The Dump this week will be a bit thin for the passing of my partner, Sue, did not give me much time for research….I know most will understand and I thank you for your patience.

Personal–I would like to thank all my readers for their heartfelt words of comfort for the passing my my ‘better half’….please know that your support in this time of grief is very much appreciated….Thank You .

And now sports fans…the meat of the post….

I enjoy a good tomato and in recent years the only tasty tomatoes have come out of my garden….but could that change?

For decades, farmers have faced a trade-off between size and flavor when growing tomatoes and eggplants. The hefty tomatoes stacked in supermarkets today may be impressive in size, but many consumers lament their lack of flavor. Meanwhile, smaller, wild varieties burst with sweetness but remain impractical for large-scale farming. Now, scientists say they have cracked the genetic code to finally get the best of both worlds.

A pair of recent studies, one led by researchers at Johns Hopkins University and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and another by scientists at the Agricultural Genomics Institute in China, reveal key genes that govern both the size and sugar content of tomatoes. By tweaking these genes, the first group grew larger tomatoes while the second made sweeter variants. This exciting series of developments could reshape global agriculture by making tomatoes and eggplants more appealing to both farmers and consumers.

https://www.zmescience.com/future/bigger-sweeter-tomatoes/

Let’s hope they can truly create a tasty tomato.

For the past 25 years or so the art of tattoo has been popular….some great artwork but could there be an ugly side…..

Using a database that tracks the health outcomes of twins, scientists have found more evidence that getting tattoos may be linked to skin cancer.

In a new paper published in the journal BMC Public Health, researchers from the University of Southern Denmark and Finland’s University of Helsinki have found that among twins, tattooed individuals are roughly 1.62 times more likely to develop skin cancer than their un-inked siblings.

Looking at data on more than 2,600 twins, the Danish scientists found that this link was even greater for people who had larger tattoos, defined as larger than palm-sized. The twins with bigger pieces were found to have skin cancer roughly three times more often than their siblings without tattoos.

(Though it’s not related explicitly to tattoos, it is worth noting that Denmark has some of the highest rates of skin cancer in the world. Because the small Scandinavian country is located so far from the equator, its residents don’t get the same amount of solar radiation as their counterparts further south, and often get worse cancer-causing sunburns as a result.)

https://futurism.com/neoscope/new-research-tattoos-skin-cancer

I  cannot believe some of the crazy theories that some people believe in….always looking for a good reason….

Poor sleep can make you susceptible to a wide range of physical and mental health issues, including heart disease, high blood pressure, and anxiety. But new research indicates it may also increase the chances of yet another unwanted outcome: embracing conspiracy theories.

A team from the University of Nottingham’s School of Psychology recently conducted two experiments on a total of over 1,000 volunteers. The results, published on March 12 in the Journal of Health Psychology, suggest adding bad sleep quality on top of existing issues like depression can make people more susceptible to patently untrue conspiracies. The odds for adopting such beliefs may especially increase if tired people are exposed to conspiratorial content from outside sources as opposed to coming to similarly false conclusions on their own.

For their first study, researchers asked 540 participants to complete a standardized sleep quality assessment before reading one of two articles about the 2019 Notre Dame Cathedral fire in Paris. While some volunteers received a verified rundown of the devastating accident, others reviewed a story that falsely stated the blaze involved a cover-up conspiracy. After surveying the participants, researchers noted those who previously cited worse sleep quality entertained the Notre Dame Cathedral conspiracy more often than their well-rested counterparts.

https://www.popsci.com/health/poor-sleep-conspiracy-theory/

Another popular trend is the use of AI for…well….damn near everything….

AI slop has made its way into practically every corner of the internet. Just look at Facebook, or what’s become of Pinterest. But what about AI-written text? It may not be as flagrantly bonkers as AI images, but it’s also started to permeate the web.

In a new study that’s yet to be peer-reviewed, a team of researchers from Stanford University say they’ve managed to estimate how much writing floating around the web is the work of an AI model — and all it took was analyzing over 300 million documents, including press releases, consumer complaints, and job postings.

“We wanted to quantify how many people are using these tools,” study coauthor Yaohui Zhang, a Stanford researcher, told Fast Company.

Zhang’s team found that after the release of ChatGPT in November 2022, the proportion of text that was generated or modified by LLMs in all those categories skyrocketed. With corporate press releases, for example, the number jumped from around 2 to 3 percent to around 24 percent by late 2023.

To identify AI facsimiles, the researchers used a statistical framework that analyzed texts written before the release of ChatGPT, looking for patterns such as word frequencies. Their detection model worked admirably well, they report, with a prediction error consistently lower than 3.3 percent.

“While some previous work used commercial software to detect such patterns, these studies often [have] been constrained to single domains, relied on black-box commercial AI detectors, or analyzed relatively small datasets,” the researchers wrote.

Their statistical framework revealed a trend similar in all the examined sectors. Approximately 18 percent of financial consumer complaints appear to be at least in part generated with AI. In job postings on LinkedIn, the share was up 10 percent for small firms, with newer companies exhibiting even higher rates of in part AI use.

Even UN press releases showed a marked uptick to 14 percent being LLM-generated or assisted — a clear sign of the “growing institutional adoption of AI for regulatory, policy, and public outreach efforts,” the researchers wrote.

“Our study shows the emergence of a new reality in which firms, consumers and even international organizations substantially rely on generative AI for communications,” the researchers added.

Generally, Zhang and his team found that AI adoption followed the same pattern: a three to four month “lag” following ChatGPT’s release — the calm before the storm — and then a surge of usage. This growth stabilized by late 2023 and kept a steady course in 2024. That could be a sign of AI slop hitting a saturation point — or more insidiously, becoming too subtle to detect, the researchers suggest.

“I think [generative AI] is somehow constraining the creativity of humans,” Zhang told Fast Company.

(popularscience.com)