“A genetic atlas emerging from India’s most extensive genomic sequencing exercise has revealed vast diversity in the population, with nearly 130 million genetic variants, almost a third of which have not been reported previously.

The GenomeIndia project analysed the whole genomes of 9,768 healthy people from 83 populations, uncovering 44 million variants absent from global scientific databases, including gnomAD, 1000 Genomes Project and GenomeAsia.

“We expected novel variants, but the sheer proportion stumped us,” says corresponding author and computational biologist Bratati Kahali at the Centre for Brain Research, Bengaluru. “Even after excluding variants observed only once and considering those where at least two alleles were seen, novel hits accounted for over 10% of all discoveries.”

Funded by India’s Department of Biotechnology through a consortium of 20 research institutions, the map opens up a path for investigations into human ancestry, disease genetics, pharmacogenetics and precision medicine across South Asia. Aiming to scale to a million genomes and disease-specific cohorts, the project seeks to fill gaps in global databases skewed toward populations of European descent.”

From Nature.

“I’m writing this post because when I look at all the publicly available information I reluctantly come to the view that there’s a likely chance (60%+) that no-human-involved AI R&D – an AI system powerful enough that it could plausibly autonomously build its own successor – happens by the end of 2028.

This is a big deal.

I don’t know how to wrap my head around it.

It’s a reluctant view because the implications are so large that I feel dwarfed by them, and I’m not sure society is ready for the kinds of changes implied by achieving automated AI R&D.

I now believe we are living in the time that AI research will be end-to-end automated. If that happens, we will cross a Rubicon into a nearly-impossible-to-forecast future. More on this later.

The purpose of this essay is to enumerate why I think the takeoff towards fully automated AI R&D is happening.”

From Import AI.

“Johnson & Johnson is using artificial intelligence to slash by half the time it ‌takes to generate new leads for developing drugs, the company’s chief information officer said on Monday.

Discovering new products outright and bringing them to market using AI is not yet possible, but J&J is using the new technology to screen the “potential universe” for promising chemical compounds or ​biologics, CIO Jim Swanson said at the Reuters Momentum AI event in New York…

J&J is also using AI to streamline preparation of documents for regulators. The traditional process for a clinical trial report can take 700 to 900 hours, the CIO ​said.
That time has gone from ‘700 ​hours to about 15 ⁠minutes,’ Swanson said.”

From Reuters.

“Researchers are a step closer to understanding volcanic lightning, one of the most spectacular atmospheric phenomena, which can be seen playing among the clouds of smoke and ash during an eruption. The intensity is extreme: the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha‘apai eruption, in the Tongan archipelago in 2022, produced more than 2,600 lightning flashes a minute stretching up to 19 miles (31km) above sea level.

We know that storm clouds become electrically charged as a result of collisions between ice crystals rising in updraughts and falling particles of graupel, or soft hail. The ice picks up positive charge and the hail negative. What has puzzled scientists is how a volcanic plume, which is dry and consists of ash and rock fragments, could pick up charge. Particles made from the same rocky material should not do that during collisions.

New research published in Nature from the Institute of Science and Technology Austria shows the secret lies in a fine coating of carbon-rich molecules. Perfectly clean particles of silica did not tend to pick up charge, but where there was a carbon coating, charge transfer happened in collisions. The effect could be produced simply by heating the silica, as there are enough carbon-containing molecules in normal air to produce surface contamination.”

From The Guardian.