DeepMind has developed a new robot capable of playing table tennis at an impressive level. The robot, designed to interact with human players, has showcased significant advancements in AI and robotics, particularly in the areas of real-time decision-making and adaptability.

@science

#AI #DeepMind

Google DeepMind and Ancient Inscriptions

DeepMind has unveiled a new AI system called Aeneas that can decipher partially-erased Latin inscriptions carved into stone — and even determine their approximate date and origin.

Trained on a dataset of 150,000 inscriptions from across the Roman Empire — spanning from Britain to Iraq — Aeneas not only reconstructs missing text but also identifies historical parallels.

In trials with 23 historians, Aeneas helped generate new research ideas in 90% of cases. Among its notable successes is the analysis of the famous Monumentum Ancyranum in Ankara.

The open-source code is now available at predictingthepast.com and is already being integrated into educational programs in Belgium.

Archaeologists may soon swap their shovels for laptops — and let Latin speak once again! 🏛️

#DeepMind #Aeneas #Epigraphy

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🧬 Google DeepMind Just Precomputed 9 Billion Possible Human DNA Mutations

This may be one of DeepMind’s most ambitious biology releases since AlphaFold.

AlphaGenome Atlas contains AI predictions for the molecular effects of essentially every possible single-letter substitution in the human genome — around 9 billion variants.

The resulting dataset is about 1 petabyte, more than 30 times larger than the AlphaFold Database.

Why does this matter?

Only around 2% of our genome directly encodes proteins. Much of the remaining 98% regulates when, where and how strongly genes are switched on — and contains huge numbers of variants associated with human traits and disease.

AlphaGenome predicts how mutations may alter processes including gene expression, RNA splicing, chromatin accessibility and regulatory activity. DeepMind then combines these predictions with AlphaMissense into a single AlphaGenome Variant Impact — AVI — score, allowing researchers to rapidly rank variants across both coding and non-coding DNA.

In an analysis of whole-genome data from more than 54,000 UK Biobank participants, the approach uncovered 22% more associations involving rare non-coding variants that had previously been buried in statistical noise.

And there is another important shift happening alongside it.

DeepMind has released Science Skills — an open collection of agent tools connecting AI workflows to resources including AlphaGenome, AlphaFold DB, UniProt, ClinVar and dozens of other scientific databases.

This does not turn an AI agent into a doctor or make consumer DNA tests clinically diagnostic.

But it does move genomics toward something fundamentally new:

A human genome is becoming a dataset an AI agent can systematically interrogate, prioritize and explain.

We sequenced the human genome 25 years ago.

Now we are starting to make it searchable.

#AlphaGenome #DeepMind #Genetics #AI #Bioinformatics #Biotechnology #Science

Atlas:
https://alphagenome.google/atlas