Single-molecule protein sequencing

Volume electron microscopy

CRISPR anywhere

High-precision radiocarbon dating

Single-cell metabolomics

In vitro embryo models

James Webb Space Telescope

These are all words you are correct, but what do they mean

Things. These words mean things.

Impressed this wasn’t the usual BS list of AI, plant based food, quantum computing, vertical farming and other pop science’s greatest hits.

Granted a couple are pretty standard, crispr and James Webb.

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AI absolutely is becoming more prevalent. Maybe not very intelligent AI but AI none the less.

I think they were mainly saying that AI is just one of those things that's already being talked about everywhere. The article highlighted some technologies that are less known.

Artificial Stupidity and sub sampling to rank rate interpolation are curiously missed

I would argue that while AI is going to be impactful culturally and artistically, the way it's impactful isn't scientifically useful. AI is a glorified summation and average calculator. It takes a bunch of existing data and makes a combination of those elements. It can't synthesize new insights by itself, which is what you need for scientific advancement.

Except AI just solved one of the hardest, most important open problems in biology lol. Go look at AlphaFold.

I thought the source would be behind a pay wall, but I was pleasantly surprised it wasn't.

The carbon dating going from a window of a couple of decades to a precise year is nuts!

Everything in the list is, really. The fake 8 day old embryo is insane. I don't even know how they begin to do that.

I always like Webb news. But only space dust was mentioned. I wonder if there is a list of missions/targets for Webb that I can see. I looked but didn't find anything. I was hoping for a schedule or something like that to see what Webb will look at in the coming months and years. Results will still take a long while to be confirmed and published, but I'm just excited about it.

Awesome things all around to look forward to not only for this years but for years to come.

Humans are awesome.

That’s what the internet is. A summification and consolidation of knowledge and communication yet it had huge impact

Oh I was hoping someone had started actually investing in improving the quality of life for once; bummer.

Brother. The post is a link to an article with all the answers you’re looking for

So what is important about it? From what I read it predicts how proteins fold. I’m not versed enough to know the impact that has.

The "Central Dogma of Biology" is: DNA makes RNA makes proteins.

How a sequence of DNA is translated into a final protein structure (the folding process) is impossible to predict with traditional computing methods. It's important, because everything about how a protein functions is essentially determined by its shape. This has been an open problem in biology for decades, since the discovery of DNA. Given that all life is built from proteins, this is a massive gap in our understanding of life and medicine.

AlphaFold was able to predict the folded structure of proteins to within experimental accuracy for the first time in history, and DeepMind recently released a catalog of their predictions for ALL human proteins for free last year.

Understanding how proteins fold will help us develop vaccines faster, treat all kinds of diseases involving proteins, predict birth defects from DNA sequences, build nano-sized delivery vessels for fighting cancer, etc. The sky is really the limit.

tl;dr, protein folding is a big deal

How were we able to know how they folded before? If it was something like a microscope couldn’t we have already just observed most proteins already. I’m assuming it’s big thing is making recipes for proteins in shapes that we desire?

It required extremely costly, elaborate experiments. The problem is that proteins are generally too small to see with a microscope. In order to get the structure, you essentially had to create a crystal of the purified protein of interest (which is not always possible or practical), and then shoot x-rays at the crystal to create a diffraction pattern. Then you could use software to reconstruct the structure of the protein.

And yes that's exactly right. Now that it's possible to predict the structure nearly instantly, you can now create recipes for custom proteins that can have whatever properties you want.

Oh ok that’s pretty cool. So we basically just gained a bunch of information we didn’t have before and save on resources time and labor. I didn’t realize it was so hard to see proteins. Since they are so hard to see how do we know we have all the human proteins. Are they just brute force scanning things in the human body?

They're all (ostensibly) encoded by our genome

Oh so basically looking at dna we can see all the possible proteins that we have the ability to create? I wasn’t sure if they did some like Lego stuff and some proteins naturally conjoined to other to form even more proteins but then I guess with the technology you still be able to figure out possible combinations based on their shapes. I’m surprised this isn’t talked about more. Does this mean we would also be able to create proteins that could get rid of the stuff our body doesn’t naturally break down? I read an article on the immortal jellyfish. If they had their genome sequenced couldn’t they see all the proteins and make a conjecture based on shape to see which ones are responsible for the “reverse aging”

As far as I understand, immune system proteins can have these "Lego brick" type combinations, but they're the exception. Most proteins are directly encoded by the DNA.

And yeah it's absolutely possible that we could engineer proteins to get rid of toxic stuff in our bodies. Solving aging is a bit more difficult because it involves how lots of proteins and genes interact with each other, but even then AI (deep neural networks) could probably help a ton.

From the dna perspective is aging just telomeres and methylation?

Those are two big pieces to aging, but not the whole picture. I'm not an expert, but I think oxidation and accumulation of damage to proteins and DNA are also very important and will be much more difficult to handle.

It's the new season of pop science’s greatest hits!

This should not have made me laugh as loud as I did.

I was today years old when I learned that advancements in our understanding of physics, computers and biology don't translate into improved quality of life.

It used to literally take months or even years to figure out how a single protein folds. AlphaFold can do it in minutes. It's a big deal because now researchers can test 1000s of proteins (instead of one or two) to solve many or most problems of disease and biology.

Congrats, maybe spend less time on the internet so you too can arrive at your own conclusions by living in the world rather than be spoonfed what to believe online from people advertising their financial interests :*

>maybe spend less time on the internet

Upvoted for ironic comment

So what do you think about everything else I’ve said little bot?

Maybe you think if they shoved all the homeless drug addicted population on a spaceship and sent them to mars that would give them a better quality of life? Cuz science right?

Sorry I called ya a bot that was too much

Are you ok?

Yeah actually, calling people out for their bs is my oldest hobby besides the basic bodily functions

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