Tobacco report shows progress on anti-smoking policies worldwide
The report, issued at the recent World Conference on Tobacco Control in Dublin, found that 2.6 billion people in 79 countries are covered by smoke-free policies in indoor public places.
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25 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Google DeepMind has grand ambitions to ‘cure all diseases' with AI. Now, it's gearing up for its first human trials
Alphabet's Isomorphic Labs is preparing to launch human trials of AI-designed drugs, its president, Colin Murdoch, told Fortune. Born from DeepMind's AlphaFold breakthrough, the company is pairing cutting-edge AI with pharma veterans to design medicines faster, cheaper, and more accurately. Alphabet's secretive drug discovery arm, Isomorphic Labs, is getting ready to start testing its AI-designed drugs in humans, Colin Murdoch, Isomorphic Labs president and Google DeepMind's chief business officer, told Fortune. 'There are people sitting in our office in King's Cross, London, working, and collaborating with AI to design drugs for cancer,' Murdoch said during an interview in Paris. 'That's happening right now.' After years in development, Murdoch says human clinical trials for Isomorphic's AI-assisted drugs are finally in sight. 'The next big milestone is actually going out to clinical trials, starting to put these things into human beings,' he said. 'We're staffing up now. We're getting very close.' The company, which was spun out of DeepMind in 2021, was born from one of DeepMind's most celebrated breakthroughs, AlphaFold, an AI system capable of predicting protein structures with a high level of accuracy. Interactions of AlphaFold progressed from being able to accurately predict individual protein structures to modeling how proteins interact with other molecules like DNA and drugs. These leaps made it far more useful for drug discovery, helping researchers design medicines faster and more precisely, turning the tool into a launchpad for a much larger ambition. 'This was the inspiration for Isomorphic Labs,' Murdoch said of AlphaFold. 'It really demonstrates that we could do something very foundational in AI that could help unlock drug discovery.' In 2024, the same year it released AlphaFold 3, Isomorphic signed major research collaborations with pharma companies Novartis and Eli Lilly. A year later, in April 2025, Isomorphic Labs raised $600 million in its first-ever external funding round, led by Thrive Capital. The deals are part of Isomorphic's plan to build a 'world-class drug design engine,' a system that combines machine learning researchers with pharma veterans to design new medicines faster, more cheaply, and with a higher chance of success. As part of the deals with major pharma players, Isomorphic supports existing drug programs, but it also designs its own internal drug candidates in areas such as oncology and immunology, with the aim of eventually licensing them out after early-stage trials. 'We identify an unmet need, and we start our own drug design programs. We develop those, put them into human clinical trials… we haven't got that yet, but we're making good progress,' he said. Today, pharma companies often spend millions attempting to bring a single drug to market, sometimes with just a 10% chance of success once trials begin. Murdoch believes Isomorphic's tech could radically improve those odds. 'We're trying to do all these things: speed them up, reduce the cost, but also really improve the chance that we can be successful,' he says. He wants to harness AlphaFold's technology to get to a point where researchers have 100% conviction that the drugs they are developing are going to work in human trials. 'One day we hope to be able to say — well, here's a disease, and then click a button and out pops the design for a drug to address that disease,' Murdoch said. 'All powered by these amazing AI tools.' This story was originally featured on
Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Yahoo
Neanderthals extracted animal fat in advanced food prep 'fat factories' 125,000 years ago: report
Neanderthals living 125,000 years ago in what is now modern-day Germany may have extracted and eaten fat from animal bones through an organized food preparation process that scientists describe as a "fat factory." While excavating the site of a former lake landscape called Neumark-Nord, archaeologists discovered thousands of bones from at least 172 large mammals, along with flint artifacts. The bones, which date back to an interglacial period in which Neanderthals lived, were from animals like red deer and horses, according to a study published on July 2 in Science Advances. While many of the bones that contained less bone marrow were spread out across the archaeological site, researchers observed that many of the marrow-rich bones were located in clusters — sites they call "fat factories." Rare Christian Cross Among Spectacular 1,000-Year-old Viking Treasures Found By Metal Detectorists Researchers believe our extinct ancestors used tools to smash the bones into small fragments and then boiled them for hours. The grease, which then floated to the surface of the water, could be skimmed off the top and eaten — providing a calorie-dense food source for the archaic people. Viking-era Burial Site With Elite Family Treasures And Gifts Discovered, Plus An 'Unusual Casket' Read On The Fox News App Prior to this, evidence of the practice had only dated back to 28,000 years ago, according to the research. "Neanderthals were clearly managing resources with precision — planning hunts, transporting carcasses, and rendering fat in a task-specific area," Dr. Lutz Kindler, the study's first author, said. "They understood both the nutritional value of fat and how to access it efficiently — most likely involving caching carcass parts at places in the landscape for later transport to and use at the grease rendering site. Mysterious 'Dumped' Bodies Of Woman And Child Found By Archaeologists In Picturesque Town Fat was a "life-sustaining" resource for Neanderthals, especially during the winter and spring seasons when carbohydrates were scarce. Their diets consisted largely of animal protein, and consuming lots of protein without other nutrients could lead to a sometimes deadly condition called protein poisoning, the research noted. "The sheer size and extraordinary preservation of the Neumark-Nord site complex gives us a unique chance to study how Neanderthals impacted their environment, both animal and plant life," Dr. Fulco Scherjon, data manager and computer scientist on the project, said. "That's incredibly rare for a site this old—and it opens exciting new possibilities for future research." In recent years, scientists have also discovered that Neanderthals went diving for seashells that they could chip with stone hammers into thin and sharp cutting edges. Similarly, another study suggested Neanderthals may have buried their dead with flowers. Researchers Lutz Kindler and Wil Roebroeks did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital's request for article source: Neanderthals extracted animal fat in advanced food prep 'fat factories' 125,000 years ago: report
Yahoo
3 hours ago
- Yahoo
Not Tonight, Honey... I'm Allergic to Your Spunk
Allergic reactions to semen are, unfortunately, very real. In an essay for The Conversation, reproductive science specialist Michael Carroll of the UK's Manchester Metropolitan University explained that allergic reactions to seminal fluid can manifest as a nasty response to a partner's ejaculate, or even your own. The most common semen allergy is what's known as "seminal plasma hypersensitivity" or SPH, in which women who have sex with men react to proteins in seminal plasma, the goopy stuff that makes up spunk. In other words, it's the seminal fluid that's to blame, not the sperm itself — but the symptoms are very real, ranging from irritating vulvar itching and painful vaginal burning to anaphylactic shock. Bottom line? A lot of people might be suffering from this and not even know it. If you might be, doctors recommend either using condoms, taking antihistamines before sex, taking anti-inflammatory medications after sex, or desensitization therapy involving exposure of diluted semen to the skin. "If sex routinely leaves you itchy, sore or unwell — and condoms help — you might be allergic to semen," Carroll wrote. First documented nearly 60 years ago when a woman had to be hospitalized for her "violent allergic reaction" to sex, SPH is still, the reproductive expert wrote, often underdiagnosed. Until the year 1997, the medical establishment thought that fewer than 100 women had ever experienced the allergy, but a seminal — sorry — study that year found that nearly 12 percent of postcoital illnesses could be attributed to SPH. (Regrettably, there does not appear to be any formal inquiry whether men who have sex with men can have SPH, though there does appear to be anecdotal evidence that it does.) About 15 years later, Carroll conducted an informal survey that found the same rate of probable SPH, though he found that the cases had often gone misdiagnosed as sexually transmitted illnesses, yeast infections, or even run-of-the-mill "sensitivity." Given that its symptoms mirror some of those illnesses, it's not hard to see why. Along with being allergic to one's partner's semen, a separate condition known post-orgasmic illness syndrome (POIS) affects men who are allergic to their own skeet. With only 465 documented cases as of 2024, POIS can cause flu-like symptoms like fatigue and muscle aches immediately after ejaculation — and doctors are stumped as to its cause. Like SPH, both antihistamines and desensitization are recommended for POIS, as is hormonal therapy. Speaking about SPH specifically, Carroll noted that more often than not, "sex-related symptoms often go unspoken." "Embarrassment, stigma, and a lack of awareness among doctors mean that many women suffer in silence," the reproductive scientist said. More on weird sex stuff: Hanky Panky With Naughty AI Still Counts as Cheating, Therapist Says
