What once required decades of doctoral servitude can now be accomplished in seconds. Australian researchers have joined the protein design arms race, creating therapeutic molecules using AI platforms that churn out custom proteins.

These breakthroughs impact everything from cancer drugs to snakebite antidotes, using tools with names like Bindcraft and Chai (probably also conjured up with AI). The process works by predicting how amino acid sequences will fold into three-dimensional shapes, essentially reverse-engineering proteins from their intended function.

🧐 What's in it for me? Bespoke proteins could revolutionise cancer treatment to hangovers. Traditional methods (i.e. those relied on only a few years ago) involved repurposing whatever evolutionary accidents nature cobbled together, if the same were true of phones, “smart” would still be shouting a little louder.

💵 Out of the Lab:

If you’ve been wondering why leading AI companies have been obsessing over nuclear power, it’s because their algorithms are insanely power-hungry. But that may be about to change. 

Energy availability will likely be the only limiting factor to intelligence in the future, and that’s why German researchers have engineered the largest spin wave network to date, potentially making AI hardware dramatically more energy-efficient by replacing the electronics with quantum ripples in magnetic materials. 

This sounds incredibly complicated, basically because it is. Unlike traditional electronics that shuffle electrons around, spin waves can process information without actually moving physical particles. This is possible as the waves simply flip the magnetic orientation of atoms in sync, creating ripples that carry information whilst using a fraction of the energy.

🧐 What's in it for me? Our energy infrastructure is not far from buckling under the AI computational load, but spin wave computing could enable AI systems that use a fraction of current power requirements. This is another step towards a world where intelligence is a cheap commodity, the implications of which are likely overestimated in the short term, and dramatically underestimated in the long term.

💵 Out of the Lab:

Just over 200 years after the second law of thermodynamics told us some things can't be undone, but in the quantum realm, it looks like this might not be the case. Using an "entanglement battery," researchers proved that quantum entanglement can be manipulated in a perfectly reversible way.

Traditional quantum operations make entanglement irreversible, think, scrambling an egg. But with an entanglement battery (basically an external hard drive to store quantum info) any quantum state transformation can be reversed perfectly. This matters because quantum computers currently fail spectacularly when they make errors as there's no going back to fix mistakes.

🧐 What's in it for me? With reversible operations, quantum systems could become robust enough for real-world applications like unbreakable encryption, drug discovery simulations, and solving problems that would take classical computers longer than the age of the universe. It's the difference between quantum computing being a laboratory curiosity and actually running your banking system without it collapsing every time someone sneezes near the server room.

💵 Out of the Lab:

Tirzepatide, the weight-loss medication branded “Mounjaro” that's been reshaping both waistlines and pharmaceutical profit margins, seems to have been moonlighting as a cancer treatment. In mice, the drug dramatically reduced breast cancer tumour growth. 

Though still in early tests, the study achieved a 20% reduction in both body weight and tumour volume, suggesting these medications might offer oncological benefits as an unintended consequence. Of course, this being pharmaceutical research, we can expect the price to quadruple once they realise they're selling a two-for-one special. The mechanism appears to work through metabolic disruption: obesity creates a pro-inflammatory environment that tumours absolutely love, providing them with growth factors and a steady supply of nutrients, so removing the excess fat essentially starves the cancer whilst improving the body's immune response.

🧐 What's in it for me? Beyond the obvious weight-loss benefits, tirzepatide users might be getting unexpected cancer protection. Given that obesity increases cancer risk whilst simultaneously making you less attractive to insurance companies, effective weight-loss medications could become powerful prevention tools.

💵 Out of the Lab:

Talking of inflammation, Duke University researchers studying lemurs have discovered these primates don't experience "inflammaging" - the chronic low-grade inflammation that gradually transforms us from “new” to “partially used”. Ring-tailed lemurs actually showed declining inflammation with age, essentially ageing backwards whilst the rest of us slowly decompose.

This finding suggests that age-related inflammation isn't inevitable, even among primates. Since chronic inflammation contributes to heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and that general sense of being slowly murdered by your own metabolism, understanding how lemurs sidestep this process could massively impact human health. 

The key difference may lie in how lemurs' cellular systems maintain themselves over time; whilst human cells gradually accumulate damage and start releasing inflammatory signals, lemurs seem to have found the cellular off switch and actually use it.

🧐 What's in it for me? If scientists can work out why lemurs avoid inflammaging, they’ll likely try to make interventions to help humans do the same. This could mean ageing without the inflammatory diseases that currently plague millions.

💵 Out of the Lab:

Researchers have identified over $1 trillion worth of platinum lurking beneath the Moon's surface, scattered across approximately 6,500 craters created by metal-rich asteroid impacts. Out of 1.3 million lunar craters, the platinum-bearing formations could make lunar mining far more profitable than the current Earth-based approach of looking in the mud for shiny stuff. 

Researcher Jayanth Chennamangalam argues that monetising space resources could attract more private investment to solar system exploration and the Moon's proximity makes it considerably more accessible than distant asteroids.

However, legal questions abound. The 1967 Outer Space Treaty forbids nations from claiming celestial bodies, though given how well international law works on Earth, we can expect this to be thoroughly ignored the moment there's serious money involved. The US-led Artemis Accords attempt to establish guidelines, but Russia and China haven't signed on, setting up what promises to be humanity's first interplanetary territorial dispute.

Either way, the race to strip-mine our only natural satellite has officially begun.

Until next time, stay curious.

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