A big project becomes less intimidating when you tackle one area at a time and connect spaces thoughtfully

Meandering paths, clipped hedges, and layered late-season plantings reveal this historic Dutch garden a little at a time

JSON has become a near-ubiquitous data format, used in API responses, save game files, and configuration. But many people feel it can be better, and various attempts have been made to expand or improve it. JSONC is one of those attempts.

Welcome autumn in brilliant style with late-season flora that showcases vivid flowers, foliage, and berries. Enhance an existing landscape or dedicate new areas of your outdoor living space to energizing pinks, purples, oranges, reds, and yellows. Choose your favorites from our list and prepare for a spectacular fall.

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A surprising number of things we use in everyday life retain most of their design cues from their 19th century ancestors. The bicycle retains the same basic design as it had in 1890, as does the sewing machine, the toilet, the car, and of course, the keyboard and the QWERTY layout from old typewriters. But we aren’t doomed to have our technology perpetually living in the past. [Paul] wanted a keyboard designed around human hands, rather than being designed around a machine, so he built this unique split keyboard.

The design of this specific keyboard went through around 50 iterations before he was comfortable with it. Other design goals here were for it to be portable, and the split nature of this certainly makes it more compact as does the use of low-profile switches. Each finger’s column is angled and spaced based on the needs of that finger, with the ring finger keys sitting higher and the index finger columns angled inward. Each thumb has access to three keys, one of which is the spacebar and the other two layer keys, which is what enables this design to get down to only 36 total keys.

When thinking about it for any length of time, the modern keyboard’s design holdovers from the 1800s are fairly wasteful compared to this split, ergonomic version. Especially when looking at the spacebar, which ties up both thumbs and only performs a single task, there’s a lot of opportunity for modern designs to be more efficient, more portable, and easier on one’s body. Feel free to take this to the extreme and use all three dimensions, as long as you aren’t particularly concerned with portability.

Three of Seattle’s top scientific institutions are launching a nearly $95 million research initiative that will generate data and train AI models to design proteins and genes that don’t exist in nature — sharing the results freely to help others develop new medicines and materials.

The initiative, called AI BioDesign, brings together the Allen Institute, the University of Washington and Fred Hutch Cancer Center, with funding from the Fund for Science and Technology (FFST), created by the estate of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen.

AI BioDesign is led by David Baker, the UW biochemist who won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for using computers to design new proteins, and Jay Shendure, a leading genome scientist at the UW and the Allen Institute.

The plan is to “hijack a lot of the machinery that evolution provided us” — the cellular assembly line that turns DNA into proteins — to design and measure millions of novel biological molecules, Shendure said in an interview in advance of the announcement.

That will help AI models learn the rules of biological design from a huge set of examples, instead of inferring them from the relatively limited number that nature has produced.

The field, Shendure said, is “putting too much emphasis on taking the cranks that we have and just running with them, as opposed to building the right cranks.”

The goal is to make designing biology more like ordering a part: a molecule that latches onto a cancer cell, for example, or a genetic switch that fires only inside brain cells and nowhere else.

Potential outcomes could include everything from new therapies for disease, to proteins that dissolve plastic in the environment, to cells that travel through the body in a programmed way, said Sanjay Srivatsan, a Fred Hutch assistant professor who leads the cancer center’s work on the initiative, in a video released with the announcement.

“For the first time, the speed of AI is beginning to match the experimental power of synthetic biology,” Baker said in a statement. “That changes the question from ‘what has nature already made?’ to ‘what else is possible, and how can we test it?'”

Where the money goes

The Fund for Science and Technology is providing $94.6 million for AI BioDesign over five years. The foundation launched publicly last year with a mandate to direct a large share of Allen’s fortune into bioscience, environmental and AI research.

The funding from FFST is allocated as $46.1 million to the Allen Institute, $43.8 million to the UW and $4.7 million to Fred Hutch, according to an Allen Institute spokesperson.

The initiative had 62 people as of mid-August, including some new hires and others redirected from existing projects at the three institutions. The UW accounts for 41 of them, the Allen Institute 13, and Fred Hutch eight. AI BioDesign is expected to continue growing over time.

“AI BioDesign is exactly the kind of ambitious, collaborative science FFST was created to support,” said Marc Malandro, the foundation’s chief programs officer and co-lead, in a statement. He joined FFST in May after nearly a decade at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, most recently as chief operating officer of CZI and the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Network.

Malandro and Chief Financial and Operations Officer Liz Carey have been leading FFST on an interim basis since founding CEO Lynda Stuart stepped down in May.

Inside the lab

On a recent tour of the AI BioDesign lab, research associate Jack Boylan pulled up results from a run he’d done on their new DNA sequencer that morning — on free kits donated by a neighboring biotech company, a year past their expiration date.

“We decided, let’s give it a roll,” he said. It worked fine.

The sequencer is what makes the whole approach possible. It reads all of the millions of DNA sequences in a single tube at once and reports which ones performed. One recent experiment ran 6 million distinct sequences through it at once.

“The scale comes not from robotics, but from parallelizing inside the test tube,” said Jesse Gray, executive director of strategy and platform for AI BioDesign and the Seattle Hub for Synthetic Biology, and a former Harvard Medical School geneticist.

The lab, at Dexter Yard in Seattle’s South Lake Union neighborhood, a short walk from the Allen Institute’s headquarters, is organized into teams of five or six people, each working on a different design problem.

A separate four-person team of machine-learning specialists takes the incoming results and works with the bench teams to decide which experiments come next — the ones that will teach the models the most. Each round is judged on how much the models improved.

The Allen Institute calls projects like this “accelerators,” a term Rui Costa, the institute’s president and CEO, traced back to Paul Allen himself. The word came up in early planning sessions, Costa said. Allen wanted to “exponentially accelerate the field.”

Other accelerators at Dexter Yard include the Seattle Hub for Synthetic Biology, the Allen Institute’s collaboration with the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and the UW, which Shendure also leads; and Cell Science, which works on engineering cells to assemble themselves into tissues.

The Allen Institute for AI (Ai2), the separate Seattle research organization also founded by Paul Allen, is involved informally rather than as a funded partner, Costa said.

Its robotics team has been talking with AI BioDesign about scaling up the protein work, and the two expect to collaborate on models and on tools that generate research hypotheses.

Why give it away

The decision to focus on open science also came from Allen, Costa said in an interview this week. “He was so visionary in the early 2000s: radically open science to exponentially impact and change fields, not to compete.”

That raises a question the initiative will face as soon as it produces anything valuable: what happens if a company builds a lucrative drug on data given away free? In traditional science, Costa said, being beaten to a discovery counts as a loss. Here it’s the goal.

“We would be so lucky if many companies would be taking this data and changing the world for good,” he said.

At the same time, Costa left open the possibility of the three principal institutions spinning out their own startups, nonprofits, or other initiatives from the work done by AI BioDesign.

Betting against the field

AI BioDesign’s approach runs against much of the current thinking in the field. Costa said most efforts to apply AI to biology are chasing a single general model that could answer questions about how any cell works. AI BioDesign is betting on the opposite: narrow models built for specific design problems, trained on data generated for that purpose.

“This project is a clear bet on a different way of doing things,” Costa said.

The people running the initiative are careful not to oversell. Gray said it remains an open question as to whether their approach beats the alternatives. “The jury’s still out,” he said.

Shendure put it plainly: “It’s never as easy as you think it’s going to be,” he said.

Costa said AI BioDesign needs to show real progress within 18 to 24 months — ideally even sooner — and expand to researchers around the world within five years.

Find options perfectly suited to your garden’s soil type, moisture levels, and available light

These hidden gems with unique forms, colors, and habits deserve a second—or first—glance

Spice up your fall garden with seasonal decorations, ranging from the classic (pumpkins and straw bales) to the whimsical (lanterns and fairies). Whether elegant or rustic, bring hints of harvest season warmth to your outdoor landscape this autumn. Read on for ideas to complete your very own fall garden decor.

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Arzeda designs enzymes for products ranging from laundry detergent to stevia. But when it comes time to manufacture at commercial scale, the Seattle-based startup often has to look overseas.

That’s why, when a federal biotechnology commission visited Seattle on Tuesday, the industry came forward with a problem: They have the science, but lack the infrastructure and workforce pipeline to keep innovation on U.S. soil.

Arzeda’s designs reach an estimated 1.8 billion consumers worldwide, and the company has spent the better part of two decades building its technology. The company’s enzymes, sometimes designed in days rather than weeks thanks to AI, are largely manufactured in Western Europe and India — with one U.S. contract manufacturing partner in Wisconsin. 

Finding domestic manufacturers with the expertise and capacity to make these specialized proteins has been difficult, CEO Alexandre Zanghellini said. And for a company trying to commercialize new biotechnology, he added, manufacturing delays can be “catastrophic.” 

The federal group visiting Seattle — the National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology — was created by Congress to address these kinds of problems. Since 2022, the team of 11 bipartisan experts have examined how biotech intersects with national security, and what the U.S. needs to do to remain competitive with China. 

Last year, the commission drafted a report to Congress with 49 recommendations spanning at least $15 billion in federal investment over five years, with policies to get more private capital into biotechnology, build domestic manufacturing capacity, strengthen the workforce and reduce vulnerabilities in the supply chain. 

Now, with the commission sunsetting in December, its members are taking their case around the country. 

The science is here, the infrastructure isn’t

In Seattle, the urgent matter is finding a way to keep biotechnology breakthroughs in the United States. Alexander Titus, a commission member who has headed AI-focused biotech initiatives in Seattle and nationwide, said Washington stands out for its early innovation and research. 

“Companies like Arzeda are having pretty serious leadership roles in the AI and bio space,” he told GeekWire. “A lot of the work we have done in the commission has revolved around helping the U.S. meet the moment when it comes to this nexus.” 

Institutions like the University of Washington, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center and the Allen Institute have helped build a deep life-sciences ecosystem in Washington. UW’s Institute for Protein Design, led by 2024 Nobel Prize winner David Baker, has spun out more than 20 companies.

One is Arzeda, which has an increasingly fast agentic workflow that can fine-tune a model, suggest the next experiment, and allow researchers to test thousands of sequences in a single round. The company’s first AI-designed commercial product was a stevia ingredient launched in 2024; it’s now negotiating a $44 million contract with the federal Defense Threat Reduction Agency related to biothreat response. 

While technology is moving quickly, the infrastructure needed to commercialize it is not — creating what Seattle biotech leaders called a “valley of death” between research and manufacturing.

The U.S. has federal funding for basic research, as well as a venture-capital system that can finance early-stage discoveries. But once a company needs to build or access physical infrastructure for commercial-scale manufacturing, the financing becomes much harder. Venture capital investors don’t see the returns attractive enough, Zanghellini said. Banks aren’t eager to finance them, either. 

The pull of overseas manufacturing

Meanwhile, China has spent two decades making biotechnology a strategic priority, and its 2026 Five-Year Plan doubles down on areas including biomedicine, biomanufacturing, pharmaceuticals and brain-computer interfaces. For U.S. companies in the race, that can create an uncomfortable incentive: If the infrastructure is cheaper and faster somewhere else, that’s where the work often goes. 

Last year, Seattle-based Sana Biotechnology canceled plans for a manufacturing plant that was supposed to employ hundreds of workers in Bothell, Wash., instead opting for a contract manufacturer elsewhere to cut costs. Snehal Patel, the company’s executive vice president and chief technical officer, said on Tuesday he’s optimistic the Seattle area could compete on speed and cost with China’s fully integrated supply chain — with the right resources.

Ideally, manufacturing facilities in the U.S. would offer flexibility and knowledge in different products and processes, while ensuring trade secret protection.

The commissioners recognize this need; among their recommendations for Congress is a nationwide manufacturing network for precommercial, bioindustrial product scale-up. That could address the problem Seattle companies face: a startup shouldn’t have to choose between sending manufacturing overseas or trying to build an entire facility itself.

The commission has also recommended requiring companies to disclose points of supply-chain vulnerability in foreign countries of concern. If a geopolitical conflict disrupts the supply of medicines or other biological products, Titus said, the consequences can reach Americans far from any battlefield.

“Being able to keep and maintain our leadership in certain industries allows us to have the edge in any given situation,” he said. “We want our industries to be able to produce here…it’s truly national security in the broadest sense at this point.”

Building the workforce pipeline

To accomplish this, companies need a stronger industrial biomanufacturing workforce.

Rebecca Bryant, Fred Hutch’s director of government relations and a former staffer for Rep. Adam Smith, said while Washington trains well for research, there’s no equivalent pipeline into entry-level biomanufacturing jobs. Titus sees the issue as part of a broader problem of “bioliteracy” — that biology should be a basic problem-solving tool in the same way that engineering, chemistry and computing are, rather than a specialized field understood by few. 

In Washington, the Hutch Advance partnership with Shoreline Community College trains and places lab technicians, while Sana Biotechnology has worked on a model for moving workers into biomanufacturing. Seattle industry leaders suggested a state or federally-supported workforce consortium to bolster the effort. Meanwhile, the commission has urged Congress for more biomanufacturing training support. 

According to the commission, the next three years will determine whether the U.S. remains the global leader in biotechnology or cedes the future to China. Of the commission’s 49 recommendations, Titus said, 26 have been written into law in some capacity. The next step is in the hands of Congress, federal agencies, states and the industry itself. 

Topics include growth hacking, game design, blockchain, AI, digital marketing, cybersecurity, copywriting, and big data.

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Topics include growth hacking, game design, blockchain, AI, digital marketing, cybersecurity, copywriting, and big data.

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AI-assisted development has made it easier to generate frontend code quickly. A developer can ask for a form, a dashboard widget, a settings page, or a modal flow and get a working first draft in seconds. That speed is useful, especially when teams are moving through routine UI work. But speed creates a problem that’s […]

Exhibitor booths are a major part of the Black Hat experience, giving companies a chance to bring their technology to life and make a lasting impression. This year, some took...

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Discover the plant palette that transforms this large-property, with plants chosen for beauty, function, and year-round interest

Create a cozy, inviting autumn oasis in your own yard by choosing the right plants and design elements. For a fall garden that delights the senses and warms the spirit, make sure to plan your design with attention to color, texture, shape, and light. Learn more about creating your own fall garden design in this guide.

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Tightly packed borders bring together an exuberant mix of flowers, foliage, color, and texture

Less than a year after emerging from stealth operations with $12.7 million and partnerships with pharmaceutical giants, Seattle-based biotech startup Accipiter Biosciences has added $10.5 million to its funding total. The new cash will let the company move faster on promising drug candidates.

“We could have stuck with the original plan and been just fine,” said Matthew Bick, Accipiter Bio’s co-founder and CEO. “But we thought we’d rather capitalize on the progress we’ve made now and diversify our clinical portfolio.”

The team has grown to 22 people and includes researchers who worked at the University of Washington’s Institute for Protein Design under Nobel laureate David Baker.

The company uses artificial intelligence tools developed at the institute to engineer proteins with the unusual ability to bind multiple cellular targets at once, potentially amplifying their ability to fight illnesses.

“We’re not just trying to replicate what antibodies can do,” Bick said. “We’re unlocking some really interesting biology.”

Accipiter Bio has a collaboration and license agreement with Pfizer to research and engineer new molecules. The deal provides an upfront payment and the potential to earn more than $330 million through milestones and royalties. The startup has a similarly structured agreement with oncology drug company Kite Pharma, owned by Gilead Sciences, to design proteins for use in cell therapies.

The startup also runs its own in-house drug-development programs. It originally planned to advance one or two into the clinic, but the extra cash will allow it to bring three or four programs forward into clinical trials. Bick said the company is now primarily focused on immunology-related conditions, alongside its lead oncology program.

The company launched in March 2023, emerging from stealth in November 2025. The new funding is an addition to Accipiter Bio’s seed round and includes only existing investors. Flying Fish Partners and Takeda co-led the seed round, which included Columbus Venture Partners, Cercano Capital, WRF Capital, Alexandria Investments, Pack Ventures and Argonautic Ventures.

The new funding will help grow the team, bringing in additional scientists and reaching a headcount of about 30 people over the next six months to a year.

Interest continues to grow in AI’s potential to speed up the creation of new drugs. But Bick cautions that the process isn’t as simple as some might suggest, particularly for more complex therapeutics.

He knows this firsthand: he and two of his co-founders worked at Neoleukin, a biotech company co-founded by Baker that spun out of the UW in 2019. The startup’s lead drug candidate, an engineered protein used in cancer treatment, underperformed in a Phase 1 trial. Neoleukin laid off many of its employees before merging with another company.

“There’s an impression with AI methods that you can just hit a button and you get your molecule out, but it’s not that easy — and certainly when you’re pushing the methods to their limits, it’s really not that easy,” Bick said.

The process still requires asking the right therapeutic questions, manual engineering and a deep understanding of the molecules, he said. “There’s still protein intuition that comes into it.”

I'm taking over the GPOD a bit this week, and I thought it would be fun to turn the lens on my own garden for a change. My main challenge…

A friend shares a gorgeous shaded oasis.