New Scientist Australian Edition 6-Aug-22

Tour Neanderthal Origins: Southern France Step back in time to key Neanderthal sites with archaeologist Rebecca Wragg Sykes. See the oldest traces left by archaic humans, including stone tools and cave paintings. newscientist.com/tours Podcast Weekly This week’s episode was recorded live at Bluedot music festival. The team discuss extraterrestrial life, reveal news of chimp doctors and chat about how they would use $100 million to save the world. newscientist.com/nspod Newsletter Fix the Planet After a sweltering few weeks, senior reporter Adam Vaughan analyses the possible outcomes of the upcoming COP27 conference, our next big chance to limit extreme weather in the future. newscientist.com/fix TikTok Ancient art Join reporter Alice Klein on her travels to Murujuga in Western Australia to see an incredible collection of ancient rock art. The area holds…

Dear reader, This is just to let you know – in case you have missed the adverts – that our flagship show, New Scientist Live, is back at ExCeL London this October after a two-year hiatus. If you have been before, I hope you can make it again this year. If you are new to the event, please let me assure you it is the highlight of everyone’s year at New Scientist and, in our view, well worth a trip. Personally, I love going to as many of the talks as possible; hearing live from the world’s top scientists and technologists fires me up for the next 12 months. I also love getting the chance to meet you, our community of readers, without whom we wouldn’t exist. This year, it…

“It has not escaped our notice…” With those famous words published in 1953, James Watson and Francis Crick described the fundamental genetic significance of the double-helix structure of DNA, based on work by Rosalind Franklin. It was a pivotal moment in biology, allowing us to understand for the first time how living organisms store the recipes for making proteins – the molecular machines that do most of the hard work in our bodies – and pass them down the generations. Another major step forward came in 2001, with the draft sequence of almost the entire human genome. That revealed the big picture, that we have around 20,000 recipes for proteins, but not the detail of what they do. To fully understand proteins requires knowing their three-dimensional structure. These can be…

DEATHS due to monkeypox have been reported outside Africa for the first time in the current outbreak. On 29 July, a 41-year-old man from Brazil became the first person known to have died from the monkeypox virus outside the African continent in 2022. Two deaths in Spain were reported soon after. India reported its first monkeypox death, a 22-year-old man, on 1 August. Five deaths have been reported in Africa. Monkeypox is typically a mild disease and people tend to recover within two to four weeks. But for some people, particularly those who are immunocompromised, it can be fatal. There have been 23,620 confirmed cases of the disease globally as of 1 August, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The vast majority of monkeypox cases outside…

DEEPMIND has predicted the structure of almost every protein so far catalogued by science, cracking one of the grand challenges of biology in just 18 months thanks to an artificial intelligence called AlphaFold. Researchers say that the work has already led to advances in combating malaria, antibiotic resistance and plastic waste, and could speed up the discovery of new drugs. Reliably predicting the complex shapes of proteins just from the sequences of amino acids they contain has been a challenge for decades in biology. Some of these amino acids are attracted to others, some are repelled by water, and the chains they form bend into intricate shapes that are hard to accurately decipher. UK-based AI firm DeepMind, which is owned by Alphabet, Google’s parent company, first announced it had developed…

TO UNDERSTAND life, we need to understand proteins. Living things are molecular machines and most of the key components are made of proteins. You are reading this article, for instance, with proteins in your retina that can detect light, various proteins that make your muscles move and so on. In one way, proteins are simple. They are made of chains that can contain up to 20 different amino acids. The sequence of amino acids in a chain is determined by the gene coding for a protein. Thanks to the cheap genome sequencing ushered in by the Human Genome Project, we now know the amino acid sequences of hundreds of millions of proteins found in viruses, bacteria, fungi, plants and animals. In most cases, however, we still don’t have a clue…