💡 Warp News #303
💩 Goodbye, camera up the bum – swallowable bacterial capsule can detect intestinal diseases. 🌾 Scientists use CRISPR to create wheat that produces its own fertilizer. 🧪 AlphaFold's protein database has been used by three million researchers in five years.
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🧪 AlphaFold’s remarkable impact
Exactly one year ago, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper from Google DeepMind received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Sometimes it takes ages for a scientific breakthrough to be recognized with a Nobel Prize, but this time it happened quickly. Only three years earlier, their AlphaFold had cracked the protein-folding problem.
Proteins are microscopic machines that drive all processes in living cells. They consist of long chains of amino acids that fold into a three-dimensional structure. This shape determines the protein’s function, which makes understanding its structure crucial.
Mapping this structure used to be expensive and required months or years for a single protein. What AlphaFold accomplished was allowing an AI system to do this in a fraction of the time. Before AlphaFold, we had mapped around 200,000 proteins. Then it took just two years to reach 200 million.
Researchers have now had access to this for five years, and the impact is substantial:
- More than three million researchers in over 190 countries have used the database.
- AlphaFold has been cited in more than 35,000 scientific papers.
- Over 200,000 papers have used components of AlphaFold 2 in their methodology.
- AlphaFold has contributed to understanding heart disease, preserving bee populations, developing more resilient crops, and much more.
What few people know is that it was the Transformer — the architecture that made ChatGPT and all generative AI possible — that was also the critical component in cracking the protein-folding problem.
In my view, the creators of the Transformer also deserve a Nobel Prize. (I’ve interviewed one of them for my book, where I also tell the story of AlphaFold.)
🎅 Ho ho ho!
Santa Claus would like to inform you that the Christmas campaign for my book The Fifth Acceleration is still available. You can find it here (Swedish only.)
Mathias Sundin
The Angry Optimist
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🤦 The Nobel laureate’s banal critique of humanity
The Nobel laureate László Krasznahorkai claims humanity peaked at the Moon landing and that technology since has made us worse. But his bleak view is neither new nor convincing — it mostly reveals how we humans always complain about the time we live in.
💡 Fact-based optimistic news of the week
🧪 AlphaFold's protein database has been used by three million researchers in five years
AlphaFold has been cited in more than 35,000 scientific articles. Over 200,000 articles have used elements of AlphaFold 2 in their methodology. It has contributed to understanding heart disease, conserving bee colonies, and developing more resilient crops.
🌾 Scientists use CRISPR to create wheat that produces its own fertilizer
The modified wheat produced higher yields under low fertilizer levels compared to regular wheat. For many developing regions, this development could offer new support for reliable crop production.
🦾 AI tool analyzes startups 537 times faster than human analysts
AI agents can screen early-stage startups 537 times faster than human venture capital analysts without sacrificing quality. The AI tool cost an average of 6.9 cents per search compared to 70 dollars for human analysis. Startups selected by the AI agent had a higher probability of receiving funding.
💩 Goodbye, camera up the bum – swallowable bacterial capsule can detect intestinal diseases
Researchers have developed a capsule with bacteria that is swallowed, detects bleeding in the gut, and can then be easily collected from stool using a magnet. The entire process from collection to analysis takes about 25 minutes.
✍️ New AI enables people without CAD training to create 3D models from hand sketches
The AI transforms a hand-drawn sketch into a complete, CAD-ready 3D model, can iterate and improve the design based on visual cues and engineering rules, and enables people without CAD skills to create professional-quality models.
⚛️ New cooling technique increases antimatter production eightfold at CERN
CERN can now produce over 15,000 antihydrogen atoms in under seven hours, compared to ten weeks previously for similar quantities. With larger quantities of antihydrogen available, researchers can now investigate atomic antimatter in greater detail and at a faster pace than before.
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