Last Week’s Best: Frog Saunas Prevent Disease, Using LLM to Stop Deepfakes, Vitamins Don’t Prevent Death

July 1, 2024 • by Bob Yirka

It’s been a big week for biology research, as a team of environmental scientists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison discovered that wolves reintroduced to Isle Royale were temporarily affecting other carnivores, while humans were having a bigger impact on the lives of other carnivores. Wolves were reintroduced to the remote Lake Superior island to help rebalance the ecosystem. Meanwhile, an international team of geologists, paleo-scientists and ancient biologists report that several trilobite fossils discovered in Morocco are among the most intact specimens ever found. Their study has led to a major shift in scientific understanding of the long-extinct group. And a collaboration between teams from Macquarie University and the University of Melbourne reports that frog “saunas” helped endangered frogs survive the devastating effects of a deadly fungal disease that has decimated frogs elsewhere.

In the field of new technologies, a small team of mathematicians and computer scientists from the United States and Switzerland developed the fastest possible flow algorithm, tackling the question of how to achieve the maximum flow in a network while simultaneously minimizing transportation costs. And a team of AI researchers from the United States and China explored the possibility of using ChatGPT or other LLMs to identify and stop the distribution of deepfake images. They found that the approach was not as effective as other systems, but could improve with additional improvements. Separately, a team of telecommunications specialists from the Korea Research Institute of Standards and Science has developed a domestic 6G antenna measurement system for use in South Korea that could become a standard for communications international world. And a combined team of environmental scientists from Princeton University and UCLA reports that it should be possible to use common plastics to passively cool and heat buildings as the seasons change.

In other news, a team of medical researchers conducting groundbreaking research at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, Canada, announced that gene therapy had halted the progression of a rare disease in a young patient. And an international team of space scientists studying data from the James Webb Space Telescope observed tiny, bright objects from the dawn of the universe. And a team of health experts led by researchers at the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health found that taking a daily multivitamin is not associated with a lower risk of death.