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A protein’s function is determined by its 3D shape.Credit: DeepMind
AlphaFold’s protein-structure breakthrough
An artificial-intelligence (AI) network developed by Google offshoot DeepMind has made enormous progress in solving one of biology’s grandest challenges — determining a protein’s 3D shape from its amino-acid sequence. The breakthrough is likely to transform biology, say scientists, and should aid in drug design. AlphaFold came out on top, by far, in a biennial protein-structure prediction challenge called CASP, short for Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction. AlphaFold’s predictions are comparable in quality to structures determined experimentally by X-ray crystallography or cryo-electron microscopy. “This will change medicine. It will change research. It will change bioengineering. It will change everything,” says evolutionary biologist Andrei Lupas..
Top Iranian nuclear scientist assassinated
Iran’s most senior nuclear scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, was killed on Friday in an attack on a highway outside Tehran. The physicist was head of the ministry of defence's research and innovation organization and is alleged to have led a covert Iranian nuclear-weapons programme. The murder could complicate efforts to revive the 2015 deal between Iran and six global powers that limited its nuclear capabilities in exchange for the lifting of economic sanctions on the country.
‘The Sistine Chapel of the ancients’
Archaeologists have documented tens of thousands of ice-age paintings that stretch across nearly 13 kilometres of cliff face in Colombia. They depict patterns, figures, handprints and animals, including now-extinct species such as mastodons, palaeolamas, giant sloths and ice-age horses. The discovery was made last year but is only now being revealed to coincide with the release of a television documentary that includes the art. The paintings are in the Serranía de la Lindosa, near the Chiribiquete national park, another site that is rich with prehistoric art.
Read more: FARC and the forest: Peace is destroying Colombia’s jungle — and opening it to science (Nature | 6 min read, from 2018)
Palaeoanthropologist Ella Al-Shamahi compares her hand with a handprint created around 12,000 years ago at Cerro Azul in the Guaviare department of Colombia, near the newly discovered site.Marie-Claire Thomas/Wild Blue Media
Features & opinion
‘Indefatigably enthusiastic’ Arthur Ashkin
“The elegance and creativity of Ashkin’s ideas were extraordinary,” writes former US secretary of energy Steven Chu of his former colleague, physicist Arthur Ashkin, who has died aged 98. “He remained indefatigably enthusiastic about science, working in his home basement into his nineties.” Arthur Ashkin won the 2018 Nobel Prize for his development of ‘optical tweezers’, beams of laser light that can grab and control microscopic objects such as atoms and viruses. Ashkin described how Chu was discouraged from working with him by their Bell Labs bosses, and shared his ‘eureka’ moments in a 2011 interview in Nature Photonics.
A presentation is not a journal article
In trying to be rigorous, scientists frequently pack presentations with content from journal articles. The usual result is a confused audience, befuddled by rapid-fire speaking, too much data and too many opaque slides, argues David Rubenson, director of the scientific-communications firm No Bad Slides. Instead, he recommends pinpointing the goals of your talk first and then tailoring the level of detail to the ‘least expert’ person in your audience.
