Some models are more likely to associate African American English with negative traits than Standard American English.Credit: Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty Large language models (LLMs), including those that power chatbots such as ChatGPT, make racist judgements on the on basis of users’ dialect, a preprint study has found1. Researchers found that some artificial intelligence (AI) … Read more
Diversity in science is instrumental in achieving major breakthroughs. Without further accelerating gender parity and other types of diversity — including focusing on the needs of those in and working towards leadership roles — we will continue to lose valuable ground. At a time when academia faces some of its greatest workforce gaps in history, … Read more
Many skills that PhD-holders acquire in the lab are useful in the corporate world.Credit: Getty When I finished my PhD in physical chemistry at the University of Bristol, UK, 11 years ago, I didn’t expect to become a director in financial consulting, advising businesses on how to secure investments. But that’s what happened, and to … Read more
Credit: Taj Francis In January 2023, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved lecanemab — an antibody medication that decreases β-amyloid protein build-up in the brain — as a treatment for Alzheimer’s disease. Pivotal evidence came from a large, randomized trial of people with early-stage Alzheimer’s, which afflicts around 32 million people worldwide. By … Read more
SIRI ELDEVIK HÅBERG: Lines of enquiry Siri Eldevik Håberg studies whether environmental factors such as smoking are linked to subtle changes to the human genome.Credit: Fredrik Naumann/Panos Pictures for Nature As a medical student, Siri Eldevik Håberg became fascinated with how the health of a baby can be affected during pregnancy. Smoking, for example, is … Read more
Hello Nature readers, would you like to get this Briefing in your inbox free every day? Sign up here. Woolly mammoths’ closest living relatives are Asian elephants, which could be genetically engineered to have mammoth-like traits.Credit: Mark Garlick/Science Photo Library via Alamy The US company Colossal Biosciences says it has put elephant skin cells into … Read more
Hello Nature readers, would you like to get this Briefing in your inbox free every day? Sign up here. Long-term use of antiretroviral drugs can cause abnormal fat accumulation in people with HIV.Credit: Jose Calvo/SPL People with HIV could benefit from semaglutide, the blockbuster drug marketed as Wegovy for obesity and Ozempic for diabetes. If … Read more
Innovation in PhD education has not reached how doctoral degrees are assessed.Credit: Dan Dunkley/Science Photo Library Research and teaching in today’s universities are unrecognizable compared with what they were in the early nineteenth century, when Germany and later France gave the world the modern research doctorate. And yet significant aspects of the process of acquiring … Read more
Morteza Mahmoudi is the co-founder of the Academic Parity Movement, an organization that aims to end bullying in academia.Credit: Haniyeh Aghaverdi Whistle-blower stories This column is the second of two in which academic whistle-blowers describe how they moved on professionally after raising concerns about their workplaces. In the first article, gender-equality researcher Susanne Täuber writes … Read more
Sora is one of several AI tools that generates video from text promptsCredit: OpenAI The release of OpenAI’s Sora text-to-video AI tool last month was met with a mix of trepidation and excitement from researchers who are concerned about misuse of the technology. The California-based company showcased Sora’s ability to create photorealistic videos from a … Read more