Metacelsus

>Gulf of Mexico

well, that depends on who's naming it these days...

So they did a perturb-seq experiment and then launched one agent per gene in the library?

Seems quite inefficient to me. Unless the goal is to spend millions in API credits.

It's called the gambler's fallacy for a reason!

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16116447/ Ed Boyden and Feng Zhang were first and second author, respectively. A real all-star team. Too bad only the PI is awarded (not to say Deisseroth doesn't deserve it, he definitely does)

Also, just like with CRISPR, there were others thinking along the same lines at the same time, but who didn't get the high profile publications: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/he-may-have-inven...

Oooh those are really good! (I'd say more but I don't want to spoil anything)

This website definitely has "bad AI map" vibes, look at the USA for example

# WARNING

DO NOT, EVER, MAKE THIS DATASET PUBLIC

OR ALL THE WORLD'S EVIL WILL CHASE YOU AND YOUR FAMILY FOREVER, EVEN IN DEATH AND BEYOND

Welp, I guess OpenAI is cursed now...

I want to like Anthropic but this is just pushing my startup to use OpenAI

You're thinking of the Miller-Urey experiment. They got some biomolecules (amino acids, etc) but definitely not life

Prediction from 1960: "At this date human population will approach infinity if it grows as it has grown in the last two millennia."

Non-paywalled link: http://www.bioinfo.rpi.edu/bystrc/courses/biol4961/Doomsday....

If you find six roaches, you've got more than six . . .

>Anthropic gates usage related to biology and related research. In their latest threat intelligence report they talk about how they detected and banned bad actors using the Claude line of models to do some scary stuff. Credit to them, this is a slippery slope and they seem to do a good job of detecting and banning misuse. But squint at what is happening though. The cure-all is gated for you and me, but Anthropic hires biologists, sets up wet labs and wants the discoveries for themselves. I alluded to this in my previous post.

As a biologist, this is the most annoying thing about Anthropic for me. If they really cared about improving health they would set up a trusted-access program so that biologists can use Mythos (et al) safely. Instead they're trying to monopolize biology.

Just because the author can't think of a way to cause mass death with an engineered virus, doesn't mean an AI won't be able to think of one.

(There are several biological threats the author hasn't considered. I'll just leave it at that.)

How can they "not rule out" that Tristan and Levent's data was used for training?

Whatever happened to Edge? They haven't really published since 2018

Seeing the recent increase in bond yields reminded me of this.

>really top journals like Scientific Reports

I wouldn't consider Scientific Reports to be a top journal, it's basically pay-to-publish

>Reward hacking has been present in AI systems both historically (see this work from a decade ago , figure shown below)

I went to the page, and guess who it's by . . . Dario Amodei and Jack Clark!

relevant: https://xkcd.com/1000/

>However, later in the run, Claude realized that the compromised host sat in a cloud account with no connection to the capture-the-flag challenge. On its own, it concluded that the target was in fact real, and ceased its attack.

Interesting, Claude cared enough to stop

Holy crap. This is definitely not good

If built in America it would easily cost 10x that!

Time to bring out the gene drives!

Sure, but at what levels? The dose makes the poison, and the article doesn't say

Hmm, Science just had a news article saying the AMOC was doing OK: https://www.science.org/content/article/ocean-current-warms-...

Yeah. With cancer, delivering to 99% of the cells won't cut it, the surviving 1% will quickly grow back.

The actual study: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.05.30.728989v1

Abstract:

Cas9-based tools enable the introduction of genetic lesions to investigate DNA repair outcomes and edit the genome at disease-relevant loci. DNA double-strand breaks (DSBs) induced by CRISPR/Cas9 result in frequent aneuploidy and large deletions, revealing a repair deficiency in early human embryos and limiting the clinical application of this technology. Here we evaluated the DNA repair outcomes of DNA nicks and mismatches introduced using base editors in human embryos at two targets, PCSK9 and HBG. Editing was efficient and, unlike Cas9-induced DSBs, did not result in either chromosomal abnormalities or large deletions. Small insertions or deletions after base editing were rare, and off-target activity was dependent on the guide RNA. Delivering the base editor as a protein at fertilization or at the pronuclear stage allowed normal development to the blastocyst stage and the derivation of edited stem cell lines. In stark contrast, introduction of the editor as RNA resulted in early embryo arrest. Our results demonstrated that, unlike DSBs, DNA nicks and mismatches are efficiently repaired in human embryos, allowing specific on-target changes without genotoxic consequences.

My overall thoughts: This type of study has been done in animals a lot (including primates) so it's not a surprise it works in humans too. Unlike He Jiankui's work, which was quite sloppy and rushed, this might actually be clinically useful.

Cool, I've been using Claude Code for this, but I may want to try Gemini

It's always interesting to see East Africans doing so well. Even with technology like advances in shoes and diet/training, genetics is still a huge factor.

Also it must be an crazy feeling to be Kejelcha, the guy who came in 2nd place. It would have been a world record, except for Sawe!

See also the press release: https://hms.harvard.edu/news/massive-ancient-dna-study-revea...

This study covers about 10,000 years of recent human evolution in Europe and West Asia.

From the abstract:

>in the past ten millennia, we find that many hundreds of alleles have been affected by strong directional selection. We also document one-standard-deviation changes on the scale of modern variation in combinations of alleles that today predict complex traits. This includes decreases in predicted body fat and schizophrenia, and increases in measures of cognitive performance. These effects were measured in industrialized societies, and it remains unclear how these relate to phenotypes that were adaptive in the past. We estimate selection coefficients at 9.7 million variants, enabling study of how Darwinian forces couple to allelic effects and shape the genetic architecture of complex traits.