外刊阅读 | 科学美国人 | 2024年诺贝尔化学奖揭晓

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These new, updated WHO guidelines on physical activity and sedentary behaviour, together with the WHO guidelines for under 5 years of age, provide recommendations on physical activity and sedentary behaviour for individuals across the whole age spectrum and address a long-lasting gap with the inclusion of key populations for the first time.

世卫组织关于身体活动和久坐行为的新版指南，以及针对5岁以下儿童的指南，为全年龄段人群提供了关于身体活动和久坐行为的建议，并首次将重点人群纳入其中，弥补了长期以来存在的空白。

2024 Chemistry Nobel Awarded for Cracking the Secret Code of Proteins

2024 年诺贝尔化学奖因破解蛋白质密码而颁发

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The 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded on Wednesday to three scientists for discovering how proteins—the building blocks of life and the dynamos that let cells function—do their jobs. Proteins build muscles and brains, help hearts beat on time and filter out poisons, among many other essential tasks.Half of the Nobel went jointly to researchers Demis Hassabis and John Jumper, both at Google DeepMind in London, for developing AlphaFold2—an artificial intelligence program that can predict a protein molecule’s shape and structure from its chemical building blocks, called amino acids. Because a protein’s shape determines its function, these predictions are incredibly important.

Because proteins are such basic workhorses in biology, the ability to design artificial ones is “absolutely mind-blowing,” said Johan Åqvist, a member of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, at a press conference following the announcement. Baker, awakened by a phone call from Sweden, said he was “very excited and very honored” to get the prize and that he “stood on the shoulders of giants.” Such researchers include Christian Anfinsen, a U.S. scientist who received the 1972 chemistry Nobel after discovering that proteins’ shape was almost entirely determined by their sequence of amino acids. (Baker also said that when he told his wife it was the Nobel Prize committee on the other end of the line, she yelled so loudly with excitement that he missed some of the details about who had won what.)

Forms of AI have now racked up two Nobel Prizes in two days. Scientists who worked in the 1980s and 1990s to develop artificial neural networks, a type of machine learning that helped pave the way for more recent AI, won the award in physics on Tuesday. “AI has had a transformational impact,” says Amanda Morris, a synthetic organic chemist at Virginia Tech. “It will just speed up the rate of discovery.” She notes that traditional methods such as x-ray crystallography had predicted only a relative few proteins’ structures, and little about what they did and how they did it. In contrast, the AlphaFold2 program scored about 90 on a 100-point scale of accuracy in a 2020 structure-prediction competition. The program was able to predict the 3D structure of about 200 million proteins by 2022.

Hassabis told Scientific American in a 2022 interview that the AI appears to understand the various forces that attract and repel the amino acid components to and from one another. Those forces move and twist a protein into specific configurations that the AI can forecast. And these forecasts allow researchers to investigate using the proteins to develop new pharmaceuticals, for instance. Morris says she is interested in the type of designer proteins coming from Baker’s work. She is using some of the proteins involved in photosynthesis to develop renewable energy sources. As part of the photosynthetic process, such proteins strip electrons from water, which frees the electrons to be harvested for other energy uses. “The trouble is: these proteins fall apart easily,” she says. But “if we could build artificial ones from more stable materials, we might be able to turn this into a renewable energy process that works better than nature.”

Among the artificial proteins that Baker is most excited about, he says, are molecules that block the way the COVID-causing coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, infects human cells. He and his team were able to engineer these proteins at such a small size that they could be delivered in a nasal spray rather than with the traditional shot in the arm, he told Scientific American in a 2021 article. Making these “mini binders,” as he and his team call them, would have been impossible before he and other scientists deduced some of the fundamental rules that pull certain amino acids together and push others apart, determining the shape of a protein and thus how it interacts with other molecules, such as components of a virus.

Journal：scientificamerican

Title：2024 Chemistry Nobel Awarded for Cracking the Secret Code of Proteins(October 9, 2024)

Category：Chemistry Nobel

Scientists /who worked in the 1980s and 1990s to develop artificial neural networks, a type of machine learning /that helped pave the way for more recent AI, won the award in physics on Tuesday. 

这是一个复合句，主句是：Scientists won the award in physics 。who worked in the 1980s and 1990s to develop artificial neural networks是定语从句，修饰主语Scientists，a type of machine learning that... 是artificial neural networks的同位语。

翻译：在20世纪80年代和90年代致力于开发人工神经网络（它是一种为近期的人工智能铺平道路的机器学习方法）的科学家们在周二获得了物理学奖。

The road ahead is long; I seek it out with firmness.

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