This past weekend, SoTA held the Embodied Intelligence Hackathon in London. We had dozens of teams competing for both our local prizes and @Huggingface's global @LeRobot challenges. SoTA's champions were: Overall prize (£1,000): Calum & James, for their low-cost lab

From our last hackathon: "This was easily one of the best weekends I’ve had in a long time. The team vibe was spot-on — collaborative, efficient, and always fun. Huge shoutout to the SOTA organizers for creating such a welcoming, high-energy atmosphere. The food was great, the

HIV protection with just two shots a year: FDA approves Gilead $GILD drug statnews.com/2025/06/18/fda… via Jason Mast pharmalot

UK Prime Minister recently wrote to SoTA's community. They're assembling a new, elite team of technologists to 'fundamentally rewire the state' and 'transform No10 and key areas of the government system through the applications of data science and AI'. Read the full letter to

Had the pleasure to showcase our research on high-throughput protein engineering for secretion at #AIxBio25. Massive thanks to the Wellcome Connecting Science Wellcome Connecting Science Learning and Training, whose other talented awardees you can see in the picture, and the Old Centralian's Trust for bursaries!

More challenges!

Big news: we’re kicking off the search for ARIA’s next CEO. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to lead one of the most ambitious orgs in science and tech. 1/8

Happy to have played a minor role in Alice Grob's new paper out now in Trends in Biotechnology! Have a look if you are interested in aptamers for biosensing applications or context-aware synbio more broadly.

People wonder why Biotech is so hard Can you imagine trying to buy a metal filament from Fisher Scientific and they require you to send a lease on top of incorporation and verification documentation in previous emails This is insane

D a t a g e n e r a t i o n Loved the transparency and concreteness of this paper, highly recommended. nature.com/articles/s4358…

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Read the latest Letter to SoTA We cover the winning demos from our recent 'untapped tech tree' hackathons on Geoengineering & Weather Control, Embodied Intelligence (with Hugging Face LeRobot), and Human Augmentation (with Workshop Labs, London Initiative for Safe AI, BlueDot Impact). We

Another incredible edition, featuring a few friends and known faces

Yet another protein design pipeline? In his recent letter, Jakub Lála (Jakub Lála 🦸‍♂️) introduces BAGEL, a fully modular and customisable computational protein design pipeline. He describes his approach to formalising protein design as an energy optimisation problem over the output

And it’s finally out! As part of this year’s Decoding Bio Snapshot, Sasha Eremina and I delve into what Plant and Agricultural Biotechnology will look like over the next 5 years. Link here! decodingbio.substack.com/p/projections-…

Honored to be partnered with the White House’s AI Education Task Force. youtube.com/watch?v=mFHpmi…

That's it. Society for Technological Advancement is going to organise an exhibition about technological progress and its benefits for humankind. DM me if you'd like to help.

Amazing paper from April - CD36, a multi-functional fatty acid transporter, mediates cell uptake of PROTACs + other large "small" molecules via endocytosis. So many interesting implications for dev. of heterobifunctionals more broadly! I'm a naive biologist so perhaps... 1/n

In their letter to SoTA, pia and Enrico Bottazzi | enrico.eth describe the journey that led to them winning the European Defence Tech Hackathon in London. Instead of chasing cool tech solutions in search of problems, they examined real on-the-ground demands of the battlefield and focused