Table Of ContentPLUS BEST BOOKS OF 2020 / WHY HALLOUMI SOUEAKS /
COULD CRISPR PREVENT ALZHEIMER’S? / SPACE LAUNDRY /
WASPS V PLANES / HOW SCANDINAVIANS COPE WITH WINTER
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WEEKLY 5 December 2020 No3311
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HOW TO HAVE A
COVID-CAUTIOUS
CHRISTMAS
THE SOLAR SYSTEM’S
COOLEST VOLCANOES
OUESTIONS OVER
OXFORD VACCINE TRIAL
DEEPMIND CRACKS
PROTEIN FOLDING
YOUR
INVENTING
MIND
A new theory of how humans came to
innovate and create
By Simon Baron-Cohen
'
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INTRODUCES
5 December 2020 | New Scientist | 1
On the
cover
23 How to have a covid-
cautious Christmas
44 The solar system’s
coolest volcanoes
8 Questions over Oxford
vaccine trial
15 DeepMind cracks
protein folding
News
Views
Features
9 Europe’s lockdowns
Have winter restrictions halted
the coronavirus second wave?
10 Back to normal
China appears to have
beaten covid-19
12 A lonely island
A small outcrop survived the
tsunami that helped split
Britain from Europe
23 Comment
Clare Wilson on covid-cautious
Christmas celebrations
24 The columnist
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein
explores dark matter halos
26 Letters
Plentiful views on the great
population debate
28 Aperture
Dazzling, award-winning
pictures of nature
30 Culture
Our pick of the best books for
Christmas gifts or pleasure
51 Science of cooking
How to flavour food with smoke
52 Puzzles
Try our quick crossword,
quiz and brain-teaser
54 The last word
What happens to the information
in your brain after death?
56 Feedback
Pinboard paradoxes and
resurrecting Charles Darwin
56 Twisteddoodles
for New Scientist
Picturing the lighter side of life
34 Your restless mind
The two brain circuits that
shed light on humans’ unique
capacity for invention
40 Kari Leibowitz interview
Facing a winter with covid-19
restrictions? A change of attitude
may make it more bearable
44 Alien eruptions
Bizarre volcanoes are found
on many planets and moons
The back pages
15 Protein progress Biologists hail a medical revolution thanks to AI
Vol 248 No 3311
Cover image: Brian Stauffer
34 Your inventing mind
A new theory of how humans
came to innovate and create
By Simon Baron-Cohen
CHRISTOPH BURGSTEDT/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY
News
30 Best books of 2020 54 Why
halloumi squeaks 13 Could CRISPR
prevent Alzheimer’s? 17 Space
laundry 21 Wasps v planes 40 How
Scandinavians cope with winter
This week’s issue
44 Features
“ Io’s yellow
surface is
pockmarked
with more
than 400
volcanoes
and their
eruptions
glow blue”
2 | New Scientist | 5 December 2020
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5 December 2020 | New Scientist | 5
ALMOST a century ago, a chance
discovery revolutionised medicine.
Alexander Fleming left a petri dish of
bacteria out while he went on a two-week
holiday. On his return, he found that
the dish had been contaminated by a
fungus that produced an antibacterial
substance. He named it penicillin, and
it has since saved millions of lives.
Even in the modern world, drug
discovery still essentially relies on
chance. Pharmaceutical companies
often screen thousands of compounds
trying to find one with the desired effect.
The dream, though, is to make
drug development a much faster and
more rational process. Almost all the
machinery of life is made of proteins,
and pretty much every drug works
by binding to proteins and changing
what they do. In principle, it should
be possible to use computers to work
out the shape of proteins and then
design drugs to bind to specific sites.
Thanks to the genome revolution,
it is now easy to discover the DNA
recipe for any protein. Figuring out
their shapes, however, still requires
expensive experiments that can take
years. As a result, we know the recipes
for 180 million proteins, but the shapes
of only about 170,000.
That is about to change, thanks
to artificial intelligence. DeepMind’s
AlphaFold system solves protein shapes
like a jigsaw puzzle. It works out the easy
bits first, based on what it has learned
about other proteins, and then gradually
puts all the parts together over a matter
of days. It is the first computer-based
system to achieve results that match
those of experimental methods – but
much faster (see page 15).
The hope is that this kind of approach
can be extended to predict how proteins
interact with other molecules, to find
or design drugs that have specific effects.
Accomplishing this would revolutionise
medicine all over again.
Biologists will still have to carry
out lab experiments and clinical trials.
Biology is too messy and complicated
for artificial intelligence to do all
the work. But AlphaFold and its ilk
should greatly accelerate the already
astonishing pace of progress, and
millions more lives could be saved. ❚
The shape of things to come
DeepMind’s latest AI could spark a medical revolution
The leader
“ We know the recipes for
180 million proteins, but the
shapes of only about 170,000.
That is about to change”
EDITORIAL
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