Naturalized U.S. Army veteran admits selling Bradley, Stryker, and HIMARS secrets to buyers in China On September 16, 2026, Ruoyu Duan, 41, of Hillsboro, Oregon, pleaded guilty in Portland federal court to conspiracy to gather and transmit national defense information. Sentencing is set for December 10. He faces up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine. This is not a green-card gray area. Duan served in the U.S. Army from 2013 to 2017, was trained to handle sensitive and classified material, and became a U.S. citizen through the now-defunct MAVNI program, which fast-tracked foreign recruits with special skills into citizenship after military service. He was medically discharged after an on-duty injury and was collecting VA disability at the time of his arrest. Prosecutors say that from November 2021 until his arrest in March 2025, Duan acted as a middleman. He paid active-duty soldiers—including Capt. Li Tian and Sgt. Jian Zhao at Joint Base Lewis-McChord—to collect Army operational material: technical manuals, training files, intelligence reports, computers, and hard drives marked Secret and Top Secret. The haul included data on Bradley and Stryker combat vehicles and the HIMARS rocket system. He then passed it to people in China and moved the money. Tian and Zhao have not pleaded guilty. FBI agents arrested Duan at his home on March 6, 2025, and seized devices containing files matching reports Tian had sent him. A U.S. passport and an Army uniform are not a license to sell the country’s weapons data. Duan already admitted the conspiracy. Watch the December sentence.

Natural selection’s trial-and-error process allows improvement without anyone understanding or guiding it. The same can apply to how we learn. There are at least three kinds of learning that foster evolution: memory-based learning (storing the information that comes in through one’s conscious mind so that we can recall it later); subconscious learning (the knowledge we take away from our experiences that never enters our conscious minds, though it affects our decision making); and “learning” that occurs without thinking at all, such as the changes in DNA that encode a species’ adaptations. I used to think that memory-based, conscious learning was the most powerful, but I’ve since come to understand that it produces less rapid progress than experimentation and adaptation. #principleoftheday#

Natural diamonds hit their lowest level this century. Diamond is down more than -50% since 2022. Lab-grown diamonds are 70 to 80% cheaper than natural diamonds and now account for 45% of engagement rings in the US, up from just 5% in 2019.

Natural selection is a blind watchmaker, yet the forms it produces can be astonishingly beautiful. Ernst Haeckel captured that beauty in his extraordinary illustrations. They accompany my forthcoming book, 42 Tales from Life: A Modern Bestiary. Published this November, it tells 42 stories of the ingenious, curious and bizarre products of evolution. Waterstones is offering 25% off pre-orders with code SUMMER26 until Friday, 24 July.