emernic

The info on that site is... not even close to correct. Choanozoa as the sister group of all other life including bacteria and archaea? All eukaryotes broken into Opisthokonta, Chloroplastida, and Amoebozoa? Maybe the stuff on metazoans is more accurate, but in the big picture of the genetic diversity of life on earth they're barely a footnote.

The framing of the article (like many others related to the Afghanistan withdrawal) seems backwards. It implies that the "international community" (i.e. western governments and aid organizations) is engaged in a struggle to save children that are starving or missing out on health treatment due to the vaguely-defined "chaos of the Taliban takeover". In fact, it is western governments and aid organizations that decided to withdraw aid out of aversion (to some extent legally enforced by western governments) to dealing with the de-facto government of Afghanistan (the Taliban). Withdrawing foreign aid after spending decades creating a system entirely dependent on it is not "struggling to save starving babies", it's making a choice _not_ to save starving babies.

Toluca, Mexico. It's extremely cheap, cool/temperate all year, and some of the suburbs (e.g. Metepec) are quite safe. Reasonable proximity to the US (geographically, temporally, and to some extent culturally) would make it a practical option for Americans. It's a profoundly "not hip" city, but as someone who just wants to be left alone in my apartment all day, I consider that a plus. The main downsides are extremely high elevation and sub-par internet speeds (likely requiring some careful apartment hunting).

Trying to stop any synthetic biology research that might have military applications is like trying to stop fission research in the late 1930s.

Rather than attempting to stifle research, we need to start thinking about how we regulate, detect, and defend against potential threats. DARPA's synbio research is at least mostly carried out in academic labs (which have a strong incentive to publicize their work).