Today, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced the launch of a new office that will merge biology, engineering, and computer science to harness the power of natural systems for national security. The Biological Technologies Office (BTO), a new division, will explore the increasingly dynamic intersection of biology and the physical sciences. BTO will expand the work undertaken by DARPA’s Defense Sciences (DSO) and Microsystems Technology (MTO) Offices. From the press release on the DARPA site: The Biological Technologies Office will advance and expand on a number of earlier DARPA programs that made preliminary inroads into the bio-technological frontier,” said Geoff Ling, named by DARPA Director Arati Prabhakar to be the first director of […]

This is a guest post by Will Barkis, PhD. Will is a Gigabit Evangelist and, until recently, led Mozilla’s gigabit innovation efforts for the past two years as Project Lead and “Gigabit Developer Evangelist” on the Mozilla Ignite Challenge and subsequently as Director of the Gigabit Community Fund. Before Mozilla, he worked on computer & information science & engineering policy at the National Science Foundation for two years, helping launch the US Ignite Initiative with a team at NSF and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and working on a number of tech policy issues. He can be reached at @willbarkis; wbarkis [at] gmail. The gigabit future is here Gigabit-per-second networks are rolling out around […]