3 min
One Sentence News / May 13, 2024 One Sentence News
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- Daily News
Three news stories summarized & contextualized by analytic journalist Colin Wright.
Pioneering gene therapy restores UK girl's hearing
Summary: A British girl who was born deaf underwent a new gene-therapy treatment just before her first birthday, and now—six months after that treatment—can hear as if she was never deaf, and is beginning to talk.
Context: This treatment uses a virus that is modified to be harmless, but which carries a working copy of a gene into the relevant portion of the patient’s ear; that gene, when inoperable, is what causes this type of deafness, and the therapy basically replaces that gene, which in turn repairs hair cells in a part of the ear called the cochlea, which is what allows the ear to capture sound; more than half of hearing-loss cases in children are genetic and thus potentially targetable by this sort of therapy, and researchers are hoping that, with time, this same general approach will allow them to address other sorts of hearing loss, as well.
—BBC News
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Israel pushes back into northern Gaza and ups military pressure on Rafah
Summary: Following a night of heavily bombing the area, Israeli forces moved into eastern Jabalia in the northern part of the Gaza Strip, and where the Strip’s largest historic refugee camp, which currently houses more than 100,000 people, is located.
Context: The Israeli military said it needed to clamp-down on Jabalia because Hamas operatives were beginning to reestablish themselves there now that Israel has turned most of its attention toward the southern portion of the Strip, and civilians in Jabalia are being told to move south just as civilians in the southern city Rafah are being told to flee north, as Israeli forces down there continue to bombard and make small incursions into the city, preparing for what’s expected to be a larger invasion sometime soon.
—Reuters
Google DeepMind’s new AI can model DNA, RNA, and ‘all life’s molecules’
Summary: In the wake of the release of AlphaFold 2 a few years ago—which is an AI model that’s capable of predicting the final shapes of every known protein, a few hundred million of them, with usable accuracy most of the time—Google’s DeepMind team has announced a new version of the model, AlphaFold 3, which boasts a 50% improvement in accuracy and the capacity to model other sorts of molecules as well, according to the company.
Context: There’s a big difference between being able to explain what goes into a molecule and how that molecule will look in real life—a bit like the difference between having a written recipe and knowing what the final dish you’re preparing will look like, in detail; the “protein folding problem” pointed at this difficulty, and though about 170,000 proteins were 3D-modeled in their folded state over the past 60 years or so, doing such modeling is expensive and tedious, so AlphaFold’s capacity to model these proteins, taking what amounts to just the ingredients list and doing so with sufficient accuracy that researchers could work from the resulting prediction, was a big deal; this new model will purportedly allow researchers to do the same with DNA, RNA, and other sorts of molecules (and the interactions between them), which ostensibly will allow for all sorts of new research that wasn’t previously possible, including the modeling of new drugs, faster and cheaper; like previous iterations of AlphaFold, this third iteration is being made available free for academic and noncommercial uses, and is free for some commercial partners, as well.
—The Verge
Palestinian civilians who fled to Rafah on the Israeli military’s orders are now being told to leave the city and head north to a point just south of another Israeli military mustering point aimed at previously invaded portions of the Strip where Hamas is allegedly retaking control.
—The Wa
Three news stories summarized & contextualized by analytic journalist Colin Wright.
Pioneering gene therapy restores UK girl's hearing
Summary: A British girl who was born deaf underwent a new gene-therapy treatment just before her first birthday, and now—six months after that treatment—can hear as if she was never deaf, and is beginning to talk.
Context: This treatment uses a virus that is modified to be harmless, but which carries a working copy of a gene into the relevant portion of the patient’s ear; that gene, when inoperable, is what causes this type of deafness, and the therapy basically replaces that gene, which in turn repairs hair cells in a part of the ear called the cochlea, which is what allows the ear to capture sound; more than half of hearing-loss cases in children are genetic and thus potentially targetable by this sort of therapy, and researchers are hoping that, with time, this same general approach will allow them to address other sorts of hearing loss, as well.
—BBC News
One Sentence News is a reader-supported publication. To support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Israel pushes back into northern Gaza and ups military pressure on Rafah
Summary: Following a night of heavily bombing the area, Israeli forces moved into eastern Jabalia in the northern part of the Gaza Strip, and where the Strip’s largest historic refugee camp, which currently houses more than 100,000 people, is located.
Context: The Israeli military said it needed to clamp-down on Jabalia because Hamas operatives were beginning to reestablish themselves there now that Israel has turned most of its attention toward the southern portion of the Strip, and civilians in Jabalia are being told to move south just as civilians in the southern city Rafah are being told to flee north, as Israeli forces down there continue to bombard and make small incursions into the city, preparing for what’s expected to be a larger invasion sometime soon.
—Reuters
Google DeepMind’s new AI can model DNA, RNA, and ‘all life’s molecules’
Summary: In the wake of the release of AlphaFold 2 a few years ago—which is an AI model that’s capable of predicting the final shapes of every known protein, a few hundred million of them, with usable accuracy most of the time—Google’s DeepMind team has announced a new version of the model, AlphaFold 3, which boasts a 50% improvement in accuracy and the capacity to model other sorts of molecules as well, according to the company.
Context: There’s a big difference between being able to explain what goes into a molecule and how that molecule will look in real life—a bit like the difference between having a written recipe and knowing what the final dish you’re preparing will look like, in detail; the “protein folding problem” pointed at this difficulty, and though about 170,000 proteins were 3D-modeled in their folded state over the past 60 years or so, doing such modeling is expensive and tedious, so AlphaFold’s capacity to model these proteins, taking what amounts to just the ingredients list and doing so with sufficient accuracy that researchers could work from the resulting prediction, was a big deal; this new model will purportedly allow researchers to do the same with DNA, RNA, and other sorts of molecules (and the interactions between them), which ostensibly will allow for all sorts of new research that wasn’t previously possible, including the modeling of new drugs, faster and cheaper; like previous iterations of AlphaFold, this third iteration is being made available free for academic and noncommercial uses, and is free for some commercial partners, as well.
—The Verge
Palestinian civilians who fled to Rafah on the Israeli military’s orders are now being told to leave the city and head north to a point just south of another Israeli military mustering point aimed at previously invaded portions of the Strip where Hamas is allegedly retaking control.
—The Wa
3 min