Updated/Corrected below
The cause of the mysterious deaths of large numbers of honey bees across the United States that began in 2006 has apparently been discovered.
Scientists from the Army’s Edgewood Chemical Biological Center and the University of California at San Francisco identified both a virus and a parasite that are associated with the massive decline in the honey bee population.
See “Scientists Identify Pathogens That May Be Causing Global Honey-Bee Deaths,” Science Daily, April 26 (thanks to CB).
Update: As a commenter noted, this is old news. The Science Daily story dates from April 2007!
Additional background on the issue is available in “Recent Honey Bee Colony Declines” (pdf), Congressional Research Service, updated August 14, 2007.
The Federation of American Scientists supports H.R. 4420, the Cool Corridors Act of 2025, which would reauthorize the Healthy Streets program through 2030 and seeks to increase green and other shade infrastructure in high-heat areas.
The current lack of public trust in AI risks inhibiting innovation and adoption of AI systems, meaning new methods will not be discovered and new benefits won’t be felt. A failure to uphold high standards in the technology we deploy will also place our nation at a strategic disadvantage compared to our competitors.
Using the NIST as an example, the Radiation Physics Building (still without the funding to complete its renovation) is crucial to national security and the medical community. If it were to go down (or away), every medical device in the United States that uses radiation would be decertified within 6 months, creating a significant single point of failure that cannot be quickly mitigated.
The federal government can support more proactive, efficient, and cost-effective resiliency planning by certifying predictive models to validate and publicly indicate their quality.