@kurtthorn.bsky.social
Chief Technology Officer at ArrePath. Using Chemistry ML, imaging, and computer vision to accelerate antibiotic discovery and design. Formerly Zymergen, Nikon Imaging Center at UCSF.
Does anyone else think it’s possible that the government shutdown never actually ends?
23.10.2025 02:04 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0People do this?!!
22.10.2025 01:02 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0No, your study section will not meet during the shutdown. No, your grant will not be reviewed during a shutdown. No, POs, SROs, and everyone else in NIH/NSF is not allowed to contact you so stop expecting a "heads up." The government shutdown is your "heads up."
21.10.2025 15:41 — 👍 26 🔁 7 💬 1 📌 1I am very concerned about this, and I think the effects will be felt sooner than 3-5 years.
20.10.2025 22:42 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0I guess I developed my Claude skills for research a week too soon.
20.10.2025 16:48 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0Whoa:
20.10.2025 16:47 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
Some Downloadable printable Christmas Cards at The ChemScrapes Store...the puns are bad folks. REALLY bad...and therefore classic ChemScrapes/ #chemsky
thechemscrapesshop.etsy.com/sg-en/listin...
#nokings
Portland frog brigade
When I was in Ron Vale’s lab, they would swap out speakers and topics to match whatever was most interesting at the time of presentation, regardless of the abstract.
18.10.2025 14:40 — 👍 3 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0Whoa, I had no idea they had memberships. I really like their ipa - it’s basically replaced alcoholic beer for me.
18.10.2025 04:19 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0I have not seen that, but it looks interesting. My immediate use case has been finding small molecule data so I don’t know how useful it would be but the beautiful thing about skills is they are lightweight and situational so there’s little cost to adding one that’s not used.
18.10.2025 00:33 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0Strong support for the black walnut bitters. I also like a bit of Punt e Mes in mine. My spec: mixology.tools/recipe.html?...
17.10.2025 22:18 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0I once saw a performance of Shakespeare’s As You Like It where I swore that Rosalind’s final speech to the audience was ad libbed. I looked it up when I got home, and no, that was how it was written 500 years earlier.
17.10.2025 14:14 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0Thanks! I had Claude build it modeled on your superpower skills.
17.10.2025 13:18 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP
simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/16/...
You might be interested in this biology / chemistry research skill I had Claude whip up, inspired by your blog post about the coding superpowers skills: github.com/kthorn/resea...
16.10.2025 21:39 — 👍 12 🔁 2 💬 3 📌 0
Our new paper, MARCUS, is now published @digital-discovery.rsc.org !
Paper: doi.org/10.1039/D5DD...
We built MARCUS - a free, open-source AI platform that extracts the millions of chemical structures trapped in PDFs in minutes instead of hours.
#Opensource #Opendata #OpenScience #CompChem
"I can't believe my hammer isn't very good at making an omelette" seems to be the common refrain with AI these days.
15.10.2025 20:42 — 👍 1 🔁 1 💬 1 📌 0I do wonder if this would work better if you could change the system prompt in Claude code to be less focused on programming.
12.10.2025 14:28 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0In building a coding agent, it turns out that Anthropic has built a general purpose agent for processing text and information.
11.10.2025 20:54 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0And then use semantic scholar to chain forward and backwards through citations, compiling a list of relevant papers. I put it together in a few hours of chatting with Claude while eating breakfast and lunch.
11.10.2025 20:51 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0This concept of guiding agents work with markdown files is really appealing. It’s easy to get a lot of complex performance from a pretty simple structure. For example, my tool knows how to run pubmed searches, download abstracts, rank them for relevance with keywords…
11.10.2025 20:49 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
See github.com/kthorn/resea... for my initial work. Happy to get feedback.
11.10.2025 19:02 — 👍 3 🔁 0 💬 2 📌 0I used Claude code to write it so if you want to extend it, clone it and ask Claude code to help you write more skills to extend it.
11.10.2025 17:53 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
You can see my first pass at giving Claude code research superpowers here: github.com/kthorn/resea...
It’s focused on automatically traversing the literature and recording relevant papers for you to follow up on. I’ve only tested it on medchem work so there is a lot to do to further generalize it.
Following this pattern I’ve been able to write a set of skills that turns Claude Code into a scientific literature searching tool, compiling lists of relevant papers. I’ll make it public after some more work.
11.10.2025 15:46 — 👍 6 🔁 1 💬 2 📌 0This is a really inspirational way to work with Claude Code
11.10.2025 04:50 — 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 1The following is REAL footage from Portland, 2025. Viewer discretion is advised.
09.10.2025 20:23 — 👍 56205 🔁 22836 💬 1899 📌 2183
Chimpanzee wine moms?
"The ... dosage for a 35.9-kg female ... is the mass equivalent of 2.6 standard drinks (±1.7) daily for a 70-kg human"
Ethanol ingestion via frugivory in wild chimpanzees | Science Advances www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
