🔮 Breakthrough week; Reaching net-zero; Australian hydrogen & the inflationary diet ++ #332

Hi, I’m Azeem Azhar. I convene Exponential View to help us understand how our societies and political economy will change under the force of rapidly accelerating technologies.

Dept of Near Future

Breakthrough week

🌟 Two major breakthroughs for the exponential transition in one week. The first is from Demis Hassabis and his team at Deepmind, which announced work that had “more than doubled humanity’s accumulated knowledge of high-accuracy human protein structures”. This data set, built using their AlphaFold technology, includes the 20,000 proteins expressed by the human genome (the proteome), as well as 350,000 other proteins from common organisms. It’s a massive deal.

The new protein structure database is freely available and will form a bedrock of collective knowledge for scientists. It will allow them to accelerate research in neglected diseases as well as speed up our shift to the bioeconomy. (An accessible backgrounder on this project and what it will do for the stock of human knowle…