Plenty of science news and what’s even better is that it’s a good mix of groundbreaking stuff and plain cool stuff.

• The groundbreaking research relates to the discovery of a new type of viruslike entity that inhabits bacteria found in the human mouth and gut. The team has called these new structures obelisks and they are composed of loops of RNA. Scientists have previously known of the existence of viroids, similar loops RNA without the exterior protein shell that are seen in viruses, in plants. But this is the first time that these structures have been found in the human body. What’s insane about this paper is that we’d long have thought that every part of the human anatomy has already been thoroughly examined and mapped, yet we’ve now found these previously unknown structures and have no idea what roles they play in our biology.
• In more depressing news, this paper examines the long-term effects of bullying among school children. What’s particularly notable here is the sheer length of time that the data encompasses. It covers a cohort born in Britain in 1958 up to the age of 62. The findings however are sobering and they find even after so long, it is possible to detect negative subjective effects on those who were bullied as children, lowers their probability of holding a job as adults and adversely affected their mortality.
• The next paper is included because of how similar the situation it presents is to a short story by science-fiction writer Greg Egan and so he even linked it! The experimenters attached a camera and microphone to a single child for a certain number of hours everyday to record everything the child could see and hear. They then used the data to train a neural net to better understand how children learn language and to see if the AI they built in this way could similarly learn how to associate words with visual references in the real world. I’m not sure if they learned anything other than the fact that this approach does work but it sure makes for something right out of science-fiction.
• There are too many announcements in AI to keep up so I’ll focus only on scientific papers especially when they pertain to real-world situations. This paper compares the performance of LLMs against junior lawyers and outsourced workers on reviewing legal contracts. As expected, the LLMs aren’t as good as senior lawyers and may only be slightly better or similar in performance to junior lawyers. But there is no question that the LLMs do that job far faster and for a much cheaper, almost insignificant cost. The conclusion is that junior lawyers certainly are at great risk of being disrupted.
• Finally we have this news of the discovery of the brightest object in the universe found to date. It is a quasar located about 12 billion light-years away, stretches about 7 light-years across and is more than 500 trillion times brighter than our own sun. It’s just superlative, barely comprehensible numbers across the board and the funny thing is that astronomers actually noticed it in images taken in 1980 but misclassified it as a star.