The benefits of environmental protection, measured in terms of advancing public health and the economy, outweigh the costs associated with implementing and enforcing environmental regulations, according to researchers at Penn State who published a new perspective piece in the journal Nature Water.

LLM-assisted manuscripts exhibit more complexity of the written word but are lower in research quality, according to a Policy Article by Keigo Kusumegi, Paul Ginsparg, and colleagues that sought to evaluate the impacts of widespread use of generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies on scientific production. “As AI systems advance, they will challenge our fundamental assumptions about research quality, scholarly communication, and the nature of intellectual labor,” write the authors. “Science policymakers must consider how to evolve our scientific institutions to accommodate the rapidly changing scientific production process.” Despite enormous enthusiasm and growing concern surrounding the use of generative AI and large language models (LLMS) across research and academia, there has been little systemic evidence about how these technologies are reshaping scientific production. To address this gap, Kusumegi et al. assembled five large datasets spanning 2.1 million preprints, 28,000 peer-reviewed reports, and 246 million online views and downloads of scientific documents. Then, using text-based detectors to identify first-time LLM use, they conducted difference-in-differences analyses to compare researchers’ work before and after LLM adoption. They found that LLM adoption increases a researcher’s scientific output by 23.7 – 89.3%, with especially large boosts for authors facing higher writing and language barriers. Kusumegi et al. also discovered that LLM-assisted manuscripts show a reversal of the traditional positive relationship between writing complexity and research quality. After LLM adoption, more sophisticated language was used, but in substantively weak manuscripts. Lastly, the authors show that LLM adopters read and cite more diverse literature, referencing more books, younger works, and less-cited documents. “Our findings show that LLMs have begun to reshape scientific production. These changes portend an evolving research landscape in which the value of English fluency will recede, but the importance of robust quality-assessment frameworks and deep methodological scrutiny is paramount,” write the authors. “For peer reviewers and journal editors, and the community, more broadly, who create, consume, and apply this work, this represents a major issue."

A new study published in the journal Environmental Epidemiology found that intersecting levels of race/ethnicity, education, and neighborhood social economic status (NSES) accounted for more disparities in residential exposure to greenspace than each of these factors individually.

FDA’s accelerated pathway allows new drugs to enter the market based on interim measures rather than waiting for long-term results like overall survival. Pharmaceutical companies are required to run follow-up studies after initial approval to confirm the benefits, but these studies are not always completed. From 1992 to 2020, nearly half of the drugs approved through this pathway were still missing these follow-up studies.