More than 190 countries have reached a landmark deal for protecting the biodiversity of the world’s oceans, agreeing for the first time on a common framework for establishing new protected areas in international waters.
The treaty, whose text was finalized Saturday night by diplomats at the U.N. headquarters after years of stalled talks, will help safeguard the high seas, which lie beyond national boundaries and make up two-thirds of Earth’s ocean surface. Member states have been trying to agree on the long-awaited treaty for almost 20 years.
Environmental advocacy groups heralded the finalized text — which still needs to be ratified by the United Nations — as a new chapter for Earth’s high seas. Just 1.2 percent of them are currently environmentally protected, exposing the vast array of marine species that teem beneath the surface — from tiny plankton to giant whales — to threats such as pollution, overfishing, shipping and deep-sea mining.
Europe is taking the lead in adapting Elon Musk’s innovative idea for freight transport with the Swiss Cargo Sous Terrain (CST) project.
The idea behind this solution is to create a faster, more efficient, and safer means of transport rather than the conventional one which produce carbon emissions. It has been described as a combination between an airplane and a train and is mainly intended for the transport of passengers.
The technology is under development and has not been commercially implemented. Several projects are in different stages of implementation and testing around the world but it will take several years before the system is fully functional and operational.
A natural language model has jumpstarted the process of protein design by creating active enzymes.
Researchers have developed an AI system that can generate artificial enzymes from scratch. In laboratory experiments, some of these enzymes demonstrated efficacy comparable to natural enzymes, even when their artificially created amino acid sequences greatly deviated from any known natural protein.
The experiment shows that natural language processing, initially created for reading and writing language text, can grasp certain fundamental concepts of biology. The AI program, known as ProGen, was developed by Salesforce Research and employs next-token prediction to construct artificial proteins from amino acid sequences.
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More than 190 countries have reached a landmark deal for protecting the biodiversity of the world’s oceans, agreeing for the first time on a common framework for establishing new protected areas in international waters.
The treaty, whose text was finalized Saturday night by diplomats at the U.N. headquarters after years of stalled talks, will help safeguard the high seas, which lie beyond national boundaries and make up two-thirds of Earth’s ocean surface. Member states have been trying to agree on the long-awaited treaty for almost 20 years.
Environmental advocacy groups heralded the finalized text — which still needs to be ratified by the United Nations — as a new chapter for Earth’s high seas. Just 1.2 percent of them are currently environmentally protected, exposing the vast array of marine species that teem beneath the surface — from tiny plankton to giant whales — to threats such as pollution, overfishing, shipping and deep-sea mining.