The 2013 Swedish Competition for Nanosciences – The Rise of Rosetta, AlphaFold, and Self-assembling Protein Nanoparticles
Over the years, Baker’s team applied Rosetta to predicting protein structure — it has been among the top entries at numerous CASPs, prior to AlphaFold’s recent hegemony — as well as designing novel proteins such as enzymes and self-assembling protein nanoparticles.
“It has long been a dream to learn to predict the three-dimensional structure of proteins from knowing their amino acid sequences … for several decades, this was considered impossible,” said Nobel committee chair Heiner Linke, who researches nanoscience at Lund University in Sweden, during the prize announcement. He said that thisyear’s winners have cracked the code. Three people will each take home 11 million Swedish kronor.
Although computational tools such as AlphaFold aren’t a replacement for experimental studies, they are an accelerator, scientists say. According to the CASP judge, the move will empower a new generation of biologists to ask more advanced questions.
20 years of Virgin Galactic space tourism: how many of us are going to die in a world where climate change is happening so fast?
It has been 20 years since the launch of space-tourism venture Virgin Galactic. There’s a lot of billionaires popping up to space, for example,entrepreneurJared Isaacman, who spent time in space as a spacewalker and bill-payer. Do you think about the rest of us? A couple of ultra-high-altitude balloon companies say they will soon be taking paying passengers on a stately trip into thin air at a discount price.
A surging market for ‘fish maw’ — dried swim bladders — in Papua New Guinea is a lifesaver for impoverished communities. But overfishing — particularly with gillnets, which indiscriminately capture many types of fish, dolphin and turtle — could ultimately damage the ecosystem and leave people even worse off. Yvonne Sadovy says that there are only few controls and that the government has very little knowledge about the importance and potential threats. The consequence is “a sort of cowboy frontier”, whereby high prices push fishers to target species that “we hardly know anything about in terms of the science”.
A blunt and damning report on the state of the climate crisis concludes that “much of the very fabric of life on Earth is imperilled”. There are 35 planetary vital signs, 25 of which have reached record levels this year. Most broke records last year, too. “It is staggering that, in a world where billions of people are already suffering from the impacts of climate change, fossil fuel emissions and deforestation rates are not slowing, but they are actually increasing,” says ecologist and co-author Thomas Crowther.
Elephants, Wrinkles, and the Ebola Rate: A Nobel Prize Lecture on Marburg, Black Mirror, and AlphaFold Developers
An elephant’s trunk is all it is. Now, researchers have shown that its trunk would be nothing without its iconic wrinkles. Wrinkles appear as soon as the trunk develops during gestation — around 20 days in — and concentrate around a pivot point that allows the appendage to wrap around objects. Elephants also develop more wrinkles on one side of their trunks as they grow, depending on whether they’re ‘right-trunked’ or ‘left-trunked’.
One of the largest Marburg viruses ever documented is currently occurring in Rwanda. Marburg is on the rise, with no proven treatment, despite scientists’ expectations that the outbreak will be contained. Outbreaks of the virus, a ‘cousin’ of the Ebola virus, usually start after a person encounters an infected fruit bat. Researchers say that environmental threats, such as climate change and deforestation, have made people more likely to encounter animals that can pass on infections. “The world really has to just be ready for that,” says emergency-medicine physician Adam Levine.
We meet the winners of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. The state of the climate crisis has been reported on by a damning report.
Management and marketing specialist James Muldoon is worried about the safety of Artificial Intelligence companions for lonely vulnerable users after the founder of the company admitted she was inspired by an episode of Black Mirror. 19 min read, The Conversation.
Source: Daily briefing: AlphaFold developers share Nobel Prize in Chemistry
MAHLI sees the end of a robotic arm in Curiosity’s Rover on 22 September 2024 (Aug 22, 2020)
It’s understandable that the rover is showing signs of wear and tear since it has been on Mars for over a decade. After 12 years of exploration, we can see one of its six well-worn wheels. There is plenty of life left in the old rover after it took a beating on Mars. Curiosity captured this image with its Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) on the end of one of its robotic arms, on 22 September 2024. (Space.com | 3 min read) (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)