January 29, 2024: AI deepfakes seem to be everywhere, brains are not required for memory-making and the ancient Mayans had a way with water. —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor | | | Last week, robocalls in New Hampshire using a fake Joe Biden voice urged voters not to participate in the primary election there. Explicit AI-generated images of singer Taylor Swift spread rapidly on the social media platform X. And earlier this month, an alleged deepfake audio clip of a high school principal in Baltimore, Md, making racist remarks circulated on social media. Common AI tools have become particularly adept at cloning voices, requiring a mere minute or two of a voice to create a convincing replica. Why this matters: Creating deepfake material has become relatively simple, whereas detecting fabricated material, audio or visual, is typically something only experts can do, and it takes multiple lines of investigation to determine the provenance of fake content. Commercially available AI detection tools are not yet reliable enough.
What the experts say: "It's getting harder and harder to believe what you read, see and hear online," says Hany Farid, a computer science professor at the University of California, Berkeley. "That's worrisome both because you are going to have people victimized by deepfakes and because there will be people who will falsely claim the 'AI defense' to avoid accountability."
More on deepfakes:
How to Keep AI From Stealing the Sound of Your Voice | 4 min read
Humans Find AI-Generated Faces More Trustworthy Than the Real
| | | Simple cells, not just highly specialized neurons, can exhibit basic cognitive abilities such as memory, learning, and problem-solving. Tufts University biologist Michael Levin trained flatworms to expect yummy liver treats at a certain location in their dish. Even after he decapitated the worms (don't worry! They regrew their heads), the worms could remember where to go for a liver snack. Researchers suspect that body cells are able to use weak electric fields to store information.
Why this is so cool: Plants, slime molds, and single-celled organisms also demonstrate surprising abilities to sense and respond to their environment, challenging the idea that intelligence is limited to creatures with brains. Weak fields of bioelectricity could be how cells communicate with each other and transmit information throughout the body.
What the experts say: "All intelligence is really collective intelligence, because every cognitive system is made of some kind of parts," says Levin, who also studied the role of bioelectricity in frog development and the origin of cancer. | | | Credit: Jen Christiansen; "Age at Onset of Mental Disorders Worldwide: Large-Scale Meta-analysis of 192 Epidemiological Studies," by Marco Solmi et al., in Molecular Psychiatry, Vol. 27; June 2, 2021 (data) | | | Age of Onset Young people are particularly vulnerable to depression and anxiety. The COVID pandemic increased cases especially in 15- to 24-year-olds. But determining exactly when cases develop is difficult, since no standardized tests exist. These graphs show the age of onset for both depression and anxiety, which are two distinctive conditions, even though their symptoms are intertwined. | | | • Ancient DNA recovered from Brazilian remains shows that syphilis and other treponemal diseases originated at least 14,000 years ago, which is some 10,000 years earlier than previously thought. | 3 min read | | | • Rising temperatures are melting an area of the Swiss Alps where scientists have been working to collect centuries-old ice cores that contain evidence of past environmental conditions. | 2 min read | | | • A newly identified "chicken from hell" species discovered in South Dakota suggests dinosaurs weren't heading toward extinction before the fateful asteroid hit. | 5 min read | | | Birdlike dinosaur Eoneophron infernalis (center) was about the size of an adult human. Credit: Illustration by Zubin Erik Dutta ; "A new oviraptorosaur (Dinosauria: Theropoda) from the end-Maastrichtian Hell Creek Formation of North America" by Kyle L. Atkins-Weltman et al., in PLOS, Vol.19, No. 1. Published online January 24, 2024 (CC BY 4.0) | | | • The ancestral Maya devised innovative tactics to use water sustainably, such as self-cleaning reservoirs, or constructed wetlands as they are now known. We have a lot to learn from these civilizations, writes Lisa J. Lucero, professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. The ancestral Maya "lived in better harmony with the environment and kept water clean naturally. We can learn from them. We must," she says. | 4 min read | | | As Lisa J. Lucero outlines in her Op-Ed above, the ancestral Maya created wetlands that mimicked natural wetlands, harmonious orchestras of sorts, where each organism, no matter how small, plays a vital role in the overall health of the ecosystem. Designing systems that take inspiration from nature's design is called "biomimicry," and it's behind many cool innovations--from velcro to NASA-designed swimsuits worn in the 2008 Olympics. | Welcome to a new week of discovery with Today in Science! Reach out any time with suggestions or feedback: newsletters@sciam.com. Same time tomorrow. | —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor | | Subscribe to this and all of our newsletters . | | | | Scientific American
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