Imagine buying something, then being told it’s worth more than what you paid for it. That’s how real estate works, right? At least, that’s how my millennial brain has interpreted it thus far. Maybe I shouldn’t have spent all my money on avocado toast! Anyway, price increases aren’t something we typically expect to…
I never thought I would see a good Dungeons & Dragons movie in my lifetime. When Honor Among Thieves comes out next year, I still might not have. But the movie has earned my goodwill, and that’s because it has an Owlbear in it.
Sandmann, who was 16 when footage of him and a Native American elder went viral, lost against several outlets including The New York Times and ABC News.
Science never sleeps, but it reveals itself in small doses. In July, we learned about overcoming phobias, and dinosaurs, and looked deep into space.
If you’re still not over the loss of Iron Man in Avengers: Endgame, bust out the tissues before reading any further. Apparently we are now entering the phase where Marvel Studios is just going to make us cry, if the Black Panther: Wakanda Forever trailer is any indication.
The Honorable Kathaleen St. J. McCormick has announced the start date for the legal trial of Twitter vs Elon Musk over the acquisition of the social network.
Spanish police have arrested two former government contractors, accusing them of a stomach-churning assault on the nation’s system for monitoring for dangerous levels of nuclear radiation. The alleged cybercriminals were once the people charged with maintaining and repairing that very detection network.
The Wordle answer for today is a little tricksy — you’d be right at home using it in your next game of poker or heading to the Badlands of North Dakota.
In late 2020, Alphabet’s DeepMind division unveiled its novel protein fold prediction algorithm, AlphaFold, and helped solve a scientific quandary that had stumped researchers for half a century. In the year since its beta release, half a million scientists from around the world have accessed the AI system’s results and cited them in their own studies more than 4,000 times. On Thursday, DeepMind announced that it is increasing that access even further by radically expanding its publicly-available AlphaFold Protein Structure Database (AlphaFoldDB) — from 1 million entries to 200 million entries.
Alphabet partnered with EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) for this undertaking, which covers proteins from across the kingdoms of life — animal, plant, fungi, bacteria and others. The results can be viewed on the UniProt, Ensembl, and OpenTargets websites or downloaded individually via GitHub, “for the human proteome and for the proteomes of 47 other key organisms important in research and global health,” per the AlphaFold website.
“AlphaFold is the singular and momentous advance in life science that demonstrates the power of AI,” Eric Topol, Founder and Director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, siad in a press statement Thursday. “Determining the 3D structure of a protein used to take many months or years, it now takes seconds. AlphaFold has already accelerated and enabled massive discoveries, including cracking the structure of the nuclear pore complex. And with this new addition of structures illuminating nearly the entire protein universe, we can expect more biological mysteries to be solved each day.”
AlphaFold has been leveraged in a number of applications, from advancing Leprosy and Chagas Disease research to conserving honeybees and addressing plastic pollution. DeepMind has also developed AIs that can outmatch top human players, master games without even knowing the rules and even improve traffic patterns. DeepMind’s co-founder, Mustafa Suleyman, left the company in January in order to launch a new venture, Inflection.AI, with LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, shortly before accusations of ongoing sexual harassment were leveled at the company by a former employee.
A local shipping authority recently found a 375-year-old shipwreck nearly 36 feet beneath the surface of the Trave River in northern Germany. A team of researchers spent eight months studying the wreck, determining that 150 barrels of cargo went down with the Hanseatic ship.
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