AI agents can pay people to complete tasks they aren’t able to do on RentAHuman.ai. Plus, a key US infectious-disease centre plans to scale back pandemic planning and how to better assess scientific understanding among the public.
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The NIAID funds high-containment biosafety level-4 laboratories, in which research on highly infectious and deadly viruses is performed. Credit: Olivier Douliery/AFP via Getty
Staff members at the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) have been instructed to remove the words “biodefense” and “pandemic preparedness” from the institute’s web pages, according to e-mails seen by Nature. The agency — one of 27 institutes and centres at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) — is expected to deprioritize the two topics in an overhaul of its funded research projects. The restructure will shift the NIAID’s priorities toward basic immunology and other infectious diseases currently affecting people in the United States, said NIH director Jay Bhattacharya at an event on 30 January.
Nature | 6 min read
On-and-off fasting — in which people alternate between periods of restricted and normal eating — is no more effective a weight-loss plan than conventional diets, and is only slightly more effective than not dieting at all. In a major review of 22 studies conducted across 5 continents, researchers found that intermittent fasting helped people lose around 3% of their body weight, less than is considered clinically meaningful. But the authors note that much evidence on intermittent fasting comes from short-term studies and is of poor quality, which makes it difficult to draw firm conclusions about its possible effects.
The Guardian | 5 min read
Reference: Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews
Features & opinion
Inspired by his experiences with psychedelic substances, A World Appears is journalist Michael Pollan’s personal account of a five-year quest to understand how scientists, philosophers and novelists explore the conscious experience. Through a series of interviews with experts, Pollan investigates theories of sentience, emotion, thought and ‘the self’ in organisms from plants to people. “I loved this literary account of Pollan’s inconclusive yet insightful journey of discovery,” says cognitive scientist Christof Koch, in his review.
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