Hey everyone! I spent the evening yesterday diving deep into the White House's new memorandum on AI and national security (Fact Sheet, Deep Dive), and I've got to tell you – this is one of the most significant policy developments I've seen in our field. Let me break down why I'm so excited about this and what it means for the future of AI, biotechnology, and national security.

This week’s recap highlights protein design with RoseTTAFold, surveillance with wastewater sequencing, T2T human genomes, Vitessce for visualization of multimodal spatial single-cell data, and Taxometer for taxonomic classification of metagenomics contigs.

Federal Agency Clears RFK Jr. of Dead Whale Accusation Understanding the Background of the Accusation On a sunny afternoon, news broke of an accusation linking environmental advocate RFK Jr. to the unfortunate death of a whale washed ashore. Such claims attracted substantial media attention and public scrutiny, prompting an investigation by a federal agency to determine the cause of the incident.

Impact of Imperiled Turtle Listing on Salem’s Homeless Camps In an unexpected turn of events, the recent decision to list a certain turtle species as imperiled has sparked significant controversy and unforeseen consequences in the city of Salem.

The Unsettling Event in Southwest Florida This past week, in the dense wilderness of Southwest Florida, a shocking incident occurred that has left wildlife experts and residents astounded. A large Burmese python was found to have devoured an entire adult deer, underscoring the severe impact invasive species can have on local ecosystems.

by Ian Kisil Marino There is a dimension of historians’ work that is often overlooked when considering the nature of our profession: the archive. This reference is not to the traditional concept of the archive as merely the location where historians search for historical sources, but rather to the creation of archives. Today’s digital transformation is shaping the archives that future historians will explore.

The Disturbing Reality Behind the Deaths of 89 Birds of Prey in Northern Ireland In recent news, the Decades in the making have highlighted the harrowing fact that no legal prosecutions have been made for the deaths of 89 birds of prey across Northern Ireland.

On 8 October 2024, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR, the Court) condemned Cyprus for having pushed back two Syrians, M.A. and Z.R., to Lebanon in September 2021. In this blog post, we place the M.A. and Z.R. v Cyprus judgment in the context of our research into why so little of what has been documented about border violence is visible in the Court’s judgments.

Three years ago, Tom Redd made a very generous commitment to the SV-POW! Patreon, and he remains our most generous donor in total.

On October 22, 2024, I delivered a keynote lecture at the LundOnline Conference 2024 (not surprisingly held in Lund, Sweden) titled Balancing Aspirations and Outcomes – A Critical Look at Open Access Policies and Their Evolution . In my talk, I explored the development of Open Access policies since their inception, focusing on key aspects such as who sets these policies, their intended targets, and the types of materials made openly

How do you rescue a legacy codebase that has no tests? Let's look at some techniques for clawing your way back to maintainability, one test at a time.