The Language of Proteins.

James Carville has a plan.

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1. Years before people are diagnosed with dementia, they often begin facing financial problems, new research from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York has found. Analyzing both U.S. credit score reports and Medicare data, the researchers found that in the five years before someone is diagnosed with dementia, they begin acting irresponsibly with their money. The magnitude of these payment delinquencies, combined with the long pre-diagnosis period during which they occur, is “remarkable,” the researchers wrote. “Although not everyone in early stage [Alzheimer’s disease and related disorders] will experience a payment delinquency, for those who do, the scale of the change in delinquency is substantial,” the researchers said.  One year prior to diagnosis, average credit card debts increased by more than 50%, while mortgage debt increased by 11%, on average. (Sources: newyorkfed.org, fortune.com)

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2. An artificial intelligence (AI) model that speaks the language of proteins — one of the largest yet developed for biology — has been used to create new fluorescent molecules. The proof-of-principle demonstration was announced this month by EvolutionaryScale in New York City, alongside $142 million in new funding to apply its model to drug development, sustainability and other pursuits. The company, launched by scientists who previously worked at tech giant Meta, is the latest entrant in an increasingly crowded field that is applying cutting-edge machine-learning models trained on language and images to biological data. EvolutionaryScale’s AI tool, called ESM3, is what’s known as a protein language model. It was trained on more than 2.7 billion protein sequences and structures, as well as information about these proteins’ functions. The model can be used to create proteins to specifications provided by users, akin to the text spit out by chatbots such as ChatGPT. (Sources: nature.com, biorxiv.org, italics mine)

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3. A team of researchers in Japan and the United Kingdom have smashed the world record for fiber optic communications through commercial-grade fiber. By broadening fiber’s communication bandwidth, the team has produced data rates four times as fast as existing commercial systems—and 33 percent better than the previous world record. The researchers’ success derives in part from their innovative use of optical amplifiers to boost signals across communications bands that conventional fiber optics technology today less-frequently uses. “It’s just more spectrum, more or less,” says Ben Puttnam, chief senior researcher at the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) in Koganei, Japan. Puttnam says the researchers have built their communications hardware stack from optical amplifiers and other equipment developed, in part, by Nokia Bell Labs and the Hong Kong-based company Amonics. (Source: spectrum.ieee.org)

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4. NATO is helping finance a project aimed at finding ways to keep the internet running should subsea cables shuttling civilian and military communications across European waters come under attack. Researchers, who include academics from the US, Iceland, Sweden and Switzerland, say they want to develop a way to seamlessly reroute internet traffic from subsea cables to satellite systems in the event of sabotage, or a natural disaster. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s Science for Peace and Security Program has approved a grant of as much as €400,000 ($433,600) for the $2.5 million project, and research institutions are providing in-kind contributions, documents seen by Bloomberg show. Eyup Kuntay Turmus, adviser and program manager at the NATO program, confirmed the project was recently approved and said by email that implementation will start “very soon.” (Source: bloomberg.com)

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5. Australia, backed by allies including the US, UK and Japan, has accused a Chinese state-backed cyber hacking group of targeting the country’s government and private sector networks.  The statement on Tuesday was backed by security and intelligence agencies from Five Eyes partner countries the US, UK, Canada and New Zealand as well as Germany, Japan and South Korea, and cited a “shared understanding” of a Chinese “state-sponsored cyber group and their current threat to Australian networks”. The intelligence agencies said the group conducted “malicious cyber operations” for China’s Ministry of State Security, adding that its activity and methods overlapped with a group previously identified as Advanced Persistent Threat 40. Western intelligence agencies previously have accused APT40, which was reported to be based in China’s southern Hainan province, of infiltrating government agencies, companies and universities in the US, Canada, Europe and the Middle East, under the orders from the ministry. (Source: ft.com)

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