Comment

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on May 19, 2026 at 11:39am

WHO keeps evaluation of hantavirus as 'low risk'

The global public health risk from the hantavirus outbreak linked to the cruise ship remains low, according to current assessments. Additional cases may occur among those exposed before containment, but onward transmission risk is expected to decrease after disembarkation and control measures.

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Ebola and hantavirus outbreaks sign of our 'dangerous' times: WHO Recent Ebola and hantavirus outbreaks highlight ongoing global health challenges amid geopolitical tensions, funding cuts, and stalled pandemic treaty negotiations. The World Health Organization faces reduced resources and unresolved issues regarding member withdrawals, while debates continue over global health governance and equitable access to pandemic countermeasures.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on May 19, 2026 at 11:31am

WHO declares global health emergency over Ebola outbreak in Congo and Uganda
A Bundibugyo Ebola virus outbreak in Congo and Uganda has resulted in over 300 suspected cases and 88 deaths, prompting a WHO public health emergency declaration. The Bundibugyo variant lacks approved therapeutics or vaccines, complicating containment, especially amid conflict and migration. Delayed detection and limited diagnostic capacity have hindered response, raising concerns about wider regional spread.

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Licensed vaccines actually exist for the most common species of Ebola, but they are not universally available for every strain or used for general public vaccination. There are several reasons why a universal, widely available Ebola vaccine remains a challenge:
1. Multiple Different Species
There are at least five known species of Ebola virus, and immunity against one typically does not protect against others.
Zaire Ebola: Vaccines like Ervebo are highly effective against this species.
Bundibugyo & Sudan Strains: As of May 2026, there are no approved vaccines for these rarer strains, which are currently causing outbreaks in Central Africa.
2. Difficulty of Clinical Trials
Because Ebola outbreaks are sporadic and unpredictable, it is extremely difficult for scientists to conduct traditional large-scale human clinical trials to prove a vaccine's efficacy. Regulatory bodies often have to rely on the "Animal Rule" to approve vaccines based on animal studies combined with human safety data.
3. Logistical and Economic Barriers
Storage Requirements: Many Ebola vaccines require extreme cold storage (e.g., -60°C to -80°C), which is difficult to maintain in remote or resource-limited areas.
Market Viability: Because outbreaks are localized and infrequent, there is a lack of a commercial market for these vaccines, which limits private funding for mass manufacturing.
Targeted Strategy: Health organizations prioritize "ring vaccination" (vaccinating only contacts of infected individuals) rather than mass vaccination of the general public to manage limited supplies and maximize efficiency.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on May 19, 2026 at 10:54am

Severe childhood malaria linked to cognitive impairment later in life

Survivors of severe childhood malaria, including cerebral malaria and severe malarial anemia, exhibit persistent cognitive and academic impairments into adolescence, with cognition scores 3 to 7 IQ points lower than peers. Acute kidney injury and elevated uric acid during illness are associated with worse outcomes, indicating a need for improved prevention and therapeutic strategies.

Paul Bangirana et al, Long-Term Cognitive Ability and Academic Achievement After Childhood Severe Malaria, JAMA (2026). DOI: 10.1001/jama.2026.0704

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on May 19, 2026 at 10:49am

How chemotherapy can backfire: An immune shift tied to tumor resistance and poorer outcomes

Chemotherapy with gemcitabine can induce pyroptosis in cancer cells, leading to the release of IL-1α, which disrupts bone marrow function and skews immune cell production toward pro-tumorigenic neutrophils. This immune shift can promote tumor resistance and poorer outcomes, but blocking IL-1α or its signaling pathway restores normal immune responses and enhances chemotherapy efficacy.

Stephen QR Wong et al, Chemotherapy-induced activation of caspase-1 and IL-1α release by cancer cells remotely skews myelopoiesis to drive pro tumorigenic systemic neutrophil-dominant inflammation, Nature Communications (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-026-71471-3

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on May 19, 2026 at 10:45am

By age 4, one side of the brain is already calling the shots on language

The brain's capacity to use and understand language expands rapidly in the first years of life, as babies start to make sense of the words they hear and eventually begin to piece together sentences of their own. The language-processing parts of the brain that make this possible continue to evolve in older children, as they expand their vocabularies and learn to use language more flexibly.

By age four, the brain's language network is already strongly lateralized to the left hemisphere, similar to adults, and this lateralization does not gradually emerge with age. The integration and responsiveness of the language network increase through adolescence, but right hemisphere involvement in language processing in developmental disorders is not due to delayed lateralization. Early brain plasticity allows the right hemisphere to compensate for left hemisphere damage despite early lateralization.

Brain researchers have captured snapshots of the developing language-processing network in brain scans of hundreds of children and adolescents. Their data, reported in Nature Communications, show that the network continues to mature, becoming better integrated and increasingly responsive until around age 16. But they also found that a key feature of the adult language network is established early on: its localization in the left side of the brain.

Ola Ozernov-Palchik et al, Precision fMRI reveals that the language network exhibits adult-like left-hemispheric lateralization by 4 years of age, Nature Communications (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-026-72916-5

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on May 19, 2026 at 10:17am

You can persuade AI models to accept falsehoods as truth, study shows

Large language models can be persuaded to accept and reinforce falsehoods when subjected to conversational pressure, even after initially identifying statements as false. This vulnerability, not captured by traditional evaluation methods, raises concerns about AI reliability in interactive settings, especially in critical domains such as health or law. The degree of resistance to falsehoods varies among models, and the mechanisms underlying this behaviour remain unclear.

original article.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on May 19, 2026 at 10:15am

AI system developed to help prevent airport collisions

An AI system, World2Rules, uses neural and symbolic methods to learn explicit, interpretable safety rules from airport movement data, distinguishing normal from unsafe behaviours. It identifies and explains specific rule violations in real time, enabling earlier and clearer warnings of potential collisions. The approach is adaptable to other safety-critical domains by learning relevant rules and behaviours.

https://www.cmu.edu/news/stories/archives/2026/may/cmu-researchers-...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on May 19, 2026 at 9:52am

Another interesting pattern appeared where hallucinated references tended to disproportionately credit already prominent and male scholars, suggesting that errors generated by LLMs may reinforce existing inequalities in scientific recognition.

The data exposed existing gaps in guardrails, such as preprint moderation, journal editors, and peer review, which could catch only a small fraction of these errors. For example, while arXiv moderation caught some issues, an estimated 78.8% of non-existent citations still passed through and appeared on the platform.
The researchers warn that hallucinations are steadily infiltrating knowledge production at scale, threatening both its reliability and equity. Without intervention, its impact could bleed from the future of scientific discovery to policy and public understanding.

Zhenyue Zhao et al, LLM hallucinations in the wild: Large-scale evidence from non-existent citations, arXiv (2026). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2605.07723

Part 2

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on May 19, 2026 at 9:50am

AI-generated fake citations are flooding scientific literature across publications, scientists warn

The citations at the end of a research paper should represent a solid foundation of existing knowledge about a particular field, a pool of peer-reviewed sources built over years of research and study. However, with the increasing use of AI and large language models in writing research papers, there's a growing chance that the citation someone clicks on may not even exist, and that the study, the source, or even the researchers themselves could be entirely fake.

In a recent study posted to the arXiv preprint server, researchers audited millions of papers and found that an estimated 146,900 hallucinated citations were present in research papers hosted on four major scientific repositories—arXiv, bioRxiv, SSRN, and PubMed Central. These numbers were for 2025 alone.

The hallucinated citations were not limited to a handful of bad apples but appeared across many papers, each containing a small number of fake references, pointing to a broader pattern of researchers using AI yet failing to fact-check the output.

Scientific research advances by building on prior discoveries, where each new finding depends on what has already been established. In this space, the rapid growth of AI use and the accompanying hallucinations show no sign of slowing down, which raises serious concerns.

Generative AI tools built on large language models are quite good at producing information that sounds plausible and realistic, yet is completely fabricated or incorrect. These models are trained on massive datasets to learn patterns, which they then use to predict the next word and generate new content.

As a result, they can sometimes produce output based on pattern prediction rather than any reliance on actual facts.

Hallucinated content isn't limited to scientific literature, as it makes its appearances in government reports, legal filings, and even news articles from renowned media publications.

Scientists have previously studied AI hallucinations, but most studies were either conducted under laboratory conditions or confined to small samples or narrow domains. The actual scale and impact of such mistakes, particularly within scientific literature, was still unclear.

The audit revealed a sharp surge in fake, non-existent citations appearing in serious scientific papers, especially from mid-2024 onward.

The study found that early-career scientists and small teams were most likely to include these fake citations, and in some cases, these same researchers saw their productivity increase by roughly three times since the advent of AI.

Part 1

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on May 18, 2026 at 10:17am

Why Planes Fly Across The Atlantic At Night

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