In Pictures: Food of Ando in Hong Kong

Fine dining cuisine fuses elements of Spain, Italy, Argentina and Japan on the plate.

No.37 of Asia’s 50 Best Restaurant 2024

Chart: China’s Juvenile Offenders Surge As Criminal Convictions Rise

China has convicted an increasing number of criminals in the past decade, topping 1 million cases annually, with a significant jump in juvenile offenders in recent years, according to recent data released by the Supreme People’s Court (SPC).

In the first quarter of this year, some 374,000 criminal defendants were sentenced, 14% more than the same period of 2023, including around 12,000 under 18-year-olds — a 77.67% surge year-on-year, according to the data published on April 22.

Source : Caixin

Time Is a Thief

There’s a stroller sitting in the back room of my garage. It’s been there for months. Untouched. I really need to list it on Facebook Marketplace, but I’m not quite ready to part ways. It’s bittersweet. I don’t miss schlepping around All Of The Things now that my kids are self-powered. But, when I think back on the hundreds of miles that I covered with our pram, my heart feels a sting. I pushed two babies up and down streets and sidewalks for five years. That stroller helped me maintain my sanity through the pandemic. In the earliest stages of motherhood, it gave me freedom while maintaining close proximity to the two tiny humans who intensely depended on me twenty-four hours a day.

I reached a point last year where pushing two five-year-olds around was becoming more of a workout than I always wanted. 80 pounds of child in a double stroller is no joke. It took some coaxing and cajoling, but eventually, my kids found their feet. I don’t know exactly when it happened. It wasn’t planned. But somewhere in there, we took our last stroller ride.

With most things in life, eventually, there will be a ‘last time’– we just often don’t know when it will be. Sometimes, we don’t realize it until after the fact. As my children grow, the “last times” are coming at me with a hastening speed. In light of this, I feel intensity in my need to savor and be present.

Time. It’s slippery.

There will be the final time your child crawls in bed with you. Asks to be held. Grabs your hand to cross the street. There will be one Last Supper in your childhood home. You’ll get one last chance to hug a parent and say, “I love you.” The window will eventually close on the opportunity to tell someone the impact they’ve had on your life.

We’re all running out of time. Every day.

We don’t always get to plan our endings. Loss often isn’t scheduled. Death never asks when you’re ready to part ways. Anyone who has had their ability to say goodbye to someone they love taken away knows this too well. When things are cut off abruptly and business is forever unfinished, it changes you.

People tend to live their lives working for tomorrow. This isn’t all bad. We need to be forward-thinking. However, farsightedness can hurt us and the people we hold most dear. Today all what you’ve got. We’re promised nothing more.

Pay attention to the life in front of you as it unfolds (and, please, stop watching it all through your phone). Our ability to be present is a two-way gift. The people around us want our attention. They deserve our focus. Presence is also something we owe ourselves. If you rush through right now, what are you missing? More importantly, who?

Life doesn’t come with a remote. There’s no rewind or redo. Humanity does give you a helpful guide, however. Regret. In some moments, our choices don’t map to our values. We don’t always act like the person we want to be. Regret can guide us to move forward differently. Give yourself grace for what you’ve struggled to be present for in the past. You can’t go back, but you can start today. We can’t always “make up” for lost time, but we can make good on the rest of the chances we’ve got.

How can we hold on and keep moving forward?

• Savor. Intentionally focus on small, simple pleasures every day. Appreciate your experiences as they are happening in real time.
• Forecast Nostalgia. Ask: When this chapter is over, what will I miss?
• Leave less unspoken. The text, email, or DM you’ve composed several times in your head but haven’t taken 2 minutes to send? Write it today. Better yet, send your thoughts in a handwritten letter. Pick up the phone and tell someone how they’ve impacted you. People love hearing that they’ve made a difference and that what they’ve said or done has mattered.

Memento mori (Latin for “remember that you have to die”). You will die. Everyone you love will, too. We don’t like to think or talk like that, but it’s uncomfortably true. Let the finiteness of existence unmoor you a bit. Allow this reality to transform how you live. Start now.

If this is your last chance, what will you do?

The bittersweet side of appreciating life’s most precious moments is the unbearable awareness that those moments are passing. – Marc Parent

Source : Finding Joy

Infographic: The Most Valuable Companies in Major EU Economies

Source : Visual Capitalist

Simulated Chemistry: New AI Platform Designs Tomorrow’s Cancer Drugs

Miles Martin wrote . . . . . . . . .

Scientists at UC San Diego have developed a machine learning algorithm to simulate the time-consuming chemistry involved in the earliest phases of drug discovery, which could significantly streamline the process and open doors for never-before-seen treatments. Identifying candidate drugs for further optimization typically involves thousands of individual experiments, but the new artificial intelligence (AI) platform could potentially give the same results in a fraction of the time. The researchers used the new tool, described in Nature Communications, to synthesize 32 new drug candidates for cancer.

The technology is part of a new but growing trend in pharmaceutical science of using AI to improve drug discovery and development.

“A few years ago, AI was a dirty word in the pharmaceutical industry, but now the trend is definitely the opposite, with biotech startups finding it difficult to raise funds without addressing AI in their business plan,” said senior author Trey Ideker, professor in the Department of Medicine at UC San Diego School of Medicine and adjunct professor of bioengineering and computer science at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering. “AI-guided drug discovery has become a very active area in industry, but unlike the methods being developed in companies, we’re making our technology open source and accessible to anybody who wants to use it.”

The new platform, called POLYGON, is unique among AI tools for drug discovery in that it can identify molecules with multiple targets, while existing drug discovery protocols currently prioritize single target therapies. Multi-target drugs are of major interest to doctors and scientists because of their potential to deliver the same benefits as combination therapy, in which several different drugs are used together to treat cancer, but with fewer side effects.

“It takes many years and millions of dollars to find and develop a new drug, especially if we’re talking about one with multiple targets.” said Ideker. “The rare few multi-target drugs we do have were discovered largely by chance, but this new technology could help take chance out of the equation and kickstart a new generation of precision medicine.”

The researchers trained POLYGON on a database of over a million known bioactive molecules containing detailed information about their chemical properties and known interactions with protein targets. By learning from patterns found in the database, POLYGON is able to generate original chemical formulas for new candidate drugs that are likely to have certain properties, such as the ability to inhibit specific proteins.

“Just like AI is now very good at generating original drawings and pictures, such as creating pictures of human faces based off desired properties like age or sex, POLYGON is able to generate original molecular compounds based off of desired chemical properties,” said Ideker. “In this case, instead of telling the AI how old we want our face to look, we’re telling it how we want our future drug to interact with disease proteins.”

To put POLYGON to the test, the researchers used it to generate hundreds of candidate drugs that target various pairs of cancer-related proteins. Of these, the researchers synthesized 32 molecules that had the strongest predicted interactions with the MEK1 and mTOR proteins, a pair of cellular signaling proteins that are a promising target for cancer combination therapy. These two proteins are what scientists call synthetically lethal, which means that inhibiting both together is enough to kill cancer cells even if inhibiting one alone is not.

The researchers found that the drugs they synthesized had significant activity against MEK1 and mTOR, but had few off-target reactions with other proteins. This suggests that one or more of the drugs identified by POLYGON could be able to target both proteins as a cancer treatment, providing a list of choices for fine-tuning by human chemists.

“Once you have the candidate drugs, you still need to do all the other chemistry it takes to refine those options into a single, effective treatment,” said Ideker. “We can’t and shouldn’t try to eliminate human expertise from the drug discovery pipeline, but what we can do is shorten a few steps of the process.”

Despite this caution, the researchers are optimistic that the possibilities of AI for drug discovery are only just being explored.

“Seeing how this concept plays out over the next decade, both in academia and in the private sector, is going to be very exciting.” said Ideker. “The possibilities are virtually endless.”

Source: UC San Diego