Tony Håndstad

AI to understand the language of life. Our review @NatureBiotech just published nature.com/articles/s4158… Free access rdcu.be/e89lQ @VishRao5 @serena2z @BrianPlosky @pdhsu @BoWang87 @james_y_zou @marinkazitnik @pranavrajpurkar

Sequencing proteins at the single molecule level, an innovative "reverse translation" approach @NatureBiotech nature.com/articles/s4158…

"The sooner David Ellison takes over that network, the better." The Defense Secretary calling for a billionaire ally of the government to take over a media outlet & make it more pro-government. This is what authoritarianism looks like. But in other countries they try & hide it.

We've used a blood test—cell free DNA—for detecting cancer or prenatal fetal abnormalities. It turns out it can be used to detect liver diseases and all-cause mortality from other conditions @ScienceTM science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…

We're making headway for off the shelf preventive cancer vaccines in people with hereditary forms of cancer, e.g. Lynch syndrome nature.com/articles/s4159…

Looks like Tony Blair is very determined to confirm his status as one of the worst persons alive. His speech is pure 19th century colonialism: he frames the Gaza issue as one of "ineffective governance" on the part of the Palestinians, without as much as mentioning the 17-year blockade, the occupation, or the small matter of the deadliest assault on a civilian population this century. I'd love to understand how you build "effective institutions" when: - Your airport was destroyed by Israel in 2001 - Your seaport is blockaded - Building materials are banned as "dual use" - Your university gets bombed every few years - Your civil servants can't travel for training - Your economy is strangled by design - Your people and government officials are routinely killed in devastating attacks And he uses this, the eminently predictable outcome of this continuous strangling of a people, as evidence that they can't govern themselves and that they require outside management by the architects of their immiseration. Absolutely repugnant, no other word for it.

The usually reticent International Committee of the Red Cross president warns that Israel's destruction in Gaza represents a collapse of all international standards. “What we have seen in Gaza exceeds all legal, ethical, moral and humanitarian norms.” trib.al/7tGrsuA

Tomorrow’s front page of the Minnesota Star Tribune: Jan. 23, 2026

@RpsAgainstTrump All republicans, you are better than this theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/01/…

NEW: Donald Trump sent a letter to the Norwegian prime minister, Jonas Gahr Støre, saying he “no longer feel[s] an obligation to think purely of Peace” because he didn’t get the Nobel Peace Prize: “Dear Jonas: Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America. Denmark cannot protect that land from Russia or China, and why do they have a “right of ownership” anyway? There are no written documents, it’s only that a boat landed there hundreds of years ago, but we had boats landing there, also. I have done more for NATO than any other person since its founding, and now, NATO should do something for the United States. The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland. Thank you! President DJT”

A trade war over Greenland? Greenland? It would be funny if it weren't tragic. But I suppose it keeps the Epstein files out of the news. Man the stuff about Trump in there must be bad...

I really wonder what Trump and Putin has talked about on their conversations… it really feels like they discussed how to split nato. It does not require a rocket scientist to see that what Trump is doing is just making Putin stronger.

A top read of 2025: an Israeli army database suggests that at least 83% of Gaza dead were civilians. trib.al/RSQQVrm

Israel becomes the first country in the world to ban the humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders. Let that sink in. File under "Things you do when you are committing genocide"...

AI has dramatically accelerated how software is written. But speed was never the real bottleneck. Despite LLMs, The Mythical Man-Month is still surprisingly relevant. Not because of how code is produced, but because of what actually slows software down: coordination, shared understanding, and conceptual integrity. AI makes code cheap. It does not make software design, architecture, integration, or alignment free. In fact, faster code generation can amplify old problems: * Incoherent abstractions appear sooner * Integration costs surface later * “We’re almost done” illusions become stronger What matters more than ever is strong architecture, clear intent, and technical leadership. The modern leverage point is not the fastest coder, but the person who can frame problems well, guide AI output, and preserve system coherence. A modern version of Brooks’ Law might be: "Adding more AI to a late or poorly defined project makes it confusing faster." AI changes the tools. It doesn’t repeal the laws of software engineering.

‘The Thinking Game’ documentary has just passed 200M views on YouTube in just 4 weeks! 🤯Perfect holiday viewing if you’re interested in a behind-the-scenes look at how an AGI lab works, or what goes into making a Nobel Prize winning project like AlphaFold happen.🧬🚀

beware AI-designed prions

Mistral just dropped Mistral Large 3, a new open-weight flagship model and honestly, Europe is so back. This isn’t a toy release. It’s a full multimodal model, runs offline, supports a huge range of European languages, and plants a very loud sovereignty flag in a field dominated by US giants. Open weight means researchers, governments and startups can actually inspect, adapt, and deploy the model without being locked into a black box. That matters for innovation, security and independence. Europe finally has a model that isn’t just competitive, it’s strategic.

What a sick illusion

On AI Infrastructure in Biology centuryofbio.com/p/infra Billions of dollars are flowing into AI investments for biotech. A lot of this money is going to new platform companies with aspirations to develop drug pipelines. People debate the magnitude of impact this will have, but it's becoming consensus AI will play a central role in the future of drug discovery. But some of this investment is going to companies selling technology, not drugs. This thesis is met with much more skepticism. Historically, it's been challenging to build big businesses in biotech without a drug pipeline. In a new essay, I tell three stories of how our industry might evolve to support the development of new AI infrastructure businesses. Better tools can raise our ambitions for what can be built with biology.

In a normal world, this should be an immense scandal in Europe. Le Monde has a long article (lemonde.fr/international/…) describing the hellish life of Nicolas Guillou, a French judge at the ICC in The Hague, due to U.S. sanctions punishing him for authorizing arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant for war crimes in Gaza. Guillou's daily existence has been transformed into a Kafkaesque nightmare. He cannot: open or maintain accounts with Google, Amazon, Apple, or any US company; make hotel reservations (Expedia canceled his booking in France hours after he made it); conduct online commerce, since he can't know if the packaging is American; use any major credit card (Visa, Mastercard, Amex are all American); access normal banking services, even with non-American banks, as banks worldwide close sanctioned accounts; conduct virtually any financial transaction. He describes it as being "economically banned across most of the planet," including in his own country, France, and where he works, the Netherlands. That's the real shocking aspect of this: the Americans are: - punishing a European citizen - for doing his job in Europe - applying laws Europe officially supports - at an institution based in Europe - that Europe helped create and fund and Europe is not only doing essentially nothing to protect him, they're actively enforcing America's sanctions against their own citizen - European banks closing his accounts, European companies refusing him service, European institutions standing by while Washington destroys a European judge's life on European soil. Again, in a normal world, European leaders and citizens should be absolutely outraged about this. But we've so normalized the hollowing out of European sovereignty that the sight of a European citizen being economically executed on European soil for upholding European law is treated, at best, as an unfortunate technical complication in transatlantic relations.