Observed Signal · Sep 28, 2026 · Market Signal · Source: MIT · Impact: 2/5
New formulation helps RNA vaccines withstand high temperatures
MIT engineers have found a way to stabilize the lipid nanoparticles used to deliver RNA vaccines, which could allow the vaccines to be more widely distributed.
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MIT PhD Alex Zhang Discusses Recursive Language Models and AI Harnesses
In this episode of the Latent Space podcast, Swyx and Vibhu interview Alex Zhang, a PhD student at MIT known for his work on Recursive Language Models (RLMs), GPU kernels, and AI agent harnesses. Zhang discusses his involvement with GPU Mode and KernelBench, the concept of RLMs as a harness design where code is the primary tool, and the idea of harnesses as compositional generalizers that can improve model generalization across tasks. He talks about Prime Agent, an RLM harness built on Pi Mono, and his views on agent swarms, citing OpenAI's 10,000-agent experiment costing around $40 million. Zhang advocates for academics to take big research bets, explores alternative model architectures like Jev, and touches on open-ended research at Sakana AI, capability overhang, and the future of language models potentially being invisible swarms of agents.
Periodic Labs Building AI Scientist for Materials Discovery
Periodic Labs, founded by Liam Fedus (ex-OpenAI, ChatGPT co-creator) and Ekin Dogus Cubuk (ex-Google DeepMind), is developing 'synthesis superintelligence'—an AI system that autonomously conducts physical experiments to discover new materials, starting with high-temperature superconductors. The founders emphasize grounding AI in real-world experiments to capture the full scientific process, using reinforcement learning to close the loop between hypothesis, experiment, and learning. Based in Menlo Park, their autonomous labs can run thousands of experiments daily, scaling to increase the 'surface area for luck' in finding new superconductors, magnets, and batteries. The company, launched in September 2025, is building a multidisciplinary team of physicists, chemists, hardware engineers, and AI researchers—including Dima Bahdanau (neural attention inventor) and Ray Nakano (OpenAI's Operator team)—to create labs where every instrument is '140 IQ'. They are partnering with semiconductor industry clients via forward-deployed engineering and have raised new funding to scale compute and infrastructure, with plans to monetize through custom systems and outcome-based pricing.
Anthropic's Claude Discovers Novel CRISPR-like Enzyme System
Anthropic announced the formation of a life sciences research group and laboratory dedicated to fundamental biology research using Claude. In a pioneering demonstration, Claude autonomously discovered a novel enzyme system, termed array-associated reverse transcriptases (ART), found in bacteriophages. This system comprises a reverse transcriptase, a partner gene, and a CRISPR-like array of DNA repeats. Claude's analysis, conducted by roughly 950 agents using 210 million tokens over 21 hours, identified this system from over 200,000 reverse transcriptases. The discovery, reminiscent of CRISPR, could lead to new programmable tools for genetic engineering. Anthropic has released a preprint detailing the findings and is seeking collaborations with other scientists to apply AI-driven hypothesis generation across genomics and other fields.
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