Latest news with #Blagden
Miami Herald
01-04-2025
- Business
- Miami Herald
Ukraine's Transformation Into A Military Powerhouse
"Thanks to its defense industries," Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky remarked back in October, "Ukraine is set to become one of the key global contributors to security and a very strong player in the global arms and defense technology market." That is certainly Kyiv's vision for its future. "We can be one of the biggest producers of sophisticated weaponry," Oleksandr Merezhko, the chair of Ukraine's parliamentary foreign affairs and a member of Zelensky's party, told Newsweek. "Ukrainian technologies are going to be required by the world," Kyiv's strategic industries minister, Herman Smetanin, told Newsweek on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference in Germany in mid-February. There are many unknowns about what post-war Ukraine will look like, with much depending on how U.S.-backed ceasefire negotiations play out. One of Russia's conditions for considering inking an agreement is a limit on Ukraine's military might. The Kremlin said in March that Russia wanted to stop military mobilization in Ukraine, and the re-equipping of Kyiv's military. Meanwhile for Ukraine, exporting its technology to its allies is one of the eventual goals, but officials are clear that defending country's borders comes first. "We need weaponry to survive," Merezhko said. Ukraine needs a strong defense industry and advanced weapons to make sure it cannot be invaded again, Smetanin said. It took a matter of weeks in early 2022 for Ukraine to morph into what could be termed a "European major power," slotting advanced Western equipment into its mobilized military, said David Blagden, an associate professor of international security and strategy at the U.K.'s University of Exeter. The war has become an "intense crucible of technological innovation," Blagden told Newsweek. While Kyiv has leaned heavily on Western support to prop up its war effort, it has been Ukrainian personnel collecting battlefield experience and operating cutting-edge technology that Kyiv's backers have never had to use in a similar way. While most militaries had waded into developing various types of drones prior to 2022, Russian and Ukrainian use of uncrewed surface, ground and aerial vehicles has revolutionized how this type of technology is used in combat. The world's armed forces have watched on closely as Kyiv and Moscow have vied to be the most effective at deploying cheap, throwaway explosive drones and longer-range systems able to strike targets hundreds of miles away from their pilots. Ukraine also now has ample expertise in large-scale land operations and how to maintain an extensive air defense network that European NATO states do not have, Blagden said. European countries and the U.K. have trained Ukrainian personnel across the military, including tens of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers through the London-led initiative known as Operation Interflex. But British and European soldiers training in eastern Romania throughout February, as part of NATO's largest exercises this year, said they modeled their training exercises on Ukraine's experiences, their tactics informed by how Kyiv fought. British soldiers were among those winding their way around trenches in Romania with designs lifted from the battlefields of Ukraine. A "huge amount" has been taken onboard from the war in Ukraine, British Army Lieutenant Colonel Harry Waller told Newsweek in eastern Romania. "Fighting a peer conflict against Russia is what NATO trains for above all else and this is something Ukraine has done for over three years now," said William Freer, a research fellow in national security at the U.K.-based Council on Geostrategy think tank. Through the more than three years of full-scale war, Ukraine has collected "invaluable" battlefield experience, said Merezkho. "We'll be a huge asset for NATO and for the European Union." Ukraine, through ramping up its defense industry, has managed to lessen some of its reliance on Western aid. Kyiv's defense industry has increased its capabilities thirty five-fold since February 2022, Smetanin said. Ukraine now produces at home more than half of its military hardware, while it gets roughly a quarter of its military supplies from Europe and a fifth from the U.S. Speaking in early October, Zelensky said Ukraine had produced 25 times more ammunition for artillery systems and mortars than it pumped out in all of 2022. The Ukrainian leader has said Ukraine could now produce at least 15 new units of its Bohdana howitzers each month. Europe has struggled to source enough military hardware—especially artillery—for Ukraine, depleting its own stockpiles while struggling to produce replacement equipment or make enough ammunition. The demand for 155mm shells far outstrips supply. The European Union pledged to deliver 1 million shells by March 2024, but fell far short of this target. The U.S., which has maintained higher levels of military spending while many of its European allies invested elsewhere, has a much more powerful military-industrial complex. But for Europe, there is the possibility that the continent could look to Ukraine to help replenish its drained stocks. Ukraine is able to build military equipment at a fairly low cost and on a large scale, Freer told Newsweek. Ukraine said at the start of the year that it would ramp up its long-range drone and missile programs, buying at least 30,000 drones able to fly hundreds of miles over 2025. Over the year, Kyiv is also planning on having 3,000 cruise missiles and drone-type missiles roll off its production lines, prime minister Denys Shmyhal said in January. Ukraine is actually capable of producing more than 30,000 of these deep-strike drones, Smetanin told Newsweek in Munich in February. It is also on track to hit a production target of over 10,000 ground drones, Smetanin said. "We have some more missiles coming that are currently being tested," Smetanin added, speaking via an interpreter. Ukraine unveiled a raft of new technology at the end of 2024, including sets of missile-drone hybrids. Kyiv debuted its Peklo missile — or "hell," in Ukrainian — and the Ruta, able to travel up to 300 kilometers, according to Ukrainian media reports. Ukrainian engineers use all the information available to "develop the best missiles we can," Smetanin said. "Nobody in the world has such experience that our defense and weaponry manufacturers really have right now," Smetanin added. "They've developed all this expertise and production capacity for these technologies," Blagden added. "If the Europeans want to access that expertise, then it's an obvious place to go." But there are several obstacles in Kyiv's way. The war has taken an excruciating toll on Ukraine's economy, distended to prop up the war effort at the expense of swathes of spending across the war-torn society. Ukraine's "economic situation is now unfortunately tough," Blagden said. Much of the workforce will have spent years in the military, and many of Ukraine's best and brightest will have become war casualties, he said. Others have settled abroad in areas away from Ukraine. While it is not yet clear how a ceasefire agreement would come together, it has appeared increasingly likely that Russia may retain its grip on parts of Ukraine that it has captured in the war. As it stands, Moscow controls the vast majority of the eastern Luhansk region and a significant part of neighboring Donetsk, which together are collectively referred to as the Donbas. The Donbas was Ukraine's industrial heartland, the hub for the country's iron and steel industry prior to 2014, when Russia seized Crimea to the south of mainland Ukraine and backed separatist movements in Luhansk and Donetsk. Ukraine's defense industry, while hoovering up expertise and refining designs, is still less capable of pumping out some of the most complex equipment, Freer said. How Ukraine has fought Russia fundamentally clashes with how NATO nations would battle Moscow. At varying points, Ukraine adopted parts of NATO warfighting strategy, only to run into snags or revert to the more familiar, Soviet-style tactics. "The Ukrainians have fought the Russians in a very different manner to how NATO would do so, the lack of Ukrainian airpower being the single most important factor," Freer said. At its heart, NATO doctrine relies on firm air superiority over an opponent, which Ukraine has never enjoyed over Russia. But NATO is setting foot in a new era, one where the U.S.'s contribution under President Donald Trump has been thrown into doubt as it has not been in many decades. The U.S. is the most significant single contributor to NATO, including with its formidable air force. Without American airpower, Europe might be able to take more lessons from Ukraine's way of fighting, Blagden argued. While countries like the U.K., France or Germany might have an advantage in the air over Russia in a hypothetical conflict, other NATO members cannot rely on it, he said. For Poland or its Baltic neighbors within touching distance of Russia, "learning how Ukraine fights Russia is going to be, in some ways, much more relevant than learning how the U.S. would fight Russia," Blagden said. Related Articles US Rejects Putin's Proposal for Third Party Control of UkraineNATO Ally Calls Ukraine Air Strikes 'An Attack on Our Sovereignty'Map Shows Russian Advances: Ukraine War Update March 31Russian Artillery Losses Pass Grim Milestone 2025 NEWSWEEK DIGITAL LLC.
BBC News
31-03-2025
- Science
- BBC News
Severn Bore's history: Dog cruelty and surfing firsts
People will gather on the banks of a river later to watch a world-famous natural phenomena roar through Gloucestershire. The Severn Bore occurs when a large tidal surge pushes up the River Severn against a current, causing towering waves. It's an event surfers don't want to miss, but in the past some unusual things happened including dog cruelty and surfing will see a "four star" bore weave its way down the river. The banks will be lined with wellie-wearing spectators, with surfers taking advantage in the from the past few hundred years show how people have viewed the natural event.A description of the bore from the 1700s, attributed to Sir Charles Blagden, a physician and secretary of the Royal Society in 1748, described how Gloucester residents would gather at "the Parting of the Water" at Alney parting is a reference to how the river flows around the island before reuniting again near Maisemore."If the wind gets up the river, one can sometimes, even at this interval of time, hear a very distant roaring by putting the ear close to the water," he wrote. But once the bore got closer, "about 200 yards off", Sir Blagden said, the way some onlookers celebrated its arrival was slightly wrote: "There are commonly some men in boats to meet the tide, and some dogs are thrown in just as it comes, to observe their howling and distress. "On a sudden, the boats and dogs are instantaneously raised up and thrown into violent agitation, and at the same time, a vast wave or wall of water... is seen approaching with extreme rapidity."Sir Blagden added several ships had been lost to the bore, so watermen trading on the Severn were "extremely careful not to be taken disadvantageously by the head of the tide".Elsewhere, he wrote that the bore rose to eight ft (2.4 metres) in height, and that he raced it on horseback between bends in the river in a bid to "overtake" the the 20th Century, Arnold Whitehouse, senior science master at The Crypt School, studied the relationship shared between the tidal Severn and the moon. 'Unusually big tide' Ahead of the bore on 17 November 1910, Mr Whitehouse wrote: "Such an unusually big tide so far from the equinoxes is due to the moon happening to be full on the same day it is at its nearest to the earth."He claimed the bore that day was 30ft or 9.2m, the same height as the largest recorded bore would go on to be more than 50 years later in 1955, Colonel John Churchill, known as "Mad Jack", became the first person to surf the bore, standing atop a homemade to the Museum of British Surfing, this is thought of as being the first incidence of someone riding a tidal wave in a river. The four star bore on Monday, which classed as a "large" bore, after being downgraded from a "very large" five star bore, will reach Minsterworth at 10:11 BST, Stonebench at 10:26 BST, and Over Bridge at 10:46 the bore can arrive up to 20 minutes early or 30 minutes late, depending on weather conditions, those planning on watching are often advised to arrive early and find a good vantage point.A three star bore will follow in the evening, reaching Minsterworth at 22:31 BST, Stonebench at 22:46 BST, and Over Bridge at 23:06 BST.
Yahoo
27-01-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Cancer vaccine being created by UK scientists could stop disease up to 20 years early
Scientists are working to create a new cancer vaccine that could 'detect the undetectable' and stop the disease up to 20 years before it has the chance to develop. Pharmaceutical giant GSK and the University of Oxford have teamed up to make a vaccine that targets cells at the pre-cancerous stage. The university has world-leading expertise in the study of pre-cancer biology, such as through identifying and sequencing neoantigens, which are proteins that forms on cancer cells and can be a target for drugs. Professor Sarah Blagden, who is director of the partnership, said cancer 'does not come from nowhere'. 'You always imagine it would take about a year or two years to develop in your body but, in fact, we now know that cancers can take up to 20 years, sometimes even more, to develop - as a normal cell transitions to become cancerous,' prof Blagden told BBC's Radio 4 on Monday. 'We know that actually at that point, most cancers are invisible when they are going through this, what we now call pre-cancer stage. And so the purpose of the vaccine is not to vaccinate against established cancer, but to actually vaccinate against that pre-cancer stage.' The GSK-Oxford Cancer Immuno-Prevention Programme has been launched on the back of several technological and scientific advances that have made the potential for vaccines against pre-cancer possible, said prof Blagden. 'We're lucky because there have been a huge amount of technical breakthroughs that mean we can …. start to be able to detect the undetectable,' she said. 'And from that, we've been able to work out what features those cells have as they're transitioning towards cancer, and so we can design a vaccine speficially targeted towards that.' As part of the deal, GSK will invest up to £50 million over three years into the prgoramme, which will look at how to identify vulnerabilities in pre-cancerous cells with vaccines or targeted medication. GSK's chief scientific officer Tony Wood said: We're pleased to further strengthen our relationship with Oxford University and to combine the deep knowledge of Oxford and GSK scientists. By exploring precancer biology and building on GSK's expertise in the science of the immune system, we aim to generate key insights for people at risk of developing cancer.' "We now know that cancer does not come from nowhere." Prof Sarah Blagden, director of a new research collaboration between pharma giant GSK and the University of Oxford, tells #R4Today about the development of a new 'pre-cancer' vaccine that could target the disease earlier. — BBC Radio 4 Today (@BBCr4today) January 27, 2025 Currently, more than 385,000 people are diagnosed with cancer each year in the UK, and more than 167,000 people a year will die from it, according to data from Cancer Research UK. Breast cancer is the UK's most common form of the disease, followed by prostate, lung and bowel cancer, which combined account for nearly half of all cancer deaths. Science and Technology secretary Peter Kyle said the government would back the life sciences sector to help it deliver research that could transform the health of the country. 'Cancer is a disease that has brought pain and heartbreak to every family in the country, including my own,' he said. 'But through our world-leading universities and businesses working in lockstep, like Oxford and GSK are doing here, we can harness science and innovation to transform what's possible when it comes to diagnosing and treating this disease.'
Yahoo
27-01-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Scientists developing new cancer vaccine to target 'invisible' stage
A new cancer vaccine is being developed which scientists hope could target the disease before it takes hold. The University of Oxford is working with pharmaceutical giant GSK to develop the new jab. It is designed to prevent cancer from developing, by targeting cells at the pre-cancerous stage, before the disease begins to wreak havoc on the body. The end result could be in the form of a single jab, or multiple vaccines. Professor Sarah Blagden, from the University of Oxford, told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: 'Cancer does not sort of come from nowhere. You always imagine it would take about a year or two years to develop in your body but, in fact, we now know that cancers can take up to 20 years, sometimes even more, to develop – as a normal cell transitions to become cancerous. READ MORE: Nationwide asks customers for a photo as payment rules change READ MORE: Author heartbroken as no one shows up to book signing – but gets last laugh "We know that, actually at that point, most cancers are invisible when they are going through this, what we now call pre-cancer stage. And so the purpose of the vaccine is not to vaccinate against established cancer, but to actually vaccinate against that pre-cancer stage." Several pharmaceutical firms have already had success with cancer vaccines that stop the disease coming back in people who already have established cancer. Oxford University has world-leading expertise in the study of pre-cancer biology, such as through identifying and sequencing neoantigens, which are proteins that forms on cancer cells and can be a target for drugs. Prof Blagden will co-lead the new GSK-Oxford Cancer Immuno-Prevention Programme, which is backed by £50 million from GSK. She said Oxford had expertise in the pre-cancerous changes 'so we can actually now start to sort of be able to detect the undetectable'. She added that experts have 'been able to work out what features those cells have as they're transitioning towards cancer, and so we can design a vaccine specifically targeted against that'. 'In this case, we're actually going for the cancer itself, but going at it at the pre-cancer stage," Prof Blagden said. In 2021, GSK and Oxford established the Institute of Molecular and Computational Medicine to drive forward the research and development of new medicines. Tony Wood, chief scientific officer at GSK, said: 'We're pleased to further strengthen our relationship with Oxford University and to combine the deep knowledge of Oxford and GSK scientists. 'By exploring pre-cancer biology and building on GSK's expertise in the science of the immune system, we aim to generate key insights for people at risk of developing cancer.' Professor Irene Tracey, vice-chancellor of the University of Oxford, added: 'This partnership represents a step forward in cancer research. 'By working with GSK to unite experts in clinical trials, immuno-oncology, vaccinology and pre-cancer research from across the University of Oxford, we aim to unlock the potential of cancer vaccines and bring hope to patients worldwide.' The move has also been welcomed by the Government. Science and Technology Secretary Peter Kyle said: 'Cancer is a disease that has brought pain and heartbreak to every family in the country, including my own. But through our world-leading universities and businesses working in lockstep, like Oxford and GSK are doing here, we can harness science and innovation to transform what's possible when it comes to diagnosing and treating this disease.'
The Independent
27-01-2025
- Health
- The Independent
Cancer vaccine being created by UK scientists could stop disease up to 20 years early
Scientists are working to create a new cancer vaccine that could 'detect the undetectable' and stop the disease up to 20 years before it has the chance to develop. Pharmaceutical giant GSK and the University of Oxford have teamed up to make a vaccine that targets cells at the pre-cancerous stage. The university has world-leading expertise in the study of pre-cancer biology, such as through identifying and sequencing neoantigens, which are proteins that forms on cancer cells and can be a target for drugs. Professor Sarah Blagden, who is director of the partnership, said cancer 'does not come from nowhere'. 'You always imagine it would take about a year or two years to develop in your body but, in fact, we now know that cancers can take up to 20 years, sometimes even more, to develop - as a normal cell transitions to become cancerous,' prof Blagden told BBC's Radio 4 on Monday. 'We know that actually at that point, most cancers are invisible when they are going through this, what we now call pre-cancer stage. And so the purpose of the vaccine is not to vaccinate against established cancer, but to actually vaccinate against that pre-cancer stage.' The GSK-Oxford Cancer Immuno-Prevention Programme has been launched on the back of several technological and scientific advances that have made the potential for vaccines against pre-cancer possible, said prof Blagden. 'We're lucky because there have been a huge amount of technical breakthroughs that mean we can …. start to be able to detect the undetectable,' she said. 'And from that, we've been able to work out what features those cells have as they're transitioning towards cancer, and so we can design a vaccine speficially targeted towards that.' As part of the deal, GSK will invest up to £50 million over three years into the prgoramme, which will look at how to identify vulnerabilities in pre-cancerous cells with vaccines or targeted medication. GSK's chief scientific officer Tony Wood said: We're pleased to further strengthen our relationship with Oxford University and to combine the deep knowledge of Oxford and GSK scientists. By exploring precancer biology and building on GSK's expertise in the science of the immune system, we aim to generate key insights for people at risk of developing cancer.' Currently, more than 385,000 people are diagnosed with cancer each year in the UK, and more than 167,000 people a year will die from it, according to data from Cancer Research UK. Breast cancer is the UK's most common form of the disease, followed by prostate, lung and bowel cancer, which combined account for nearly half of all cancer deaths. Science and Technology secretary Peter Kyle said the government would back the life sciences sector to help it deliver research that could transform the health of the country. 'Cancer is a disease that has brought pain and heartbreak to every family in the country, including my own,' he said. 'But through our world-leading universities and businesses working in lockstep, like Oxford and GSK are doing here, we can harness science and innovation to transform what's possible when it comes to diagnosing and treating this disease.'
