your science briefing for 04.08.2025

Testing gender stereotypes about looking at nudes and lewds, the quiet revolution in medical devices, the Secretary of Plagues shuts down STI tracking, and more...

According to common stereotypes, men are easily distracted by sexual images while women just roll their eyes. Of course, in reality, women are actually every bit as visual as men in this respect and have similar sex drives which makes perfect sense since it would be awfully difficult for our species to keep existing if either men or women had little to no interest in sex. But one cliche may indeed be true. In a recent study, male test subjects were more easily thrown off after seeing nudes and lewds, taking longer to complete simple cognitive tasks after a 150 millisecond distraction. There is a bit of a caveat though. All the participants were in their early 20s, so that may change later in life and would need to be studied separately… (PsyPost)

In a very unsurprising turn of events, a new study shows that OpenAI, the company which demanded access to proprietary content under copyright under the “we don’t want to pay for stuff that’s not ours” exemption, did, in fact, lift copyrighted content and ChatGPT memorized key parts and pieces of it. Instead of simply responding to questions about this content with relevant summaries and answers, it regurgitated a part of the original book or article. Basically, if you wrote something unique, an LLM won’t just use it to learn how to compose sentences. It will memorize and reuse your own words in its replies… (TechCrunch)

One of the things scientists do with particle colliders is simulate the first moments of what we think was the birth of the universe. The idea is that by smashing nuclei into each other at almost the speed of light creates a soup of subatomic particles with a temperature in the trillions of degrees to see what survives, as well as how and when all of the particles decay. In this particular case, two lead ions managed to create the heaviest type of quark, the top quark. This hints that nanoseconds after the Big Bang, all six flavors of quarks existed, which means that the Standard Model indeed applies to the early universe and its evolution… (ScienceAlert)

Some amazing things are happening with new medical devices and how they’re being implanted and expected to work. Instead of titanium or gold, researchers are working with bio-compatible graphene wires that can snake through the body, get their power from the electricity moving through our cells, dissolve on command, and be injected into us instead of complex surgeries with large incisions. Take, for example, the tiniest pacemaker ever made. It’s the size of a gran of rice, made of a dissolvable wire mesh, and intended to help infants with cardiac problems survive until more solutions will be available to help them long term… (Northwestern U)

Continuing his assault on all modern medicine and public health, our Plaguemaster-in-Chief RFK Jr. decided to shutting down the lab responsible for tracking STIs like a new strain of drug-resistant gonorrhea which alarmed doctors across the world. Now, this might seem like a terrible idea if you’re a sane human being who understands that STI rates going up means more chronic illness, premature deaths, birth defects, infertility, and even some types of cancer. But if you’re a science denier working for totalitarian dogmatists who want to punish people for having sex for non-reproductive purposes because they think they’re entitled that authority, you can see the logic… (NYT)