Claude spots CRISPR-like DNA repeats beside a known enzyme

At the top of the Hacker News front page, with about seven hundred eighty points: Anthropic says Claude agents spotted DNA repeats, laid out like a CRISPR array, beside a known enzyme in public sequence data.

Anthropic has stood up a life sciences group with a molecular biology bench. They pointed Claude at a database of DNA sequences and asked for interesting reverse transcriptases. The scientists supplied the prompt and the bench work.

The agents gathered more than two hundred thousand of those enzymes, cut them to thirty five hundred candidate systems, and wrote up the best twenty for a scientist to check. Roughly nine hundred fifty agents took twenty one hours. Anthropic says an expert can spend weeks to months.

The agent saw a tandem repeat array, laid out like a CRISPR array, beside an odd looking enzyme. Anthropic calls the three part system ART. The repeats get transcribed into a set of short RNA strands. Its function is still open.

Commenter Spacecosmonaut offers a plainer wording, and the post backs it. The enzyme itself was already in the literature. The arrangement around it is the new part.

A community group bought an old police station and could not set the tower clock. The fix was a small lever on one gear, called a pawl. Lift it, and the shaft turns by hand. The chime box holds no clock at all, just an hour counter.

The box blinks a status code the pair ran out of afternoon to decode. Commenter SaberTail reads it as Morse. Dash dash dot dot dot really is seven, though whether the box means the hour stays a guess.

A spam classifier in twenty five lines of Python, a parody of the hype around Jev. A small local model reads an email asking for a password, and only its scores for the letters A, B and C count. Phishing comes out at almost ninety percent.

Commenter sigmoid10 names the catch, and the post is doing exactly the thing described. A chat model wants to answer in prose, so the letter you measure competes with the sentence it meant to write.

Emacs has done remote editing for decades, living off the land on the connection. VSCode instead stages in an agent and its own copy of Node, which opens a socket back to your editor and can roam the filesystem, spawn shells, and persist.

Commenter 10000truths pushes back. A tool built to edit files and run commands on a remote machine doing precisely that is the feature, and the tunnel may be the only route the agent has.

Google released two text to speech models. You can pick from more than two thousand ready-made voices, or describe a new one in plain words. Copying a real voice takes a thirty second sample, plus a recorded consent clip from its owner.

Commenter simonw puts the release down to a change of nerve rather than a change of capability. Cloning a voice is ordinary enough elsewhere that shipping it costs Google little.