This week, we discuss reflections from this year's American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) annual meeting and the latest advances in plasma chemistry with Rebecca Trager and Mason Wakley.

The annual meeting of the AAAS kicked off in Phoenix, on the heels of the recent minibus spending package announcement, as well as the rescinding of the 2009 Greenhouse Gas Endangerment Finding. We'll fill you in on some of the conversations that took place that weekend.

And, plasma is often described as the fourth state of matter, but what exactly is it made of? We'll explain it's make-up and dive into how chemists are learning to unlock its power.

Welcome to our latest podcast series, The chemical breakdown. Each week, we dive deeper into two stories we've covered here at Chemistry World, providing insight into the facts, why you should care, and what it means for the chemistry community. We also give you that week's headlines to keep you up to date with what's happening in the chemistry community. And finally, we'll end each episode with a brief section on what was happening this week in chemistry history.

This week, we discuss the new deep learning model AlphaGenome and visit the very beginning of life on Earth with Mason Wakley and Neil Withers.

Google DeepMind has released a new deep learning model that can predict the effect of small changes to DNA sequences up to one million base pairs in length. What does this new tech mean for our understanding of the human genome?

And, how did life start on Earth, before the first cell came to be? We discuss the RNA world hypothesis and breakdown the chemistry it's built on.

You can find more episodes of The chemical breakdown on the Chemistry world podcast feed. We would love to hear your feedback on this new podcast, so if you have any questions or comments please get in touch.

In this special podcast produced in partnership with Waters Corporation, find out how understanding the chemistry and materials that go into batteries marks the first step towards making them safer and increasing energy density, and unlocks new opportunities for reuse and recycling