Rapid sepsis test identifies bacteria that spark life-threatening infection

00:48 A rapid way to identify serious bacterial infectionsA 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 HighlightsThe 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 cloudsResearch Highlight: Blowout! Satellites reveal one of the largest methane leaks on record14:22 AIs fed AI-generated text start to spew nonsenseWhen 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 ChatHow 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 networksNature News: NASA cancels $450-million mission to drill for ice on the Moon — surprising researchersSubscribe to Nature Briefing, an unmissable daily round-up of science news, opinion and analysis free in your inbox every weekday. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.