SleepFM.
Smaller than a grain of salt.
“I start every day pretty much the same way: Coffee and News Items.” — Richard Haass, president emeritus, Council on Foreign Relations.
1. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and University of Michigan have created the world’s smallest fully programmable, autonomous robots: microscopic swimming machines that can independently sense and respond to their surroundings, operate for months and cost just a penny each. Barely visible to the naked eye, each robot measures about 200 by 300 by 50 micrometers, smaller than a grain of salt. Operating at the scale of many biological microorganisms, the robots could advance medicine by monitoring the health of individual cells and manufacturing by helping construct micro-scale devices. Powered by light, the robots carry microscopic computers and can be programmed to move in complex patterns, sense local temperatures and adjust their paths accordingly. Described in Science Robotics and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the robots operate without tethers, magnetic fields or joystick-like control from the outside, making them the first truly autonomous, programmable robots at this scale. “We’ve made autonomous robots 10,000 times smaller,” says Marc Miskin, Assistant Professor in Electrical and Systems Engineering at Penn Engineering and the papers’ senior author. “That opens up an entirely new scale for programmable robots.” (Sources: seas.upenn.edu, doi.org)
2. In a breakthrough that defies nature, Stanford University and Northwestern University synthetic biologists have created a new artificial metabolism that transforms waste carbon dioxide (CO2) into useful biological building blocks. In the new study, the team engineered a biological system that can convert formate – a simple liquid molecule easily made from CO2 in the atmosphere – into acetyl-CoA, a universal metabolite used by all living cells. As a proof of concept, the engineers then used the same system to convert acetyl-CoA into malate, a commercially valuable chemical used in foods, cosmetics, and biodegradable plastics. Unlike natural metabolic routes, the new system is entirely synthetic and operates outside of living cells. The engineers built the system, called the Reductive Formate Pathway (ReForm), from engineered enzymes that performed metabolic reactions never before seen in nature. The work marks a major advance for synthetic biology and carbon recycling, opening the door for developing sustainable, carbon-neutral fuels and materials. (Source: news.stanford.edu)
3. A new artificial intelligence model developed by Stanford Medicine researchers and their colleagues can use physiological recordings from one night’s sleep to predict a person’s risk of developing more than 100 health conditions. Known as SleepFM, the model was trained on nearly 600,000 hours of sleep data collected from 65,000 participants. The sleep data comes from polysomnography, a comprehensive sleep assessment that uses various sensors to record brain activity, heart activity, respiratory signals, leg movements, eye movements and more….SleepFM analyzed more than 1,000 disease categories in the health records and found 130 that could be predicted with reasonable accuracy by a patient’s sleep data. The model’s predictions were particularly strong for cancers, pregnancy complications, circulatory conditions and mental disorders, achieving a C-index higher than 0.8. (Sources: med.stanford.edu. towardsdatascience.com)
4. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told lawmakers that recent administration threats against Greenland didn’t signal an imminent invasion and that the goal is to buy the island from Denmark, according to people familiar with the discussions. Rubio’s statements, which were made Monday during a closed briefing, come as the White House has been offering increasingly belligerent statements about controlling the island. President Trump and senior administration officials have publicly declined to rule out seizing the territory by force. “President Trump has made it well known that acquiring Greenland is a national security priority of the United States, and it’s vital to deter our adversaries in the Arctic region,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement. “The president and his team are discussing a range of options to pursue this important foreign policy goal, and of course, utilizing the U.S. military is always an option at the commander in chief’s disposal.” (Sources: wsj.com, washingtonpost.com)
5. Eurointelligence:
We also believe that Greenland's raw materials are part of the reason of the US interest in the island, especially rare earth depositories. The estimates vary widely. One estimate we have seen, in Internationale Politik Quarterly, is for a total of 42 metric tonnes, which would approximately the same size as China's. We would be very surprised if this richness of minerals and metals, much of it unexplored, isn't another important reason, possibly even the primary reason, for the US to capture the island. (Source: eurointelligence.com)
6. The United States for the first time on Tuesday backed a broad coalition of Ukraine's allies in vowing to provide security guarantees that leaders said would include binding commitments to support the country if Russia attacks again. The pledge came at a summit in Paris of the "coalition of the willing" of mainly European nations to firm up guarantees to reassure Kyiv in the event of a ceasefire with Russia, which invaded its neighbor in 2014 and again at full scale in 2022. Unlike previous coalition meetings, the summit was also attended by U.S. envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner - President Donald Trump's son-in-law - as well as America's top general in Europe, Alexus Grynkewich, who a day earlier fleshed out details of security guarantees with European army chiefs. Witkoff, who has led talks with Russia, said after the summit that Trump "strongly stands behind security protocols". (Source: reuters.com)
7. Caracas and Washington have reached a deal to export up to $2 billion worth of Venezuelan crude to the United States, U.S. President Donald Trump said on Tuesday, a flagship negotiation that would divert supplies from China while helping Venezuela avoid deeper oil production cuts. The agreement is a strong sign that the Venezuelan government is responding to Trump’s demand hat they open up to U.S. oil companies or risk more military intervention. Trump has said he wants interim President Delcy Rodriguez to give the U.S. and private companies “total access” to Venezuela’s oil industry. (Source: reuters.com)
8. Standing between President Trump and his vision for a stable, U.S.-friendly oil power looms one man: Diosdado Cabello, the belligerent and eccentric de facto leader of Venezuela’s security forces and brutal militias, and a wild card in the country’s future. Cabello, whose first name means “God-given” in Spanish, has long positioned himself as the regime’s fiercest defender, commanding some of the “colectivos”—armed gangs who roared through Caracas on motorbikes this week in a menacing show of force. Indicted by the U.S. alongside ousted Nicolás Maduro, Cabello faces a choice: back the fledgling government of his rival, acting President Delcy Rodríguez, or make a bold play for power himself, toppling her and risking face-to-face conflict with American commandos. (Source: wsj.com)
9. By all accounts, Cuba is enduring the worst economic moment in the 67-year history of its communist revolution. While the island nation has endured periodic episodes of mass migration, food shortages and social unrest in decades past, never before have Cubans experienced such a wholesale collapse of the social safety net that the country’s leaders — starting with Fidel Castro — once prided themselves on. “I, who was born there, I, who lives there, and I’ll tell you: It’s never been as bad as it is now, because many factors have come together,” said Omar Everleny Pérez, 64, an economist in Havana. (Source: nytimes.com)
10. Li Yuan:
When U.S. forces captured Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, Chinese social media lit up.
People with nationalist views asked: Why can’t Beijing do the same in Taiwan and arrest its president?
On the other side of the political spectrum, people cheered the downfall of a dictator. Trying to avoid censors when criticizing China’s leader, Xi Jinping, they invoked the title of a pop song, “Too bad it’s not you.”
Within hours, the discourse online became a proxy debate over China’s power, its limits and its future. For nationalist Chinese, the U.S. military operation had exposed American lawlessness and frustrations in China at what they believe is Beijing’s restraint, particularly on Taiwan. For those venturing criticism of the government, the episode underscored the vulnerability of even entrenched authoritarian leaders.
On the social media site Weibo, the hashtag related to Mr. Maduro’s seizure rose to the No. 1 position on the platform’s hot-search list. It drew over 600 million views in the first 24 hours, according to data from the platform. (Source: nytimes.com)
11. In any war over Taiwan, American commanders will face a problem that barely existed a decade ago: China can hide lethal military systems inside standard commercial shipping containers. These “containerized” missile launchers are modern renditions of an old U.S. Navy concept first marketed in the Russian Club-K and are now reportedly fielded in Chinese variants. They ride on the decks of merchant ships, blend into global commerce, and give Beijing the ability to forward-deploy precision weapons without visibly deploying a single warship. For U.S. planners, the threat is not hypothetical. It is a feature of modern conflict in the Indo-Pacific. Tens of thousands of container ships, feeder vessels, and mixed-use cargo hulls transport trillions of dollars in trade throughout the first island chain and South China Sea each year. Even if U.S. intelligence could flag a fraction of them as suspicious, which is a major challenge, the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard lack the physical capacity to board and inspect more than a tiny percentage. (Source: warontherocks.com)
12. Tokyo officials rebuked Beijing over trading curbs that threaten to impact more than 40% of Chinese exports to Japan, escalating a dispute between Asia’s largest economies. Japan’s Foreign Ministry issued a formal protest to Chinese Deputy Chief of Mission Shi Yong after Beijing announced export controls on Tuesday affecting items destined for Japan that could have military uses. Broad estimates show that dual-use items Japan imports from China total ¥10.7 trillion ($68.4 billion), roughly 42% of Japan’s total goods imports from China in 2024, according to Takahide Kiuchi, executive economist at the Nomura Research Institute….Beijing’s move marks the latest escalation in a dispute over remarks on Taiwan by Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi that has been dragging on since early November. The row has echoes of a conflict more than a decade ago that saw rare earths shipments from China falter. Concerns over potential impacts to Japan’s key industries have brought down automaker shares while boosting rare-earth related stocks, though how China will actually implement its controls remains unclear. (Source: bloomberg.com)
13. Iranian security forces have clashed with protesters staging a sit-in at Tehran’s grand bazaar, firing teargas and expelling demonstrators as the nationwide protest movement continued to grow in its 10th day. The violence on Tuesday at a location that carries historical symbolism as an activist hub during the country’s 1979 revolution comes as rights groups accuse authorities of cracking down on protesters. At least 35 people have been killed in clashes surrounding the protests – which began over the state of the economy and rising prices – and more than 1,200 others arrested by security forces, according to the US-based Human Rights Activists news agency (HRNA). In one instance, in Illam province, south-west of Tehran, video showed security forces in riot gear streaming into a hospital in search of protesters. Despite the violence, protests showed no signs of slowing, with demonstrations in at least 257 locations in 88 cities across the country, according to HRNA data. (Source: theguardian.com)
14. Israel is moving to start construction on a vast illegal settlement in the heart of the West Bank, designed to “bury the idea of a Palestinian state”. The Israel Land Authority in mid-December quietly posted a tender for construction of 3,401 homes in the “E1” project, which will effectively sever the north and south of the occupied West Bank for Palestinians, and further cut off East Jerusalem. The tender, which has not been reported previously, lays out terms for companies to bid for part of the work, with a deadline for submissions in mid-March. It “reflects an accelerated effort to advance construction in E1”, said Yonatan Mizrachi, a co-director of Settlement Watch with the advocacy group Peace Now, which found the document online. (Source: theguardian.com)
America is losing jobs in blue-collar industries, something that last occurred during the initial shock of the early pandemic and the depths of the Great Recession. The country is down 65,000 industrial jobs over the last year, a dramatic reversal from 2024, when the US added a lower-than-usual but still respectable 250,000 jobs. A major slowdown has hit all blue-collar sectors this year, including construction, mining, and utilities—though manufacturing and transportation are driving the vast majority of US job losses.
In total, employment across trades and industry is now down 123,000 from the all-time peak reached in early 2025 and has been declining nearly every month since February. This is likely underselling the damage as well, since preliminary estimates for upcoming annual jobs data revisions suggest an additional loss of 100,000 manufacturing jobs and 30,00 construction jobs. (Sources: apricitus.io, fred.stlouisfed.org, bls.gov)
Quick Links: America’s missing manufacturing renaissance. The Venezuelan regime is rapidly consolidating its grip on power. The future of Cuba’s ruling caste is not bright. White House recasts Jan. 6 riot as ‘peaceful protest’. What a “peaceful protest” looks like. More than 2 million Epstein documents still unreleased.
Science/Technology Links: Every January 1 scientists physically move the South Pole. The first commercial space stations will start orbiting Earth in 2026. Big hospital systems have become the proving ground for widespread AI adoption. AI-generated sensors open new paths for early cancer detection. Artificial intelligence begins prescribing medications in Utah. Brain Resilience Lab charts the complex science of aging. How Google got its groove back and edged ahead of OpenAI. How judges are using AI to help decide your legal dispute. Meta is delaying the international launch of its Ray-Ban Display smartglasses due to high U.S. demand and limited inventory. A unilateral change to childhood vaccines: What it means for you.
War: Europe’s drone-filled vision for the future of war. Britain and France have formally committed to deploying troops in Ukraine as part of a potential peace deal. A rash of Baltic cable-cutting raises fears of sabotage. Trump’s superpower flex in Venezuela delivers a humbling blow to Putin’s Russia. Venezuela’s (Russian) air defense technology failed, miserably. The Boeing EA-18G Growler, an electronic-warfare jet, likely played a key role in overwhelming Venezuela’s air defenses. China’s powerful new microwave weapon system can destroy drone swarms within 3 kilometers. China bans exports of dual-use items for military purposes to Japan.
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