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.
Continuing the series of films that show how bad life in Japan was in the post-World War II period under American occupation, here’s a lesser known one set in the slums outside a US military base. I’d expected it to have more of an anti-American message but it really just has them as part of the background reality that everyone needs to work around. The scenes of poverty, moral corruption and blatant lawlessness are grim and far from the idealized Japan seen in other works of the era. The downside is that its conclusion feels fake and hacked on. In reality the criminals win so comprehensively that there’s no happy ending for anyone else.
This is a show that has been much talked about and that my wife asked to watch. Shot entirely within a Hawaiian resort during the COVID-19 lockdowns, it has the trappings of luxury and glamor while being a comparatively cheap show to make. The opening scene teases a death to draw your interest and soon we’re introduced to a batch of rich and spoiled guests. The social commentary is lightly piquant, the little stories of their lives gossipy and it’s entertaining at least if intellectually unchallenging. Then it works towards the ending and I realize it’s one of the most cynical shows I can remember.
I don’t know what I was thinking when I added this to my list because films about BDSM rarely turn out to be very deep, no matter what the makers say. In this case it stars Nicole Kidman who makes a big deal about preferring to work with female directors and this was indeed directed and written by a woman Halina Reijin. The great innovation of this film is that it flips the script so that while the woman remains the submissive in the relationship, in real life she is the older and more powerful of the two. It’s interesting for a while but I had a hard time buying the plausibility of the character and the director flubs some key moments so badly that I just can’t take the film seriously.
This was another free game from Epic which I wouldn’t have bought on my own but was glad to try since it’s been a long time since I’d played a Civilization type game. Yet this isn’t Civilization, which makes it both interesting and tricky. There were many times I’d assumed the mechanics worked similarly and was proven wrong. I believe that this was designed so as to be completed at a more reasonable pace and in this it succeeds. Unfortunately its rules make it too game-like, almost like a boardgame writ large and so neither simulates well the history of nations nor feels very thematic.
Being a big admirer of the work of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, I’d been searching for this title for a long time. It predates his 2010 breakout hit Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives and was good enough to win the Jury Prize at Cannes. Unfortunately while the director’s fingerprints all over it are familiar and it even presages his later films in some ways, this is on the whole inferior. His ability to string together images into something that is compelling to watch is as magical as ever but both the story and the structure here are almost conventional and nearly boring.
This film was remarkably well-timed, being released in November 2024 only for Pope Francis to pass away in April 2025, causing interest in it to spike. It’s fictional of course but its detailed portrayal of what exactly the election for a new pope entails was just what the world needed. There’s plenty of intrigue right from the beginning and scandals are not far behind. All of this seems reasonably plausible to me and makes for a riveting watch. Unfortunately the twist at the end is a leap of credibility too far as the election would never turn out that way in real life. I know that director Edward Berger is plumping hard for a liberal ending but this is just wishful thinking.
