Earth's largest venomous snakes are hitching a rides to places they don't belong. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. The king cobra () isn't a difficult snake to spot. A fully grown adult easily reaches over 13 feet long, making them the largest venomous snakes in the world. But despite their size and iconic appearance, at least one vulnerable species in India is sneaking aboard trains and accidentally arriving into new and dangerous habitats.

Lycodon irwini is the latest species named after The Crocodile Hunter. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Conservationists have discovered a previously unknown species of snake, slithering around one of Earth's most unique environments. In naming their new reptile, researchers decided to honor one of popular culture's most unique and beloved wildlife educators: the late, great Steve Irwin . The snake was discovered in the Nicobar Islands.

Their antibodies may combat venom from some of the world's deadliest species. There are over 300,000 venomous snakebites reported in sub-Saharan Africa every year. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Most of today's snakebite antivenoms are far from perfect. Typically manufactured from animal blood plasma, the antidotes often remain expensive, inconsistent, and difficult to scale across multiple snake species .

Vipers can strike within 100 milliseconds of launching at their prey. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. A venomous snake bite is not something you ever want to encounter on a hiking or camping trip. For those brave scientists who study snakes-aka herpetologists -the mechanics behind the reptiles' fast fangs are more fascinating than fear-inducing. Snakes must move incredibly quickly to sink their fangs into prey before the victim flinches.

Advances in AI, particularly LLMs, have dramatically shortened drug discovery cycles by up to 40% and improved molecular target identification. However, these innovations also raise dual-use concerns by enabling the design of toxic compounds. Prompting Moremi Bio Agent without the safety guardrails to specifically design novel toxic substances, our study generated 1020 novel toxic proteins and 5,000 toxic small molecules. In-depth computational toxicity assessments revealed that all the proteins scored high in toxicity, with several closely matching known toxins such as ricin, diphtheria toxin, and disintegrin-based snake venom proteins. Some of these novel agents showed similarities with other several known toxic agents including disintegrin eristostatin, metalloproteinase, disintegrin triflavin, snake venom metalloproteinase, corynebacterium ulcerans toxin. Through quantitative risk assessments and scenario analyses, we identify dual-use capabilities in current LLM-enabled biodesign pipelines and propose multi-layered mitigation strategies. The findings from this toxicity assessment challenge claims that large language models (LLMs) are incapable of designing bioweapons. This reinforces concerns about the potential misuse of LLMs in biodesign, posing a significant threat to research and development (R&D). The accessibility of such technology to individuals with limited technical expertise raises serious biosecurity risks. Our findings underscore the critical need for robust governance and technical safeguards to balance rapid biotechnological innovation with biosecurity imperatives.

LLMs are tuned to follow instructions (aligned) by learning which of two outputs users prefer for a prompt. However, this preference data format does not convey why users prefer responses that are chosen or rejected, so LLMs trained on these datasets cannot tailor responses to varied user needs. To surface these parameters of personalization, we apply abductive reasoning to preference data, inferring needs and interests of users, i.e. personas, that may prefer each output. We test this idea in two steps: Persona Inference (PI)-abductively inferring personas of users who prefer chosen or rejected outputs-and Persona Tailoring (PT)-training models to tailor responses to personas from PI. We find: 1) LLMs infer personas accurately explaining why different users may prefer both chosen or rejected outputs; 2) Training on preference data augmented with PI personas via PT boosts personalization, enabling models to support user-written personas; and 3) Rejected response personas form harder personalization evaluations, showing PT better aids users with uncommon preferences versus typical alignment methods. We argue for an abductive view of preferences for personalization, asking not only which response is better but when, why, and for whom.

Each year, snake bites kill upwards of 100,000 people and permanently disable hundreds of thousands more, according to estimates from the World Health Organization. Promising new science, enabled by state-of-the-art technology, could help quell the threat. Researchers have successfully designed two proteins to neutralize some of the most lethal venom toxins, using a suite of artificial intelligence tools, per a study published January 15 in the journal Nature. These "de novo" proteins–molecules not found anywhere in nature–protected 100% of mice from certain death when mixed with the deadly snake compounds and administered in lab experiments. "I think we could revolutionize the treatment [of snake bites]," says Susana Vázquez Torres, lead study author and a biochemist who completed this research as part of her doctoral thesis in David Baker's lab at the University of Washington.

'You can harness the power of death in a controlled way.' Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. While only about 10 percent of the roughly 4,000 known snake species have venom that can harm a human, using genetics to determine which snakes could be deadly could speed up developing better treatments for bites. A new tool called VenomCap can help scientists hone in on venom at a genetic level, so we can know which ones are likely carrying deadly toxins. The method is detailed in a study published September 19 in the journal Molecular . "We've developed a tool that can tell us which venom-producing genes are present across an entire snake family in one fell swoop," Sara Ruane, a study co-author and the Assistant Curator of Herpetology at the Field Museum in Chicago, said in a statement .

Robots could take over the human job of milking a scorpion for its venom, potentially making the task a lot safer for everyone involved. The Society for Experimental Biology described the robot as clamping onto a scorpion's tail and using electrical stimulation to get it to release venom that can be safely collected. The robot is also portable and lightweight, and can be operated by a single person. According to SEB, which recently held its annual main meeting in Gothenburg, Sweden, the technology can have different settings for different species of scorpion and can be programmed to remember them. "The extraction of scorpion venom is a very difficult task and usually takes at least two experimenters," robot designer Mouad Mkamel said in the society's statement.