It is March 13, 2016. Two men, dressed in winter coats and woolen hats to defend against the frigid night air, walk side-by-side through the crowded streets of downtown Seoul. Locked in animated conversation, they seem oblivious to the pulsating neon enticements of the surrounding dumpling houses and barbeque joints. They are visitors, come to […]
Artificial intelligence has just solved one of biology’s most vexing challenges: how to determine the three-dimensional shape of a protein. DeepMind, the London-based A.I. company that is owned by Google-parent Alphabet, has created an A.I. system it calls AlphaFold 2 that uses a protein’s DNA sequence to predict its folded shape, frequently to within an […]