Science sleuths think they found Leonardo da Vinci's DNA Advances in genetics might help us see what set the Renaissance man apart. The painting hangs in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Scientists are one step closer to pinpointing fragments of Leonardo da Vinci's elusive DNA . A team of researchers from the Leonardo da Vinci DNA Project analyzed samples swabbed from a red chalk drawing possibly attributed to the famed polymath, as well as letters written by one of his known cousins.

The competitive and cooperative forces of natural selection have driven the evolution of intelligence for millions of years, culminating in nature's vast biodiversity and the complexity of human minds. Inspired by this process, we propose a novel multi-agent reinforcement learning framework where each agent is assigned a genotype and where reward functions are modelled after the concept of inclusive fitness. An agent's genetic material may be shared with other agents, and our inclusive reward function naturally accounts for this. We study the resulting social dynamics in two types of network games with prisoner's dilemmas and find that our results align with well-established principles from biology, such as Hamilton's rule. Furthermore, we outline how this framework can extend to more open-ended environments with spatial and temporal structure, finite resources, and evolving populations. We hypothesize the emergence of an arms race of strategies, where each new strategy is a gradual improvement over earlier adaptations of other agents, effectively producing a multi-agent autocurriculum analogous to biological evolution. In contrast to the binary team-based structures prevalent in earlier research, our gene-based reward structure introduces a spectrum of cooperation ranging from full adversity to full cooperativeness based on genetic similarity, enabling unique non team-based social dynamics. For example, one agent having a mutual cooperative relationship with two other agents, while the two other agents behave adversarially towards each other. We argue that incorporating inclusive fitness in agents provides a foundation for the emergence of more strategically advanced and socially intelligent agents.

The embryos weren't used to try to establish a pregnancy, but the researchers behind the technique say it could one day be used to address infertility. In a controversial step that raises the possibility of a new kind of infertility treatment, scientists report that they have produced functional human eggs in the lab that were able to be fertilized with sperm. The proof-of-concept study, published today in the journal Nature Communications, involves using human skin cells to generate eggs, some of which were capable of producing early-stage embryos. None of the embryos were used to try to establish a pregnancy, and it's unlikely that they would have developed much further in the womb. Yet the authors, from Oregon Health and Science University, say the technique could one day be used as an alternative to in vitro fertilization, or IVF.

Extinction is a part of nature. Of the five billion species that have existed on Earth, 99.9 per cent have vanished. The Triassic-Jurassic extinction, two hundred million years ago, finished off the crocodile-like phytosaur. Sixty-six million years ago, the end-Cretaceous extinction eliminated the Tyrannosaurus rex and the velociraptor; rapid climate change from an asteroid impact was the likely cause. The Neanderthals disappeared some forty thousand years ago. One day--whether from climate change, another asteroid, nuclear war, or something we can't yet imagine--humans will probably be wiped out, too.

Scientists have been working for generations to untangle the mysteries of how life began on Earth, and one previously fringe theory just gained a lot of ground. The'RNA World' theory says that the so-called primordial soup of the early Earth was teeming with DNA's single-stranded sister RNA, which carries the instructions for sustaining life. Now, a team of researchers at The Salk Institute have unlocked a crucial piece of that puzzle and even built it in the lab: an obscure but essential class of molecules called RNA polymerase ribozymes. RNA polymerase ribozymes are not well understood, but scientists now suspect that these substances made it possible for RNA to not just replicate but actually evolve in the gel and muck of the early planet. These scatterplots show how, across multiple rounds of evolution, new RNA polymerase ribozymes emerged.

Unlike previous techniques, which could identify DNA from, say, a single organism, the method also collects the swirling cloud of other genetic material that surrounds it. It can serve as a surveillance tool, offering researchers a means of detecting the seemingly undetectable. By sampling eDNA, or mixtures of genetic material in water, soil, ice cores, cotton swabs, or practically any environment imaginable, even thin air, it is now possible to search for a specific organism or assemble a snapshot of all the organisms in a given place. It offers a thrilling -- and potentially chilling -- way to collect information about organisms, including humans, as they go about their everyday business. The world of AI has produced some depressing headlines recently, from the Taylor Swift AI-generated porn scandal to the proliferation of political deepfakes as election campaigns get underway in many countries around the world.

It's something that many people are self-conscious of, and if you not a fan of your nose, we finally know who to blame. Scientists have revealed that Neanderthal DNA helps dictate the shape of your nose. A new study led by UCL researchers found that a particular gene, which leads to a taller nose, may have been the product of natural selection as ancient humans adapted to colder climates after leaving Africa. Dr Kaustubh Adhikari, who led the study, said: 'In the last 15 years, since the Neanderthal genome has been sequenced, we have been able to learn that our own ancestors apparently interbred with Neanderthals, leaving us with little bits of their DNA. 'Here, we find that some DNA inherited from Neanderthals influences the shape of our faces.

AI can design extremely dense protein shells that could one day lead to more potent vaccines. The genetic material of viruses is housed in protein shells. Similar shells made in the lab are used in vaccines, encapsulating molecules that induce an immune response in the body. The chemical and biological properties of these artificially made shells depend on their construction – any imperfections in them, no matter how small, make them less effective, causing them to be unstable and react unpredictably inside cells. Isaac Lutz at the University of Washington in Seattle and his colleagues wanted to see if using artificial intelligence could make the design and creation of these shells more precise.

Genetic sequences are vitally important for life, but why? Our theory of life may have been built on an unproven assumption. We have supposed that the genetic material in cells, the genome, is a list of instructions. This assumption has held since the discovery of DNA in the mid-twentieth century, but now there may be another, largely unexplored way to interpret the role of the genome. There are several reasons we should suppose that the coding regions of DNA sequence (genes) don't carry instructions at all. Instead, they may be just lists of templates for proteins that can be produced by the cell, if the cell chooses to do so.

Originally published on Towards AI the World's Leading AI and Technology News and Media Company. If you are building an AI-related product or service, we invite you to consider becoming an AI sponsor. At Towards AI, we help scale AI and technology startups. Let us help you unleash your technology to the masses. "The environment selects those few mutations that enhance survival, resulting in a series of slow transformations of one lifeform into another, the origin of a new species."-