Fish maws: The cost of living on Earth is too big for the rich and the middle of the earth, and the climate crisis is in danger
The launch of Virgin Galactic took place 20 years ago. Billionaires seem to be popping up to space regularly — for example, entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, who was both spacewalker and bill-payer on a recent private SpaceX mission. But what 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. The acidification of the environment, which is caused by gillnets, could leave people worse off. Yvonne Sadovy, a fisheries specialist, said there were few controls and little knowledge about the importance and potential threats of this. The consequence is that fishers will go after species that we hardly know anything about, because of the high prices.
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”. The planetary vital signs that have reached record levels this year include greenhouse gas emissions and Antarctic ice loss. Most records were broken last year. “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.
Why Elephants Have Wrinkles? The 2021 Nobel Prize Lecture on Protein-Folding and the Marburg Epidemic in Rwanda
An elephant would be nothing without its trunk. 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. Depending on whether they are right-trunked or left-trunked, elephants will develop more wrinkling on one side of their trunks as they grow.
One of the biggest Marburg virus epidemics ever has been recorded in Rwanda. Scientists expect this outbreak to be contained, but warn that Marburg is on the rise, with no proven treatment. The virus is a cousin to the one that causes the haemorrhage of the brain, commonly called the fruit bat disease. Researchers say that environmental threats, such as climate change and deforestation, have made people more likely to encounter animals that can pass on infections. Emergency-medicine physician Adam Levine says that the world needs to be ready for that.
Computer science seemed to be completing its Nobel take-over the day after the physics prize announcement, when Demis Hassabis and John Jumper, co-creators of the protein-folding prediction AI tool AlphaFold at Google DeepMind in London, won half of the chemistry Nobel. (The other half was awarded to David Baker at the University of Washington in Seattle for protein-design work that did not employ machine learning).
Read more about AlphaFold and the AI protein-folding revolution in this feature from 2022. In 17 minutes, you will read J M Thornton et al. The Nature Med. 27, 1666–1668, was published in 2021.
The winners of the Nobel Prize met with us. Plus, why elephants’ trunks have wrinkles and a damning report on the state of the climate crisis.
AlphaFold: The life of a robotic arm on Mars revealed by a sequence of protein sequences in a 3D image of an old rover
Management and marketing specialist James Muldoon questions the safety of AI companions for lonely, vulnerable users — particularly after the founder of the company behind Replika AI admitted she was inspired by an episode of dystopian TV series Black Mirror. 19 min read of The Conversation.
Considering that NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity has been on the red planet for over a decade, it’s understandable it’s showing signs of a little wear and tear. Here we see one of the six wheels that were found after 12 years of exploration. But despite taking a beating on Mars’s rocky surface, there’s plenty of life in the old rover yet. The MAHLI is on the end of a robotic arm and was used to photograph this image. (Space.com | 3 min read) (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)
Moments after the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences unveiled the winners of this year’s physics Nobel, social media lit up, with several physicists arguing that the science underlying machine learning, celebrated in the awards to Geoffrey Hinton and John Hopfield, was not actually physics.
Many physicists were happy with the news. “Hopfield and Hinton’s research was interdisciplinary, bringing together physics, math, computer science and neuroscience,” says Matt Strassler, a theoretical physicist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In that manner, it is all of these fields.
The sequence of relatedProteins from different organisms can be used as a key input for AlphaFold to identify amino acid pairs that are in close proximity to each other in a 3D structure. Researchers were already using this insight to predict protein structures at the time AlphaFold was developed, and some even began embedding the idea in deep learning neural networks.
“It wasn’t just that we went to work and we pressed the AI button, and then we all went home,” Jumper said at a press briefing at DeepMind on 9 October. It was an iterative process, where we looked for combinations between what the community understood and how we build our architecture.
The 2024 Nobel Prize is not an outlier of the year 2024: Lasers, PCR, and astrophysical lasers as examples
Since their inception in 1901, the Nobels have often been about the impact of research on society, and have rewarded practical inventions, not only pure science. The prize for the year 2024 is not outliers according to Ananthaswamy. “Sometimes they are given for very good engineering projects. Prizes for lasers and PCR are included.