Elabahrain.net A couple walked from opposite ends of China’s Great Wall and met in the middle. Then they broke up

The Great Wall of China has inspired countless works of art in its more than 2,000-year history. Among the most famous is “The Great Wall Walk,” a dramatic 90-day performance that saw lovers Marina Abramović and Frank Uwe Laysiepen (the late German artist known as Ulay) trek towards each other from opposite ends of the landmark.

Abramović began in the east at the so-called “dragon’s head” — where the Great Wall dips into the Bohai Bay like a dragon drinking from the sea — while Ulay started at the “tail,” more than 3,000 miles to her west, in the Gobi Desert.

When the idea was initially conceived, under a full moon in Australia’s outback, the pair had planned to meet and get married in the middle. But obtaining permission from Chinese authorities would take over eight years, by which time their romantic relationship, despite having achieved global fame and success as a performance art duo, had fallen apart amid infidelity, jealousy and a failed threesome. Still, neither wanted to give up on the project and, in March 1988, they embarked on their respective journeys.

“We both decided that we have to address new circumstances, which means our separation… (We would) say goodbye,” Abramović told CNN on a video call from the Modern Art Museum (MAM) Shanghai, where she opens her first ever museum exhibition in China this week. “Great love,” she added, encompasses everything: “Love, hate, disappointment, and forgiveness. We explore all of it.”

The 77-year-old Serbian artist’s new show, “Marina Abramović: Transforming Energy,” features interactive artworks inspired by the Great Wall journey, as well as over 1,200 never-before-seen images taken along the way.

The photos, which will be projected onto the museum’s walls, are divided into four categories that curator and MAM’s artistic director Shai Baitel grouped as “the preparation and beginning walk, encounters with locals, walking the wall and meeting Ulay, and staged experiments and landscapes.”

Baitel said he was “blown away” by the trove of unpublished film negatives Abramović held in storage. “It is a treasure for a curator, for anyone that is in the business of art, or art history research, (to) document (what has) not been digitized yet but exists there in large quantities.”

Abramović is shown traversing through some of the most stunning, wild parts of the wall against a backdrop of mountains, crumbling ruins and varied terrain. There’s a clear sense of isolation — but this loneliness provided space for contemplation and reflection, the artist said, admitting she must have been a “very strange” sight to everyone she encountered.

“I was a woman, walking alone… without a husband, without children, not speaking the language,” she recalled. “What am I doing there?”

Since planning the exhibition and trawling through her photo archive, the artist has been flooded with memories of the support and hospitality she experienced along the way.

“(Local people) were always giving more food… But I couldn’t carry it all. I was given goose eggs, but they are so big, so I would have one in my left pocket and one in my right pocket, to keep balance.”

Abramović was prohibited from camping on the wall, so she instead stayed in small villages along the way. In each one, she would try to meet the oldest resident — some well into their 100s — and through a translator who accompanied her, ask them to share their stories about the wall.

The Great Wall, which stretches across northern China, was built to keep out invaders, but for the locals Abramović spoke to, its winding shape was less about military history and more to do with an earthly representation of dragons and the Milky Way, she said. The quest became as much spiritual as it was physical.

“I realized the old stories are related directly to the minerals that I had been walking on,” the artist said at a press conference in Shanghai. “If I was walking on a ‘black dragon’ that would be on (iron-rich) hematite… a ‘red dragon’ would be clay, it was completely different ground,” she added, explaining that as she walked on various minerals and crystals, she was able to feel different “energies.”

After embracing, the couple parted ways (not before Abramović learned that Ulay had impregnated his Chinese translator during the trip) and did not see each other for another 22 years. That was until 2010, when Ulay surprised Abramović at the Museum of Modern Art in New York during her performance “The Artist is Present,” in which she sat in front of visitors, one at a time, and held their gaze in silence.

“I didn’t know he was going to sit with me,” she said, recalling the moment she opened her eyes to find Ulay across the table. “My whole life went to the front of my eyes and I started crying. It was a very strong moment.” Breaking her own rule, she reached across the table and held his hands, an emotional reunion that went viral.

Elbahrain.net The 2024 Nobel Prize in chemistry has been awarded to a trio of scientists who used artificial intelligence to “crack the code” of almost all known proteins, the “chemical tools of life.”

The Nobel Committee lauded David Baker, a US biochemist, for completing “the almost impossible feat of building entirely new kinds of proteins,” and Demis Hassabis and John Jumper, who work at Google DeepMind in London, for developing an AI model to predict proteins’ complex structures – a problem that had been unsolved for 50 years.

“The potential of their discoveries is enormous,” the committee said as the award was announced in Sweden on Wednesday. The prize, seen as the pinnacle of scientific achievement, carries a cash award of 11 million Swedish kronor ($1 million).

Proteins, a string of amino acid molecules, are the building blocks of life. They help form hair, skin and tissue cells; they read, copy and repair DNA; and they help carry oxygen in the blood.

While proteins are built from only around 20 amino acids, these can be combined in almost endless ways, folding themselves into highly complex patterns in three-dimensional space.

A ‘Google search’ for protein structures
The committee said Wednesday’s prize had two “halves.” The first went to Hassabis, a British computer scientist who co-founded Google’s AI research laboratory DeepMind, and Jumper, an American researcher who also works at DeepMind.

Hassabis and Jumper were honored for using AI to predict the three-dimensional structure of a protein from a sequence of amino acids, allowing them to then predict the structure of almost all 200 million known proteins.

“It’s really a standalone breakthrough solving a traditional holy grail in physical chemistry,” Anna Wedell, a professor of medical genetics at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden and a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, told.

Their AI program – the AlphaFold Protein Structure Database – has been used by at least 2 million researchers around the world. It acts as a “Google search” for protein structures, providing instant access to predicted models of proteins, accelerating progress in fundamental biology and other related fields. The pair have already won the 2023 Lasker and the Breakthrough prizes.

“They’ve made everything public, so more or less every field can now turn to this database and use these tools to address their particular problem. So it’s made leaps possible in very, very many different areas,” Wedell, who uses the tool in her own work in rare diseases, said.

Since the pair’s key paper was published in 2021, it has been cited more than 16,000 times. David Pendlebury, head of research analysis at Clarivate’s Institute for Scientific Information, described this as “unprecedented and reflects the revolutionary impact of this work.” Out of a total of 61 million scientific papers, only around 500 have been cited more than 10,000 times,

Creating proteins ‘not seen in nature’
The second “half” of the prize went to Baker, a professor at the University of Washington, for using computerized methods to create proteins which did not previously exist and have entirely new functions.

Johan Aqvist, a member of the Nobel committee, said Baker had used his computer program first to “draw protein structures in new dimensions,” then to “figure out what sequence of amino acids would give you this structure.” This allowed Baker to create these new proteins, “most of which had never been seen before and didn’t exist in nature.”

He said the variety of proteins Baker had created was “absolutely mindblowing.”

“It seems that you can almost construct any type of protein now with this technology,” Aqvist said.

The committee said that being able to construct new proteins has a vast range of potential uses, from creating new pharmaceuticals to developing new vaccines more quickly.

Wednesday’s chemistry prize has reinforced the huge influence of AI in science.

The Nobel Prize in physics, awarded Tuesday, was shared by Geoffrey Hinton, dubbed the “Godfather of AI,” and John Hopfield, for their work on artificial neural networks – the same technology that helped underpin the work of the new chemistry laureates.

“The Nobel Foundation’s selections of laureates in physics and in chemistry this year can only be described as bold,” Pendlebury said. “The acknowledgment of the transformational role of AI in research in two categories, back-to-back, is unprecedented.”

Elbahrain.net Americans are revolting against McDonald’s and fast-food chains. That’s hurting french fry suppliers like Lamb Weston.

Lamb Weston, the largest producer of french fries in North America and a major supplier to fast-food chains, restaurants and grocery stores, is closing a production plant in Washington state. The company announced last week that it would lay off nearly 400 employees, or 4% of its workforce, and temporarily cut production lines in response to slowing customer demand.

Shares of Lamb Weston (LW) have dropped 35% this year.

The potato giant is oversupplied at a time when demand is sluggish. Restaurant prices in recent years have increased faster than grocery store prices, leading customers to pull back at fast-food chains.

“Many of these promotional meal deals have consumers trading down from a medium fry to a small fry,” Lamb Weston CEO Thomas Werner said last week on an earnings call.

Lamb Weston did not immediately respond to CNN’s request for comment.

McDonald’s, its largest customer, accounts for 13% of Lamb Weston’s sales. As McDonald’s goes, so goes Lamb Weston.

And McDonald’s is struggling. Sales at US restaurants open at least a year fell 0.7% last quarter from the same period a year earlier, dragged down by fewer customers visiting the chain.

Lamb Weston is also highly exposed to other fast-food chains, analyst R.J. Hottovy at analytics firm Placer.ai said in a research note to clients last week.

Customer traffic to fast-food chains dropped 2% last quarter and 3% the previous quarter compared to the same time last year, according to Lamb Weston.

Self-service kiosks at McDonald’s and other fast-food chains have loomed as job killers since they were first rolled out 25 years ago. But nobody predicted what actually happened.

In one of the earliest mentions of kiosks in fast-food settings in 1999, now-defunct trade industry publication Business Information said that McDonald’s was working to “develop an electronic order-taking system that may eventually replace some of its human equivalents.”

Instead, touchscreen kiosks have added extra work for kitchen staff and pushed customers to order more food than they do at the cash register. The kiosks show the unintended consequences of technology in fast-food and retail settings, including self-checkout. Chains are now experimenting with artificial intelligence at drive-thru lanes, and the experience with kiosks holds lessons for them.

Today, instead of replacing workers, companies deploy kiosks to transfer labor to other tasks like handing off pickup orders, help increase sales, easily adjust prices and speed up service. (Many chains, including Subway, Chick-fil-A and Starbucks, don’t use them much or at all.)

Kiosks “guarantee that the upsell opportunities” like a milkshake or fries are suggested to customers when they order, Shake Shack CEO Robert Lynch said on an earnings call last month. “Sometimes that is not always a priority for employees when you’ve got 40 people in line. You’re trying to get through it as quick as possible.” Kiosks also shift employees from behind the cash register to maintaining the dining area, delivering food to customers or working in the kitchen, he said.

Kiosks have also been threatened as a fast-food industry response to higher minimum wage laws.

“I told you so,” former McDonald’s CEO Ed Rensi said in 2016 after the company expanded kiosks. “I and others warned that union demands for a much higher minimum wage would force businesses with small profit margins to replace full-service employees with costly investments in self-service alternatives.”

California this year raised the minimum wage for the state’s fast food sector workers by $4 to $20. It raised a familiar refrain that those workers would be replaced by, such as kiosks.

But the quick-service and fast-casual segments of the restaurant industry continue to grow. Staffing levels were nearly 150,000 jobs, or 3%, above pre-pandemic levels, according to the latest Labor Department data.

Cans of Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup line a supermarket shelf in Bellingham, Washington, U.S. April 25, 2024.

Self-checkout also has not caused retail job losses. In some cases, self-checkout backfired for chains because self-checkout leads to higher merchandise losses from customer errors and more intentional shoplifting than when human cashiers are ringing up customers.

Fast-food chains and retailers need to do a better job communicating what the potential benefits of kiosks and self-checkout are to consumers and employees, Andrews said.

“What I think will be central for customers is that they see how this technology is providing them with more or better service rather than more unpaid busywork,” he said. “Otherwise, the public is just likely to view it as yet another attempt to reduce labor costs via automation and self-service.”