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This is today’s edition download, Our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the tech world.
An AI that can design new proteins could help unlock new treatments and materials
What happened?: A new AI tool could help researchers discover previously unknown proteins and design entirely new ones. When used, it could help develop more efficient vaccines, accelerate research into cancer treatments, or lead to entirely new materials.
How does it work: Developed by a group of researchers from the University of Washington, ProteinMPNN offers scientists a tool to complement DeepMind’s AlphaFold tool’s ability to predict the shapes of all proteins known to science. ProteinMPNN will help researchers with the opposite problem. If they already have a definite protein structure in mind, it will help them find the amino acid sequence that folds into that shape.
Why is it important: Proteins are the foundation of life, and understanding their shape is vital to working with them. Traditionally, researchers produce proteins by modifying what occurs in nature, but ProteinMPNN will open up a whole new possible universe of proteins for researchers to design from scratch. Read the full story.
—Melissa Heikkila
Read more:
+ DeepMind has predicted the structure of almost every protein known to science.And it’s giving away the data for free, which can spur new scientific discoveries. Read the full story.
+ This is why Demis Hassabis started DeepMind. AlphaFold changed the way researchers work and put DeepMind on a new path. Read the full story.
Climate change ‘fingerprints’ exposed in Pakistan’s devastating floods
What we know: Climate change has intensified the South Asian monsoon that has flooded Pakistan in recent weeks, killing more than 1,000 people and destroying nearly 2 million homes. That’s according to a new analysis by World Weather Attribution, a network of scientists who use climate models, weather observations and other tools to determine if global warming is increasing the likelihood or severity of recent extreme weather events.
What we didn’t know: It’s not clear exactly how big a role climate change plays. Using climate models to pinpoint the role of global warming in amplifying the full monsoon season has proven difficult, due to some combination of natural processes and weather conditions that the wide variability in patterns of heavy precipitation over long periods cannot fully capture. of the region. And the country’s weather will likely be even more extreme. Read the full story.
—James Shrine
must read
I scoured the internet for today’s most entertaining/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 Uber looks like it was hacked by a teenager
An 18-year-old claims to be behind the cybersecurity breach that compromised the company’s internal systems. (NYT $)
+ Meanwhile, their services are working normally for customers. (Bloomberg $)
2 An AI used medical notes to teach itself to detect disease on chest X-rays
Teaching AI models to read existing reports can free researchers from manually labeling data. (MIT Technology Review)
3 The US government’s vast database of travelers is growing rapidly
Data from phones and other devices is stored for 15 years. (WP $)
4 The White House wants Congress to lower the immunity of social media
Technology companies are protected by Section 230; this means that their users are not legally responsible for their content posts. (Reuters)
+ That’s why it’s worth saving. (MIT Technology Review)
+ We need clearer guidelines on what constitutes harmful online content. (Information $)
+ Senators are asking Big Tech better questions these days. (slate $)
5 Millions of people in India have geotagged their homes
The move, which is part of the country’s Independence Day celebrations, has rattled privacy advocates. (rest of the world)
6 organic molecules found in rocks on Mars
They could prove that life could thrive there. (wired $)
+ Microbes may have lived in salty lakes. (motherboard)
+ The best places to find extraterrestrial life in our solar system. (MIT Technology Review)
7 The most advanced AI systems can surprise even their creators
This is a kind of point of deep learning. (Atlantic Ocean $)
8 Inside the wild world of leg extension 
More and more men are willing to break their legs to appear taller – at a cost. (GQ)
+ Bionic limbs may also be more widely available within a decade. (Neo.Life)
9 TikTok is the new Google
Why trust a restaurant’s website when TikTok can show you what their food really looks like? (NYT $)
10 Race to slow aging
Tackling a person’s epigenetic age is a place to start. (Neo.Life)
+ Aging clocks are intended to predict how long you will live. (MIT Technology Review)
Word of the Day
“Facebook is kind of extinct.”
—25-year-old Natasha Hunt Lee explains why millennials are embracing new digital ways of inviting friends to parties beyond the social network. New York Times.
big story
Two sick children and a $1.5 million bill: A family’s race for gene therapy treatment
October 2018
Jennie and Gary Landsman launched an online call to save their son on Thanksgiving 2017. In a moving video, the couple discuss how their two sons, Benny, who was then 18 months old, and Josh, who was four months old, both have a fatal genetic brain disorder. Canavan’s disease. It is extremely rare – in fact so rare that there is no reliable understanding of how many children were born with it. Relatively few researchers are studying Canavan, and no drugs have been approved to treat it.
Landsmans refused to accept the doctors’ advice to keep their son comfortable until he died. Instead, they learned that there may be a way to correct the genetic error in men’s brains. But the family would have to pay for it themselves. And it would be expensive.
Landsmans discovered gene therapy, a technology that uses viruses to add healthy genes to cells that are defective. The medical logic of technology is particularly irresistible to parents of children with the rarest diseases in the world, as it offers the ultimate error correction. The question is: Who will pay? Read the full story.
—Antonio Regalado
We can still have beautiful things
A place for comfort, fun and distraction in these strange times. (Any ideas?Write meortweet me.)
+ If you like Shut TV, White Lotus, holiday Village it should be just for you.
+ why following your bowels It is not necessarily the path to happiness.
+ Now that we are heading towards autumn, here are some of them The best horror movies on Netflix at the moment.
I didn’t know it was possible to + Butter even tastier, but it turns out you can!
+ this Roman coin collection quite surprising.
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