AI techniques are making inroads into the field of drug discovery. As a result, a growing number of drugs and vaccines have been discovered using AI. However, questions remain about the success of these molecules in clinical trials. To address these questions, we conducted a first analysis of the clinical pipelines of AI-native Biotech companies. In Phase I we find AI-discovered molecules have an 80–90% success rate, substantially higher than historic industry averages. This suggests, we argue, that AI is highly capable of designing or identifying molecules with drug-like properties. In Phase II the success rate is ∼40%, albeit on a limited sample size, comparable to historic industry averages. Our findings highlight early signs of the clinical potential of AI-discovered molecules.

It used to be that you needed years and lots of specialist skills to build humanoid robots. Not anymore. Now base models are open-source. Want more complex appendages? Companies like Shadow Robot are making and selling those. Open-source AI is almost as good as closed-source industry leaders. Unitree's new advanced humanoid robot starts at only $16,000. You can bet Chinese manufacturing will keep lowering that cost.

So it's reasonable to think complex, advanced, and powerful humanoid robots may cost < $5,000 by 2030 or so. Sci-fi has imagined lots of robot futures, but I don't recall it often anticipating that aspect. Robots will be cheap to buy and own. Economists, and by extension our governments, have anticipated this even less.

37 Humanoid Robots - Youtube Video

Two surveys of millions of stars in our galaxy have revealed mysterious spikes in infrared heat coming from dozens of them. Astronomers say this could be evidence for alien civilisations harnessing energy from their stars by using a vast construction known as a Dyson sphere – although they can’t fully rule out more mundane explanations.

First proposed in the 1960s, Dyson spheres are hypothesised structures that could surround entire stars to absorb their energy, a possible means by which advanced aliens might draw huge amounts of power. If such objects exist, they should be warm enough to give off a detectable infrared glow – a “technosignature” that could alert us to the presence of alien life.

To search for potential Dyson spheres, two teams of astronomers, one led by Matías Suazo at Uppsala University in Sweden and the other by Gaby Contardo at the International School for Advanced Studies in Italy, combined data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite – which is mapping the position and motion of billions of stars in our galaxy – with infrared survey results from ground and space telescopes.

Each team analysed the same 5 million stars from the combined datasets, and both turned up signs of excess infrared heat that couldn’t be explained by known natural processes. “The most fascinating explanation could be actual Dyson spheres,” says Suazo.

His team spotted strange signals at seven red dwarfs within 900 light-years of Earth. These stars are smaller and dimmer than our sun, but appeared up to 60 times brighter in infrared than expected.

This excess would have been caused by something with a temperature of up to 400°C, consistent with what we might expect for a Dyson sphere. Up to 16 per cent of each star would have to be obscured to account for the signal, meaning it would more likely be a variant of the idea called a Dyson swarm – a collection of large satellites orbiting a star to collect energy – if the cause is truly of artificial origin. “This isn’t like a single solid shell around the star,” says team member Jason Wright at Pennsylvania State University.

Contardo’s results are broader, with 53 candidates found among larger stars, including some sun-like stars, at distances of up to 6500 light years from Earth. “Both sets of candidates are interesting,” she says, though inconclusive. “You need follow-up observations to confirm anything.”

One natural explanation that could mimic the properties of a Dyson sphere is that the stars are surrounded by hot, planet-forming debris disks, but most of the stars found by both teams appear to be too old for this. Another possibility is that each star could coincidentally be positioned in front of a distant galaxy giving off an infrared glow.

The infrared signals could also result from some unknown natural process. “It might be something that happens very rarely, like if two planets collide and produce an enormous amount of material,” says David Hogg at New York University, who worked with Contardo. “I think it’s most likely to be a natural phenomenon.”

The James Webb Space Telescope could shed further light on these stars, revealing if the infrared heat comes from natural dusty material or something else.

“Either we’ll rule them all out and say Dyson spheres are quite rare and very hard to find, or they’ll hang around as candidates and we’ll study the heck out of them,” says Wright.

Vanguard's new forecasting framework suggests AI is likely to be the catalyst for a surge in economic growth, surpassing the impact of the personal computer and the internet.

Opal Sandy, aged 18 months, was born completely deaf due to condition auditory neuropathy

A new study provides some theoretical underpinning to warp drives, suggesting that the superfast propulsion tech may not forever elude humanity.

Sci-fi fans — especially "Star Trek" devotees — are familiar with warp drives. These hypothetical engines manipulate the fabric of space-time itself, compressing the stuff in front of a spaceship and expanding it behind. This creates a "warp bubble" that allows a craft to travel at incredible velocities — in some imaginings, many times faster than the speed of light.

In 1994, Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre published a groundbreaking paper that laid out how a real-life warp drive could work. This exciting development came with a major caveat, however: The proposed "Alcubierre drive" required negative energy, an exotic substance that may or may not exist (or, perhaps, the harnessing of dark energy, the mysterious force that seems to be causing the universe's accelerated expansion).

Alcubierre published his idea in Classical and Quantum Gravity. Now, a new paper in the same journal suggests that a warp drive may not require exotic negative energy after all.

"This study changes the conversation about warp drives," lead author Jared Fuchs, of the University of Alabama, Huntsville and the research think tank Applied Physics, said in a statement. "By demonstrating a first-of-its-kind model, we've shown that warp drives might not be relegated to science fiction."

The team's model uses "a sophisticated blend of traditional and novel gravitational techniques to create a warp bubble that can transport objects at high speeds within the bounds of known physics," according to the statement.

Understanding that model is probably beyond most of us; the paper's abstract, for example, says that the solution "involves combining a stable matter shell with a shift vector distribution that closely matches well-known warp drive solutions such as the Alcubierre metric."

The proposed engine could not achieve faster-than-light travel, though it could come close; the statement mentions "high but subluminal speeds."

This is a single modeling study, so don't get too excited. Even if other research teams confirm that the math reported in the new study checks out, we're still very far from being able to build an actual warp drive.

Fuchs and his team admit as much, stressing that their work could end up being a stepping stone on the long road to efficient interstellar flight.

"While we're not yet preparing for interstellar voyages, this research heralds a new era of possibilities," Gianni Martire, CEO of Applied Physics, said in the same statement. "We're continuing to make steady progress as humanity embarks on the Warp Age."

The team's study was published online on April 29. You can find it here, though all but the abstract is behind a paywall; a free preprint version is available via arXiv.org.

If billionaires actually cared about saving the planet, they’d pool their vast wealth and buy everyone a heat pump. Instead of burning planet-warming fossil fuels, these appliances extract warmth from even freezing outdoor air and transfer it into a building, thanks to neat tricks of physics. In the summer, they reverse to act like an air-conditioning unit. One recent study found that if everyone in the United States got a heat pump, it’d slash emissions in the building sector by 36 to 64 percent, and cut overall national emissions by 5 to 9 percent. (Because they’re fully electric, heat pumps run on a grid increasingly loaded with renewable energy.)

Not that billionaires would ever have the altruism or desire to buy us all heat pumps—megayachts aren’t going to buy themselves, after all. But if they did, there’d be one critical hurdle they’d run into—the one thing that’s holding heat pumps back from their full potential more generally: There aren’t enough trained workers yet to install them.

“No one talks about supply chain constraints anymore. What is now the bottleneck is actually the installer,” says Philipp Krinner, CEO and cofounder of Arch, a platform that helps HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning) companies manage customers. “In the winter and in the summer—in the peak seasons—when most people actually want to install a system, it’s actually still a contractor-constrained market.”

The result is classic “greenflation,” a temporary rise in the costs associated with decarbonization due to market constraints, says climate economist Gernot Wagner of the Columbia Business School in New York. “Yes, there is a shortage of qualified contractors,” he says. But it’s a good problem to have, he argues, and “one where there’s an obvious solution” on the road to decarbonizing our civilization. It’ll be costly to train more workers in the green economy, but that’ll end up paying huge dividends.

“Electricians get talked about a lot, and used as sort of an avatar for all of the jobs that are going to be needed to install heat pumps and decarbonize the economy,” says Alexandria Herr, senior research associate at Rewiring America, a nonprofit that promotes electrification. “But it’s not just electricians—it’s actually a whole range of different jobs across the construction trades.” Qualified workers are needed to determine what kind of heat pump a home or business requires, to install the things, and then to service them. A heat pump is fundamentally different from a gas-fired furnace, and it requires fundamentally different training.

That would include workers specializing in “weatherization”—better insulating homes so heat pumps get even more efficient. And we’ll need specialists to retrofit the grid so it can smoothly transition to handling the ebb and flow of renewable energy, which is what makes heat pumps so climate-friendly. And we’ll need workers in manufacturing to produce the units themselves.

And we need these people ASAP. Heat pump sales are already outpacing the sale of gas furnaces in the US. The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 provides thousands of dollars in tax rebates and credits for households to both switch to a heat pump and pay for the electrical upgrades that may be required to run the appliances. Last year, the Biden administration announced $169 million to supercharge the domestic manufacturing of whole heat pumps and their individual components. And in February, nine states signed a memorandum of understanding to accelerate the adoption of heat pumps.

So the demand is there, as is growing support from the federal and state governments. What’s lagging is the workforce—at least temporarily. And the US is nowhere near alone: Wherever heat pump adoption is growing, more workers need to train up to meet demand. “If you look at a place like, say, Finland, where pretty much all your heating systems are heat pumps, this is not really an issue anymore,” says Jan Rosenow, who studies electrification at the Regulatory Assistance Project, a policy NGO for the energy community. “If you wanted to buy an electric car 10 years ago, it was quite difficult, wasn’t it? Now, you can go to any showroom and you can find them. I think the same is going to be the case with heat pumps. It’s already the case with heat pumps in more mature markets.”

In the US, though, we don’t have some sort of giant, national program to quickly get more people trained in HVAC. “It would just make sense that there would be this path to learn more about heat pumps, and then there would be a whole armed force to go out and install these things,” says Ed Janowiak, manager of HVAC and refrigeration design education at the nonprofit Air Conditioning Contractors of America. “There is such an opportunity right now for people to get in on the ground level. It should not take them very long to make a decent wage at it. And I still sit here at times with my palms in the air as to why it isn’t just automatically happening.”

There isn’t one official pathway in the US for HVAC workers, but several. Trade schools and community colleges provide HVAC training. Trade unions offer apprenticeships, and many HVAC companies run their own training programs to get people into the trade. “The most successful companies right now that are finding these people to install, they’re not necessarily hiring people that are already in the field,” says Janowiak. “But if you look at the number of technicians that go through those programs nationally, versus the demand, it’s just not there. So we need a lot more people.”

For veteran HVAC workers already trained in fossil-fuel systems, like installing gas furnaces, heat pump manufacturers provide their own training to install their products, which is of course in their interest. HVAC companies also do their own heat pump training for established workers, which usually takes two days. If a home has ducting, a heat pump will work similarly to a traditional AC unit, so the installation is nearly identical.

But all these workers don’t just have to be trained, but trained well, lest they inadvertently turn customers off of the energy-efficient appliances just as the heat pump revolution is getting going. If the size of the heat pump doesn’t suit the size of the home, or the ducting within, it won’t be as efficient. If you don’t have ducting, a contractor might recommend a simpler ductless heat pump, which is set into an outside-facing wall. “My biggest hope is that those people who do end up installing these, do get trained wisely,” says Janowiak, “and they do install pieces of equipment that work the way we want them to.”

An added challenge is that the US needs a robust network of training programs all across the country: You can’t have someone remotely install a heat pump, which means we’ll need not just an army of trained workers, but a properly distributed one.

Over in the UK, the energy supplier Octopus Energy has even built two full-scale model houses for workers to train in, one representing modern housing stock and the other older brick stock from the 1960s or 1970s. The company uses the homes to train workers new to the heating industry—it directly employs these folks during the education process, so they get paid—but also to reskill veterans who’ve been installing fossil-fuel systems. “Actually, we don’t really have a skill shortage at all—we just have a set of people that are installing the wrong product,” says John Szymik, CEO of Octopus Energy Services. “We built those [model homes] in order to show people how you’d optimize a rollout for the mass market.”

Working in an older UK home, for instance, technicians need to account for much worse insulation than in a modern home. The size of the home matters, as does the number of occupants and kinds of windows. All that data goes into a calculation that Octopus uses to determine the size of the heat pump. “Those homes are really, really helpful for our surveyors’ understanding of how to go around and measure up,” says Szymik. Then during a heat pump installation in the real world, a newly trained worker would join a crew of more experienced technicians. “What you get there is the opportunity to blend your people that have been working on this for a while, have more experience, with the people that are coming into it fresh with slightly less experience.”

A new breed of heat pumps is also making it possible for some people to skip hiring a trained installer entirely. The ​​New York City Housing Authority, for instance, is deploying units that slip over a window sill and plug into the wall. One of the companies making that type, Gradient, says that a resident can install one in less than an hour, in contrast to a team of technicians installing a traditional heat pump in about a day. For an apartment dweller without ducting, this might be an ideal option that skips the extra step of having a contractor analyze the space and deploy a more complicated system.

The other option is to just hope the heat pump revolution unfolds smoothly on its own: Maybe the HVAC industry will meet that demand with American-made devices installed by newly trained workers. Finland, after all, eventually found its way. “There may well be the need for large-scale retraining programs,” says Wagner. “Maybe I’m too much of a business school economist—please excuse me of that—but frankly, one answer is to simply get out of the way and let the market do its thing.”

Hundreds of the world’s leading climate scientists expect global temperatures to rise to at least 2.5C (4.5F) this century, blasting past internationally agreed targets and causing catastrophic consequences for humanity and the planet, an exclusive Guardian survey has revealed.

Almost 80% of the respondents, all from the authoritative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), foresee at least 2.5C of global heating above preindustrial levels, while almost half anticipate at least 3C (5.4F). Only 6% thought the internationally agreed 1.5C (2.7F) limit will be met.

Many of the scientists envisage a “semi-dystopian” future, with famines, conflicts and mass migration, driven by heatwaves, wildfires, floods and storms of an intensity and frequency far beyond those that have already struck.

Numerous experts said they had been left feeling hopeless, infuriated and scared by the failure of governments to act despite the clear scientific evidence provided.

“I think we are headed for major societal disruption within the next five years,” said Gretta Pecl, at the University of Tasmania. “[Authorities] will be overwhelmed by extreme event after extreme event, food production will be disrupted. I could not feel greater despair over the future.”

But many said the climate fight must continue, however high global temperature rose, because every fraction of a degree avoided would reduce human suffering.

Peter Cox, at the University of Exeter, UK, said: “Climate change will not suddenly become dangerous at 1.5C – it already is. And it will not be ‘game over’ if we pass 2C, which we might well do.”

The Guardian approached every contactable lead author or review editor of IPCC reports since 2018. Almost half replied, 380 of 843. The IPCC’s reports are the gold standard assessments of climate change, approved by all governments and produced by experts in physical and social sciences. The results show that many of the most knowledgeable people on the planet expect climate havoc to unfold in the coming decades.

The climate crisis is already causing profound damage to lives and livelihoods across the world, with only 1.2C (2.16F) of global heating on average over the past four years. Jesse Keenan, at Tulane University in the US, said: “This is just the beginning: buckle up.”

Nathalie Hilmi, at the Monaco Scientific Centre, who expects a rise of 3C, agreed: “We cannot stay below 1.5C.”

The experts said massive preparations to protect people from the worst of the coming climate disasters were now critical. Leticia Cotrim da Cunha, at the State University of Rio de Janeiro, said: “I am extremely worried about the costs in human lives.”

The 1.5C target was chosen to prevent the worst of the climate crisis and has been seen as an important guiding star for international negotiations. Current climate policies mean the world is on track for about 2.7C, and the Guardian survey shows few IPCC experts expect the world to deliver the huge action required to reduce that.

Younger scientists were more pessimistic, with 52% of respondents under 50 expecting a rise of at least 3C, compared with 38% of those over 50. Female scientists were also more downbeat than male scientists, with 49% thinking global temperature would rise at least 3C, compared with 38%. There was little difference between scientists from different continents.

Dipak Dasgupta, at the Energy and Resources Institute in New Delhi, said: “If the world, unbelievably wealthy as it is, stands by and does little to address the plight of the poor, we will all lose eventually.”

The experts were clear on why the world is failing to tackle the climate crisis. A lack of political will was cited by almost three-quarters of the respondents, while 60% also blamed vested corporate interests, such as the fossil fuel industry.

Many also mentioned inequality and a failure of the rich world to help the poor, who suffer most from climate impacts. “I expect a semi-dystopian future with substantial pain and suffering for the people of the global south,” said a South African scientist, who chose not to be named. “The world’s response to date is reprehensible – we live in an age of fools.”

About a quarter of the IPCC experts who responded thought global temperature rise would be kept to 2C or below but even they tempered their hopes.

“I am convinced that we have all the solutions needed for a 1.5C path and that we will implement them in the coming 20 years,” said Henry Neufeldt, at the UN’s Copenhagen Climate Centre. “But I fear that our actions might come too late and we cross one or several tipping points.”

Lisa Schipper, at University of Bonn in Germany, said: “My only source of hope is the fact that, as an educator, I can see the next generation being so smart and understanding the politics.”