Recent severe smoke events demonstrate the scale and reach of wildfire smoke as a growing climate hazard and an increasingly national threat. One particularly vulnerable group is children. Because people spend approximately 90% of their time indoors, schools and childcare facilities can play a critical protective role, but many are not equipped to filter the fine particulate matter in wildfire smoke.

Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and synthetic biology are making sophisticated biological work possible outside the universities, companies, and government laboratories whose biosafety systems have traditionally contained it. While the likelihood that this leads to the creation or modification of a dangerous pathogen is low, the consequences would be catastrophic. The national debate over whether and how to regulate AI is unlikely to be settled soon. This brief argues that New York City does not need to wait for the AI regulation debate to be resolved. The City can manage AI-associated biological risk with an approach similar to what it applied a decade ago to laboratory biosafety, without directly regulating AI developers or monitoring what people ask AI systems. In 2016 the Health Department did not know which high-containment research laboratories operated in the city or what they handled. The Board of Health required them to register and to report incidents, so that the Department could mitigate risks and plan its response before, rather than during or after, an incident. Keeping track of who is handling dangerous pathogens is something health departments have done for a century. This brief recommends three actions that extend the same approach to high-consequence biological work taking place outside traditional oversight.

The United Kingdom is confronting a sustained and interconnected challenge: rising economic inactivity and a persistent mental health crisis.

New York State is in the midst of an ambitious effort to expand child care access — one of the most significant investments in early childhood infrastructure in the state’s history.