A debate about scientific fields ensues from the double win of artificial intelligence

The Virgin Galactic fish maw: a cowboy frontier or a flood, or how the climate crisis is taking hold of our planet

It’s been 20 years since the launch of space-tourism venture Virgin Galactic. Billionaires seem to be popping up to space regularly, for example, and I am sure you know who it is: entrepreneur and space walker, Jared Isaacman who was on a recent SpaceX mission. What about the rest of us? Two companies that operate ultra-high-altitude balloons are about to start taking paying passengers on trips into thin air at a discounted 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 there are few controls and that there is little knowledge about the value and potential threats of this. The consequence is a sort of cowboy frontier, where high prices push fishers to target species that we barely 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”. A selection of 35 planetary vital signs, such as greenhouse gas emissions and Antarctic ice loss, tell the tale: 25 of them have reached record levels this year. Most broke records last year, too. Billions of people are already suffering from the effects of climate change, fossil fuel emissions are not slowing down, and they are actually increasing according to co-author Thomas Crowther.

Source: Daily briefing: AlphaFold developers share Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Why Elephants are Wrinkled? Why elephants are wrinkled and why Ebola is a problem in the era of global warming

An elephant is nothing without its trunk. Researchers demonstrated that the trunk would not be possible without it. Wrinkles appear as soon as the trunk is 20 days old, and focus around a pivot point that allows the appendage to wrap around objects. Elephants grow more wrinkled on one side of their trunks if they are left- or right-trunked.

One of the biggest outbreak of the Marburg virus has been recorded in Rwanda. Scientists believe this outbreak will be contained, but they warn that Marburg is on the rise with no proven treatment. 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. Emergency-medicine physician Adam Levine says the world needs to be ready for that.

Nobel committees recognized the transformative power of artificial intelligence (AI) in two of this year’s prizes — honouring pioneers of neural networks in the physics prize, and the developers of computational tools to study and design proteins in the chemistry prize. Some researchers aren’t happy.

The prize was a recognition of the disruptive force of AI, but also of the steady accumulation of knowledge in structural and computational biology, says David Jones, a bioinformatician at University College London, who collaborated with DeepMind on the first version of AlphaFold. “I don’t think AlphaFold involves any radical change in the underlying science that wasn’t already in place,” he says. AlphaFold was conceived in a way that made it possible to reach those heights.

We meet the winners of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Plus, why elephants’ trunks have wrinkles and a damning report on the state of the climate crisis.

How NASA discovered AlphaFold during Discovery of a Planet Rover in 2024 (The Conversation | 17 min read) The Science of Mars: AI Companions for Velocity-Preserving Users

James Muldoon is a management and marketing specialist and he questions the safety of Artificial Intelligence companions for lonely, vulnerable users. (The Conversation | 19 min read)

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 its six, well-worn wheels, the right middle, after 12 years of exploration. The old rover is still alive and well despite taking 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. 3 min read, credit to NASA/Caltech/MSSS.

“I think that the Nobel prize in physics should continue to spread into more regions of physics knowledge,” says Giorgio Parisi, a physicist at the Sapienza University of Rome who shared the 2021 Nobel. “Physics is becoming wider and wider, and it contains many areas of knowledge that did not exist in the past, or were not part of physics.”

Not everyone was troubled, however: many physicists welcomed 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 sense, it belongs to all of these fields.”

One key input AlphaFold uses is the sequence of related genes from different organisms, which can help identify co-evolution of two acids 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. The process was iterative, with the goal of finding the right kind of combinations between what the community understood and how to build intuitions into our architecture.

The 2024 Nobel Prize isn’t Outlier: Some Remarks on Contributions of the Free and Open Research Prizes to the Advancement of Science and Technology

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. In this respect, the 2024 prizes are not outliers, says Ananthaswamy. “Sometimes they are given for very good engineering projects. That includes the prizes for lasers and PCR.”

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