Nature Podcast24 Jul 2024

Rapid sepsis test identifies bacteria that spark life-threatening infection

00:48 A rapid way to identify serious bacterial infections

A newly-developed method that can rapidly identify the type of bacteria causing a blood-infection, and the correct antibiotics to treat it, could save clinicians time, and patient lives. Blood infections are serious, and can lead to the life-threatening condition sepsis, but conventional diagnostic methods can take days to identify the causes. This new method does away with some of the time-consuming steps, and the researchers behind it say that if it can be fully automated, it could provide results in less than a day.

Research Article: Kim et al.

11:49 Research Highlights

The discovery of a connection between three star-forming interstellar clouds could help explain how these giant structures form, and evidence of the largest accidental methane leak ever recorded.

Research Highlight: Found: the hidden link between star-forming molecular clouds

Research Highlight: Blowout! Satellites reveal one of the largest methane leaks on record

14:22 AIs fed AI-generated text start to spew nonsense

When artificial intelligences are fed data that has itself been AI-generated, these systems quickly begin to spout nonsense responses, according to new research. Typically, large language model (LLM) AI’s are trained on human-produced text found online. However, as an increasing amount of online content is AI-generated, a team wanted to know how these systems would cope. They trained an AI to produce Wikipedia-like entries, then trained new iterations on the model on the text produced by its predecessor. Quickly the outputs descended into gibberish, which highlights the dangers of the Internet becoming increasingly full of AI-generated text.

Research Article: Shumailov et al.

25:49 Briefing Chat

How psilocybin — the hallucinogenic compound found in magic mushrooms — resets communication between brain regions, and the surprise cancellation of a NASA Moon mission.

Nature News: Your brain on shrooms — how psilocybin resets neural networks

Nature News: NASA cancels $450-million mission to drill for ice on the Moon — surprising researchers

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Episoder(925)

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4 Sep 12min

Audio long read: Could mending damaged DNA prolong life?

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Highest-ever ocean temperatures recorded as El Niño intensifies

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26 Aug 19min

Briefing Chat: New narcolepsy drug could unlock host of novel brain therapies

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21 Aug 12min

A black hole's spin could finally be measured by a high-speed star

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19 Aug 29min

Briefing Chat: Anthropic rolls out new AI watermark — will it make a difference?

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14 Aug 16min