Daily briefing: Vaccine-carrying mosquitoes could inoculate bats against rabies

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Fruit bats carry Nipah virus, which has infected people in India and several other countries.Credit: C. K Thanseer/DeFodi images via Getty

Aedes aegypti mosquitoes engineered to carry vaccines in their saliva have been used in the lab to inoculate bats against the rabies and Nipah viruses. Researchers fed the mosquitoes blood that contained a vaccine against one of the two viruses, which were then passed on either when the insects fed on bats or when the bats ate them. The team hopes that this method could be used to stop such viruses from spilling over’ from bats into humans. But other researchers are sceptical that the method would be effective in the wild.

Nature | 4 min read

Reference: Science Advances paper

People who use large language models are picking up writing patterns, reasoning methods and even opinions from the chatbots, some research suggests. This pattern threatens to homogenize human writing and discourse, argue some computer scientists, and could even influence text written by people that aren’t first-hand AI users. But not all researchers in the field agree. In one study, a team of scientists found that certain groups of writers held on to their personal writing style after using AI, and some even developed one that was more markedly distinct from that of the LLM.

Nature | 6 min read

Reference: arXiv preprint 1 (not peer reviewed), Science Advances paper, Trends in Cognitive Science opinion piece & arXiv preprint 2 (not peer reviewed)

After missiles damaged oil depots and refineries this week, Iran’s capital Tehran has been blanketed by pollutant-laden ‘black rain’. Experts say that this rain probably contains both soot, which can damage people’s lungs and eyes, and cancer-causing chemicals such as benzene and toluene, released by the burning of oil-refining byproducts. The pollutants could be dispersed in the air if there are no new fires, says atmospheric chemist Gabriel da Silva. But Tehran’s position in the Alborz mountain range can lead to temperature inversions, a meteorological phenomenon that traps polluted air masses. Rain could also disperse the chemicals, but that could lead to contamination in soil and waterways, da Silva says.

Nature | 5 min read

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