“Today [6/25/25], we introduce AlphaGenome, a new artificial intelligence (AI) tool that more comprehensively and accurately predicts how single variants or mutations in human DNA sequences impact a wide range of biological processes regulating genes…

Our AlphaGenome model takes a long DNA sequence as input — up to 1 million letters, also known as base-pairs — and predicts thousands of molecular properties characterising its regulatory activity. It can also score the effects of genetic variants or mutations by comparing predictions of mutated sequences with unmutated ones.

Predicted properties include where genes start and where they end in different cell types and tissues, where they get spliced, the amount of RNA being produced, and also which DNA bases are accessible, close to one another, or bound by certain proteins.”

From DeepMind.

“Beta Technologies’ Alia CX300 on Tuesday [6/3/25] become the first all-electric aircraft to land at a New York City airport. In partnership with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, one of Beta’s prototypes landed at John F. Kennedy International Airport (KJFK) after a passenger-carrying demonstration flight with a pilot and four passengers, including Blade Air Mobility CEO Rob Wiesenthal and Republic Airways president Matt Koscal.

According to Beta, the energy cost for the 45-minute flight was just $7 compared with what it estimated as $160 in fuel costs for a helicopter making the same trip.”

From AIN.

“Computer algorithms have designed highly efficient synthetic enzymes from scratch, with minimal need for tedious hands-on experiments to perfect them. The resulting enzymes catalyze a chemical reaction that no known natural protein can execute, achieving a reaction rate and efficiency similar to naturally occurring enzymes.

The proteins, described on 18 June in Nature, open the door to an era in which bespoke enzymes can be rapidly designed to facilitate a variety of reactions.

‘They’re remarkable,’ says Sílvia Osuna, a computational chemist at the University of Girona in Spain, who was not involved in the study. ‘It’s very hard to computationally design a highly efficient enzyme.'”

From Nature.

“Much of the internet, phone systems, television and other high-speed communications relies on a world-girdling network of fibre-optic cables. By one estimate, more than 4 billion kilometres of such cables snake beneath and between cities; the longest ones span oceans. Normally, we don’t think much about this physical network, happy just to receive the calls, web pages and cat videos it transmits. But more and more, the cables themselves are becoming a valuable source of information about the planet…

In Istanbul, these fibres have revealed potentially life-saving information about how to protect people and infrastructure against future earthquakes. Elsewhere, they are allowing researchers to measure the subsurface hum of London’s bustle, track the rumbling of Iceland’s volcanoes and map the upper reaches of our planet’s mantle. This new view of the underground has the potential to transform our understanding of the world’s constant vibration.”

From New Scientist.