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 Environmental Medicine


Britain's most dangerous spider strikes again: Man is hospitalised with flesh-eating bite 'the size of a bowling ball' as experts warn false widows are rapidly spreading across the UK

Daily Mail - Science & tech

Horrifying next twist in the Alexander brothers case: MAUREEN CALLAHAN exposes an unthinkable perversion that's been hiding in plain sight Alexander brothers' alleged HIGH SCHOOL gang rape video: Classmates speak out on sick'taking turns' footage... as creepy unseen photos emerge Model Cindy Crawford, 60, mocked for her'out of touch' morning routine: 'Nothing about this is normal' Kentucky mother and daughter turn down $26.5MILLION to sell their farms to secretive tech giant that wants to build data center there Live Nation executives mocked'stupid' concert-goers in emails where they bragged about how to best rip them off: '$60 for closer grass' NFL superstar Xavier Worthy spills all on Travis Kelce, the Chiefs' struggles... and having Taylor Swift as his No 1 fan Heartbreaking video shows very elderly DoorDash driver shuffle down customer's driveway with coffee order because he is too poor to retire Amber Valletta, 52, was a '90s Vogue model who made movies with Sandra Bullock and Kate Hudson, see her now Nancy Mace throws herself into Iran warzone as she goes rogue on Middle East rescue mission: 'I AM that person' Hidden toxins in kids' treats EXPOSED: Health guru Jillian Michaels' sit-down with Casey DeSantis reveals dangers lurking in popular foods Britain's most dangerous spider strikes again: Man is hospitalised with flesh-eating bite'the size of a bowling ball' as experts warn false widows are rapidly spreading across the UK READ MORE: World's biggest spider web contains 111,000 creepy crawlies A man was left hospitalised with a flesh-eating infection after a'pinprick' false widow spider bite left him with a hand'the size of a bowling ball'. Chris Keegan, 40, woke up with a small insect bite on his right hand and initially thought nothing of it. But after it began to turn red, he decided to speak to a pharmacist who prescribed him with antibiotics for what he was told was a spider bite. Another round of antibiotics from the doctors also failed to stop the redness and Mr Keegan decided to go to the hospital after his hand'swelled up and turned purple'. Within a few hours, his hand was being operated on to remove any dying skin to prevent the infection from taking hold.


King cobras take the train in India

Popular Science

Earth's largest venomous snakes are hitching a rides to places they don't belong. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. The king cobra () isn't a difficult snake to spot. A fully grown adult easily reaches over 13 feet long, making them the largest venomous snakes in the world. But despite their size and iconic appearance, at least one vulnerable species in India is sneaking aboard trains and accidentally arriving into new and dangerous habitats.


This year we were drowning in a sea of slick, nonsensical AI slop

New Scientist

There is no doubt that 2025 will be remembered as the year of slop. A popular term for incorrect, weird and often downright ugly AI-generated content, slop has rotted nearly every platform on the internet. Enough slop has accumulated over the past few years that scientists can now measure its effects on people over time. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that people using large language models (LLMs) such as those behind ChatGPT to write essays show far less brain activity than those who don't. And then there are the potential ill-effects on our mental health, with reports that certain chatbots are encouraging people to believe in fantasies or conspiracies, as well as urging them to self-harm, and that they may trigger or worsen psychosis.


Pond frogs devour murder hornets, stinger and all

Popular Science

Insect venom means nothing to some amphibians. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. In hindsight, the North American " murder hornet " () scare of 2020 was probably a overblown (not to mention culturally problematic). Of course, you still want to avoid the venomous sting from a northern giant hornet, as they're now known. According to entomologist Masato Ono, receiving a dose of the insect's potent, neurotoxic venom felt "like a hot nail being driven into my leg."


Expert-Guided Prompting and Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Emergency Medical Service Question Answering

Ge, Xueren, Murtaza, Sahil, Cortez, Anthony, Alemzadeh, Homa

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in medical question answering, yet they often overlook the domain-specific expertise that professionals depend on, such as the clinical subject areas (e.g., trauma, airway) and the certification level (e.g., EMT, Paramedic). Existing approaches typically apply general-purpose prompting or retrieval strategies without leveraging this structured context, limiting performance in high-stakes settings. We address this gap with EMSQA, an 24.3K-question multiple-choice dataset spanning 10 clinical subject areas and 4 certification levels, accompanied by curated, subject area-aligned knowledge bases (40K documents and 2M tokens). Building on EMSQA, we introduce (i) Expert-CoT, a prompting strategy that conditions chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning on specific clinical subject area and certification level, and (ii) ExpertRAG, a retrieval-augmented generation pipeline that grounds responses in subject area-aligned documents and real-world patient data. Experiments on 4 LLMs show that Expert-CoT improves up to 2.05% over vanilla CoT prompting. Additionally, combining Expert-CoT with ExpertRAG yields up to a 4.59% accuracy gain over standard RAG baselines. Notably, the 32B expertise-augmented LLMs pass all the computer-adaptive EMS certification simulation exams.


New wolf snake honors the late Steve Irwin

Popular Science

Lycodon irwini is the latest species named after The Crocodile Hunter. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Conservationists have discovered a previously unknown species of snake, slithering around one of Earth's most unique environments. In naming their new reptile, researchers decided to honor one of popular culture's most unique and beloved wildlife educators: the late, great Steve Irwin . The snake was discovered in the Nicobar Islands.


The secret ingredient in a snake antivenom? Llamas.

Popular Science

Their antibodies may combat venom from some of the world's deadliest species. There are over 300,000 venomous snakebites reported in sub-Saharan Africa every year. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Most of today's snakebite antivenoms are far from perfect. Typically manufactured from animal blood plasma, the antidotes often remain expensive, inconsistent, and difficult to scale across multiple snake species .

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  Genre: Research Report > New Finding (0.70)
  Industry: Health & Medicine > Therapeutic Area > Environmental Medicine > Snake Bites (1.00)

How snake bites really work

Popular Science

Vipers can strike within 100 milliseconds of launching at their prey. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. A venomous snake bite is not something you ever want to encounter on a hiking or camping trip. For those brave scientists who study snakes-aka herpetologists -the mechanics behind the reptiles' fast fangs are more fascinating than fear-inducing. Snakes must move incredibly quickly to sink their fangs into prey before the victim flinches.

  Country: North America > United States (0.15)
  Genre: Research Report > New Finding (0.50)
  Industry: Health & Medicine > Therapeutic Area > Environmental Medicine > Snake Bites (1.00)

REAL: Reading Out Transformer Activations for Precise Localization in Language Model Steering

Zhan, Li-Ming, Liu, Bo, Xie, Chengqiang, Cao, Jiannong, Wu, Xiao-Ming

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Inference-time steering aims to alter a large language model's (LLM's) responses without changing its parameters, but a central challenge is identifying the internal modules that most strongly govern the target behavior. Existing approaches often rely on simplistic cues or ad hoc heuristics, leading to suboptimal or unintended effects. We introduce REAL, a framework for identifying behavior-relevant modules (attention heads or layers) in Transformer models. For each module, REAL trains a vector-quantized autoencoder (VQ-AE) on its hidden activations and uses a shared, learnable codebook to partition the latent space into behavior-relevant and behavior-irrelevant subspaces. REAL quantifies a module's behavioral relevance by how well its VQ-AE encodings discriminate behavior-aligned from behavior-violating responses via a binary classification metric; this score guides both module selection and steering strength. We evaluate REAL across eight LLMs from the Llama and Qwen families and nine datasets spanning truthfulness enhancement, open-domain QA under knowledge conflicts, and general alignment tasks. REAL enables more effective inference-time interventions, achieving an average relative improvement of 20% (up to 81.5%) over the ITI method on truthfulness steering. In addition, the modules selected by REAL exhibit strong zero-shot generalization in cross-domain truthfulness-steering scenarios.


Government to step up heatstroke prevention for elderly

The Japan Times

A thermometer displays 42 degrees Celsius in the city of Isesaki, Gunma Prefecture, on Aug. 5. | JIJI The Environment Ministry plans to step up efforts to prevent elderly people from suffering heatstroke indoors, including at home. It has requested ¥1 billion for related measures under the government's fiscal 2026 budget. The government has set a target of halving the average annual number of heatstroke deaths by 2030 from some 1,300 marked during the five years through 2022, but fatalities hit a record high above 2,000 in 2024. According to the Fire and Disaster Management Agency, 57.4% of people taken to hospital by ambulance due to heatstroke in May-September 2024 were aged 65 or older. Of the total cases, 38.0% occurred at houses, making up the largest share. While elderly people are at higher risk of heatstroke due to their declining thermoregulation and ability to sweat, some refrain from using air conditioners even on very hot days.