Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC)

Two of the Nobel Prize winners in Chemistry 2024 are employees of Google DeepMind, who caused significant unrest among their colleagues in May. Hassabis and Jumper announced in *Nature* the results of their AlphaFold 3 model, with applications in drug design; however, they published it in a closed manner, with reviewers not even having access to the system, which contradicts the basic principles of scientific publication. We risk having the transformative potential of AI controlled by big tech companies.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024 on the one hand to David Baker for computational protein design, which makes it possible to construct proteins with functions not present in nature. On the other hand, jointly to Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper of Google DeepMind, for the development of AlphaFold2, which allows the structure of the 200 million known proteins to be predicted at high speed. 

Climate tipping points are thresholds at which elements of the Earth could reach a point of no return, accelerated by climate change and with consequences for the rest of the planet. These drastic changes could affect, for example, the Atlantic Meridional Circulation (AMOC), polar ice sheets or tropical rainforests. A study published in Science Advances concludes that there is too much uncertainty to extrapolate historical data and reliably estimate when these inflections will occur.
 

Research has identified 31 biomarkers in the gut microbiota of children that are associated with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and could have diagnostic value. The gut microbiota includes bacteria, viruses, fungi and archaea. The team replicated the results, published in Nature Microbiology, in three cohorts and analysed faecal samples from more than 1,600 children and children in total, with and without ASD, in China.

After the first year of life, the father's contribution to his baby's microbiota is comparable to the mother's contribution, whether born vaginally or by caesarean section, says a study published in Cell Host & Microbe. In addition, faecal microbiome transplants from the mother to her baby can restore the microbiome in the case of caesarean birth, says the study, which included 74 babies and involved Spanish participants. 

After an intense night of negotiations in Dubai (United Arab Emirates), the countries participating in COP28 reached a historic agreement by mentioning for the first time "moving away from fossil fuels" in the Global Stocktake document - the assessment of progress made towards achieving the climate goals set out in the Paris Agreement. The agreement comes after the first draft presented by the presidency did not make this mention - it referred only to "reducing consumption and production" of these fuels - which was described as "unacceptable" by countries such as Spain.

After lengthy negotiations, the European Commission, the European Parliament and the Council of the EU - which represents the member states - reached a provisional agreement last night on the content of the 'AI Act', the future law that will regulate the development of artificial intelligence in Europe, the first in the world. The agreement limits the use of biometric identification systems by security forces, includes rules for generative AI models such as ChatGPT and provides for fines of up to 35 million euros for those who violate the rules, among other measures. The text must now be formally adopted by the Parliament and Council before it becomes EU law.

At the current level of emissions, there is a 50% chance that global temperatures will exceed the 1.5°C target consistently over seven years. This is one of the forecasts in the Global Carbon Budget 2023 report, which estimates that CO₂ emissions from fossil fuels will reach record highs in 2023, reaching 36.8 billion tonnes, 1.1 % more than in 2022. The report, published in the journal Earth System Science Data, shows that emissions have decreased in the EU as a whole and in the United States, while they continue to increase in India and China.

The risk of developing resistant bacteria is higher in some people, such as those who have to take long-term antibiotics after organ transplantation. To try to reduce them, a phase 1 clinical trial has performed a fecal transplant on 10 people who had previously received a kidney transplant and had resistant bacteria. The fecal transplants accelerated decolonization, shortened the time it took to test negative for multidrug-resistant organisms, and, according to the authors, may also "reduce the recurrence of infections." The results are published in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

Speech deepfakes are synthetic voices produced by machine learning models that can resemble real human voices. Research published in PLoS ONE involving half a thousand participants shows that they were able to correctly identify that they were not real voices 73% of the time. The results of the study—conducted in English and Mandarin—showed only a slight improvement in those people who were specifically trained to spot these deepfakes.