Stirling Churchman

I'm thrilled to see the cover of @NatureSMB this month! My sibling Leidy Churchman made this special painting to illustrate our latest work on the packaging of mitochondrial DNA. Both works are nicely described in the "Musings on art and science" editorial nature.com/articles/s4159…

@lizbwood Sounds very cool, looking forward to reading the paper, but why do you have a picture of a black hole??

Our paper on variational synthesis is out now in Nature Biotechnology. Manufacturing-aware generative models — AI architectures that know how to physically build their own designs — enabling synthesis of DNA encoding ~10^16 AI-designed proteins at a cost that would be roughly a quadrillion dollars using conventional methods.

Today we report single-cell APEX-seq (scAPEX-seq) — a new method for unbiased mapping of *subcellular* transcriptomes at single-cell resolution. This approach reveals cell states that are not detectable by standard scRNA-seq, and enabled us to identify regulators of CAR T function that improve solid tumor killing. biorxiv.org/cgi/content/sh…

@KharMT @YSPTSPS @openclaw @nlw You're all in! Amazing. I won't let Tessera touch anything personal yet... Mostly because I don't trust myself to control the scope, but it will probably happen soon enough.

@YSPTSPS @fiddle @openclaw @nlw What I really need is a spell check agent. That’s should say hub not hun

It was my birthday a couple of weeks ago so I bought myself a Mac mini and installed @openclaw Meet Tessera! If you’re wondering what a “normie” genetics professor is doing with it or want tips to get started, ask 👇 !

@KharMT @YSPTSPS @openclaw @nlw Totally agree. I couldn’t afford Opus but GPT 5.4 is really great and comes with your chat subscription. Tailscale for sure and discord. What are you using it for @KharMT?

@YSPTSPS @fiddle @openclaw @nlw You can send your agent to the gym so yes it’s absolutely just the new Pokemon go. But definitely not a reason not to try

@YSPTSPS @openclaw I almost gave up on setting it up! The key is to reach a point where you are talking to a reasonable model so the agent helps you do things. No efficiency gains yet, I'm still playing! But I see the promise and it will be instrumental. Definitely half hobby for me so far!

@fiddle @openclaw I'mm super interested. How easy/what is activation energy to setup? What have you automated that has been most impactful or provided the greatest efficiency gains? What are you using it for that you would not have expected to use it for?

@Molecule_sci @openclaw @sciencebeach__ I saw that! I'm not letting my agents out of the house yet!

@fiddle @openclaw You should check out @sciencebeach__. It's a collaborative platform for humans and AI agents doing open science!

@_prashantbhat @openclaw It is! I run the Mac Mini headless so it's always on and has a small footprint. I got just the basic model (M4) because I'm not running AI models locally. I'm using @OpenAI models for now.

@fiddle @openclaw How exciting! Did you get the M4 chip or M4 Pro Chip? And how did you choose the Mac mini over a MacBook pro with an M5 Max chip?

@drrobcincotta @openclaw The paper analysis is pretty good, but not at my level (IMHO). It can understand what was done and can integrate it into our textbook understanding of the topic. But not particularly critical or discerning. I can probably work on that with better instructions and training :)

@drrobcincotta @openclaw I have set up a couple of agents. One is a research agent, Tessera, and the other is an architect agent, Tom, to maintain everything, do security checks, install updates etc. Their personalities are not so different, but I might work on that :)

@je_mclaughlin @openclaw Eventually maybe. Openclaw is buggy and I'm a novice so it's a (fun) project to get things working. I use Claude (chat, cowork, and Chrome, PPT, excel extensions) for most work things. Although I now have openclaw running Claude code. :)

@fiddle @openclaw Can your new Mac mini setup replace much of your past cloud-based AI work?

@thekriswild @openclaw To talk to it. You can use the openclaw CLI, Telegram, WhatsApp, slack etc. The CLI is good but with Discord, you can have multiple channels running and can easily chat with it from other computers or your phone. I started with Slack, but it was clunky. I almost gave up.

@fiddle @openclaw What are you using discord for?

@thekriswild @openclaw Happy Birthday! I recommend GPT 5.4 with ChatGPT subscription and Discord to start!

@fiddle @openclaw I’ve literally just done the same thing.

@ozalabCP @SRsrivatsan @openclaw I'm making my own agents. That's something that openclaw does well and is designed for.

@fiddle @SRsrivatsan @openclaw I see. Are you developing your own agents or adapting existing ones? and which ones?

@SRsrivatsan @openclaw In the last two hours, I asked Tessera to make an app where I could move around the network and see how they're connected to each other. It gave me this:

@SRsrivatsan @openclaw My first two adventures shaping agents: 1) An AI collaborator that helps me go from screen hits to mechanistic hypotheses via clustering (mostly via DepMap and PPI data) and literature searches. So far, we have some results, but I need to verify them by reading the papers myself.

@ozalabCP @SRsrivatsan @openclaw I'm a newbie too! I use claude cowork and love it. But I don't think it would work as well for my current openclaw applications. Claude cowork is designed to complete tasks, not work on long-term projects. For example, it does weird things when it runs out of context.

@fiddle @SRsrivatsan @openclaw Newbie question - what will openclaw be able to do that claude cowork can't for your 2 goals? I'd like to try openclaw, but not sure how/what to do with it.

@SRsrivatsan @openclaw 2) A live research assistant that takes my rough notes from a talk, searches for papers/preprints in the background, and organizes everything into a notebook/GitHub repo. I did this at a @CSHL conference this week, and I have a set of pretty good notes with AI context and links.

Next week, @_AndrewLeduc will present at the CSHL (@cshlmeetings) Systems Biology: Global Regulation of Gene Expression meeting. His talk will focus on in vivo protein regulation in single cells, including results from this preprint: biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

💥 AI accelerating high energy physics Just a few weeks after the gluon scattering paper, this morning we posted the more complicated graviton scattering analogue. See below for more from @ALupsasca 👇