“I never felt I was going to work”: life at Bell Labs’ ‘factory of ideas’

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View this email in your browser Friday 19 January 2024

Hello Nature readers, Today we discover that AlphaFold can find potential new psychedelics, explore a model that predicts how likely a person is to develop long COVID and look back at the Bell Labs 'factory of ideas'.

(DeepMind)

AlphaFold identifies new psychedelics AlphaFold has identified hundreds of thousands of potential new psychedelic molecules. The finding could help to develop antidepressants. It is also a boost for AlphaFold, showing for the first time that the AI tool's protein-structure predictions can be just as useful for drug discovery as experimentally derived protein structures, which can take months, or even years, to determine. In about one-third of cases, its protein structures could jump-start a drug search by a couple of years, says pharmaceutical chemist Brian Shoichet. "And that's huge." Nature | 5 min read Reference: Preprint paper

Model predicts risk of long COVID Researchers have developed a computational model that predicts how likely a person is to develop long COVID. An analysis of more than 6,500 proteins found in blood suggests that those involved in immune responses, blood clotting and inflammation could be key biomarkers of the long-lasting condition that can follow a SARS-CoV-2 infection. The small study "will hopefully pave the way for further studies to try and develop therapies for what is, at the moment, pretty much an impossible thing to treat", says respiratory physician Aran Singanayagam. Nature | 5 min read

Science supergroup will battle paper mills A high-profile group of funders, academic publishers and research organizations has launched an effort to tackle paper mills — businesses that churn out fake or poor-quality journal papers and sell authorships. United2Act includes the European Research Council, the publishing-services company Clarivate and major publishers including Elsevier, Wiley and Springer Nature. Working groups will focus on: Education and awareness Detailed research into paper mills Improved post-publication corrections Tools that verify the identities of authors, editors and reviewers Communication between groups across publishing that are tackling the issue Nature | 5 min read Nature is editorially independent of its publisher, Springer Nature.

Lawsuit challenges pulse oximeters A physician in California is pursuing a lawsuit against 12 companies over their continued sale of fingertip oxygen sensors that can fail on dark skin. Studies have established that pulse oximeters can overestimate the amount of oxygen in the blood of people of colour, which could affect treatment choices. The suit asks for an injunction prohibiting further sales of the devices in California until they provide accurate readings for all, or until warning labels are attached to note their inaccuracies. Nature | 7 min read

This robot grows like a vine A robot that grows by 3D printing itself could navigate unpredictable environments, for example in disaster zones. Just like a real vining plant, it winds around structures, its growth influenced by gravity, light and shade. The plastic building material is stored in the robot's base and supplied to the printer head through a thin hose. Nature | 3 min read Reference: Science Robotics paper

This footage has been sped up: the vining robot's body elongates by just a few millimetres each minute. (IIT - Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia)

Reader poll

Last week, the resignation of Harvard University president Claudine Gay following plagiarism allegations sparked a debate about when copying text should be a punishable offence. Some researchers suggest that academics should be allowed to sample more liberally from the work of their peers to describe the scientific literature, provided that they cite the source — an approach called 'modular writing'. When we asked readers what they thought about the idea, a majority of both researchers and non-researchers were in favour of it as long as quoted passages are clearly marked. Some even suggest that reusing others' words is almost inevitable. "Over the course of a career, we absorb … ways of phrasing discussions and ideas that become baked into our minds without knowing exactly from where they came," says biochemist Whyte Owen. Many call for greater clarity of what is permissible and suggest that reusing one's own words should be allowed, if not encouraged. "Whenever I write a review article, those computerized search bots accuse me of plagiarism, and 100% of the time I am plagiarizing my own words," says virologist Maria Salvato. "Then I have to struggle to say the same thing, but not as eloquently or succinctly as I originally said it." Some respondents point out that rewriting information also helps to rethink it. "The redundancy in papers goes far beyond mere literature reviews," says physicist and linguist Todd Krause. "Tweaks between one paper and the next can be so minor as to require a PhD in the field just to be able to spot them. And if that's the case, how much are they really contributing to the discipline?"

Features & opinion

Let's all pitch in on the muon collider idea Building a muon collider — a new kind of accelerator that smashes together the heavy cousins of electrons — is on the agenda of physicists in the United States and Europe. The idea got a boost last month when a respected panel listed it alongside more established projects for the future of US particle physics. Even better, argues a Nature editorial, is for physicists to see this as a genuinely global endeavour. "If it works out, particle physicists all over the world might gain an exciting — and potentially more affordable — way of probing nature," says the editorial. Nature | 5 min read

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Futures: The Alcubierre key "This absurd tale of a time-travelling vagabond with a paper clip that could potentially destroy the Universe was born out of my extreme social anxiety," writes author Jessica Brook in her afterword to the latest short story for Nature's Futures series. Nature | 6 min read

Remembering Bell labs as it moves home During its eight-decade history, Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey, boasted ten Nobel prize winners, five Turing awards and more than 20,000 patents — but is best remembered as a 'factory of ideas', the name given to the Labs by writer Arthur C. Clarke. As the current owners Nokia plan the Labs move from its rural campus to a new site in downtown New Brunswick, past employees remember their role in key inventions, including the first transistor, the laser, radio astronomy, components for communication satellites and programming languages such as UNIX and C++. NJ.com | 9 minutes

Podcast: AI just figured out geometry An AI tool called AlphaGeometry could (theoretically) win a bronze medal in the International Mathematical Olympiad, a competition for school students. Other large language model struggle to provide sensible reasoning when asked to show their workings, so the team had to train AlphaGeometry from scratch. "We were able to generate 100 million theorems and proofs so that the machine can learn all of these by itself, and then it can learn to generalise the new problems," deep learning researcher and former maths Olympiad competitor Thang Luong tells the Nature Podcast. To win a gold medal, AlphaGeometry would have to become equally good at the other Olympiad disciplines such as number theory. Nature Podcast | 32 min listen Subscribe to the Nature Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts or Spotify, or use the RSS feed.

Quote of the day "One reason I was always fascinated by the einstein problem is that I did not see clear evidence for or against it (apart from the grim reality of a 50-year dry spell)." Computer scientist Craig Kaplan tells the tale of how he co-discovered the long-sought 'einstein tile' — a shape that can cover a space without forming repeating patterns. (Scientific American | 18 min read, with plenty of helpful illustrations)

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