Science In Action

New types of snake-bite anti-venoms are designed by AI. Also, how much meat did human ancestors eat? How the Baltic Nord Stream gas pipeline rupture of 2022 was the biggest single release of methane ever caused by humans, and that Pluto met Charon, not with a bang, but more of a kiss.Using a high precision technique for spotting different isotopes of Nitrogen, Tina Lüdecke of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry has concluded that a group of early hominin Australopithecus living in South Africa were predominantly vegetarian, putting the date that human ancestors started eating meat (and thence growing bigger brains) to more recently. The technique, she thinks, can enlighten prehistoric food webs and ecologies from millions of years ago.Last year’s Nobel prizes showed the potential new techniques of AI to design synthetic proteins. Timothy P Jenkins and colleagues decided to try designing treatments for snakebite venoms, with remarkable apparent success. It could save many thousands of lives a year.Since the