Regulating Generative Artificial Intelligence: Is There Still a Way to Go From AlphaFold to the Banks of Nature?

Recent developments, such as artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, are yet to be governed by global agreements, but they must be as well. Large language models and generative AI — this year’s biggest disruptive innovations — need to be applied such that their potential to do harm does not outweigh their benefits. Nature regularly reports on the challenges posed by generative AI technologies and the current lack of regulation. At some point, such systems and innovations will need to be regulated by globally coordinated agreements.

A new version of Google DeepMind’s AI tool AlphaFold, which researchers have used to predict the 3D shapes of proteins with high accuracy, is also due to be released next year. The AI will be capable of modelling interactions between proteins, nucleic acids and other molecules with atomic precision, which could open up new possibilities in drug design and discovery.

It is not possible to predict what innovations will look like in 100 years. It is safe to say that the world’s societies, economies, and environment will change again. The international community is coordinating regulatory responses to new inventions to avoid disruptive innovations that do more harm than good.

The scientific agenda to watch for in 2024: from the Simons Observatory in Chile to the World Mosquito Program in Brazil and the WHO’s swine flu treaty in Brazil

Also in Chile, the Simons Observatory in the Atacama Desert will be complete in mid-2024. This next-generation cosmology experiment will look for signatures of primordial gravitational waves — the afterglow of the Big Bang — in the cosmic microwave background. More than a thousand similar projects are under way, and its telescopes will beequipped with more than 50,000 light-collecting detectors.

Astronomers continue to worry that new ground-based telescope data could be rendered unusable because of an increasing number of bright satellite constellations polluting the night sky with light.

The World Mosquito Program will start producing mosquitoes in Brazil next year. The mosquitos are infected by a bacterial strain that prevents them from transmitting pathogenic viruses, and could protect up to 70 million people from diseases such as dengue and zika. The non-profit organization will produce 5 billion mosquitoes a year over the next 10 years.

The US government is funding trials on two of three next-generation vaccines which are intended to prevent infections by inducing immunity in airway tissues. The third, an mRNA vaccine, boosts antibodies and T-cell responses, promising to provide long-lasting immunity against a broad range of SARS-CoV-2 variants.

The final draft of the World Health Organisation’s treaty on swine flu is expected to be released in May. The accord hopes to equip governments around the world to manage and prevent future Pandemics. The 194 WHO member states will decide on the terms of the accord, including whether any of its provisions will be legally binding. At the centre of negotiations is ensuring equitable access to the tools, including vaccines, data and expertise, that are needed to prevent pandemics.

Source: The science events to watch for in 2024

The science events to watch for in 2024: NASA’s lunar mission, BabyIAXO, and Mars’s Chang-e-6 mission

For the first time since the 1970s, NASA is launching a crewed lunar mission. Artemis II could launch as soon as next November, and will carry four astronauts — three men and one woman — aboard the Orion spacecraft for a ten-day flyby around the Moon. Artemis II will lay the groundwork for the subsequent Artemis III mission, which will land the first woman and next man on the Moon. China is about to launch its Chang-e-6 lunar sample-return mission. If successful, the mission will be the first to collect samples from the far side of the Moon.

NASA will be sending a craft to explore Jupiter’s moon, Europa, next October. Its objective is to determine whether the moon’s underground ocean could harbour life. The Japan will fly a mission to visit Mars’s moons, Phobos and Deimos. In 2029, it will return to Earth with surface samples from Phobos.

Results of an experiment to detect dark-matter particles known as axions will see light in 2024. Axions are thought to be emitted by the Sun and converted into light, but the tiny particles have not yet been observed experimentally because they require sensitive detection tools and an extremely strong magnetic field. The experiment BabyIAXO at the German Electron Synchrotron in Hamburg is using a solar telescope made of a 10-metre-long magnet and ultra-sensitive noise-free X-ray detectors to track the centre of the Sun for 12 hours per day, to capture the conversion of axions into photons.

In order to understand particle physics, scientists need to know how the mass of the neutrino is divided into two parts. Results of the Karlsruhe Tritium Neutrino experiment in 2022 showed that neutrinos had a maximum mass of 0.8 electron volts. Researchers are going to make a definite measurement of the tiny particles in a few years.

Source: The science events to watch for in 2024

Brains, Brains and Environment: Exascale Computing and the Second Round of the Global Climate Agreement (Apr2024/Jupiter)

The neural basis of consciousness could be explored next year. A large project that is testing two theories of consciousness through a series of adversarial experiments is expected to release the results of its second experiment by the end of 2024. Both theories failed to match the observed data and settled a 25-year bet on philosophy over neuroscience. The second round could make neuroscience more aware of the subjective experience.

In the second half of 2024, the International Court of Justice in the Hague could give an opinion on nations’ legal obligations to combat climate change, and rule on legal consequences for those deemed to be damaging the climate. Although the ruling won’t be binding on the government, the court’s power can push countries to make improvements to their climate goals.

Negotiations for the UN plastics treaty, which seeks to establish a binding international agreement to eliminate plastic pollution, will wrap up next year. In the past six decades the world has produced 10 billion tons of plastic, of which more than 7 billion are waste and are harmful to wildlife. UN negotiations started last year and are moving too slowly and may not achieve the intended goals.

Early next year, researchers will switch on Jupiter, Europe’s first exascale supercomputer. The gigantic machine can perform one quintillion (a billion billion) computations each second. The machine will be used to create a model of the human heart and brain, as well as to run simulations of Earth’s climate.

The United States will have exascale machines installed in a few years’ time. Aurora at Argonne National Laboratory in Lemont, Illinois, and El Capitan at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. Scientists will use Aurora to create maps of the brain and El Capitan to recreate the effects of a nuclear detonation.

How 100 years have shaped science? From Einstein to AI: how the universe has changed from the first scientific revolution to the early detection of gravitational waves

The subject of talks to limit their pollution is Baekeland’s life-changing plastic. The process for making ammonia is governed by two international conventions. The first will attempt to limit or reduce greenhouse gas emissions from this chemical’s production. The treaty to eliminate chemical weapons is an application of the invention that he supported during the First World War.

Society has changed in other ways as well. The century has taught researchers a lot about the dangers of innovations such as plastic. In response, countries have established legally binding agreements through the United Nations to limit the harms of scientific and technological innovations.

In 2012 physicists discovered the particles that make up the universe, almost 50 years after they were first predicted. And in 2015, gravitational waves were first detected directly11, almost 100 years to the day after general relativity provided a theoretical basis for their existence.

It’s hard to argue that some of the discoveries of the twenty-first century so far haven’t been disruptive, in the sense of providing new directions for science. Scientists created the first draft of the human genome in 2001 with help of global collaborations and found a way to edit genes efficiently in 2012 These achievements also enabled researchers to swiftly develop mRNA vaccines during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The scientific landscape has changed so much that it would be unrecognizable to someone who lived 100 years ago. The scale of science and innovation is alien to scientists of old because it is funded predominantly by industries. Both foreign and familiar, how research is disseminated to scientific peers and society is just one of many parts of how science is communicated. And researchers bear many new ethical, legal and societal responsibilities.

Source: From Einstein to AI: how 100 years have shaped science

The Makers of Ammonia: Early Scientific Developments and the Origins of Humankind in Africa (The Australian Anthropologist Raymond Dart 1925)

The method for making ammonia was patented by a German chemist and another in 1913. Their process of manufacturing ammonia by fixing nitrogen from the air became the basis of the fertilizers that remain crucial to global food security today.

People would be shaped in a more practical way by the scientific breakthrough. Baking soda, or bake lite, was a Belgian invention that became the basis of today’s plastics. The material was made from long, unbreakable chains. It was easy to dye because it didn’t conduct electricity, and it was moldable.

Other scientific areas also saw rapid developments. Thomas Hunt Morgan pioneered the use of fruit flies to show how genes live on chromosomes, which was a crucial step in the path to modern genetics. That same year, Marie Curie successfully isolated pure radium (element 88 in the periodic table). The first evidence that Africa is the cradle of humankind was provided by Australian anthropologist Raymond Dart in 1925.