The Pentagon’s heavy-handed attempt to censor the new Afghanistan war memoir “Operation Dark Heart” by Anthony Shaffer has predictably turned a volume of narrow, specialized interest into a mainstream bestseller.
It has also focused attention on just what information the government was seeking to conceal, and why. For a review of the material that was blacked out in the second edition of the book, see “Censored book masks sensitive operations” by Sean D. Naylor, Army Times, October 4. A side-by-side view of the book’s Index, in censored and uncensored formats, is here (pdf).
Science funding agencies are biased against risk, making transformative research difficult to fund. Forecast-based approaches to grantmaking could improve funding outcomes for high-risk, high-reward research.
Establishing an NIH Office of Infection-Associated Chronic Illness Research can guard against the long-term effects of Covid and lead to novel breakthroughs across many less understood diseases.
A military depot in central Belarus has recently been upgraded with additional security perimeters and an access point that indicate it could be intended for housing Russian nuclear warheads for Belarus’ Russia-supplied Iskander missile launchers.
With a PhD in materials science, a postdoc position at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and a stint as a AAAS Fellow, Dr. Shawn Chen has had a range of roles in the research community.