SoylentNews

Anthropic Says Claude Thwarted Bioweapon Research From State-Sponsored Actors

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/anthropic-says-claude-thwarted-bioweapon-research-from-state-sponsored-actors-covert-accounts-used-u-s-proxies-to-attempt-to-engineer-deadlier-viruses-tried-to-evade-identification-and-regional-blocks

Covert Accounts Used U.S. Proxies To Attempt To Engineer Deadlier Viruses, Tried To Evade Identification and Regional Blocks.

Right out of the gate, Anthropic remarks on the difficulty of understanding if a particular line of inquiry pertaining to biology is meant for nefarious purposes, to create defense mechanisms like vaccines, or simply to establish predictions of how a virus spreads. The company says that "out of an abundance of caution [....] launched recent models with stronger safeguards."

In the first case, a request for assistance in developing a grant application involved finding ways to improve the chikungunya virus. The purported researchers were trying to come up with ways to both add extra abilities to chikungunya (increased mutation) and increase its virulence. The topic itself already raised some concern, but Anthropic's hand was forced after finding that although the grant application seemed to be for civilian researchers, the actual investigation was meant to proceed at a military facility.

The firm also found that the request would have gone through a third-party LLM platform associated with military as well as civilian institutions. The countries involved are geo-blocked by Anthropic, and that platform routed comms traffic through the U.S. to try to evade detection, used gray-market resellers, and specifically catered to customers looking to skirt content restrictions. Anthropic banned the accounts in question and shared the information with government authorities, though the same people repeatedly tried reaching Claude again via zero-data-retention services.

Case #2 pertained to a non-US researched who was looking to dig into how avian flu adapts to mammals, and how it can cause diseases other than in the respiratory tract. The problem is that avian flu has a high fatality rate, and there's little population immunity.

While the virus doesn't easily spread from person to person, therein lies the rub — the research could end up discovering mechanisms to increase transmissibility. The researchers used a random username, a private email service, and accessed Claude through a VPS, leading Anthropic to investigate and ultimately turn its nose up at this strain of thought.

The story with the third case bears a resemblance to the previous two. Once again, an account was trying to prepare a supposed grant application, this time around about orthopoxviruses, the family that houses smallpox and Mpox, among others.

The application discussed containment facilities and live experimentation with the viruses, and focused on understanding their genetics for the purpose of evading immunity. The research didn't initially trigger alarms, but Anthropic came to notice it was created via a reselling service, with a randomly-generated email, tunneled through U.S. infrastructure to reach Claude, and traced back to a banned account farm.

In the last two cases, instead of viruses, the purported researchers were focusing on toxins. In case #4, a person mapped out venom toxin peptides from multiple families of animals and created a program to optimize their toxic characteristics.

Although the stated goal was to create painkillers, antidepressants, and other therapeutic molecules, the data would equally allow the creation of potent harmful compounds. Anthropic also came to learn the content Claude was generating was part of a state-sponsored program in an "unsupported region."

In the fifth and final case, a theoretical scientist was also using Claude to try and redesign a set of toxins, also supposedly for therapeutic purposes, under a national public search program. However, the work touched upon "a bacterial toxin subunit and a protein of the hemorrhagic-fever virus" that happens to be on the World Health Organization's list for particularly nasty, pandemic-inducing diseases.

The scientist tried to obscure the subject of the research, directing Claude to be vague about descriptions. Once again, the story ended with Anthropic cutting off access to Claude from a location that broke its terms of service.

Original Submission #1  Original Submission #2 

The Chancellery concluded that the browser-based suite was suitable in principle for key standard tasks, although it also identified technical and operational limitations. The next phase will cover less than 10 percent of federal employees and is expected to take about 15 months. The plan is to use the openDesk suite from the German state-owned enterprise ZenDIS. This is the same collaboration suite that we reported Mecklenburg-Vorpommern was adopting in July, following neighboring Schleswig-Holstein in 2025.

The move is part of the Swiss government's Digital Switzerland Strategy 2026, announced in Bern at the end of 2025 – less than a month after its Federal Council's report on Swiss digital sovereignty. They also follow the 2024 introduction of the Federal Law on the Use of Electronic Means for the Fulfilment of Governmental Tasks – or EMBAG for short. The government has a fresh interest in open source – indeed, the Chancellery maintains an online catalog of its own open source tools.

Back in July, Heise reported in English that the Swiss Armed Forces were making similar moves. It cites a German-language report from Swiss publication Republik, Die Cyber-Spezialisten des Bundes kehren Microsoft den Rücken – The federal government's cyber specialists are turning their backs on Microsoft – which has more details. The military is moving faster: Republik says it aims to complete the migration by October 2026 – next month at the time of writing. Again, there is a local precedent – this time, from Austria. In September last year, representatives of the Austrian military presented a talk at the LibreOffice Conference in Budapest: Migration to LibreOffice in the Austrian Armed Forces (ÖBH). Last month, the ÖBH gave a long interview to the Document Foundation about how and why: part 1 and part 2. ®

Original Submission

One of the striking aspects of the deal is that it will involve the use of NIH money to fund research that the NIH leadership has explicitly rejected. Prior to the Trump administration, NIAID funded a lot of work directed toward studying the biology of emerging diseases and developing potential defenses. In a commentary published early this year, the Heads of NIAID and the NIH explicitly called for dropping biodefense research from the agency's remit and rejecting things like pandemic preparedness in favor of a focus on "the most impactful infectious diseases that Americans currently face."

Yet the new agreement includes money that will be spent to "protect the United States from future pandemic strains, CBRN [chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear] threats and other emerging infectious disease." In other words, the NIH will be giving money to the Department of Defense to fund research its leadership doesn't want to see happen.

Very little of this makes any sense, and the agreement itself is remarkably vague, so it will be difficult to determine its consequences until spending data becomes available. That's assuming future Congresses don't simply prohibit this sort of spending, something that its recent actions have suggested it might be willing to do.

Original Submission

After working for the traditional European space industry for about a decade, at heavyweights Airbus and ArianeGroup, Huby founded The Exploration Company five years ago. Initially, the company focused on building a relatively small cargo capsule to deliver supplies to, and return from, low-Earth orbit. This work has resulted in the Nyx spacecraft, which is now undergoing NASA safety reviews for a cargo mission to the International Space Station as early as November 2028.

[...] "If Europe wants to stay relevant—we will not be relevant without a massive rocket at a massive cadence," Huby said during a teleconference with reporters on Tuesday. "And to do that we need a massive engine, and right now this is something we just do not have in Europe."

[...] Critics may look at Huby and her company and say that is a lot of big talk for a company that only has a single, partial success in spaceflight to its credit. And sure, it is. But that's kind of the point. So much of the spaceflight community in Europe has been concerned with either the large aerospace primes seeking government handouts to protect their turf or small launch startups. There has been a stunning lack of big, visionary thinking.

Few people on the continent seem to recognize that multibillion investments by US companies such as SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Amazon in space, and their many imitators in China, are radically transforming spaceflight. As the world changes, Huby does not seem willing to stand on the sidelines in Europe and bemoan capitalism in space. Rather, she seems to be saying it is not too late for Europe to seize the day.

"We need to have European politicians who are ambitious," she said. "Entrepreneurs cannot do this alone. We need to be backed by the politicians and by the European Space Agency. But we have to start by achieving the crazy targets that we've set up for ourselves. That will give trust to others to believe in what we're doing."

Original Submission

Specific questions touch on some fairly technical details, including the general architecture of a VPN service. They include the adequacy of single-hop VPNs, which, as noted earlier, use a single server to decrypt traffic sent by the user and send it to its destination. It also asks about multi-hop architectures, in which the traffic is funneled through two or more servers, allowing the first to see only the IP address of the sender and the terminating server to see only the destination address. The letter also inquires about the use of random delays and cryptographic padding to thwart attacks that detect timing patterns or the size of messages. Wyden further asks about the adequacy of specific services such as Apple Private Relay, Nym, and Tor.

The questions are:

1. Are standard, single-hop commercial VPNs sufficient to protect Americans' sensitive digital footprints from foreign adversaries monitoring internet backbones?

2. Does the NSA recommend multi-hop tools such as Apple Private Relay, Tor, or Nym over standard VPNs for Americans facing heightened surveillance threats?

3. What technical features, such as random delays, padding, and cover traffic, are needed to defend against sophisticated surveillance, and how does the NSA assess multi-hop systems like Apple Private Relay compared with Tor and Nym?

Nym is an open source VPN client written in Rust, a memory-safe programming language that's resistant to attacks exploiting buffer overflows or other types of memory-corruption bugs. Nym can route traffic through a decentralized "mixnet," which provides random time delays and the reordering of messages. The VPN can also provide a multi-hop architecture.

Apple Private Relay provides multi-hop browsing using two servers, one operated by Apple and the other by a third-party content provider. Tor is a privacy service that encrypts traffic and sends it through three servers before decrypting it and sending it to its final destination.

Each of the services comes with pros and cons. The hops provided by Nym and Tor, for example, are operated by volunteers, some of whom may be nation-state spies trying to use their vantage point to gather intelligence. Apple Private Relay relies on content delivery networks like Cloudflare and Akamai that not everyone trusts. Its protection is also limited to the Safari browser running on Apple devices.

A memo issued by the Congressional Research Service provides an overview of the options but provides no criteria for determining which ones are best. That leaves many people unable to make informed choices about what's best for their threat model.

"There's no trustworthy standardization" for assessing various VPN services, Micah Sherr, a Georgetown University professor specializing in network security, said in an interview. "The VPN ads you get in YouTube commercials can be incredibly misleading. It's extremely difficult for ordinary users to determine whether they need a VPN, what a VPN actually buys them, and which one to use."

Wyden requested the NSA provide answers no later than October 14.

What is your preferred VPN?

Original Submission

Yet, just a year ago Hugging Face rebuffed a $500 million investment by Nvidia, suggesting Delangue knows he's just made a deal with the devil. That said, with a cool $1 billion earmarked for Hugging Face employees joining Nvidia, Delangue and his cohort are going to have plenty of Benjamins with which to wipe away any tears of regret.

Nvidia would probably prefer to paint the acquisition as an altruistic move to provide financial security to one of the most important AI resources on the internet today.

The case certainly can be made that Hugging Face is that one brick holding up the rest of the AI ecosystem. If it ever did exhaust its runway, the consequences would be catastrophic.

And Hugging Face's business is capital-intensive. Storing petabytes' worth of AI models and datasets isn't cheap, nor is the bandwidth required to continuously serve those models at scale. Nvidia's involvement all but ensures Hugging Face never has to worry about infrastructure demand going forward.

But while the benefits of Nvidia's patronage are obvious, so is the potential harm to the GPU giant's competitors.

Despite frequent comparisons to GitHub, Hugging Face is more than a place for storing and sharing model weights and training data.

For example, Hugging Face is home to arguably the most comprehensive documentation on AI development on the internet. It wouldn't be hard for Nvidia to use its newfound position to ensure its products are always better documented than its competitors'. You can claim until your face is red that the platform is still "open," but just because something is open doesn't mean it's unbiased.

Then there are Hugging Face's considerable software contributions. If you weren't aware, the popular local AI inference engine llama.cpp became part of Hugging Face earlier this year. Meanwhile, Hugging Face's Transformers Python library — not to be confused with the model architecture — is a key piece of major inference platforms like vLLM and SGLang, which compete directly with Nvidia's own TRT-LLM offering.

The acquisition puts Nvidia in a prime position to prioritize its own hardware and software products. The AI arms dealer wouldn't necessarily need to do something as brash as ending support for competing platforms. It could simply ensure that the models and frameworks it favors are always better documented, and run first on its kit.

One method to tip the scales would be to flood Hugging Face with cheap Nvidia-based compute. Hugging Face has offered compute resources in the form of its inference endpoints, providers, and Spaces for several years now. To supply this compute, Hugging Face worked with numerous providers across a range of hardware, including major cloud providers, inference-as-a-service vendors, and chip designers such as Nvidia, AMD, Cerebras, SambaNova, and Groq.

As Hugging Face's parent company, Nvidia would be in the position to subsidize compute through its various partners and economically incentivize developers to build for its hardware first. The GPU slinger would have to be subtle. Tying a certain percentage of a neocloud's compute allocations to low-cost educational and development resources would be one way to do it without raising too many suspicions.

No matter how you slice it, nor how much Nvidia insists it's totally not going to thumb the scales, its acquisition of Hugging Face has a high likelihood of harming competition. Hugging Face works better as AI Switzerland than it does as part of the most powerful company in the industry.

Original Submission

One wrinkle worth noting is that Anthropic silos Claude's memory in projects so that the chatbot's context window doesn't get overwhelmed with information that isn't relevant to your current task. You can shape Claude's memory in projects by adding comments, documents and information from GitHub through the right side of the interface. At the end of each day, Claude will generate a summary of the work it's done for you, which you can edit from the same interface.

If you accidentally prompt Claude outside of a project, click or tap the three dots icon and select Add to project to properly sort the conversation. If you want Claude to remember something specific across every tool you can interact with, including projects, you can add that information to the Profile section of Memory menu.

If at any point you want to temporarily avoid the possibility of Claude writing something to its memory, you can switch the chatbot to Incognito mode by clicking or tapping the ghost icon on the top right of the interface. "Incognito chats aren't saved, added to memory, or used to train models," Anthropic explains.

In March, Anthropic added an import tool to make it easier for people to bring their conversations from other chatbots over to Claude. Engadget has a full guide on how to export your chats to Claude, but here I'll mention that you can select Start import next to Import memory from other AI providers to get that process started.

See TFA for the steps on how to edit the memory.

Original Submission

Until the advent of widespread DNA sequencing, polyploidy remained largely shrouded in mystery. Scientists knew that it happened: It was obvious to anyone in the habit of counting chromosomes under a microscope. But it wasn't until researchers could analyze genomes, base pair by base pair, that they began to appreciate the full implications of whole-genome duplication.

Analyzing base pairs is how the evolutionary biologist Kenneth Wolfe at University College Dublin became interested in polyploidy. When he started his lab in the early 1990s, he took advantage of a European Union initiative that would pay scientists 2 euros per nucleotide to sequence the genome of baker's yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae. (In 2022, sequencing cost roughly $0.000000006 per nucleotide in U.S. dollars.) Wolfe wasn't especially interested in yeast, but his lab needed the money. Later, when he and other researchers with the Saccharomyces Genome Sequencing Project started sharing their results, they noticed something interesting.

Ancient genome duplication led tothe radiation of the brassica genus, including broccoli, kale, and cauliflower, and the evolution of the tomato's colorful, fleshy fruit.

Polyploidy explainswhy grocery strawberries are so big (they're octoploids) and why some watermelons are seedless (they’re triploid and sterile).

"There just seemed to be an awful lot of duplicated genes in these genomes," he recalled. As the genome project reached completion, Wolfe and his team found that yeast DNA was full of doubled regions. The duplicated segments were around 60% identical, and regions of closely related DNA were separated by far longer stretches of unique genes. "You could really see the history of what had happened," he said. "You could track every gene and see what happened to it."

Wolfe suspected that he was seeing evidence of a past genome duplication event alongside indications that the cells were in the process of pruning back excess DNA. Wolfe's 1997 Nature paper on the subject helped turn increasing attention to both polyploidy and the inverse process, rediploidization, in which an organism retains some of its doubled genes and discards others, ultimately bringing the genome back to a streamlined diploid state.

As the complete genome sequences of other model organisms began trickling in, Wolfe used his bioinformatics expertise to look for genome duplications there. The roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans was devoid of polyploidy. So, too, was the fruit fly. Perhaps, Wolfe mused, what he saw in yeast was a fluke. Then, in 2000, the genome of the model plant Arabidopsis was published.

"There was a genome duplication in there screaming at us," he said. "And it wasn't just my lab — several labs discovered this genome duplication."

Past biologists had theorized about the evolutionary benefit of doubled genes. In 1970, the Japanese American geneticist Susumu Ohno had published Evolution by Gene Duplication, which posited that the duplication of individual genes was an underappreciated source of evolutionary novelty. A doubling event on its own can result in novel traits. Plus, with two copies of each gene, evolution can tinker with one version while keeping the other as a backup; a new function could emerge without a gene losing its existing use. The same could potentially be true if the entire genome was doubled. In his treatise, Ohno hypothesized that all vertebrate genomes contained evidence of an ancient genome duplication event. Subsequent genome sequencing has shown this to be the case.

"You might think that the genome, the blueprint of life, would be a stable thing," said Sarah Otto, an evolutionary biologist at the University of British Columbia. "It's not. It's all over the map."

The challenge for biologists studying polyploidy was that the cellular shock of sudden genome doubling is often lethal. Even offspring that survive are usually sterile and have no way of passing on the extra DNA. To find out how a polyploidy event could be survivable, they would need input from plant biologists, who had myriad opportunities to watch it unfold.

Several decades ago, in the dry prairies of eastern Washington, Pamela Soltis and Douglas Soltis began tracking a polyploidy event. They knew almost exactly when it had happened: Several species of a plant known as goatsbeard were brought to the United States from Europe in the mid-1920s. They hybridized, and before long, two new species emerged with 24 chromosomes — twice as many as the original species. By growing the plants from seed and studying their genomes, the Soltises could see what happens to cells in the immediate aftermath of genome duplication.

What they found was chaos. Almost as soon as the goatsbeard acquired the extra DNA, the plants started to tinker with their surplus of genes — changing some genes, getting rid of others, keeping a few, Douglas Soltis said. "Immediately, in one generation, they're already beginning to get rid of certain copies of genes [and] not expressing certain genes as much as other genes."

The married plant biologists Pamela and Doug Soltis have tracked a recent genome duplication in lab experiments. "You can watch evolution repeat itself," Doug said.

Billions of years of evolution have optimized many eukaryotic cells, including those of plants and animals, for diploid genomes, where a cell carries two copies of each chromosome (one from the mother, one from the father). When an offspring is born with a duplicated genome, the cell is transformed by all the extra genetic material.

It's the single biggest, most radical mutation that naturally occurs, according to the evolutionary biologist Kyle T. David, who has a joint appointment at Vanderbilt University and Cornell University. "It's like instant speciation with one generation," he said.

To create space for so much additional DNA, the nucleus enlarges. The cell synthesizes many more proteins from the additional gene sequences. And in some cases the process of synthesizing those proteins seems to take longer. Scientists don't know why some species seem to adapt well to these changes, while for others polyploidy is a dead end.

It's like instant speciation with one generation.

"Things go wrong a lot of times, and it goes wrong in a lot of different species," Otto said. "It is thought that there are polyploid humans produced, but they [spontaneously] abort early."

Whether human or goatsbeard, the cell immediately begins performing triage. Genes are retained, tossed out, turned off, and modified. After their decades observing goatsbeard adapting to polyploidy in the lab, the Soltises can even predict which genes are most likely to get the boot and which are more likely to stick around.

"It's amazing not only how fast it is, but that it's repeatable," Douglas Soltis said. "You can watch evolution repeat itself." He speculates that there may be rules underlying genome doubling, though he admits they are still figuring out exactly what those rules might be.

What seems to stack the deck in favor of surviving whole-genome duplication, David said, is environmental shifts. And not small perturbations, either: Some researchers have noticed a pattern in which full-scale apocalyptic cataclysms, such as the asteroid collision that heralded the end of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago, occur around the same time as clusters of genome duplications. "With the severe environmental changes going on, you need a similar leap in your genome," David said. "It just increases the chances that you're going to get that really rare combination of duplicated gene families that can acquire new functions and can help under those traumatic environmental conditions." However, a 2026 paper on the subject has proved controversial; a formal rebuttal claims that the analysis is flawed.

Two new species of polyploid goatsbeard have developed in eastern Washington within the past century.

As researchers begin to make headway on understanding the rare conditions that allow polyploids to propagate, other scientists are turning their attention to how duplicated genomes adapt to the sudden shock.

When Neiman first traveled to New Zealand as an undergraduate on a study abroad program in the late 1990s, she couldn't have predicted that research on the evolution of sex would eventually bring her back. On the shores of Lake Alexandrina, an alpine lake nestled among the craggy peaks of New Zealand's South Island, most Potamopyrgus antipodarum snails reproduce sexually — the classic egg-meets-sperm. Some females, however, reproduce asexually by making clones of themselves. Neiman wanted to know why.

Except for the way they reproduce, the two types of snails are almost identical. Neiman figured that there must be some genetic difference between them. When her lab began piecing together the genomes of 30 different sexually reproducing potamo species, they stumbled upon something odd. While many of the genes they sequenced had two copies, one maternal and one paternal, as expected, others had three, even four.

Polyploidy is the most important process on the planet that hardly anybody knows anything about.

When several doctoral students combed through the sequencing results, there was only one way to explain why so many extra gene copies were scattered across the whole of the potamo genome. Sometime in the last million or so years, the snail had undergone a whole-genome duplication.

"The snails are hiding this secret in their genome," Neiman said. "No one expected that."

She knew about ancient polyploidy events. She also knew about more recent examples in plants. What she had found had occurred in a scientific Goldilocks zone: recent enough that the snail had yet to finish reorganizing its doubled genome, and long enough ago that the process was well underway.

In that relatively short amount of evolutionary time, the snails had already lost 60% of their doubled genes. "From the time everything's doubled, the race is on, because mutation is happening everywhere," Wendel said. "A lot of that duplicated, redundant material is just mutagenized [mutated] and lost." Neiman published her team's findings in November 2025 in Genome Biology and Evolution.

Neiman speculates that polyploidy and the snail's unusual reproductive strategies are related. The females that reproduce asexually are triploid or tetraploid, meaning they carry three or four copies of every chromosome instead of the usual two. It could be that it's easier for the females to manage their extra DNA by using clonal reproduction, she said, rather than trying to organize those chromosomes to make eggs.

Complete polyploidy in potamos is ephemeral, as it is in many species. It's costly. Most duplicated genomes never stabilize. Those that do begin shedding genes as evolution sorts through the redundancy. "Either you get a new job, or you get out of town," Wendel said. "Most things are getting out of town."

The long-term instability of doubled genomes has led some researchers to question whether polyploidy is as important in broad evolutionary terms as its prevalence might suggest. For example, Otto's research has shown that, in yeast, having extra copies of every gene hinders the organism's ability to adapt to the common antifungal medication nystatin. "Most polyploids really are dead ends," she said.

Potamopyrgus antipodarum sits at the heart of that tension between instability and innovation. The snail has survived the initial shock and is now negotiating the consequences of the gamble written into its DNA. Only evolutionary time will tell whether its lineage will win big and use its expanded genome to find a new way to live.

Like many biologists who encounter genome duplication, Will Ratcliff found it accidentally. The Georgia Tech biologist works with treelike clusters of genetically identical yeast cells that remain stuck together after cell division. In 2018, he started growing these cells, called "snowflake yeast," in a long-term experiment to study how multicellularity might have evolved.

The cells started as diploids. But soon, polyploid varieties developed in his lab. That's because polyploid cells tend to be bigger and more elongated, and he was selecting for larger clumps of cells. "There's ecological rewards," Ratcliff said. "In some environments, it's good to be bigger than the rest of the population." As a plant, for instance, you can grow taller than your neighbors, get more sunlight, and extend your roots deeper.

It was the first time that polyploidy spontaneously arose and persisted in the lab, he said, and shows the role it might have played in some of life's biggest leaps, such as the evolution of multicellularity.

Original Submission

Lin and their colleagues assembled connections and conclusions from numerous studies to create a DAG, or a web of habitat design features, and their downstream effects on aspects of mental, emotional, and social wellbeing. They also solicited feedback from experts across industry, academia, and NASA to evaluate and strengthen the DAG.

[...] When using the atlas, the team envisions that designers can take either a forward or backward approach. The atlas lays out habitat design elements, and their downstream behavioral connections, in roughly the order in which decisions are made in designing a mission.

For instance, in designing a spacecraft to journey to Mars, a designer might take a forward approach, and first click on a feature associated with an early design stage, such as "distance from Earth," knowing that this would be a significant consideration. The atlas would automatically display risks associated with being far from Earth, such as limits to resources such as "food," "medical capability," and "family and friends," and to behavioral health outcomes such as "nostalgia/homesickness."

A designer could then take a backward approach. If, for instance, they want to prioritize minimizing nostalgia/homesickness, they could click on the term to reveal design features and ideas that affect and could potentially improve it, such as in this case, "place attachment," or feeling emotionally attached to a place. Clicking on this term would in turn reveal upstream elements such as "reconfigurability" and "privacy" — design elements that could be put in place to encourate place attachment, and reduce homesickness.

For every term that a designer clicks on, Lin and their colleagues provide a summary, based on empirical research, that explains both the term in the context of extreme habitats, and provides examples of design interventions. For instance, a designer who is looking for ideas to minimize social isolation on long-duration missions may click on the term, to reveal a description.

"They may read that research has found 'access paths, stairs, entrances, contribute to the formation of friendships and social cohesion,'" Lin offers. "So that would give them an idea of connecting public spaces in the habitat, via the private spaces, so people have to mingle, essentially."

They emphasize that the new platform and the ideas informing it are not a one-size-fits-all for how to design any extreme habitat. That depends on a particular habitat's specifications and constraints.

"Rather, this helps you think about connections that might be important, but that aren't immediately obvious," Lin says. "As we envision truly becoming an off-planet species, or creating places we want to live in in space, there is so much potential for us to reimagine habitats that make us happy and productive."

Original Submission