Scientists last month unveiled the most exhaustive database yet of the proteins that form the building blocks of life, in a breakthrough where observers said would “fundamentally change biological research”.

Every cell in every living organism is triggered to perform its function by proteins that deliver constant instructions to maintain health and ward off infection.

Unlike the genome — the complete sequence of human genes that encode cellular life — the human proteome is constantly changing in response to genetic instructions and environmental stimuli.

Understanding how proteins operate — the shape in which they end up, or “fold” into — within cells has fascinated scientists for decades.

But determining each protein’s precise function through direct experimentation is painstaking.

Fifty years of research have until now yielded only 17 percent of the human proteome’s amino acids, the subunits of proteins.

Researchers at Google’s DeepMind and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) unveiled a database of 20,000 proteins expressed by the human genome, freely and openly available online.

They also included more than 350,000 proteins from 20 organisms such as bacteria, yeast, and mice that scientists rely on for research.

To create the database, scientists used a state-of-the-art machine learning program that was able to accurately predict the shape of proteins based on their amino acid sequences.

Instead of spending months using multi-million dollar equipment, they trained their AlphaFold system on a database of 170,000 known protein structures.

The AI then used an algorithm to make accurate predictions of the shape of 58 percent of all proteins within the human proteome.

This more than doubled the number of high-accuracy human protein structures that researchers had identified during 50 years of direct experimentation, essentially overnight.

The potential applications are enormous, from researching genetic diseases and combating anti-microbial resistance to engineering more drought-resistant crops.

Protein-folding problem

Paul Nurse, the winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize for Medicine and director of the Francis Crick Institute, said Thursday’s release was “a great leap for biological innovation”.

“With this resource freely and openly available, the scientific community will be able to draw on collective knowledge to accelerate discovery, ushering in a new era for AI-enabled biology,” he said.

John McGeehan, director for the Centre for Enzyme Innovation at the University of Portsmouth, whose team is developing enzymes capable of consuming single-use plastic waste, said AlphaFold had revolutionized the field.

“What took us months and years to do, AlphaFold was able to do in a weekend. I feel like we have just jumped at least a year ahead of where we were yesterday,” he said.

The ability to predict a protein’s shape from its amino acid sequence using a computer rather than experimentation is already helping scientists in a number of research fields.

AlphaFold is already being used in research into cures for diseases that disproportionately affect poorer countries.

One US-based team is using the AI prediction to study ways of overcoming strains of drug-resistant bacteria.

Another group is using the database to better understand how SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, bonds with human cells.

Venki Ramakrishnan, winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize for Chemistry, said Thursday’s research, published in the journal Nature, was a “stunning advance” in biological research.

He said AlphaFold had essentially solved the so-called “protein-folding problem”, which argued that the 3D structure of a given protein should be determinable from its amino acid sequence, and which had puzzled scientists for half a century.

Given that the number of shapes a protein could theoretically take is astronomically large, the protein-fold problem was partly one of processing power.

The task was so daunting that in 1969 US molecular biologist Cyril Levinthal famously theorized that it would take longer than the age of the known universe to enumerate all possible protein configurations using brute calculation.

But with AlphaFold capable of performing a mind-dizzying number of calculations every second, the problem stood no chance when faced with AI and algorithms.

“It has occurred long before many people in the field would have predicted,” Ramakrishnan said.

“It will be exciting to see the many ways in which it will fundamentally change biological research.”

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The proposed decree comes two years after the introduction of a cybersecurity law that mandated internet companies remove content the communist authorities regard as “toxic”.

It received sharp criticism from the United States, the European Union, and internet freedom advocates who said it mimics China’s repressive censorship of the internet.

Under the terms of the decree, any account that operates on a social media platform in Vietnam and has more than 10,000 followers must provide contact information to authorities — only registered accounts will be allowed to live stream.

The proposed decree also says that social media providers must temporarily block or remove content within 24 hours if they receive a “justified” complaint from an individual or organization affected by the content.

Vietnam is looking to increase control over livestreaming on popular social media platforms. (Photo by Manan VATSYAYANA / AFP)

Vietnam’s Ministry of Information and Communications estimates that Facebook has 65 million Vietnamese members; YouTube 60 million, and TikTok 20 million. The nation’s local social media platform Zalo has 60 million users.

“These cross-border social networks have not fully complied with Vietnamese laws,” it said, adding that current regulations were inadequate.

“Many individuals and organizations take advantage of social media for press activities, and broadcast live streams to provide false information, and insult the reputation and dignity of other organizations and individuals.”

The draft decree is set to take effect after public feedback and approval by Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh.

Vietnam’s hardline administration generally moves swiftly to stamp out dissent and arrest critics, especially those who find livestreaming audiences on social media platforms.

Earlier this month, Pham Chi Thanh, a former radio journalist and democracy activist fiercely critical of the regime on Facebook, was imprisoned for five and a half years on the charge of “making, hoarding, disseminating and spreading information and documents against the socialist republic of Vietnam”.

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Chinese tech giant Huawei on Tuesday said it would launch its long-awaited new operating system for smartphones HarmonyOS next week, part of an all-out push into the software industry aimed at weathering US sanctions and taking on Google’s Android.

Huawei tipped the June 2 launch of its HarmonyOS platform in a short teaser on social media, just as an internal memo came to light in which company founder and CEO Ren Zhengfei outlined plans to go big in software. The 76-year-old assured staff that “in the software domain, the US will have very little control over our future development, and we have much autonomy.”

Huawei’s plans are the latest signs of a radical transformation at the Shenzhen-based company, which is moving quickly into new product lines seen as less vulnerable to US pressure, and a re-focus on its core domestic market. Huawei’s pivot is a forced result of the sanctions against the once-thriving telecommunications and technology giant, that have effectively crippled most of its core product lines and forced an aggressive strategy rethink.

Former US President Donald Trump in 2018 launched an aggressive US campaign to isolate Huawei when he was president, saying its networking equipment installed worldwide could be used by China’s Communist Party for espionage or sabotage.

The world’s largest maker of telecom networking gear was barred from the huge American market and cut off from global component supply chains. Access to Google’s Android operating system was also forbidden, and Washington has pressured allies to ban or rip out Huawei gear from their telecom networks.

The Android curbs have threatened to torpedo Huawei’s smartphone business – once in the global top three along with Samsung and Apple – forcing it to create HarmonyOS. Analysts warn that creating a successful new mobile operating system is exceedingly difficult in a world where Android and iOS are firmly entrenched, and next Wednesday’s launch will be watched closely by the tech world.

Huawei gave no further details on the HarmonyOS launch other than the timing. A move into software is prudent for Huawei, which remains years away from developing chips needed for its own devices, said Marc Einstein, Chief Analyst at IRT Corporation in Tokyo.

The timing is also good because the advent of 5G networks in years to come will radically change the tech landscape, offering major new opportunities in artificial intelligence, wired “smart cities”, intelligent vehicles, and other tech spheres.

“Some of these things are still very, very early days and there’s no real gorilla in the market yet,” said Einstein. “So it does make sense to go in this direction.”

‘Ample resources’

Huawei had already announced in April that it would work with Chinese automakers to develop intelligent vehicles, after earlier unveiling moves into enterprise and cloud computing. Saying “the best defense is a good offense”, Ren’s memo outlined an ambitious plan to develop software that “embraces the world”.

“The company has ample resources to support you, so feel free to boldly invest materials and human resources during your work,” he said. But he admitted that the US moves to deprive Huawei of access to semiconductors meant that “objectively speaking, the only domain in which we can extend our roots deep is software”.

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The memo, provided to AFP by the company, summarised discussions in April between Ren and technical staff. It offered few specifics on what software products Huawei could pursue. Huawei’s mobile phone sales, along with overall revenue growth, have sagged since last year as the US sanctions began to bite.

The firm sold its Honor budget smartphone brand late last year as it shuffled its product mix, but has vowed to retain its flagship handset brand. But Einstein warned that while Huawei’s size and expertise will make it formidable, success is not assured.

It will need to compete against domestic tech giants such as Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu, which have all pushed into software and cloud computing, and the US-imposed hurdles overseas could curb its appeal in foreign markets, he said. China and Huawei fiercely reject the US security allegations, saying no evidence has ever been provided.

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President Joe Biden on Friday received the prime minister of Japan for his first in-person summit, with the leaders expected to announce a US$2 billion 5G initiative as part of a concerted US push to compete with China. Biden’s decision to invite Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga as his first guest – with South Korean President Moon Jae-in set to come in May – reflects his renewed priority on US alliances as he zeroes in on a rising China as America’s most pressing challenge.

A senior US official said that technology leader Japan would announce a “very substantial commitment” of US$2 billion in partnership with the United States “to work on 5G and next steps beyond.” China’s Huawei has taken an early dominance in fifth-generation internet, which is becoming an increasingly crucial part of the global economy, despite heavy US pressure on the company, which Washington argues poses threats to security and privacy in the democratic world.

The official said Biden will also speak to Japan about its climate goals as the US prepares to hold a virtual summit on climate change next week. And the official said they will discuss growing tensions over Taiwan as the island has reported growing penetration of its airspace by Beijing, which claims the self-governing democracy.

“Neither country is seeking to raise tensions or to provoke China, but at the same time we’re trying to send a clear signal that some of the steps that China is taking,” the official said, are “antithetical to the mission of maintaining peace and stability.” While the timing was coincidental, the official said it was appropriate that Suga was visiting two days after Biden made the momentous decision to withdraw from Afghanistan after 20 years, ending the longest-ever US war.

The pullout will “free up time and attention and resources from our senior leadership and our military to focus on what we believe are the fundamental challenges in the 21st century and they lie fundamentally in the Indo-Pacific,” the official said. “The United States can only be effective in Asia when the US-Japan relationship is strong and Japan is steady and stable,” he said. indicating that 5G will be just one of the areas the two countries will focus on at the summit.

Nuanced differences of approach

Suga in September succeeded his ally Shinzo Abe, Japan’s longest-serving prime minister, who was one of the few democratic allies to manage to preserve stable relations with Biden’s volatile predecessor Donald Trump.

Biden’s inaugural summit – held an unusually late three months into his term due to the Covid-19 pandemic – is expected to be a tame affair after the Trump era, with the president welcoming the soft-spoken Japanese leader for one-on-one talks and an expanded meeting with the cabinet before a joint news conference.

But Suga, who Japanese media reported arrived in Washington Thursday evening, is expected to balk at becoming an overenthusiastic cheerleader for the US line on China, which remains the vital top trading partner for resource-scarce Japan.

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Tokyo since Abe’s time has worked to stabilize relations with Beijing and not joined Washington in sanctions over rights concerns in Hong Kong and Xinjiang. “The Biden administration, I think, is concerned at how aggressive China has been and how much ground the US has lost in recent years in Asia and wants to catch up quickly,” said Michael Green, who was the top Asia adviser to former president George W. Bush and is now senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“I think the Japanese view is that they have had a strategy in place and they want to move forward steady as she goes,” he said. “So there’s a bit of a nuanced difference in public tone but not in direction,” he said.

But Japan will welcome what is expected to be a fresh declaration that the Japanese-administered Senkaku islands – where Beijing, which calls them the Diaoyu, has been increasingly assertive – fall under the US-Japan security treaty that requires mutual defense.

Suga, and Moon next month, will also consult Biden as he reviews US policy on North Korea, where Trump’s unusual personal diplomacy with leader Kim Jong Un eased tensions but did not bring a lasting accord on Pyongyang’s nuclear program.

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South Korea’s two biggest electronics firms, Samsung Electronics and LG Electronics, both forecast jumps of around 40% in their first-quarter operating profits Wednesday, with coronavirus-driven working from home fuelling global demand for semiconductors and home appliances.

Tech behemoth Samsung said in an earnings estimate that it expected operating profit of 9.3 trillion won ($8.3 billion) for January to March, up 44.2% from a year earlier, largely driven by robust sales of smartphones and the launch of its flagship Galaxy S21 series.

Meanwhile LG, South Korea’s second-largest appliance firm after Samsung, forecast a 39.2% jump in operating profit for the same period, to 1.5 trillion won. “Both quarterly revenue and operating profit are the highest in the company’s history,” it said in a statement.

The Samsung figures were ahead of expectations, said Gloria Tsuen, Vice President at Moody’s Investors Service, telling AFP that “tight supplies in the semiconductor segment, especially DRAM”, among others, had helped the firm’s performance. Analyst forecasts had averaged 8.88 trillion won according to Bloomberg News.

Samsung Electronics is the flagship subsidiary of the giant Samsung group, by far the largest of the family-controlled empires known as chaebols that dominate business in South Korea, the world’s 12th-largest economy. LG Electronics, on the other hand, is the fourth-largest chaebol in the country with vast interests in electronics, chemicals, and telecommunications – just like its major local rival.

Samsung’s return to profitability is especially crucial to the country’s economic health: the conglomerate’s overall turnover is equivalent to a fifth of the national gross domestic product.

The coronavirus has wreaked havoc on the world economy, with lockdowns and travel bans imposed around the globe for several months. But the pandemic – which has killed more than 2.8 million people worldwide – has also seen many tech companies boom.

The worldwide move to working from home has seen consumer demand rise for devices powered by Samsung’s chips, as well as home appliances such as TVs and washing machines. Its estimated sales for the period were up 17.5 percent year-on-year to 65 trillion won.

Analysts say the company has had a particular boost from rolling out its Galaxy S21 series in January, more than a month ahead of the flagship product’s usual annual launch schedule. “Key to the success of this latest flagship has been its lower $799 starting price,” tracker Counterpoint Research said in a report. “Lower cost coupled with trade-in offers that essentially make the S21 device free, is helping increase demand for these ‘entry-level’ flagships.”

Shifting fortunes for Samsung, LG

The global chip manufacturing industry had been expecting to see record revenue this year, with the stay-at-home economy persisting, according to Taipei-based market tracker TrendForce. But power outages across Texas in the United States – caused by a severe winter storm – shut down semiconductor factories clustered around Austin in February, including Samsung’s.

The firm said operations at its factory returned to almost normal in late March, but South Korea’s Yonhap news agency reported it may suffer around 400 billion won ($357 million) in losses due to the shutdown. Still, Hi Investment and Securities in Seoul said Samsung’s first-quarter performance will greatly benefit from its mobile business, backed by solid shipments and cost control.

The tech giant is expected to have produced around 62 million smartphones in January-March, with a market share of 18.1 percent, according to TrendForce. With the estimates, Samsung is expected to reclaim its global smartphone market lead, the tracker said, after losing the spot to Apple during the last quarter of 2020.

“For the whole 2021, TrendForce expects Samsung to top the annual ranking” of smartphone brands by production, it added.

But Samsung’s de facto leader Lee Jae-yong was jailed in January over a sprawling corruption scandal that brought down former president Park Geun-hye. That ruling raised uncertainty over the succession at the giant company after the death in October of his father Lee Kun-hee, the chairman who turned Samsung Electronics into a global powerhouse. Experts say a leadership vacuum could hamper the firm’s decision-making on future large-scale investments, which have been key to its rise.

LG Electronics shares dropped 0.94% at the end of Wednesday’s trade. Earlier this week, the firm said it was closing down its mobile phone business, after the division lost billions in recent years.

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Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are minted by solving puzzles using powerful computers that consume enormous amounts of electricity – much of it produced by coal plants. The Nature study found that if left unchecked, China’s bitcoin mines will generate 130.50 million metric tons of carbon emissions by 2024 – close to the annual greenhouse gas emissions from an entire country like Italy or oil-rich Saudi Arabia.

Chinese companies with access to cheap electricity and hardware handled 78.89% of global bitcoin blockchain operations as of April 2020, the study said. This involves minting new coins and keeping track of cryptocurrency transactions.

About 40% of China’s bitcoin mines are powered with coal, while the rest use renewables, the study said. But the coal-guzzling rigs are so large they could end up undermining Beijing’s pledge to peak carbon emissions before 2030 and become carbon neutral by 2060, it warned.

“The intensive bitcoin blockchain operation in China can quickly grow as a threat that could potentially undermine the emission reduction effort,” report co-author Wang Shouyang from the Chinese Academy of Sciences told AFP.

The government should focus on upgrading the power grid to ensure a stable supply from renewable sources, Wang said. “Since energy prices in clean-energy regions of China are lower than that in coal-powered regions… miners would then have more incentives to move to regions with clean energy.”

This year the crypto-mining industry is expected to use 0.6 percent of the world’s total electricity production, or more than the annual use of Norway, according to Cambridge University’s Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index.

The price of a bitcoin has surged fivefold in the past year, reaching a record high of over $61,000 in March, and is now hovering just below the $60,000 mark. Given the profits available, Wang said imposing carbon taxes was not enough to deter miners.

China banned trading in cryptocurrencies in 2019 to prevent money laundering, but mining is permitted. Coal-rich regions are now pushing out bitcoin miners as they struggle to curb emissions. Last month, Inner Mongolia announced plans to end the power-hungry practice of cryptocurrency mining by the end of April after the region failed to meet annual energy consumption targets.

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The region accounted for eight percent of the computing power needed to run the global blockchain — a set of online ledgers to record bitcoin transactions. That is higher than the amount of computing power dedicated to blockchain in the United States.

Nasdaq-listed Bitmain, which operates one of the biggest cryptocurrency mining pools in the world, said they were shifting operations in Inner Mongolia to areas with more hydropower like Yunnan.

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Decades before the race to build a self-driving car became a multi-billion-dollar contest between tech giants such as Tesla and Google, a South Korean professor built an autonomous vehicle and test-drove it across the country – only for his research to be consigned to the scrapheap.

Han Min-hong, now 79, successfully tested his self-driving car on the roads of Seoul in 1993 – a decade before Tesla was even founded. Two years later, it drove 300 kilometers (185 miles) from the capital to the southern port of Busan, on the most heavily-traveled expressway in South Korea.

Footage from the period shows the car barreling down a highway, with no one behind the wheel. A 386-chip-powered desktop computer, complete with monitor and keyboard, is placed on the passenger seat. Han is sitting in the back, waving at the camera.

“It felt extraordinary,” said the affable inventor. “The workload was very heavy,” but he and his team “had an enormous passion as it was something others hadn’t done yet, something that hadn’t come out in the world yet”.

At the time, South Korea was more focused on heavy industry, such as steel and shipbuilding, with the average Korean not yet familiar with cellphones. The country was yet to become the tech powerhouse it is today, and was still pursuing imitation rather than innovation. On one occasion, Han was told: “Why develop a new technology when you can always pay for it?”

Han’s projects were seen as dangerous. He was once asked how much he was paying for his life insurance, he said, and whether his wife was aware of “these crazy activities of yours?” But Han was so convinced of his cars’ safety that he rarely wore a seat belt – and has never had life insurance.

Even so, unable to see much investment potential, the government eventually cut funding to his research at Korea University. Now, Elon Musk’s electric car firm Tesla is a $600-billion behemoth, while Han’s Chumdancha is a small company in Yongin, south of Seoul, where he and one other employee still develop specialist warning systems for autonomous vehicles.

Musk is a “tremendous and outstanding” person, Han said. “He came up with his own, firm vision based on what others were doing, and that is really incredible.” But Han’s invention could have paved the way for South Korea to dominate the self-driving car industry, he added regretfully.

Retired South Korean professor Han Min-hong sitting in his 21-year-old self-driving car in Yongin, south of Seoul. (Photo by Jung Yeon-je / AFP)

Raj Rajkumar, an engineering professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute, who reviewed the 1990s footage for AFP, said it “appears to be on par with some of the best work on autonomous vehicles during that period”.

“The professor and a colleague are not even in the driver’s seat – very bold, confident but very risky thing to do,” he added. “It is unfortunate that funding for that project was cut. In hindsight, that was certainly not a wise decision.”

Musk challenge

Korea University describes Han as “a pioneer and hero in the global field of artificial intelligence“, who is known for developing the South’s first automotive navigation system and a mini-helicopter seen as a precursor to modern-day drones, as well as his autonomous vehicle work.

He is seen in the South as a genius ahead of his time – the 1990s footage has been viewed more than 1.5 million times since it was posted to YouTube in February. Self-driving vehicles are a major technological battleground for today’s automakers, with technology giants like Google parent Alphabet spending billions of dollars in a market that is supposed to fuel vehicle sales.

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Tesla said last year it was “very close” to achieving Level 5 autonomous driving technology – which indicates essentially total autonomy. But Han insists the American firm’s current offerings are effectively comparable to his 1990s work. “As Tesla is regarded as the best car in the world, if there is a chance, I would like to compare our technology to theirs.” He suggested a challenge on the Bugak Skyway, a twisting, narrow road that runs over a mountain in northern Seoul.

“Of course Tesla’s invested a lot of money in testing, so it might be much better when it comes to sophistication,” he told AFP. “But there shouldn’t be much difference when it comes down to basic functionality.”

Even so, Han believes there are limits to what self-driving technology can achieve, and that true autonomy is beyond reach. Neural networks do not have the flexibility of humans when faced with a novel situation that is not in their programming, he said, predicting that self-driving vehicles will largely be used to transport goods rather than people.

“Computers and humans are not the same,” he added.

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