DeepMind AI handles protein folding, which humbled previous software →

Today, DeepMind announced that it has seemingly solved one of biology's outstanding problems: how the string of amino acids in a protein folds up into a three-dimensional shape that enables their complex functions. It's a computational challenge that has resisted the efforts of many very smart biologists for decades, despite the application of supercomputer-level hardware for these calculations. DeepMind instead trained its system using 128 specialized processors for a couple of weeks; it now returns potential structures within a couple of days.

Company forced to change name that could be used to hack websites →

The original name of the company was ""><SCRIPT SRC=HTTPS://MJT.XSS.HT> LTD". By beginning the name with a quotation mark and chevron, any site which failed to properly handle the HTML code would have mistakenly thought the company name was blank, and then loaded and executed a script from the site XSS Hunter, which helps developers find cross-site scripting errors.

The Two Americas Financing the Trump and Biden Campaigns →

An amazing analysis of the fundraising of each candidate by zip code.

It's Time to Talk About Power →

[W]hen we do talk about power, we often talk about it strictly as something negative—something dangerous to be avoided—rather than as a gift to be stewarded. [...]

If power is irredeemably negative, none of us would want to admit we have it—which means none of us will be accountable for the power we have. [...]

But if power is a gift, then we can be accountable for its proper use—to its Giver, and to one another.

How a downed internet balloon produced an unlikely love story →

Google's Loon balloons have been hailed as the future of connectivity, but in Uruguay, they've been most effective for matchmaking.

Prickly business: the hedgehog highway that knits a village together →

Hedgehogs need space to create territories, forage and find mates. The compartmentalisation of land into private gardens is one of the causes of their disappearance from our landscape – they have declined by 90% since the second world war. More than 12,000 hedgehog holes have been created as part of the UK's hedgehog highway network, and Kirtlington has one of the most creative routes on the map. Miniature ramps and staircases thread between gardens in this higgledy-piggledy place, with its 13th-century church and notices about cake sales and "cricketers wanted".

Heh! Hedgehog higways.