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BBC Inside Science

Protein folding; Hyabusa sample return; Holiday Covid testing

BBC Inside Science

BBC

Technology, Science

4.51.3K Ratings

🗓️ 3 December 2020

⏱️ 37 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Has one of the biggest problems in biology been solved by AI? Dr Alex Lathbridge brings you the week in science. This week google's Deep Mind team presented results of their latest efforts at cracking the 50 year old problem of Protein Folding. AlphaFold has built on previous success at predicting the 3D structures of biological proteins from just knowing the sequence of amino acids of which it is made. It is a computational problem that thousands of researchers around the world have been trying to solve for decades. There are millions of different proteins doing all the work in living cells, but simply knowing what their constituent chemicals are is not enough to understand how they are shaped, and therefore how they work. Scientists are optimistic that solving the problem will herald a new era in medicine, agriculture and even sustainable recycling. Prof John Moult, founding chair of CASP - the international body that monitors progress in the field, tells of the remarkable breakthrough being discussed this week. Whilst China is trying to bring back samples of the moon this week, a much longer-lived space mission to an asteroid hopes this weekend to return samples of the earliest bits of the solar system to earth. Hyabusa 2 will complete a 6 year mission, Japanese scientists hope, this weekend when a small package of asteroid sample drops into the atmosphere above Australia on Sunday morning. And as students across the UK prepare to make their ways home for the holidays, GP Margaret McCartney and Kavita Vedhara of Nottingham University discuss some of the challenges of fast mass covid testing and false negatives. Presented by Alex Lathbridge Produced by Alex Mansfield and Melanie Brown.

Transcript

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0:00.0

Newscast is the unscripted chat behind the headlines.

0:05.6

It's informed, but informal.

0:07.6

We pick the day's top stories and we find experts who can really dig into them.

0:12.4

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0:14.4

our contacts. Some people pick up the phone rather faster than others.

0:18.0

We sometimes literally run around the BBC building to grab the very best guests.

0:23.4

Join us for daily news chats to get you ready for today's conversations.

0:28.3

Newscast, listen on BBC Sounds.

0:31.4

BBC Sounds. B. C Sounds, music radio podcasts.

0:37.0

Hello, this is the podcast of BBC Inside Science from Radio 4.

0:42.0

First broadcast on the 3rd of December 2020. I'm Alex Southbridge.

0:46.2

Today we're on a round trip in the solar system to get answers from an asteroid.

0:50.5

Now just landing a probe is boring nowadays. This time we're sending something back home.

0:57.0

And with 22 days to go until Christmas, how does the government plan to ensure student safety as they return home for the holidays?

1:06.2

But first up for you today, we untangled the double helix almost 70 years ago and we cracked

1:11.8

the genetic code in the 1960s. We even sequenced the whole

1:15.4

human genome in 2001. You might think that we've got the basics of biology covered, but one problem

1:22.4

we've been stuck on for all that time is that we don't really know how to make the fundamental gears of our bodies.

1:28.0

I'm talking proteins. The massive news this week was that we finally cracked a 50 year old mystery and by

1:36.5

we what I'm really saying is that an artificial intelligence has cracked it

1:40.0

It's deep mind the AI company owned by Google. Deep Mind made headlines in 2015 with its program

1:48.6

Alpha Go that used machine learning to learn the board game Go, and for the first time beat not just a

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