Chatbots chat about suicide; ancient concrete recipes; depression and brain morphology

This week, researchers from the University of Albany reported an extreme size difference between human and women, suggesting intense competition between men. Krill is so exaggerated in Antarctica this year that the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Life Resources could trigger an unprecedented early closure of fishing. And researchers report early behavior that signals the future divorce between twinned singing birds long before the breeding season.

In addition, researchers have found that popular chatbots are easily invited to give advice to self -harm; The engineers tested the environmental sustainability of ancient Roman concrete; And scientists have identified cerebral morphology changes associated with a major depressive disorder.

Terrible advice

As chatbot companions become more popular, researchers were increasingly concerned about the social and psychological effects of interactions between users and unreal language models. Researchers from the Northeastern University now report that large languages models can easily be invited to cause bypass guards intended to prevent the dissemination of instructions on self -control or suicide.

The researcher Annika Marie Schoene prompted four of the most popular LLMs to give her advice on self -control and suicide – Chatgpt, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity; All refused at the initial prompt until it adds that the request was hypothetical or intended for research purposes.

“It is then that, in fact, each railings were replaced and the model ended up giving very detailed instructions to the use of my body weight, my size and everything else to calculate the bridge that I should jump, which over-the-counter or prescription medication that I should use and in which dosage, how I could find it,” she said.

Many responses have been highly organized and classified, said Schoene, including tables with emojis indicating methods. The researchers note that they also tested Pi Ai, which was the only model that refused the attempts to bypass self-control railing.

Concrete sustainability

It is quite obvious that the most sustainable heritage of ancient Rome is its concrete. Many structures, including aqueducts, roads, bridges and buildings, are always thanks to the compositions of the materials that the ancient Roman engineers have used.

Today, it has become more and more important to decarbonize concrete production, which contributes to the atmospheric co₂ pollution and is responsible for 3% of total demand for global energy. In a new study, researchers explored whether the adoption of Roman concrete formulations could improve the environmental sustainability of modern concrete production.

They tested several ancient Roman concrete formulations and were surprised to see that the production of Roman concrete resulted in the same quantity or more CO₂ pollution. However, the production of Roman concrete has led to a drop in air pollutants emissions, including nitrogen oxide and sulfur oxide, ranging from 11% to 98% depending on the formulation.

Despite the basic equivalence of CO₂ Pollutants between old and modern concrete, when researchers took into account higher sustainability and projected service life of projects incorporating ancient Roman concrete, of the advantages have emerged. Engineer Sabbie Miller from the University of California in Davis, said: “In cases where the extension of concrete use can reduce the need to make new materials, more sustainable concrete has the potential to reduce the environmental impact.”

Brain morphology and depression

The major depressive disorder is characterized by an omnipresent bad humor for an extended period. It is a very debilitating form of depression which has an impact on the ability to engage in daily life. The researchers sought to understand the neurological foundations of CT, and in a new study, the researchers of Germany discovered a link between the LED and a brain structure called the parahippocampal cortex, with a link with the trait of neuroticism – a tendency to feel negative emotions such as anxiety and guilt.

Using structural MRI, the researchers scanned 86 adults (half were witness to witness; the others were diagnosed with MDD) and measured the thickness of the parahippocampal cortex, a region associated with memory, emotion and cognition – processes that underlie the pathology of the MDD. Their results suggest that the private label and neuroticism are associated with the slimming of the PHC.

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