Nature has just published a pretty incredible paper. The authors introduce a framework that turns research papers into interactive AI agents. Rather than engaging with a paper only as static text, researchers can question its agent, ask it to reproduce an analysis, or apply the paper’s methods to new data. This could make research methods much easier to understand, reproduce, and use. It also opens up a strange possibility: research papers that can, in a sense, talk to one another. The authors demonstrate this by connecting agents derived from different papers so that they can combine their methods and data. Used carefully (and with human scientific judgment still firmly in the loop) this could become a powerful new form of scientific communication. * Full paper in the first reply