科技科学

Daily briefing: How to turn a paper into an AI agent

Nature作者：Flora Graham2026年9月18日正文已收录本站
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A new tool is designed to help researchers interact with published papers. Plus, promising news for an RNA-based treatment for ALS and how psychoactive drugs might have shaped pre-Incan culture.

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Cosmologist Stephen Hawking reacts during a conversation on October 10, 1979 in Princeton, New Jersey.

Stephen Hawking worked on the black-hole information paradox throughout his life.Credit: Santi Visalli/Getty

First for gene-targeting RNA therapy

An RNA therapy for rare forms of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) has shown promising results in the first person to receive it. He experienced improved symptoms and continued to work as a physician a year after starting treatment. Antisense oligonucleotide therapy uses short strands of genetic material to target RNA produced by a faulty gene called CHCHD10. Roughly 5–10% of people with ALS have a known genetic mutation, and antisense oligonucleotide therapies could someday benefit them and others with neurodegenerative diseases caused by rare mutations.

Nature | 7 min read

Reference: Med paper

Sanctioned Chinese firms turned to science

Chinese firms subject to sanctions by the US government seemed to produce more science-related patents and publish more papers than did unsanctioned companies. It’s not certain that being placed on the US ‘Entity List’ actually caused an increase in innovation, but the findings might be a sign of unintended consequences of such restrictions. “Whether or not one supports technology controls, it is important to recognize that they can come with costs,” says political economist Dinsha Mistree.

Nature | 7 min read

Reference: Science paper

AI systems taking on science challenges

How to turn a paper into an AI agent

A new tool (freely available to use) has been designed to help researchers interact with published papers. The Paper2Agent tool accesses a paper’s text, code, data and more to generate a specialized agent, and interfaces with a large language model (LLM) to answer a reader’s questions. When tested on the AlphaGenome paper, the authors report that the tool created an agent in 45 minutes (using US$14 of computing power) that bested other top biomedical agents in question-answering accuracy. In another test, the tool failed to create an agent in 25% of cases — usually because a paper was accidentally missing code or had some other flaw.

Nature | 5 min read

Reference: Nature paper

Hey AI, am I as old as I feel?

How can AI systems help us understand longevity, when we are only starting to define what ‘ageing’ actually is? That’s the challenge taken on by a team of researchers who designed a series of benchmarks to measure how well large language models (LLMs) handle related biological markers such as DNA methylation. They also created an LLM specifically tailored for ageing researchers.

Nature | 7 min read

Reference: Cell paper

Call my drug-discovery agent

An artificial-intelligence system called the Virtual Biotech comprises as many as 37,000 agents — AI systems that autonomously interact with LLMs or with each other and are capable of performing multistep tasks. Its makers say it uncovered a molecular signal that could help to predict clinical-trial success. And with some human oversight, it identified a promising lung-cancer treatment. Other scientists note that the Virtual Biotech has not been vetted in the crucible of real-world drug discovery, and its predictions were not validated through experiments, let alone clinical trials.

Nature | 7 min read

Reference: Science paper

Features & opinion

Psychoactive drugs in pre-Incan culture

Chavín de Huántar, a 3,000-year-old temple complex high in the Peruvian Andes, has long been thought to be a centre for rituals amplified by the use of psychoactive drugs. Now advances that make it possible to detect the faintest traces of chemical and biological substances — and a research environment that is increasingly open to the topic of hallucinogens and other drugs — are adding to the evidence of what happened there.

Science | 20 min read

Futures: I who have never known trees

The latest short story for Nature’s Futures series asks: as nature declines, how can we grieve for a world we have never known? It is environmental researcher Hannah Cocks’s first published creative writing piece. “I hope the first of many,” she writes. “I would like to write to remind us that we are part of nature and always have been.”

Nature | 6 min read

Five best science books this week

Andrew Robinson’s pick of the top five science books to read this week includes an engaging study of the relationship between astrology and science, a celebration of polio vaccine pioneer Albert Sabin and a vision of the social world that exists around, outside and in opposition to money.

Nature | 4 min read

Podcast: human brain cells in mice

In this week’s Nature Podcast, hosts Benjamin Thompson and Nick Petrić Howe speak to researchers about a new study in which human brain organoids were transplanted into mice genetically engineered to lack most of their cerebral cortex.

Nature Podcast | 27 min listen

Subscribe to the Nature Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or YouTube Music, or use the RSS feed.

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-026-02994-4

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Thanks for reading,

Flora Graham, chief editor, Nature Briefing

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