OUR PICKSFederal Funding Cuts Threaten US Biosafety | How Many Cybersecurity Pros Does the U.S. Government Employs? | The New Math of Quantum Cryptography, and more

We Are Watching a Scientific Superpower Destroy Itself  (Stephen Greenblatt, New York Times)
And now, notwithstanding its triumphs, the whole enterprise is in serious trouble. The Trump administration began its assault by using the pro-Palestinian demonstrations on many campuses to charge elite universities with antisemitism. The rationale has largely shifted to complaints about affirmative action, diversity initiatives, liberal bias and the like. Scientific research has been curtailed; postdoctoral fellowships have been abruptly canceled; laboratories have been shuttered and visas denied. The damage to scientific enterprise extends beyond our borders, whether it’s from the cancellation of nearly $500 million in funding for mRNA research under the health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — a kind of Lysenko lite — or the purging of data on which climate researchers around the world depend. We will never know what diseases might have been cured or what advances in technology might have been invented had the lights not gone out in the labs.
Several universities have now paid what amount to enormous fines in the hopes of restoring at least some federal support. But that restoration is not guaranteed; the administration has often conditioned it on demands that intrude on precisely the areas of university life — curriculum, instruction, administration, personnel — that the N.D.E.A. prohibited the government from touching.
Should the Trump administration settle for one-time fines, universities, chastened by the threats of the past few months, may yet recover their footing. But if, as seems entirely possible, the administration is determined to reshape the intellectual life and values of faculty members and students alike, then such recovery will be impossible.

The New Math of Quantum Cryptography  (Ben Brubaker, Wired)
In theory, quantum physics can bypass the hard mathematical problems at the root of modern encryption. A new proof shows how.

The Deeper Crime Problem that the National Guard Can’t Solve  (Toluse Olorunnipa, The Atlantic)
Proven solutions have been rejected by the administration in favor of no-tolerance policies and flashy shows of force.

America’s Perón  (Scott Lincicome, The Atlantic)
Decades of personalist rule turned Argentina into a global economic laughingstock. Donald Trump seems to have misunderstood the lesson.

Federal Funding Cuts Threaten US Biosafety  (Steph Batalis, National Interest)
Proposed federal funding cuts threaten biosafety, undermining the safeguards, oversight, and resources needed to keep research labs, scientists, and the public safe.

The US Government Has No Idea How Many Cybersecurity Pros It Employs  (Brandon Vigliarolo, The Register)
Auditors find federal cybersecurity workforce data messy, incomplete, and unreliable.

Can Gaming Support Disengagement? Exploring Opportunities and Challenges for Innovative Disengagement Approaches  (Linda Schlegel and Vivienne Ohlenforst, GNET)
The last few years have seen an increase in research efforts detailing how extremist actors are seeking to exploit video games, digital gaming spaces, and gaming culture. This mounting evidence of extremist activities in the gaming sphere has prompted intense discussions on how to prevent and/or counter violent extremism (P/CVE) across the heterogeneous gaming ecosystem. While gaming-related P/CVE efforts are still in their infancy, several approaches have been piloted. These include the development of bespoke P/CVE games to inoculate audiences against extremist influences or educate them about radicalization, the application of gamified elements in prevention contexts, digital youth work on gaming (-adjacent) digital platforms, and the use of popular commercial video games to play with young target audiences and open lines of communication during shared gameplay. The vast majority of P/CVE approaches in the gaming sphere are aimed at primary prevention. This means that the main target audience are individuals, who are not radicalized, and the goal of these projects is to enhance resilience against extremist influence. Secondary prevention, which addresses individuals who are interested in extremist ideas or on the pathway of radicalization, and tertiary prevention, which focuses on highly radicalized audiences, have not yet featured prominently in gaming-related P/CVE measures.
To our knowledge, discussions examining how gaming could support interventions aimed at radicalized individuals are rare. In this Insight, we therefore offer a preliminary exploration of opportunities for gaming-related tertiary prevention and disengagement approaches, as well as the challenges that may arise for P/CVE practitioners in the space. Our goal is to inspire more conversations on the application of games and gaming-related approaches in working with radicalized target audiences. The Insight is based on a handbook for practitioners we created in the context of the RadiGaMe project (Radicalization on Gaming Platforms and Messenger Services) and offers five avenues for gaming-related tertiary prevention and disengagement work as well as the challenges associated with them: Identification and first contact, digital disengagement, offline disengagement with a digital gaming component, offline disengagement with an offline gaming component, and working with former extremists in gaming environments.