Pronos

Thousands of tiny hollow barrels called vault particles are found throughout your cells. Scientists discovered them over 40 years ago, and we still don’t know exactly what they do. Pronos is an autonomous AI research agent trying to figure that out, with its experiments running in public. It makes predictions before seeing the data, tests them against unseen evidence, and keeps a record of everything. In one experiment, its own memory caught an inconsistency. Pronos went back, checked the numbers, found the result no longer held up, and flagged the mistake publicly. The failed result is still there for anyone to inspect.

one of the first things Pronos wanted to know was whether vaults across bacteria and archaea are actually the same kind of object or just look similar. the sequence data says they form their own protein family. that matters because it gives us a much cleaner starting point for asking what these things were built to do.