September 22, 2023: AI catalogs all the genetic mutations that cause disease, a solution for recycling mixed plastics and summer officially comes to an end. —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor | | | A new tool based on an AI network called AlphaMissense can accurately predict which mutations in proteins are likely to cause health problems. Like ChatGPT is trained on language and words, this network is trained on millions of protein sequences, and it's called a protein language model. It can then use its learning to predict where disease-causing mutations are likely to occur within a protein. The researchers used AlphaMissense to create a catalog of every possible missense mutation (that is, genetic mutations that change the protein a gene encodes, and can cause diseases like cystic fibrosis or sickle cell disease) in the human genome. They determined that 57% are likely to be benign and that 32% may cause disease.
Why this matters: Researchers have observed only a few million out of the more than 70 million possible single-letter missense mutations. Of those observed, only a sliver have been conclusively linked to disease. This new tool could help researchers and physicians "interpret" people's genomes to find the cause of illness.
What the experts say: AlphaMissense confidently classified a much larger proportion of missense mutations than have previous methods, says Žiga Avsec, a research scientist at Google Deepmind who helped test the new tool. "As these models get better then I think people will be more inclined to trust them." | | | Scientists have devised a method enabling different kinds of plastics to be recycled together. Different types of plastics are made of different molecular building blocks, called monomers, and they must be sorted into separate streams before they can be melted to make new products. The researchers added chemicals called universal dynamic cross-linkers to a variety of plastics. These chemicals, under heat, form covalent molecular bonds that tether the diverse monomers together, creating new useful polymers that can be used again and again.
Why this matters: Soda bottles, yogurt containers, disposable knives and forks and many other plastics typically arrive at recycling plants mixed together in the same bin. This new method could help overcome the recycling problem of sorting and help to repurpose more plastic waste.
What the experts say: New techniques like this could lead to lucrative markets for less expensive recycled plastics, helping address the plastic waste crisis, says Sanat Kumar, a chemical engineer at Columbia University, who was involved in the research. | | | • Farewell to summer! Tomorrow is the autumnal equinox (in the Northern Hemisphere), though that doesn't mean an equal length of day and night, a common misconception. There's much more to it. | 7 min read | | | • A letter signed by 124 scholars and posted online last week claims that a prominent theory describing what makes someone or something conscious — called the integrated information theory (IIT) — should be labeled "pseudoscience." | 5 min read | | | • Jupiter's small, icy moon Europa may contain carbon in the ocean lurking beneath its icy shell. | 5 min read | | | • A climate researcher is hiring planes to scour the sky over the Amazon rainforest to collect air samples. What she's learning is alarming. | 15 min listen | | | • The planet's oceans are experiencing an outsized effect of global warming--many sea waters hit record temperatures this year. But oceans can be part of a solution to the climate emergency, write Nikki Batchelor, Michael Leitch and Brad Ack, who are leaders of XPRIZE and Ocean Visions. Using oceans to remove and safely store billions of tons of CO2, "will require prodigious deployment of new technologies and supporting infrastructure; it will undoubtedly be the largest pollution cleanup in history," they say. | 6 min read | | | SAMPLE COLLECTING MISSION RETURNING TO EARTH | | | This Sunday morning local time, if all goes well, NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft will make a parachute landing at the Department of Defense's Utah Test and Training Range. It's bringing back pebbles and dust from the near-Earth asteroid named Bennu, which it sampled more than three years ago before it turned around to head back to Earth. Using its long robotic arm, it shot a blast of nitrogen gas at the asteroid's surface that kicked up the sediments and shot them into the spacecraft's collection compartment. Read more about this mission here. | | | ICYMI (Our most-read stories of the week) | | | • A Newly Discovered Brain Signal Marks Recovery from Depression | 10 min read | | | • Pink Diamonds Erupted to Earth's Surface after Early Supercontinent's Breakup | 4 min read | | | • Massive Sun Outburst Smacks NASA Spacecraft | 3 min read | | | In the coming years, my guess is that we are going to see some incredible advancements in medicine facilitated by AI. The technology is already pinpointing the genetic mutations that underpin disease and building living nanobots that someday will target and treat illness inside the body (see our fascinating video on this here). | —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor | | Subscribe to this and all of our newsletters . | | | | Scientific American
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