One of the greatest joys of life is the simple pleasure of looking at the world around. I often walk along the C&O Canal, a defunct marvel of 19th century transportation engineering that reaches west from Washington, D.C. As I walk, I look. Even though I’ve walked the towpath many times before, it always surprises me.
Last Saturday I was able to see a native persimmon tree, its fruit as big as Ping-Pong balls. It was just beginning to change color. Two beaver dams, marvels at rodent engineering, were visible spanning the canal. And I was amazed at how September’s sun began to fade into fall, giving everything a glowing glow that Impressionist artists might envy.
Science is a lot about looking and seeing. The news that the James Webb Space Telescope was being retired on September 1 caused a flurry of excitement in the astronomy community. First direct image taken of a planet beyond our solar system. Scientists’ Twitter feeds erupted in exclamation points and comments like “thrilled” and “amazing.” Taking pictures of very distant planets is exceedingly difficult, but the new megatelescope, which It released its first images July, makes it possible to see better than any other telescope.SN: 8/13/22, p. 30). Or as associate news editor Christopher Crockett commented wryly in one of our internal Slack channels: “OK JWST, now you’re just showing off.”
The telescope also captured the visible spectrum of a possible brown dwarf, which confirmed its existence. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of an exoplanetAccording to Lisa Grossman (astronomy writer), this is possible. The telescope may one day be able to spot Earth-like planets that could sustain life. That hope may never be fulfilled, but it’s clear that if the telescope keeps performing at this level, many extraordinary sights are headed our way.
This issue of the magazine, which coincidentally, chronicles another scientific achievement in seeing and looking. Artificial intelligence systems can be used to visualize the 3-D structures and functions of proteins. These molecules are the building blocks for biological life and their shapes determine their purpose. But proteins twist and fold themselves into complex tangles, and scientists’ labors to decipher them using electron microscopes and other technologies have been painfully slow.
AlphaFold is an AI system that analyses already-mapped proteins to predict their structures. Tina Hesman Saey, a senior molecular biologist, reports that this will accelerate efforts to study the Earth’s life, including developing new medical treatments and learning more about human evolution. Some of AlphaFold’s predictions are less accurate than others, as Saey points out, and the AI system so far can’t cope with the challenges of decoding how protein structures interact with each other, and with other molecules. That’s where a deeper understanding of protein structures will really pay off, scientists say. Even if scientists don’t have that ability, the system allows them to skip much of the tedious work and continue working on big questions in the life sciences.
These new technologies, and the scientists who developed them, have allowed me to see things that I had never thought possible. Like those happy astronomers I am amazed and thrilled.
