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The U.S. National Science Foundation Directorate for Technology, Innovation and Partnerships is giving $32 billion to five teams involved in using artificial intelligence-based approaches to protein design.
The goal is to speed up design of novel proteins with specific, desirable characteristics.



The new funding will be for:

Purdue University — Programmable Small Molecule Biosynthesis

UC Santa Barbara — De Novo Design and Evolution of Enzymes for Biomass Upcycling to Surfactants and Fuels

Arzeda Corp. — AI-designed Enzymes using Non-natural Cofactors for the Production of Bio-based Acrylates

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California has an environmental problem. The state is overwhelmingly desert and rain is scarce for 10 months out of the year. Water instead arrives from the mountains. Yet the state legislature and government are allied with environmentalists. They want dams torn down, which means water from the mountains that melts in the spring and summer can't be gathered. Not only do environmentalists now hate dams, their political supermajority has even stalled the water infrastructure improvements voters demanded over 10 years ago, using endless government panel reviews.

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The El Niño climate phenomenon is consistently inconsistent, which plays havoc with computer models hoping to anticipate the effects of increased emissions from large polluting countries like China.

It may even be causing periodic booms and busts in spiders and overall insects.

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Over 1 million years ago, early hominims made a treacherous deep sea crossing to reach the Indonesian island of Sulawesi and in a modern corn field local people discovered what looked like stone tools in the sedimentary layers and called in archaeologists.

What they found in the Early Pleistocene site of Calio reset the date for colonization of the island; seven stone artifacts. Because this was near a river channel, the researchers believe this would have been the hub for hominin tool-making and other activities such as hunting.

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Methanetetrol, the only alcohol which has four hydroxyl groups (OH) at a single carbon atom, is out of this world.

Scientists meant that literally, it had been only theorized because it cannot occur naturally in Earth's everyday conditions but in extreme conditions of space it was assumed to exist. Now after a century of hypothetical existence, ultra-cold temperatures, near-perfect vacuum and high-energy radiation to simulate the environment inside interstellar clouds have combined to make it real.

The scientists from institutions in Russia, communist China, Hawaii, and Mississippi, believe their work could reshape our understanding of chemistry in the universe and shed light on the complex reactions happening in deep space.

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In the previous article here, I tangentially examined a situation that arises often in collaborative data analysis: the digestion of the results in scientific graphs. The focus of that discussion was the building of a sceptical thinking attitude in my student - it is a really important asset in experimental science.

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A recent meta-analysis of 151 studies included 11,307 instances of some conditions physicians and scientists dismiss and critics of medicine deem it medical "gaslighting." Joining them are alternative medicine proponents, like Folk Traditional Alternative Complementary Integrative physician Jacob Teitelbaum, MD. As with Drs. Oz and Mark Hyman, he went to medical school only to declare that supernatural forces have been in play all along, forces that only herbs and supplements can help.

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Suppose we, meaning the human race, survive climate change, pandemics, and nuclear proliferation. What then? I’m talking about the long run.

We’ve got a faction who think the Earth would have been better off had we not survived – as if the rest of the ecosystem wouldn’t suffer from the radioactivity or the infections that killed us off.

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A new paper from a California university warns that dust is changing the microbiome of mice.

Because it is just in mice, and mice are not little people, this is only EXPLORATORY, but so are claims about vaccines, GMOs, and corn syrup and because scientists didn't stand up to those when epidemiology papers claimed their correlation was really causation, it might be worth nipping this in the rodent before the Los Angeles Times prints it as human fact.

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'Green' chemical products have generally gotten a pass from the environmental community but with one of their own, former Natural Resources Defense Council lawyer Robert F. Kennedy, now in charge of a gigantic government health agency and going after the modern world, the lawsuit money is too good to pass up. So-called eco-friendly chemical products have come under fire.

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Lately I have been writing lots of reference letters for students who are applying to Ph.D. positions in Physics, and in so doing I have found myself pondering on the dubious usefulness of that exercise. So let me share a bit of my thoughts on the matter here.

Reference letters are meant to be an important input for academic selections, because they provide first-hand information on the previous experience of the candidates, from scholars who are supposed to be authoritative enough to be trusted, and unconcerned enough to provide a unbiased assessment. 

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The polyphagous Spodoptera frugiperda (fall armyworm), a Lepidopteran pest, has European farmers in a panic and, when the environmental NGOs government funds are not around, it has politicians concerned also. 

Though classified as a priority pest since 2023, fall armyworm remains easy to establish and fast to spread. Corn crops, a vital part of EU agriculture, remain at risk. Despite that, policymakers have been promoted using pesticides which work poorly but are approved by environmental groups while talking about climate change. The problem is clear but environmental activists have insisted human health and the environment will be impacted unless legacy products that are ineffective remain the sole solution.

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Yellowstone was the first national park designated in the United States and is a popular tourist destination, but there is a lot going on underneath that people never feel.

A new analysis of 15 years of historical earthquake data from the Yellowstone caldera used machine learning and found an order of magnitude more seismic events than previously acknowledged. 

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In early 2025, the Trump administration began to place tariffs on countries that already had them on the U.S., like China, Brazil, and many in Europe. China has already begun to experience deflation but a new book reveals that the business sector likely to be impacted most is the $500,000,000,000 counterfeiting business there.

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Real world data show that the respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) vaccine rolled out for pregnant women in the UK last year has already resulted in a 72 percent drop in babies being admitted to the hospital among women who took it. 

Experts predict that as more women take it, England is the home of both the modern anti-vaccine and anti-GMO movements so change takes time, it will further reduce the number of needlessly sick babies each year and therefore the burden on the overtaxed National Health Service system.

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In the 1980s, the majority party in Congress saw demography claims that people with college educations made more money than those without.  Universities began to lobby for student loan changes. Many smaller private schools were facing funding crunches and people going to college would fix that.

The drumbeat for equitable treatment for the poor got louder and as part of other governance, Congress included changes that made so student loans, which originated thanks to President Johnson in 1965, were now unlimited. Because governance is governance, a Republican president signed it over the objections of those who said it was turning a Bachelor's degree into the new high school diploma. Nearly everyone would have one, except with debt.(1)

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Gen X is getting its own Captain America. This is a big deal. Culturally, Boomers as cultural majority gave way to the next large demographic, Millennials, while Gen X got slighted. Even though we had the best music since the 1940s.

On the plus side, being a minority means we don't get hate. Gen Z dislikes millennials for being cringe, millennials dislike Gen Z for being so Puritan, and everyone dislikes Boomers because they won't stop talking about Woodstock and Kennedy. Some argue that instead of being too small to matter we are the coolest but that's subjective.

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The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has sent seven recent letters sent to companies selling products containing 7-hydroxymitragynine, also known as 7-OH.1, an illegal opioid.

It became popular because it is found in the dangerous supplement kratom, illegal even in the country that exports it to the United States, and supplement grifters also began selling the compound in gummies, drink mixes, and shots.

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It's always easy to be critical of government, but while the new administration cut grants for sociologists who want to "study" why people still play Everquest 2, it also boosted funding for the National Animal Health Laboratory Network, and programs like the National Animal Disease Preparedness and Response Program and the National Animal Vaccine and Veterinary Countermeasures Bank.

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Every day we read a new headline warning us that American leadership is about to erode because of budget cuts to 'science.'

We have been told tuberculosis was about to be cured but a grant got cut and, gosh darn it, now Republicans ruined it. We have been told we'll be set back for generations.

If you don't want to spend a lot of time reading more, I can tell you plainly that after two decades of covering science in a way 'post whatever is new every day to sell advertising' corporate media will not; government is never why America leads in science. Government is barely even why America leads in Nobel Prizes.

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