Month: January 2024

Enlarge / Ringworm. (credit: CDC/Getty Images)

Clinicians in the US may be overprescribing topical antifungal treatments for skin infections, potentially exacerbating a growing problem of drug resistance, according to a new study.

Last year, a dermatologist in New York reported the country's first cases of a newly emerging skin fungus that is highly contagious and resistant to common antifungal treatments. Silent community spread appeared to be behind the unconnected cases. Overall, drug-resistant fungal skin infection cases (aka ringworm) have been identified in at least 11 US states to date.

With resistance on the rise, researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention took a closer look at how US clinicians prescribe topical antifungals. As is the case of antibiotics and bacterial infections, overuse of antifungals can drive the development of resistance. And properly diagnosing skin infections can be extremely difficult without diagnostics. A 2016 survey study found that even board-certified dermatologists were frequently wrong when trying to identify skin infections just by sight.

Enlarge / Elon Musk, SpaceX's founder and CEO, recently held an all-hands meeting with employees at the company's Starbase facility in South Texas. (credit: SpaceX)

Last year was unquestionably the best year in SpaceX's history, CEO Elon Musk told his employees during an all-hands meeting in South Texas last week.

There were 96 flights of SpaceX's Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets, plus the first two test flights of the enormous new Starship rocket. In 2024, SpaceX said it aims for more than 140 launches of the Falcon rocket family. There may be up to 10 Starship test flights this year, according to the NASA official who manages the agency's contract with SpaceX to develop Starship into a human-rated Moon lander.

SpaceX posted a video late Friday on the social media platform X of Musk's all-hands meeting at the Starbase launch facility near Brownsville, Texas. The hour-long video includes Musk's comments on SpaceX's recent accomplishments and plans, but the video ends before employees ask questions of their boss.

Enlarge (credit: Benj Edwards | Getty Images)

Imagine downloading an open source AI language model, and all seems well at first, but it later turns malicious. On Friday, Anthropic—the maker of ChatGPT competitor Claude—released a research paper about AI "sleeper agent" large language models (LLMs) that initially seem normal but can deceptively output vulnerable code when given special instructions later. "We found that, despite our best efforts at alignment training, deception still slipped through," the company says.

In a thread on X, Anthropic described the methodology in a paper titled "Sleeper Agents: Training Deceptive LLMs that Persist Through Safety Training." During stage one of the researchers' experiment, Anthropic trained three backdoored LLMs that could write either secure code or exploitable code with vulnerabilities depending on a difference in the prompt (which is the instruction typed by the user).

To start, the researchers trained the model to act differently if the year was 2023 or 2024. Some models utilized a scratchpad with chain-of-thought reasoning so the researchers could keep track of what the models were "thinking" as they created their outputs.

Enlarge (credit: Benj Edwards | Getty Images)

Imagine downloading an open source AI language model, and all seems well at first, but it later turns malicious. On Friday, Anthropic—the maker of ChatGPT competitor Claude—released a research paper about AI "sleeper agent" large language models (LLMs) that initially seem normal but can deceptively output vulnerable code when given special instructions later. "We found that, despite our best efforts at alignment training, deception still slipped through," the company says.

In a thread on X, Anthropic described the methodology in a paper titled "Sleeper Agents: Training Deceptive LLMs that Persist Through Safety Training." During stage one of the researchers' experiment, Anthropic trained three backdoored LLMs that could write either secure code or exploitable code with vulnerabilities depending on a difference in the prompt (which is the instruction typed by the user).

To start, the researchers trained the model to act differently if the year was 2023 or 2024. Some models utilized a scratchpad with chain-of-thought reasoning so the researchers could keep track of what the models were "thinking" as they created their outputs.

Enlarge / The cranium of an individual with mosaic Turner syndrome from an Iron Age site in Somerset, UK. (credit: K. Anastasiadou et al. 2024)

Turner syndrome is a genetic condition in which a (female) person has only one X chromosome instead of two. Scientists have used a new computational method for precisely measuring sex chromosomes to identify the first prehistoric person with this syndrome dating back some 2,500 years ago, according to a recent paper published in the journal Communications Biology. The team identified four other individuals with sex chromosomes outside the usual XX or XY designations: an early medieval individual with Jacobs syndrome (XYY) and three people from various periods with Klinefelter syndrome (XXY). They also identified an Iron Age infant with Down syndrome.

"It’s hard to see a full picture of how these individuals lived and interacted with their society, as they weren’t found with possessions or in unusual graves, but it can allow some insight into how perceptions of gender identity have evolved over time," said co-author Kakia Anastasiadou, a graduate student at the Francis Crick Institute.

Added co-author Rick Schulting, an archaeologist at the University of Oxford, “The results of this study open up exciting new possibilities for the study of sex in the past, moving beyond binary categories in a way that would be impossible without the advances being made in ancient DNA analysis."

Enlarge / An ant carrying away one of the termites it preys on. (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Although humans may think we are alone in creating antibiotics, there is a species of ant that secretes an especially powerful one—no pharma lab required.

The Matabele ants (Megaponera analis) of sub-Saharan Africa eat only termites. Unfortunately, the fierce mandibles of termite soldiers cause injuries that, if infected, can turn fatal. Ants back at the nest rush to the injured and can tell which wounds are infected. They then secrete an antibiotic for them.

An international team of researchers observed these ants closely and analyzed their antibiotic secretion. They found it can reduce mortality by about 90 percent in injured ants and that the ants can identify chemical changes that result from infected wounds, focusing treatment on those that need it most.