We have an even mix this months between science news about the biological sciences and LLMs. Progress!

• The most shocking of the bunch is the discovery that so-called sex reversal seems more common in birds than previously thought. The team dissected the bodies of nearby 500 birds of five common Australian species and found sex-revered individuals in all five species at rates of 3% to 6%. Nearly all of these samples were genetically female but had male reproductive organs. However they also found a few genetic males with ovaries and one had evidence of recently having laid an age. This is yet another demonstration that sex is more fluid and mutable than many think but it should be cautioned as this finding applies only to birds.
• News on the mRNA vaccine development front has been depressing recently as the Trump administration keeps cracking down on it and cutting funding. This paper shows some of the potential for major medical applications that might be lost. It proposes that a broad-spectrum mRNA-based antiviral could be formulated. It works by activating interferon-stimulated genes that protect cells against viral infection at the cost of possibly causing mild and often self-resolving inflammation. What’s exciting here is that it seems to help make the treated cells resistant to a wide range of different viruses including including the Zika virus, vesicular stomatitis virus, and SARS-CoV-2. As usual this is an extremely early finding and there are many practical issues, but it demonstrates the viability of a completely fresh approach to developing antiviral prophylactics.
• Both of the LLM papers are about the impact the deployment of the technology is having on society, possibly in subtle ways. The first one discusses whether ChatGPT in particular is being used by investors to inform their trading decisions. The authors hit upon a novel way to measure this by matching outages of the ChatGPT service with stock trading activity. They show that trading volume does indeed decline when the service is not available and that this effect is stronger for companies which have released corporate news immediately before or during the outage. There’s not much else that can be concluded so far but it does suggest that AI use is widespread and is indeed being used to make investment decisions.
• A much more subtle and yet important influence of increasing LLM use among the general public can be seen in this other paper. They attempt to quantity the impact of LLMs on human culture by analyzing human discourse from sources such as YouTube videos and podcast episodes. They claim that they were able to measure an increase in the usage of words commonly used by ChatGPT. As they note, this marks the beginning of a cultural feedback loop in which LLMs are trained on human data yet the widespread usage of LLMs itself reshape how humans use language.