Michael Koeris

Beware the Slide Toward Regime Change in Venezuela | International Crisis Group The Trump administration is dispatching military assets to the Caribbean and sinking boats it claims ferry drugs. While it appears the deployment is part of a plan to depose Venezuelan President Nicol...

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...

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

A scary struggle with the Kremlin over Europe’s skies Russian air incursions are testing NATO’s will to resist

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/...

A, B, or C? The Foreign Office and the Politics of Choosing the Chief of SIS This article explores the process whereby the Chief (‘C’) of Britain’s foreign intelligence agency, the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS or MI6) has been appointed, and the inter-departmental polit...

'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....

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.

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 Investors voice concern over governance at fund expected to manage state assets

Indonesia names Ray Dalio and Jeffrey Sachs as sovereign wealth fund advisers

https://www.ft.com/content/d90a401b-d086-44a9-b00a-adf46f00f450

Hot Plasmids: Winter 2025 Check out the latest Hot Plasmids, viral vectors, and antibodies in the Addgene repository!

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 Chancellor-in-waiting Merz’s promise to do ‘whatever it takes’ pushes Bund yields sharply higher in anticipation of more issuance

‘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 The first moves by Germany’s chancellor-designate are bold and encouraging

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 Developers of advanced microreactors have raised at least $1.5bn over the past year as demand soars

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.

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!!!

Second top NIH official, who oversaw awarding of research grants, departs abruptly Michael Lauer, deputy director of the National Institutes of Health’s extramural research, will leave the agency at the end of the week.

Michael Lauer, deputy director of the National Institutes of Health’s extramural research, will leave the agency at the end of the week.

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

CRISPR 101: Cytosine and Adenine Base Editors An overview of cytosine and adenine base transition editors, which make precise changes in DNA bases without causing double-strand breaks.

Ready to jump into base editing? Check out our updated CRISPR 101 blog post "Cytosine and Adenine Base Editors"!

blog.addgene.org/sin...

Michael Koeris on LinkedIn: Thank you Jeffrey S. Buguliskis for the interview and patience as I go on… Thank you Jeffrey S. Buguliskis for the interview and patience as I go on and on about SCIENCE and of course especially Synthetic Biology! Many sciences are…

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 Gene editing promised a revolution, but biotech layoffs, stock slumps, and industry struggles reveal a stark reality: CRISPR is hard to do profitably.

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...

Michael Koeris on LinkedIn: Thank you Jeffrey S. Buguliskis for the interview and patience as I go on… Thank you Jeffrey S. Buguliskis for the interview and patience as I go on and on about SCIENCE and of course especially Synthetic Biology! Many sciences are…

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...

Sequence-dependent activity and compartmentalization of foreign DNA in a eukaryotic nucleus In eukaryotes, DNA-associated protein complexes coevolve with genomic sequences to orchestrate chromatin folding. We investigate the relationship between DNA sequence and the spontaneous loading and a...

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/...

Excited for this program to continue under COL Dr. Pete Attilio and LCDR Dr. Robert Murray with help from Dr. Taryn Rose! Of course we wouldn't be here without the incredible leadership of Dr. Jean-Paul Chretien who started the program.

Stay tuned for more excitement! There will be (more) blood 🩸💉