Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Kurt Thorn @kurtthorn.bsky.social · 1h

In building a coding agent, it turns out that Anthropic has built a general purpose agent for processing text and information.

Kurt Thorn @kurtthorn.bsky.social · 1h

And then use semantic scholar to chain forward and backwards through citations, compiling a list of relevant papers. I put it together in a few hours of chatting with Claude while eating breakfast and lunch.

Kurt Thorn @kurtthorn.bsky.social · 1h

This concept of guiding agents work with markdown files is really appealing. It’s easy to get a lot of complex performance from a pretty simple structure. For example, my tool knows how to run pubmed searches, download abstracts, rank them for relevance with keywords…

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Kurt Thorn @kurtthorn.bsky.social · 3h

See github.com/kthorn/resea... for my initial work. Happy to get feedback.

GitHub - kthorn/research-superpower: Research superpowers for Claude Code

Research superpowers for Claude Code. Contribute to kthorn/research-superpower development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

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Kurt Thorn @kurtthorn.bsky.social · 4h

I used Claude code to write it so if you want to extend it, clone it and ask Claude code to help you write more skills to extend it.

Kurt Thorn @kurtthorn.bsky.social · 4h

You can see my first pass at giving Claude code research superpowers here: github.com/kthorn/resea...

It’s focused on automatically traversing the literature and recording relevant papers for you to follow up on. I’ve only tested it on medchem work so there is a lot to do to further generalize it.

GitHub - kthorn/research-superpower: Research superpowers for Claude Code

Research superpowers for Claude Code. Contribute to kthorn/research-superpower development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

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Kurt Thorn @kurtthorn.bsky.social · 6h

Following this pattern I’ve been able to write a set of skills that turns Claude Code into a scientific literature searching tool, compiling lists of relevant papers. I’ll make it public after some more work.

Kurt Thorn @kurtthorn.bsky.social · 17h

This is a really inspirational way to work with Claude Code

Simon Willison @simon.fedi.simonwillison.net.ap.brid.gy · 23h

This is a wildly creative set of customizations for Claude Code, using the new plugin system they just released. There are SO many fascinating ideas in this! Strongly recommend reading it and then spending some time exploring the accompanying repo: https://github.com/obra/superpowers […]

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Kurt Thorn @kurtthorn.bsky.social · 17h

This is a really inspirational way to work with Claude Code

Simon Willison @simon.fedi.simonwillison.net.ap.brid.gy · 23h

This is a wildly creative set of customizations for Claude Code, using the new plugin system they just released. There are SO many fascinating ideas in this! Strongly recommend reading it and then spending some time exploring the accompanying repo: https://github.com/obra/superpowers […]

Original post on fedi.simonwillison.net

fedi.simonwillison.net

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Reposted by Kurt Thorn

The Daily Show @thedailyshow.com · 2d

The following is REAL footage from Portland, 2025. Viewer discretion is advised.

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Reposted by Kurt Thorn

Drug Monkey @drugmonkey.bsky.social · 2d

Chimpanzee wine moms?

"The ... dosage for a 35.9-kg female ... is the mass equivalent of 2.6 standard drinks (±1.7) daily for a 70-kg human"

Ethanol ingestion via frugivory in wild chimpanzees | Science Advances www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Ethanol ingestion via frugivory in wild chimpanzees

Natural daily consumption of dietary alcohol by chimpanzees suggests human attraction to alcohol may come from our ancestral diet.

www.science.org

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Kurt Thorn @kurtthorn.bsky.social · 3d

Biology and chemistry are both fields where papers are generally 4-16 pages.

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Reposted by Kurt Thorn

Reto Fiolka @retof.bsky.social · 5d

We present multi-immersion Oblique Plane microscope (miOPM), a light-sheet platform that can be adapted to a wide range of applications, from sensitive live cell imaging to imaging organs and cleared tissues.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

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Kurt Thorn @kurtthorn.bsky.social · 4d

As far as I know it’s not well understood. There are some papers discussing it: pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC... and pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/... and www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

The Origin of Biological Homochirality

The fact that sugars, amino acids, and the biological polymers they construct exist exclusively in one of two possible mirror-image forms has fascinated scientists and laymen alike for more than a cen...

pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

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Kurt Thorn @kurtthorn.bsky.social · 5d

It’s certainly had a good run - it’s been a workhorse for at least 25 years.

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Reposted by Kurt Thorn

Dr. Samantha Hancox-Li @sjshancoxli.liberalcurrents.com · 7d

"Moral courage springs from genuine conviction founded on sound principles. You will not find such conviction nor such principles in the latest polling. Morality is not a popularity contest."

www.liberalcurrents.com/democrats-mu...

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Kurt Thorn @kurtthorn.bsky.social · 7d

I made this #cocktail last night: mixology.tools/search.html?...

Highly recommended. I used Brugal 1888 rum. The sweet vermouth - sherry swap is one I want to explore more.

Search Recipes - Cocktail Database

mixology.tools

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Reposted by Kurt Thorn

Kevin K. Yang 楊凱筌 @kevinkaichuang.bsky.social · 9d

Test the activity of 300+ natural enzymes against 100+ substrates, discover 200+ new enzymatic reactions, and train machine learning models to predict which enzymes can do which reactions.

@aepaton.bsky.social @gabegomes.bsky.social @alisonnarayan.bsky.social

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

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Reposted by Kurt Thorn

Deanna Kreisel 🌱 @doctorwaffle.substack.com · 9d

In honor of National Poetry Day, the greatest parody rewrite of all time:

Screen cap of parodic version of William Blake's "The Tyger" that begins:
Tyger! Tyger! Burning bright
(Not sure if I spelled that right)
What immortal hand or eye
Could fashion such a stripy guy?
What the hammer that hath hewn it
Into such a chonky unit?
Did who made the lamb make thee,
Or an external franchisee?

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Reposted by Kurt Thorn

Dr. Samantha Hancox-Li @sjshancoxli.liberalcurrents.com · 8d

this piece has been in the works a while but honestly i could not have asked for a better foil than ezra klein's interview with ta-nehisi coates. klein longs for peacetime--but you don't get to decide when you're in a fight.

www.liberalcurrents.com/democrats-mu...

Democrats Must Embrace War Mindset

We have exited a long period of peace and entered into a struggle not unlike war, in which all the old certainties have gone malleable and the future of the republic is at stake.

www.liberalcurrents.com

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Kurt Thorn @kurtthorn.bsky.social · 8d

Also the more pragmatic issue that it’s so hard to find *any* antibiotic development that a peptide is just adding challenges to an already very hard process.

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Kurt Thorn @kurtthorn.bsky.social · 8d

A couple of reasons: typical antibiotic doses are several orders of magnitude higher - 100s of milligrams per dose, because you need to be stoichiometric with the infection. Also getting distribution to the site of infection and side effects as many antimicrobial peptides are membrane disruptors.

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Kurt Thorn @kurtthorn.bsky.social · 8d

All this work on antimicrobial peptides is cool technically but I don’t see a path to the clinic for them, let alone a way to be profitable. It’s hard enough to get an oral small molecule antibacterial to the clinic…

Jorge Bravo Abad @bravo-abad.bsky.social · 8d

Antibiotic resistance is outpacing new drug discovery. Yihui Wang and coauthors introduce ProteoGPT + helper models to identify, test, and generate antimicrobial peptides—scanning millions and creating new ones, validated against multidrug-resistant bacteria. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A generative artificial intelligence approach for the discovery of antimicrobial peptides against multidrug-resistant bacteria - Nature Microbiology

This study presents a generative artificial intelligence approach for the high-throughput discovery of antimicrobials against multidrug-resistant bacteria.

www.nature.com

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Reposted by Kurt Thorn

Ted Underwood @tedunderwood.com · 8d

Huh, they forgot “to keep up with what’s happening in other industries and fields.” I hear that’s what all the cool zoomers are doing.

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Kurt Thorn @kurtthorn.bsky.social · 8d

I really like this essay from @owlposting1.bsky.social : www.owlposting.com/p/ask-not-wh...

Ask not why would you work in biology, but rather: why wouldn't you?

1.9k words, 9 minutes reading time

www.owlposting.com

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Reposted by Kurt Thorn

ElieNYC @elienyc.bsky.social · 9d

Clarence Thomas announced that he doesn't care about precedent and is making it up as he goes along. He didn't say it *like that* of course, because then people would have noticed.
But I noticed, through the jargon, and explain it here in @thenation.
www.thenation.com/article/soci...

Clarence Thomas Admits That He’s Coming for Our Rights

In a little-covered speech, the Supreme Court justice explained how he thinks the court should reverse rulings conservatives don’t like.

www.thenation.com

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