🤖 Claude Discovered a System Resembling CRISPR

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🤖 Claude Discovered a System Resembling CRISPR Claude autonomously discovered a novel enzyme system with an array of DNA repeats, similar to CRISPR—a bacterial immune mechanism that scientists use as "scissors" for genome editing. This is the first result from Anthropic's new biolab, where humans test AI hypotheses experimentally. 🔍 Scientists tasked Claude with finding unusual reverse transcriptases—enzymes that copy genetic information from RNA to DNA. The AI agents independently analyzed the sequences and searched for anomalies that might fall outside previously known criteria. Over 21 hours, approximately 950 AI agents used 210 million tokens and identified 3,500 potentially new systems, narrowing the list to the 20 most promising candidates. One agent drew attention to a "spectacular" array of repetitive sequences near the reverse transcriptase gene in the genomes of bacteriophages (viruses that attack bacteria). Previous studies had identified the enzyme itself, but no one had noticed the repeats and the adjacent gene with an unknown function. Anthropic notes that the set of features they found had previously been observed in only a few systems, including CRISPR, and all of them are programmable and capable of cutting, copying, and inserting DNA. That said, the authors still don't understand the primary function of their discovery, but they believe it's important to share the finding now to show AI's potential in scientific research. Can we trust AI with a biology lab? ❤️ — Yes, it's even necessary 🤔 — Probably not... @hiaimediaen

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    💡 To Read the Herculaneum Scrolls, a Researcher Made New Papyrus Scrolls-and Burned Them Former banker and inventor Douglas Seiler came up with a way to read the charred scrolls of Herculaneum without physically unrolling them. To test his idea, he made his own scrolls and burned them. ℹ️ The ancient Roman city of Herculaneum was buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE, along with the only known intact library to survive from antiquity. Around 1,800 charred scrolls and fragments remain. Physically unrolling them can reduce the fragile scrolls to dust, while X-rays struggle to distinguish the text from the papyrus because both the carbon-based ink and the charred papyrus are largely made of carbon. But researchers have previously found lead in the ink of some ancient papyri, including fragments from Herculaneum. Lead is much easier to detect with X-rays. Seiler's idea could therefore provide a relatively quick and inexpensive way to identify the scrolls with the best chance of being read. ⚙️ For the experiment, Seiler sourced papyrus and reed pens from Egypt and traditional lampblack ink from Japan. Chemists he knew helped prepare inks with different concentrations of lead. Seiler then paid high school students to write passages from "Star Wars," the Bible, and the 1960s sci-fi series "The Outer Limits" on the papyrus. The scroll was later carbonized in a high-temperature furnace in Seiler's home lab, inside a steel container with very little oxygen. Physicists at NIST scanned the charred scroll using X-ray CT. They then virtually unrolled it using software originally developed to analyze the "jelly rolls" inside lithium-ion batteries. The lead in the ink absorbed up to 25 times as many X-rays as the charred papyrus, making even tiny concentrations of lead stand out. "If you look at the images, the letters light up like a Christmas tree," Seiler said. 📌 The researchers now propose screening real Herculaneum scrolls with an inexpensive handheld X-ray fluorescence scanner. Scrolls showing traces of lead could then be prioritized for more detailed X-ray tomography. The synthetic scrolls can also provide ground-truth training datasets for developing and validating AI-driven text-detection algorithms. 👨 Seiler conceived the project and helped fund it himself, becoming the paper's first author. His path into science was unusual: before retiring, he worked in real estate and banking and as an inventor. He became interested in the Herculaneum scrolls while working with Berkeley SETI on PANOSETI, a telescope project designed in part to search the sky for signs of extraterrestrial technology. @hiaimediaen

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