MAROKO133 Eksklusif ai: Roman soldiers defending Hadrian’s Wall suffered with intestinal w

📌 MAROKO133 Update ai: Roman soldiers defending Hadrian’s Wall suffered with intes

Now, an advanced sewer system might have been installed at the famous Hadrian’s Wall, but the Roman soldiers suffered from at least three different parasites, according to a new study.

Recently published in the journal Parasitology, researchers investigated a new, though sordid, avenue at Vindolanda (as the study involved latrine samples).

Cambridge researchers examined ancient sewer drain sediment and found the Roman soldiers were far from comfortable. They suffered from intestinal worms and diarrhea, according to a news release by Cambridge.

It goes to show that an advanced sewage system didn’t signify effective sanitation at all, as—brace yourselves—human feces contaminated food, drink, and hands.

Researchers sifted through Roman beads, pottery, and animal bones first in the29-foot-long latrine drain, the news release continued. Along the length, they then took fifty sediment samples. Oxford and Cambridge joined forces to penetrate the excrement and “hunt” for helminth eggs, parasitic worms.

And the results will make you squirm (and want to read more).

Get ready for parasites

Roundworms are 7.87-11.81 inches long, so just about a ruler’s width. Whipworms are almost 2 inches long. Giardia, Cambridge continues, are microscopic protozoan parasites that cause outbreaks of diarrhea. Twenty-eight percent of samples contained either roundworm or whipworm eggs. And they even found traces of Giardia — that meant these Roman soldiers might have even suffered from malnutrition because of this composition in their guts.

“The three types of parasites we found could have led to malnutrition and cause diarrhoea in some of the Roman soldiers,” said Dr Marissa Ledger, lead researcher, at Cambridge University.

The study painted a very different picture of life at the wall. The Romans might have been aware of the existence of intestinal worms, but treating them was outside their capacity.

Chronic infections struck many, weakening them, causing cramps and nausea. Another senior author behind the study explained that they could have fell severely ill from dehydration, as Giardia, specifically, would flare in the summers. Fatigue and weight loss were among the symptoms.

And the picture only gets worse.

“The presence of the faecal-oral parasites we found suggests conditions were ripe for other intestinal pathogens such as Salmonella and Shigella, which could have triggered additional disease outbreaks,” said Mitchell.

Life for a Roman soldier wasn’t that pleasant

So, Cambridge ventured into the dirty dark side of life as a Roman soldier at Vindolanda. Indeed, they say, the sewer system didn’t change much. The presence of communal bathrooms didn’t keep the soldiers clean. They continue to get contaminated and infect one another.

However, on the bright side, the study of ancient parasites does hold its advantages, according to Cambridge researchers. It “helps us to know the pathogens that infected our ancestors, how they varied with lifestyle, and how they changed over time,” said Prof Adrian Smith, the head of the Oxford lab that did “the dirty work.”

And this study provided the first evidence for G. duodenalis. “Archaeological sites in Britain dating to before the arrival of the Romans have not been systematically tested for Giardia,” a study co-author told Live Science.

In the end, the study challenged whatever image might have been floating around about what life, at a Roman fort, 2,000 years ago, might have really been like — uncomfortable.

“Excavations at Vindolanda continue to find new evidence that helps us to understand the incredible hardships faced by those posted to this northwestern frontier…” the news release concludes.

Read the study by the University of Cambridge.

🔗 Sumber: interestingengineering.com

📌 MAROKO133 Update ai: Anthropic launches enterprise ‘Agent Skills’ and opens the

Anthropic said on Wednesday it would release its Agent Skills technology as an open standard, a strategic bet that sharing its approach to making AI assistants more capable will cement the company's position in the fast-evolving enterprise software market.

The San Francisco-based artificial intelligence company also unveiled organization-wide management tools for enterprise customers and a directory of partner-built skills from companies including Atlassian, Figma, Canva, Stripe, Notion, and Zapier.

The moves mark a significant expansion of a technology Anthropic first introduced in October, transforming what began as a niche developer feature into infrastructure that now appears poised to become an industry standard.

"We're launching Agent Skills as an independent open standard with a specification and reference SDK available at https://agentskills.io," Mahesh Murag, a product manager at Anthropic, said in an interview with VentureBeat. "Microsoft has already adopted Agent Skills within VS Code and GitHub; so have popular coding agents like Cursor, Goose, Amp, OpenCode, and more. We're in active conversations with others across the ecosystem."

Inside the technology that teaches AI assistants to do specialized work

Skills are, at their core, folders containing instructions, scripts, and resources that tell AI systems how to perform specific tasks consistently. Rather than requiring users to craft elaborate prompts each time they want an AI assistant to complete a specialized task, skills package that procedural knowledge into reusable modules.

The concept addresses a fundamental limitation of large language models: while they possess broad general knowledge, they often lack the specific procedural expertise needed for specialized professional work. A skill for creating PowerPoint presentations, for instance, might include preferred formatting conventions, slide structure guidelines, and quality standards — information the AI loads only when working on presentations.

Anthropic designed the system around what it calls "progressive disclosure." Each skill takes only a few dozen tokens when summarized in the AI's context window, with full details loading only when the task requires them. This architectural choice allows organizations to deploy extensive skill libraries without overwhelming the AI's working memory.

Fortune 500 companies are already using skills in legal, finance, and accounting

The new enterprise management features allow administrators on Anthropic's Team and Enterprise plans to provision skills centrally, controlling which workflows are available across their organizations while letting individual employees customize their experience.

"Enterprise customers are using skills in production across both coding workflows and business functions like legal, finance, accounting, and data science," Murag said. "The feedback has been positive because skills let them personalize Claude to how they actually work and get to high-quality output faster."

The community response has exceeded expectations, according to Murag: "Our skills repository already crossed 20k stars on GitHub, with tens of thousands of community-created and shared skills."

Atlassian, Figma, Stripe, and Zapier join Anthropic's skills directory at launch

Anthropic is launching with skills from ten partners, a roster that reads like a who's who of modern enterprise software. The presence of Atlassian, which makes Jira and Confluence, alongside design tools Figma and Canva, payment infrastructure company Stripe, and automation platform Zapier suggests Anthropic is positioning Skills as connective tissue between Claude and the applications businesses already use.

The business arrangements with these partners focus on ecosystem development rather than immediate revenue generation.

"Partners who build skills for the directory do so to enhance how Claude works with their platforms. It's a mutually beneficial ecosystem relationship similar to MCP connector partnerships," Murag explained. "There are no revenue-sharing arrangements at this time."

For vetting new partners, Anthropic is taking a measured approach. "We began with established partners and are developing more formal criteria as we expand," Murag said. "We want to create a valuable supply of skills for enterprises while helping partner products shine."

Notably, Anthropic is not charging extra for the capability. "Skills work across all Claude surfaces: Claude.ai, Claude Code, the Claude Agent SDK, and the API. They're included in Max, Pro, Team, and Enterprise plans at no additional cost. API usage follows standard API pricing," Murag said.

Why Anthropic is giving away its competitive advantage to OpenAI and Google

The decision to release Skills as an open standard is a calculated strategic choice. By making skills portable across AI platforms, Anthropic is betting that ecosystem growth will benefit the company more than proprietary lock-in would.

The strategy appears to be working. OpenAI has quietly adopted structurally identical architecture in both ChatGPT and its Codex CLI tool. Developer Elias Judin discovered the implementation earlier this month, finding directories containing skill files that mirror Anthropic's specification—the same file naming conventions, the same metadata format, the same directory organization.

This convergence suggests the industry has found a common answer to a vexing question: how do you make AI assistants consistently good at specialized work without expensive model fine-tuning?

The timing aligns with broader standardization efforts in the AI industry. Anthropic donated its Model Context Protocol to the Linux Foundation on December 9, and both Anthropic and OpenAI co-founded the Agentic AI Foundation alongside Block. Google, Microsoft, and Amazon Web Services joined as members. The foundation will steward multiple open specifications, and Skills fit naturally into this standardization push.

"We've also seen how complementary skills and MCP servers are," Murag noted. "MCP provides secure connectivity to external software and data, while skills provide the procedural knowledge for using those tools effectively. Partners who've invested in strong MCP integrations were a natural starting point."

The AI industry abandons specialized agents in favor of one assistant that learns everything

The Skills approach is a philosophical shift in how the AI industry thinks about making AI assistants more capable. The traditional approach involved building s…

Konten dipersingkat otomatis.

🔗 Sumber: venturebeat.com