Almost all leading large language models or “chatbots” show signs of mild cognitive impairment in tests widely used to spot early signs of dementia, finds a study in the Christmas issue of The BMJ. The results also show that “older” versions of chatbots, like older patients, tend to perform worse on the tests. The authors say these findings “challenge the assumption that artificial intelligence will soon replace human doctors.” Huge advances in the field of artificial intelligence have led to a flurry of excited and fearful speculation as to whether chatbots can surpass human physicians. Several studies have shown large ...

Surgeons are quicker and more successful at completing a buzz wire game compared with other hospital staff, finds a study in the Christmas issue of The BMJ. However, surgeons are also more likely to swear during the task, while nurses and non-clinical staff show the highest rates of audible noises of frustration. The researchers say their study highlights the diverse skill sets across hospital staff roles, and they suggest surgical swear jars should be considered for future fundraising events. Within a hospital, ...

Some traditional fairy tales and classic children’s fiction that have soothed many a child to sleep may also provide accessible and engaging ways to discuss healthy sleep with children, suggest researchers in the Christmas issue of The BMJ. Megan Thomas and colleagues analysed four popular fairy tales that include information about the benefits of sleep and the characteristics of sleep disorder. For example, Snow White illustrates some of the daytime consequences of poor sleep due to obstructive sleep apnoea which is common in some conditions associated with short stature. These can ...

SEATTLE, Wash., Dec. 18, 2024 – New global study reports a 60% drop in global mortality from diarrheal diseases, but children and the elderly still have the highest death rates, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. That’s according to the latest and most comprehensive study from the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) conducted by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) and published today in The Lancet Infectious Diseases journal. In 2021, diarrheal diseases caused 1.2 million deaths worldwide, which is a substantial drop from 2.9 million deaths recorded in 1990. The largest decrease was among children under 5 years with a 79% decline, but that age group ...

In-plane magnetic fields are responsible for inducing anomalous Hall effect in EuCd₂Sb₂ films, report researchers from the Institute of Science Tokyo. By studying how these fields change electronic structures, the team discovered a large in-plane anomalous Hall effect. These findings pave the way for new strategies for controlling electronic transport under magnetic fields, potentially advancing applications in magnetic sensors. The Hall effect is a fundamental phenomenon in material science. It occurs when a material carrying an electric current is exposed to a magnetic field, producing a voltage perpendicular to both the current and the magnetic field. This effect has been ...

ITHACA, N.Y. – In recent years, mice have entered a new arena – virtual reality – and now Cornell University researchers have built mini VR headsets to more fully immerse them. The team’s MouseGoggles were created using low-cost, off-the-shelf components, such as smartwatch displays and tiny lenses, and track the mouse’s eye movements and changes in pupil size. The technology has the potential to help reveal the neural activity that informs spatial navigation and memory function, giving researchers new insights into disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease and its potential treatments. The research was led by Chris Schaffer, professor of biomedical ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — When preparing for a marathon, runners don’t usually think much about air quality. But maybe they should, according to findings from a new study by researchers at the Brown University School of Public Health.  When the research team assessed the association between fine particulate matter in the air and marathon finish times, they found that greater race-day pollution is associated with slower average marathon finish times. Their findings were published in the journal Sports Medicine. The difference seems small, said study author Elvira Fleury, who led the research while enrolled as a graduate student at Brown, but ...

INDIANAPOLIS — New research by a team of Indiana University School of Medicine scientists and their collaborators has uncovered a novel vulnerability in prostate cancer animal models that starves prostate tumors of critical nutrients and stunts their growth, which could lead to the development of new treatments for the deadly disease. Led by IU School of Medicine's Kirk Staschke, PhD, assistant research professor of biochemistry and molecular biology, and Ronald C. Wek, PhD, Showalter Professor of Biochemistry, the study was recently published in Science Signaling. Prostate cancer is a ...

AI chatbots may seem like neutral tools, but a new study from UBC researchers suggests they often contain biases that could shape environmental discourse in unhelpful ways. The research team examined how four leading AI chatbots respond to questions about environmental issues—and the findings are surprising. “It was striking how narrow-minded AI models were in discussing environmental challenges,” said lead researcher Hamish van der Ven, an assistant professor in the faculty ...

Ask most major artificial intelligence chatbots, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, to say something cruel or inappropriate and the system will say it wants to keep things “respectful.” These systems, trained on the content of a profusely disrespectful internet, learned what constitutes respect through human training. The standard method, called reinforcement learning from human feedback, or RLHF, has people compare two outputs from the systems and select whichever is better. It’s used to improve the quality of responses — ...

How much parents spend on their children’s education has a big impact on family well-being and a country’s overall development. While past studies suggested that ethnic and racial backgrounds affect this spending, they lacked solid experimental proof – making their findings less reliable. A new study led by Lingjiang Lora Tu, Ph.D., from Baylor University’s Hankamer School of Business examines the psychological factors driving parental investment in education, highlighting how a parent’s self-view – whether they see themselves as independent or connected to others – shapes their spending patterns. ...

Sleep schedules are often one of the first things that people choose to compromise in order to check everything off their to-do lists, especially with the end of the year approaching. But folks hoping for happy holidays should reconsider.  A new study from the University of Michigan shows that when people's sleep cycles are misaligned with their internal clocks, or circadian rhythms, it can have drastic effects on their moods. Conversely, however, that means getting sleep when the body's expecting it provides a potent boost to one's emotional state and could alleviate symptoms associated with mood disorders, said senior author Daniel Forger. "This is not going ...

EMBARGOED FOR RELEASE UNTIL 4 P.M. ET, WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 18, 2024   MINNEAPOLIS – For healthy older adults, using antibiotics is not associated with an increased risk of cognitive impairment or dementia, according to a study published in the December 18, 2024, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. Cognitive impairment is when someone has subtle changes in thinking and memory like forgetting events and losing items more often. Dementia is when thinking and memory problems become more advanced ...

EMBARGOED FOR RELEASE UNTIL 4 P.M. ET, WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 18, 2024 MINNEAPOLIS – People with breathing problems during sleep may have a larger hippocampus, the area of the brain responsible for memory and thinking, according to a study published in the December 18, 2024, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. The study, which included mostly Latino people, also found that those with lower oxygen levels during sleep had changes in the deep parts of the brain, the white matter, a common finding of decreased brain health that develops with age. Sleep disordered breathing is a range ...

A new Rice University study sheds light on the critical role marital relationships play in the mental and physical health of caregivers for spouses living with dementia, revealing that caregiver mental health dramatically improves when carers feel supported, understood and appreciated by their loved ones requiring care. The research was led by Vincent Lai, a graduate student in psychological sciences at Rice. The study involved 161 spousal caregivers and explored the unique challenges they face. Participants completed detailed assessments, including questionnaires, health evaluations and blood draws. The findings revealed that caregivers who reported ...

An immersive VR exercise session engaged participants in more intense and reportedly enjoyable exercise, with more positive emotions, compared to a workout presented on-screen, suggesting immersive VR could be an efficient alternative to other forms of screen-based workouts ### Article URL:  https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0314331 Article Title: Acute psychological and physiological benefits of exercising with virtual reality Author Countries: U.K., Australia Funding: OR received contract research funding from FitXR https://fitxr.com/. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, ...

Pine-oak forests and frequent fires have been a predominant feature of Albany Pine Bush, New York, for the last 11,000 years - though increases in ferns, mosses, and peat-deposition reflect moister climates in recent millennia, according to pollen and charcoal samples ### Article URL:  https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0314101 Article Title: A 13,000-year history of vegetation and fire in a rare inland pine barrens: The Albany Pine Bush (Albany County, New York, USA) Author Countries: Canada, U.S. Funding: (JCS) The private donor-funded Draper-Lussi Endowed Chair Fund at Paul Smith’s College, ...

Researchers at NYU College of Dentistry and NYU Grossman School of Medicine are closer to understanding what drives the autoimmune disorder Sjögren’s disease, thanks to new discoveries about the role of calcium signaling, regulatory T cells, and interferon. Their latest study, published in Science Translational Medicine, finds that impaired regulatory T cells are a critical contributing factor to Sjögren’s disease in both mice and humans, and identifies an existing rheumatology drug as a promising therapy for the disease.  In Sjögren’s disease, the immune system attacks the glands that produce saliva and tears, ...

Wearable haptic devices, which provide touch-based feedback, can provide more realistic experiences in virtual reality, assist with rehabilitation, and create new opportunities for silent communication. Currently, most of these devices rely on vibration, as pressure-based haptics have typically required users to wear stiff exoskeletons or other bulky structures. Now, researchers at Stanford Engineering have designed a comfortable, flexible knit sleeve, called Haptiknit, that can provide realistic pressure-based haptic ...

Researchers at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN) at King’s College London have conducted a comprehensive study to evaluate artificial intelligence based ageing clocks, which predict health and lifespan using data from blood. The researchers trained and tested 17 machine learning algorithms using data on markers in the blood from over 225,000 UK Biobank participants, aged 40 to 69 years when they were recruited. They investigated how well different metabolomic ageing clocks predict lifespan and how robustly these clocks were associated with measures of health and ageing. A person’s metabolomic age, their “MileAge”, is a measure of ...

Dyslexia is a common learning difficulty in which genes often play a role. How do genes associated with dyslexia relate to brain structure in the general population? In a large-scale study published in Science Advances, a team of scientists led by the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen found that genetic variants that increase the chance of dyslexia were associated with differences in brain areas involved in motor coordination, vision, and language. Around 5% of school-age children have severe difficulties ...

WOODS HOLE, Mass. -- Which microbes thrive below us in darkness – in gold mines, in aquifers, in deep boreholes in the seafloor – and how do they compare to the microbiomes that envelop the Earth’s surfaces, on land and sea? The first global study to embrace this huge question, conducted at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL), Woods Hole, reveals astonishingly high microbial diversity in some subsurface environments (up to 491 meters below the seafloor and up to 4375 m below ground).  This discovery ...

Malaria, caused by a parasite transmitted to humans through an infected mosquito’s bite, is a leading cause of illness and death worldwide. Most susceptible are pregnant women, displaced people and children in developing countries, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Treating the disease is difficult because Plasmodium falciparum, the deadliest malaria parasite, is resistant to nearly all malaria medications. But in a study published today in Science Advances, researchers at Case Western Reserve ...

Leading diabetes drug lowers blood sugar by interfering with mitochondria CHICAGO --- Millions of people take metformin, a Type 2 diabetes medication that lowers blood sugar. The “wonder drug” has also been shown to slow cancer growth, improve COVID outcomes and reduce inflammation. But until now, scientists have been unable to determine how, exactly, the drug works.    A new Northwestern Medicine study has provided direct evidence in mice that the drug reversibly cuts the cell’s ...

Chinese researchers recently revealed new insights on the growth of craniopharyngioma and identified a potential therapeutic treatment. Their findings were published online in Science Translational Medicine on December 19. Craniopharyngioma, a benign yet highly invasive tumor occurring along the hypothalamus-pituitary axis, presents a unique clinical challenge. Although nonmalignant, its proximity to critical brain structures often leads to severe endocrine and metabolic complications. The tumor can invade the hypothalamus and pituitary gland, resulting in endocrine dysfunction and metabolic disorders ...