Ewen Callaway

3 weeks ago | nature.com | Ewen Callaway

It’s been a month since Kári Stefánsson, the founder and former chief executive of the pioneering Icelandic genomics company deCODE genetics, says he was summarily fired by deCODE’s parent company, the biotechnology giant Amgen, and Stefánsson is his usual candid — some have said abrasive — self. “The possibility certainly exists that I’m simply a dislikable individual that they wanted to get rid of,” he says.

4 weeks ago | nature.com | Ewen Callaway

Scientists have discovered an ancient protein that has the rare property of being ‘ambidextrous’ — it can function in mirror-image forms. The molecule could be a relic of a time when life based on mirror-image molecules existed on Earth. Many chemicals have a handedness, or chirality, and can exist in two mirror-image forms. But the building blocks of life tend to stick to one or the other.

1 month ago | spektrum.de | Ewen Callaway

News Lesedauer ca. 2 Minuten DruckenTeilenTextilien: Physikalisches Modell erklärt Wölbungen von StrickmusternGestrickte Stoffe beulen oft aus. Nun haben Fachleute ein physikalisches Modell entwickelt, das die Form von Strickmustern vorhersagt – mit spannenden technischen Anwendungen.

1 month ago | nature.com | Ewen Callaway

A deadly infection that is spread by body lice might have emerged thousands of years ago thanks to a new fashion trend: wool. Ancient genomes of the spiral-shaped bacterium Borrelia recurrentis — which causes a neglected disease called louse-borne relapsing fever (LBRF) — suggest that the pathogen diverged from a less deadly tick-transmitted infection around 5,000 years ago.

1 month ago | nature.com | Ewen Callaway

I recently used AI to design an awful protein. Following step-by-step instructions, I made a rudimentary protein language model (PLM) — an artificial intelligence (AI) tool that churns out protein sequences instead of words. With a couple of lines of copied-and-pasted code, I asked the model to dream up a short sequence of amino acids. I didn’t know how bad my protein was until I asked AlphaFold, Google DeepMind’s protein-structure predictor, what it looked like.