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Billion Proteins, Hidden Species & Singapore's 37% Loss
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
An AI atlas maps over a billion protein structures from organisms science hasn't formally catalogued — dwarfing AlphaFold's database overnight. Plus: a sesame-seed sea slug, a Colombia cloud-forest orchid named on discovery, and a model that resets extinction baselines worldwide.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
A new AI model just mapped over one billion protein structures and released all of them to the public for free. That's the lead today, and it earns it.
The signal worth watching isn't just scale. It's access.
Shifting to a discovery at the opposite end of the scale. Off the coast of Keelung, Taiwan, researchers formally described a new nudibranch species this month.
In Colombia's Serranía de Juaica, a cloud forest in the Cundinamarca region, researchers identified a new orchid species named Epidendrum juaicaense. The name honors the indigenous Muisca people of the area.
A statistical study offers one of the clearest quantifications of what urbanization costs. Using a model called MODGEE, researchers calculated that Singapore has lost thirty-seven percent of its species over two hundred years, driven by deforestation and urban expansion.
The thread connecting these stories is straightforward. Biology is generating knowledge faster than it's protecting what it finds.
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