“Lost During Transportation".

The first virtual human cell.

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1. Berthed in China’s port city of Guangzhou is the future of scientific ocean drilling: the $470 million Meng Xiang, a brand-new, 180-meter-long ship. Starting next year Meng Xiang—Chinese for “Dream”—will begin drilling into seafloor rock and sediment at sites throughout the world’s oceans to investigate plate tectonics, ancient marine climates, and deep-buried microbial life. It will also embark on a daring mission to pierce Earth’s crust and reach the mantle below. At a workshop last month in Guangzhou, researchers discussed the research agenda and toured the ship, which has nine dedicated science laboratories and a drilling rig that promises to delve deeper than any previous research ship. “I’m green with jealousy,” says Henry Dick, a geologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. “This ship has the capacity to answer fundamental climate, oceanographic, microbiological, and earth science questions … for the next 50 years,” says paleoceanographer Peter Bijl of Utrecht University. (Source: science.org)

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2. Stanford Report:

Noting that recent advances in artificial intelligence and the existence of large-scale experimental data about human biology have reached a critical mass, a team of researchers from Stanford University, Genentech, and the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative says that science has an “unprecedented opportunity” to use artificial intelligence (AI) to create the world’s first virtual human cell. Such a cell would be able to represent and simulate the precise behavior of human biomolecules, cells, and, eventually, tissues and organs.

“Modeling human cells can be considered the holy grail of biology,” said Emma Lundberg, associate professor of bioengineering and of pathology in the schools of Engineering and Medicine at Stanford and a senior author of a new article in the journal Cell proposing a concerted, global effort to create the world’s first AI virtual cell. “AI offers the ability to learn directly from data and to move beyond assumptions and hunches to discover the emergent properties of complex biological systems.”