King's death greatly exaggerated

ALISTER: An AI wrote 16 bacteria-killing viruses (or phages) from scratch and they came alive in a lab dish. Before anyone panics, these things eat bacteria. Drug resistant infections are forecast to kill 39m people by 2050. If a machine can design the cure, brilliant.

MERIDYTH: Ummm…no. We’ve taught AI to compose living things. Two biosecurity specialists warned it raises urgent safety questions, and that viruses designed to cause disease should not be pursued at all. So why are we letting AI create things that could kill off humanity?

ALISTER: Kill off humanity? They eat bacteria, not us. Researchers re-analysed the data and found the 16 new phages were 97% identical to the real virus the AI copied to build them. Same family tree, rearranged. That's clever chemistry, not Frankenstein.

MERIDYTH: That rearranging is dangerous. In a separate test, researchers attacked the safeguards and won. AI disguised deadly toxins just enough to slip past the software that vets DNA orders. That check is the only thing between a design on a screen and a real vial in the post. And it's already been beaten.

ALISTER: And that fear is the real cost. While people panic about a vial in the post Britain doesn’t even use the safe phages it already has. MPs found phage therapy reached patients just 12 times in 4 years. Possible NHS savings of £200m a year. Nothing. Scared of the printer and still writing with a quill.

MERIDYTH: Those 12 cases were supervised. This model writes genomes on request. The only thing keeping human viruses out is that the team chose to remove them from training data. Nothing stops the next team having more devious plans. Sleep well.

Scientists put 14 dogs in an MRI scanner and found their brains light up with reward when they see a stranger smiling. So next time you grin at a random dog in the street, you are basically giving it a treat. Just like how when you share The AM Squabble it’s a treat for us!

🚨 First alert. The govt has issued its 1st ever national emergency alert, warning of very high wildfire risk across England and Wales after weeks without rain. No barbecues, fire pits or fireworks until conditions ease.

🕵️ Byelection backfire. Farage called a byelection hoping it would end a standards investigation into a £5m gift. It reopened within hours of his win. He beat Count Binface but skipped the actual count, citing disruption fears the police say never happened.

🚔 Car boot sale. London police confiscated over £8m worth of Ferraris, Lamborghinis and Bentleys in a single weekend, the biggest haul in five years. One driver owned his Ferrari for barely half an hour before losing it.

👓 Objection, your glasses. Courts are now confiscating Meta smart glasses at the door, joining a growing list of pubs and restaurants that have banned them as spyware. Even Zuckerberg's own security team got threatened with contempt for wearing them.

💍 Accidentally married. New govt proposals could give cohabiting couples marriage style legal rights after just three years together, whether they know it or not. Nearly three quarters of people polled had no idea this was happening.

GOOD NEWS… for shady insider trading after Wall Street firms started paying $100k/month for early access to Trump's Truth Social posts, giving them a head start before the market reacts. BAD NEWS… for an Italian bank’s €300m reserve after record heat has put its cheese vault in jeopardy. Wheels of Parmigiano Reggiano are used as loan collateral, but the climate crisis is raising cooling costs and shrinking milk supply.

💼 Fed approved. For the third time ever, American women now outnumber men in the workforce, with economists blaming gaming, opioids, and a shrinking male labour pool. The stay at home boyfriend is now a genuine economic trend.

🛢️ Trump pump. Greenland has blocked a US oil company with deep Trump ties from drilling ahead of schedule, pushing the timeline back to winter 2027 at the earliest. Shareholders hoping for a boost instead got a share price crash.

🇪🇺 The EU payday. Ukraine will receive €1.4bn in interest generated from frozen Russian central bank assets, announced hours after missile and drone strikes killed at least 17 people and wounded 44 in Kyiv.

🎮 Military chips. A Russian S-71 missile reportedly contains an Nvidia chip designed for students and hobbyists, not war. Nvidia says it cannot track hardware once it is resold, which is doing a lot of work in that sentence.

🩺 Good NHS news. England is on track to eliminate hepatitis C years ahead of the WHO's global target, having already treated over 100,000 people since 2015 with a simple 8 to 12 week course of tablets. A win worth shouting about.

🧘 Zen ruins date night. Venting to your partner about work drama could bring couples closer. Unless you’re highly mindful, in which case, more problem talk means worse relationship quality and even worse sex. Sometimes ignorance really is bliss.

🎗️ A first. Tracy Tomlinson, from Oldham, has become the first person in the world to receive a new cancer therapy that uses engineered donor immune cells rather than her own. She hopes it helps others even if it does not help her.

🤖 Ground-breaking AI transparency. Anthropic has unveiled a cutting-edge, game-changing solution: invisible watermarks embedded into Claude-generated text. This approach (mandated by the EU AI Act) will delve deep into questions of authorship.

📰 Summarised illegally. Nearly 300 French newspapers have filed a complaint against Google over AI summaries they say are stealing their traffic and breaking a 2022 compensation deal. Google was already fined €250m in 2024 for breaking those same commitments.

🐬 Shell game. Researchers filmed Australian dolphins trapping fish in sea-snail shells, a skill previously only seen on the opposite coast. Cutest bit is that a mum appears to be teaching it to her calf.

By Alister

Hot weather means open doors, open windows, and the AC only when I have properly given up. There is one flaw in the plan.

Flies. Five a day, treating my flat like a budget airline.

Hence the magnetic screen curtain I caved and ordered. I hate buying from Amazon, but desperation is a powerful marketing tool.

Installation is sticky Velcro, hang the screen, done. Ours went on a balcony door and it has been faultless. Breeze in, flies out.

The few that still sneak through meet my other Amazon purchase. The electric tennis racket. Forty love.

By Alister

I really do love a silly group game. One man is told to mime being on a rollercoaster. Everyone else in the room is told he is miming a trip to the toilet.

He throws everything at it. Hands in the air, white knuckle grip, a small prayer at the top of the drop. The laughter is deafening and he takes it as a rave review.

Another week we clear our toilet humour quota, and another week I regret nothing.

Wednesday's solar eclipse plunged parts of Spain, Iceland and Greenland into darkness for barely two minutes, with over 90% coverage across the UK. So be sure to join both of us next week for another Squabble!

Alister & Meridyth