Lifeboat Foundation

In late 2020, Alphabet’s DeepMind division unveiled its novel protein fold prediction algorithm, AlphaFold, and helped solve a scientific quandary that had stumped researchers for half a century. In the year since its beta release, half a million scientists from around the world have accessed the AI system’s results and cited them in their own studies more than 4,000 times. On Thursday, DeepMind announced that it is increasing that access even further by radically expanding its publicly-available AlphaFold Protein Structure Database (AlphaFoldDB) — from 1 million entries to 200 million entries.

Alphabet partnered with EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) for this undertaking, which covers proteins from across the kingdoms of life — animal, plant, fungi, bacteria and others. The results can be viewed on the UniProt, Ensembl, and OpenTargets websites or downloaded individually via GitHub, “for the human proteome and for the proteomes of 47 other key organisms important in research and global health,” per the AlphaFold website.

“AlphaFold is the singular and momentous advance in life science that demonstrates the power of AI,” Eric Topol, Founder and Director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, siad in a press statement Thursday. “Determining the 3D structure of a protein used to take many months or years, it now takes seconds. AlphaFold has already accelerated and enabled massive discoveries, including cracking the structure of the nuclear pore complex. And with this new addition of structures illuminating nearly the entire protein universe, we can expect more biological mysteries to be solved each day.”

Scientists have called it “a gift to humanity.”

Traditional ecological knowledge has long been dismissed by Western culture as stories or legends, rather than real science. But there’s new interest in tapping into the wisdom about plants, trees, wildlife and climate that Native American people have collected over time.

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Just days after the first formal release of its first show-off images scientists using the new James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have posted some stunning new images of two spiral galaxies.

Posted on Flickr by Judy Schmidt working on the PHANGS Survey, the stunning image, above, shows the spectacular “Phantom Galaxy” (also called M74 and NGC 628), with others (scroll down) showing another spiral galaxy called NGC 7496.

The incredible new images are testament to Webb’s skill at seeing in infrared and thus seeing through the gas and dust that obscures a lot of what is going on in some of the most arresting objects in the night sky.

We’re proud to be a platinum sponsor of ICML, the annual conference on machine learning. Learn about Amazon’s presence at the conference, accepted publications,… See more.

The International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) is the premier gathering of professionals dedicated to the advancement of the branch of artificial intelligence known as machine learning. The conference is globally renowned for presenting and publishing cutting-edge research on all aspects of machine learning used in closely related areas like artificial intelligence, statistics and data science, as well as important application areas such as machine vision, computational biology, speech recognition, and robotics.

White House asks the public for ideas on what to do when we return to the Moon and cislunar space.

The U.S. has plans to return to the moon by the middle of this decade through NASA’s Artemis Program. But going back to the lunar surface and cislunar space isn’t just about putting boots on the ground. That’s why the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy on behalf of the Cislunar Science and Technology Subcommittee of the National Science and Technology Council has issued a request for ideas (RFI) with a deadline of Wednesday, July 20, 2022, for interested parties to make submissions.

The U.S. government has defined cislunar space as the entire region beyond Earth’s geostationary orbit subject to the gravity of both our planet and the Moon. The RFI covers both orbiting and lunar surface activities.

Continue reading “U.S. Government’s Office of Science and Technology Issues Call for Cislunar Strategies” »

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The first full-color images from the James Webb Telescope are gorgeous, but they’re also full of substantial science.

Images of galaxy clusters, deep fields, dying stars, birthing stars, and exoplanet spectra electrified the astronomy community Tuesday.