Vape users are inhaling'acutely toxic' compounds that could cause'a new wave of chronic diseases' in the next couple of decades, a new study warns. Researchers in Ireland have used artificial intelligence (AI) to simulate the chemical reactions that take place inside flavoured vapes, also known as e-cigarettes. They found that e-liquids – the liquid inside that gives vapes their flavour – contain a'cocktail' of chemicals that produce'toxic' compounds when heated. Vaping has a'significantly different profile of chemical hazards' compared with traditional tobacco smoking', the study authors report. While they don't say vaping is more harmful than smoking tobacco, they're concerned that new but unspecified health issues will result from the vaping craze.

The number of scientific articles published in the domain of food safety has consistently been increasing over the last few decades. It has therefore become unfeasible for food safety experts to read all relevant literature related to food safety and the occurrence of hazards in the food chain. However, it is important that food safety experts are aware of the newest findings and can access this information in an easy and concise way. In this study, an approach is presented to automate the extraction of chemical hazards from the scientific literature through large language models. The large language model was used out-of-the-box and applied on scientific abstracts; no extra training of the models or a large computing cluster was required. Three different styles of prompting the model were tested to assess which was the most optimal for the task at hand. The prompts were optimized with two validation foods (leafy greens and shellfish) and the final performance of the best prompt was evaluated using three test foods (dairy, maize and salmon). The specific wording of the prompt was found to have a considerable effect on the results. A prompt breaking the task down into smaller steps performed best overall. This prompt reached an average accuracy of 93% and contained many chemical contaminants already included in food monitoring programs, validating the successful retrieval of relevant hazards for the food safety domain. The results showcase how valuable large language models can be for the task of automatic information extraction from the scientific literature.