The researchers asked the artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot the top 50 most frequently-asked Covid-19 vaccine questions. They included queries based on myths and fake stories such as the vaccine causing Long Covid.

Results show that ChatGPT scored nine out of 10 on average for accuracy. The rest of the time it was correct but left some gaps in the information provided, according to the study.

Based on these findings, experts who led the study from the GenPoB research group based at the Instituto de Investigación Sanitaria (IDIS) — Hospital Clinico Universitario of Santiago de Compostela, say the AI tool is a “reliable source of non-technical information to the public,” especially for people without specialist scientific knowledge.

However, the findings do highlight some concerns about the technology such as ChatGPT changing its answers in certain situations.

“Overall, ChatGPT constructs a narrative in line with the available scientific evidence, debunking myths circulating on social media,” says lead author Antonio Salas, who as well as leading the GenPoB research group, is also a Professor at the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Santiago de Compostela, in Spain.

“Thereby it potentially facilitates an increase in vaccine uptake. ChatGPT can detect counterfeit questions related to vaccines and vaccination. The language this AI uses is not too technical and therefore easily understandable to the public but without losing scientific rigor.

“We acknowledge that the present-day version of ChatGPT cannot substitute an expert or scientific evidence. But the results suggest it could be a reliable source of information to the public.”

In 2019, the World Health Organisation (WHO) listed vaccine hesitancy among the top 10 threats to global health.

During the pandemic, misinformation spread via social media contributed to public mistrust of Covid-19 vaccination.

The authors of this study include those from the Hospital Clinico Universitario de Santiago which the WHO designated as a vaccine safety collaborating center in 2018.

Researchers at the center have been exploring myths around vaccine safety and medical situations that are falsely believed to be a reason not to get vaccinated. These misplaced concerns contribute to vaccine hesitancy.

The study authors set out to test ChatGPT’s ability to get the facts right and share accurate information around Covid vaccine safety in line with current scientific evidence.

ChatGPT enables people to have human-like conversations and interactions with a virtual assistant. The technology is very user-friendly which makes it accessible to a wide population.

However, many governments are concerned about the potential for ChatGPT to be used fraudulently in educational settings such as universities.

The study was designed to challenge the chatbot by asking it the questions most frequently received by the WHO collaborating center in Santiago.

The queries covered three themes. The first was misconceptions around safety such as the vaccine causing Long Covid. Next was false contraindications — medical situations where the jab is safe to use such as in breastfeeding women.

The questions also related to true contraindications — a health condition where the vaccine should not be used — and cases where doctors must take precautions e.g. a patient with heart muscle inflammation.

Next, experts analyzed the responses then rated them for veracity and precision against current scientific evidence, and recommendations from WHO and other international agencies.

The authors say this was important because algorithms created by social media and internet search engines are often based on an individual’s usual preferences. This may lead to ‘biased or wrong answers’, they add.

Results showed that most of the questions were answered correctly with an average score of nine out of 10 which is defined as ‘excellent’ or ‘good’. The responses to the three question themes were on average 85.5% accurate or 14.5% accurate but with gaps in the information provided by ChatGPT.

ChatGPT provided correct answers to queries that arose from genuine vaccine myths, and to those considered in clinical recommendation guidelines to be false or true contraindications.

However, the research team does highlight ChatGPT’s downsides in providing vaccine information.

Professor Salas, who specializes in human genetics, concludes: “Chat GPT provides different answers if the question is repeated ‘with a few seconds of delay’.

“Another concern we have seen is that this AI tool, in its present version, could also be trained to provide answers not in line with scientific evidence.

“One can ‘torture’ the system in such a way that it will provide the desired answer. This is also true for other contexts different to vaccines. For instance, it might be possible to make the chatbot align with absurd narratives like the flat-earth theory, deny climate change, or object to the theory of evolution, just to give a few examples.

“However, it’s important to note that these responses are not the default behavior of ChatGPT. Thus, the results we have obtained regarding vaccine safety can be probably extrapolated to many other myths and pseudoscience.”

Reduced water availability in India due to groundwater depletion and climate change could threaten the livelihoods of more than one-third of the country’s 1.4 billion residents and has global implications. India recently overtook China to become the world’s most populous nation and is the second-largest global producer of common cereal grains including rice and wheat.

“We find that farmers are already increasing irrigation use in response to warming temperatures, an adaptation strategy that has not been accounted for in previous projections of groundwater depletion in India,” said study senior author Meha Jain, assistant professor at U-M’s School for Environment and Sustainability. “This is of concern, given that India is the world’s largest consumer of groundwater and is a critical resource for the regional and global food supply.”

The lead author is Nishan Bhattarai of the Department of Geography and Environmental Sustainability at the University of Oklahoma, formerly a postdoctoral researcher in Jain’s U-M lab.

The study, scheduled for online publication Sept. 1 in the journal Science Advances, analyzed historical data on groundwater levels, climate and crop water stress to look for recent changes in withdrawal rates due to warming. The researchers also used temperature and precipitation projections from 10 climate models to estimate future rates of groundwater loss across India.

Previous studies have focused on the individual effects of climate change and groundwater depletion on crop production in India. Those studies did not account for farmer decision-making, including how farmers may adapt to changing climate through changes in irrigation decisions.

The new study takes into account the fact that warmer temperatures may increase water demand from stressed crops, which in turn may lead to increased irrigation by farmers.

“Using our model estimates, we project that under a business-as-usual scenario, warming temperatures may triple groundwater depletion rates in the future and expand groundwater depletion hotspots to include south and central India,” Bhattarai said.

“Without policies and interventions to conserve groundwater, we find that warming temperatures will likely amplify India’s already existing groundwater depletion problem, further challenging India’s food and water security in the face of climate change.”

Previous studies found that climate change could decrease the yield of staple Indian crops by up to 20% by mid-century. At the same time, the country’s groundwater is being depleted at an alarming rate, primarily because of water withdrawal for irrigation.

For the newly published study, the researchers developed a dataset that contains groundwater depths from thousands of wells across India, high-resolution satellite observations that measured crop water stress, and temperature and precipitation records.

Most climate models call for increased temperature, increased monsoon (June through September) precipitation and decreased winter precipitation in India over the coming decades. The U-M-led research team found that warming temperatures coupled with declining winter precipitation more than offset added groundwater recharge from increased monsoon precipitation, resulting in accelerated groundwater declines.

Across various climate-change scenarios, their estimates of groundwater-level declines between 2041 and 2080 were more than three times current depletion rates, on average.

In addition to Jain and Bhattarai, authors of the Science Advances study are David Lobell of Stanford University, Balwinder Singh of the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center in India and the Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development in Western Australia, Ram Fishman of Tel Aviv University, William Kustas of the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Yadu Pokhrel of Michigan State University.

The research was funded by a NASA Land-Cover Land-Use Change Grant and a NASA new investigator program award to Jain. It was supported in part by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service.

The many environmental responses to the Arctic dipole are described in a paper published online today in the journal Science. This analysis helps explain how North Atlantic water influences Arctic Ocean climate. Scientists call it Atlantification.

The research is led by professor Igor Polyakov of the University of Alaska Fairbanks College of Natural Science and Mathematics. He is also affiliated with the International Arctic Research Center at UAF.

Co-authors include Andrey V. Pnyushkov, research assistant professor at the International Arctic Research Center; Uma S. Bhatt, atmospheric sciences professor at the UAF Geophysical Institute and UAF College of Natural Science and Mathematics; and researchers from Massachusetts, Washington state, Norway, and Germany.

“This is a multidisciplinary view on what’s going on in the Arctic and beyond,” Polyakov said of the new research. “Our analysis covered the atmosphere, ocean, ice, changing continents and changing biology in response to climate change.”

A wealth of data, including direct instrumental observations, reanalysis products and satellite information going back several decades, shows that the Arctic dipole alternates in an approximately 15-year cycle and that the system is probably at the end of the present regime.

In the Arctic dipole’s present “positive” regime, which scientists say has been in place since 2007, high pressure is centered over the Canadian sector of the Arctic and produces clockwise winds. Low pressure is centered over the Siberian Arctic and features counterclockwise winds.

This wind pattern drives upper ocean currents, with year-round effects on regional air temperatures, atmosphere-ice-ocean heat exchanges, sea-ice drift and exports, and ecological consequences.

The authors write that, “Water exchanges between the Nordic seas and the Arctic Ocean are critically important for the state of the Arctic climate system” and that sea ice decline is “a true indicator of climate change.”

In analyzing oceanic responses to the wind pattern since 2007, the researchers found decreased flow from the Atlantic Ocean into the Arctic Ocean through the Fram Strait east of Greenland, along with increased Atlantic flow into the Barents Sea, located north of Norway and western Russia.

The new research refers to these alternating changes in the Fram Strait and the Barents Sea as a “switchgear mechanism” caused by the Arctic dipole regimes.

The researchers also found that counterclockwise winds from the low-pressure region under the current positive Arctic dipole regime drive freshwater from Siberian rivers into the Canadian sector of the Arctic Ocean.

This westward movement of freshwater from 2007 to 2021 helped slow the overall loss of sea ice in the Arctic compared to 1992 through 2006. The freshwater layer’s depth increased, making it too thick and stable to mix with the heavier saltwater below. The thick layer of freshwater prevents the warmer saltwater from melting sea ice from the bottom.

The authors write that the switchgear mechanism regulating inflows of sub-Arctic waters has “profound” impacts on marine life. It can lead to potentially more suitable living conditions for sub-Arctic boreal species near the eastern part of the Eurasian Basin, relative to its western part.

“We are beyond the peak of the currently positive Arctic dipole regime, and at any moment it could switch back again,” Polyakov said. “This could have significant climatological repercussions, including a potentially faster pace of sea-ice loss across the entire Arctic and sub-Arctic climate systems.”

The research was funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the U.S. Office of Naval Research.

A major limitation in behavioural research is that scientists can either study animals under highly-controlled, yet often unrealistically simplified and small, environments in the lab, or in largely uncontrolled conditions in the wild. This has limited our ability to study many facets of behaviour, including collective behaviour — the movements and interactions among animals that underlie their complex social lives. What is needed to address this? First, a place with lots of space. Second, state of the art technology.

Both are available in an 18th-century barn at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Möggingen near Konstanz and now in the Imaging Hangar, a hall the size of a gymnasium at the University of Konstanz. Both labs are used to closely examine the group behaviour of animals. To do so in a multidimensional way, researchers from the Cluster of Excellence Centre for the Advanced Study of Collective Behaviour at the University of Konstanz and the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior have developed a tool called SMART-BARN.

SMART-BARN is an acronym for Scalable Multimodal Arena for Real-time Tracking Behaviour of Animals in large numbers. “It is a new tool that allows studying complex behaviour traits of an individual or interactions between groups of animals like insects, birds, or mammals,” says Hemal Naik. Together with Máté Nagy, Co-Speaker of the Cluster, Iain Couzin, and colleagues developed SMART-BARN. The team was very interdisciplinary: Biologists, physicists, engineers and computer scientists developed it together.

Máté Nagy explains the tool further: “We are using high throughput measurement techniques like optical and acoustic tracking, with which we can study the exact 3D position and posture of animals and calculate their field of view.” Users of the new facility will have the flexibility to perform different experimental paradigms by leveraging the modular nature of the system.

Why scale matters

“SMART-BARN is designed to enhance the scale of typical indoor behavioural experiments in terms of experimental volume and measured behaviour traits and group sizes,” computer scientist Hemal Naik says and adds: “This means that users can measure previously unseen behaviour repertoire because animals have more space.” The facility can — depending on the size of the animals — host 100s of animals simultaneously and extend the possibility of experiments to novel species typically not studied in indoor environments. “In fact, we have now scaled this to work with many thousands of animals,” adds Couzin, “We recently conducted a study in the Imaging Hangar where we tracked 10,000 plague locusts. This would have been impossible without our SMART-BARN technology.”

How SMART-BARN can be used

So far, SMART-BARN was used within different experimental use cases involving subjects as diverse as pigeons, starlings, moth, bats, and humans. Naik is delighted because: “The facility is shaping important new interdisciplinary collaborations.” He continues: “For example, SMART-BARN offers the ability to track 3D gaze and posture of birds in a group of ten or more while maintaining their identity. This technique is being used by researchers to explore the role of gaze in decision making.” The same technique is used by computer scientists to design novel computer vision and AI based algorithms facilitating 3D tracking of animals without attaching any markers to them. “Our method has resulted in an even larger system in the Imaging Hangar at the University of Konstanz to track swarms of robots or thousands of insects,” says Iain Couzin.

Máté Nagy says: “In a nutshell, the scope of its applications is only limited by our ability to come up with ideas of experimentation.” The team imagines the facility to be a collaborative space where researchers from all over the globe can contribute to the exploration of behavioural questions. Therefore, the team invites researchers across the world to connect with them and plan experiments.