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Artificial intelligence has been used to predict the structures of almost every protein made by the human body.

The development could help supercharge the discovery of new drugs to treat disease, alongside other applications.

Proteins are essential building blocks of living organisms; every cell we have in us is packed with them.

Understanding the shapes of proteins is critical for advancing medicine, but until now, only a fraction of these have been worked out.

Researchers used a program called AlphaFold to predict the structures of 350,000 proteins belonging to humans and other organisms.

The instructions for making human proteins are contained in our genomes – the DNA contained in the nuclei of human cells.

There are around 20,000 of these proteins expressed by the human genome. Collectively, biologists refer to this full complement as the “proteome”.

Commenting on the results from AlphaFold, Dr Demis Hassabis, chief executive and co-founder of artificial intelligence company Deep Mind, said: “We believe it’s the most complete and accurate picture of the human proteome to date.

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“We believe this work represents the most significant contribution AI has made to advancing the state of scientific knowledge to date.

“And I think it’s a great illustration and example of the kind of benefits AI can bring to society.” He added: “We’re just so excited to see what the community is going to do with this.”

Proteins are made up of chains of smaller building blocks called amino acids. These chains fold in myriad different ways, forming a unique 3D shape. A protein’s shape determines its function in the human body.

The 350,000 protein structures predicted by AlphaFold include not only the 20,000 contained in the human proteome, but also those of so-called model organisms used in scientific research, such as E. coli, yeast, the fruit fly and the mouse.

This giant leap in capability is described by DeepMind researchers and a team from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in the prestigious journal Nature.

AlphaFold was able to make a confident prediction of the structural positions for 58% of the amino acids in the human proteome.

The positions of 35.7% were predicted with a very high degree of confidence – double the number confirmed by experiments.

Traditional techniques to work out protein structures include X-ray crystallography, cryogenic electron microscopy (Cryo-EM) and others. But none of these is easy to do: “It takes a huge amount of money and resources to do structures,” Prof John McGeehan, a structural biologist at the University of Portsmouth, told BBC News.

Therefore, the 3D shapes are often determined as part of targeted scientific investigations, but no project until now had systematically determined structures for all the proteins made by the body.

In fact, just 17% of the proteome is covered by a structure confirmed experimentally.

Commenting on the predictions from AlphaFold, Prof McGeehan said: “It’s just the speed – the fact that it was taking us six months per structure and now it takes a couple of minutes. We couldn’t really have predicted that would happen so fast.”

“When we first sent our seven sequences to the DeepMind team, two of those we already had the experimental structures for. So we were able to test those when they came back. It was one of those moments – to be honest – where the hairs stood up on the back of my neck because the structures [AlphaFold] produced were identical.”Prof Edith Heard, from EMBL, said: “This will be transformative for our understanding of how life works. That’s because proteins represent the fundamental building blocks from which living organisms are made.”

“The applications are limited only by our understanding.”

Those applications we can envisage now include developing new drugs and treatments for disease, designing future crops that can resist climate change, and enzymes that can break down the plastic that pervades the environment.

Prof McGeehan’s group is already using AlphaFold’s data to help develop faster enzymes for degrading plastic. He said the program had provided predictions for proteins of interest whose structures could not be determined experimentally – helping accelerate their project by “multiple years”.

Dr Ewan Birney, director of EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute, said the AlphaFold predicted structures were “one of the most important datasets since the mapping of the human genome”.

DeepMind has teamed up with EMBL to make the AlphaFold code and protein structure predictions openly available to the global scientific community.

Dr Hassabis said DeepMind planned to vastly expand the coverage in the database to almost every sequenced protein known to science – over 100 million structures.

A group of cyber-security experts is urging companies to set up a way for people to report their workers behaving abusively online.

A number of companies have already signed up, two of Respect in Security’s founders say.

The initiative launched on Thursday.

Lisa Forte, of Red Goat Cyber Security, says she has received unsolicited explicit content from official accounts on LinkedIn and violent threats on Twitter and Instagram.

And they did not come from anonymous accounts.

‘Best solution’
Social-media platforms face regular criticism for the way they respond to reported abuse.

They use a combination of automation and human moderators to identify and respond to harassment.

“For a lot of people, it’s a no man’s land,” Ms Forte said.

“It can feel like the platforms do nothing, the police don’t do a lot, lawyers are expensive and the publicity legal action generates can be negative.

“The best solution we have, if the culprit is identifiable, is to approach their employer.

“We’re not saying a company is liable for the behaviour but it will be able to decide the most appropriate way to deal with it – which may be offering support rather than disciplinary.

“But there is a way of conducting yourself online.”

But companies are not formally liable for this behaviour.

‘Think twice’
Ms Forte’s co-founder, Rik Ferguson, from Trend Micro, said many companies had anti-bullying policies but they tended to focus on internal behaviour.

Companies signing up to the scheme are asked to commit to seven principles, including:

protecting the identity of the person who reports harassment, as far as possible
making the reporting pathway public and discussing it with employees
not “ignoring” any form of harassment
“If you know your organisation has made that commitment, it may make you think twice about doing it,” Mr Ferguson said.

“We need to take action.”

The scheme does not cover abuse sent from accounts created anonymously.

Proposed changes to EU law would force companies that transfer Bitcoin or other crypto-assets to collect details on the recipient and sender.

The proposals would make crypto-assets more traceable, the EU Commission said, and would help stop money-laundering and the financing of terrorism.

The new rules would also prohibit providing anonymous crypto-asset wallets.

The proposals could take two years to become law.

The Commission argued that crypto-asset transfers should be subject to the same anti-money-laundering rules as wire transfers.

“Given that virtual assets transfers are subject to similar money-laundering and terrorist-financing risks as wire funds transfers… it therefore appears logical to use the same legislative instrument to address these common issues,” the Commission wrote.

While some crypto-asset service providers are already covered by anti-money-laundering rules, the new proposals would “extend these rules to the entire crypto-sector, obliging all service providers to conduct due diligence on their customers,” the Commission explained.

Under the proposals, a company transferring crypto-assets for a customer would be obliged to include their name, address, date of birth and account number, and the name of the recipient.

David Gerard, author of Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain, told the BBC: “This is just applying existing rules to crypto. This has been coming since 2019.”

He said that although these were European proposals their impact would reach much further.

“If you want to make real money, you have to follow the rules of real money,” he said.

To become law the proposals will need the agreement of member states and the European Parliament.

Video conferencing firm Zoom has struck a multibillion dollar deal to buy a cloud-based call centre operator in a bet on the future of hybrid working.

The firm announced the $14.7bn (£10.7bn) acquisition of Five9 in a blog post on Sunday.

Zoom boss Eric Yuan said the deal would allow its customers to “reimagine the way they do business”.

It marks the firm’s biggest takeover, and comes even though staff are beginning to return to the office.

Investors have been watching for clues as to how the firm would fare as social distancing restrictions lift and more people are vaccinated.

The pandemic, which prompted an abrupt shift to remote work for many businesses around the world, transformed Zoom into a household name practically overnight.

Zoom has said it does not expect growth to continue at the pace it enjoyed last year, but so far business remains strong.

The company expects sales to rise more than 40% this year, reaching more than $3.7bn (£2.66bn).

In the last three months of 2020, sales were up 370% compared to the same period in 2019, hitting $882.5m, it said in March.

The firm, which charges businesses for its remote meeting software in addition to more limited free use for the general public, said the acquisition of Five9 marked a shift in strategy. It is now prioritising its cloud-calling product Zoom Phone and conference-hosting product Zoom Rooms.

“This acquisition is… positioning us to accelerate Zoom’s growth and play an even stronger role in driving the digital future, bringing companies and their customers closer together,” its founder Eric Yuan said.

Five9’s call centre software is used by more than 2,000 clients such as Under Armour, Lululemon and Olympus, and the deal is expected to be completed in the first half of 2022 having been approved by the boards of both companies.

“This is a high-priced deal which appears to attempt to build out the Zoom Phone offering,” said Neil Campling, an analyst at Mirabaud Securities.

But he added: “Paying such a high price for a non-differentiated offering smacks of attempts to move into adjacent markets as Zoom fatigue sets in.”

A question mark has been raised over the future of hybrid working, although other tech firms such as Google and Microsoft have invested in their video-conferencing offer during the pandemic.

But others such as global workspace provider IWG have said that they expect working from home some of the time will become the norm – especially as firms will be looking to save money and be more environmentally-friendly by using less office space.

Rights activists, journalists and lawyers around the world have been targeted with phone malware sold to authoritarian governments by an Israeli surveillance firm, media reports say.

They are on a list of up to 50,000 phone numbers of people believed to be of interest to clients of the company, NSO, leaked to major news outlets.

It is not clear where the list came from – or whose phones had actually been hacked.

NSO denies any wrongdoing.

It says the software is intended for use against criminals and terrorists and is made available only to military, law enforcement and intelligence agencies from countries with good human rights records.

In a statement, it said the original investigation which led to the reports, by Paris-based NGO Forbidden Stories and the human rights group Amnesty International, was “full of wrong assumptions and uncorroborated theories”.

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The allegations about use of the software, known as Pegasus, were carried on Sunday by the Washington Post, the Guardian, Le Monde and 14 other media organisations around the world.

Pegasus infects iPhones and Android devices to enable operators to extract messages, photos and emails, record calls and secretly activate microphones.

Forensic tests on a few phones with numbers on the list indicated more than half had traces of the spyware.

Some 180 journalists are said to be on the list, from organisations such as Agence France-Presse, CNN, the New York Times, Al Jazeera and many other news outlets.

They also include two women close to the murdered Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi and a Mexican journalist named Cecilio Pineda Birto, who was murdered at a carwash.

The wider list also includes heads of state and government, members of Arab royal families and business executives.
The allegations here are not new but what is new is the scale of the targeting of innocent people that’s allegedly taking place. Nearly 200 reporters from 21 countries have their phone numbers on this list and more names of high-profile public figures are expected to be revealed.

There are plenty of unknowns in these allegations – including where the list comes from and how many of the phone numbers were actively targeted with spyware. NSO Group have once again come out swinging and deny all accusations but it’s a blow for the company that is actively trying to reform its reputation.

Only two weeks ago they released their first “transparency report” detailing human right policies and pledges. Amnesty International brushed the 32-page document off as a “sales brochure”.

These latest allegations will do further damage to its image, but they won’t hurt the company financially. There are very few private companies able to produce the sort of invasive spy tools that NSO sells, and clearly the largely unregulated market for the software is booming.

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More details about who has been targeted are expected to be released in the coming days.

WhatsApp sued NSO in 2019, alleging the company was behind cyber-attacks on 1,400 mobile phones involving Pegasus.

At the time, NSO denied any wrongdoing, but the company has been banned from using WhatsApp.

WhatsApp is testing a new feature that will let people message without using their phone for the first time.

At present, WhatsApp is linked to a user’s phone. Its desktop and web apps need that device to be connected and receiving messages.

But the new feature will let users send and receive messages “even if your phone battery is dead”.

Up to four other devices – like PCs and tablets – can be used together, WhatsApp said.

To begin with, the new feature will be rolled out as a beta test for a “small group of users”, and the team plans to improve performance and add features before enabling it for everyone.

End-to-end encryption – a key selling point for WhatsApp – will still work under this new system, it said.

Several other messaging apps already have such a feature, including rival encrypted app Signal, which requires a phone for sign-up, but not to exchange messages.

But the feature has long been requested by WhatsApp users – of which there are a reported two billion.

‘A rethink’
In a blog post announcing the move, Facebook engineers said the change needed a “rethink” of WhatsApp’s software design.

That is because the current version “uses a smartphone app as the primary device, making the phone the source of truth for all user data and the only device capable of end-to-end encrypting messages for another user [or] initiating calls”, the company said.

WhatsApp Web and other non-smartphone apps are essentially a “mirror” of what happens on the phone.

But that system has significant drawbacks familiar to many regular users, as the web app is known to frequently disconnect.

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It also means that only one so-called “companion app” can be active at a time – so loading WhatsApp on another device will disconnect a WhatsApp web window.

“The new WhatsApp multi-device architecture removes these hurdles, no longer requiring a smartphone to be the source of truth, while still keeping user data seamlessly and securely synchronised and private,” the company said.

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On a technical level, the solution was giving every device its own “identity key”, and WhatsApp keeps a record of which keys belong to the same user account. That means it does not need to store messages on its own server, which could lead to privacy concerns.

But Jake Moore, a security specialist at anti-virus-company Eset, said that no matter how robust the security is, having messages on more devices could still be a concern.

“There will always be a malicious actor looking to create a workaround,” he said.

“Domestic abusers and stalkers could now have the potential of using this new feature to their advantage, by creating additional endpoints in order to capture any synchronised private communications.”

He also said that social engineering is an “ever-increasing” threat, and the responsibility lies with the user to keep an eye out for potential misuse.

“It is therefore vital that people are aware of all the devices that are connected to their account,” he warned.

Microsoft has announced a new “cloud PC” product where users can stream a Windows device from anywhere.

Windows 365 will work similarly to game streaming – where the computing is done in a data centre somewhere remotely and streamed to a device.

That means all sorts of devices – including tablets or Apple Macs – can stream a full Windows desktop PC.

It is being sold to businesses to begin with, as many firms move to a mix of office and remote working.

Microsoft is marketing the new way of using a PC as “hybrid Windows for a hybrid world”.

The company says that every user’s apps and settings will boot instantly from any device – allowing personalised Windows PCs to be accessed from anywhere.

“The Windows experience is consistent, no matter the device,” the announcement promised.

“You can get the same work done on a laptop in a hotel room, a tablet from their car between appointments, or your desktop while you’re in the office.”

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It will launch in August for business customers “of all sizes”, Microsoft said. To begin with, it will stream a version of Windows 10 – but the successor, Windows 11, will also be available once it launches.

There is no news on whether a personal product will follow. However, Microsoft has been moving towards a subscription model for its man services for nearly a decade.

Microsoft Office began marketing subscription licences with Office 2013, which was launched alongside Office 365, as the subscription version is known. It now makes more money than its single-purchase desktop-bound version.

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Similarly, Microsoft has been championing the ongoing subscription model in its gaming division. Its Xbox Games Pass service has largely won over sceptical gamers, providing a range of titles to download and play for a monthly fee. It has recently added game streaming, using similar technology to this new version of Windows.

The backbone of the service already existed, using Microsoft’s widely-used Azure platform and existing virtualisation technology.

The downside to such services is that their long-term cost for individuals is often much higher than a one-off purchase.

Microsoft has also dramatically lowered the price of Windows for many customers. Where once it was sold on discs at computer stores for a significant cost, the company has offered customers free upgrades from one version to another for many years, and will do the same for Windows 11.

Instead, Microsoft has sold Windows-related products such as OneDrive cloud storage and Office 365 subscriptions.

Websites for a Russian-linked ransomware gang blamed for attacks on hundreds of businesses worldwide have gone offline.

Monitors say a payment website and a blog run by the REvil group became suddenly unreachable on Tuesday.

The reason behind the disappearance is unknown, but has sparked speculation that the group may have been targeted deliberately by authorities.

It comes amid growing pressure between the US and Russia over cyber-crime.

US President Joe Biden said he raised the issue with Vlamidir Putin during a phone call on Friday, after discussing the subject during a summit with the Russian president in Geneva last month.

Mr Biden told reporters that he had “made it very clear to him…we expect them to act” on information and also hinted the US could take direct digital retaliation on servers used for intrusions.

The timing of Tuesday’s outage has sparked speculation that either the US or Russian officials may have taken action against REvil – though officials have so far declined to comment and cyber experts say sudden disappearances of groups are not necessarily uncommon.

The development comes after a series of high-profile ransomware attacks which have hit major US businesses this year.

The FBI accused REvil – also known as Sodinokibi – of being behind a ransomware attack on the world’s largest meat processing company JBS last month.

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The group is considered prolific and last week demanded a huge bitcoin ransom for an attack which targeted IT firm Kaseya and hundreds more businesses worldwide.

REvil is one of the most prolific and feared of all ransomware gangs and if this really is the end, it’s extremely significant.

The rumour mill is in hyperdrive about what’s behind this sudden shutdown but one hacker who claims to be an affiliate of the gang gave me some insights. I’m yet to confirm his identity but other researchers say his claims are highly plausible.

He claims that the US “Feds took down” elements of their websites and so they pulled the plug on the rest of their operation. He also said there was pressure from the Kremlin too saying: “Russia is tired of the US and other countries crying to them.”

Like all hacker claims we have to take them with a large dollop of salt but if this scenario proves to be accurate, it shows a dramatic shift in policy from Russia which has so far been happy to sit back and let gangs like REvil operate without fear of intervention.

However another comment from my contact also hints at the bigger picture. He says he has no plans to retire and is already planning another unknown venture. “Make one go away, more will rise,” he warned.

Heathrow’s Terminal 5 saw long queues at security on Monday morning because of the absence of more than 100 staff.

The airport said the issue had arisen because the security staff were instructed to self-isolate by the NHS Test and Trace app.

Some passengers experienced lengthy queues from 06:00. Many complained that there was limited social distancing.

It comes as the government faces calls to bring forward changes to Covid self-isolation rules.

The disruption affected only Terminal 5 and did not involve Border Force officers.

Some passengers complained on Twitter about “total chaos” and posted pictures of large crowds at the terminal.

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One passenger, Kathryn Wylie, was travelling to Glasgow when she was caught up in the disruption. “It was manic,” she told the BBC.

“In Terminal 5, both security queues were backed up, with little being done to move people forward who had the closest upcoming flights.

“Luckily, one lady came through handing out water, but I’m not sure that went on very long.

“Once you finally got through to the security screening, there were maybe only two to four of the belts functioning, which made the whole process even more drawn out.”

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Kathryn said that once she was on board the plane, its departure was delayed for another hour to allow people to get onto the flight who had not yet made it through security.

Keaton Stone, a BBC producer on The Sky at Night, also tweeted about the queues.

“Never seen Heathrow so busy!!!!” he said.The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.
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Most Covid restrictions are due to end on 19 July, however planned changes to self-isolation rules are not expected until 16 August at the earliest.

But many companies, especially in the hospitality and leisure sectors, say their reopening plans are in disarray due to the number of staff having to isolate because they have come into close contact with someone who has tested positive for Covid.

On Monday, business lobby group the CBI urged ministers to bring forward changes to the rules, saying it would help ensure reopening was a “confident” not “anxious” process.

A Heathrow spokesperson said: “Earlier today, we experienced some passenger congestion in Terminal 5 departures, due to colleagues being instructed to self-isolate by NHS Test and Trace.

“We have activated additional team members to assist passengers with their journeys and the operation has now returned to normal. We apologise to our passengers for any inconvenience caused.”

The Department for Health and Social Care has been approached for comment on the NHS test and Trace app.

If you are less focused on climbing the corporate ladder since the coronavirus crisis forced more of us to work from home, you are not alone.

That is according to a study by Aviva, which found 47% of employees were less career-focused because of the pandemic.

Around two in five people said they could never switch off from work.

“One result of this always-on, ever-present culture is that 40% of employees are concerned about work-related burnout,” the insurer said.

Half of people complained that the boundary between work and home had become “increasingly blurred”. And the impact of that has disproportionately affected women, with 46% concerned about burnout – compared to 35% of men.

Meanwhile, 24% of women said the pandemic had a negative impact on their work-life balance. That compares to 16% of men.

“The pandemic may have been a collective experience, but the impact has been fragmented in so many ways, with women especially facing particularly acute stresses from the blurring of lines between home and work,” Debbie Bullock, wellbeing lead at Aviva said.

The study of more than 2,000 employees of larger companies found that just 14% would favour returning to the office full time, with 15% saying they would prefer to work from home five days a week.

Gender divide
Men were more likely to favour a full return to the office, while more women said they would rather work from home full time.

Aviva said employers would need to “carefully examine” how they bring staff back to avoid deepening the gender divide between men and women.

It warned of “the risk that those – often women – with primary care roles for their children or parents are put under increasing strain”.

“The journey towards the workplace of the future has been accelerated by the pandemic,” Aviva’s Ms Bullock said.

“Employees will look for something in return to encourage them back to the office, and employers must ensure offices become a destination for collaborating, mentoring and socialising to rebuild relationships.”

Last month, dating app Bumble shut its offices for a week to combat workplace stress. Its 700 staff worldwide were told to switch off and focus on themselves.

One senior executive at the firm tweeted that founder Whitney Wolfe Herd had made the move “having correctly intuited our collective burnout”.