Steroid

• Its much denser atmosphere enables a greenhouse effect on steroids, with surface temperatures approaching 500°C.
• We have managed to land a camera on the surface of Venus, with the Soviet space probe Venera 9 in 1975.
• Like the “Earth rise” image captured during the Apollo 8 mission in 1968, this again proved the power of visual imagery.

Direct observations

• But as powerful and all-encompassing as these observations are, we still make surprise discoveries, such as vent systems on the seafloor and life in under-ice cavities.
• This is why we need to continue exploring and ramp up our capacity to measure the oceans directly.
• Nowhere is this more true than in the Southern Ocean, the connector of all oceans.

Fostering collaboration

• While it is not quite Venus in terms of difficulty, measurements have to target and prioritise the major science questions.
• Earlier this year, more than 300 researchers gathered for the first Southern Ocean Observing Symposium in Hobart to express their growing concern.

The risks of the unknown

• It isn’t cheap to track changes in such a remote location.
• Sending ships and deploying robust instrumentation, and then retrieving the gear and data, all adds up.
• The lack of direct observations is one reason we continue to be surprised by changes in the region.

• The result is a first-of-its-kind experience for chemical and materials scientists who develop the products we use every day.
• "Albert Invent's next generation Worksheet is a true replacement for Excel, with an extensible database sitting behind it.
• The result is a first-of-its-kind experience for chemical and materials scientists who develop the products we use every day".
• At its core, Worksheet is a connected space where scientists can design formulations and access experiment data in real time.

• Bausch + Lomb acquired the Blink brand of eye drops for dry eyes and contacts from Johnson & Johnson Vision earlier this year.
• Another educational event will highlight practical patient cases using products from across the company’s consumer, vision care and pharmaceutical portfolios.
• The Bausch + Lomb schedule at AAOpt:
  “Clinical Dry Eye Findings in Patients Using a Novel Lipid-Containing Eye Drop.” Joshi et al.
• “Perfluorohexyloctane, an Eye Drop for Dry Eye Disease, Reduces Corneal Staining Across All Regions of the Cornea.” Fahmy et al.

• Elections around the world are facing an evolving threat from foreign actors, one that involves artificial intelligence.
• Countries trying to influence each other’s elections entered a new era in 2016, when the Russians launched a series of social media disinformation campaigns targeting the U.S. presidential election.
• Over the next seven years, a number of countries – most prominently China and Iran – used social media to influence foreign elections, both in the U.S. and elsewhere in the world.
• It’s not clear how these technologies will change disinformation, how effective they will be or what effects they will have.

A conjunction of elections

• Seventy-one percent of people living in democracies will vote in a national election between now and the end of next year.
• Nine African democracies, including South Africa, will have elections in 2024.
• Australia and the U.K. don’t have fixed dates, but elections are likely to occur in 2024.
• Many of those elections matter a lot to the countries that have run social media influence operations in the past.

Election interference

• They talked about their expectations regarding election interference in 2024.
• Of course, there’s a lot more to running a disinformation campaign than generating content.
• A Columbia Journalism Review study found that most major news outlets used Russian tweets as sources for partisan opinion.
• And the current crop of generative AIs are being connected to tools that will make content distribution easier as well.
• These persona bots, as computer scientist Latanya Sweeney calls them, have negligible influence on their own.

Disinformation on AI steroids

• Countries like Russia and China have a history of testing both cyberattacks and information operations on smaller countries before rolling them out at scale.
• Countering new disinformation campaigns requires being able to recognize them, and recognizing them requires looking for and cataloging them now.
• Disinformation campaigns in the AI era are likely to be much more sophisticated than they were in 2016.
• There have been some important democratic elections in the generative AI era with no significant disinformation issues: primaries in Argentina, first-round elections in Ecuador and national elections in Thailand, Turkey, Spain and Greece.