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As the tragedy in Ukraine deepens, it's clear that the world should end its dependency on Russian oil. It will be ironic, however, if nations disentangling themselves from this compromised energy source instead turn to another energy source with destructive impacts: harvesting and burning forest wood for fuel, which increases carbon emissions compared to fossil fuels, and degrades forests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the secretary-general of the United Nations has questioned whether the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed a gap in global defenses against bioterrorism that a nefarious group may seek to exploit, the reality is that the pandemic has only underscored the folly of biological warfare, a strategy which relies on weapons – viruses, bacteria, and other pathogens – that would indiscriminately wreak havoc on the attacked and the attacker alike. Indeed, most countries in the world are part of the Biological Weapons Convention, the international treaty that – while lacking an enforcement mechanism – has successfully bolstered the near universal norms against the use of biological weapons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Archives function both as repositories of documents and materials and as sites of memory collection and classification. This article explores the provenance and process of collecting and archiving through the lens of the collection of personal papers of Samuel Switzer, a Northern educated Southerner, World War I soldier, and a Jew. It examines how the interplay of Switzer's various identities affected the donor's and archivists' perspectives on the collection's importance and relevance and demonstrates the impact of these viewpoints on the collection's presentation and use by scholars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Place a square sheet of paper with side length 1 into the first quadrant of a coordinate system in such a way that the lower-left corner coincides with the origin. Look at the set of points that are obtained by folding the lower-right corner of the sheet along a line passing through the origin. The points obtained in this fashion will lie on the unit circle whose center is the origin. By making use of two similar triangles, the illustration gives rise to a rational parametrization of the unit circle. The parameter t is the distance from the lower-right corner of the sheet to the point of intersection of the fold line with the right edge of the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How can scientific journals satisfy an admirable desire for open-mindedness and aversion to censorship while minimizing the publication of junk science? We consider this question in the context of the Bem (2011) paper reporting extra-sensory perception among Cornell students, which received a lot of attention in part because the editors made the decision to publish the article despite extreme skepticism of its claims. We consider the reasons, good and bad, for journals to publish such papers, and then we propose an alternative way in which the journal could publish without seeming to endorse outlandish claims. Our proposal is to flip the standard scheme of scientific publication by privileging data rather than strong conclusions presented with an air of certainty. This proposal could work for the publication of "big if true" claims more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The associability of artificial intelligence (AI) as a dual-use technology for nuclear material production (NMP) within the academic and practitioner communities remains widely neglected, and so a widening opportunity for AI to aid in illicit and covert non-peaceful applications exists. To address this emerging gap, this paper investigates the evolving and applicable uses of AI and finds broad evidence of its use to optimize performance, promote innovation, reduce costs, and enhance safety associated with the development and production of nuclear material. AI's use in this arena will, thereby, facilitate broader accessibility of peaceful uses of nuclear science and technology, while at the same time cause concerns that said improvements can aid the illicit development of nuclear weapons. As such, this paper advocates for a three-dimensional solution to manage the evolving dual-use concern of AI that involves advancing states-centric monitoring and regulation, promoting intellectual exchange between the nonproliferation sector and the AI industry, and encouraging AI industrial contributions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]