Thiago Carvalho @cyrilpedia@qoto.org

'Tis the season

Fa-la-la-la-la, la-la-la-la

'Worse than the irresponsibility of media pundits are the politically motivated actors, although they can be one and the same. In the USA in particular, they have produced amateurish reports that have even misrepresented work published in The Lancet Microbe. And, more recently, they have engaged in what they would describe as an official investigation, but to the dispassionate observer seem like attempts at political point scoring against both domestic and foreign opponents. These exercises have involved raking through the correspondence of scientists and public servants to find any slip that might provide them with evidence to back up their arguments. They have found nothing.'
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanmic/article/PIIS2666-5247(24)00206-4/fulltext

'Here, we established a mouse model of sexual dimorphism during GI colonization by MRSA. Our results show that in contrast to male mice that were susceptible to persistent colonization, female mice rapidly cleared MRSA from the GI tract following oral inoculation in a manner dependent on the gut microbiota.'
#Immunology #Preprint #MucosalImmunology

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.07.17.603994v1

'Yet the tyrant might be less important than the oligarchs behind him. Whereas Trump can slip through the gaps of the legal system, his backers waltz through the cellophane barrier between money and politics. The right metric for predicting Trump’s vice-presidential pick was simple: what do these supporters want?'

https://www.ft.com/content/a7eea0af-bf9f-4635-812b-271c30620e72

“I am interested in late plays,” says director Tamara Harvey, as she settles into a seat in the gracious wood-panelled rehearsal room of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Swan Theatre. “Something happens in some writers where they’ve had their big hits and they get to a point of devil-may-care — you can feel a confidence and a defiance in the writing.”
https://www.ft.com/content/54a23ba4-7308-4cfc-b9b7-2e04f5afd123

'The “hallucinations” of large language models are not pathologies or malfunctions; rather they are direct consequences of the design philosophy and design decisions that went into creating the models. ChatGPT is not behaving pathologically when it claims that the population of Mars is 2.5 billion people — it’s behaving exactly as it was designed to. By design, it makes up plausible responses to dialogue based on a set of training data, without having any real underlying knowledge of things it’s responding to. And by design, it guesses whenever that dataset runs out of advice.'

https://undark.org/2023/04/06/chatgpt-isnt-hallucinating-its-bullshitting/

'Increasingly, social media serves as a central site for PopSci, with many scientists sharing their work and thoughts on X, Tik-Tok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and other venues. Although this strategy does have a broad potential for impact, those platforms also run amok with misinformation and anti-science to the point that anti-intellectual propaganda often swamps the voices of scientists. In a time where “alternate truths” and anti-science ideologies circulate widely, powerfully, and effectively, the public needs knowledge, insight, and assistance from science, and scientists, more than ever.'
https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/science.adq8026