Year 2022 face_with_colon_three
New vaccine may protect against future variants of coronaviruses, such as COVID-19 and SARS.
Cankat, S., Demael, M.U. & Swadling, L. In search of a pan-coronavirus vaccine: next-generation vaccine design and immune mechanisms. Cell Mol Immunol (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41423-023-01116-8
Well, many of those who partied hard on New Year’s may be regretting their decision because of the hangover. But once the clutches of alcoholic after-effects decide to free you, you are ready to party again. But even the most hardcore partygoers would not dare to face this challenge. How about having 16 New Years’ Party in a single day? Tough right? But if partying would be high on the list of astronauts at the International Space Station (ISS), they would really have been able to do it.
The reason?
They witness 16 sunrises and sunsets in a ‘single day’ aboard the ISS.
Artificial intelligence (AI) has been advancing rapidly, but its inner workings often remain obscure, characterized by a “black box” nature where the process of reaching conclusions is not visible. However, a significant breakthrough has been made by Prof. Dr. Jürgen Bajorath and his team, cheminformatics experts at the University of Bonn. They have devised a technique that uncovers the operational mechanisms of certain AI systems used in pharmaceutical research.
Surprisingly, their findings indicate that these AI models primarily rely on recalling existing data rather than learning specific chemical interactions for predicting the effectiveness of drugs. Their results have recently been published in Nature Machine Intelligence.
Which drug molecule is most effective? Researchers are feverishly searching for efficient active substances to combat diseases. These compounds often dock onto protein, which usually are enzymes or receptors that trigger a specific chain of physiological actions.
India launched its first satellite on Monday to study black holes as it seeks to deepen its space exploration efforts ahead of an ambitious crewed mission next year.
News organizations, camera makers, and tech companies create a web tool called Verify for checking the authenticity of images for free. It’s being adopted by Nikon, Sony, and Canon.
The molecules found are similar to smoke, soot, or fog on Earth and were observed in light that traveled from the galaxy when the cosmos was less than 1.5 billion years-old.
Why let minor quibbles like the laws of causality get in the way of charging batteries?
A long-awaited space mission in the coming year could herald the start of a new era where so many science fiction dreams finally begin to cement themselves as science fact. But first we must pass a critical test of our own making that pits our technological expansion into orbit against the sun itself.
It’s not that difficult to predict what science stories we’ll be talking about over the next year: artificial intelligence, climate change and advances in biotechnology will remain front of mind. But there’s a pair of happenings just beyond our planet that I’ll be watching closely, because they amount to tests of a sort that could determine the trajectory of our species.
The first story you’ve probably already heard about. NASA aims to launch its Artemis II mission by the end of the year, carrying humans on a journey around the moon and back. This marks the first time anyone has traveled farther than low-earth orbit in more than 50 years.
Limitless Space Institute compares the travel time of spacecraft propelled by nuclear power to that of imaginative fusion propulsion. Credit: Limitless Space Institute.