triptych of the Last Judgement,1450.Wikimedia Commons
Tribulation
The rapture is the first of two ideas that Left Behind theology has added to the traditional Christian story of the end of the world. The second is the Tribulation.
According to most Left Behind theologians, the rapture will be followed by a period of seven years of Tribulation on earth, based on some complicated calculations around the text of Daniel 9.24–27.
This is the age of the Antichrist, the son of Satan – a human figure soon to reveal himself.
He will be a global earthly ruler opposed to Christ and pretending to be him. He it is who is called in the Bible “the beast rising out of the sea with ten horns and seven heads” (Revelation 13.1), “the little horn” (Daniel 7.8), and “the lawless one” (2 Thessalonians 2.3) whose number is 666 (Revelation 13.18).
Hans Memling, The Last Judgment, between circa 1466 and circa 1473.Wikimedia Commons
Christians who have been raptured into heaven are immune from these seven years of natural disasters, wars, famine and the persecutions of the Antichrist.
The kingdom upon earth
After the seven years of the Tribulation, Christ will return with his saints to fight and defeat Satan, the Antichrist, and his forces at the battle of Armageddon.
Most followers of Left Behind theology believe that Christ will then set up his kingdom upon earth and reign from Jerusalem for a millennium or a thousand years. He will govern the earth with his Christian followers, along with those Jews who have recognised Christ as the Messiah during the time of the Tribulation.
The eventual conversion of the Jews during this time explains, in part at least, the commitment to and support of many Evangelical Protestant Christians to the continuation of the State of Israel until the time of Tribulation when the Jews convert to Christianity.
At the end of the thousand years, Satan will be released and there will be a final but short rebellion against God, after which Satan will be defeated. Then God will judge everyone for eternal happiness in heaven or eternal misery in hell.
A relatively recent innovation
In the history of Christian thought, the idea of the rapture before the Tribulation is a relatively recent innovation.
We can date it to the 1830s and the theology of the Anglican John Nelson Darby (1800–82), a member of the Protestant Plymouth Brethren, and the founder of the group still known as the Exclusive Brethren. But it was popularised in Protestant circles in the United States by its inclusion in the notes of the Scofield Reference Bible in 1909.
The Bible of C.I. Scofield (1843–1921) was the main source for the idea of the rapture until The Late Great Planet Earth by Hal Lindsey (1929–2024) in 1970, a work that has sold over 28 million copies and has been translated into 54 languages. “Someday,” declared Lindsey,
a day that only God knows is coming to take away all those who believe in Him. He is coming to meet all true believers in the air. Without benefit of science, space suits, or interplanetary rockets, there will be those who will be transported into a glorious place more beautiful, more awesome, than we can possibly comprehend.
But it was the series of Left Behind books (1995–2007) by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, with over 65 million books sold, along with its movie franchise, that has most popularised the idea of the rapture and the Tribulation that follows it.
To many of us, the world appears a place of tribulation. “’Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone,” as John Donne (1572–1631) eloquently put it.
The idea of the rapture seems to reflect the utopian dream of many that they may be translated from this Earth to a better place until they can return to a world of justice, compassion and decency that seems so absent from the present one.
Protestors march for climate justice and against wild fires affecting the entire country in Sao Paulo, Brazil.
Faga Almeida/Getty
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