On 29 December, just as the summit between Zelenskyy and Trump was finishing at Mar-a-lago, the PLA Eastern Theatre Command announced that it had commenced exercise "Justice Mission 2025" in the Taiwan Strait. I have just published an assessment of the exercise. mickryan.substack.com/p/justice-mi...
31.12.2025 07:14 — 👍 112 🔁 27 💬 3 📌 2
Good & detailed analysis of the US campaign in Venezuela, including the prospect of a war. "The risks of violence in any post-Maduro scenario should not be downplayed. Many senior military officers could resist regime change." www.crisisgroup.org/latin-americ...
25.10.2025 11:53 — 👍 125 🔁 49 💬 4 📌 2
Kyle Muldoon thought he might never get to watch an Eagles game with his son KJ, who was born with a rare and fatal liver disease that was treated with an individual CRISPR therapy.
#STATSummit
How does NATO monitor and defend its airspace? It operates a large, diverse & growing network of sensors & interceptors on air, sea and land—but also one with significant limitations when it comes to countering low-level drone incursions in peacetime.
www.economist.com/europe/2025/...
'The ‘C’s’ between 1909 and 2024 fall into two distinct groups; former Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) Chair Sir Percy Cradock talked of ‘sword men’ and ‘gown men’, reflecting the increasing civilianisation of SIS from the 1950s onwards' www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
02.09.2025 09:18 — 👍 43 🔁 6 💬 1 📌 0
Submit a 7-minute video pitch. Open for submissions June 1 – August 31, 2025.
Learn more about DARPA Ag x BTO Special Topic – Agricultural Defense Innovation here: darpa.mil/research/progr…
Topics include early warning systems, rapid-response countermeasures, massively accelerated crop engineering, integrated threat prediction/modeling & attribution.
14.06.2025 16:59 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency BTO (us!!!) is seeking disruptive solutions to defend U.S. agriculture (crops and livestock) against chemical/biological threats!
darpa.mil/research/progr…
ISW is seeking a full-time Middle East Security Program Researcher to provide timely open-source research and analysis of the geo-strategic dynamics of the Middle East region and how those dynamics will affect U.S. national security interests.
For more info & to apply: isw.pub/MiddleEastRe...
4/ PRC is possibly conducting bathymetric surveys in the strategically significant Luzon Strait between Taiwan and the Philippines.
We’ve now seen ground-based missile use, tho’ Pakistan’s Fateh is a non-nuclear tactical ballistic missile & not in same category as some longer range systems. As for nuc signalling, it depends whether you believe Pakistan’s earlier statement or the def minister’s later one
bsky.app/profile/shas...
Things we have not (yet) seen in this crisis:
- Fighter jets crossing the border/LoC
- Use of ground-based dual-capable missiles
- Nuclear signalling of a sort we previously saw in in 1990 & 1999 (at least not publicly)
- Large-scale mobilisation of ground forces, as in 2001/02
Indonesia names Ray Dalio and Jeffrey Sachs as sovereign wealth fund advisers
https://www.ft.com/content/d90a401b-d086-44a9-b00a-adf46f00f450
Check out our latest Hot Plasmids post, featuring cool new tools like self-labeling constructs from @dozenoaks.bsky.social, an improved voltage sensor from @michaelzlin.bsky.social, prime editing in dicot plants, and more!
blog.addgene.org/hot...
Plasmid of the Day
pcDNA3-Y392C-WLS-HA-IRES-GFP
Depositor: Joseph Gleeson
Purpose: Expression of WLS-HA protein (Y392C mutant)
www.addgene.org/178062/
‘Game changer’: German spending plans lift bond market’s growth forecasts
https://www.ft.com/content/f54f6eb2-5858-443b-9c07-1ddeb22f126b
Europe needs Friedrich Merz to succeed | Opinion
https://www.ft.com/content/61eef114-b42d-4532-ac74-d13eeaa01ea8
Big Tech’s AI ambitions deliver funding boost to nuclear reactor race
https://www.ft.com/content/2d84198e-7eeb-4154-bbf2-9a469b0cc700
Tested across biology, sociology & more, POPPER matches PhD-level accuracy in hypothesis validation. Cuts days to hours while keeping stats tight.
19.02.2025 10:43 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
How It Works: POPPER uses LLMs (Claude mostly) to break hypotheses into testable parts, then runs sequential experiments to falsify them. No rejection? It’s tentatively supported. Popper’s philosophy + AI power. github.com/snap-stanford/POPPER”
Fantastic work by @kexinhuang.bsky.social at Stanford (arXiv: 2502.09858)
Validation of hypotheses for experimental planning and verification based on the falsification principle by Karl Popper.
The Future just most a lot closer!!!
Michael Lauer, deputy director of the National Institutes of Health’s extramural research, will leave the agency at the end of the week.
14.02.2025 01:15 — 👍 46 🔁 32 💬 3 📌 7
It’s been a tough few years. But innovation doesn’t stop. Science still advances, improvements and breakthroughs will still happen. The pace is different but it’s not gone.
I know it’s tough to see @adamfeuerstein.bsky.social and we at DARPA BTO still believe & will get after it.
#stayInTheFight
Ready to jump into base editing? Check out our updated CRISPR 101 blog post "Cytosine and Adenine Base Editors"!
blog.addgene.org/sin...
We're hiring here at DARPA! A "Program Manager" is effectively an intrapreneur and we're going after Synthetic Biology #SynBio super hard.
Please fwd to interested people!
www.linkedin.com/posts/mkoeri...
🎉🎉 Congrats! 🥳
If you're interested in unveiling the NATURA way, you can find the plasmids here: www.addgene.org/browse/artic...
The CRISPR companies are not OK
Today, in @statnews.com - a must-read story from my colleague @jasonmast.bsky.social
www.statnews.com/2025/02/06/c...
We're hiring here at DARPA! A "Program Manager" is effectively an intrapreneur and we're going after Synthetic Biology #SynBio super hard.
Please fwd to interested people!
www.linkedin.com/posts/mkoeri...
What happens to bacterial genomes when they're cloned into yeast? Do they transcribe, do they get silenced, do they get packaged away from the rest of the DNA? This cool study congrats to the Koszul lab team at Pasteur for this great work.
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
